bang, bang

Once Billy Collins told a group of us that if we ever caught him looking at his own poem in a book to shoot him. He said once he published it he was done with it. Well I think I am the exact opposite, if you ever find me taking for granted that someone actually published me in a journal then please get out the gun.

Tonight in the middle of a thunderstorm I drove to Barnes and Noble and bought the new issues of Pleiades and Bitter Oleander, mainly because I have had several emails about the poem and for some reason have not received my copies. I needed to see it for myself, and for some other reason that I am not quite sure of, had to tell the clerk who was ringing me up that I was on page 32.

I would also probably start telling strangers at the periodical section if the person I was with didn’t start whining about how my “free copy” would be there in a few weeks and wanted to leave. No matter, I understand myself and I work perfectly.

Tonight I went for a run in a thunderstorm, tonight I touched my name and for a moment it was all okay.

So yesterday we went down to Loring Park and looked at all the Sculptures outside which btw, as you can see in the below photo, was worth the effort. I wish I had a photo of my daughter running through the big vagina which of course she did. It did not happen quite that way the first time when it actually involved my body. Oh the limitations of art.

I just can’t wait for her “What I Did This Summer” stories b/c you have to know that running through a big vagina is going to leave an imprint on her mind. Then again, what I think will never does and those small things always tend to haunt like her brief 15 min in sunday school.

Anyway this photo is the top runner for my book cover. Hell I’d buy it.

because suzanne missed it the first time
Oh the wonders of art  

You know as a woman you are spending too much time on the computer when you actually starting timing your monthly cycles by blog posts. Yes I know too much information but I actually had a great sensitivity this morning to not being on someone’s blog roll which is so lame I can’t even begin to delve into it. I need to call my friends back. I need to answer emails. I need to actually walk around this great city.

For father’s day I sent my dad a copy of the Massachusetts Review and Mid American Review with my poems in it, well they have not been printed yet but I am having them sent to my father when they are. I had to call and say to my mother, please don’t throw this away if you open the box, please look for my name.

My father is a good man. He will carry me around for days. He will show his fishing buddies at the bar, he will drive me around on the tractor when he is laying down seed. He will tell my grandfather who has yes, 6 books of poetry I know you think this modern stuff is crap but here she is. My father will not say crap. But he will make me known, my father will say my name and no matter what the poem says, even it paints him in not the best light which to be honest some have done, he will be proud of me. He will carry me everywhere.

for laurel 

Velveteen

I want to tell you the rabbit
was real all along
he simply needed to undo the zipper.
The hunter came
said how do you like your supper
but the rabbit didn’t stew
or stir, the rabbit
with his doll eyes and boy love
the rabbit sang
with a low cry like tiny knobs
while the hunter turned the dial.
The skin horse burned,
the radio blazed, nothing
touched the boy
and the song
went on.

daughter 

I keep getting up with the doves. My oldest daughter is going on a trip today this is her first summer when she goes away for days. Last night she came to my bed and told me the world is spinning too fast. I remember this. I remember the exact moment childhood left when I felt it slip from the room.

Sometimes you have to parent the exact opposite of what you feel. I pack her packs and tell her I remember, one of the reasons I work with children I say, is because you can return and I do mention it is bitter. I tell her she is strong that we have both grown up together. And I let her go.

There are days when loving someone is the exact the opposite of how you feel. Yes, my daughter before the world opens it spins crazy like a top.

We Shall Name The Baby Blue

Dead blue baby we shall call you sweet
and the cord shall be your string.

This is how my sister buries her son
in a casket no bigger then a tool box.
Here are the things we won’t forgive:

everything is dust and shall return.

I tell my daughter
there are eggs inside her no bigger then a pin.
Numerous like stars, they cannot be named
there is no pleasure.

The baby is blue, the midwife brings my sister a sweater.
He is a print in my hand and I share him with paper.

Everything is dust
nothing is returned
and when the boy turns in my sister's belly
we name him.

My daughter believes there are enough words—
this one could be cup, she says another bowl.

We could go on like this forever.

