·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

I am just about to leave for a 5 day silent retreat. (Spirit Rock,
about an hour north of San Francisco near Woodacre, Marin County).
Somehow, an image of meditation, the way, while sitting,
one’s head (or psyche) may lean one inarticulate way or another,
got me to revisit these tree top ‘heads’ currently
“a-float” atop my neighborhood.

Whether these heads are articulate or mute, I suspect that
possibility is subject to interpretation. Ovid certainly got much
mileage out of confining humans and mythic figures
into trees, stones, animals et al.

Among the migration of damned or otherwise mortally
punished souls, maybe that is all true.

Or, maybe, while whatever part, or selves, within the pscyhe
wait to become articulate, we store those parts in ‘nature’s schemes.’
Maybe these tree shapes are the winter’s silent presence - or signal -
of a waiting muse.

Such as he or she looks into the distance, I have not written poetry, as such, in a long time, or so it seems.

****

I will be back on January 28th. Always appreciate you responses. Please use the email address - top left sidebar - to respond.

Headless torso. Haunting. What did she do wrong?

Mytho-morphology a winter sport. Beauty parades everywhere.

Way up the hill on Sanchez overlooking 20th Street, San Francisco.

Well, last night I had fun reading to my 91 year old mom from Joanne Kyger’s About Now, her collected works. As often with other people’s poems, I am astonished by the way the poems make her become bright, and attentive while she listens, then makes her own interpretations. For the most part here (below) without typing out Joanne’s poems, here are a series of her responses. Sometimes, these may be a little confusing in that my mom - in her curious form of dementia - thinks that I - not Joanne - is the writer and I am reading to her my own work!

(pp. 192-193)

                     Still
                             our breath our sun
             our moon, our stars, our space
     our water that flows
out of the mountains, our coean, our roads, our paths
                               and into this year and the next...

” That’s good. Very good. She writes well.”
Why do you say that?
“It pentrates your thoughts.”

(p. 196)

                         …I hope this working out as a novel
                          approach, at least the disruptions make
                          the substance.   Otherwise inside
                         doesn’t make any difference
                         if I’ve forgotten anything

“That’s what it is. Parts of the whole culture, the actual caricature of the area.”

My mom seems to pick up immediately on the way in which Joanne is rendering portions or fragments of different characters in Bolinas as a way to render to look at the larger community.

(p. 202)

 
               Same thing open.
               Same thing closed.

“That’s one way to put it.”

                  2 guys high up
                        hi Joanne, hi Joanne 

“They didn’t do it on your level
did they?” (This response is funny to me, because I suspect the ‘hi’ is also a pun on “being high” on grass, mushrooms or something, and this evening, indeed, I am not on that particular kind of level!)

(pp.209 - 210)

                         ….The tunes familiar
                        weeping & laughing
                        I leave my love behind…”

“That was the girl who was his lover?
I don’t think of it as a finished story
but I also did not think of it
as a prolonged tale”

It’s impressive, I think, how she so easily accepts Joanne’s use of fragmentation to build an implied story, rather than making an exhaustive narration. I am sure such a style was not much permitted when my mom was writing short stories back in the 1940’s.

(p. ?)

Dead heart, alive.

“Dead hope but alive.”

She had heard the line wrong. I suspect this is more of a self-mirroring of how she sees herself as useless in this current period of her life..

(p. 588)

 
                      Have you seen my yappy little dog?
                      Well no. The neighbor’s doggy ate him.

“Did you think of that all by yourself?!” (As if I am Joanne!)
She laughs, smiles.

(p. 311)

…The minister squats down, he has a kilt
on, and you can see his balls hanging there. Thus
clearing up what is under a Scotman’s kilt.

“What do you think of that, Mom?”

“I guess that’s true.
He can’t do much when
he’s got his pants all tied up.

Each one of us has a story like that.”

What is your story?

“I can’t remember the details
but I can remember the story.”

(p. 311)

….We’ll sit at the table, and don’t put me on, the room in my heart
gets nourished by your friendly, handsome looks. You read
a lot of books.

“Maybe she does read through
lots of books.”

At this point, my mother is tired. I help her rise from the kitchen table to grip her walker. As I slowly guide her towards her bedroom, I ask:

“Mom, would you like to be a ghost.” I probably ask because there are occasional ghosts in Kyger’s work and something about my mom makes me suspect eventually she will become a ghost that will haunt at least some of us..

“No,” she answers immediately and authoritatively. “They have to listen to the same thing over and over again.”

