Coming next weekend: a poetry reading in Columbus Ohio (invitation only; contact me if interested) and a poetry reading in Pittsburgh PA (free and all invited; 1:15 Tues. 7/20, at Hemingways back room). Thanks to everyone who's come to my readings and shared their adoption stories and poetry--this is a rich, fascinating set of connections for me and my family, and for adoption poetry!
My poetry loves the company. Jan
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Sky = Empty: My New Favorite Book
Well, it was a long trip to take to make a good friend rant about a poetry book. (Seeing Chris and her family, and getting a new job, not our toast, was the goal of the trip).
Down the Mountain
Take Me as nothing left
lift me twisted through granit and moss
water lung, milk waist, sage
I pass through these pages like a ghost
erase my shape in the sun on the porch
brown my skin into the riverbed
push my words into a lullaby
paper lung
milk waist and sage
whatever I came with exhausted
I pass through these pages like a ghost
whatever I came with I spent
The poems range from quirky and lyrical family stories ("Mom Says Stalin was a Bad Communist") to pieces full of strange, isolated-figure juxtapositions as she writes about illness and the skinless way we feel when we fear we're sick and can't recover, to these striking two-language poems that reflect her life in Japan and her bi-lingual interest in how words make people imagine their lives in different languages. So, as the end of "Woman Under Trees" shows us:
ama
ocean woman:
a woman diving for shells
kan
three women:
wickedness and mischief
ameonna
rain woman:
a woman who brings rain
It doesn't make as much sense without the beginning, but I'll let Judy's poem close this entry; the poems finishes with:
these words flood into the river
they are trees that rise uprooted
they are butterflies in the trees
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Poetry and the Lively Audience
Last night I read poetry at Mississippi Pizza--and came home and had frozen pizza (I ate more at home than there). (The pizza is a LOT better there!)
Here are some pictures of this poetry + music event (next shows: Fri. January 22 11:30 am at Chemeketa CC, Building 2, Salem, and then Tuesday, January 26, 7:30 at The Press Club on SE Clinton St in Portland).
Pictures: the writer, reading seriously with pianist (Lorin!) in the back. Then, in the other picture, note the real show. Poetry works better with dancing kids. (Asa, our friend's 1 1/2 year old in the audience, kept saying, "Jan. Jan. Stage." And, Zoe too!).
Thanks to musical genius Lorin, the book table guy and the film guy (Jeremy and Justus), and especially to all who attended--and to the amazing sound engineer Lauren ("When the kids start dancing, turn up the mic's," I instructed her) and the kids who danced spontaneously on stage, demonstrating their ability to jump over dragon beams. To avoid being dragon bait.
Unscripted moments included the melt down before the show (Zoe's, not mine!), Tim shouting support for some parenting joke from the audience ("I have been backed up by a MINISTER," I said), Zoe trying to put a sticker on my chest during a poem, and the kids forming a chain and trying to hide under my--thankfully full skirted--dress.
Just your basic poetry reading, with backup Eddie Vedder on the mandolin.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Baby's Got Bach: Poetry and Its Musical Cousin
Reading poetry alone on stage can be powerful—or can boring, or precious (a precious word writers use meaning, what the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live would call, “Special”). Reading with music—well, I don’t know how to describe that yet because, formally, I haven’t done that yet.
When my new poetry book was about to be released—birthing children, adopting children, even staging minor coups are all faster than publishing a first poetry book—I knew I needed to read a few times, promoting it. But I wanted it to be more interesting than some readings I've done, and to have a buddy on stage for support, to make it a performance, not just a sight reading.
And I knew I’d rather do it with music, and when I thought of music, I thought of Lorin. He's a professional level musician with a beer blogger, and a friend I know throught friends here: and, he can play.
Flash to Bach concerts in downtown Portland, to having fondue with his partner Kristin at a downtairs restaurant before Beethoven’s 9th, to hearing international holiday music a few years ago where he was the only white guy who’s sway looked natural—all that and him riffing on a piano or strumming a mandolin at parties. I knew he was talented.
But, generous enough to kill a few nights playing with poetry? And, how would it sound?
