Stitched Verse

For Ben Hiatt

2011-02-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

By Guest Poet A.D. Winans

Like a hummingbird feasting on

the pollen of life

You walked the streets like a Samurai

With words sharp as a sword

You lived your life like a chess master

Found peace in the mountains

But never forgot the life blood

Of the city

Ravaged by illness, you cut through

The pain with the precision

Of a surgeon’s scalpel

Your spirit left behind

In the grass in the leaves

In the sky

Your words soft as feathers

Rode life to the end of the line

With metaphors that serenaded

The mind

Your memory dances with the wind

Becomes one with the stars

In a new place a new terrain

In the Buddha temple of life

All things die

But only the flesh expires

The spirit cannot be killed

Lives on in the heartbeat of the sun

In the words and friends who wait

To become one

Photo Credits: Hummingbird © Larry Keller | Dreamstime.com and Samurai Grabbing Sword © Sean Pavone | Dreamstime.com

About Ben Hiatt (1943-2007)

Ben was a well-known Northern California poet, a larger-than-life character and one of the many people whose talent and passion for poetry provided a model for me in my early days as a poet. Learn more about him on Rattlesnake Press and on this tribute on Sacramento Poetry Center's blog.

Thanks to A.D. Winans, for permission to print this poem about his long-time fellow poet in honor of the upcoming publication of Ben's last manuscript in Primal Urge, including testimonials. Watch for it.

Great-Auntie Earth

2011-02-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

You look so hunched and frail,

yet you have the strength

to push a hundred.

You thought I was lost—

never met me

beyond my mother’s belly—

but when I found all of you so many years later,

Your eyes danced love and sparkled recognition.

You were the link to all my good.

When they wouldn’t have understood,

you took us in.

Your kindness imprinted me for the rest of my life.

Your influence was stronger

than the word illegitimate.

“You’re the most generous woman I know,”

my husband tells me.

No wonder.

Look at where I come from

how you welcomed me

and taught me

in utero

when I was still forming

to have an open heart.

Now we sit vigil while you make up your mind

to stay or to go—to cross worlds.

You’re an elf, but also an old Hungarian plough woman

muttering rosary prayers as she cuts through

the thickness of earth with all her might.

You are most God-fearing, but also the most God-loving,

woman I have ever known.

You blend fragile spirit with stubborn strength:

the kind it takes to push earth in its many forms,

and to keep on keeping on,

as we will keep on loving you,

pushing earth like you taught us well

with total generosity of spirit.

