Christmas Eve 2009

The tree is trimmed, the stockings not yet stuffed (soon, soon) and presents no doubt will appear. In recycling happiness, we'll wrap all gifts in rolls of paper brought out of storage from many years' past.

The house is filled with smells of pine and freesia (a winter bouquet from a local market) and we look forward to the Harry and David pears that Anne Porter sent (they're beginning to smell and feel just right).

Word from Hanging Loose is that Tourist at a Miracle shipped yesterday and should be in New York early next week. With Katherine's blessing and a nod from Jesse, on Monday I'll head down to the VCCA for a week of country air, for poetry and rest, a chance to reflect a little bit on the past year, to recharge the batteries that seem a little run down.

peace and joy to all, saludos, abrazos, amor,

Mark

Not quite three months

Oh where does the time go? Just a minute ago I was celebrating Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and now Chanukah is done and we've got our tree and the Christmas parties have started in earnest, the semester is over, work needs grading, so what's a poet to say to any and all but hello. I hope you missed me.

War stories abound and I won't tell any because there isn't much point except to say that there are war stories that could be told of these past months and I've survived. Walking. Breathing. Feeling good about the world.

Of note: these were good months. A little time that I was pretty sick, but that passed and now am up to pretty full speed (proof was last night's midnight romp in the snow with Cannonball, and a healthy shoveling of stoop and walk in the middle of the blizzard; today's walk with Katherine, Jesse and Cannonball in the park suggested that the romp was no fluke, nor was the blizzard, see Jesse's website for photos bandoftheland.com).

Of note: Tourist at a Miracle is any day now. A slight glitch in the cover, discovered in time on bound galleys before cover and book were bound. Old were destroyed, new covers printed, a week's delay (not in time for Christmas) but the 2010 book will make its appearance in 2009. It looks terrific. You can see sneak previews in the current issues of Hanging Loose, Cincinnati Review and with an additional poem in the forthcoming new Portable Bloog (look for it New Year's Day, on-line and elsewhere, St. Mark's, the Bowery Poetry Club, etc).

Of note: for Tourist at a Miracle, first reading will be at the Bowery Poetry Club, Saturday, January 9, from 6-7:30. Other readers include Jane LeCroy and Bill Zavatsky.

Of note: I reluctantly support the Senate's pending health care bill. It is not great by any means and to say something is better than nothing sounds like a cop-out. But it isn't. Social Security took time to become Social Security. The same with Medicaid and Medicare. To have a national health care policy that has some very distressing things in it only suggests that progress isn't made in a straight line. I don't often quote Edward Albee (does anyone?) but in Zoo Story he writes Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of your way in order to come back a short distance correctly. This is a part of the long distance. With more work, we go further on that road (the one you make by walking) to come back that short distance right.

Of note: to keep the record straight, last week, I finished a moleskine, and started another, which already seems to have more poems in it than I could have expected. It gives me great happiness to think about this coming break: poetry, translation, a new book of poems, seeing friends, being with Katherine and Jesse.

Peace and love in this time of celebrations.

Mark

a new year

So we have passed through the days of awe and into the days of a new year.

I wish all my friends of every faith, and my friends who have no faith at all:) a good year, full of joy and possibility, and I thank you all for your friendship and good will.

The last weeks have seen the loss of many people who mattered in many of our collective lives--but memory matters so just keep doing that, remembering. Talking. Sharing. It's by the stories we leave behind that we live beyond the mortal coil.

Let this be a time in which peace becomes a greater possibility, when we can really think of a finer world than the world of the year before.

abrazos,

Mark

okay so I really am insomniac

A few things:

proofs are back to HL, I think all things said and done this will be a book of which I'm very proud, Donna Brook and Dick Lourie have done an extraordinary job. It even surpasses the work Ron P. and Chris E. did on Listener, which astounded me.


So a moment of sadness for Willliam Safire. I can't remember many points on which we agreed on the political side, but he was a great colleague in language and I will miss his (sometimes wrong) takes on language, but never his wit or his style.

