Quotes of the week

TV screen of empty bar whose proprietor is watching an old French movie

Tiny new potatoes

Overheard after a performance of the Messiah, singalong:

"Wrinkles and laxity are wrinkles and laxity."

"I am a living, breathing, walking, talking potato."

It's ART, for heaven's sake, not widgets

There is a new practice I've noticed among editors using the submission manager Submittable. No complaints about Submittable, by the way. It seems to be a good engine for organizing and tracking the hundreds of submissions editors of a given journal might receive during an open reading period. That part is fine. Lately, though, editors of said journals have taken to using only Submittable to advise writers of the writers' submission status. No emails. Not even a tacky and insensitive form email. (See:  Co-Axial Reply to a Snippy Form Letter, http://www.riddledwitharrows.com/issue-1-4-toc/poetry/#reject) Just a change in  status, of which no notice sent to the writer, so you have to check in at Submittable to find out if there is any news. 

A paying market is a rare place. I understand the economic realities of publishing poetry; supply/demand comes to mind. But it is art, and it's hand-made, so to speak, and we folk who work on writing it give a lot of time and devotion to bringing it forth. And not only is poetry art, we write it essentially for the love of it, for free. How dreadfully hard can it be to send out an individual email to the rejected writer? or the accepted one, for that matter? Just two months ago, I nearly missed an acceptance from  B O D Y, a very cool venue that is open to some of my weirder productions. And these editors are extraordinarily gracious and supportive. They paid me the compliment of rejecting an earlier submission by telling me that the work wasn't as good as my best work, so they weren't going to take it. And they were right!

So OK. I've incorporated checking my Submittable account into my daily routine. But I do miss the one-to-one notifications, and I do not find the new efficiency an improvement. 

Something completely different...

.for my blog is trying out products and reporting on them. Paperless Post contacted me, praised my blog and its appearance (OK, I'm susceptible, all right?), and offered me free coin to try out the site and post about it by today. So, now it's today, and here I go.

Paperless Post is dedicated to flyers and invitations--announcements, if you will--for events. There are also cards, filed under occasions and events, and I had to bat around for a bit to determine this. I'm always rather dense about new sites, so it is to the credit of their interface that I managed to find my way around.

You get many choices in pleasant styles--nothing too edgy, nothing too stodgy--and different levels of formality. Attractive contemporary designs. You may feel decision fatigue setting in, so remember:  Perfection is the enemy of the good. I had a good time trying out different combinations.

I was able to assemble a pretty and unique card for my friend, and, thanks to the magic of multiple windows, able to send it to her in good time. The site also links up with your address book, so really I didn't need to have resorted to multiple windows. I have mixed feelings about this, but we've been trading convenience for privacy for years, so why balk here?

Thank you, Helen Chuchak, for sending this my way. It makes a good addition to the other options in my repertory.

They can be found at this URL

https://www.paperlesspost.com

The movies in my head

No really suitable photo for this post. This morning, for the first time since my husband's death, I got back to my old style of dreaming. To wit: longish, detailed, complicated but coherent plots, featuring a mixture of real people, celebrities, and previously unknown people, doing improbable or metaphorically interesting activities. Walter called them three-reelers, and I could always help him fall asleep by telling him a dream (or made-up dream) in a monotone. Or I could just share them and entertain him. Like the time I attended a book signing of George Clooney, who had just published a book of poetry entitled "I'm Just Like You, Only Cooler." George knew my writing buddy Judith Terzi. I couldn't find any pants that didn't have cat hair on them.

But back to our sheep. This morning I slept well and long enough, and woke retaining this dream. Excellent, I thought, stretching, Walter will love this. And then I realized that he was gone, and would never get to laugh and exclaim over this dream. And my dear friend and former analyst Meredith Mitchell had died in 2017. And I don't know anyone--anyone--who has the right combination of intimacy and psychological interest to appreciate this dream. This is the first time in literally 50 years that I've had nowhere to take a dream. I collapse a little bit inside, then a little more.

One of the many hard things about losing my beloved husband Walter is that I can no longer share new experiences or old memories. Inspired by my friend Diane Schifrin, who created a page on Pinterest for her late father, I have established such a page on Facebook. The URL below does not create a link, but you can paste it into your browser.

https://www.facebook.com/Walter-Would-Have-Liked-This-107536047325019/

If you like, visit to see what he used to like and might have liked now. You might like those things too.