© 1999 - 2011 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

~~~

Photo Credit: © Oksana Belodarova | Dreamstime.com

Present Peace

2010-12-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

Santa surprises

merry mischief

candy cane kisses

love eyes glitter

Italian lights

dark fades

for the light of the world

hearts beating

one loud rhythm

one song

Silent Night

holy

a nanosecond

of illusive calm

in children’s eyes

in adults’ eyes

the child

stacked presents

steps of love

climb to touch heaven

bring peace down to earth

in the silence

finding

no need

to reach.

joycemason.com

Photo Credit: Christmas Love © Les3photo8 | Dreamstime.com

The Church of Snow

2010-12-11T01:15:00.000-08:00

By Guest Poet Tony Vowles

A whole city adrift
and we become washerwomen;
fretting and gossiping, running and jumping,
talking to neighbours and shovelling.
As the church of snow hymns
across the rickety divides,
levelling its white thud.
And it moves me, the peace of it,
the promethean warmth.
Like a smile from a stranger.

© 2010 by Tony Vowles
All Rights Reserved
theastrologyblog.com

Photo Credit: Woman Shoveling © Andrew Jalbert | Dreamstime.com

Angry Young Men

2010-12-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

old lovers

long friends

angry young men

now depressed

on fast forward

aging

corded to my heart

draw optimism

and healing

ask first

without ever saying

the words

or knowing they want it

treasure my life force

touch my chi like thin china cups

of immortality

so gentle

their souls are tissue paper

to wrap the present

their sadness, losses

touch me

their view of the finish line

of life

I’m grateful

to live

grateful to give

grateful to honor our history

to be there for them.

joycemason.com

Photo Credit: Cup of Tea © Diavata Dreamstime.com

Feast

2010-10-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

We hugged every high hill
in San Francisco
tasting the world
in a fast stroll
climbing cement sidewalks
you eating eggs
at a breakfast
where I ate you with my eyes.

Later, we gobbled up
the radio waves in the car
chewing on California Girls
swallowing the bay
and planning our next meal
unbeknownst
to the Chinese check-out clerk
charging Safeway
with our bill of fare.

Not even
the museum
the Cannery
nor Ben Johnson’s
knew what we were going through
as we gluttonized
our particular piece
of the universe
in ravenous recourse
to the miserable malnutrition
we knew before Tiburon.

Not Bob, nor Victor,
nor the few human characters
dropping in for dinner
suspected this mad meal,
not even that crazy black cat.

Not even God Himself
noticed the teethmarks
we left on that week
or the empty cupboard
in the clouds.

© 2010 by Joyce Mason

joycemason.com

Photo Credit: Contemplating a Beautiful City © Celsodiniz Dreamstime.com

No Cry But a Quicksand

2010-10-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

I threw myself down

buried my head

in a caseless pillow

A primordial ooze

melted down my cheek

in death procession pace

my face gorged in mascara molasses

crawling too slowly

down my arm

no cry but a quicksand

of gooshing

melodramatics

The Good Angel shouldered a smirk betting the devil
which drop would win.

joycemason.com

Author's Note: No Cry but a Quicksand is part of a three-poem trilogy I call The Sanity Poems, which also include Today I Saran Wrapped My Sanity and The Glass Blower and the Goat.

The Glassblower and the Goat

2010-10-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

Watch the glasssblower

spin my sanity thin.

See my knees go weak.

Strange, that man

works on my head

in daytime nightmares

of panic mirage.

Thus cut, now tinkling

in air-conditioned breeze

my Chinese windchimes

balance

trembles in fragile fear

of a goat to come

rushing in

crushing

no tin-can in his terror teeth

comes bucking

shattering

masticating (glass) me.

Photo Credit: Forming the Glass © Ahmet Ihsan Ariturk Dreamstime.com

Author's Note: The Glass Blower and the Goat is part of a three-poem trilogy I call The Sanity Poems, which begin with Today I Saran Wrapped My Sanity and end with No Cry but a Quicksand.

Today I Saran Wrapped My Sanity and Unplugged the Refrigerator

2010-09-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

You can see right through it
and it never sticks
like it says it should
(reminds me of men I have known)
so I stuck it in the icebox, pulled the plug, and hoped.

I think I just saw it oozing
toward my big toe.
Mixed with the grape
popsicle juice
and the smell of stale fish,
it almost looks green.

Guess I gotta clean it up
or move my foot.

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

Author's Note: Today I Saran Wrapped My Sanity is part of a three-poem trilogy I call The Sanity Poems, which also include No Cry but a Quicksand and The Glass Blower and the Goat

Happy Birthday

2010-09-20T07:03:00.000-07:00

Born on the brink of fall
of mother in spring of life
Virgo on the cusp of Libra
Taurus Rising
seven-pounds-some
of cosmic energies.

Writhing in the will to live
cast-off and bastardly
big-eyed baby
and waiting.

Doctor Diameter
finished his errand
ran off
left only his name
on a forgible
formality.

Certified Live Birth

means I AM!

Accident

