Archive
And this is how…
And this is how it was for a long time and she was your only sister until she climbed that ladder and stretched out across the night sky to sleep.
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Pyroclastic characterized by explosive gas, ash and pumice
Bastard Measure odd point size (9 pt.)
Lapidation the act of stoning
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Now the wine woman could change into any off-kilter or improbable thing or person she chose to with a simple ‘yip’ or by baring her teeth.
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No more ‘Chopsticks’ — now it was all Glenn Gould all the time.
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Sleeping under dirt blankets Sleeping under ice blankets
Sleeping under chalk blankets Sleeping under slate blankets
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Research Ellen Key, Swedish feminist Free Love proponent
wrote Love and Marriage 1912
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I speak. I talk. I crow. I sing.
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Sregolatezza intemperate immoderate debauchery disorder
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There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence.
George Steiner, ‘The Retreat from the Word’
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They ate shark meat, drank rain water from their blistered palms
and listened to high church music from an unknown hell. Raw wound
sound ‘submitsubmitsubmit’. So difficult to submit. Whose metaphors
are these? Whose ghosts pack the choir loft that stinks of myrrh?
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This vehicle has been checked for sleeping children.
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Art is what you have to do when it doesn’t have to be done.
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Rt. 28 Economics: Stimulus Sirloin Steak Dinner 7.95
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The tiny tufts of impatiens every six inches like cheap pink & white buttons
annoy in this half-assed spitting rain.
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Her name was Number. His name was Skin.
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Mordbrenner criminal gangs that roved central Europe
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people here will give you food / threatening might get results / money here / stay away, people want you to work
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Picasso: This target on my eye might bring heaven closer. In my soft little slippers and my stained, frayed shorts.
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Thin Spots Galore touched the clouds/sky/weather from her 30-foot perch, an aluminum ladder named Doug.
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Stirred up the milk of amnesia.
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Goodhue County, Minn. Research poetry barns outside Red Wing.
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Stenciled white paint Breathing in leaves ashes…drawing the harvest inside us
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She put pine needle in her vein. She dreamt tree’s dream.
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Straight lines in the landscape help the aviator.
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Notebooks are the quarries of artists.
Author’s note: I’ve still got a file drawer full of notebooks/journals & datebooks that go back to the late 70’s. I randomly grabbed a 1980 lab book and a pocket-sized notebook from 2008. Working quickly I skimmed lines and pulled bits from both books and dropped them straight into a single Word doc without noting either year.
Funny how little my interests and obsessions changed in that 28-year period.
Holly Anderson’s The Night She Slept With A Bear, published May 2012, is a collection of flash fictions and mesostics shipping with an original soundtrack CD written and played by Chris Brokaw from Publication Studio in Portland, Oregon. For more about Holly, see her page on the Mission of Burma website.
AKA Annie
So now
I take the car service way out there for what?
To THE Bronx? What is that anyway?
Some wrong turn a Dutchman took?
It’s all gone. None of it is
here: Fulton cobbles dipped in pewter, the shitting,
shrieking gulls
wearing their necklaces of fish guts and dawn-tinted tiaras.
This new joint looks like an airport.
The sweet sweet reek and bladderwrack all gone. All gone.
Some of those weisenheimers always called out ‘Nice rack, Annie’
my buoyant my
bouncing clouds of joy Oh!
how the boys enjoyed the chest that some god somewhere
gave me to share
joyfully with all the world. All gone.
A bit of luck for the really young ones now.
A floppy bit of rest for me old market boyos.
Game over.
Nothing left to sell.
Better to bundle these riddled bones and storied skin
mottled blue and tallow yellow, red bursts and pin dots. What the hell happened to the queenly scroll of vellum that men pored over, studied and adored?
so I just watch wonder
and wait now for warmth to find me again.
Tucked up in a tidy corner with some busted flat, waxed boxes underfoot
and a tower of clean crates at my back.
Dozing. Nothing left to sell.
I’m happy to sleep. When I sleep I can fly. Not so dramatic that
just me running hard
running full-out down a lake road sun-blistered and so
much hair where is that hair now?
The way it wagged like a tail like a curtain like water tumbling over rocks
my mouth laughing the panting he is chasing my fine frame wanting me again wanting to worship at my freckled altar
but I’m always running hard and then
and then I’m lifting off tanned legs bicycling over spruce tops far
far beneath the skittish clouds and I can read all the
alphabets of pine pitch birds bottle green and blue sky symbols.
Flying high where it’s clear and it’s cold as pack ice.
Where it’s polar. Where it’s quiet. It’s so quiet.
Maybe I’m a satellite.
