I want to write that I’ve been traveling which is true. I’ve been to the ocean and back, up and down stairs, around the block and back to same house I lived in when I was twenty. My boss tells me I am a good closer. She says this b/c I am good at getting donations, hiring teachers, finding art benefactors. But I don’t believe this is true. I believe I am a good path jumper. I like shorts visits, short tasks. If it involves 15 min of my time I am really good at it.

If I met a bear in the woods (always the test of one’s moral character) I would not face the bear nor would I fear the bear I would simply change my direction thus the travels in my life look a little bit like Ms. Packman on speed--all the beautiful yellow lines but no direct course.

I think a better person would have closed her blog—left ya with a bit of mystery, desire to wonder instead of simply leaving the room with the lights on. Oh well I apologize but there’s a bear in the cupboard and a moose in the foyer.

I realized today I am not writing b/c I am blocked or busy but b/c simply I have forgotten how one approaches such things. I don’t remember at all how it begins. I know it was me. I was here and I listened.

At the reading Ms. Gallagher said to me it is good to have a book again and I said yes, it is good to remember the hunger, the hunger to be read. For as much as we may try to convince ourselves otherwise we write for one person alone and it IS ourselves and even when they bound and wrap the book, send it to millions of people it is still only for us—the writer. Funny thing that, a very funny thing indeed.

 

Last night I went to hear Tess Gallagher read at the new library which doesn’t look like a library at all but more of a big museum which is storing every book just in case mankind is suddenly obliterated.

I went b/c I was suppose to be her student last August but her mother was dying and b/c honestly I felt like if I did not do something literary soon my head would implode. Note: not explode, implode—there's a difference.

Gallagher was quiet and lovely and now I want to be quiet and lovely. She gave the best answers EVER during the very horrid part of a reading when people can ask questions like how do you “craft” a poem and what made you decide on the title of your book.

Note: this is generally when I want to start rampant poet killing.

Honestly I just wanted to know if she desired to strangle the man in front of me who wanted her to sign a Ray Carver’s book instead of her own. What are people thinking????

All that said we share the same name, even though she is Teresa with an “H” and we both have poems about head shaving and a hunger to be read. I tried to pull off being called "Tess" in 7th grade (it is in my middle school yearbook) yet no one but me seemed to pick up on the change.

But I did send off three submissions today due to older women poet guilt which is a disease all its own.

Best News from Best New Poets 2006

Teresa Ballard and Vincent Zompa were selected as the Best New Poets Open Competition Winners by Eric Pankey and Jeb Livingood.

the beer is on me!!!!

 

It took me three hours to walk through the Diane Arbus exhibit. It felt like I had been there a half an hour when I came out the elevator door. I checked the clock three times.

” I used sometimes to wish not to notice the difference between things and people as if that would constitute enlightenment.

I understand this…I’m trying to forget.

I read all the little scrawls in note books, all the letters. Remind me to burn my journals before I die. I don’t mind manuscripts under glass. It’s the things I draw on napkins that terrify me.

I am applying for a Guggenheim even though I have no degree or formal training. I do speak a little French but I don’t think they are going ask me that.

Top of the Guggenheim application: I am a single mother of two small daughters and I want time to create art.

How many times have I written that?

Because there is a photo in the exhibit where she is pregnant and looking into the mirror, b/c I have that same photo of myself at twenty four and because I know what it’s like to leave my husband, to use my art as a way out and because honestly I had forgotten how she died, when the suicide came under glass with the date, I made a sound inside myself that frighten the man next to me and I wanted to not understand so well.

Diane Arbus

 

If I have not written you—I’m an ass, if I have not called you back it is b/c my phone is not hooked up (and I’m enjoying it) and if I did not respond when you said my name I think I am sorry.

Reclusive is a lovely word.

Today I am going to see the Diane Arbus exhibit b/c it is the last day and it will be amazing. I hope. If not, I know it will be crowed and I can say reclusive, reclusive a thousand times in my head.

The sewer exploded last night again downstairs and now I need to pay someone to run cameras under my house to look at shit. Photos of shit. For some reason I find that incredibly funny—I hear humor takes over right before you go mad.