So far, my iPhone is filled with bars of music he’s played for me—and the notes from our rehearsal last night are next to me, ready to be formalized (they are scrawls from my husband and me, dictations by Lorin, saying, play this there. Pause. Come in here. Let Jan start the poem, then, hit it.)
We are both formally trained, in poetry and music, and I played one of the tunes he’s doing on the piano on my cello: Bach’s first Cello concerto (it’s in relaxing car commercials and movies; you’d know it).
So, for anyone who wants to know how you organize a poetry reading with a musician accompanying you on no budget, with some good free beer:
1. Call Lorin
2. Make sure you have poetry he can play to
3. Watch with amazement when, like a sci fi movie where the flowers all drop into a million stars, he explodes with activity and ideas (excuse me, we just saw Avatar!)—
4. Go to his house and be amazed at the range of music he suggests going with your lyric poems (Purcell, Bach, Eddie Vedder—I would not make this up—something from a Kung Fu movie played on Mandolin--)
5. Rehearse.
Which brings me to the one interesting part that might teach or surprise writers: reading in a rehearsal with music is different from reading alone, and from editing your work. Suddenly things get edited more, or words are omitted because you need more tension that meets the music. Some poems go fast, some go slowly.
If two nights ago, you’d said, which of your poems are Allegro (fast) and which are Largo (slow), I’d have said, “Whaa-a-a-?”
Now, for the two January performances with Lorin, I know. Some, come here our Goldberg Variations and Chinese adoptive parent poems, hear an original mandolin lullaby by Lorin with a poem about naming an international child, and see my counting silently, trying to find my opening through the music and words to what the Japanese poets call the Kokoro, the heart of the work.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Kitten and the Book
Cat and Book FAQs, with litterbox and font details included.
The Cast of Characters:
Kitty Echo
We were going to get our six year old daughter a white kitten named Snowflake? Well, it morphed, like a character in an anime movie: from white girl cat (Snowflake Mimi) to white boy cat (Snowflake Bosco) to a gray tabby with a pink nose who is upstairs napping, and is named Echo. We adopted him Saturday.
The Poetry Book (see below)
My book about adopting from China
(The Long Birth) just arrived, and is now listed on Amazon.com. Most folks are ordering direct through me so they can have a discount and get Zoe's signature on the book. She works for candy, literally (don't tell her dentist).
So, with this week's new kitten and my new book, I thought I'd answer a few questions folks have asked me.
Re: The Font
I went with Garamond, or, since I work with a committee of opinionated writers, one might say "we." It is pretty and old fashioned, and like ordering bread at a bakery, you don't know how interesting the options are until you've had, say, a really good olive loaf.
Re: The Litterbox
Snowflake Mimi Bosco Echo does use it, and we clapped for him when he first did this.
Re: The Artist
Cover artist Nikki McClure is a Pacific Northwest artist whose prints I love; they have these rich deep colors and are not drawn in ink, as it appears, but from cut paper. I asked to use her work, and my publisher's designer, Tania Baban, helped me pick the nest image on the cover. It was all handled through the publisher, Jim Natal.
Re: Claws
Kitten have claws. As poet Marianne Moore might have written, "Kittens have claws and one is made to know it." The story of the little kittens with mittens sounds very attractive now (but dudes, don't lose them!). Echo likes to massage us at night with his tiny sharp claws sort of involved. Think Edward Scissorhands as a masseuse. I trimmed his claws with nail clippers, and he let me. Good kitty.
Re: Nocturnal?
The book is active any time you read it; the kitten is active all night long. Remember: when you see a sweet relaxing kitty in the afternoon sun, he is napping to be lively all night, when you sleep.
Re: Marketing
Some students in Chemeketa's excellent Visual Communications (Graphic Arts) program are designing postcards to advertise my January Readings with Musician Lorin Wilkerson, and the kitten, being adorably perfect, needs no advertisement whatsoever.
Re: The Dog
It is possible our dog adapts more easily to books, though, than to kittens. . . (we have him downstairs hanging out with books now, and will get him to meet the kitty next weekend). We want them to get so used to smelling each other on our clothes and in the house that, when they finally meet, it will be more like a reunion than a meeting. Every day, my dog Grendel looks at me boredly, as if to say, "Well, where is it?"
