Poem: The Uses of Nature (from Inverse Origami)

the Uses of Nature

Down at the interplanetary 2nd-hand nature boutique
I’d like to buy the night sky. I'll take the round full moon,
and put it in my pocket so I'll always have a coin.
I'll pick the stars, every one. I'll put some in my hatband
I'll put some across the shoulders of my coat,
and I'll stuff the rest up my sleeves so I'll
finally be luminous and amazing.
And when I am tired of being admired,
I'll take the darkness that remains and slip it over me
and become invisible so I can rest.

But look! There are lovers there under the night sky
clutching nothing, clutching everything in each other.
What will light their way when I have the moon?
What will hide them when I have the dark?
What will they wish on, when I have every star?

Hey! I could divide the moon into quarter acre lots,
and they could get a variable rate mortgage
with giant balloon payment and health insurance
and chain themselves to jobs they hate for 30 years to pay for it.
I could portion out the stars, one to every house,
An heirloom,a family treasure kept in a little box on the mantle
taken out as a conversation piece to impress visitors
I could pour the darkness into pint containers
and have it delivered to people's doorsteps
I think there's enough to go around....

----------------

by Mar (Mistryel) Walker
10/95, POEM 27 - From Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding  - c 1998

I am posting this because I read it Friday evening.  (it's 12:36 am Saturday) I read it last night really I guess, during a Google+ hangout. One poet was from India another from UK. etc etc. I just looked in, and was surprised when they called on me to do a poem. I had no work within reach so I did this one - an old stand-by from my chapbook that I have slammed with in the past. I have it memorized but I forgot changes I had made to the beginning of it.....

Obsolete tech devices as canvas and frame

I painted this abstract (above) in an odd place - inside a dead Sharp Personal Organizer, "512K" which, for a short  time many years ago, was invaluable. (Click on the picture to see it even larger - I think it makes the size-transition well) Of course, every darling is brief in the tech world and the planet is littered with abandoned, non-functioning gizmos. Painters - recycle! Below you can see it insituo - in the frame and substrate.

Poetry in disguise at Halloween party

Pictured above, are the crazy folks at the annual Halloween thing at Wednesday Night Poetry,  missing are Faith, (a devil) Victoria, (a pizza delivery girl with a pizza) Ernie in a bandana with a pirate spyglass. And T.G. as herself, with Tess, as herself.  We can't forget Tess. I had 'em wondering, including Tess who barked at me in my head-covering Egor mask, I tried to talk very low pitchwise, and sit not like myself, no leg crossing or sitting on my feet.  The whole bit  seemed to upset Tess no end - the cues were too confusing I guess. Poor puppy.  

I read a short spoof of a poem in my ultra low-pitch, threatening Egor style:

Mouse traps
Hickory Dickory Dock
Little mousie ran up the clock
The clock struck one
And Mousie did run and run
until she was done dun  da dun, dun da dun da dun da dun

A poem on a drawing: Free Space

From the archives:

Free space,

defined by what it's free of...

the grace, the drape, the liquid

air, where shuffling gauze

gives way, writing the bend

of torso, an ambition of words,

of space, of not often enough

exploring, hiding

or not hiding,

the cloth that tells

betrays the careful

covering and uncovering,

the moving and falling,

the piling of layers taken

away, removed as

we find our - silence.

.

-- a poem and drawing by Mar Walker aka Mistryel

This is an extended doodle, and all of the words of the poem appear in the drawing. I drew this during a lecture at a conference on metaphor and the book ta few years ago.  It was done in a little leather book that is very small. The medium is pencil. I have boosted the contrast to make it easier to see.  It is one of a handful of  small works where I have tried to combine drawings with words....

Dancing under a dark sky

From the PuzzledDragon archives: 

This is a picture where music is integral to the subject. You can't dance unless someone or something is piping out a tune...

