Fragile Industries

Creative Impulses and Opportunities

A few days ago, I wrote my first poem in two years.  I did everything I thought I could do for it for the first day, now it's aging in my .docs files until I'm ready for it again in a week or so.  Then I let the critic loose for fine tuning.

My initial impression is that it's not very good, but it's a start.

Today, I got a commission inquiry (that looks very promising) for a new wedding book from my fairly inactive art website.  It's a very interesting project and would be a blast to make.  These people get the "participatory" aspect of what I do and would add their own custom touches once they get it.  It's a replacement for the pillow held by the ringbearer, with little niches and drawers for the rings.  This, above and below from my gallery, was their inspiration:

http://fragileindustries.com/galleryalteredbooksmysterybook.html

 

 

I finished a book about 6 months ago that was a bit of a new direction and challenge, a working of a poem that is deeply powerful to me, NOT my own -- Jane Hirschfield's "The Weighing."  Here's some pictures (bad and out of focus) that haven't made it to the Fragile Industries Studios website yet until I can clean them up.

 

 

Thoreau and the Toads

Thoreau and the Toads

David Wagoner

After the spring thaw, their voices ringing
At dusk would beckon him through the meadow
To the edge of their pond where, barefoot,
He would wade slowly into the water
And stand there in the last of light
To see the mating toads—a hundred or more
In the shallows around him, ignoring him
Or taking him for another, inflating
The pale-green bubbles of their throats to call
For buffo terrestris, leaping half out of the pool
And scrambling to find partners. The atmosphere
Would quiver with their harmonic over-
And undertones, with their loud, decent proposals
Like the sounds of a church potluck, their invocations
And offertories for disorderly conduct,
With the publishing of their indelicate banns
And blessings to the needy in their distress
And benedictions even beyond springtime
To all those of the faith. And he would see
Among this communal rapture, there underwater,
The small grey males lying silent
On the backs of females, holding on
To their counterparts with every slippery finger
And toe, both motionless, both gazing
Inward at the Indivisible
And rising from time to time together
To the surface only an inch above them
To breathe, then settling again and staring
With such a consciousness of being
Common American toads, he would stand beside them,
As content as they were with their medium
Of exchange, the soles of his feet trembling
With a resonance he could feel deep in his spine,
Believing this mud could be his altar too,
And his pulpit, where all of his intentions
Would be as clear as theirs, as clear as the air
In the chill of the fading light. He would lift
His bare feet gently and silently, making scarcely
A ripple, balancing
Himself onto the grass and, while his brethren
Like a drunken choir went on
And on without him, would sit down
Vibrant on the earth and once again struggle
Into his stockings, into his waterproof boots,
And straighten and square-knot his rawhide laces.

Happy Easter, everyone!

(With loving thanks to niece Anna "Monkey", who found this poem)

 

Fragile Industries' Favorite Poem by Fragile Industries

This one's for Houston.  He loved this from jump.  It's become my favorite too.

For reference, google images of Francois Boucher (with the curly bit under the "c") -- 1703-1770.

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A SKY FULL OF WOMEN

(after Francois Boucher)

a sky full of women

at dawn, all blushes and pink nipples,

blue lurking under the skin

a reminder that night passed only an hour ago.

furled scarves, stray yardage twines

between them, strategic loops through legs

to mask pudenda here and there.

oh, and the cherubs with stubby wings

impossibly cute and clean without diapers

are all male.  a lonely artist dreamed of heaven,

where lush voluptuaries bask and the men

(infant boys forever, tiny erections in the soft

dawn breeze) flit unnoticed

around them like blessed moths.

what do these glowing women, as perfect

and massive as cabbages, talk about?

they don't, no need, all is endless delight

as they laugh, musically, a chorus of lapping waves.

the cherubs giggle and smirk, the air smells of grapes,

talc, and the women, not girls these are women, sway

and loll in the sated bliss of their own skin.

