Photo by Ann Privateer
COWBOY STARTER KIT
—Ann Privateer, Davis
Travel, reunions, summer food,
tax credits rerun the falling dollar,
prayers resell this year’s drought,
heat relief jumps in the pool,
trade livestock for fresh fruit,
vegetables for the next investment
before NASA explodes,
before payments compensate,
before mud spits in your face,
before tornados whip you to the basement,
before your favorite show is canceled,
before garage sales leave your closet empty,
before you move to Chandler, Texas
with a cowboy starter kit
to pick tomatoes for the chili
cook-off, sauté them onions
with mayhem and a dash
of sex appeal, remember who
you used to be before summer
awakened that thin slice of you,
diced into tight jeans to dot
the dust with square toed boots.
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Thanks, Ann! Ann Privateer and Edythe Schwarz will be reading at Sacramento Poetry Center this coming Monday night; see below for more details. Or see also Medusa's blog for March 10, 2008 (scroll down through the Archives at the right of this column) or rattlesnakepress.com (RattleChaps page).
This weekend in NorCal poetry:
•••Saturday (11/15), 7:30 PM: Six Ft. Swells Press presents a 2-for-1 Happy Hour of Poetry, as they celebrate the two latest chapbooks in their famed Cheap Shots Poetry Series: Sex On Earth by Christine Irving and Noel Kroeplin, and The One That Got Away by Will Staple. Rhythm’s Café, 114 W. Main St., Grass Valley. There will be a book-signing following the readers. Only a $2 cover, with beer and wine available. For more information call 530-277-4379 or sixfootswells@yahoo.com. Please visit our website at www.myspace.com/sixftswells/. [See last Monday's post for bios.]
Coincidentally, interviews with Noel Kroeplin and Will Staple are included in Conversations, Vol. 4 of B.L. Kennedy’s Rattlesnake Interview Series, which was released just this past Weds. at The Book Collector!
•••Sat. (11/15), 10 AM-4 PM: SpiralChapper Joe Finkleman’s images will be part of a one-day show/sale at St. Mary’s School, 58th and M Streets, Sacramento. Joe will have full-size framed images, small images, and lovely greeting cards (suitable for framing) for sale. It's a great chance to buy holiday gifts at affordable prices. Check it out! Information about Joe can also be seen on the SpiralChapper page of rattlesnakepress.com, or go to visionsandviews.com/.
•••Monday (11/17), 7:30 PM: Sacramento Poetry Center presents Ann Privateer and Edythe Haendel Schwartz at HQ for the Arts, 1719 25th St., Sacramento. Ann Privateer says: I started writing nature poems in my 20s, jotting down thoughts after the first thaw when it was warm enough to walk on icy creek water without wearing a jacket in Ohio. The next theme that pulled me was the way life unfolded while raising a son and a daughter. Working in Sac., driving there each day, gave rise to dead dog on the highway poems. Now I'm retired, writing more than ever in ways I have yet to define.
Edythe Haendel Schwartz is retired from the faculty, Department of Child Development, California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Calyx, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Earth’s Daughters, Poet Lore, Pearl, Spire, Kaleidoscope, Potomac Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Spillway, Vermont Literary Review, JAMA, Runes, Passager, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies. Her chapbook, Exposure, was a finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices competition, and was published by FLP, Georgetown , KY, December, 2007.
Coming Up at SPC: November 24: Connie Post and Janet Smith.
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Mark your calendars!
Copperfield’s Books Renowned Speakers presents a reading by Mary Oliver in Santa Rosa at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Rd. on December 1 at 8 PM. Tickets start at $15 at wellsfargocenterarts.org or call 707-546-3600 (noon-6 PM, Tues.-Sat).
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Bill Gainer writes: I won the Beat Museum's October 2008 Poetry Contest! Check it out at: http://thebeatmuseum.org/; you'll see my name to the right—click on it. No more of the Honorable Mention/first loser stuff, baby, we're over the hump and I'm feeling good! Bill has won so many honorable mentions that he felt like he was stuck in "always a bridesmaid..." Congrats, Bill!
If you'd like to hang out with Bill and the rest of Grass Valley's rowdy crowd of After-Hours poets, head on up there Saturday night for the Six Ft. Swells book release (see above). Here's a poem from Will Staple:
SIERRA LOVE NOTE
—Will Staple
Empty high Sierra cabin
one room, table, bench
a note on a nail
by the one window,
"the day you're due
I rise before dawn
if I know you'll be here at 4
I'm already happy at noon."
