YOU OPERATE
—Erica Jong
You operate on the afternoon
You perform open heart surgery
on the ghosts
of your suicidal friends
You divorce your parents
before you have time
to be born
You kick out your wife & child
You tell your girlfriend
to go screw herself
This is the solitude you wanted
The silence
is stitching you up
you write
__________________
This week in NorCal poetry:
•••Monday (4/20), 7:30 PM. Sacramento Poetry Center presents Mary Zeppa and Friends [Julia Connor, Victoria Dalkey, Patrick Grizzell, Kathryn Hohlwein, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Ann Menebroker, Tom Miner, Stan Zumbiel] at HQ for the Arts, 1719 25th St., Sacramento. No open mic this week. [See last Friday's post for details.]
•••Tues. (4/21), 9 PM: The Moore Time for Poetry TV series is on Ch. 17 Comcast, also SureWest and Strategic Frontier. National Champion dance team, the Sac Allstars. Also, vocalists Aaron Devon, Lolita Moore, Brian Randle and Ricky Center. The encore cablecast schedule is on April 23 at 5 AM. Also, visit this website, www.accesssacramento.org, and click on the BIG "Watch Channel 17" button to watch our program! Hosted by Terry Moore & 4 year old daughter Tyra Moore.
•••Tues. (4/21), 7 PM: Woodland Public Library presents Danny Romero and Tim Kahl, 250 First St., Woodland. Danny Romero was born and raised in Los Angeles. He has degrees from University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1988) and Temple University (MA, 1993) in Philadelphia, where he taught writing (part-time) for many years. Romero’s poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals throughout the country, including Colorado Review, Drumvoices Revue, Green Mountains Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Ploughshares. His work can also be found in such anthologies as West of the West: Imagining California (1989), Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction (1993), Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (2003), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (2006), Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (2008) and Pow Wow: Charting the Faultlines in American Experience: Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009). He is the author of the novel, Calle 10 (1996), and two chapbooks of poetry, the latest being Land of a Thousand Barrios (2002). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press. He teaches in the English Department at Sacramento City College.
Tim Kahl was born in Chicago and has been published in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog, The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/). His first collection is Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009). He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press, which is dedicated to works of poetry in translation into English. He teaches at Sacramento City College.
•••Weds. (4/22), 6-7 PM: Upstairs Poetry Reading celebrates Earth Day at The Upstairs Art Gallery, 420 Main St. (2nd floor), Placerville. It's a poetry open-mike read-around, so bring your own poems or those of a favorite poet to share, or just come to listen. No charge.
•••Thurs. (4/23), 8 PM: Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café (1414 16th St., Sacramento) presents Chris Olander and James Lee Jobe. Chris Olander is a poet and bio/educator who has been writing since 1980 and teaching for California Poets In the Schools since 1984. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, chapbooks, radio and TV performances and readings from Seattle to San Diego—Hawaii to New Mexico. Olander lives in the Sierra foothills. James Lee Jobe is a poet and radio producer, with four chapbooks and many publications, including The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems. He has also been on the board of directors of the Sacramento Poetry Center. Jobe lives in Davis. Free; open mic.
•••Friday (4/24), 7-9 PM: Barnes & Noble (Sunrise Boulevard in Citrus Heights) open mic as part of their "Turn Off" week. Margaret Bell writes: I would like to cast the net wide and get a lot of poets from a 50-mile radius to come and share their poems. They could use the event as an opportunity, not only to read their poems, but to advertise their own poetry activities and open mic opportunities. I just received confirmation that a truly wonderful guitarist will play some background. He is going to play softly behind one of the poems I intend to read and asked me to send him a copy of the poem so he can prepare for it. He can play behind one of your poems if you want him to do so. Just send me a copy of the poem. I will forward it to him, with your request that he play.
•••Saturday (4/25), 7:30 PM: 17th Annual Listening to the Wild at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley. Poetry, prose, film and music featuring local and regional artists. Tickets are available at Center for the Arts. The theme this year is Harmony/Disharmony.