This work is an oil pastel/water color I did in 1992 while I was in Maine and its lovely hills are visible in the background. The guy in blue with the hair was a very odd fellow named Peter Smith who used to wear fingerless billy idol gloves and who could talk just like homer simpson. Go figure.  The fellow in the brown tee shirt is waving his arms despite his girth. He was based on a rotund neighbor named Rob Puncheon. I tried to create vivacity here with the motion of bodies, stars, sky and grasses. Even the seated figure on the far left seems as though she might jump up and join in.  The only static being here is the pensive onlooker on the right. And the picture is really hinges on her. There is all this joyful motion and one sad bit of pensive melancholy. Ah well.

This was moved from the gallery blog, where it was a Jan. '07 entry

Coming home - for some it's not easy or simple

 from the archives of the Puzzled Dragon:

 

Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried 

A few years ago in October was a series of  local events on the book, as a part of  the "One Book, One Community" series including a visit by Tim O'Brien.  That's why I've reposted this bit - I have changed my blog name several times since posting it originally.

DEATH AND THE FUNHOUSE MIRROR

To clearly see ourselves whole, stripped of the polite social mask, is at once privilege and nightmare. Tim O'Brien's self-reflexive novel The Things They Carried offers a soldier's view of the Vietnam War, but also a view of how a man's socially sanitized vision of himself can break down during war.  More than this, O'Brien takes readers on side trips, where they can feel a portion of what he felt, where they can envision their own disintegration.

After describing in a dozen different categories the things they carried with them, O'Brien the author tells us this:

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then however, there were times of panic..... when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly..... In different ways it happened to them all."

It is a rare thing for me to fall speechless after reading a novel. Some of this novel is like Lock-tight and stays around when it is no longer convenient to remember. For instance the passage where the medic in grief and rage shoots a baby water buffalo to death one small divot of flesh at a time making sure that it is alive and suffering.  Or the repeated references to the Lemon tree, the light and the explosion, the clean-up.... Despite the amazingly different content, this book bears a great structural resemblance to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like Stein's book, it discusses itself to death, one chapter discussing how the previous chapter was written, discussing if any of it is really true.  The book also uses Stein's device of the endlessly repeating iterations of cubism. Many scenes first appear in a slice, then in part, reveal just a little more, then the full version then recede, but never completely.... This cycling structure, Stein's "little waves"  lapping, lends itself to the material in that it mimics the soldier's inability to let go of the experience of combat in Vietnam, just as O'Brien the writer could never let go of it.  It also mimics the reoccurring nightmares of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the mind's inability to let go of this self-disintegrating experience. This whole structure is  echoed in the chapter "Speaking of Courage" where Norman Bowler drives around and around the lake after returning from the war, unable to stop driving or thinking about the shit field by the river and Kiowa drowning and Bowler's failure to rescue him. Then in the next chapter we discover maybe it was O'Brien the writer who let Kiowa disappear in the muck. Maybe it was true, maybe it was a story. How Steinian. One of the oddest chapters is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." In this chapter O'Brien the writer effectively shows an aspect of war rarely discussed with non-combat veterans: that for some soldiers nothing in life will ever be as physically thrilling and challenging (nor as traumatizing) as survival, will never involve as much of their instincts, not as civilized beings but as cunning animals, tribe members, ritualistic hunters.  This is usually only hinted at in much war literature. By couching it in a double fiction, showing the transformation as a fable that supposedly happened to a women in a pink sweater, O'Brien both externalizes this transformation and at the same time, frames how easily, how steadily civilizations slips away from even the most innocent and loving.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding, editor and writer at the  Puzzled Dragon and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly originally written in November of 2003 .
Previously  posted on all my variously named blogs, puzzleddragon, MMW113, etc etc etc

Returning to be ignored?

The troops finally will leave Iraq. How will they be treated? Will there be jobs? Not yet apparently. Will there be healthcare through the VA or will that be gutted too? Have their homes been foreclosed while they were gone?  How many lives have been disrupted and then changed irrevocably?  War takes a bitter toll even on those who can walk away.
Click here for the LA Times on the withdrawl announcement

(below a note on the vicious Stop Loss program,  from last January)
 You can tell there is an unspoken caste system in the U. S.
 Here is how you can tell:

When the economy took a dive and the feds had to bail out so many giant financial corporations, the lobbies and lawyers screamed that contracts including big bonuses to CEOs CFOs COOs, traders etc, had to be honored. Start breaking contracts and Western civilization would crumble, according to the bankers and their lackies in government.  When the fed finally got busy and put some restrictions on bonuses - the banks couldn't pay the TARP back fast enough.