Such lighthearted tenderness
erotic and trusting
—you love not when you wish
but when you love—
when you're older,
it's no different,
it just takes longer.
(from Will's new book, The One That Got Away)
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Tom Goff writes: This is with thanks to the fine poem you posted Thursday by Jane Blue, which freed up my mood to write this...
TODAY THE VAPORS OF NOVEMBER
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
We revisit Empire Mine State Park:
Nora’s brought her camera and us here
to snap old buildings—the gold assayer’s office,
the miners’ rescue station—at promising
angles for future watercolors. Today,
vaporous with November, seems all
one promising angle, one future watercolor,
eternal color, the water of diamond-caught
sunlight strained through cheesecloth
cirrus, wisps and streaks all about, and yet
the light filtered near-drinkable, tinting
Nora’s profile, cheekbone, nose, and brow
purest white. White of the Sombreuille rose
grown in the garden here, a shoot of it now climbing
our trellis at home…Nora’s face a woman’s face
seen through a rain-running window,
and also the window, splashed transparency, molded
to the mask of her lineaments…A summons to peace,
in accord with our mood, in accord with California,
with the song of the nation and its election.
Yes, we have public motives for this acutely
harmonious private instant, and also
reasons hermetically ours. Sights absurd
if coldly considered—the granite ball
forever unfalling from atop the Bourn Cottage
gatepost, the stuck stone lion’s head unceasingly
vomiting waterstream into the old terraced pool—
seem insubstantial, liminal, gauzes easy to penetrate,
mysteries that submit to our soft inquisitions
with the least possible resistance (earthly, ghostly?).
Impressed by the power appearances have given
into our hands, we ease back, content not to exert
this imperium…here we are at Maple Lane, where
after all, we were married so very outside of time ago,
where carriages, two- and four-in-hand, once
would idle, burning not one drop of gasoline,
the rubbed gleaming black of their sides and bellies,
the spotless brass fittings now glinting, now opaque
as the leaf-eyelids above blink; and it seems to me,
as we tread the small heaps of leaves pocking the lane,
that each footfall releases vapory droplets distilled
from the pent-up snorts of all horses ever here,
each leaf shoetip-turned,
a puff of the feathery fumes of their breath,
white, blinkered horses, black and dappled horses
mute and alert, standing and stamping
silent in a wintry and vanished century…
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ALICE IN WONDERLAND’S GARDEN PARTY*
—Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Tehama
1
In a sun-filled glade in the wormwood
fleabane torments wolfbane
who howls threats with his painted tongue
at the leopard's bane chewing on blood flowers
Under skunk cabbage possum grapes play dead
Porcupine grass lays down its quills
Spider lily spins snail vines
ties Canary Island broom
to sweep the place clean
Gopher plant and mole plant
lay out the lawn design
pattern the dance floor in lambs quarters
Fairy wands and fairy dusters
loop moth orchids on the dove trees
Drape the clearing with white baby's breath
2
Alice sets the table with flamingo celery
harts' tongue fern and pork and beans
Elephant's food and liverleaf
fill separate blue bowls
Toadflax squats by the pond
where goldfish plant and pickerel weed swoop
Swan river daisy teases a sea urchin
Crab cactus and shrimp plant and lobster-claw
hope they won't be canapés
3
Cockscombs his woolly blue curls
ties them into a pony tail palm
Apes' earrings dangle under huge elephant ears
Gayfeather tickles goat's beard
Cowslips into her Chinese woolflower gown
Wake-robin tunes up his voice
Kingfisher daisy rattles percussion
while harebell chimes from a shadblow
Lambs ears and bunny ears perk
deer tongue fern says the dance shall begin
The freckle face panda plant stirs its bones
Firetail blazing colts foot thunders up
Coyote brushes against beefwood
thinks of a snack
4
Out of sight in the golden fleece
the false dragonhead lifts his parrot's beak
Horehound skulks and spies with Virginia creeper
The rattlesnake master guards his serpent's tongue
Venus flytrap licks her fleshy lips and waits
The devil's walking stick keeps them company
Tiger flower prowls and lion's tail twitches
Baboon flower patrols the treetops
Yellow-eyed grass watches for trouble below
Bull bay and dog-tooth violet and buffalo berry
keep their red shanks ready
Emu bush buries her head in the sand
The Cheshire Cat grins and observes
from deep in the butterfly bush
5
Blissfully unaware
Alice and naked ladies dance
Their little birds' feet skip through the old tunes
In tiny sweet tones they sing chickabiddy
while their five-finger ferns pin foxgloves
to the donkey's tail
Flame bush bursts into a red-hot reel
Hummingbird flower deigns
to dance the turkey-foot
Even touch-me-not grabs
the cardinal climber and swings
Spurned dandelion takes his bleeding heart
to fawn lily for comfort
Under the pussy willow Miss Willmott's ghost
cuddles a teddybear cactus
Wallflowers watch the dance from the sidelines
with hens and chicks and poor pigweed
Standing alone Queens tears drip
from the ladies' sagging wattles
7
Monstera lights fairy lanterns
Bells-of-Ireland call birds of paradise
in a fireworks display so grand
it bends the devil's backbone
for the grand finale of Alice's garden party
*plant names from Sunset Western Garden Book
(originally published in Wicked Alice, 2006)
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Thanks, PWJ and Tom, for your enchanting responses to our Seed of the Week: Secret Gardens and Other Enchanted Places. Watch for more of their work in Rattlesnake Review #20, due out in mid-December. Both will have poetry in there, and our Historian-in-Residence Tom Goff has written a very interesting article on California Poet of the past, George Sterling.