surely a New Year’s Eve spree

Origin Unknown.

Good sisters mothered me

just till my mother

was properly dossiered

prepped and suspensed.

Loved me I loved her

scars and all

lantern eyes found

what they searched for

in the dark.

There in a pile of red tape

a mother was born

a daughter legitimized.

No one noticed the outcome

of the abortion controversy

when she cried:

WE GOT OUR BABY!!!!!!!

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

Photo Credit: Beautiful Children in Autumn Leaves © Marina Maslennikova
Dreamstime.com

Author's Note: Happy Birthday is from my collection due out this autumn, Thick Water: Poems on Bonds of the Heart.

Featured Guest Poet: A.D. Winans

2010-09-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

Post © 2010
by Joyce MasonPoems and bio
© A.D. Winans
All Rights Reserved

As a young poet in my late twenties, I was fortunate to be “discovered” by A.D. Winans who published a number of my poems in his late, great literary journal, Second Coming. SC was a top quality literary feast delighting poetry lovers for 17 years. The ‘70s were a great era to come of age as a poet, and I couldn’t have had a better mentor than Al Winans.

If you don’t already know the fine work of this prolific poet who has been on the poetry scene for decades, you’re in for a treat. If you know him already, you’ll have a chance to get to know him in a way you never have before in his autobiography in this post, “A.D. Winans on A.D. Winans.”

A.D.’s latest chapbook, Love – Zero, is a déjà-heartbreak and healing for anyone who has ever been in love. The following poem will introduce you to what I mean.
--Joyce Mason

most of my life
I lived in the fast lane seeking
excitement in bars at parties
at concerts and night clubs
with crazed poets failed cowboys
and jazz angels wrapped in limbs of fire
expecting wanting each day to be a volcano
hot lava for breakfast lunch and dinner
until the hangovers the failed loves
and sleepless nights piled up
like dead wood on a deserted beach
and I withdrew stepped back and left
my words to find whatever excitement was left
then you came dancing into my life
and every day was like Christmas
walking nature’s trail visiting rural towns
and browsing antique shops
sex a slow carousel ride
with no detours at the end
slow talk and no talk brunches
and ice-cream cones
my heart finding peace with the
simple holding of hands
a walk down memory lane
the radiant look in your eyes
that night you treated me to dinner
at an Italian restaurant
not far from the river bank
images of you asleep on the bed
camp inside my head as I lie
next to you wanting to be in your dreams
my demons held at bay
all the woman I need lying here
at my side

#12 from Love – Zero
© 2010 by A.D. Winans
All Rights Reserved

A. D. Winans on A. D. Winans

I was born in San Francisco, and have lived here almost my entire life. I was born at home, premature. My mother said the doctor told her I would not live a long life. Now I’m 74 and the doctor is long dead.

My father was seventeen years older than my mother, and they fought constantly... When my mother wasn’t yelling at my father, she was yelling at me. This left deep scars which is reflected in my book Scar Tissue.

My mother was born in Canada and was smuggled illegally into the U.S. when she was three years old. When she later tried to become a U.S. citizen, she was told by immigration officials that there were no records of her entry into the country, and was advised not to pursue the matter or she might face deportation. She died a woman without a country.

My father had a difficult time expressing himself. It was my mother who took me for walks in the park and to the movies. My father didn’t like his job as a grip man on the Municipal Railway and frequently called in sick. The fondest memories I have of my childhood were the times we gathered in the living room to listen to our favorite radio shows (The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger) and the occasional weekend trips to Alum Park and the Russian River. However, the good times were few and far between, in what can only be described as a dysfunctional family.

I was a misfit in both grammar and high school. I was shy and largely kept to myself. I spent time at the public library, where I discovered the works of Jack London and day dreamed of shipping off to sea and writing of my own adventures.

I joined the Air Force in 1954 and was assigned to an Air Base Defense Unit, which doubled in peacetime as an Air Police Unit. I spent three years in Panama, where I saw the President of Panama assassinated and a dictatorship supported by the U.S.

There were three classes in Panama: The rich people who frequented the gambling casino at the Hilton Hotel; the middle class comprised mainly of Chinese immigrants who owned the shops and small restaurants, and the lower class who lived in squalor and poverty in the downtown area.

It was while serving in Panama that I became disillusioned with the American system. Panamanian canal workers, who performed the same work as their American counterparts, were paid less than half the going pay. In the American controlled Canal Zone, the U.S. Governor refused to allow the Panamanian flag to fly alongside the flag of the United States. Elections were rigged and ballot boxes were found floating in the canal.