•••Sunday (4/26), 11 AM-12:45 PM: El Camino Poets meet on the fourth Sunday at the Hart Senior Center, 27th and J Sts., Sacramento. Please bring 8 copies of your poem to be critiqued. There will be no El Camino Poets in May.
__________________
THE TEACHER
—Erica Jong
The teacher stands before the class.
She's talking of Chaucer.
But the students aren't hungry for Chaucer.
They want to devour her.
They are eating her knees, her toes, her breasts, her eyes
& spitting out
her words.
What do they want with words?
They want a real lesson!
She is naked before them.
Psalms are written on her thighs.
When she walks, sonnets divide
into octaves & sestets.
Couplets fall into place
when her fingers nervously toy
with the chalk.
But the words don't clothe her.
No amount of poetry can save her now.
There's no volume big enough to hide in.
No unabridged Webster, no OED.
The students aren't dumb.
They want a lesson.
Once they might have taken life
by the scruff of its neck
in a neat couplet.
But now
they need blood.
They have left Chaucer alone
& have eaten the teacher.
_________________
BOOKS
—Erica Jong
The universe (which others call the library)...
—Jorge Luis Borges
Books which are stitched up the center with coarse white thread
Books on the beach with sunglass-colored pages
Books about food with pictures of weeping grapefruits
Books about baking bread with browned corners
Books about long-haired Frenchmen with uncut pages
Books of erotic engravings with pages that stick
Books about inns whose stars have sputtered out
Books of illuminations surrounded by darkness
Books with blank pages & printed margins
Books with fanatical footnotes in no-point type
Books with book lice
Books with rice-paper pastings
Books with book fungus blooming over their pages
Books with pages of skin with flesh-colored bindings
Books by men in love with the letter O
Books which smell of earth whose pages turn
_________________
THE BOOK
—Erica Jong
I float down the spiral stairs
of the old apartment.
At the dining room table sit
my six ex-analysts, two brokers,
& five professors,
considering my book.
They dip the pages of the manuscript in water,
to see if it will last.
From where I watch, the sheets look blank.
They discuss my sexual hang-ups.
Why do I write about women
when, after all, they're men?
They enumerate my debts, losses,
& the lies I've told; the red lights
I have passed, the men I've kissed.
They examine a lock of my hair for bleach.
Finally, muttering, they rise & yawn in chorus.
They decide to repossess my typewriter, my legs,
my Phi Beta Kappa key, one breast,
any children I may have, & my espresso machine.
My book, of course, is through.
Already the pages have dissolved like toilet paper.
I wake up with the bed
still on the wrong side of the dream.
My legs are scattered through the streets
like pick-up sticks.
Crawling on stumps, crawling
in the spittle & dog shit,
I bitterly accuse the City
& bitterly accuse myself.
How could I not have known
that the book was on the wrong side
of the dream?
How could I
have walked into it?
—Erica Jong
You operate on the afternoon
You perform open heart surgery
on the ghosts
of your suicidal friends
You divorce your parents
before you have time
to be born
You kick out your wife & child
You tell your girlfriend
to go screw herself
This is the solitude you wanted
The silence
is stitching you up
you write
__________________
This week in NorCal poetry:
•••Monday (4/20), 7:30 PM. Sacramento Poetry Center presents Mary Zeppa and Friends [Julia Connor, Victoria Dalkey, Patrick Grizzell, Kathryn Hohlwein, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Ann Menebroker, Tom Miner, Stan Zumbiel] at HQ for the Arts, 1719 25th St., Sacramento. No open mic this week. [See last Friday's post for details.]
•••Tues. (4/21), 9 PM: The Moore Time for Poetry TV series is on Ch. 17 Comcast, also SureWest and Strategic Frontier. National Champion dance team, the Sac Allstars. Also, vocalists Aaron Devon, Lolita Moore, Brian Randle and Ricky Center. The encore cablecast schedule is on April 23 at 5 AM. Also, visit this website, www.accesssacramento.org, and click on the BIG "Watch Channel 17" button to watch our program! Hosted by Terry Moore & 4 year old daughter Tyra Moore.