That angle of vision on the life of a ghost had never dawned on me. That a ghost would have no boundaries and would be constantly immersed in observing an endless recyling of events.

Omens of my mom as a happy ghost -if there is such - methinks not! Yet, we have had a wonderful evening diving into Joanne’s poems - she becomes so alert, so bright. Much of her days are not spent in this manner, but more likely asleep between stretches of barely kind boredom.

By the way, I am writing a review of Joanne Kyger’s About Now for Big Bridge, Michael Rothernberg’s on-line magazine. As research, I thought it would be good to start with my Mom. Probably 20 years apart in age, they were also born 20 miles apart, Joanne in Vallejo, my mother in Richmond. (We’re talking California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.)

An image of a dying figure, the ghost of a former self.
Yet, with the turn of the head, the street’s
other side provides a beautful graffiti:

The thin arcs of cursive letters appear
as if a line of dancers or, perhaps, young poets in a strut
ready to mount a charge - alphabet in hand, letter by letter -
to pierce straight into the City’s heart.

&, looking closer, the mythologically large white figure
- as if a mother or fierce serpent - on the red brick
from which the letters emerge as if, indeed,
she is giving birth to these fresh figures
infused so with desire, power, such limber force.

On one alley side, the Landlord decrees death
where a new architecture, sooner or later, will emerge.
On the opposite side, the artist, as an angelic provocateur,
descends with multiple-color spray cans to propell
an opposite world, one of athletic shape, passion and color.

Curious I find the way the City continuously
shifts the eye from death to life and back. As if
the witness to these transitions - and here,
so close together - is vital to the City’s infrastructure
and we, its citizens. Astonishment is all!
Or the real pleasure to walk between certain buildings.

These are the final 3 pieces of 32 from the Hemp Haptic Journal:
#32: Sandy’s Kitchen, 733 Guerrero, San Francisco, 9:30 - 10:30 PM
&
#33: 3514 21st. Street, Chair, Bay Window, 1 - 2 PM

The haptics were made with an India Ink brush on hemp rag paper in a spiral bound drawing book in which each panel is 8.5 x 11″. Though the works in the entire series of 33 panels - such as these 2 - are clearly non-representational, they were accomplished at different sites in the City, different times of the day, and, always, in one sitting of about an hour. As haptics they are made in response to sounds and responses to sitting in a particular space. I am the last person to be an authority on my processes, but one suspects that the drawings are inter-subjective. That is, a mix of what is going on ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ myself as the maker of these objects. What emerges may be perceived and experienced as a kind and form of visual music, say, as one experiences the sound of falling rain during the various episodes of a storm, yet a storm without any kind of predictable narration. A page fills up in no consecutive order - the hand moving variously back and forth into various parts of the page, then returning to play over and under previous marks - until the work comes to a sense of fulfillment & completion. The entire project finishes only because the pages in the drawing book are exhausted. And it becomes time to move on to other formats, other projects. One might even think of Philip Whalen when he says of his work: “This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history . . .” And the haptic may will be a visual revelation of such; pieces upon pieces, from which one is propelled - one upon one - to become one in the process of making new histories. After all, what else is there to do!

Hemp Haptics (Soundscapes) from a series of 16 pairs; India Ink on Hemp Rag Paper; 8.5 x 11″

Walking home on Church Street on New Year’s Day. Amazing what pops out of a neighbor’s trashcan to greet, to astonish the eye. Omens, perpetual omens or signs of this torture propounding regime. Omens that this President and his colleagues are about to be trashed. Signs that they are still very much with us. This national, hell driven disaster - now, already, seven years about us. Trash, yes, to the trash.

Parenthetically, last week I was with my mom - a perpetual Republican hater all the way back to my childhood. At 91, almost 92, she has trouble finding the words for what she wants to say. I forget what I asked her, but she was in a sustained moment of silence, not able to speak what she wanted to say.
“Mom, are you having a Republican moment?” I ask her. I know if I say Republican, it will, at least, provoke her.
“You mean it doesn’t fit,” she responds, with the implication that nothing Republican ever fits and, further more, not being able to speak as she wants puts her in a bad fit, as well.

Even in her silences, something inside her definitely continues to think and wrestle with the world about her.
“Have you lost your powers of articulation,” I ask her.
“Are you asking me if I have lost my powers of articulation. No, I have not,” she says quite firmly, then goes silent again.

Yes, indeed, Ring in the New Year!

And may it go well for all who visit here!

Stephen Vincent

P.S. It’s since been cooked and devoured - an old Pagan Eucharist, this one!