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P – Week 5 log and update

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So, I have not been keeping up with my updates lately like a good girl, so here goes:

I have driven back and forth across the midwest several times in the past month, both as a passenger and a driver, helping my friend to ferry his many vehicles and plethora of work equipment to his new house in Kentucky, where we were staying in between jaunts, although for the first few weeks we were actually living in his travel trailer parked next to the house, as the house had been empty for a year and was not habitable.  I have been to Houston, Texarkana, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Davenport, Iowa, as well as all of the rural spaces in between.  I have slept in a trailer parked in various locations (next to a house, in rv parks, at truck stops and rest stops and once in a Walmart parking lot for a few hours), houses, cheap motels and nicer hotels.  I helped my friend make his house livable, turning an uninhabited space into a place–a home.  I drove a gigantic pickup truck, pulling a gigantic travel trailer from Texarkana to a tiny town in western Kentucky, and then from the tiny town in Kentucky to a tiny town in Michigan, which is where I am now and should be for the next couple weeks, until I get back to Olympia in time for the week 10 presentations.

While riding around the country as a passenger, waiting in the truck in various pipeyards and mechanic shops, at truck stops, late at night in hotels and motels, and in my “office” on J’s front porch in Kentucky, I have done a lot of reading on space and place, including The Eyes of the Skin (really great book, I’ve read it through three times), the Poetics of Space, Place and Experience (available through Evergreen’s e-brary), the Body and the City, and lots and lots of poetry.  I have found that, strangely, I get more work done when I am in places not generally conducive to schoolwork.  I even had a minor breakthrough on what to do for my research paper at a truckstop somewhere in Ohio, where we had stopped for a few hours so J could make some repairs to his work truck, and several truckers came by my table in the cafe/lounge to see what I was doing behind my stack of books and papers, feverishly typing on my laptop.  (I had been planning on doing another Holdrege-style paper, but now I am working on something more in the vein of The Midnight, which fits in much more with Anais Nin’s style in House of Incest, which is something I have been playing with lately.)

Oh, and I think my accent has gotten thicker, but hopefully it will fade pretty quickly when I get back to Oly–my accent has always been very fluid, changing depending on who I’m talking to and where I am.

 

Log of hours:

4-29-13: 2 Poetics of Space, 2 Body & City, 1/2 morning pages, 1/2 yoga at hotel

4-30-13:  1 truck stop free writing

5-1-13:  1 reading seminar passes, 2 wordpress, 2 moodle readings, 2 HOI reading and writing

5-2-13:  1/2 morning pages, 1/2 tai ji, 5 wordpress, 1 poetry observed, 2 “Writing Poetry” wb

5-3-13:  1/2 morning pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 4 wordpress, 1 self-eval, 2 Poetics of Space

5-4-13:  1/2 morning pages, 1 photos for gallery, 2 trailer park poetry, 1.5 nature hike/meditation

5-5-13:  3 Perloff, 3 Neuro, 1 sem pass, 1 NKN (not knowing notebook)

Total:  43 hours

Week 5 log

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April 29th


  • 1hr of peer review

  • 3 hrs of reading Lord Byron

  • 1hr writing

  • 1hr meditative thinking


April 30th


  • 1hr  Poetry Reading and Interpretation

  • 1.5hr  Seminar: As poetry recycles neurons in conversations between Marjorie Perloff’s poets and Neuro

  • 1.5hr Guest Poet: Lucia Perillo

  • 2hrs reading The Last Myth and My Poets


May 1st


  • 1.5hrs Writing Workshop w/TESC program Methods of Mathematical Physics

  • 3hrs reading My Poets and Neuro


May 2nd


  • 1.5hrs  “Doing Goethean Science: Your Poet”  Weekly explorations of themes from Neuro in relationship to the poet of student’s choice modeled on Maureen McLane’s My Poets

  • 2hrs of reading Lord Byrons compleat works

  • 1hr of reading Lord Byron and the Ruins of Paridise


May 3rd


  • 4hrs on the old hilltop ward park exploring the grounds and finding some of the most fantastic views of the mountains I’d ever seen. took photos, wrote some quick bits of poetry. All in Lakewood, WA.

  • 0.5hr in steilacoom exploring the tiny place before we left

  • 2 hr writing and meditating at old docks in Hoquiam, WA


May 4th


  • 3hrs on Lynda.com working on Photoshop Techniques

  • 4hrs shifting through photos from yesterdays trip and editing them in PS CS6, utilizing new things learned through Lynda.com


May 5th


  • 3hrs reading Nuro and Perloff

  • 1hr typing up work from journal

  • 2hrs working on photoshop work

  • .5hrs doing wordpress work

Total Hours this week: 42 hours

The Stone (Another Memory Poem)

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I’ve seen the truth slip out your mouth and vanish.
thus giving your speech no ring, nothing to hold to.
There is no peace within this glade, as you stand befor me,
sun ore your head, your sham has met it’s end
with my defiance. I will not waver like the trees to the wind,
I am stone, solid and forboding,
ominouse yet beautiful in its own right.
and you my dear wind, have no power over me.
Yet you are blind and see nothing,
you do not see the softer side of the stone,
the part that weeps, for you once ment so much,
now you mean so little.

Winters Heart (A Reflection)

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“She Walks in Beauty” by Crystal Muns 2013

The days fly by my window like the birds who
having nowhere else to roam, and having made this
dreary town their own, nestle in the hidden kiss
of serpentine dew,
Eden is old fashioned too!
And so all faith shall go amiss
as night to gaudy day resists
all that is, and all that’s overdue.

Bring hand in hand the end of days
may the bell of sorrow ring no more
but may the light of all these winters
never lose their chord, least there blaze,
a passionate fire, uncontrolled devolve to lore,
so that my heart shall weep forever-more.

