THE SLOGGING OR DASHING BEATNIK

Thank you, Clark, for the image....

I now have enough lushis [8 line poems] to create a book. In addition, I have enough decent poems spread over the years to make at least another book. Adding in the book of poetry I created during my years with prostate cancer and the two self-published books, I have probably six books of poetry already in the can [to borrow from old film lingo]. None of them are anything like the poetry of Clark Coolidge, but poets are a varied lot. 

Ahead of me, still awaits another — the sixth or seventh — rewrite of my sci fi novel Ghoul World. I feel so many good bursts of energy as I work over the rewrites of my poems that I hate to stop to work on Ghoul World. The reworking of a novel requires long periods of slog during which I feel no reward as compared to the rewriting and creation of poetry that offer short bursts of feeling good reward. Not only that, I've been reading modern science fiction and it appears to me that my novel reveals a writer born in a past generation whose style and subject matter might be outdated. But here's a troubling thought. I've read pieces of modern sci fi written by my younger peers that reveal no familiarity with past literature when it comes to good grammatical writing. It can only be their subject matter that causes librarians to choose such poorly written novels. I don't feel any sour grapes when I note this trend. I hope it's just an observation. After all, grammar and word choice does change as the generations unfold, and a writer would be a fool not to accept that fact.

NOT SO SILENT DISAPPOINTED BEATNIK BOOMER

Interesting experience with a poetry submission today. I sent four poems out on New Years

Here, for example was a troubled male...

Day and got them back today from Three Penny Review. Two days. Though nobody anymore comments except through form letters, I was disappointed by the brevity with which they were considered. The four poems take the point of view of very troubled males who have troubled relationships with the women in the poems. So many women these days are offended by such material that they can't recognize the quality of the poems. I will continue to send them out, hoping that someday, someone, somewhere will recognize their artistry. I have written a novel too with such a plot, and one Facebook woman said she would not read such material if she encountered it. Three of the poems were based on women I knew and the fourth was built out of the kind of loving/controlling mentality of some men who put women on pedestals only to try and control them for fear of their appeal to other men. Dostoevsky wrote a wonderful short story on just such a theme. I cannot recall its name. I will share one of the more lyric poems to get a reaction, if any is forthcoming. I was trying to employ the loving/threatening voice of a controlling male:  

A WOMAN LIKE FLOWERS

Oooh, I thinking, what would want me her

When carry I my briefcase life home to rest me?

I think me: a flower wee

To never drop her pretty petals

Even though transplanted into a watery myworld,

Crystal vase surrounding it, like …?

So pretty a world as who would complain of it?

A flower most delicate like orchids,

And always,

An opening to me face of sunflowers.

Rue, as of delicate small petals,

Trustworthy as perennials,

She to bloom under my careful tenderness

As who wouldn't?

O such a beauteous treasure

To sit so up highness on my mantelpiece

And me stare at from my flower-hungry eyes,

Secateurs held loosely in my tendering hand.

THIS IS A MYTUBE PRODUCTION

Four times a day, I shove the red rubber foot and a quarter worm that I hold in my right  hand [that's right, my "right" hand], into my terwilliger until its snout says, "ur in." I then direct the "result" into a plastic pail to be quantified and logged in my "Daily Urination Log". That's right, I've joined the Urine Nation. Six, noon, six and midnight I do the deed. Often, I'm left with an uncomfortable sensation  — although the process is more uncomfortable than painful — that resembles an urge to urinate. This sensation keeps me awake when I'd rather be sleeping. I believe I'm living on 3 to 4 hours of sleep a day. Today I tried to go to the gym to exercise. I could only exercise about 20 minutes, but I did feel hale enough to go to the senior room where I attempted to play cribbage. I hesitated to join in playing cribbage because I suddenly feared I couldn't remember how to play cribbage after a lifetime of playing cribbage. I imagined at first that my mind was going, but I believe, now, that my exhaustion is so severe as to deprive me of my full mental capacity at times. If you think I can do much writing in this state of mind, you must be losing yours. My life resembles the life of someone in a railroad car where a terrorist bomb has just gone off. However, I am messing around with rewriting some very old poetry that I cannot do much damage to. I sent five of them off last night when I wasn't sleeping. I asked my urologist the other day, if I would be needing to do this "drilling" for the rest of my life. He didn't make any promises but suggested he has a few tricks up his sleeve. Meanwhile, for the next few months, I'll be trying to adjust my life to this daily boring process.

BEATNIK SILENT BOOMER CAN STILL WRITE 'EM

I caught me one good poem for my book Up Your Ass. So all my creative juices haven't dried up yet. I'm experimenting with this long line form. Sometimes it works. Some of the lines don't break correctly because of the format of the blog. I just corrected them so now they do.

