SIDESTEPPING REAL

About ProtestPoems.org

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:52:00 +0000

Here is my little spiel (at least what I intended to say) from a radio interview next to no one heard:

When I read about Saw Wei (Wai) in a PEN RAN alert, I remembered that it wasn't that long ago that a blog group of amateur writers were talking about acrostic poems. I thought it might be an idea to ask people to write acrostic poems for a good cause and that I could mail them to the authorities – in the same way that PEN and Amnesty protest.

I thought all this for about 5 seconds and then requested poems through the Babel Fruit facebook group and some poetry listservs. Then I panicked. I figured I would be swamped with a hundred poems over the weekend.

I was certain people would do this again and again, so I set up the protestpoems.org site. I thought that posting the poems online might also motivate unpublished poets to take part. I wanted to keep the collections of amateur and professional writing on individual topics separate from the human rights journal.

I imagined a year's work of protest poems collected in chapbooks and distributed free at festivals and conferences.

What happened with Saw Wei was that I received lots of notes from people telling me what a great idea it was. And then I received fourteen poems. Most of them by established poets I know. I was very disappointed.

Amateur writers on the net have communities that do regular writing prompts and I want to engage them in writing projects that may make a difference. Even if the collections that are mailed make no difference at all, it may open people’s eyes to what we take for granted, and that makes a difference.

In many countries PEN is a organization that is, in part, about prestige: who is good enough to actively be involved with protests. I think it’s easy to write your name on a petition. I also think it is easy to forget the next day what you signed. Just sitting down to think, “Tibetan songwriter imprisoned: what is there to write about?” takes effort and engagement. You don’t forget the next day.

It should be about the grassroots. When freedom of speech is taken away, it’s felt at the grassroots. Just look at the importance bloggers make in the world today. And how many of them have become targets of oppressive governments.

I’ve gotten some emails from people who say they are uncomfortable meddling with the politics of other countries. I tell them that this is only a matter of free speech, not endorsing anyone’s political views. It is basically a reminder: “Let them talk”. Even if you’re only letting them talk so you can laugh at them later, or giving fools a megaphone so they can prove what fools they are.

What saddened me was that I found out a month ago that another literary journal asked for acrostic poems, inspired by Saw Wei, to make an online chapbook (not as a protest, but as a tribute). Of course, I think that is wonderful. But I was surprised that they had many more submissions than protestpoems.org had contributions, although we’d placed calls for poems in the same venues.

I’ve withheld public presentation of the work at the request of the writer, if it is to be used elsewhere or if it is just downright embarrassing. Protestpoems.org isn’t about prestige at all.

It is just a more engaging way to sign a petition.

A more annoying way to clutter a mailbox!

I can’t help but wonder why people really write political poetry. Who they write it for. I have actually had amateur poets email me with urls, telling me I can look around to see if I can find anything useful for "my project". I am not promoting writers. I actually get very upset when this happens. Not really by the arrogance, but by the naivety, the irresponsibility and lack of awareness. I hope no one would ever give anyone carte blanche with their words for a political cause.

Having said that, I do have friends, professional writers, who have sent me a previously published poem they thought was right for the protest.

There are over 90 people on protestpoems.org’s mailing list. And I think that nearly all of them must believe that someone else is taking care of it this time around. I think they're sure that if they “sit this one out” someone else will have taken part.

The truth is - no one is there to pick up the slack.

protestpoems.org

Remember, there's no requirement for online publication. Your words can be a secret between you, me and the diplomats and presidents we are out to piss-off.

*

And soon back to my self-deprecating self. Yeah, right.

It Looks Like It

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:03:00 +0000

I guess I am on hiatus. Unexpected and unintentional.
I am finishing my book and sleeping. A lot.
No one ever told me that all the shit would hit the fan all at once.

Whoever said life starts at forty didn't have teenagers or bunions.

Because there are other scary things we can make fun of easily

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Amnesty

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:20:00 +0000

"June" by Shi Tao

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:07:00 +0000

Yahoo Complicit in Shi Tao's 2005 arrest. He is serving a 10-year sentence for sending an email to a pro-democratic site: Asia Democracy Foundation.

However, his poem "June" is traveling as a PEN torch passing through one translation to another to spotlight the Chinese government's abuse of Human Rights.

"June" Shin Tao PEN Human Rights China Olympics

More Honest than Therapy

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:14:00 +0000

The commentators on CNN were talking about how boring the newest musical on the West End is. Then guaranteed something not boring: the golf headlines.

So I switched channels and snagged onto a French film somewhere near the beginning. One of those films that the French do so well: the kind that makes you question your own basic “goodness”. Not in an abstract kind of way. Not the kind of films that give you an excuse to stay up until 4 am discussing existentialism with Adonis from your Tuesday-Thursday philosophy class. And not the kind of film that poses moral questions that you can ponder while doing the laundry.