But, WHAT ABOUT OUR SOLDIERS WHO SIGN A ONE YEAR CONTRACT for military service - but then the U.S. engages its "STOP LOSS" program and they aren't allowed to leave, sometimes having to serve a second or third term against their will. Their contracts are broken, and they have no legal recourse. So a contract with a banker is sacred. A contract between the Federal Government and a soldier isn't worth the paper its written on.....  (See Stop-loss policy entry on Wiki)

Of course a whole list of American Indian tribes could have told us this.....So according to U.S. practice -- If you are a well-connected banker the government will go broke to protect you and your contracts are sacred.(Unless of course there is a populist outcry of VOTE THE BUMS OUT!) If you are just a foot soldier, or an Indian Tribe, historically the government says, screw you. Obama may have fixed the first part - but he hasn't gotten around to the second part yet....Check out this NPR story about a  soldier the army wouldn't let go --  who is going to get a court marshal because he wrote and sang a song protesting the Stoploss program. The military actions against this soldier are unAmerican.

SCAN fall sale reception

The Society of Creative Arts of Newtown had an opening reception for its fall holiday show Friday evening. Lots of artists, a few local pols, everyone with cider or wine, noshing on fattening snacks and wandering in isles of art. A nice time, lots of great stuff to see and buy if you have a few bucks to spare. Ends tomorrow at 5. (10/23) Might be bargains!
.
.

"We are all connected" - the Symphony of Science

I am 60 years old this week, and less isolated than I have ever been. More than ever I know that all of you out there are part and parcel of this world, or which I am also a part. I feel the small speck of life that is me, is in relation to all the specks that are, in a very basic way.   The music in this video is a part of a series of videos from http://SymphonyofScience.com - watch the video and checkout their website.  I think it expresses how I feel in many ways.

Honoring The Women Beats

Helen Peterson

Yvon Cormier

An event called Women Beat Era Poets/Authors/Artisits: A Celebration, took place at Broad Street Bookstore in Middletown, CT on Sunday. Like most women during the 50s, they were a bit under-exposed, and despite their own rebellions they seemed overshadowed at the time by their outlaw men.  I have to admit I enjoyed listening to their work.
.
 Poet Yvon Cormier who organized the event, asked to me read poems representing someone, and I chose Jay Defeo - a visual artist rather than a poet, who now in retrospect is considered one of the definitive American Abstract Expressionists.
.

Joan Kantor

Colon Haskins

For the occasion I put together six poems, five so called found poems gleaned from her own words as found in a lengthy oral history interview with Defeo conducted around 1976. The last was a reaction poem to her monumental one ton painting, The Rose which was eleven feet high, eight feet wide, 11 inches deep and eight years of effort long. It's now owned by the Whitney Museum.
.
.

Dolores Lawler

Mad Mar Walker

The former Poet Laureate of Long Island, George Wallace was suppoed to read Janine Pommy Vega. He was unable to come at the last minute so Dolores Lawler read Pommy Vega's work instead, as well as some some Denise Levertov and some of her own. Helen Peterson, co-editor of the Waterhouse Review read Diane DiPrima, Joan Kantor, author of Shadow Sounds, read Hettie Jones, Yvon, who organized the reading, read Mary Fabilli and Colin,Haskins, who's put out a whole slew of fine poetry chapbooks and started the Free Poets Collective among many other ventures, read Elise Cowen.
.

.
.

Robin Sampson

Sympetalous

 I only have two pics from the open mic, Robin Sampson and Sympetalous.  I have video but give me a month or two to sort that out.

According to the press release: This event is proudly presented by the FREE POETS COLLECTIVE, IN COLLABORATION WITH BROAD STREET BOOKS & CAFÉ, The Wesleyan Bookstore. The next Free Poets Collective event is Farmtober on 10/22, 1-4 at Fort Hill Farms in Thompson, CT

Noticed: ratio of for sale vs help wanted ads

This morning I am adding a tiny inexact comparison to the list of ways I guage the health of the local economy.