In these days, I send my best and wish him and his elegant voice, a happy and confrontational voice with all in that heavenly consortium.


But I m tired of being sad.



abrazos

Mark

proofs have arrived and sadness re: Jim Carroll

Two (or three?) quick notes:

The proofs for Tourist at a Miracle arrived today via e-mail from Hanging Loose. I have to say, the book looks good. Donna Brook was such a marvelous editor and Dick Lourie such an astute copy-editor that as I go through it I wonder--did I write this? Of course I did but seeing it in this form there is a freshness, even for me, who has lived with these poems for many years now. The cover art (Katherine Koch) is beautiful and though the book is scheduled for 2010, I should have walking around copies by late this year. Excited? Oh yes.

And another piece of sadness to see that Jim Carroll is dead at 60 of a heart attack. He was one of those figures that, like Ted Berrigan somehow became larger than life in our lives. The Basketball Diaries have a voice and kind of sophisticated innocence that in memory still draws me and haunts in a way that is poignant? impossible? original? So another blog entry that has to confront death. "Time's beating wings" as Katherine reminded me.

Some have wondered about the Hinajosa work: it goes but goes slowly. Saw a major error in the first four books. In my absorption of getting his voice, I put poems in the preterite into the present. So have to go back and correct, correct, correct. When Pablo Medina, my collaborator on Poet in New York called to note this (I had sent him a large part of the manuscript) he didn't even say a word before I just said "I know I know I know." Good friend that he is, he didn't make me feel like an idiot but simply praised the essence of what I was doing.

un abrazo a todos,

Mark

mary travers

I am deeply saddened to hear the news of mary travers death. She was one of the voices of my youth and even now to go on-line and hear her radiant and ageless voice fills me with a kind of happiness and melancholy I find hard to express. Whether it was the sweet simplicity of such dopy and wonderful songs as Puff or to hear her on Leaving on a Jet Plane or 500 Miles or Blowing in the Wind with Peter and Paul, there was also something confident, bold and courageous in her voice. I find my last two posts have been about folks dying (Teddy and now Mary). A sign of the voices of my life life moving by. My own as well.

I expect to post something happier soon, but felt this part of my life needed to be marked.

abrazos a todos.

Mark

A hard and sad day: Vaya con dios el leon

I've written in my poem "invisble Man" which will appear with Hanging Loose late this fall in my collection Tourist at a Miracle (2010) that John Kennedy was my first president. And I think that, subtly, Bobby, because of where he went with Civil Rights, was my first inkling of the nature and the possibility of the public voice.

But Teddy was Teddy. Mistake prone and large as life, not the slim and swift or cool of his brothers, he did more, I think, for more American politics than his brothers may have accomplished. He maneuvered in the anti-poll-tax amendment for the Voters Right Act. He worked with Bush on education while opposing the war. He stood for a decent minimum wage while his colleagues in the senate were making hand over fist, getting money from lobbyists' and he said no time and time again. There would e no Medicare or Medicaid without Teddy. There'd be no child left behind or Chips or Voters Rights Acts. He went against the Democratic Machine and said yes we can to Obama when the Clintons prayed he would just stay out.

He was dying and he talked about a dream. He was dying and he talked about hope. He was dying and he talked about a torch being passed.

This president, and we generations can only listen and learn and act and do. I am tired of the guns at birther rallies, at the lies told about the president's origins. Teddy was a lion in many ways, but he was not alone nor did he ever believe he was alone. He stood for everything that I hold true as an American and a citizen of this world.

There is hope.
There is dream.
There is a time for then
and a time for now.

I look at my son and think what world will he inherit, not from me, but from all of us, just as all parents must wonder the same. We have work to do. Myles Horton called it the long haul. His wife sang of not being moved.

We all have our ways. Choose yours.

Un abrazo y un beso a todos los heroes y que descanses en paz el leon. Vaya con Dios.


Mark