Best of the Net Nomination, 2023: And then

 WWalter, Karen, and Julie chez Christine and Anand, 2010

Thank you Dale Wisely and other editors of Right Hand Pointing for nominating my poem And then for Best of the Net 2023. I am honored. This poem also appears in The Beautiful Leaves.

And then

     How empty his body became

once he’d left it,

his jaw hanging slack, then slacker,

his face emptying, dissolving

into mere parts. Empty of him,

no longer his face. Still his hands.

     I still expected him

to pull away 

from my tugging fingers

when I tied up a bundle of his silver hair 

with a length of thread, 

binding a sheaf

before I cut it off.

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Poetry In the Marketplace--Literally

 

Fresh herbs are where it's at in the open air market

Chinese or Asian eggplants in the farmers market

Marketplace

 

Thin blondes and their teacup Yorkies yap

next to the baby beets, the bunches of purple basil.

A wannabe-Dylan’s harmonica whines,

but these organic buyers don’t look back.

By the heirloom potatoes, fitful typing chatters

as the Unheard Poet taps out a poem,

free, for anyone who asks, plus a bill or two for Art.

He is taking the Basho challenge on his dusty portable Olivetti.

Hipster skulls twitch on his brown suede sneakers,

and he works his toes as he hunts and pecks his way.

Behind him, a puddle holds a scrap of lettuce

            floating in its mirrored milky sky. 

Rowdy Seniors Close Down Poetry Reading, Get Booted from Bookstore

Signing copies of TBL for Stephanie and for Sherry

McKenna DeLucca, much-tried bookstore manager, and Mark Givens, my esteemed publisher

 Last Saturday, September 9 2023, I threw a book launch party for The Beautiful Leaves at the Claremont Forum's Prison Project Bookstore. The Prison Project sells donated books to fund prisoners' requests for books. (The most requested book? Dictionaries.) It was a great afternoon. Official start time was 2:00, but we kicked off at 2:20 to give people a bit of time to gather and to buy books. Mark Givens, my publisher at Bamboo Dart Press, introduced me warmly (and told me privately that he thought this was a really good collection, and that it gave him ideas for expanding the purview of his press). 

I read five poems. I selected them on the fly, so I could gauge my audience’s response. I found myself avoiding the poems I wrote closest to his death—not really for read-aloud. Nancy Murphy commented that my poems sounded conversational. It’s true that I strive to write the way I talk, which is sometimes conversational, sometimes more elevated and holding forth. Left over from having taught pre-docs, I suppose. It’s also true that I am a fairly experienced reader, so choose poems that read more conversationally. The more intricate poems work better on the page, and that’s where I leave them. It is also true that it takes a lot of craft to sound artless.

Partly because of my age, most of my friends are seniors. The rest comprised friends from all parts of my life:  high school, acupuncturist, voice teacher, psychologists, poetry people, people affiliated with the Cal Poly Chemistry Department whom I met through Walter, friends who are simply friends. People drifted, congregated, saw old friends, talked with new people, milled around. Then the manager received a call—three calls—from Claremont Forum board members. They were ‘concerned’ about people blocking the aisles. It was at this point that I noticed a camera surveying the bookstore. Apparently board members can monitor the feed. The manager apologetically asked me if I could ask my guests to leave those spaces clear, in case some emergency arose and the place had to be evacuated. I thought to myself that the board apparently hadn’t minded people in the aisles before my event started, when the bookstore was so full of people milling around in the center space that I had trouble entering. But anyhow. My guests fitted themselves into a bay, rather the way you arrange yourself in an elevator, talked and sampled refreshments, ventured out of their improvised compound to buy the bookstore’s books. Then the much leaned-upon manager told me that the board was insisting she stop the reading, or else close the bookstore. I read another set, a little grimmer this time. My daughter and friends packed up the refreshments while I chatted with folks and signed some more books. We were out by 4:00 instead of 5:00.

How often do you get to say, “Dude! Raging seniors kicked out for partying too hard! Whoot!” Walter would have been proud.