It's a measure that may or may not be invalid in these internet days. Perhaps it's a measure that says more about the future of newspapers than the future of employment. In your local paper take a look at the want ads in yesterdays paper, the Sunday paper which traditionally has the larges want ads section of the week. Look at the section labeled For Sale.   Then flip over to the section for Help Wanted.  One seems significantly larger than the other.

Let me make a sweeping surmise:  Because the one is so slender, the other has increased. People without jobs or if they have jobs, without raises,  people who can't move on to a job or a better job, want to raise cash by selling things. Cars, houses, stuff. If you charted the ratio from 2007 to the present - I wonder what the arc would look like......

Now that's the economic explanation. There might be another way of looking at this. Perhaps as the baby boomer generation are retiring or getting cash strapped through job loss, they are trying to selling things to downsize their bills, downsize their debt.

Demographics or economics.  Who knows. Maybe a little of both. Might be a third or forth way of looking at it, or a fifth or sixth.  Conjectures at least, are free.

Hairs on Fire - with an oil pastel technique

From the archives:

HAIRS ON FIRE! Not really. This is an oil pastel I did while working in North Conway, New Hampshire.  I often find the faces of people I know creeping into my work. I guess because I have had to look at them and their features are familiar. In my mind there is some facial resemblance to a fellow named Burns who was a planner there. (It's not much of a likeness.)

One of my favorite things to do with oil pastels is to lay down thick color then draw back into it with some handy implement or other. Sometimes the first layer is scraped, then a second color is heavily applied and scraped into revealing some of the first color. When I took a drawing class at Western Connecticut State University, many years ago, I remember learning to draw into  heavy pencil marks with an eraser. This is where I got the idea of removing material as a way to form the picture. 

Post Script 10/19/2011 - One of the reasons I reposted this at this time is, I recently read how Jay Defeo formed The Rose using sharpened knives as much as brushes as she cut back into the layers of paint and scraped and hacked to remove material to form the topography of the painting. Very cool stuff.

Guns as Inheritance: Passage or Portent?

From the archives:

I haven’t been able to think clearly about guns since my ex-husband shot me in the behind with a pellet pistol 30 years ago. He actually said those classic words - “I didn’t know it was loaded.” 

He said it in an uncharacteristically high and nervous voice as he was wringing his hands. My ex kept that gun in our over-the-junk-store apartment for the unbelievable purpose of shooting wasps, and he was actually quite good at it.This isn't on my mind at the moment. 

Right now, I am troubled because I was witness to an odd ceremony last weekend. A grandfather, a relative of mine, gave a pistol with a holster and ammunition to his 14-year-old grandson. It was not a toy. He talked about not being around much longer and wanting someone to have it. He helped the boy strap on the belt and tie the bottom of the holster around his leg. Showed him how to load it. His segment of the family takes periodic Sunday afternoon outings to a shooting range at grandpa’s behest. 

While I understand the idea, this last gift is a bit disconcerting. Adolescents don’t live in the same world this 78-year-old grandpa did when he was coming of age. After Columbine and other recent school shootings I can hardly believe anyone would think this was a good gift for a teen. 

Though this boy seems smart and sensible, he is a teen. The young seem to live in a world of exaggerated response, always testing the limits and forming the brain circuitry. A young teen’s world is up and down in a day. Their triumph and despair always seem life rending. I hope his parents had the good sense to store it out of reach.

No doubt guns have several iconic meanings in American culture. The giver of the gun was a guardian-of- freedom type, a wanna be militia man with twisted but good intentions. For him and for many conservatives and libertarians, guns represent a sacred trust by which we remain free, though the federal government runs amok, though invaders from abroad or from Mars descend. To the frontiersman or the hunter they are a tool to dinner, triumph, survival. To the egoist, validation. To the vigilante and the sociopath, gunfire is the bark of the archangel. 

As a wounded pragmatist, to me guns will always represent a pain in the ass and an unanswered moral question.

