The Best Memoirists Pageant Ever! 11/24 in NYC

Mark your calendars! On Saturday, November 24th at
3 PM The Bowery Poetry Club will host five writers reading excerpts from their memoirs-in-progress. As the flyer says: True stories! You'll laugh, you'll cry...you'll pay $5 at the door. Cash bar, refreshments for sale and great coffee.

Featuring:
Kim Brittingham (NYC)
Neil Cotter (Brick, NJ)
Chrys Buckley (Washington State)
Heather Maidat (Los Angeles)
Radmilla Suleymanova (NYC by way of Turkmenistan)

Kim Brittingham, who is organizing the evening, is in my writers' group, and I can testify to the fact that she is a wonderful writer who is working on a powerful memoir that fairly crackles with teen angst. If you are lucky, she'll read some of the material pertaining to her Duran Duran obsession - hilarioius!

Madeleine L'Engle as Poet

I honestly don't think that L'Engle was as powerful a writer of poetry as she was of prose.

Yet, I read her poems, because in her poetry she gamely wrestled with God, in all the joy and pain that comes with trying to be a person of faith.

Late tonight I pulled down yet another book, THE WEATHER OF THE HEART, a book of L'Engle's poems published in 1978. This one is a beauty, and particularly appropriate at the moment of her death. It is titled LOVE LETTER.


I hate you, God.
Love, Madeleine.

I write my message on water
and at bedtime I tiptoe upstairs
and let it flow under your door.

When I am angry with you
I know that you are there
even if you do not answer my knock
even when your butler opens the door an inch
and flaps his thousand wings in annoyance
at such untoward interruption
and says that the master is not at home.

I love you, Madeleine.
Hate, God.

(This is how I treat my friends, he said to one great saint.
No wonder you have so few of them, Lord, she replied.)

I cannot turn the other cheek
It takes all the strength I have
To keep my fist from hitting back
the soldiers shot the baby
the little boys trample the old woman
the gutters are filled with groans
while pleasure seekers knock each other down
in order to get their tickets stamped first.

I'm turning in my ticket
and my letter of introduction.
You're supposed to do the knocking. Why do you burst
my heart?

How can I write you
to tell you that I'm angry
when I've been given the wrong address
and I don't even know your real name?

I take hammer and nails
and tack my message on two crossed pieces of wood:

Dear God
is it too much to ask you
to bother to be?
Just show your hindquarters
and let me hear you roar.

Love,
Madeleine

Winter Storm

Fresh snow standing deep

on the phone wire. If you call me,

speak softly.



Poem from BRAIDED CREEK, A Conversation in Poetry
by Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser

TED KOOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet

Here's a poem for today, written by one of my favorite authors, Ted Kooser (he was also the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2004).

December 30: Two Degrees and Clear

A box of holiday pears came yesterday,
twenty tough little pears, all red and green,
neatly nested in cardboard cubicles,
their stems all pointed the same direction
like soldiers, a shine on their faces.
Five, all in a row, had been singled out
for special commendation and were wrapped
in crumbled tissue parachutes. Maybe
these were the leaders, the first to leap
from the trees, singing their battle song,
Early this morning I lifted the lid
and they were sleeping peacefully, lying
on one hard side or the other, dreaming
their leafy, breezy dreams of home.

Forest Haiku

You two, doe and fawn

Why do you scatter, shocked

when I come each night?

Storm King Mountain: Mystery Artist

A silent sculptor

works the forest, stones

balanced with breaths of whimsy.

On moving to my new house

Moving once again.

How many fewer boxes

to hold the air I feel.

Autumn

Wet summer, gilt-edged fall,

gold trumps orange, auburn, red.

Trees, leaves made of light.

Moving Out

Spring dashing free

Trucks mired in mud leave tracks

that my heart memorizes.

The First Sip of Spring

Spring turns up in muddy boots
Suck…suck…suck at my ankles.
Born of a steady, velvet rain,
every breath tastes of rebirth.
Resurrection.

Dwarf irises spiky and erect
Freckled with purple tears and
Golden mouths dripping life dust
Clearly unaware of how tiny they are.
So proud.

Lyra plunges into the creek, retrieving
mouthfuls of icy water as it rolls
down the mountain. The last vestiges
of winter snow still sparkling,
but now in motion.

Why are the only evident colors
on a yellow-bellied sapsucker
his black and white checked waistcoat
and the dashing red crown on his head?
Shouldn’t I see yellow?

The Netherlands Weighs In

This note is from my friend Thé Lau in Amsterdam. He is a recording artist and poet, so I've been eager to hear his thoughts on the current world situation.

Liz-
At the moment I'm often invited by tv and radio-programmes to comment on this situation. What I always tell them is, listen, I think there are many Americans. In 40 years there have been 3 Texan presidents, all of whom were at war. Bush, when watching him speak (and joke) does not resemble any American I know. This might well turn out to be a new Vietnam; I remember Henry Kissinger saying 'I refuse to believe that a third-rate nation like North Vietnam can resist a superpower like the US.'


They did.


Unfortunately people like that are in power, not only in your country. It affects the whole world. These arrogant hawks. Believe me, a huge amount of Europeans can still discern, they dislike Bush, and Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitsch and all the others, but they don't dislike Americans in general.


Let's pray for those poor GI's, who have to do a stupid job, and in case things go wrong will not be thanked for it, whom nobody blames but everybody pities.

Kiss,
Thé

Sorrow

I shall believe in sorrow when it comes
like the first down-wandering of snow,
laying its drift of shadow on my heart,
hugging against the hedges of my soul,
gathering on the lintel of my door.
Its wide and still possession of the air
I shall acknowledge as necessity
and pray and pray, not for an early spring
but for the harvest that the year must bring.

By Jane Tyson Clement