September, 1994

Poetry Corner: Maya Angelou

This poem just makes me glad to be a woman.  "...diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs..."  And the hope to carry it off with a fraction of Dr. Angelou's dignity.  Oh yeah.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries. Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own back yard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise. Maya Angelou

On My Birthday, Gifts Remembered, Gifts Unexpected

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together..."

"Yes," I said.  "isn't it pretty to think so?"

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises, last lines

WAIT

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become interesting.

Second hand gloves will become lovely again;

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands.  The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asked to be filled;

the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don't go too early.

You're tired.  But everyone's tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Galway Kinnell, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980

Fragile Industries' Second Favorite Poem By Fragile Industries (And The One That Nearly Killed Me)

Background to Poem:

To left: The Fox Woman Kuzunoha Leaving Her Child (Yoshitoshi, from the "36 Ghosts" series):

One day when he was out walking, Abe no Yasuna saved a fox from hunters. Not long after, he met and married a beautiful girl named Kuzunoha. (Kuzunoha means "kudzu leaf"; the flowering vine appears in the foreground of the print.) She bore him a son and they lived happily together for three years. However, she eventually had to leave him and her son because Yasuna discovered her true nature. She left behind a poem written on a sliding screen: "If you think of me, love, come seek me in the forests of Shinoda, and you will find a kudzu leaf." Kuzunoha's true form appears in the shadow on the sliding screen; it was thought that reflections in water and mirrors, as well as shadows, revealed the true form of supernatural beings who were pretending to be human.

Look closely at the shadow on the screen, and the child clinging to her hem.  It's heartbreaking.

I saw this in an exhibit of Japanese woodcuts in Kansas City.  I was in Kansas City with my father for his mother's funeral, which is a story worth a post all its own.  My dad was many things, but I never thought of him as a connoisseur of art.  Yet he surprised me, sometimes.  He wept like a child at Puccini operas, thrilled to his core.  He was in Japan several times, first when posted there with the army of occupation after WWII, and apparently came to appreciate much of the Japanese culture.  So he was enthusiastic when I suggested going to the exhibit as a break from the Sturm und Drang of Grandma's very Italian (as in The Sopranos-Italian) funeral planning.  We were both struck by this image, as much as my Absolute Favorite, which is listed (plug, plug) in my new list to the left, Shameless Exhibitionism.  I read the story of the woodcut, posted in the gallery more or less as above.

Years passed, and the details of the story became fuzzy, including the spelling of the name Kuzunoha.  I wrote the following, based on my faulty memory.  We should never trust memory to be factual, but it is always interesting how the mind processes and transforms facts into memories, a notion I explore in the poem, as it turns out.  Wouldn't a human-turned-animal now process the human memories in a form accessible to the animal? 

Poem:

KUDUNOHA

In this Japanese folktale, an unfaithful wife and mother turns into a badger after she is evicted from the family home.

A silken kimono rustles down the hall,

then the click of claws on the porch.

Is she cursed with memory?

Kinder if she feels only a moment’s confusion

before she looks for soft earth

to turn up a grub.

But that’s no punishment.

No the moral force of the story requires

penance.  Little fires under her heart,

a burning in eyes that cannot weep.

Badgers carry sadness deep in their wide bodies.

She misses the children, the smell of their necks,

their clumsy fingers like tubers, most of all

the nestling and crooning before naptime.

Mysteries even to her, mysteries from her body.

The enormity of this loss leaves little grief

for her wronged husband.  He’s no marvel.

Under her new and bristling pelt, she thinks of him

rarely, of her lover, not at all.  With her perfect recall,

she still can’t distinguish human men

one from the other or from the violent, snarling tumbles

in the dens.  The white badge on her forehead remains

impassive, like her face

when she wore the good wife’s mask.

Sometimes in sleep her paw flutters

as if waving a fan.