Walter had been a photographer since his early 20s, when he took up photography to take advantage of the air-conditioned dark room at his Army base in Bixby, Arizona. He got a big kick out of the sillier composition errors, such as trees or fountains or flower arrangements growing out of people's heads.

Hail, kindred spirit!

I had a fine piece of serendipity today. I'd gone for a walk in our local botanical garden, which features native plants and plant communities of the Southwest. There is a particular oak tree that must be more than 300 years old. Its sign proclaims it to be the Majestic Oak, and indeed it is, although Walter and I always rebelled against the un-ironic name and called it "the pretty big oak." It is one of the places where I left some of his ashes, discreetly of course, to become part of the tree.

As I continued my walk, I found myself putting words together about it. Ooo, a keeper! But bizarrely, I had set out without anything to write with or on or in, and I couldn't find the Notes app on my phone. Despite rising heat, I hustled over to the gift shop. "Hello!" I said to the young man behind the counter. "Could you give me a scrap of paper and something to write with?" "That's a nice 'hello'," he said, and handed me both. I jotted down what I had, noting as I wrote where it needed some work. "I totally understand," he said; "I'm a writer, and I'm never without," and showed me his moleskine journal and pen. Turns out he writes YA fiction, and was impressed (!!) that I write poetry. Well, I was impressed that he can come up with plots, which I could not do if my life depended on it. We talked Craft for a while, particularly the Surrealists' tricks for jump-starting inspiration. We exchanged our information, recommended readings to each other. I suggested Richard Garcia and Matthea Harvey for prose poems.

Hail, Avery! Long may you bring the right words to paper!

Notre Dame was burning (posted better late than never)

Live TV coverage of Notre Dame in flames. You can see the huge jets of water being pumped directly from the (adjacent) Seine. Every firefighter in Paris must have been called in on this one.

Old Wood

Halfway through my last dinner, I saw the blaze,

unfathomable as the Grand Canyon creaking shut.

The owner confirmed:  Everyone on staff is following

as firefighters poured the river onto the flames.

When the spire lifted as it toppled, people gasped, 

wailed as though a suicide had jumped.

The day before I’d walked the quais, 

browsed the bookinistes, shot mood pics of the towers,

total cornball, through the mist of new leaves.

Arrow of God, the spire had fallen before the sun was down, 

The fire turned the sky red, turned the cross white-hot.

Not all the water in the world, not even the river could help.

People stood and watched, sang and wept.

Rains came only the next morning.

Ash sifted down catching, reflecting coral light 

I’d brought my husband’s ashes in a carved wooden box.

No need, no need.

After dinner, the owner walked me to the door. We sniffed the air.

Vieux bois, she shrugged, wincing. Old wood.

(published in New Verse News on April 23 2019, Easter Sunday)

Kafka's Cat gets out

Glenn Ligon's work, at the Broad in DTLA, with visitor

Thank you, Sammy Greenspan of Kattywompus Press (welcome to the 'wompus!) who did not scoff or mock, but instead encouraged me to put together this manuscript of weird prose poems using the hapless Franz Kafka as my persona. These are surreal, I say diffidently, and why Kafka works as a speaker for me is a good question.

When I first read Kafka in German, I was startled to realize that he is funny. Not just "funny" as in "not quite right", but "funny" as in--funny. It is not only the situations, which are funny enough in the first sense. His choice of words, his sentences, read like gags. There are good translations, faithful and deft, but I have never seen one that captured Kafka's hilarity. I certainly haven't been able to achieve it. Word is that Kafka used to read new works aloud to friends, and that his performance brought them into hysterical laughter. I can understand.

Anyhow, if you want to see what I'm talking about, you can click on some of the links at the left, which include Kafka's Cat where it first appeared in Otoliths. You may leave me a message with your information at my email, KarenGM.poetry@yahoo.com, or go directly to Kattywompus's web page,   https://kattywompuspress.com/.   Or not.

Now playing on K-REN? Night and Day

If Renoir had painted Notre Dame

First night in Paris

For the last three weeks, this song has been going through my head. All day long. I don't choose them, I just report them. And, honi soit qui mal y pense.

For Ella, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6M--07fGwU

And alternatively, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzmZ7pHTalE
for the close harmony!

