This is a quick snippet from the NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) novel I’m working on, Reality & Richard’s Curry.

Keep in mind that NaNoWriMo is all about producing raw, unchecked wordage. You jump right in and grind away at telling a story, fast and crazy like.

Therefore, this snippet has not yet been polished, but thought I’d share a little dialogue-scene with you all. Especially since I missed Poetry Saturday this weekend.

(scene background: a small group of artists and artists’ friends sitting at a diner, evening).

.

.

“I want to be a Zen monk, but I like beer too much. And pretzels.”
They were eating at Murphy’s Diner. Evening light pooled on the faux wood tabletops.
“What?” Michael Trent looked up.
“To be a Zen monk.” Pan added, “You can only eat rice and water.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It is. Seriously. In the monasteries, they make you eat rice and water.”
“No bread?” Richard asked, becoming interested.
“None.”
“I seriously don’t think that’s true.” Michael Trent repeated, checking to be sure his reuben had enough sauerkraut.
“It is. You’ll never miss something you’ve never had. They say, if you’ve never tasted cheesecake, you won’t miss it. So, they cut it out.”
“They cut it out completely?” Michael Trent took a bite of his sandwich.
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit.” Kevin said, leaning forward with a curled grin. “I’ve never banged Marita and I miss it all the time.”
“Think about food. About cheesecake. Or curry.” Pan’s face brightened. “Think about curry. Would you miss it if you didn’t know curry was good?”
“I love curry.” Richard added.
“Would you? Miss it, that is?”
“I guess.”
“I hate curry.” Kevin said with a grunt, guzzling his coffee.
“In lieu of being a Zen monk… I’ll take cheesecake and curry.” Richard said triumphantly.
“Sometimes we have to make choices based on what we love.”
“I just want to make a living doing what I love. Enough to pay the bills. It’s not too much to ask, really.” Michael Trent announced as he chewed. It had always bothered his dad when he talked with his mouth full, but he did it anyway, definitely, insanely.
“I just want tomorrow,” Julian said.

Indeed.

November 1st is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month–a kickoff of worldly, wordy wackiness.

This year, I am working on something a little more wry and philosophical (hopefully humorous and serious at the same time). Tentative title: Reality and Richard’s Curry.

I decided against the young adult novel, as the ideas and characters for “Reality” started flooding in while eating curry one day. Oh, yes.

Stay tuned! I have to produce about 1600 words per day, in order to stay on top of the 50,000 words in 30 days challenge. Last year, I made it through, and on days where I skipped writing, I made up the difference the following days by pumping out 3000+ words. Whew.

This year, I have the added challenge of being self-employed, teaching, AND being a student, all in one, while trying to pump out work. I think I can’t even spell the word “anuerism” today.

If you’re also participating in NaNoWriMo, please become a writing buddy, by going to my profile while you’re logged in to your own account. I’d love to keep track of what other people are doing. http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/214840

Poetry Saturday - In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This brief, Imagist work offers a glimpse into a single moment. A striking visual is presented, which at first seems short and simple–but on closer examination spirals deeply with sensation, location, and meaning.

Some have likened it to a Japanese haiku, although Pound himself has denied that it is intended to be a haiku, saying that he would not have arbitrarily chosen a form, then written a poem to simply fill it. To him, this would have been against everything poetry stands for–the sense of the immediate, organic, and spontaneous (with hidden scaffolding).

The poem grew organically from a moment Pound experienced coming off a subway train. He got off a train in Paris and was stricken by the beauty of many faces walking and bunching in a crowd, in the rain. He couldn’t find the words to express exactly what he felt and struggled with putting it down all day–until he developed what he called an “equation… not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that–a “pattern,” or hardly a pattern, if by “pattern,” you mean something with a “repeat” in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour.”

Pound’s “one image poem” does indeed impart the elements necessary for haiku (or a hokku)–a brief image, an established time of year (wet–rainy, probably spring or fall), and a connection to “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” (people walking, embarking or disembarking the train, daytime during the rain, and at a station of the metro). Since Pound was a scholar of Eastern poetic forms, he no doubt was influenced by the haiku for this–and also by Japanese or Chinese painting, which also presents a single flashed moment, forever implied by only a few strokes, but his work is a new form entirely. He says with this type of form, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself into a thing inward and subjective.”