•••Tues. (4/21), 7 PM: Woodland Public Library presents Danny Romero and Tim Kahl, 250 First St., Woodland. Danny Romero was born and raised in Los Angeles. He has degrees from University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1988) and Temple University (MA, 1993) in Philadelphia, where he taught writing (part-time) for many years. Romero’s poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals throughout the country, including Colorado Review, Drumvoices Revue, Green Mountains Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Ploughshares. His work can also be found in such anthologies as West of the West: Imagining California (1989), Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction (1993), Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (2003), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (2006), Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (2008) and Pow Wow: Charting the Faultlines in American Experience: Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009). He is the author of the novel, Calle 10 (1996), and two chapbooks of poetry, the latest being Land of a Thousand Barrios (2002). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press. He teaches in the English Department at Sacramento City College.
Tim Kahl was born in Chicago and has been published in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog, The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/). His first collection is Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009). He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press, which is dedicated to works of poetry in translation into English. He teaches at Sacramento City College.
•••Weds. (4/22), 6-7 PM: Upstairs Poetry Reading celebrates Earth Day at The Upstairs Art Gallery, 420 Main St. (2nd floor), Placerville. It's a poetry open-mike read-around, so bring your own poems or those of a favorite poet to share, or just come to listen. No charge.
•••Thurs. (4/23), 8 PM: Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café (1414 16th St., Sacramento) presents Chris Olander and James Lee Jobe. Chris Olander is a poet and bio/educator who has been writing since 1980 and teaching for California Poets In the Schools since 1984. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, chapbooks, radio and TV performances and readings from Seattle to San Diego—Hawaii to New Mexico. Olander lives in the Sierra foothills. James Lee Jobe is a poet and radio producer, with four chapbooks and many publications, including The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems. He has also been on the board of directors of the Sacramento Poetry Center. Jobe lives in Davis. Free; open mic.
•••Friday (4/24), 7-9 PM: Barnes & Noble (Sunrise Boulevard in Citrus Heights) open mic as part of their "Turn Off" week. Margaret Bell writes: I would like to cast the net wide and get a lot of poets from a 50-mile radius to come and share their poems. They could use the event as an opportunity, not only to read their poems, but to advertise their own poetry activities and open mic opportunities. I just received confirmation that a truly wonderful guitarist will play some background. He is going to play softly behind one of the poems I intend to read and asked me to send him a copy of the poem so he can prepare for it. He can play behind one of your poems if you want him to do so. Just send me a copy of the poem. I will forward it to him, with your request that he play.
•••Saturday (4/25), 7:30 PM: 17th Annual Listening to the Wild at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley. Poetry, prose, film and music featuring local and regional artists. Tickets are available at Center for the Arts. The theme this year is Harmony/Disharmony.
•••Sunday (4/26), 11 AM-12:45 PM: El Camino Poets meet on the fourth Sunday at the Hart Senior Center, 27th and J Sts., Sacramento. Please bring 8 copies of your poem to be critiqued. There will be no El Camino Poets in May.
__________________
THE TEACHER
—Erica Jong
The teacher stands before the class.
She's talking of Chaucer.
But the students aren't hungry for Chaucer.
They want to devour her.
They are eating her knees, her toes, her breasts, her eyes
& spitting out
her words.
What do they want with words?
They want a real lesson!
She is naked before them.
Psalms are written on her thighs.
When she walks, sonnets divide
into octaves & sestets.
Couplets fall into place
when her fingers nervously toy
with the chalk.
But the words don't clothe her.
No amount of poetry can save her now.
There's no volume big enough to hide in.
No unabridged Webster, no OED.
The students aren't dumb.
They want a lesson.
Once they might have taken life
by the scruff of its neck
in a neat couplet.
But now
they need blood.