‘AKA Annie’ was inspired by a New York Times article about Gloria Wasserman’s storied life dated Oct. 10, 2010
Some of Holly Anderson’s recent work can be heard on Peg Simone’s 2010 record Secrets From the Storm (Table of the Elements/Radium). Forthcoming in 2011: ‘The Night She Slept With A Bear,’ a collection of flash fictions and mesostics shipping with an original soundtrack by Chris Brokaw from Publication Studio in Portland OR.
Strays
So you know how a stray dog will dip its face into any dirty bit of puddle? Well, when Taller began doing the very same to Smaller people screamed real loud that they were out to swindle us somehow or bring the railing wrath upon us. Take your pick.
And didn’t we all think they looked suspicious and shifty, walking right up to our triple-strand razor-wired barrier with their swollen lips and sun-damaged eyes. No Identity card, no permanent address, not even vaccination or gender verification marks. No acceptable explanation for where they could have been. We’re looking to share something so valuable with all of you. Their wild eyes blinked slowly as we gathered in the center of our compound, unable to decide should we beat them straight up, or immediately banish them or be the audience they seemed to want. We were bored and the Pheedwagon was still hours away from arrival. They praised something out there in the murky blue beyond the furthest gate when we said we’d watch.
First we’ll lay down the golden ground said Smaller as she unfurled a moth infested length of yellow colored, old style fiber blanket. They paced it out in half-steps, then stood dead still and both of them went into a wheezing, winding story about a roaring comet of flying trash they’d been hit by out on some unnamed plain. They said they’d been plastered in torn or burnt pages and read many of the old words that had been eliminated by a series of court orders.
We’d sold off our names for credit vouchers long ago in the earliest days of The Curtailment but we had our assigned logos and we had the might. So then we roared in unison start it now as the swarms of black flies chewed us and left their trail of poisonous Braille across our faces and tattooed limbs.
It was right about then that Smaller took Taller into her arms and started rubbing against her in a shape like a wagging tail.
We looked hard at each other and some of us were falling to our knees, throwing our arms up high and begging forgiveness. Contact of any sort was routinely forbidden. Every one of us knew that.
After all the talking they pressed their mouths together tight. We heard some humming, then some moaning sounds. They stripped right down to their smallest, barest gestures even though the wind was scrubbing all of us raw. Taller made that Smaller shake real hard when she slipped one thin as a new moon hand between Smaller’s legs. It was then that the dogs started howling like they always do on days when the sun doesn’t come up and stay pasted tight right there in the sky.
By this time the very last of their strange words had stopped. There was a sound from somewhere we couldn’t see like that long drawn out sigh before a dust storm gathers itself up into a high, spinning mass. Our eyes lost their focus but our fists knew the way.
The dogs tore their filthy tongues out first. The dry ground was soon dimpled with dark spots like rain. It hasn’t rained here in memory.
But now green things grow where we laid them out.
Some of Holly Anderson’s most recent work can be heard on Peg Simone’s 2010 record Secrets From the Storm (Table of the Elements/Radium), or visit her at SmokeMusic.tv.
On Suzanne
(May 9, 1960 – October 5, 2009)
Frigid night, tramping through a grove of young birches, then — fairy tale you!
Vintage, grey curly-lamb coat — shrugging it off, rivers of hair undone.
You threw blazing light: blue comet flashing wild, pulled into your orbit.
We drank red wine until our lips cracked black telling stories through the night.
Yes, the hair was a carnival, a conniption that framed your fierce soul.
Winter day’s diner lunch where we toasted delicious men we’d enjoyed.
A Supernova Remnant releases heat inside the Milky Way.
So apt a definition of you and your hell-for-leather mission.
Mentor, muse to many, your own painted photos hung glowing — at home.
You heard music with your body, huge heart and wide-open awareness.
Your truest sister: Euterpe, muse of music, ‘Giver of Delight.’
We danced to 60’s Ethiopian bands under summer night sky.
How you loved bliss-state love, so ready for love to smack you once again.
SriPraPhai, your fave: too many Thai plates, laughs, bottles of Yellow Tail.
Radiation round, you ate three bowls of my chicken soup, hungry day.
In hospital you drew kohl round your eyes, then ate fresh-picked blueberries.
Six episodes of ‘Hung’ back-to-back, suburban dad is pretty hot.
The morning bath: long bones emerging from the garden of your body.
Lipstick, kohl crayon, multi-button japanese dress, warm scarf — car’s here.
Black car, grey rain — you said you love rigor, difficulty, hate jam bands.
Bottomless chocolate eyes, brows arched like a bird wing: brand new beauty.
I’ll paint my lips a rich, hard red again in your memory, darling.
