Bilbao in my dreams

Yesterday was a day of meeting Bilaoans, including several poets! In the photo below, I've just finished a terrific lunch with my Bilbao Greeter, Marivi Puente (great that her last name means "bridge"). The man with the beard and sungasses is the poet Javier Arnaiz; the middle two are the restaurant owners, and Marivi is on the far left. Later in the day I met another poet named Santiago Liveral and we exchanged books.

 

What an amazing idea/experience this Bilbao Greeters is. Www.bilbaogreeters.com. I found it by chance on the internet.

 

But I must get this word down: Tzakoli, which sounds like "chokoli." that's the white wine I'm drinking in the cafe Iruna down the block from my hotel, a place with photos of Hemingway on the walls.

 

The main thing I want to say is why I'm an hispanophile and an italophile (and it remains to be seen if I'll become a francophile): relationships with other people count more than anything. Bilbao has an ongoing cafe/bar life that is as true for twenty-somethings as it is for eighty-somethings.

 

What has happened to NYC? Where I'm lucky if I see a friend every 3 months. And I hear my experience is not dissimilar from many others.

 

It's difficult to post from a place where I'm too busy living, though it was interesting to see how quickly the conversation turned to money and the fact that no one in Spain buys poetry books. Sound familiar?

 

But there is a group called Noches Poeticas that puts on performance evenings in various spaces, including bars: an evening that intermingles poetry with music and theater. As supposedly, everyone is rapt during the poetry recitations. Perhaps Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club comes the closest to achieving that idea. They've finished their programs for the summer, but I'd love to return some day to jam with the locals.

 

Declarations for the 4th & 5th of July

"That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
You probably think that Thomas Jefferson wrote these words, but actually, they were written by a neighbor of George Washington, George Mason, and then revised by Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence. I'm reading a terrific biography of Washington by Ron Chernow. Food for thought: At what point is it acceptable for someone to be considered the author of the words that s/he's edited? Talk about issues of intellectual property right at the get-go of this country's founding.

When I was a girl growing up in Brooklyn, July 5th was always a very busy, exciting day. I would get up early and comb through the detritus of the streets (this at a time when everyone had their own stash of firecrackers that they'd set off) for firecracker wrappers. For several years I collected these wrappers and organized them into pages in a scrapbook. I've photographed two of them. The one with the Apollo spaceship on it is from 1970. I loved the bright colors, the stylized artistry. Most of the fireworks (and I have to assume that the artwork as well) were made in Macau. I'd love to hear from anyone else who has such a peculiar collection. Of course, I have to wonder, What kind of a patriotic display is it if the fireworks are all made in China?

Where will all the artists go? Or why Manhattan is in danger of becoming less fascinating . . .

Ripples, 2011, Dorothy Simpson Krause

I went to a fascinating event last weekend (yes, I'm blogging but I still ruminate for several days over what I might write like an old-fashioned writer): Two young musicians guitarist Ben Kaplan and composer Peter Flinthttp://peterflintmusic.com/ played together for free in a little exhibition space called 571 Projects http://www.571projects.com/. Kaplan played guitar and synthesizer and Flint played accordion also electronically altered. They played the kind of Reichian/Glassian Bang-on-a-Can new music that I love. So about 20 of us sat there sweating and rocking to the music, while glancing around at these mixed media pieces based on the painter's time spent in the Everglades. But what was particular poignant was to learn that this space, which had been there for 3 years, if I recall correctly, was due to close at the end of the summer. Why? Because the building, which sits off the corner from the Chelsea Piers, that is, in prime Manhattan real estate land thanks to all the artists' galleries, was being demolished to make way for high-end condos. Big surprise, right? It's what always happens. Except there are those of us who remember what it was like when New York was a place where young artists—dancers, writers, painters, theater performers, musicians—were able to move and live, working at peripheral jobs while still pursuing their metier. This has all become less and less possible. As the terrific raconteur Fan Lebowitz puts it in her Martin Scorsese documentary, Public Speaking, to paraphrase: If a city is nothing but rich people, it's not a very fascinating place. She uses the word fascinating as the camera pans over  the seedy, but somehow authentic, Times Square (with its FASCINATION parlorhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/christianmontone/4830837185/lightbox/), which she mourns has become a cleaned-up tourist spot one is ashamed to be seen passing through. I'll save my trip to Brooklyn for a future post.

