Dharma Bum

19

Note to Self..

learn to say "I don’t know"
learn to say "I can’t say" "I don’t remember"
learn to say nothing

train your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay mute

insist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history's winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life
- Urszula Koziol
To a Young Man
A Polish Lesson

Poetry Reading With Luisa Pena & Chris Davidson at the Huntington Beach Art Center

Please join us as the Huntington Beach Art Center hosts another poetry reading as part of the Late8 schedule. On Thursday March 22nd starting at 6:30 two outstanding poets, Luisa Pena and Chris Davidson will be reading. About the poets:

Luisa Peña is a second year MFA student in poetry at CSU Long Beach. Her poetry has appeared in multiple volumes of Spot Literary Magazine, and her obsessions include, but are not limited to, Borges, Early Medieval Britain, and David Foster Wallace. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her non-romantic life partner and three horrible cats.

Chris Davidson received his B.A. in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He directs the Biola composition program and the writing center, and he teaches courses in poetry writing and composition. His poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Caesura, Cimarron Review, CRATE, Dust Up, Orange Coast Review, and other journals. He is currently working on a manuscript of poems, title TK.

Please join us this Thursday!

I asked the river
About its destination
And came out lucky:
It babbled about nothing
And never came to a point
- Gyosen

How to live - someone asked me this in a letter,
someone I had wanted
to ask that very thing.

Again and as always,
and as seen above
there are no questions more urgent
than the naive ones.

—Wisława Szymborska

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
- Amy Gerstler
Advice from a Caterpillar

We return to everything strange..

But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.
- Stephen Dunn
from Essay On The Personal

25. XII. 1993
For a miracle, take one shepherd's sheepskin, throw
in a pinch of now, a grain of long ago,
and a handful of tomorrow. Add by eye
a little chunk of space, a piece of sky,

and it will happen. For miracles, gravitating
to earth, know just where people will be waiting,
and eagerly will find the right address
and tenant, even in a wilderness.

Or if you're leaving home, switch on a new
four-pointed star, then, as you say adieu,
to light a vacant world with steady blaze
and follow you forever with its gaze.
- Joseph Brodsky
Nativity Poems
five branch tree

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
                        plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
                        strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
                        in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don't drop it, Don't drop it, Don't drop it - ,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
                                            of a crazy song.
- Tony Hoagland
from How It Adds Up
What Narcissism Means to Me

"life on paper is so much more
pleasurable:
there are no bombs or flies or
landlords or starving
cats"

Charles Bukowski - The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hill

Poetry!

This Wednesday night was the second poetry reading I helped pull together for the Huntington Beach Art Center's Late8 series. Featuring David Hernandez and Ryan Ridge, the poetry was outstanding and we had another great turn out. Thanks to all that make these readings happen especially Darlene DeAngelo. I hope we can keep doing these events at the Center because it seems both the audiences and the poets are really enjoying the unique setting for a reading. Hope to see you all at a future reading. Some photos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry! Reading with David Hernandez & Ryan Ridge

It's that time again. Poetry at the HB Art Center. Please join us as the Huntington Beach Art Center hosts another poetry reading as part of the Late8 schedule. On Wednesday Nov. 9th starting at 6:30 two outstanding poets, David Hernandez and Ryan Ridge will be reading. About the poets:

David Hernandez is the recipient of a 2011 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. His recent collection, Hoodwinked, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and is now available from Sarabande Books. His other collections include Always Danger (SIU Press, 2006), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and Poetry Daily. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches at the University of California, Irvine and poetry workshops at California State University, Long Beach.

Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collection Hunters & Gamblers and the poetry collection Ox. In 2013, Mud Luscious Press will publish his novel(la) American Homes. He lives in Long Beach, California, and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.

Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.

Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.

What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.

- Thomas Merton

Holy. All Of It.

Poetry!

Tonight was the first ever Poetry reading at the HB Art Center. Several months back I was at an opening at the center, in conversation with the curator Darlene DeAngelo, when she mentioned that they were interested in different programming for their Late8 series. I selfishly suggested a poetry reading and told her I would pull it together,  she was all for it. Tonight it all came together and it went off wonderfully. We had two outstanding poets, Allison Benis White and Collier Nogues, and a very nice crowd for the first event. Many thanks to all who participated and all who came out to support, it was a great reading. Attached are some photos from tonight. I can't wait for the next one!

Allison Benis White & Collier Nogues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gift

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.
- Leonard Cohen

Poetry Reading!

  I'm excited to report that I will be hosting/facilitating my first poetry reading as part of the Huntington Beach Art Center's Late til 8 series this summer. The event is going to happen on August 11th starting at 6pm. I'm especially excited to report that two outstanding local poets, Allison Benis White and Collier Nogues, will be reading. Please mark your calendars, and spread the word. Now for a little introduction of the poets:

 

Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, and Ploughshares, and her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, Prairie Schooner’s Bernice Slote Award, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Her current manuscript, “Small Porcelain Head,” received the James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from the San Francisco Foundation, and was recently a finalist for the PSA’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. For more information, please visit www.allisonbeniswhite.com.

 

Collier Nogues's first book of poems, On the Other Side, Blue, was published this spring by Four Way Books. She has been a MacDowell Fellow and a Ucross Foundation Resident, and was recently the Fishtrap Writer-in-Residence for two years in Enterprise, Oregon. Her poems were a special feature of the Spring 2010 issue of Pleiades, and other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, Blackbird, and The Pinch, among other journals. She's a graduate of UC Irvine's MFA Program in Poetry, and now teaches in UCI's Composition Department. She lives in Long Beach with her husband.

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is -
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
- Rainer Maria Rilke