“Mostly, I used to make this kind of thing.  Feathers. Could not get enough of feathers.

Now, I mostly make these.  I don’t even know when it started changing.  Just one day, I was like, I’m done.  I just suddenly felt really done with wings, you know? And then these started happening.  I mean, I know I’ll never really be done with those wings, & I still LOVE feathers, of course. But for now, I’m really into what’s going on with these little ridged globes.

photo by shundo haye

In honor of Mother’s Day, here is a pdf of Chatterbox, an essay that appeared last year in Shambhala Sun magazine (January 2012). 

I no longer have the photo of my mom in the  quotation mark dress that sets this essay in motion, so hearty thanks to my brother Joe for his extensive transcontinental efforts in hunting around for other possible photos and to Tara Hardy for so thoughtfully envisioning the dress in her illustrations.  And many thanks to Andrea Miller for making the piece possible, and to Liza Matthews for her patience while we searched for photos.

READINGS

• April 26 at the Emerald Tablet, with Lizzy Acker, MK Chavez, Mariama Lockington
• May 23, with Alex Dimitrov Poetry Flash @ Moe’s
• June 2, Sunday Studio Reading
• June 7, launch for Farnoosh Fathi’s Great Guns, with Michael Bauer, Rebecca Blakley, and Kristen Gleason,  The Green Arcade (at McRoskey Mattress)
• June 19, g.e. Collective reading, Books & Bookshelves
• tba: launch for Found Dharma Talks, forthcoming from Missing Links Press
• August 13, Provincetown Art Association & Museum
• October 15, YBCA/Litquake

 TEACHING

I’m happy to announce that we’ll be having our first reading for all Sunday Studio poets and writers.

I invite everyone who has ever participated in the studio to come and read something!  It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been here in a while. Come on out! Each person will read for 5-7 minutes.

If you’d like to take part, please let me know as soon as possible, and definitely by May 15. 

Please feel free to invite friends and family. Light refreshments will be served.

Admission:  Free for readers.  All others by donation.  No one turned away of course!

Please email me below if you’d like to reserve a spot or if you’d like more information.

All genres welcome. [contact-form][contact-field label='Name' type='name' required='1'/][contact-field label='Email' type='email' required='1'/][contact-field label='Website' type='url'/][contact-field label='Comment' type='textarea' required='1'/][/contact-form]

I’m not that interested in whether reincarnation is “real.” As in the romantic ideations of former lives people spin that in some way propagate a wish for how they’d prefer their present life to be, i.e. “In my former life I was a ____________.”  Or, as a way of wiggling out of perceived shortcomings on this round – a get-out-of-jail-free card for the future, “Maybe I will be reincarnated as a ______________.”

I find it much more compelling to think of reincarnation as a system that reminds us that we’re constantly living and dying every day: dying, foregoing, surrendering, exfoliating, yielding, giving over, and, simultaneously, being delivered, renovated, refurbished, dumped off the bus, restored, redeemed, renewed – however you want to conceive of the ongoing ecology, the intracorporeal re-incarnation of the everyday.

Mark Doty’s poem, “Spent,” today’s poem-a-day on the Academy of American Poets takes up this ongoing rebirth, and asks the most challenging question,

“But how, exactly, to clamber across the sill”

which is, for me the main utility of an idea of reincarnation, that each time we’re “locked out,” we have a chance to come at it a new way – “Negotiate, submit?” – and be “reborn,” the encouraging proposition that in our actual lives we have the opportunity to keep trying something new, exhausting/”spending” ourselves into experience, and folding in what we’re just learning: the sporty combination of intention, agency, and manifold circumstance/chance that keeps things hopping.

Today I kept mixing up the sacred and secular as I encountered each in signage.

First, on Church St. I caught out of the corner of my eye a van that I thought said Healing Hands, but what it said was Hauling Hands, El Amigo Hauling Hands.

And then later, walking down Gough St., just above my direct vision, for Mt. Trinity, I read, Mr. Trinity.  Mr. Trinity Baptist Church.  Which I think is a fine name for a church.