The Cast of Characters:
Kitty Echo
We were going to get our six year old daughter a white kitten named Snowflake? Well, it morphed, like a character in an anime movie: from white girl cat (Snowflake Mimi) to white boy cat (Snowflake Bosco) to a gray tabby with a pink nose who is upstairs napping, and is named Echo. We adopted him Saturday.
The Poetry Book (see below)
My book about adopting from China
(The Long Birth) just arrived, and is now listed on Amazon.com. Most folks are ordering direct through me so they can have a discount and get Zoe's signature on the book. She works for candy, literally (don't tell her dentist).So, with this week's new kitten and my new book, I thought I'd answer a few questions folks have asked me.
Re: The Font
I went with Garamond, or, since I work with a committee of opinionated writers, one might say "we." It is pretty and old fashioned, and like ordering bread at a bakery, you don't know how interesting the options are until you've had, say, a really good olive loaf.
Re: The Litterbox
Snowflake Mimi Bosco Echo does use it, and we clapped for him when he first did this.
Re: The Artist
Cover artist Nikki McClure is a Pacific Northwest artist whose prints I love; they have these rich deep colors and are not drawn in ink, as it appears, but from cut paper. I asked to use her work, and my publisher's designer, Tania Baban, helped me pick the nest image on the cover. It was all handled through the publisher, Jim Natal.
Re: Claws
Kitten have claws. As poet Marianne Moore might have written, "Kittens have claws and one is made to know it." The story of the little kittens with mittens sounds very attractive now (but dudes, don't lose them!). Echo likes to massage us at night with his tiny sharp claws sort of involved. Think Edward Scissorhands as a masseuse. I trimmed his claws with nail clippers, and he let me. Good kitty.
Re: Nocturnal?
The book is active any time you read it; the kitten is active all night long. Remember: when you see a sweet relaxing kitty in the afternoon sun, he is napping to be lively all night, when you sleep.
Re: Marketing
Some students in Chemeketa's excellent Visual Communications (Graphic Arts) program are designing postcards to advertise my January Readings with Musician Lorin Wilkerson, and the kitten, being adorably perfect, needs no advertisement whatsoever.
Re: The Dog
It is possible our dog adapts more easily to books, though, than to kittens. . . (we have him downstairs hanging out with books now, and will get him to meet the kitty next weekend). We want them to get so used to smelling each other on our clothes and in the house that, when they finally meet, it will be more like a reunion than a meeting. Every day, my dog Grendel looks at me boredly, as if to say, "Well, where is it?"
Birthing the Book
The plane flew into China through our beating hearts. . . –from “Traveling Song”
This December, I’m giving birth to my second child: a poetry book (It is faster to adopt from China than to write a poetry book about it). The Long Birth should be available by the second week of December, and if you want one, it can be ordered from me or through Amazon.com (the cost is lower if you buy from me, but I don't have gift wrapping! To order from me, contact vanstavern@gmail.com).
****
When her husband had food poisoning, Jean shouted on the bus: “Ladies, I don’t care what he did. You do not want to do this alone.”
–from "Red Thread Weaving: The Families"
For a poet, at least for this poet, writing poems about a life changing, heart expanding, sleepless experience is not easy. Poems about love work best from a distance: It would be better, female novelist George Elliot once suggested, to have a conversation with a woman, instead of writing so many sonnets about her.
And so it took me several years to write this book.
At first, I could not write a single sonnet, and instead kept listening to our daughter: through her cries, her calls, her first word (“Uh oh”) and her second (“No!”). But the music and stories built up behind the wall of laundry and pacifiers. For her, and for other adopted children and families, and for me, I wanted to write this book.
So a manuscript started to develop. At first like a composition student writing (“Five pages! I can’t write five pages!” they complain. I too had a page number goal, when the muse was invisible. One more page?). Later, I felt like a gawky teenager coached by fabulous aunts and uncles: I found a group of brilliant poets in Portland.
And I had a publisher: Jim Natal of Conflux Press, who had published chapbooks (small arty poetry books) for poets I admire and love: ‘the Runes editors ‘Lynn Follett and Susan Terris. And I had a child, and a job, and a messy house, and a garden of overripe tomatoes.