You are the Moon card. Entering the Moon we enter
the intuitive and psychic realms. This is the
stuff dreams are made on. And like dreams the
imagery we find here may inspire us or torment
us. Understanding the moon requires looking
within. Our own bodily rhythms are echoed in
this luminary that circles the earth every
month and reflects the sun in its progress.
Listening to those rhythms may produce visions
and lead you towards insight. The Moon is a
force that has legends attached to it. It
carries with it both romance and insanity.
Moonlight reveals itself as an illusion and it
is only those willing to work with the force of
dreams that are able to withstand this
reflective light. Image from: Stevee Postman.
http://www.stevee.com/


Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

piper parade 

Hide

Well my friends its Friday and do I need to go work and teach people how to make beautiful art or not so beautiful art as the case may be? No the answer is no—there will be no brushes used in this house for the next three weeks unless it is for entertainment purposes.

Yesterday I received an email from someone I did not know saying how much he enjoyed my recent poem in Pleiades which would be great if I had actually received my own copy. As politically incorrect as this sounds, I feel like a blind girl going out of the house naked. Damn it, why can’t I read the poem? I mean yes, I wrote it but that was like three years ago and now I am naked and blind and writing nothing.

Also in the box, a letter from the director of Palm Beach workshop (could I possibly milk this workshop any further?) asking me to send a copy of my poem “Hide” which I read at the reading because someone from Sydney Australia wants to read it at their poetry festival and they don’t seem to be able to find a book by Teresa Ballard. I am going to have to get Teresa Ballard has no book T-shirts.

Anyway I have decided to make a copy of all these letters and send them to Louise with my next Yale submission and tell her it is all her damn fault. If she would just pick me next year we would all be satisfied and she would break her lifetime streak of never picking a woman. Not that I am bitter.

So the question for the day is how far have you ridden a poem because I think I might have to go out and shoot this one after it gets back from Australia? And is there one poem in your work that people keep coming back to?

These are the things I want to know, while I finish my pile of The New Yorker which has grown by bed.

Sleep

I enter willingly
for here the walls are clear
inlets of land
off the coast calling
to sandpipers
digging their beaks
in the sand.

Tides are strange bed fellows.

Curve of the crescent becomes your hip
then your breast.

This is how water moves when there is no glass
no way to contain the body.

The body returns to sand.
I am free
to build my nest
in the places forgotten.

after 53 hours of art class the first thing to go are the hands;)

I tried to explain to someone what my hands look like after tie-dying with 18 girls today in Girls in Power (yes I WAS wearing gloves) but it wasn’t possible to pin down the hue and different variations of blue. True fact: two of my students don’t know my real last name, all their lives they have called me “Teresa Color” which stays true to the only character I ever wanted to be in the Wizard of Oz. A horse of course.  

Russian poets

This is the end of my fifty hour weeks and then I have three weeks off where I am supposed to do nothing but the book and the girls. I plan to hire a small marching band to swing by here on Friday.

This is my summer of Russian Poets. I am reading the modern history of Russian Poetry which of course, isn’t all that modern. The thing is, when you read these kinds of things at the beach and someone comes up to you and wants to know what class you are taking and you say no, I am doing this for fun---they look at you really weird.

Reading Merwin this morning he said “If you are going to be a writer there comes a point where you’ve apprenticed yourself hard to a number of ppl you feel close to. Then you stop that b/c you are not trying to adopt a voice and after that you can learn from writers without being deafened by them.”

I love it when I believe that the loudest voice in the room of my mind is my own, as if anyone can know that for certain.

door 

Tonight I am tracing the contour of your body on the page, long line of your neck, moon of your hip. I’m telling you I love you from a thousand miles away, remembering my last man on paper. We were in some think tank outside of London. I was twenty and he was twice my age, studying the theories of Nietiche and I drew him every day, the slow slump of his shoulders. Somehow I believed in capturing the soul and charcoal held the origin of pleasure.

He took me through the forest and there was door without a room and I did not walk around but opened the latch and set myself inside. He told me he wanted to love me but he could not. It was simple, as simple as stopping the music in mid song, walking away, deciding not to play.