They have left Chaucer alone
& have eaten the teacher.
_________________
BOOKS
—Erica Jong
The universe (which others call the library)...
—Jorge Luis Borges
Books which are stitched up the center with coarse white thread
Books on the beach with sunglass-colored pages
Books about food with pictures of weeping grapefruits
Books about baking bread with browned corners
Books about long-haired Frenchmen with uncut pages
Books of erotic engravings with pages that stick
Books about inns whose stars have sputtered out
Books of illuminations surrounded by darkness
Books with blank pages & printed margins
Books with fanatical footnotes in no-point type
Books with book lice
Books with rice-paper pastings
Books with book fungus blooming over their pages
Books with pages of skin with flesh-colored bindings
Books by men in love with the letter O
Books which smell of earth whose pages turn
_________________
THE BOOK
—Erica Jong
I float down the spiral stairs
of the old apartment.
At the dining room table sit
my six ex-analysts, two brokers,
& five professors,
considering my book.
They dip the pages of the manuscript in water,
to see if it will last.
From where I watch, the sheets look blank.
They discuss my sexual hang-ups.
Why do I write about women
when, after all, they're men?
They enumerate my debts, losses,
& the lies I've told; the red lights
I have passed, the men I've kissed.
They examine a lock of my hair for bleach.
Finally, muttering, they rise & yawn in chorus.
They decide to repossess my typewriter, my legs,
my Phi Beta Kappa key, one breast,
any children I may have, & my espresso machine.
My book, of course, is through.
Already the pages have dissolved like toilet paper.
I wake up with the bed
still on the wrong side of the dream.
My legs are scattered through the streets
like pick-up sticks.
Crawling on stumps, crawling
in the spittle & dog shit,
I bitterly accuse the City
& bitterly accuse myself.
How could I not have known
that the book was on the wrong side
of the dream?
How could I
have walked into it?
_________________
A READING
—Erica Jong
The old poet
with his face full of lines,
with iambs jumping in his hair like fleas,
with all the revisions of his body
unsaying him,
walks to the podium.
He is about to tell us
how he came to this.
_________________
—Medusa
SnakeWatch: What's New from Rattlesnake Press:
Rattlesnake Review: The latest Snake (RR21) is now available (free) at The Book Collector, or send me four bux and I'll mail you one. Next deadline is May 15 for RR22: 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. Meanwhile, the snakes of Medusa are always hungry; let us know if your submission is for the Review or for Medusa, or for either one, and please—only one submission per issue.
Also available (free): 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. Pick up a copy at The Book Collector or write to me and I'll send you one. Free!
NEW FOR APRIL: A SpiralChap of poetry and photos from Laverne Frith (Celebrations: Images and Texts); a (free!) littlesnake broadside from Taylor Graham (Edge of Wildwood); and Musings3: An English Affair, a new blank journal of photos and writing prompts from Katy Brown. Now available from the authors, or The Book Collector, or (soon) rattlesnakepress.com/.
April 15 was the deadline for the second issue of WTF, the free quarterly journal from Poetry Unplugged at Luna's Cafe that is edited by frank andrick. Submission guidelines are the same as for the Snake, but send your poems, photos, smallish art or prose pieces (500 words or less) to fandrickfabpub@hotmail.com (attachments preferred) or, if you’re snailing, to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. And be forewarned: this publication is for adults only, so you must be over 18 years of age to submit. Copies of the first issue are at The Book Collector, or send me two bux and I'll mail you one. Next deadline, for issue #3, is July 15.
COMING IN MAY: Join us Weds., May 13 for a new rattlechap, Sinfonietta, from Tom Goff; Vol. 5 of Conversations, the Rattlesnake Interview Series by B.L. Kennedy; and the inauguration of a new series, Rattlesnake LittleBooks, with Shorts: Quatrains and Epigrams by Iven Lourie. That’s at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, 7:30 PM. Free!
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, or any other day!): 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.......!
_________________
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.