And get your own poetry, photos, artwork, etc. in by the next deadline, which is
Tomorrow—Saturday, November 15!! Yikes!
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Today's LittleNip:
I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.
—Ogden Nash
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—Medusa
SnakeWatch: What's New from Rattlesnake Press:
Next deadline for Rattlesnake Review is November 15!!! Send 3-5 poems, smallish art pieces and/or photos (no bio, no cover letter, no simultaneous submissions or previously-published poems) to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. E-mail attachments are preferred, but be sure to include all contact info, including snail address.
New for November: Now available at The Book Collector, or from the authors, or (soon) through rattlesnakepress.com, or—heck—just write to me and I'll send 'em to you: a new rattlechap from Red Fox Underground Poet Wendy Patrice Williams (Some New Forgetting); a littlesnake broadside from South Lake Tahoe Poet Ray Hadley (Children's Games); our 2009 calendar from Katy Brown (Beyond the Hill: A Poet’s Calendar) as well as Conversations, Vol. 4 of B.L. Kennedy’s Rattlesnake Interview Series. Also: littlesnake broadside #46: Snake Secrets: Getting Your Poetry Published in Rattlesnake Press (and lots of other places, besides!): A compendium of ideas for brushing up on your submissions process so as to make editors everywhere more happy, thereby increasing the likelihood of getting your poetry published.
Medusa's Weekly Menu:
(Contributors are welcome to cook up something for any and all of these!)
Monday: Weekly NorCal poetry calendar
Tuesday: Seed of the Week: Tuesday is Medusa's day to post poetry triggers such as quotes, forms, photos, memories, jokes—whatever might tickle somebody's muse. Pick up the gauntlet and send in your poetic results; and don't be shy about sending in your own triggers, too! All poems will be posted and a few of them will go into Medusa's Corner of each Rattlesnake Review. Send your work to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. No deadline for SOWs; respond today, tomorrow, or whenever the muse arrives. (Print 'em out, maybe, save 'em for a dry spell?) When you send us work, though, just let us know which "seed" it was that inspired you.
Wednesday (sometimes): HandyStuff Quickies: Resources for the poet, including whatever helps ease the pain of writing and/or publishing: favorite journals to read and/or submit to; books, etc., about writing; organizational tools—you know—HandyStuff! Tell us about your favorite tools.
Thursday: B.L.'s Drive-Bys: Micro-reviews by our irreverent Reviewer-in-Residence, B.L. Kennedy. Send books, CDs, DVDs, etc. to him for possible review (either as a Drive-By or in future issues of Rattlesnake Review) at P.O. Box 160664, Sacramento, CA 95816.
Friday: NorCal weekend poetry calendar
Daily (except Sunday): LittleNips: SnakeFood for the Poetic Soul: Daily munchables for poetic thought, including short paragraphs, quotes, wonky words, silliness, little-known poetry/poet facts, and other inspiration—yet another way to feed our ravenous poetic souls.
And poetry! Every day, poetry from writers near and far and in-between! The Snakes of Medusa are always hungry.......!
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Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events, to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.) Medusa cannot vouch for the moral fiber of other publications, contests, etc. that she lists, however, so submit to them at your own risk. For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com). And be sure to sign up for Snakebytes, our monthly e-newsletter that will keep you up-to-date on all our ophidian chicanery.