I drew the faces of children on the train, they passed before me as trees and then what I loved became objects, solid as stone. But today I found you there. Your face became a line and then a nose and then a smile. It was the laying down of everything I hold, of saying to the door here I am and walking through.

alien 

Alien

One of the conversations I have had with my mentor recently, after of course the five pages on syntax was the weakness of modern poetry. In truth, she has these conversations mostly with herself and I sit there in fear thinking she’s going to tie my name into it some how.

We forget to write how we talk. The ticker tape in our head which really is a beautiful poem does not always come out on the page. We transform it into what we believe a poem should look like and I do know that most harmful thing in any art form is preconceived notions.

I am thinking of this b/c I do not see the prose poems at all in my work. I don’t know how to do what Emily did and pull them out of posts and there is a part of me that is a little angry that they are not coming out in “poem form” my poem form and yet I have a distinct feeling they need to stay as there are.

When I take my students out to paint I tell them to forget everything they know, this is not really a tree, I say but some creature who has landed here and now is beginning to grow. You are the first person to paint a tree, describe what it really is.

I tell my students, if we approach things as alien we can finally see their beauty.

beam 

The oil barrel was cut in half, tied to the rafters of the boat house which more like a barn high above the water where the ships would come, surrender themselves. It was here we would swing, walk tip toe across the beam, drop and trust two ropes attached to the wall.

I don’t remember what I was afraid of when I was young. I remember I never felt I would fall, water was safer then land. Both my parents had lost a sibling. My father was holding his sister’s hand when she ran across the street and my mother's older brother was dragged 14 feet by a drunk driver.

I was raised on those stories of loss. I was raised by the simple principle that anything could happen, if you moved your feet, one step of misdirection could cost you everything. I learned to lie well, to hold onto to my daring, to slip across the barn floor at night, to hang myself from beams.

When I was eight the car barely missed me, I was riding down the hill making the corner fast, on to the main street. I had my hands in the air, used my hips to lean over the edge and I made the turn, bounced slowly off the fender into the ditch.

There is an art to being still, to making your body stiff, to hoping he will not see you, face down in the grass. There is art to saying no, I do not live here or here. My house is somewhere over the hill and there is no one home to claim me.

Ten Different Things You Didn’t Know

1. I was a missionary in Haiti.
2. I was a drug dealer (in 7th grade.) I wore a black pleather jacket
and dark kohl under my eyes. I sold mostly pot mixed w/ oregano.
3. I used to know how to talk to whipporwills.
4. I said do me a favorite instead of do me a favor when I was little.
5. I swam with seals, whales, sharks and yes dolphins
6. I am a butcher’s daughter and know all my sides of beef.
7. I read when I was three.
8. I hate meatloaf.
9. I can touch my nose with my tongue.
10. I collect rocks and put them in my pocket.

my home 

Seal Island

I spent my 11th summer on island of the coast of Nova Scotia. A great grandfather had discovered this place centuries before, he set up one of the first light houses in North America. I was born into a family with names written on boats. I was born into a New England family with history.

My 11th summer we had no water or electricity. The children wandered the island, mostly in packs like small dogs. These were fisherman children, boys and girls who’d leave you in a well yet save you from drowning. I loved my first boy there, rode on the back of his motorcycle with hands outstretched like wings. I believed my father could see me all the way from Maine. I believed my father had that much power.

Now it is a bird island. There are no fishermen or children and I believe my family put it in a state trust so it could never be owned, never belong to anyone. It is the last place I felt completely free. The kind of free that makes you dive into the rocks and come up smiling. How much distance do we need to travel to find our eleven year old selves? How many boats do we need to board?

Find the:

four elephants
the wing span
the feather
the bird
the tomato
stone henge
church window
cloud
tree
and find me if you can
 

dove 

I don’t know how long I can handle Barbie pink on my blog.

My confused owl is really a morning dove or at least I think she is. I found a nest of morning doves yesterday while having my coffee. We have history. In Mr. Dawson 8th grade class two would sit by my desk in a small cage while the teacher taught us the art of standing still. He’d put a pie plate the floor full of bird seed, show us how to sit like a statue and then someone would open the dove’s door and a bird would fly to him.