---- Mar Walker
December 4, 2006

Duct Tape Improvisations

From the Archive:

A few weeks ago, on a rural/suburban road I noticed a pitiful mailbox that had been hastily repaired. It’s a simple, stubborn fix, born of a determination not to let the wreckers win. That’s a sentiment my father would have appreciated.

We lived in the middle of a long dark stretch of woodsy road, and our mailbox often fell victim to the excessive exuberance of youths with unsafe levels of testosterone and beer in their veins. Once, a family who lived four miles away called to say they had found our mailbox, crushed to sheet metal, and tossed onto their lawn in the middle of the night. It was the fourth time that summer our mail box had been assaulted. Once it was blown to shreds with an M80.

In response, my father fell to clenching his teeth and muttering down in the basement. He had something more substantial than duct tape in mind. For weeks he worked to construct an impenetrable mail box fit for the great age of the vandals. He added steel plates to the ends of a heavy gauge steel pipe. One plate was mounted on a heavy spring so the Mailman would have to pry it open to insert the mail. What my father had in mind was Roadrunner and Coyote. In particular, the scene where Coyote raises his baseball bat, but the Roadrunner suddenly steps aside. Coyote, swinging for all he’s worth his a big rock instead of Roadrunner. Cartoon shock waves travel up his arms until his whole body shakes. My father planned a stealth execution of this script. He intended to wrap the steel pipe with a regular, vulnerable-looking mail box to lure the villains. Unfortunately he died before he could put the thing up. I often wondered if the extra stress contributed to his early death.

In Dad’s reckoning, making needless work for someone else, was a theft of their time and effort. “Don’t make work for you mother,” he was always telling me sternly. We put up the steel mailbox for a few months without its stealth covering. As fate would have it, a plow knocked it over. Though the plow driver apologized, the original vandals were never found. Now, twenty-five years after the great steel mailbox caper, I wonder if somewhere, somehow our vandals have mailboxes of their own, and a baggy-pants, spiky-haired teen with ear buds dangling is unknowingly getting even for Dad with a quart of green slim or a quarter-stick popper.

---- Mar Walker, 12/3/2006

On the Women Beats - a reading this Sunday

On Sunday October 16th 11A.M. - 2:30P.M. at Broad Street Books in Middletown Ct there will be:

 A CELEBRATION OF THE WOMEN BEAT ERA POETS/AUTHORS/ARTISTS　　 

The press release reads:

"This rare spectacular event commemorates Women Beat Generation poets, authors, and artists, featuring international poet GEORGE WALLACE, former Poet Laureate of Long Island, N.Y. based in N.Y. City, author of twenty-one chapbooks and was named artist in residence at Walt Whitman’s birthplace, reads Janine Pommy Vega; Helen R. Peterson, of Canterbury CT, writes poetry and fiction and is coeditor of The Waterhouse Review reads Diane DiPrima; Joan B. Kantor of Collinsvile CT, author of Shadow Sounds (Antrim House) reads Hettie Jones; Mar (Mistryel) Walker of Danbury, CT, painter singer and author of Inverse Origami the art of unfolding, reads Jay DeFeo; Yvon J. Cormier of West Haven CT, author of Life Sketches in Blue, reads Mary Fabilli, and Colin Haskins of Glastonbury, CT, latest poetry collection Drinking of You (Ye Olde Font Shoppe) is Free Poets Collective founder will read Elise Cowen. Following the features there will be open mic, music and a reception.

 This event is proudly presented by the FREE POETS COLLECTIVE, IN COLLABORATION WITH BROAD STREET BOOKS & CAFÉ, The Wesleyan Bookstore. YVON J. CORMIER will host the event at BROAD STREET BOOKS, 45 Broad St, Middletown, on Sunday, October 16, from 11:00A.M. to 2:30P.M. For more details visit http://freepoetscollective.webs.com/ or questions, call 860-233-4984."

Rant on Political Ads

From the archives:

Imagine a world where elections were won by over-the-top spending of a different sort, say donating millions from campaign coffers to pay down the national debt. Or spending to actually help someone: creating jobs for the jobless, homes for the homeless, assisting those left destitute by weather, war, disease or corporate raiding.