The Joseph McCarthy Era, the struggle for civil rights, the treatment of the American Indian, and the Vietnam War all became fodder for later rebellion, which resulted in the many scathing political poems I have written. I was honorably discharged from the military in February 1958, and returned home to discover the Beat generation.

I found a part-time job working at the post office and attended day classes at City College of San Francisco, graduating in 1962 from San Francisco State College (now University).

I began reading the works of Camus, Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and later became interested in poetry after discovering Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and other Beat poets and writers.
While attending college, I spent my nights in North Beach, spending long hours at City Lights Bookstore browsing through underground magazines and books by established and emerging Beat poets and writers. I hung out at Mike’s Pool Hall and drank at the Coffee Gallery (now the Lost and Found Bar) and Gino and Carlo’s Bar. My favorite hangout was The Place, where “blabbermouth” night was presided over by Jack Spicer, an evening event where poets and philosophers could get up and speak their minds on any topic that came into their head.

I met Richard Brautigan at Gino and Carlo’s Bar and frequently saw Bob Kaufman at the “Co-Existence Bagel Shop,” where he held court. I frequented the Anxious Asp, a jazz establishment, and was the first featured poet at the Coffee Gallery, receiving five dollars and all the beer I could drink. Discovering North Beach opened up a new way of life for me. It was the training ground for my becoming a poet and writer.

In the sixties and into the early seventies I worked at a variety of jobs, none of which were to my liking. The lone exception was when I received a coveted CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) position with the San Francisco Art Commission, Neighborhood Arts program, where I worked from 1975 to 1980.In the seventies, I started up Second Coming Magazine and Press, which began in 1972 and ended in 1989. I served three terms on the Board of Directors of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers), which later became the International Organization of Independent Publishers.

These were exciting times, with annual conferences bringing together poets, writers, editors and publishers from all across the country. Thanks to my CETA position, I was able to organize poetry and music events throughout the city, including the 1980 Poets and Music Festival, a three-county, seven-day festival honoring the late poet Josephine Miles and the late Blues musician, John Lee Hooker.

I met a lot of poet and musician friends and engaged in conversations that lasted into the early morning hours, but the truth is that I find it difficult talking about myself. I prefer to let my poems do the talking for me. Too many poets perceive their craft as a “holy” mission, seeing themselves as prophets. That’s a hard message to sell to the homeless and downtrodden souls that walk the streets of our inner cities, or the working-class men and women struggling to make ends meet.

My poetry largely addresses issues of concern to millions of Americans who spend the majority of their lives struggling to survive in a society bankrupt in spirit and moral fiber, where money is the only common denominator.

Early in my life I was influenced by the writings of T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, but my mentors were the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski, and to some extent, the Beat poet John Weiners, whose book the Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) moved me deeply.

I have never worn the label of poet well. It’s not a word I’m comfortable with. It carries a connotation that somehow the poet walks on a higher ground than the average individual. Too many of today’s poets are more concerned with publication credits than the human condition they write about. The truth is that I would not be a poet if it were not for these strange voices camped inside my head; demon voices that confront me and demand that I write down their thoughts. The finished poem often bears little resemblance to whatever I initially had in mind.

The demons simply invade my thought process and take over. In this, I share Jack Spicer’s philosophy that “verse does not originate from within the poet's expressive will as a spontaneous gesture unmediated by formal constraints, but is a foreign agent, a parasite that invades the poet’s language and expresses what it wants to say.”

I have been both blessed and cursed by the inner voices (demons) that possess me. I’ve never kept a notebook or used a tape recorder for future reference and I seldom write in long hand, although this may be in part due to my poor handwriting. Many people have called me a “street” poet. I suppose this is because much of my subject matter has dealt with life on the streets. I don’t think this is an accurate label. I have been writing for over four decades and my style continues to evolve. The subject matter is as diverse as life itself. The form and technique I employ can and has changed from time to time.