1996

Aftermath of Poem:

I wrote the poem in a rush, a few hours one evening, tinkered a tiny bit the next day, and that was it.  A few months later, I submitted it to a poetry contest run by the SF Guardian.  I ended up winning and being the SF Guardian Poet of the year.  It was initially a hugely giddy process, with interviews, press, much wider publication and publicity for my poetry, and culminated in a huge poetry festival in a SF nightclub attended by Everyone On Earth, or so it seemed, where I read the poem after all the runners up, the top billing. The crowd's reaction was muted, understandably, because it was a young, poetry slam kind of audience.  The thing is, this is not an "out loud" poem.  This is a "read it to yourself, someplace quiet" kind of poem.

The totality of all the fuss and furor was that I developed a poetry writer's block that remains to this day.  I continued to write poetry for several years, but in my mind, and in fact, it was inferior work.  So I stopped, and write maybe three poems a year, mostly dreck but just to do it.  That distressed me terribly for years.  I'm OK with it now.  I have other creative outlets.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.  If it comes back, I'd be delighted, but it's not My Life's Work anymore.

The block is actually common to writers (and other artists) who achieve sudden recognition.  My fervent hope is that my new creative passion does not achieve Fame And Fortune, but that I can poke along having fun, and maybe make a few people happy with what I make.  So even though I'm trying to make The Greatest Art In The World, and The Most Beautiful Website, and achieve Search Engine Optimal Nirvana, please god don't let me win any prizes.

Oh, and what's my favorite, if this is my second favorite?  Wait and see.  It's Houston's favorite, too.

Poetry on Wednesday -- Gus

My new friend Patti is a woman of many talents.  She’s an actress, director, stuffed bunny maker, mom, wife, and earns her living teaching drama and music in local schools.  She recently directed a junior-high production of “Cats” which was a smash – the kids were outstanding and both audience and cast had a great time.  Patti designs the sets, the costumes, scours eBay for props and wardrobe, and is now in rehearsals for a high school production of “Les Miserables.”  I donated a bunch of silk flowers and other craft items for the cause – now they grace ballgowns and chapeaux created specially for the show.  I have to go see “Les Miz” for the floral display alone.  But back to “Cats.”  In the ‘80’s, I had a cassette tape of the musical that I played non-stop in my car and had memorized, singing along with the lyrics in traffic jams, much to the consternation of other drivers when I lifted both hands for a dramatic finale of “Memories.”  I had a particular affection for “Gus, The Theatre Cat” because it reminded me so much of my father, an actor, and all his actor friends as they recounted their stage triumphs.

So sing along:

GUS, THE THEATRE CAT

T.S. Eliot

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,
And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.
Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats--
But no longer a terror to mice and to rats.
For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in its time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club
(Which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)
He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.
For he once was a Star of the highest degree--
He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.
And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,
Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.
But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.

"I have played," so he says, "every possible part,
And I used to know seventy speeches by heart.
I'd extemporize back-chat, I knew how to gag,
And I knew how to let the cat out of the bag.
I knew how to act with my back and my tail;
With an hour of rehearsal, I never could fail.
I'd a voice that would soften the hardest of hearts,
Whether I took the lead, or in character parts.
I have sat by the bedside of poor Little Nell;
When the Curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell.
In the Pantomime season I never fell flat,
And I once understudied Dick Whittington's Cat.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell."

Then, if someone will give him a toothful of gin,
He will tell how he once played a part in East Lynne.
At a Shakespeare performance he once walked on pat,
When some actor suggested the need for a cat.
He once played a Tiger--could do it again--
Which an Indian Colonel purused down a drain.
And he thinks that he still can, much better than most,
Produce blood-curdling noises to bring on the Ghost.
And he once crossed the stage on a telegraph wire,
To rescue a child when a house was on fire.
And he says: "Now then kittens, they do not get trained
As we did in the days when Victoria reigned.
They never get drilled in a regular troupe,
And they think they are smart, just to jump through a hoop."
And he'll say, as he scratches himself with his claws,
"Well, the Theatre's certainly not what it was.
These modern productions are all very well,
But there's nothing to equal, from what I hear tell,
That moment of mystery
When I made history
As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell."

Friday Poetry Corner: Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

From Twenty Poems of Love, Pablo Neruda.