Written in 1913, the poem was originally published with spaces between phrases. The spacing would force the reader to slow down, experience each fall of sound like a flump in the snow. Focus.

The apparition | of these faces | in the crowd;

Petals | on a wet, black | bough

(try reading it out loud and pausing on each little section. See how it rolls gently, like rain or snow?).

A little mini bio teaser:

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972), is one of the world’s most respected poets, arguably one of America’s most influential. He made tremendous headway in breaking away from the rhymed, formal poetry of previous centuries–adopting a style of free verse that had its own inherent musical structure, not reliant upon canonical forms. He was a major player in the Modernist movement and had heavy ties to others in the field, including artists and musicians. He is also well known for having mentored TS Eliot, composer of “The Wasteland,” and other monumental works.

He is a fascinating writer and if you have the time, I’d recommend the tidbits on Wikipedia, just to get you acquainted, although they leave out a lot of the juicy tidbits. He was outspone against war, and was an expatriate during World War II, but later arrested for having broadcast what was then considered anti-American diatribes (they were really anti-War machine diatribes–but it was 1949). It’s said that when he was arrested, they took him without anything but the clothes he was wearing–and a Mandarin Chinese dictionary that happened to be stuck in his pocket. He appreciated the visual value of the Chinese language and was responsible for translating many ancient Chinese poems into his own lyrical style.

I recommend: Selected Poems of Ezra Pound for further reading.

Been thinking a lot lately about the next art movement, the next great wave.

Art parallels what happens in the literary world, each riding endless waves of ups and downs, new approaches and old revivals. Lots of argument could be made about the nature of art today–that Pop Surrealism, Graffiti Art, or a continuation of Abstract Expressionism is where it’s at, the next history-book-bound wave.

It could be any of them, or none of them, really (I’m leaning toward all of the aforementioned as an extension of the Pop movement, but y’know). That’s the fun part. We’ll probably all be dead before a new one is declared (hindsight is the best lens, after all), but it’s exciting to speculate. Or, maybe I’m just an art Geek.

In considering everything that’s needed for an art movement, I started thinking about art and its machinery. The gimmicks. Little quirks, ticks, and media-grabbers that contemporary artists use to get attention. The Balloon Boy and John Gosselin stuff that gets people looking, even if they hate the people they’re looking at. Stunts, wackiness, pretentiousness, craziness…

Many of the commercially successful artists this century (especially since the 1950s) have used gimmicks to get attention and to make sales. Sometimes gimmicks outweigh even the quality of the art itself, but it’s there, ever-present.

Now, I’m not putting gimmick down, per se. It’s just interesting. Andy Warhol was (possibly) the greatest commercialist artist of all, attending art openings and parties with an agent on his arm and an entourage of strange people ready to attract attention. This kind of thing is still rampant today, although with less far-reaching effects than Warhol’s age. I’ve seen the quirky artists with entourage in tow attend shows and openings, wearing desginer clothes and wacky get-ups to garner press. Hell, when we did an April Fool Around show last year, every artist who wore wacky jester clothing sold more than those who did not. Maybe the public wants to buy the whole image of art–the art from the artist, and the artist as artist. Interesting to speculate, and probably something an entrepeneuring grad student could do as a dissertation: what people buy when they buy art.

If people want to buy the idea of art, in addition to the end product, that explains at least some of what attracts us to the artists who break boundaries and are larger than life.

Pricasso, a wild Australian artist who paints with his penis, is internationally known for his wackiness (and also the fact that his paintings are incredibly good for being painted with a pecker). He’s a great example of the larger-than-life gimmick, and his tactic works to generate sales and interest. Some may degrade his approach to art–that it’s more gimmick than quality, but looking back on some of our beloved, famous artists, we find that his type of rule-breaking craziness is rampant and honored.