Mr. Dawson had photographs of himself covered in chickadees, sparrows. He claimed it was the art of trusting, of being in the same space over and over, of being more object than man and his students went off like disciples, their pie plates in hand, their pockets full of sunflowers. I seem to be, the only who noticed that the birds never sang, not one note. So I sat the three of us, near a cage in the absolute horror of it.

There is an art to being held, an art to belonging. I have met very few people who know how to do well. One who can be loved, fed and still produce song an another who can feed, and walk away.

now picture her in white...lol 

Yesterday in my art class we mummified Barbies!!! I had so much fun. Today we made our own chariots and rode around the rose garden by the lake. Tomorrow I get to play King Arthur or the horse, the kids will probably make me be the horse. If anyone ever finds out how much fun I have at work they might stop paying me.

treezaa 

I want to climb trees tonight

We had a three hundred year old pine across the street when I was growing up. Three trunks in one tree: the father, the son and the holy ghost. This is what I called them and then I crawled inside their belly to have my tea. I buried my secrets and built small graves for birds. Here is how you love, without reason, something incapable of loving you back. It is beautiful that way.

My first year away from home the power company came and cut the pine down, I was at college and everything was changing. I remember walking up to the door, turning around and seeing so much emptiness and light. I threw up all over my mother’s rhododendrons.

Someone asked me today, how long ago it was I cried for love? Tonight I want to know how to climb trees, how to begin again. I think the birds know all the answers.

fawn 

I am up before the owl. This week will be another crazy week. I am teaching Greek Legends which I love but have no curriculum for and then I have a mosaic class with wonderful things like 20 hammers.

I finished the biggest grant of the bunch yesterday, so much for thinking this wouldn’t be a lot of work. Who knew they’d ask a poet for a five page budget? It is funny how everything leads into another. I use to think submissions were difficult and then I began the manuscript and well, it became as easy as pie. Now I am back to thinking all I want now, is to send off my book and not be asked to add or multiply.

It would be so nice to have one romantic ideal left about being a writer. The porch swing is gone, the cabin in the words, the endless coffee and discussion of Dickenson’s use of metaphor and it is replaced with well, I suppose reality. Reality sucks.

happy birthday my dear sister... 

grant woes

I want all the great literary minds of our time to get together and decide one thing---staples or paper clips?????

medusa 

Thanks everyone for all the kind words but you are suppose to come in here quietly and whisper way to go Teresa Ballard so not to anger the gods. I mean look at poor Medusa, all she did was say out loud she was beautiful and loved Poseidon and the girl got a head full of snakes and all those stone men outside her door. Having had both stone men and snakes, I don't need the trouble.

Anyway I finished my ten pages of syntax and the manuscript is almost done again. One of the most useful tools Carolyn taught me (that I am passing to you) was the mapping technique where you take each poems topic thread such as: hide=sex, animal, betrayal. You do this with every poem and then you weave in and out your topics through out the whole manuscript so then the whole book becomes a poem, with each poem being its own line. Painting is like this: walk away and it is color, come close it is nothing more than brush strokes.

Yes, I have thought about this book way too much and yet so not enough.

Mid-American Review 

Lucky

The best things come to me in threes. I always have to do something three times and then I know it forever. I think my third love will be my best love and to adhere to this principle the poetry gods sent me a wonderful letter. The Mid-American Review accepted all THREE of my poems. Yes, that would be all three of the poems I sent them with a letter thanking me for sending such exceptional work. God I hope they don’t mean another Teresa Ballard. And feel free to break into song because yesterday Hunger Mountain said they are holding one of my poems for the November guest issue and that combined with Massachusetts Review makes yes, three acceptances in the last week. Good thing my personal life is going to hell b/c I might start to think I am lucky.

... 

the confused owl

The confused owl and I have become friends. She wakes me at 6:30 in the morning to tell me her night has begun and I sit with her and have my coffee. When I was leaving my husband, when I had two small girls at my hip I found an owl outside in the lilac bush in the middle of the day chased there by crows. I stood guard for two hours with a stick and every time the crows would swarm down I’d take a swing until the owl flew to the next tree and we continued like this: crow, owl, woman and stick until we lost each other.