Author’s note: Allen Ginsberg westernized the haiku (sometime in the early 90’s I believe) — he kept the same 17 syllable-count but set them out in a single sentence. He called them ‘American Sentences.’ I’ve written these about a fiercely vibrant friend just lost to lung cancer, and despite the ravages of the disease and the nuclear fallout from western medical protocols, Suzanne retained her essential, flame-lit core to the very end. That is, to me, a form of health that cannot be taken from someone no matter how vicious the attacks.
Holly Anderson’s poetry and prose has been anthologized in Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press), The Unbearables (Autonomedia), and First Person Intense (Mudborn Press). Her limited edition books Lily Lou (Purgatory Pie Press) and Sheherezade (Pyramid Atlantic) are in library collections including MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Anderson’s lyrics can be heard on Consonant (s/t), Love and Affliction (Fenwayrecordings) Mission of Burma’s VS, OnoffOn (Matador), Jonathan Kane’s Jet Ear Party (Table of the Elements/Radium), and various other albums.
The Slovenian Grandmother To Her Daughter The Platinum-Haired Dervish Just Before A Chunk of Stove Wood Was Hurled But Missed Its Blue-Eyed Mark Widely
YOU EAT MY HEART
YOU DRINK MY BLOOD
Click the above link to see more of Anderson’s work and read her bio.
Personnage
14 August 1971 (Picasso is painting)
I lay the yolk-y yellow ground down
now here goes my triangulated body
here is my flesh-colored jock strap
my flesh-colored wings ready for take-off.
It’s hot as blisters and look how the sweat
still runs off me like a young man.
My balls hang heavy and damp.
My dark-veined stones.
Still here. Still have it. It’s all in here.
I’m bringing it out bringing it forth.
I can do this. I can always do this.
The paint still listens.
I talk to the colors and they come —
from the fields this yellow mustard
from fields seen from a train trundling south
then blue canvas awning stripes
sandy Torremolinos days with mother
green seedlings black taxis in the Paris rain. Drunk
and taking Fernande home to finally touch her secrets.
Finger her notch her crook tongue her cleft
heft her high and bury my self.
Now I have wings.
Flesh now yes it’s always been flesh to flesh
and light shifting shapes changing course
of course I’ve followed the light all my life
and strung the string of shapes that tell the stories.
All the stories I’ve lived them all.
89 and the line still excites still makes me hard
the kernel of sex was and is and will always be there
as it should be as it must be forever and ever
so help me god.
So help me work these hands wash in pigment
wash in rapture.
The seed is there
the bursting is still there.
The bursting remains.
Holly Anderson’s poetry and prose has been anthologized in Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press), The Unbearables (Autonomedia), and First Person Intense (Mudborn Press). Her limited edition books Lily Lou (Purgatory Pie Press) and Sheherezade (Pyramid Atlantic) are in library collections including MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Anderson’s lyrics can be heard on Consonant (s/t), Love and Affliction (Fenwayrecordings) Mission of Burma’s VS, OnoffOn (Matador), Jonathan Kane’s Jet Ear Party (Table of the Elements/Radium), and various other albums.
Our Rowdy Pack Song
a hay(na)ku*
dented
moon, wheeling
just like me.
synaptic trash
caught sweet
in blue-violet mercies
roaring,
glory-headed girl,
smashed diamond skies
tilt,
tilt a-whirl,
twist and all-fall-down.
dry
river coursing
bloodstream’s ancient dreams
sashay
into beatitude
unravelling like me,
glistering
somersault into
infinity’s unformed matter
—is
that fire-
eating the open door?
or
peat-y fingers
down my throat?
i’m-a-ring-’round-rosie-girl,
a hot-blue-star
unhitched and free-wheeling
one-of-seven-sisters,
a pleiade,
bartering my soul.
unbolt
this cage
of inkblue heaven
drown
my mercies,
fill my mouth,
cast-me
deep beyond
the oh-so-watchful stars,
deepsky,
non-stellar objects
wheeling lopsided within.
by Holly Anderson and Caroline Beasley-Baker
Download the MP3
__________
*Hay(na)ku is a 21st century verse form invented by poet and publisher Eileen Tabios, who launched the first Hay(na)ku challenge to the world at large via the web on June 12, 2003 (Philippine Independence Day). The “traditional” form of a hay(na)ku entails:
- A tercet: 3 lines.
- A total of 6 words: 1 in the first line, 2 in the second line, and 3 in the third line.
- There is no restriction on syllables, stresses, or rhymes.
Then, in 2007, Tabios issued an online invitation to poets to join in groups of three or more to create “chain” hay(na)ku with each tercet moving between voices as in a conversation or a traditional “parts” song. “Our Rowdy Pack Song” is a poetic duet that loosely interprets the form.