Night and Day

Cole Porter

Night and day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun

Tour Eiffel into the night

Whether near to me or far
It's no matter, darling, where you are
I think of you night and day, 

Night and day, why is it so 
That this longing for you follows wherever I go?
In the roaring traffic's boom
In the silence of my lonely room
I think of you night and day

Night and day, under the hide of me
There's an, oh, such a hungry yearning
Burning inside of me
And this torment won't be through
'Til I spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day…

Night and day, under the hide of me
There's an, oh, such a hungry yearning
Burning inside of me
And its torment won't be through
'Til you let me spent my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day

Songwriters: Cole Porter

Night and Day lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, Red Brick Music Publishing

It's irrational, but I love Pi Day--or, multiples of 11

A pie crust for people who believe in butter.

I almost forgot that today is Pi Day. It's the first one in years for which I baked no pie. Just not in the mood. But pies have been part of my life since I was a child, not because anyone in the family baked superb pies, but because I loved them. They were my preferred dessert any time I had a choice. I started trying to make crust when I was 11. Miserable results, partly because my mother did not believc in butter. By the time I was 22 I could produce good crust, just not reliably. Thus the quest for the perfect pie crust. I hit dependability when I was 44; now, at 66, it's a crust you can be happy to eat, even if it is not the apotheosis of what crust can be. The good-enough pie crust, D.W. Winnicott might say. 

A layer of almond paste is a good addition to all the almond-essence fruits.

Who is my audience? Who's in the crowd?

Tourists at the foot of Sacre-Coeur surveying the hordes of tourists on the street leading to the foot of Sacre-Coeur.

 No, really:  I'm asking. Yesterday I got a high number of hits and visits. Yippee, said I, and clicked on the audience stats to see who these people were. Almost all the hits were from Moldavia. Um, OK, I said, glad you liked my stuff enough to click through my blog.

The Paris Metro, with the continuous cars of Line 1, 5 pm on a weekday.

Then I looked to see what websites were the sources. A gratifying number were from links at journals where I've had work published, but a disconcerting number were from a free porn site. I don't know quite how that happened. Perhaps it means simply that people are complex, not to say complicated.

The police forces out en masse for a group of teachers, from pre-school through university professors, protesting cuts to education funding. btw, gendarme means "people who are armed" with guns, not simply truncheons.The short couple in the center are about to be taken into custory.

Maybe it simply means that I'm not nearly as narrow/obscure/esoteric as I sometimes feel. Hi-ho.

Values on parade: eavesdropping at the Louvre

La Jaconde as you head through Charles de Gaulle International Airport on your way out

Arrows

Back in the day, on our second trip to Paris, we moseyed through the gallery the Louvre docents had given to the Italian Renaissance. Most visitors were not moseying. They were trotting, hustling even, on their way to the room with only one access and no exit that houses La Jaconde, La Giaconda, aka Mona Lisa. We were enjoying the art and lingering, but not everyone felt the same way. One American (Madras shorts, loafers without socks) held forth in the middle of the room, proclaiming that no one really liked Picasso, that his fame was all a scam put forward by a cabal of critics. (As it happened, Walter adored Picasso, so he made some extraordinary faces to keep from laughing out loud.) However, there were also two guys who were thrilled by what they were seeing. They stood for some time before some master's painting of the martyrdom of St. Anthony, namely, the muscular yet lissome saint being riddled with arrows. Then one said to the other, with some exaltation and exhilaration and reverence, "You can't call yourself a man if you don't make Art."

Before it's too late

I have a clutch of poems that I wrote about Walter in his last years and last months. No new ones yet. The widow or widower writing a collection in grief is almost a trope, and I don't know that I'd have anything to add to the canon anyhow. When I write about him again, it will likely be very specific, both as tribute and as bald truth. In the meantime, here is a short poem I wrote after our appointment with the oncologist, the appointment in which he showed us all the scans, told us what they meant, and gave us his estimate of Walter's remaining life.

BLAT 

Not salad, fries, he said,

and the BLT,

on white, toasted, extra mayo,

and make it a BLAT

and I’ll take a Coke

and why not?

for he’d no need now

to stave off pleasure

to save up for old age

having reached eighty-nine

and just left the oncologist’s office

where they told us

about the metastases

and the nodes

and the mass.