V – (Dandelions and V’s)

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Harvesting Taraxacum Offcinalis:

Oh how the vibrant Yellow of the wide open dandelions rejuvenate my spirit.      Their headlong medicine turns me onto a new page of thought, a thought of flowing, that special scent that only comes with the placement of the sun directly overhead, puffy freshly hung clouds floating in the distance.   I got a moment to go out in my new yard and pluck their gracious heads from their sturdy stems today.  I then sat in the sun, taking the time to remove the sepals and place the petals in a jar like so: Image

I covered these sweeties with olive oil and hope to make some lovely salves in the summer time-this oil I find particularly magical and would love to gift it in the late summer!

I highly suggest trying Dandelion Fritters or any other combination of putting this lovely plant into your own body, your own vessel.  It is rich with minerals and is fabulous to tone and cleanse the system during this spring time! Enjoy and have fun.

V, forming the opening with Pottery.

Today during my time with the wheel I choose to work with the letter V.   Here is a riff I wrote as I said V over and over again.

Image

: The sun. The Sole of the Uterus, a holding and releasing to something sensual.

Upward.  Holding hands to the sun – light.  a light letter with an intrusion of space. The tangle and untangling of growth, hanging on your tongue.  The horns of a bull.  An entrance, to what?

A bird, the wings in shape of taking flight.  Sound, a humming of the chest.  Opening of the mouth.  An Exhalation. VIBRATION.

so then…..I made a vase.  I got to spend time with this piece, it allowed me to work patiently with it for over an hour.  Pulling, pressing, being gentle and patient, being open to its inevitable collapse, yet this never came, which was nice.  I now have a a vase that expressed an outward feeling, an opening that begins wide and falls into a smaller center, reminding me of the yoni, the womb, the sound of a v that leads into a word, that letter that seems to weave the word and vibrate through the whole.

I intend to look into the history of V now that I have let my mind freely play with it.  Allowing my artistic mind and scientific mind to play off one another i will shift from doing research then throwing, to throwing and then doing research.  I believe this will give me a taste of how i artistically tap into the pottery and the language of our associations with letters.

P(r) – Final Poem

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These movements that seem to move themselves

with a grace that hides the strength

that brings ease of movement as we manipulate ourselves

into achieving what should be impossible.

The lines of the body extended far past the center, the core,

the baseline, what the textbooks say is normal

–but I think we just might

create our own homeostasis.

 

Are the boundaries of our bodies absolute,

or only a suggestion?

A dare from our ancestors,

to see what we are capable of…

 

…I never could refuse a dare…

 

Do the lines of my body define me,

or is it only the outline of my meat suit?

Do the limits of my body describe my potential?

If my core expands invisibly across creation

and my physical self is confined, contained, constrained,

here, now—but there is no separation, no divide,

my body is not a car I drive around in,

it is me and

I cannot distance myself from myself.

 

The given parameters are no longer acceptable.

I will fight every constraint

and cross every boundary I am given

or give to myself.

I’ve always toed the line,

daring myself to cross

and am exhausted from the effort

of holding myself back.

I’ve always enjoyed lost causes

but this has become an exercise in wasted effort.

 

If the past is a memory and the future a dream,

the present is what I hold in my hands right now.

And now. And now.  And

I don’t want to be held responsible for

precedents set in my before.

I want to tell the story again.

I want to tell my story again.

 

Present tense.

I and Ai is Change

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I thought I knew what Love is;

it sounded like my Eye, and I

told you how I Love so much I couldn’t tell you Why.

But the moment I belie Wo’ Ai,

you have another Eye:

A coiled Thought like Buddha sitting

claims the label “I”.

I thought I was Love, but Love is Ai.  (I know for sure Wo’ Ai)

But what of I?  It can’t be “E”,

because Sun and Moon make “E”.

The Sun and Moon make Change in me,

and lizards in my mind,

but I and Ai, I still can’t see–

 

which one of them is mine?

P-is-for-Piano

P – Poetry Week 5

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The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – By T.S. Eliot

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;                                30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

“Some people are convinced that letters have well-defined colors that can be seen exactly in the mind’s eye. The experience is called synesthesia – a strange intermingling of sensory modalities that constitutes further evidence for neuronal recycling.” Dehaene, S. (2009) Reading in the Brain. Penguin Books, NY. (P. 215)

“Whatever you can do with your hands gives you a small world that you can actually cope with.” (Wilson, F. (1998) The Hand. Random House NY. (P. 219)

Words – the black on the page – transmitting colors, sensations, emotions. Voice, sound, substance evoking memories, ever present. Fear and indecision ever needing the distraction of hands, of creation.

The articulate hand
Seeing voices
Musical grammar
My melodies speak when…

Handiwork – “the ways of hands“
Express, gesticulate, create
Paint, pick, weave
Edit, write, see
Try to feel without imagining what it looks like
Touch just to remember the color of sensation
The sound of the smoothness
of each key under
each finger, sending velvet waves
into the universe

(I wonder if each key is like a stone being dropped into a pond – the pebble sinks out of sight and the ripples flow one into another, one after another. The pebble coming to a halt at the bottom, and the ripples ever reverberating off the edges and resonating together)

Substance – Void
Empty shelves, devoid of substance,
(Books being the ultimate substance)
In a library – the ultimate holder of voices – vice of voices
I see the hands taking books from shelves
With no minds

Hands flying minds…
Minds flying miles
Away, away from time
Sound forced from covers slapped together
Ideas rubbed against each other as two books meet

 

Three full rows empty. Devoid of substance
The clamour of voices from the neighboring shelves muted
Here in the silence, the void
Devoid of substance and voice.