Similarities
The fetchingly lithe and charmingly disheveled Ms. Tetley-Pringle was well into the third hour of her daily asanas when truth called down to her like a thunderclap:
A clock has a floor and a ceiling and four walls. A clock also has a window. Some, but not all, clocks have doors.
A telephone, not unlike a clock, has four walls, a floor and a ceiling. All telephones also have doors. Some, but not all, telephones have windows.
She forgot her 13th or 14th Downward Facing Dog of the day and hit the sticky mat belly first. In considerable pain she considered her prosthetic limb. She preferred the old-fashioned wooden sort to the lighter and infinitely more wieldy synthetic variety, believing this choice gave her practice a better chance of finally attaining true liberation.
Ms. Tetley-Pringle tried again to empty her mind but found herself considering the startling similarities among disparate objects such as prosthetic limbs, bowls of breakfast cereal, and the books of the Old Testament. She now understood with utter clarity that all have four walls, windows, a floor and a ceiling. Each also has a door. And one day one of these doors will open into a post office and a young man with snow on his shoulders will rush up to a clerk, with an urgency he never knew he was capable of and shout, “My grandmother has broken her hip. You must go to her at once!”
by Peter Cherches and Holly Anderson
For process notes, see “Found Photo.”
Found Photo
When you live with something long enough I guess you get used to the odor and then it’s no odor at all, it’s part of the room, maybe it’s just a dead mouse behind the wall and there’s nothing to be done unless you want to take a hammer to the wall one hot, grey afternoon when it feels like ants are crawling up and down your legs, getting right into your underpants.
So here we are, all dressed up and left all alone in the shaking woods. Why did they leave us out here like this, all alone? Drive away in that brand new automobile we helped them to buy? Sure, Pop’s lost a bit of his left leg, the diabetes chewed his foot right up to the shinbone, but that’s no reason to throw us out here without so much as a drink of water. A smell, sure, but not a stink. And weren’t they the ones always pushing sugary things at him anyway? He never was one to say no.
When you live with something long enough it’s really no odor at all.
We knew it had to come off when even the dogs wouldn’t go near him.
Thinking helps to pass the time.
He never did talk much, and it’s especially hard to be sitting here on a bench in the absolute dead center of nowhere with a one and a half-legged man who won’t say a word. Thank the Lord they didn’t drive off with the crutches.
When you live with something long enough I guess you get used to it.
So here we are, left alone in the woods by our own children, and not a soul to help us, and not a drop to drink. My mouth must look like a flattened mattress by now. Or an old and faded photograph.
It’s all part of life, I guess. You bring them into this world, you do your best to make a life for them, and then they have to up and leave you one day, go off on their own. I just never thought it would be like this! It’s like there’s a dead mouse behind the wall and there’s nothing to be done unless you want to take a hammer to the wall one hot, grey afternoon when it feels like ants are crawling up and down your legs, getting right into your underpants, out in the woods, all alone, thinking to pass the time, sitting on a bench with a one and a half-legged man who won’t say a word.
An old and faded photograph has an odor, but not a stench.
by Peter Cherches and Holly Anderson
Process notes
They had collaborated once before, about eighteen years earlier, but the piece they wrote then was published for the first time only recently. That publication led to an invitation to submit to the present collection. They agreed that it would be nice to work together again, and they started tossing ideas back and forth via email. Time constraints wouldn’t allow the two of them to get together in a room and compose a piece from scratch through give and take, as they had done before. They’d have to work differently this time. One of them suggested that they each write independent sections of a prose piece, or intertwined sentences, with different typefaces to differentiate the two voices (though they would not identify which typeface matched which contributor). The other wasn’t happy with that idea, didn’t want the individual contributions to be so clearly delineated. This one suggested a process whereby each would submit a piece to the other, a piece the first writer felt was unfinished, perhaps, or just not up to snuff, and the second would work with it: edit it, change it, complete it, rewrite it, whatever seemed appropriate, whatever seemed in order. The version completed by the second writer would be the final version. The writer who started the piece would have no veto power and no rights to further edit or rework it. The writer who suggested this method saw this as an exercise in trust. Two writers with different but compatible voices and visions would have their way with each other’s pieces. They would not reveal which of them started which piece. The other writer was skeptical at first, felt that their individual voices would be flattened or neutralized by the process. But the writer who suggested this method didn’t see it that way at all. This writer believed that the process could unleash a compelling third (or third and fourth) voice, a product of the two. The other ultimately agreed to this approach. The two writers submitted old, long-abandoned (or shunted aside) pieces to each other, and they went to work. Two pieces, by two writers. (Look for the second piece to appear later in this issue. —Eds.)
qarrtsiluni 