 Now that you have imagined high purpose, turn on your TV. Almost any channel will do during prime time. The election ads you will see feature distortions, half-truths. Say candidate x voted against an ethics bill. Maybe that bill didn’t go far enough, maybe it had a rider raising or cutting taxes, or granting a presidential power or some pork barrel project wasting millions.

 Any legislator or senator with a voting record has been in a bind at one time or another, having to choose the lessor of two evils according to his beliefs. Yet these unqualified sound bite ads are offered up to us as if they held facts revealed instead of obfuscated, and all backed by emotional music and images. This has cheapened, poisoned and polarized us. In the guise of free speech, this has enabled monied partisans on both sides to fool some of the people some of the time.... But the reality of any legislative situation is more complex than a two-minute ad. And the tasteless spleen-filled ads I see daily, more nearly resemble a mental mugging than the civic discourse they pretend to be. Don’t think I don’t mean your candidate.

 At the paper where I work, letters to the editor attacking a candidate are not accepted for the last week before the election. Partisans may tout their favorite, but may not blast the opposition at the last minute when there is no time for a rebuttal. For television, a ban on negative ads beginning a month before the election would give us relief from the onslaught of tawdry distortion blaring endlessly from the tube right now. TURN OFF YOUR TELEVISION IN PROTEST.

Join me in my small bid to change this disgusting election curse. Help America toward civil discourse! Ban negative TV campaign ads! Or at least ban them in the last 30 days of the campaign, so last minute lies, later debunked, can’t tip elections.

---- Mar Walker, 10/28/2006

POST SCRIPT 2011: OVERTURN Citizens United!!!

Uncle Henry Torments Deacon Wayne Just A Little

From the archives:  a fictional vignette

Uncle Henry was crazy, that's what Deacon Wayne said. And Henry had a few odd ways about him, in a sublime sort of New England way.

When he worked on his truck, he’d take a brown paper bag and roll it up until it was about six inches deep. Then he'd jam it down over the top of his head to protected his hair from any oil that might drip down from the chaise. When he was done fiddling with the engine, he'd forget to take it off. He'd stroll up the back stairs and wander in through the kitchen doors to where Aunt May was just pouring tea for the Ladies Garden Guild. He'd stride in with that bag on his head, grab Aunt May and kiss her on the cheek, then help himself to the cookies she was serving up with tea. Aunt May didn't mind. But it got all over town that Henry wore a brown bag instead of a hat. It was that sort of thing that made folks wonder about him.

One day Deacon Wayne stopped by the house about a blueberry pie Aunt May was baking for the church bake sale. Henry came upstairs to see who had arrived for tea. Naturally he had a bag on his head. Deacon Wayne pointed at it and announced that it was prideful to be odd. Uncle Henry said Deacon Wayne was prideful enough for both of them since he was so proud of being humble. Deacon Wayne choked and tea came leaking out from between his lips unexpectedly. The Deacon sniffed and poked at his mouth with a paper napkin then blew his nose. Said he was doing the Lord's work and that he'd just be about it now if Henry and May didn't mind. He stuffed the napkin in his pocket, snatched up May's pie and headed for the door.

"If that fuzzy old man you call OUR father wanted us all the same - don't you think he could have managed it hisself?" Henry hollered as Deacon hurried away down the walk. Then he noticed the Deacon's hat sitting on the radiator under the window. He opened the door and tossed it across the lawn like a Frisbee. The Deacon scrambled after his hat with the pie balanced precariously, all the while praying out loud that the Lord should bless him and save him from Uncle Henry.

--- Mar Walker, 2006

Chris August at White Plains Library

This past Wednesday, (10/5/2011) I headed over to the first Wed. poetry and Zorkslam event at the White Plains Library. I read in the open mic, one poem "Travel Ready."  The highlight of the night for me was the feature Chris August, a teacher, and a touring poet from the D.C. area who has a wildly vigorous performance style. I really loved it. He gets his whole body involved, like a dance....