The one constant is that people remain my favorite subject matter. If John Weiners was a poet’s poet, I’d like to be remembered as a poet of the people. My poems and my life are one and the same. They simply can’t be separated.

Being a native San Francisco poet, I know the streets of this city like a gambler knows when to hold and when to fold. Jack Micheline wrote in a foreword for A Bastard Child with No Place to Go:

A. D. Winans is a man in search of his soul His compassion and love for his native city San Francisco shows in his poems. A. D. takes us on a journey of lost souls in the cruelty of a large city. He writes of the people he loves: poets, musicians, and the ordinary souls who have moved him. He knows the wars, the lost hookers, the crazies, the victims, and the ones gone mad. The system and the tragedy of America.

There it is in a nutshell. I’m not a guru. I don’t go to the mountains looking for the Dalai Lama. I create largely in isolation. I write out of a sense of loneliness and sadness and anger, but also with love and humor, the latter for which I am indebted to the late Bob Kaufman

I write with the same observational intensity as Charles Bukowski, yet entirely unlike him. Like Bukowski, you will never have to search in a dictionary to understand my poems.

I try in the most direct manner possible to say the things I have felt and experienced in life, and hope that the reader will find the voyage a memorable one. The noted writer Colin Wilson said:

Everything I read by A. D. Winans fills me with pleasure because of a beautiful natural and easy use of language—he seems to have an ability which should be common but which is in fact very rare to somehow allow his own pleasant personality to flow direct into the page.

I believe this statement to be true, but acknowledge too that my personality is not always a pleasant one.

Sometimes the anger cuts through and severs an artery, but I believe this only serves to make the poem stronger.

In essence, I write about life, its ups and downs, the laughter and the tears, the real and the imagined, the good and the evil in man. I don’t pull any punches. I simply try to tell it the way it is, from the 9/11 tragedy to the homeless plight on the streets of America.

Poetry and writing have kept me going all these years. They have been the wife and children I’ve never had. I’ve had fifty chapbooks and books of poetry and prose published and have appeared in several hundred literary magazines and anthologies. I’ve given countless readings and made lifelong friends. None of this would have been possible if I had not discovered the magic of poetry. I believe that in the long run my poems and prose will tell you most about who I am. As I said earlier there is no separating my poetry from my life.

I get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper, spend a couple of hours at the computer, pick up the mail at the post office, take a forty five minute walk, return home, listen to my jazz records, put in a few hours of writing, and then it’s time to go to bed and get up in the morning and start all over again. That’s what life is pretty much about. The growing up, the learning, the wild years, the mellowing, the settling into a routine, and then one day it’s over. I’m satisfied with my life and the way I have lived. Writing poetry has helped keep lady death from my door. The demons are still there inside me, but I no longer let them control me.

I don’t think any one man’s life is really that important, but what he does with it and leaves behind is. I hope I have earned more good karma than bad karma points. I hope in the end I can look death in the face and say that I’ve played the game honestly and that I never sold my integrity. In the end integrity is all a writer has.

Sell your integrity and you’ve sold your soul to the devil.

===

Purchasing Information and Critical Praise for “Love – Zero”

LOVE - ZERO with foreword by Neeli Cherkovski
Limited Edition signed by the author
$10, plus $3 shipping – Total $13 for U.S. orders
$10 plus $8 shipping – Total $18 for overseas orders

Send Payment to:

A. D. Winans
PO Box 31249
San Francisco, CA 94131

CRITICAL REVIEWS

"Winans is as open as one can be with this work...exposing vulnerabilities, love, disappointment, passion and a dedication to a relationship that was headed for disaster from the start. --Anne Menebroker

"I'm carrying your love poem in my purse. It haunts me." --Janice Mirikitani

"These poems express so well the feelings of love. I don't know if they're worth a broken heart, but anyone who has ever loved and lost will shed tears over these poems. There is a wonderful acceptance, not a raging over lost love, rather a kind of twilight love, the kind of love that wishes the other party well." --Sharon Ramirez

Discover More about A.D. Winans in these sources:

A.D. Winans Website – Poetry, photography, articles and more

More poems and an interview with A.D. Winans by Terry Reis Kennedy on kagablog (6-Aug-08)

A.D. Winans: Memories and the Demise of Jazz in North Beach

Poem, “America” by A.D. Winans

Fourth of July Poem by A.D. Winans on Rusty Truck