Next week will be my eleventh wedding anniversary. I remember my parents’ eleventh anniversary, leaving us behind to drive to Montreal. I remember realizing for the first time, my parents were people, individual people who had existed somewhere alone before they met. Oh the frightening information of childhood.

Somewhere in my closet I have all the letters from the divorce, the ones people wrote telling me not leave. The ones with images of my children becoming serial killers, drug addicts, my brother’s letter claiming that urban living had corrupted my soul and one from a girl in high school who met an aunt at the A&P and was told promptly that I had lost my mind, nervous breakdown and my aunt claimed it was because I had left a man who was suppose to take care of me.

Yes they are all in my closet, even some I have not read and I wonder if it is time now, to burn them all because even though I was wrong about some things, leaving my husband did not make me instantly happy or loved. I was right about some things to—the girls and I are alive. Strong. We sleep in tents, read books about snakes. We go outside in the rain and my daughters trust me to take care of them. In every part of their being they know they are loved by me and even on bad days, they know their mother will keep them safe, she knows how to handle a stick.

I am working 50 hours a week and living on beer and sushi. Thank you god today is Friday. I will surround myself with books tommorrow and do nothing but read and sleep, well maybe eat more sushi.

... 

Well if you were driving down Cedar Ave. about five minutes ago and you saw a girl with curly hair, no hands on the wheel, driving a little too fast, drumming her hands in the air to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”, racing the boys at the light by winking and gunning her engine…well that was me and it can only mean one thing. I FINISH MY MANUSCRIPT for the Loft. Yes I did and the deadline wasn’t till tomorrow which means I fulfilled my own personal goal of not dragging my ass there the last possible minute. But of course, I did slip it under the door like a three pound abandoned baby because I could not get it done before eight.

Only three more grants to write before June 30th and then I can dance around naked. I am in a dancing mood tonight. And then if I actually receive any of the above grants I get to stay home and write for at least two months straight with my nanny named Lola taking care of the girls. It will be a good life.

...the hard shell bird... 

Tonight I am thinking of sea turtles, how they travel thousands of miles alone but return to the place where they began to mate, how they know it is home by the taste of water in their mouths.

For four hours, if they are sleeping they can live underwater and when awake only a few minutes. In one world, they are weightless and in another they move so slowly it is almost death. On land they cry tears. Pockets of salt water saved from the places they have been.

The turtle never changes but the world constantly changes around them and b/c of this, in each environment a new creature is born almost directly opposite from the one it has been.

Good Reading

and turn on your sound people. Btw wonderful interview with Claudia.

bear 

Well I survived the camping trip. The highlight was taking a group of kids on a midnight hike (I was the only adult they could convince to do this) and we shut off our flashlights and walked in complete darkness, when we reached the bridge we held the lights up to the sky, a whole world of insects glittered over our heads. You could hear the owls in the distance, the night birds flying down and feasting. It was beautiful.

The next night I went for a walk at night by myself and watched the lightening bugs high in the trees over my heads. When I was little they always seemed low to the earth so easy to touch to capture. I wonder when lightening bugs figured out to head to higher ground.

There are lots of changes coming in my life over the next month. It is possible I could be moving back to New England. What ever the case, with change I have no idea how it will all balance out, what my writing life will look like, I feel so close to something and it almost feels like it is being taken away.

I hate change. You would think I would be good at it by now. I want to go high up into the trees today and I do not want to come back down.

one rock 

Before Goldilocks was eaten by a bear

Well it is pretty safe to say I am the only parent on the 4th and 5th grade camping trip who is bringing her manuscript, four books, and fives pages on syntax. Oh and hopefully though I am debating how pitiful I really am and thinking about my laptop. Whether I have rain gear or clean underwear is another question. Yes, I understand I will be in the woods with countless kids but the thing is, large groups entertain themselves, throw em a box of twinkies or a glow in the dark ball and well that is at least five pages of silence.

So before Goldilocks was eaten by a bear she said goodbye to her blogger friends. She said, now be good and don’t piss on my carpet. I will be back with poems or at least maybe a thought. And Goldilocks put in a secret note for the bird, the beautiful bird to say there will be photos. Wonderful photos.