Chromophilia, or Color-love

I just finished reading a terrific little book. Actually, I'm embarked upon reading it a second time because it so perfectly captures one woman's obsession with the color blue as a way to read her world. Maggie Nelson's Bluetshttp://www.wavepoetry.com/collections/authors/products/bluets  is written in the form of numbered  "propositions," a la Wittgenstein, but they are as lyrical and as far-reaching in style and subject matter as possible: from disquisitions on fucking: "There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue" to discussions of Platonic, Newtonian, even celestial optics, as well as questions of God as light or darkness: where abstruse topics such as "the idea of agnosia, or unknowing, which is what one ideally finds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness." And, of course, there are nods to William Gass, Goethe: "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it."

And threaded throughout—yes, with a cobalt blue thread—is the lover's despair, not unlike Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husbandhttp://www.amazon.com/The-Beauty-Husband-Fictional-Tangos/dp/0375707573, though this thread is subtler, less central though perhaps the initiating emotion.

Color. She rejects yellow—as being the least pleasing of colors when alone (is that why Jews were associated with yellow?) and green.

Poets who are drawn to color—though what poet isn't? Mallarmé, for one. And Rimbaud. And of course Lorca: "Green, green, I want you green." And Kim Addonizio, whose poem "What Do Women Want?" opens "I want a red dress." http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16213

"What does your poetry do?—I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language" (John Ashbery).

Several, actually nearly 10 years ago, I published a book of ekphrastic poems called Serious Pinkhttp://www.marshhawkpress.org/Dolin.htm. While it is mostly documents my love affair with painting, there's also a long collage of a poem called "Ode to Color." Most of what's there is what others have said about color, not because I have nothing to say, but because I wanted to make a patchwork quilt, a coat of many colors, about color.

I'll leave you with a poem about red that's inside that larger poem—red being a color to counteract all this blue, red being a color that has duende in it, red being the color, according to a study, that if a woman wears it on a first date, is a sign she will sleep with the man right away. I'm not convinced by that reading of red, but I do know I was told, if you wear red for a poetry reading, you won't trip up on your lines. And that I have found to be true:

ODE TO COLOR

A man in a red GEORGIA baseball cap wearing 

       a sweatshirt with a red bulldog over his heart,

       sitting in a subway car, the smell of his poverty much too strong

but I stay out of weakness and pity: 

       his dark skin has gone through fire

       and his hands and arms and who knows how much more of him

wear the ropy scars: I watch him, not wanting to stare,

       as he draws out of a pocket dangling from a long rope at his waist

       a red-plastic compact he opens: inside, a red plastic brush

on its obverse the mercury pool he dips and dips his face towards

       as though to stanch the fire (who knows what he sees)

       he shuts it opens it shuts it then like a black Narcissus he has to re-open

and stares. Maybe it solidifies him, all I know is I'm mesmerized too and steeped

       in my own pool, trying to think only of color, see this portrait in red.                     

                        

                 

                        

Writer's block or why it's okay to be a mess at all times

At a recent book party, someone asked me what I was working on and I said that I hadn't been writing much for the last year and a half. I guess that's what others would call writer's block. But, of course, that's not entirely true. If I look at my notebook, at least my main poetry notebook (and yes, I do write by hand, preferably with a fountain pen in a physical notebook), I might find very little there. And yet, there are now all these other little notebooks I carry around (usually 3 1/2" x 5 1/2") in bright colors or patterns, as in the photo of some I bought at MOMA (I started buying Moleskin once they started doing something other than basic black). There I scratch away, particularly when in transit, in fact, mostly when in transit so that for the last several years, I have found myself writing by not writing sequences of aphorisms (prose poems?) connected to place.

The most comical aspect of this project is that I've been getting these aphoristic sequences published as creative nonfiction. As someone who has always only written poetry, I feel like I'm a prose writer-in-drag, that is, a poet tricked up as a writer of creative nonfiction. In fact, my New York Aphorisms will be published later this year from Fourth Genre, which only publishes nonfiction. You could another sequence here:http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2011-summer/selections/andalusian-wind/.

So perhaps that is the secret to writing without writing: to write with the left hand (if you're a righty), to write someplace else all the time believing that you're not writing at all. And I've had this experience before: the sensation that I'm not really writing, and apparently, it's not a unique one. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, author of Other Desert Cities, was recently interviewed by Alec Baldwin on his radio podcast Here's the Thing .http://www.wnyc.org/shows/heresthething/2012/jun/04/ At the very end of the show, Baldwin asks him if he's working on anything new. Baitz balks at an answer and Baldwin persists, "You're scribbling . . ." And Baitz, "Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing things. I'm a mess at all times."