Four years, three poetry group pals, several poetic email pals, some David St. John Workshops, a sabbatical project, and a summer of Joe taking extra childcare later, and I’m about to have a beautiful book.
The cover has a bird’s nest by Northwest Artist Nikki McClure, who makes Asian looking art from paper cut outs. And thanks to help from my friend Christine Linder, it has a red O in the title, a wink to parents who adopted from China, land of the red thread.
Readings in January
There will be three book readings in January, two of them accompanied by Bach singer, legal clerk, and beer and music blogger Lorin Wilkerson (this is a Renaissance man). We’re figuring out how to mix Bach with poetry about changing diapers on a plane.
Readings will be held at Mississippi Pizza* on January 16 (4-5—a fun kid’s event), at Chemeketa Community College on January 22 (11:30-12:20, with a children’s book drive: bring a used book!) and at The Press Club* on at 7:30 on January 26. (* indicates Lorin will play classical music. At Chemeketa, instead of Lorin, we'll have free classical pizza.) For reading reminders or to share stories, become a fan of The Long Birth on Facebook.
****
In our video, the world bobs because I bowed when the monk said to.
The golden Buddha, and sleeping child eyes closed,
hands curled against her new father’s broad arms. . .
–from "Temple Blessing"
This December, I’m giving birth to my second child: a poetry book (It is faster to adopt from China than to write a poetry book about it). The Long Birth should be available by the second week of December, and if you want one, it can be ordered from me or through Amazon.com (the cost is lower if you buy from me, but I don't have gift wrapping! To order from me, contact vanstavern@gmail.com).
****
When her husband had food poisoning, Jean shouted on the bus: “Ladies, I don’t care what he did. You do not want to do this alone.”
–from "Red Thread Weaving: The Families"
For a poet, at least for this poet, writing poems about a life changing, heart expanding, sleepless experience is not easy. Poems about love work best from a distance: It would be better, female novelist George Elliot once suggested, to have a conversation with a woman, instead of writing so many sonnets about her.
And so it took me several years to write this book.
At first, I could not write a single sonnet, and instead kept listening to our daughter: through her cries, her calls, her first word (“Uh oh”) and her second (“No!”). But the music and stories built up behind the wall of laundry and pacifiers. For her, and for other adopted children and families, and for me, I wanted to write this book.
So a manuscript started to develop. At first like a composition student writing (“Five pages! I can’t write five pages!” they complain. I too had a page number goal, when the muse was invisible. One more page?). Later, I felt like a gawky teenager coached by fabulous aunts and uncles: I found a group of brilliant poets in Portland.
And I had a publisher: Jim Natal of Conflux Press, who had published chapbooks (small arty poetry books) for poets I admire and love: ‘the Runes editors ‘Lynn Follett and Susan Terris. And I had a child, and a job, and a messy house, and a garden of overripe tomatoes.
Four years, three poetry group pals, several poetic email pals, some David St. John Workshops, a sabbatical project, and a summer of Joe taking extra childcare later, and I’m about to have a beautiful book.
The cover has a bird’s nest by Northwest Artist Nikki McClure, who makes Asian looking art from paper cut outs. And thanks to help from my friend Christine Linder, it has a red O in the title, a wink to parents who adopted from China, land of the red thread.
Readings in January
There will be three book readings in January, two of them accompanied by Bach singer, legal clerk, and beer and music blogger Lorin Wilkerson (this is a Renaissance man). We’re figuring out how to mix Bach with poetry about changing diapers on a plane.
Readings will be held at Mississippi Pizza* on January 16 (4-5—a fun kid’s event), at Chemeketa Community College on January 22 (11:30-12:20, with a children’s book drive: bring a used book!) and at The Press Club* on at 7:30 on January 26. (* indicates Lorin will play classical music. At Chemeketa, instead of Lorin, we'll have free classical pizza.) For reading reminders or to share stories, become a fan of The Long Birth on Facebook.
****
In our video, the world bobs because I bowed when the monk said to.
The golden Buddha, and sleeping child eyes closed,
hands curled against her new father’s broad arms. . .
–from "Temple Blessing"
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)