This was movie-as-virus. The kind that seeps through your semi-permeable membranes and makes you wonder if the nightmare on screen is really on screen, or if some Innocent image you’ve encountered has turned dangerous only by replicating what is already in you.

And you’re afraid to turn to your companion and ask if they see what you see. In part because you fear they will say no and realize you are lolling about in that black hole everyone else has sealed up with their millions of years of evolution. Your companion will whisper into all your friends’ ears and no one will sit with you at lunch.

And in part because they might nod and you will both race to change the channel and try not to look each other square in the face until the baseness has been flushed out with repeated episodes of “Touched by an Angel”. Which will take a long time because you will start drawing parallels based on immature word play.

And it is about this point where you want to walk to the nearest police department or asylum (whichever is closer) and turn yourself in. After you’ve finished watching the movie.

When I say you, I obviously mean me—so relax.

All right, I admit I sat through the movie. No one else was home.

It wasn’t fantastic. Sometimes the symbolism was as subtle as rockets taking off, as fountains shooting into the air (which, really, seriously was the last scene of the film). I kept telling myself that this is way to obvious to be art.

Not that that was comforting—telling myself I wasn’t watching a dirty film. On the contrary. I must want to see the symbolism. All these images that are making me so uncomfortable: should I be watching this? Is it naughty? Is it far worse than naughty? Is it really Innocent (are you getting by now this is the title of the film?) and I am a warped, deeply disturbed human being?

Somewhere near the end of the film I stopped worrying about all that. I don’t know what the director intended. I have no idea what other people carry away with them after watching this film. But by the end of the film I stopped watching through the eyes of who I know I am supposed to be. I stopped trying to guess what a pedophile would see.

I watched through the eyes of my nine year-old self. I recognized the ambivalent feelings I had then. Not knowing whether to curl up with a cup of cocoa or vomit. It is probably not a coincidence that I sit here sucking on peppermint candy, wondering if the milk I poured on my cereal hadn’t been just a little off.

Starting to wonder why, in elementary school, no one would ever sit with me at lunch.

I take all that back. I am just going to say that I really didn’t watch that movie. I am a good girl.

Innocent French Films Therapy Morality

His Prerogative

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:06:00 +0000

I am supposed to be doing something else. I am always supposed to be doing something else. One day I will give up on doing something else altogether.

I am not going to write about politics. I choose who I spar with. People I respect (but whose synapses route differently than mine) and people who don’t resort to name-calling and hyperbole. Which means, of course, I don’t spar with the candidates. I just throw pillows in my living room. And at my husband. Sometimes at my teenager.

Today I did it. I through a pillow at my kid’s head in what he saw as a completely unprovoked attack.

But, you see, once again it has come up in the local political debate (and by local in Norway, I mean national): should teenagers be allowed to vote? This first time I heard this I thought it was a joke. Then I hoped it was a joke.

This morning I saw the proposal in the paper again and threw a white bolster at his head. He was eating at the time, so now my bolster is flecked with butter stains and smells a bit like cinnamon.

I kind of like cinnamon, so that’s okay. And he managed to get most of the butter out of his nose. The rest will lubricate his brain for algebra. So that’s okay, too.

In Norway kids can’t get a drivers license until they are eighteen. Can’t drink whiskey until they are twenty-one. But they must be responsible enough to make decisions regarding the political policies of a nation.

I am not saying teenagers aren’t interested in politics. Most of the students I taught were. But most of them still thought that lions could lie down with lambs, if only they had a good mediator. (And this isn’t a shot at the Oslo accords. Really. Seriously. At the risk of “the lady doth protest . . .”)

I have always wondered about my own right to vote. I voted before I learned that I could hate a person for their ideology. Before I knew what my own ideology was.

I question whether I was able to make the right choices that would affect the mortality of people who were celluloid images taken from places I had never even read about except in the Herald Tribune. When I hadn’t a grasp on my own mortality.

With every little creping, patch of skin I become more aware of the fact that I will die. That other people die, if not suddenly, then little by little. Demanding care.

I hope my son gets a good job.

I guess I should stop throwing pillows at him.

He may vote to take my voting rights away when I am no longer able to run a mile. Or tolerate listening to My Prerogative for the thirty-second time in a row.

I didn’t really want to talk about growing old, but I began this by saying I wouldn’t talk about politics.

voting teen voting aging Britney Spears generations

Hoopla Worthy?

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:45:00 +0000

I am waiting for the FedEx gal to ring the doorbell. Our doorbell doesn’t work, so I am relying on the fact that my dog (at the moment sleeping with her back against the front door), will be startled by the vibrations on the stoop and bark.