It takes too much time to be a writer. I, the keeper of all time especially mine, have decided this. In a perfect world there is enough time to do the things you love or maybe that is too loose a definition, I mean the things which let you breathe easier. In my ideal world I’d write without the guilt of motherhood, financial responsibility or stress, I’d write b/c it helps me breathe. But I don’t live in my ideal world

I live here.

I have just finished my third 50 hour week and I have to get a non profit art program off the ground by next week. I have a giant dragon in my front yard made out of cardboard that Isabel made in go-cart class and its raining. I am debating how much I love my daughter and if I should try to push the giant red dragon into the trees so it doesn’t get ruin---it is way too big for my garage.

This week I read to my students from Da Vinci’s notebooks. I talked to them about light, the human form and inventions. I told them this man was brilliant not just b/c of everything he thought but b/c he wrote everything down. He valued his mind--great people are made when they allow themselves to be great people.

Please remember to write it down.

 

This is an evil meme to play when a girl has all her books in boxes

The Books which

changed my life?

Okay there have been more than one: Holy The Firm by Annie Dillard, Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden, Jane Eyre, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Ring of Endless Light by Madeline L’Engle.

I've read more than once?

All of the above plus all of Celan’s Selected, Sexton’s Selected and Anna Akhmatova Collection. I have these books memorized.

I'd want on a desert island?

I don’t want a book. I want an endless ream of paper and lots of pens.made me laugh?

Made me laugh?
I hate books that make me laugh---maybe b/c my real life is so funny!

Made me cry?
Once my x husband had to pull over the car b/c I was sobbing so hard while reading Elizabeth Berg’s Talk Before Sleep. He begged me to give him the book and I refused. He said he would not drive the cars unless I gave him the book. I got out to walk. I can walk while reading---it’s a gift.

I wish had been written?
Geek Love, Stones From A River—any book that has an original story from a voice not often heard from, like in Stones From A River this is the main character. I think I have a thing for dwarfs and circus acts. Yes, and to To Kill A Mocking Bird no dwarfs or tigers were killed in the making of this novel.

I wish had never been written?

The New Genre of Women’s Fiction and those sad children chapter books which treat kids like idiots. Oh and those self help parent books When to Speak when your child does not give a pluck to hear what your saying

I'm currently reading? Door In The Mountain by Jean Valentine, Late Wife by Claudia Emerson.

I've been meaning to read? Moby Dick!!!! Yes I know it seems impossible and even though I have discussed it at length and with some intelligence I’ve never actually read the damn whale. I also promise myself several times a year, I wont buy another book till all the ones on my shelves are read.

People I tag: Lee, Allison and Rebecca (b/c she will never do it and it bothers her;)

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I’ve decided to delete all my archives—it is a horrible thing to read your self a year later. I was far more interesting then or at least I discussed poetry. I discussed poetry five times in one month….IMAGINE.

Carolyn taught me that every word counts, for example if you have truck in a poem do you mean Ford? Do you mean green Ford? Do you mean green Ford with a flat tire? I have taught myself that sometimes I mean truck.

One of the things which really troubles me about modern poetry is the need to use words which do not appear in every day language. If I write a poem with a dictionary well then bravo, but the fact is what makes great poet great (in my opinion) poets like Celan and Sexton is that everyday language is their home.

If I wanted to tell you I love you, I would make sure you could understand the note. In art school you learn to reinvent every day images, that the most powerful tool to the eye are things recognized yet undistinguishable. Here is my poem. Would Dickson’s poem be so powerful if we did not all know the fly, how it buzzed? Have we not all watched a fly at some time in life flutter and fail? Have we not all tied ourselves somehow to that said fly? I heard a fly buzz before I died I did, I heard a fly buzz and it told me I was all and nothing at the same time.

Dial up is crazy. I’m at a friend’s house and I honestly feel like someone has given me a string and two cans. How do you people live?

My camera was stolen or our/her/my camera was stolen and I mourn it b/c it had the best lens and held my history. Cameras do things words can never do. Words can hope but cameras see.

In the mailbox I received the contact from BEST NEW POETS which makes me think I should be young and shiny like a new penny; most days this summer I have felt like the Susan B. Anthony dollar—spendable yes, popular no.

I also feel like this summer I’ve had the word dialectictattooed on my ass.

I want a button in my head to shut off. I want to stop wondering and just be. Tell me do safe happy people write books?

I bought organic peaches yesterday. I thought of Brigit Pegeen Kelly all fish and eyes and I want to write a poem like that. I want to hold it in my mouth.