There are artists who paint with BBQ sauce, sand, french fries and ketchup, bottles of water on a sidewalk, or human blood. There’s a guy who pukes paint onto a canvas and another who creates compositions only with rolled-up recycled bits of trash and paper. All I might say are doing quite well, or at least enjoying some level of success which the average impasto landscape painter might only dream of. Is this good or bad? Is the fact taht gimmick makes them notable better or worse than sheer skill, because surely there’s something ground-breaking about what they do, and a level of skill necessary to pull it off…

I’m making no claim to the right answer, or even to a judgment at all, just throwing this out here for consideration. If gimmicks in marketing work to sell ordinary products like household cleaners, horror movies, and bubblegum, the cleverness of a marketing campaign, or of an artistic gimmick must surely go toward helping an artist establish an idenity.

As artists we must keep in mind that we are constantly on call to “make it new.” As art lovers and art buyers, we must constantly keep in mind that art is more than just decor for the living room–that you’re buying a piece of something bigger, something which transcends a color match and lives on. Whether or not a new style of gimmick will garner a new art movement is unknown. Just something to think about from both sides of the discussion.

It’s another “Poetry Saturday” already? I’m glad you guys are enjoying it. Thanks for the comments and emails.

This week’s poetry snippet is another one from my Inventory chapbook. It’s a “work” poem, a genre many poets love-hate doing. Hee hee. I seem to be alternating every other week, my stuff, the next week, other poets. Works for me.

Friday, 1:25 p.m.

Sherman sits across from me
eating green beans
with housin sauce
and golden squares
of tofu at a shiny
blond table in the
galleria and people are
milling and shopping
and rustling silvery
trendy-bags and getting
$5.00 shoeshine-sushi boat-
gift sets.

In the steady murmur
of public-voice lunchtime,
he imagines miscalculating
the inventory and writing
a lean, mean resignation letter
on stark white paper.

He will get laid off in January.

While his lips purse
business has built itself from
basement to skyscraper
and back again.

–Ren Adams, 2000, from Inventory.

Hmmm… National Novel Writing Month is almost upon us, and I’m debating whether or not I should dive in again this year Last year I did about 60,000 words in 30 days. This year, I have a young adult novel in mind (think older Harry Potter age range) and would like to hammer out a draft, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time with teaching, school, and painting…

What do you think? Should I go for it? Richard, Ran, Jen, Nathan, Angela, there’s a good change you guys could be in it… (teaser).

Japanese Garden, photo by me!

(All of the photos taken by me–I have more to share, too! You’ll see them here and there).

I had the best day I’ve ever had here in Albuquerque last Thursday. Yep. For real.

The kind of simple, radiant, refreshing day that comes once in a while, when everything falls into place and flows naturally. Autumn clarity. Natural zen. This is Tao.

On a whim, Ken suggested we go to the Albuquerque Botanical Gardens and Aquarium. It’s not a huge place. Maybe the best in the state, but certainly not the best in the country. We’ve been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the best in the world, so this whole thing wasn’t about how fancy or spectacular the destination was. It was about the day being slow, calm, meditative, and new.

It went beyond “yeah, the BioPark is cool. I love it.” It was oneness with all things.

We called our good friend Robert, also a fan of the capricious and random. We headed down without cameras actually (these photos were taken on our return trip Sunday).  The day was pleasantly warm, with cool seams–the perfect walking, strolling, thinking weather.

Armed with a sketchpad, we hit the Aquarium first. Scuttling sturgeons and mud-gazing carp became gestural lines–fuel for future brush paintings. Stingrays effortlessly gliding just above the rocky surface reminded me to find the flow in overcoming obstacles. Their sleek bodies drifting, gliding, always moving, silent. There’s no argument there, no bullshit pettiness or backstabbing gossip casseroles, just natural movement. Keeping yourself going as you soar above the jumbled rocks.

Some of you already know my love of jellyfish. I paint them frequently. Capturing the light, almost non-existent jelliness is challenging and rewarding. They didn’t have very many jellies there, but that’s no matter. It was the perfect thing, at that moment, at that time. The jelly room was dime and comforting, like the interior of an ancient cave. A column of softly glowing Moon Jellies, glistening and drifting was centerstage. They’re not concerned about politics. They could care less about new cars, hair dye, prestige, designer fashion snippiness. I drew hundreds of thumbnails of them, drifting, floating. When we thought some were dead–they moved again each time. Always surprsing.

There seemed to be a weighty, natural sound to their silence.