The Beautiful Leaves, the book arrives

 

You’ve been hearing me talk about this collection for a few years, and now it is about to see light of day. The Beautiful Leaves , the collection of my poems about my beloved last husband Walter, will be published on August 8 by Pelekinesis Press (specifically, the Bamboo Dart division). Usually, I feel somewhat constrained about promoting my collections, but not this time. I feel that I am honoring Walter as he deserves. I feel also that my particular take on death and dying is not one you commonly encounter, and that my approach might strike a chord with other bereaved folk.

If you would like me to sign a copy and send it to you, please send $12 ($9 for the book, $3 for packaging and mailing, to my PayPal account, pieplate8@yahoo.com. Be sure to include your address in the notes. If you prefer Zelle, send me an email to the above address, or leave a comment, and I’ll send you the account number. Venmo also works:  @karen-greenbaum-maya. Of course, if we will see each other soon, or if you are planning on attending my book launch, or any of my readings, then just the $9.

I am so happy to have this collection come out. Walter loved the poems I wrote before his death, and I am glad to leave testimony about him.

AHA: a blast from the past, so to speak.

 

A very striking (no pun intended) virtual installation. You had to download the app, then sign in and view this creation through your phone. Naturally, the other people on the pier have no idea what you're seeing--and the phone just adds them into the scene

There is a little game in this prose poem. No one has noticed it yet. Perhaps you will.

Aha:  Atomic Apron

Hidden in the fold of the hem are the secrets of the atomic bomb, the equations and transitions that won the war. A white cotton apron, trimmed with satin-stitched wild roses. How can it have gone through the war and still be so pure? And the cloth, gauzy, open-weave, nothing but a net of threads. How did the secrets not leak through? Always the question no one asks out loud: Did that really happen? He’s the one who knows. Archbishop of physicists, eighty years ago they say, he inscribed the breakthrough on the cloth, then stitched it up tight. He is now so famous that credit, blame, renown no longer concern him. All respect is temporary. He knows this, as surely as he knows everything atomic reverts, sooner or later, to hydrogen. Ad infinitum, he will remember the moment when he understood: My God, he’d said, ja mei, mais non, aha.

Take it or leave it: Actually

 

The beginnings of a wildfire, near Sunland, CA

Actually…

…before she grew up in a barn, she was raised by wolves.

Her hair's a mess, but she has a fine big voice.
You can hear her down the street howling out Mahler
with something of an accent.  Sends a shiver up the spine.
She was a wild child, looking out into the moonlight,
snarling and nipping if someone interrupted.
School wasn't easy, what with the biting and the fleas.
No one has ever been trapped so long and survived.
She woke with the chickens, she slept with the cats.
Their smells kept her safe with the other animals.
People in the house made horn-signs, spat to avert her.
Their every sigh drew drops of blood.
This brought bad luck.  If you stumble as you go,
you are not welcome, and she never stepped right,
as sure as dancing, not even once.

Play her the song.  Maybe she'll sing.

Not quite Shakespeare: About the Author

 Found poem with refrigerator magnets

In college I had a friend, then known as Frances Harrod, who adored Alexander Pope. She had memorized hours and hours of his work, and would recite at any provocation. I loved it. I particularly loved Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, where Pope complains about the travails of being a famous poet. Alas. At one point, he mocks folks who try to flatter him by telling him how he resembles the greats, but only in their defects:  "Go on, obliging creature, make me see//All that disgraced my betters, met in me." Naturally I found it very possible to take the same approach.

About the Author

 

Like Proust, I’m not inventive.

Like Henry James, I’m fat.

Like Melville, slow to publish;

Like Eliot, I’ve a cat.

 

Like Stevens, I do other work;

Like Jarrell, write in prose.

Like Thurber, I don’t see too good;

Like Shakespeare, I wear clothes.

 

Like Kafka, I remember dreams;

Like Shaw, pontificate.

Love Paris just like Baudelaire;

Like Henry Roth, I’m late.

 

Like Freud, I must have enemies.

Like Gilbert, I’m not glad.

Like Wilde, I’m snide but tactless.

Like Sylvia Plath, I’m mad.

 

Like Joyce, exploit allusions;

Like Tolstoy, I’m no fun;

Like William Blake, can’t catch a break;

Like Reverend John, I’m donne.