Tuesday, June 26, 2012

dragonflyscape

























I counted my Submishmash rejections today. Oh well.
Poor dragonfly. I wrote a poem about you a long time
ago. Here's the link to Anecdote of Air.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Ganges


















An amazing thing it will be to travel, to write,
to be in India...coming!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

mask






















After the Mother of the Ball Turret Gunner

In sleep you are hawk-slipped near some stream

Perched on its bank, moon snagged in your rusty chest

You are back on earth a rowdy boy sailing over the lawn

I don’t wake from the nightmare of you alive

Your body mine again as we rock and doze

Sunday, June 3, 2012

more cindy




















Then of course it's not much to write poems
as mothers of soldiers, because
that's what I am so am I really becoming
an other? The Poetry Foundation says
the persona is a dramatic character
"distinguished from the poet."
Cindy Sherman's personas at first seem
like charicatures. But move up close and you
notice the extreme and reverent attention
to detail. The women are simultaneously
generalized and specified. As you can see,
the photographs continue to do some work.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Cindy Cindy Cindy
















































(The guard's hand in front of my camera to block the shot)

Finally saw the Cindy Sherman exhibition today. It felt
good to be in another museum space -- other than where
I work. And it felt good to look and listen. I admire
Sherman's determination to construct personas so fully.
She is immersed in the drama of her characters. I was moved
by that, by all the women she becomes. And yet there she is,
under the makeup and costumes, her face. I've been playing
around in my own writing recently with personas. A series
seems to be developing. Mother of warriors poems.
I'm going through an anthology of war poetry, reading randomly
and then writing a poem in response. Without planning
the poems have been in the voice of or from the perspective of
the mother of the soldier speaker or subject of the poem
from the anthology. To do this is to take on the face of that other.
Not only the face but the sound. To write in a different
octave or scale, or say as a soprano rather than alto, if that makes
sense. I think I'd like to see the Sherman before it closes, soon
unfortunately. There's more for me to learn. Of course.