~~~

Photo Credit: © Aleksey Dayen (A.D. headshot)

This Silence

2010-09-09T05:52:00.000-07:00

By Guest Poet, Susannah Bec

It drips on me

this silence

through the cracks

in my solid ceiling

it seeps

leaving patterns

a tiny tracery

of unspoken words

like delicate fronds

on the cold hard concrete

of today

Time silvered dominos

topple, a tidal wave

of tiny dots

falling

and falling

until

once again

the empty room

the silence

outofmyocean.blogspot.com

Susannah lives in a small village in the middle of the beautiful rolling English countryside with her partner and their three cats. When asked what was the reason she named her blog “Out of My Ocean” she referred back to the main header of her site. “I think the best way to explain the name is to repeat what is written on my blog about it.

“Words bubble up from the depths of that big subconscious ocean, the vast churning sea that lies beneath the realm of conscious thought. They float on the swells and are rocked by the rhythm of the ever moving waters, until finally they reach the shallows and ride the surf to my shoreline. I find them washed up amongst the flotsam and jetsam, I write them down and store them here . . ." Read Susannah's complete interview on Poet's United.

Your Handwriting

2010-09-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Neat and beautiful,
penned perfectly
across a year’s worth of cards
scattered on my desk,
your handwriting paints
a gorgeous sunset
onto my home office landscape.

Loving notes fill Valentine’s,
anniversary, birthday cards.

But by autumn
your handwriting was shaky.

There were no more cards
with your signature.

You were gone just past Thanksgiving:

now only memories
and Hallmark
to remind me what you wrote
in big letters across my heart.

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

PoetQuotes

2010-08-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

~W.B. Yeats

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

~Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

~Novalis

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

~Robert Frost

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

~Plato, Ion

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.

~Robert Frost

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

~Stephen Mallarme

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

~ Christopher Fry

~~~

Photo Credit: Speech balloon © Raja Rc Dreamstime.com

PoetQuotes will be a regular feature, interspersed between poems, featured poets, and other fare.

Timing

2010-08-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

When is the right time?
The time to say
“I love you” or
“I’m done with this?”

When is the right time to put down
the dog
the cat
or say goodbye
to shoes so old
their price tags
make you laugh?

The head says,
“Set goals,
give them time limits.”
The heart often
thinks
better of it.

Where is the cosmic alarm clock?
The oven timer
that tells you when
something is cooked?

I will go deep within
my biological clock
set to cosmic cycles.

I will await word
from the falling star
of inner knowing.

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

Arousal

2010-08-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

Marriage aroused me

long before you leapt

into my life

knocked me down

with over-enthusiasm

panting

breathless
from all that commotion.

The intimacy:

two-across-the-table

watching two touch

tongues

fingers

thighs

At dinner

I watched us

like I’ve watched

so many couples before

high on connection

And even before the lobster melted
on my palate
so did I
in your eyes.

Later, when your lips
were cinnamon sugar,
I laced my legs through you
in order to keep my feet on.

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

~~~

Photo credit: Intimate couple close-up © Alexandr Stepanov |Dreamstime.com

Wordmonger

2010-08-20T11:49:00.001-07:00

You called me a wordmonger

with great affection,
an endearment.