YOU WAKE ONE MORNING

You wake one morning when the alarm sounds in the middle of your life and cancer battle,

and you begin to toddle about the house with an aging mind, trying to formulate a beginning

when you suddenly miss your wife so much that tears rush into your eyes and a hole opens 
in your belly. For a moment you don’t know what it is you have to do to keep yourself alive,

then you imagine yourself as an even much older man, alone and missing a woman’s touch,

and you remember the old man they brought into the nursing home where you were working

in that small town of long ago because you’d just broken up with wife number three. You had

to make a living, the same way you always had to make a living no matter how or where.

You recall they found him in his farmhouse out in the boonies alone in shit stained undies.

He’d lost his wife of 60 years and couldn’t cook for himself and hadn’t cared for himself.

His sons found him that way, more dead than alive among the pines, delusional with grief.

You recall how you saw him as an example of the pampered male, so dependent on a spouse

that he couldn’t live without her and how his dilemma was smugly humorous to you back then

when you were contemptuous of all the members of your own pampered gender, the idiot male.

That was before counseling where you learned to have compassion for the male you were and

where you wondered how you’d come to hate your manhood so much you didn’t want to be one.

Maybe that’s why at puberty a few times you stood before the mirror in your stepmom’s undies

to give yourself a thrill. In counseling Bob asked why you’d stopped doing it, and you told him,

“I don’t know. I just stopped.” That was before counseling with ex-priest Bob who left his order

because his succubus was so beautiful that the sap rose up in him like honey and blinded him,

and you saw how, for guessed at reasons, you’d taken the women’s side in the battle of the sexes

in the turmoil of the 60s that busted up all the John Wayne foundations of American existence, 
and you sank into a quagmire of self loathing, booze and woman needing you called your self,

and you heard Pete Seeger singing, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” one morning 
like this morning when the tears wash up out of your silent interior into your eyes, remembering.

BEATNIK BLOGGING ALONG BLOGGING

THE TORQUE

I've got this 13000 word long story, Lit. Noir, in a style reminiscent of early Woody Allen. I like it, but the rewrite, the third rewrite this time thru, felt like a slog. Do all rewrites at my age feel this way, I wonder? I've never felt this way before. Rewrites were just part of the overall fun. Thirteen hundred words? Who'll publish anything that long anyhow? Serialized in 3 issues maybe?

Photo is inside the new Torque location. Lovely place to write, looking out at the river thru the long window on the left. 

My list of publications will soon increase by a single poem. First published in 1985 at Bellowing Ark, the poem "Willingness of Seeds" will be reprinted in the Perfume River Poetry Review from Tourane Poetry Press. Editor Vuong Quoc Vu got hold of the poem during a moment when I nearly was involved in a chain letter exchange of poetry with other poets, but after I sent one poem out to Vuong, I withdrew from the process. It's the same old story. To take time off for anything but writing, rewriting and, now, submitting my work, plus finding time to read every night [what about my wife besides], it was hard for me to select and pitch in 20 names of friends required to keep the process going. I did not know who Vuong was, but Vuong liked the poem a good deal, and I felt immediately humbled and appreciative of his comments. If you look on his websites, you'll find some powerful poetry about his mother and himself in Vietnam when the bullets were flying. Besides that event, several of my poems have been at Cutbank for a long while now. I'm imagining/hoping they're being looked at with some interest. Wouldn't that be nice? One of the poems is entitled, "With Hugo In Montana ".

4X2 or FOURBYTWO BOOMING ALONG IN BEATNIK TIME

The 8th issue of FOURBYTWO is out from the hands of Klipschutz and Gaulke. If my scan of its contents seems askew, that's in honor of the skewedness of the layout of this particular issue and also of the "poems as in process" of  some the poems by James Schuyler (Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for The Morning of the Poem) included herein, plus the variety of the  typefaces for the various poems by Klipschutz, Rene Ricard (also, like Schuyler, deceased) and Schuyler. Of the three, only Klipschutz (latest, A Visit To The Ranch) is not deceased. The poetry as always is interesting and entertaining. Who could ask more of poetry than that?

As for myself, recently long lost in novel and short story and screenplay writing, poetry has fallen by the wayside, it's little vowels scattered and broken by the winds of fiction. All I have to report is that I'm plugging away at the short fictions I hope to imprison together into a book probably by the end of the year. Other stories are drifting into my imagination to be written for the first time. BUT, will I? At 78, I almost think I hear a gallop of creativity thundering over the far horizon, coming my way. Or, maybe, it's only the sound of my horse drawn hearse. 