A tub of chrysaora jellyfish, one of my favorites, was also present–backlit with plankton buzzing everywhere. I had never realized that I had not observed plankton up close, or had not actually realized I was doing so. The excited energy of the tiny lives, paired with the deliberate, smooth chrysaora was enchanting and balancing.

The walk through the botanical gardens was equally refreshing. We discovered a “Moorish Garden,” which we now call our backyard porch. We got lost in a children’s maze (scary for kids, I think), which had wild, giant fake veggies and many varieties of bamboo. We spent a huge chunk of time there, decompressing. I keep thinking now, every regular day, that I want to go back to the Moorish Garden and sit.

The Path, photo by me!

The Japanese garden was enjoyable as well, though not totally authentic–but who cares? Sketching random plants, pointing out odd things, and admiring the koi. We spent a long time here, sitting close to the water. A koi with blue eye shadow befriended Ken and kept coming back to see why Ken wasn’t tossing him bread.

Koi (curious about us), photo by me!

Japanese Garden, photo by me

More Koi, photo by me

The indoor desert and Mediterranean gardens were as “hot as Malaysia,” or so Robert declared. I held a huge millipede in my hands–he was shiny, black, and seemed unreal, very lightweight. He gently coiled (he was afraid), and then unraveled and used all of his legs to re-orient himself. Everything moving in unison.

By the time we left, we felt refreshed. Renewed. it was a personal Zen Center. A re-centering experience.

(Of course, there was funny stuff too–like our battle to stay 50 leauges ahead of any screaming nose-pickers, but you know! LOL!).

We went back again this weekend and spent several hours feeding the koi, watching their movements, personality, and faces.

After the gardens, we decided to eat somewhere expensive. It reminded us of San Francisco (I mean that fondly. In fact, the place here in town was actually more expensive than similar places in The City). Creole Pasta with Cream Sauce. Proper customer service in Albuquerque, imagine that! We were in Old Town then, and walked on foot into the little village, so commercialized and crazy, but fun.

The sun was getting low in the sky and cheesy flickering chili lights and neon signs made shimmering impressions.

All those piles of New Mexico shot glasses, hot chili suckers, and squash blossom jewelry–the perfect, funky end to a day of Tao.

On Sunday, we returned, this time with bread for the koi. Check them out!

Pushy Koi Wanting Bread, photo by me

Poetry Saturday

This week, I am featuring a poem by the late Frank O’Hara, a brilliant poet whose conversational style lends an air of freedom and elegance. He was irrevocably tied into modern art movements in the 1950s.

Sardines, Mike Goldberg, 1955

Why I am not a Painter
by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

*

*

Here’s an interesting online Frank O’Hara Exhibit, showing his close connection to the arts.

I highly recommend The Collected Poems of Frank O’ Hara.

…posted on Sunday! I know, how terrible of me.

This is a poem from my “Inventory” chapbook. Work, commuter, and modernity poems.

.

He Considers Three Things

.

.

He hates lovesongs and prefers

powdered detergent

because the bright red box

lasts longer and sometimes

some people believe even

cardboard has a soul.

.

There’s something special

about the way Irene packs

Priority Mail boxes in the

warehouse and how her

steaming Tupperware containers

are always filled with fragrant

white rice, plump chicken, and bok choy.

.

He understands that the

independent woman who lives

under the Men’s Warehouse sign

has a pattern to the unfolding of plastic

and bags and small, muddy trinkets.

She lays cardboard beneath her

life-stained comforters for padding.

.

Ren Adams, 1998.

.

(sorry about the periods in between stanzas–sometimes WordPress will NOT accept the formatting I put in for poetry.).

(please don’t reproduce poems from my column without sending me a happy little note first. Not trying to sound mean and scary, although some people think I am–just ask me if you can post pne and I will probably say, “go for it, man.”). I don’t  bite.

Whenever I post a poem by a poet other than myself, I am plugging their published books and providing links to places to buy. Poets gotta make a living, too.

So far they’ve raised $4,200 for Autism awareness and research, through the sale of artwork.

Art Now for Autism – Final 2 Days :

Today and Tomorrow | All available art now $30 http://www.artnowforautism.com

Get in and bid for a bigger cause!