The Leaving

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond's cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper's stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was--I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.

Sadly do you know how long it takes a group of ten elementary students to tie-dye? Not very long and I have a three hour class of nothing but tie dye this week and they’ve already ruin my shirt and shoes by aiming the dye bottles directly at ME!!!! On the exiting side we are right next to the cardboard city class and Elliot built me a boat. I always wanted a boat of paper. I will ride it home.

Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

My neighbors are on vacation in Maine for a month. They told my children they will wave to their grandfather when they cross his bridge. It is one of the few drawbridges left in the country—my father makes it go up and down.

It is raining. My neighbors want me to water their garden two hours a week even if it is raining b/c they have lost two trees in the front. It is the acid in the land not the water. I have told them this but you can only tell pp. so much and then they must plant their trees and watch them die and then plant them again. We are an animal which learns by doing not by hearing---not so different from the other animals I suppose.

I read in the Sunday paper this morning that non-fiction is the big literary seller in our decade which means the collection of short stories could do well. Maybe I could invent a new genre, not that I believe there any new genres, or art forms for that matter left to be invented but if I can’t write a damn fine book at least I could invent something essential like scotch tape or a doggie door.

This has been the summer of no blog or maybe I should just call it the summer I moved. It has been one week since the truck left everything in cardboard piles in the new old/house…one week and there are barely dents. The summer I took chances, was messy, became a foundation—lived well. Deliberately well.

The summer I took too long.

The act of deliberate living is no easy act to perform at 38. Oh and then I turned 39—still not an easy act. Fire eating at 37 was a walk in the park;)

A summer of no writing and yet the summer where the ONE THING I sent in, landed me in Best New Poets. It is impossible sometimes to write and live---maybe it is not fair or just but there are times when living is too much to write about. I never thought I’d be there but I have and I’ve survived.

It has been the summer of this which everybody waits to hear/read about, to see if it floats or sinks, some are cheering one way or another and maybe b/c of that I haven’t recorded any of it. Maybe b/c the most private thing we can do is love.

Here is the truth: we are traveling. We are happy and sometimes we are not. The last year has taught me you can always look in at something, someone and believe you understand yet in fact, you know nothing. With all the things I write about, imagine, days I live, I will never know what it is like to be you—in your skin.

What a wonderful, horrible thing.

It is the summer I learned to judge less.

tonight my best friend lost something incredibly important, vital and it should be named somehow. It should have grown to be named. We control so very little in this life. So tonight I am sad, I mark it for you and with you. And I am sorry. Blessings on your head my darling.

my front yard in july

 

anti matter

Last summer my goals were simple: I wanted to read through a series of Russian poets and finish the book AGAIN. But this summer they focus around two houses, children home from school, a new relationship and really too much emotional growth for one almost forty year old woman.

God why doesn’t age ever sound sexy?

I realized this morning that REALLY the only goal I had was to take Teo to Orchestra Hall to hear music; he is an eleven year old from Ecuador who discusses music with me like it is baseball. He plays the violin; he stands at the stone arch bridge and plays the violin for money. We debate who is better, Mozart or Beethoven—we decide on neither.

It should be noted here: I know nothing about music. It was my great downfall in high school that while others were discussing bands, I was in fact reading those Russian poets. Then you add, my parents idea of culture was to take me to a Crystal Gale concert (she had wonderful hair) well, I’m doomed.

Truth: music leads to other conversations with Teo and I hold out for those. Another truth: children and old people are the only human beings really worth talking to, b/c they tell you exactly what they think, and you can actually have an intelligent conversation without having to dig for it.

For example, on the forth of July while watching fireworks Teo and I discussed anti matter, how it was his favorite thing, and how it was impossible to gain reliable information b/c it was constantly changing. I asked him if he thought anti matter was needed in the universe b/c of this fact, if we controlled anti matter, would then the whole chaos theory of existing be thrown out of whack?

We discussed human beings need to control, instead of coming along side and what really needed to be invented was something that did not “control” anti matter’s energy but merely followed it, like a wave.

When living with unpredictability one must give up the need to know. Note: I have been unable to accomplish this!!!!!! Another side note: science and inter personal relationships---not that different.

Teo has never been inside a concert hall, I believe it is the one thing in the universe I can change in July.