GALLERY 360 BOOK FAIR A TRIUMPH

They bought my book, Tenderfoot

I sold four books at the Gallery 360 Book Fair put together by Peggy Bird and promoted strongly by Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna. Mertie came down to Gallery 360 to take a look and bought 9 books from one of the other book sellers...children's books for her nieces and nephews in Spokane. We're losing money, but who cares, as long as writers and poets get the money. We're heading to Spokane during whatever week of July holds the 13th... Mertie's birthday. 

The young man, above, opened Tenderfoot and began to read the following poem: 

SKATING THIN ICE

 

Stepping from the landlocked trees to ice,

On thin, steel blades, the skater leaves

His two sure feet and sails;

     He skims the grey-smooth ice on out

To places where the firmness softens and water's deep.

There, black holes gape and bubbles rise

Through thick, black water like thoughts of gods.

     That far out on flying edges,

The skater's body quails with soaring fear,

And shore fires cast a fitful light

On small musings that freeze like cubes of ice;

     That far out

The rugged shore and threadbare trees

Seem dreams that edge a frozen universe

Where bubble thoughts drift up through thick

Black air on spumes of mist to burst away,

     And water's deep.

I told him I thought the poem was about taking intellectual risks, about thinking like an atheist...or something like one. 

Still no news on the novels and short stories I have in circulation. Down to two chapters on the rewrite of the novel Programming Frank Singletary that was once upon a time called The Porno Writer.

POET, SILENT BOOMER AT GALLERY 360 IN VANCOUVER

Putting on my poet hat in 16 days. On Saturday, June 20th, from noon to 3, I [and several other writers] will be at Gallery 360, right next to the Farmer's Market, hopefully selling one or two of my books of poetry, during the book fair put together by Peggy Bird. Thank you, Peggy Bird. Come down, sample a locally grown tomato and pick up a book from any of the writers at the fair. Click on Gallery 360, above, and the complete list of participating writers is there, down the page a little ways. 

My books will be in two piles. Gray House By Cold Mountain will be marked "MUST BE 21". It's sexually explicit in the latter half. The other, Tenderfoot, is a collection of my poetry from my thesis that found their way into print here and there through the years.

Today was a frustrating novel day. I discovered I'd lost all the work I'd done on Wednesday and, after 4 hours of slogging away, I was right back where I finished on Wednesday. I lost some pretty good writing too.

REWRITING, REWRITING & REWRITING

Two interesting events, coming up for me later this year. August 25th, I'll be a featured poet at Barnes & Noble's "Last Tuesday" poetry event, hosted by David Hill. I'll be reading material from my more modest book, Tenderfoot, created from my poetry thesis. Then June 20th, a Saturday, I'll be selling both my poetry books at a Book Fair at Gallery 360 in Vancouver. Their gallery is right on the edge of the the Farmers Market and gets some spill over on Saturdays from the market.  

Today, Easter Sunday, I finished page 311 of final rewrite of about 400 pages. Spent 3 hours to rewrite 5 or 6 pages today. It was a big transition scene. PI Charley Manning meets up with Doctor Cable Christiansen at the Biotric Research facility in the nation of ___________ . Leaving it blank as I don't want to tell readers too much. Ran into the old memory problem. That's why I took so long to make so few pages of progress today. The two ghouls had to exchange a lot of information as they were strangers to each other. This necessitated a long chapter with lots of details. Found I'd put in the same detail in several different ways so had to go over and over and condense, cut and paste, but, by gosh and by golly, I'm getting near the end.

EVEN BEATNIKS GET THE HOTS ... FOR CREATIVE WRITING

Find photo source here.

The years 2013-14 have turned out to be a most successful period. Poetry published in three places and anthologized in two other places, a poem won a spot in a local contest that joined art to poetry, a humorous health piece appeared in a local senior's magazine, a creative tribute to the Kiggins, our local art house, in another publication (thanks Olin Unterwegner), and a short story in a third (tip of hat to Julie Madsen). Three opportunities to be a featured poet, due to the help of poet and friend, Christopher Luna. A complete rewrite of one novel finished and, as you who read this know, I'm nearing completion of the first draft of a new science fiction novel. Stimulated by these events, in the last two weeks, I dug out three of my best short stories and reworked them, intending to submit, and, tonight, I finished a two day stint of reworking of Chapter One of an old novel, The Porno Writer, that I have great ambitions for. I've put in close to 8 hours of writing each day recently and can't wait for each new day's dawning to do more writing. Finally, I'm looking seriously at putting together a ms of short stories and, perhaps, looking at my accumulated unpublished poetry to find enough suitable ones to make up a third poetry ms. Ambition, hopes and lots of writing? Pretty good for a 77 year old once upon a time beatnik writer. In 2012, I wouldn't have imagined these last two years turning out this way. Now wouldn't it be nice if a little money came along with it?