The most private thing I'm willing to admit

The other day, while rushing into a midtown office building to keep an appointment, the security guard at the desk asked where I was going and when I told him, he raised what turned out to be a camera eye at me as I went gliding by. "Hey, did you just take a picture of me?" I asked. And he, "Yes." Now I'm already around the corner at the elevators, "But you didn't even ask." And he: "I'm not supposed to." Why does this exchange bother me? Perhaps because, along with a steady erosion of our civil rights has come a steady erosion of any sense of privacy. Now, the fact that I'm writing this on a blog would seem to indicate that I've tossed all sense of privacy to the wind as I go whirling along here, but that is far from the way that I see it. Ironic? A bit. But I do believe in privacy. I do I do I do.

So, as a poet, who has certainly written poems about her life, what do I mean by privacy? Privacy means I don't have my photo taken without my permission. Privacy means I choose which words of mine are seen/read by others. Privacy means no one but the person I'm speaking to is privy to my conversation. Privacy means I don't get frisked by the police because I am about to ride the NYC subways.

But in our era, that's an impossibility. Every time I enter my bank and use my ATM, I am being photographed. Every time I search online for a product, I will be barraged with ads offering me similar products, at least for the next few weeks. Has my phone been tapped? I'm probably too uninteresting and unthreatening for anyone to bother. However,  I know that because I am a white woman, my chances of being frisked by NYC cops is probably nil. And my chances if I were a black or Latino man, well . . . are much much higher.

There's a difference between the photo I choose to post and the ones that someone takes of me without my permission.

There's a difference between what, from my private life, I choose to fashion, transform, into a poem and someone else chooses to steal and use.

It's not only the lack of privacy; it's the lack of much conversation about it. Or at least, not enough conversation. Whatever happened on 9/11, it has had one overwhelming effect, helped along by the medium I am using at this moment to communicate: the balance between security and privacy has shifted heavily in the direction of security. Perhaps, in this medium, it's the balance between the marketplace (the right to sell) and privacy has also shifted in favor of the former.blog/technology-and-liberty/civil-liberties-digital-age-weekly-highlights-682012

The title of this post is taken from one of the profile questions to a popular dating site. It's a hopeful sign that many people still balk at answering the question.

What is it about electronic readers

Someone gifted me a Kindle. It was never something I would have bought for myself. I'm trying to figure out why I resist reading from it. [Full disclosure: I am still one of those people who gets The New York Times delivered, who rides the subway with a newspaper folded in her hands. Who holds the smooth pages of The New Yorker as she reads.] A year or more ago, I bought and read Sara Bakewell's How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.http://www.sarahbakewell.com/Montaigne.html I was travelling and it seemed like a good way to read the book instead of lugging along a huge hard cover. And I did read it, but I can barely remember the book and the pencil markings, scratchings, I like to make in a physical book are, of course, not there. "Clippings," as Kindle calls them, are a different thing altogether. What brought me to thinking about this, while walking the dog today, is why I'm reading for at least 6 months a really terrific book: Ann Patchett's State of Wonderhttp://www.amazon.com/State-Wonder-Ann-Patchett/dp/0062049801. I'm engrossed in reading it when I pick it up, but then put it down for months. For some reason, because I bought it for my Kindle (pace Ann, who is the only major writer I know of who also owns a bookstore), I don't feel compelled to enter and remain in the world as well. And a different world it is, set mostly in the Amazon jungle with characters that have enough staying power.

I also downloaded the "sample" of my own last book, Burn and Dodgehttp://www.amazon.com/Burn-Dodge-Pitt-Poetry-Series/dp/0822960052, just to see what that would look like. All you get is the first 6 lines of the first poem, which is, aptly, "Regret."

REGRET

        Here's another sin you're sunk within
    owl-necked looking back
to where you might have been
        or what you could have done
   to deep you from the muck
you're stuck standing in.

Okay. Okay. I liked seeing my words on a screen, despite the fact that I had to change the font size so the lineation of the poem wouldn't change. But what I really want is for readers to hold the volume in their hands. And what I want as a reader is to feel the heft of paper, to smell the smell of new paper, to throw a pencil in to mark my place and to use to pencil in whatever notes I care to make. That said, I do intend to finish reading the book on my Kindle. And when I travel this summer, I probably imagine myself bringing the Kindle along, or else borrowing my son's ipad.