I can write the saddest lines tonight. Write for example: ‘The night is fractured and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’ The night wind turns in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest lines tonight. I loved her, sometimes she loved me too. On nights like these I held her in my arms. I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes. I can write the saddest lines tonight. To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her. Hear the vast night, vaster without her. Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass. What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her. The night is fractured and she is not with me. That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off, my soul is not content to have lost her. As though to reach her, my sight looks for her. My heart looks for her: she is not with me The same night whitens, in the same branches. We, from that time, we are not the same. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her. Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses. Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her. Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long. Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms, my soul is not content to have lost her. Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer, and these are the last lines I will write for her. Pablo Neruda

It's been over three years since the Ex said he wanted a divorce.  That was while the ink on our prenuptual agreement modification in his favor was still wet. I can't summon up a thimble-full of bitterness any more.  In all sincerity, I wish him well.  This poem is a more literate version of my recent theme song, "Since U Been Gone."  It may not have a catchy beat, but I find it even more moving . . .

Friday Poetry Corner - "The Big D, And I Don't Mean Dallas"

It's been a week since the divorce was final.  Last Friday , I felt pure relief.  I had a dream the night before that was rich with symbolism.  I said goodbye to old relationships, personified by My First Love, who appears in my dreams as an icon of love.  He gave me a handcrafted bed as a parting gift.  Then I gave birth to a son, and I knew my life had changed forever -- overwhelmed by love and a blessed responsibility.  The bed morphed into a beautiful cottage in the country.  I wanted to do nothing but sleep and eat and feed that baby.  I told a friend, "His mother is bright and beautiful, and his father has more money than God."  (We're still in Dreamland, OK?  There's a certain amount of wish fulfillment allowed.)  His father was indeed infinitely providing, a vague figure full of love and safety.  My new life was vulnerable, needed my care before it was ready for the big world, but I could do this, wanted it desperately.  A dream full of emotion and promise.

I'm so moving on.

This poem started in 1993 as an exercise in prepositions.  I wanted to play with the idea of them, and remembered a grammar school teacher's introduction of this form of speech.  She told us "A preposition is anything you can do to a cloud."  I wrote it in the context of where I was then -- putting away the last remnants of my first marriage.  For those hard of hearing, this is not about the most recent ex, it describes a different person.  Still, I find it relevant again.

A HEATED FLUID WILL EXPAND

While the years emptied gravid bottles for my thirst,

you touched me everywhere and shaped my edges with you.

You did and did: around under above in and out.

While my breasts fell and the smooth

creased and the mercury in me rolled this way and that

girls boys boys girls

a wavy flicker ruled by the moon

you were constant: there and here and resting hard

around my liquids until you were ready again to mold

that quicksilver.

Alembic and vessel, you heated me and held

about my steam in your form.

steam builds pressure.  I pushed

but I never thought you could break.  You did, in time:

over and through.

I am mist.  I expand like crazy knitting.

A painful release held back too long.

I surge out my windows and flow up Twin Peaks,

curl down goddamn 24th street, pass through

chrome spokes of the bike, of the baby carriage

all those cycles we abandoned,

seep over every cat until they all seem gray,

yours mine hers.

Even so,

this vapor persists, more invulnerable than granite.

Thrust, if you can, if I didn’t break that too,

in and out and over and through.  Only the wind

wounds me now.  Tell me,

what can you do to a cloud?

Poetry Corner

ILLUSIONS OF SUPPORT

Daring aerialists work without a net.

They go it alone on the wire

wearing skin-tight leotards

suggesting nudity, exaggerating

how vulnerable bodies in motion seek balance,

the hands of a partner in the sky

at the precise second of need

when the trapeze swings away.

The crowd gasps, appalled

cymbals crash

disaster imagined, averted.

Can you imagine working without a wire?

Or flying without the hanging swing

for propulsion or destination?

This is the real circus.  This is the center ring.

You are your only audience in the endless moment.

Is courage a form of madness, or is madness a form of courage?

Weave your net, your wire, your trapeze,

the saving hands in the sky

and hold them dear within you.

You will fly.  You will fly.

11/14/05