I knew when you said
I was your favorite writer
you meant it,
not just because you were
my husband.

But it’s ironic
like calling
a fat person Slim
or a short person Stretch.

Wordmongers toss words around
willy-nilly.
Mine are so deliberate
stitched and hand dyed
Turkish rugs perfect on both sides
suitable for kneeling in prayer.

The term conjures
fishmonger.
I imagine myself:
an open market
selling vowels, consonants
and assorted punctuation
weighing whole sentences
at a dollar a pound.

The scent of fish
transports me:
Jesus multiplying
loaves and fishes.

I just want to feed the world.

Wordmonger.

~~~

Photo Credit: Wine jug and food © Photowitch | Dreamstime.com

joycemason.com

Taking Back the Poems

2010-08-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

You held me at gunpoint:
Emotional bullets
invisible fingers cocked at my temple
harmless on the surface
lethal to my spirit

You fired.

The poems were decimated.

Ink ran every where.

They died instantly.

“You dump all your anger into your poetry,”
you said
(or something like that.
It sounded like criticism.)

I was terrified to cross you
while you held a gun to my head;
so, I dropped them.

The thud echoed in the chambers of my heart,
a duet with the empty pistol.

Sixteen years later,
our marriage long dead and gone,
my life rounding the finish line
to Wholeness:

I am taking back the poems!

I found your ransom note
crumpled in my notebook.

“Your poems or your life,” it said
(as if there were a difference).

~~~

Photo Credit: Closeup of a fountain pen © Hpphoto Dreamstime.com

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
joycemason.com

The Rhapsodes Left Words—and Crowds—in Stitches

2010-08-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

How My New Blog Got Its Name

A rhapsode or in modern usage, rhapsodist, refers to a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry. Rhapsodes performed the epics of Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod and the satires of others. Itinerant performers, they often customized their presentations. Improv figured highly in their offerings. [1] As I say of myself in a post on one of my other blogs, they were very verse-a-tile!

The term rhapsode is derived from a Greek word that means to sew songs together.

A rhapsode was known on sight by his long flowing robe and staff. The rhapsode built his repertoire in diverse myths, tales and jokes. His performance of epic poetry was called in classical Greek rhapsodia and its performer a rhapsodos. According to some sources, the “outer shell” of a given work would be kept intact keeping secure such underlying themes as morality or honor. Some modern scholars argue that the rhapsodos was by definition a performer of a fixed, written text. I resonate to the idea of a fixed core with wiggle room around the edges. The lifestyle of the rhapsode was consistent with a free spirit, unlikely to relish poetic confines.

The word rhapsodos was in use as early as works of Greek lyric poet, Pindar (522–443 BC). Pindar offers two different explanations of the term, "singer of stitched verse" and "singer with the staff". The idea of stitched verse is correct from an etymological standpoint, as already mentioned. The reciter held a staff, perhaps like the scepter in the Homeric assembly as a symbol of the right to be heard. (It reminds me of the Native American talking stick.) The staff may also have been used, according to some sources, to emphasize the rhythm or as a prop for “giving grandeur to their gestures.” The word derivation meaning, stitched verse, is a precise metaphor about what oral narrative poets do, stitching together formulas, lines, and scenes during a performance.

Later evidence supports the idea that the rhapsodes were forced to work from written text, even compelled by law to do so.

Let me say it outright. I’m at least two-thirds rebel, and I only stitch verses according to the beat of my own drummer!

Poetry Contests and Mass Communication

Much as we’d like to think we invented poetry contests in modern times, rhapsodes performed competitively way back when. They vied for prizes at religious festivals, a practice already well established by the fifth century. Read the Wikipedia article, linked at the end, for more juicy details.

