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