Another interesting idea to contemplate. Poetry reading through the rhapsodes was an ancient form of mass communication! Mass communication begins with an audience of more than one. According to another source, the rhapsode was considered special as a “news producer.” In some societies, the news producer was a rhapsode, griot, or one of a thousand other names suggesting wisdom, experience and cultural memory. “Singer of Tales" is still a main source of such cultural riches in the Balkan countries. [2]

Poets and lovers of poetry: This is our history.

Why I Fell in Love with the Rhapsodes and Got Fired Up to Start This Blog

I have always considered myself a weaver. Someone who takes diverse concepts, topics, and experiences, then stitches them together in a cohesive, helpful, healing picture—a mandala that someone can use for deeper self-understanding.

My life has been a tapestry of rich and radiant reunions. (Apologies to Carole King.) After reuniting with birth mother, boyfriend/great love, and finally, my first boyfriend who is now my husband: I realized I was more than fond of The Re-do. (While we’re on the subject, I also married and divorced my first husband twice.)

Lately I’ve started having reunions not with not just people but things I love. One of them is poetry. After a hiatus of over three decades, I’m back in the saddle, stitching together my first poetry collection, available this fall, Thick Water: Poems on Bonds of the Heart.

Yet it took another poet’s book to turn me onto how this thing I do naturally creates a tapestry out of “my mishegaas,” as my dear friend Esther puts it. The Yiddish term mishegaas says it so much better than mere English, how strange, mixed-up, and misfit my diverse interests appear at first. For a long time, they seemed an odd mixture, even to me. What thread can possibly connect writing (poetry in particular), astrology, and cosmic signs (synchronicity, oracles, dreams)? The thread is symbolism but more importantly, it’s the sewing—taking disparate parts of life experiences and weaving them into a whole picture. Making sense out of mishegaas.

But it’s more. According to Kim Rosen in Saved by a Poem, the rhapsodes ultimately evolved to be part of the Olympic Games and other competitions. For a fee, a person could ask the rhapsode a question and receive a personal passage from Homer as a form of guidance or divination. Ancient fortune cookies, compliments of the rhapsode. I know people who do “Bible dipping,” open the Good Book to a page and point their finger on some text. Wherever it lands, that’s their personal passage, their modern Christian version of the oracle at Delphi speaking. This oracular spin on the rhapsodes puts poetry right in my trick bag of tools for divine guidance. Divine guidance is the thread, but we don’t see the tapestry or big picture unless we sew.

As ye sew, so shall ye reap.

My first reaction to this inspiration? I need a third blog like a hole in my head. Then, on second thought, maybe I need it more than I know. Now that I’ve been blogging for nearly four years, it’s second nature to share what I’m learning with others … and it keeps my website tidier to have links to separate blogs for major topic areas or writing genres. That’s what the link is for, to create threads with many weavers who sew together ideas and inspiration on the massive tapestry of the World Wide Web.

Everything I do is a form of healing, helping people to feel more whole, what stitching something together is all about. We are stitched back together when we’re hurt. Humor is a huge piece of it, the most healing thing the gods and muses ever bestowed on humanity. When someone makes us laugh so hard we could bust a gut, we say they keep us in stitches. Poetry heals both poet and audience. I still am amazed at how my most personal poems hit universal chords in my readers and listeners.

Besides, I need practice being “out there” with my poems. It’s been a long time.

Welcome, and thanks for being here. I hope I keep you in stitches for years to come.

~~~

Next Up: What you came for—a poem! Just a little more waiting is fullness.

SOURCES:

[1] Wikipedia - Rhapsode

[2] ENGLISH 104 (Spring 2005) MEDIA HISTORY: A brief guide to the grand tour
[3] Kim Rosen, Saved by a Poem, p. 105.

"Waiting Is Fullness"

2010-08-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

A quote from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

Stitched Verse will launch with its first official post on Friday, August 13, at 8:28 pm PDT.