FedEx is bringing me baseball tickets. Not just any baseball tickets, but six tickets to the Yankee vs. Red Sox game this July.

That’s a big deal, right?

I wouldn’t know really. When I lived in the States, I didn’t watch baseball. I vaguely remember my grandfather taking me to Angels’ games. I think that was in the days before foam fingers.

I don’t think that those games traumatized me, so I am actually pretty certain that was before huge foam fingers.

And when I think about it, maybe he only took me to one game. (When I look back on my childhood I very often “used to” do things.) But Grandpa wasn’t the kind of guy to have season tickets.

I did get a cap.

Or I used to get caps. At least I know I used to eat hot dogs. And Cracker Jacks. Which were disgusting, but with that prize and all the trouble the packagers had to go through to squeeze it between that sticky stuff, I felt obliged to say yes thank you.

But, you know, I am going to force my kids to try it. It is a part of the American Experience. Even the gagging.

When I lived in Texas, I didn’t wear cowboy boots or listen to country music. Here I love my boots. In fact, it has taken me fourteen years to understand that wearing them when the streets are covered with ice just isn’t safe.

And I bought tickets to the Grand Ole Opry. It isn’t because I am crazy about country music now. And it isn’t really nostalgia. It’s a compulsion to experience Americana in a way I would never have thought to had I lived there still.

Last summer we drove through 15 states and our horseback ride through Bryce Canyon was as powerful of an experience as walking around the pyramids. And certainly more relaxing, since no one in a turban was yanking on my shawl to get me to stand on a rock to get a view of – I never figured out what – and expect me to pay him rent for standing on “his” rock. And there were men with machine guns patrolling the bus. One guy seemed to take an odd interest in my son’s ear. Like he thought my son had shoved a bag of cocaine in there.

Of Course, we did see machine guns in New York. In 2002, I was asking the police about the barricades on Wall Street just when the lights went out. We’d come from Ground Zero, and we watched the high rises empty. And we all walked the length of Manhattan in a wave of smiling, chatting people. Okay, not all. Some were jerks, others were concerned about picking up their kids from school on time. But we heard later that not a single gunshot went off.

I always thought New York was cool. But that night, I fell in love with NY. (And NO, I didn’t buy an I (heart) NY tee shirt - it's not just a crush, for goodness sake.)

So: a good ol’ Southern Yah hoo, and Hip Hurrah for the home team. If nothing else, my ambivalent kids will be force-fed an Americana vocabulary.

As for my nephews, I don’t know what they really think about the Yankee’s game.

You can’t really judge the sincerity of a hoopla over MSN.

Everything I know about baseball, I have learned through Friends. And it never seemed to be part of a major plot line. And Friends was set in New York. . .

Oh no! I knew I should have gone for an Orioles game!

(Did you notice I said “gal”?)

New York Yankees New York Expatriate Americana Grand Ole Opry Egypt tourist

Why I Haven't Blogged Lately

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:45:00 +0000

The spring issue of Babel Fruit: Writing under the influence is online now.

www.babelfruit.org

This issue boasts poetry by Sankar Roy, winner of the PEN USA Emerging Voices Award; a translation by Claire Keyes, which introduces many of us to the Cuban writer Gertrudis Gomez de Avallaneda; rough poetry fragments by the well-known Iranian writer Mansour Koushan; and more.

The number of submissions that find the other in unexpected places has excited us.

We received many poems about illness - the other that invades us. Barbara Benoit’s “Commonplace Desire” shows us the other that is formed by the other.

We are privy to moments of truths so raw they uncover the other within - as in Tim Mayo’s poem “You”.

Velbekommen. We hope you will enjoy Volume 3, Issue 2.

*

We invite submissions – especially exile/expat writing and sound files.

Of course with a tag like “writing under the influence” we expected a lot of submissions about drugs. What surprised me was the number of poems and stories about people taking drugs. Observations about people simply “under the influence”, rather than experiences that lead to real change.

It has become important for us to strictly define exactly where “writing under the influence of the other” tips into a passive - however impassioned - narration of the other. Please read the journal and the writers’ guidelines before sending us your work.

Thank you!

Half-Naked Superheroes or How I Want to Die

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:37:00 +0000

My youngest son is a swimming superhero.

One afternoon his skinny, little self showed up in the living room in his underwear and a blue beach towel strapped onto his shoulders with a criss-crossing belt.

Oh- and swimming goggles.

He stood there with his arms out to the sides- looking rather like a fledgling batman in a Marvel Comic book.

I took a picture. It is my favorite picture in the whole world. (All right. For those of you who hate hyperbole: my whole world.)

I want to frame this picture. I want to have it tattooed on my forearm, so that every time I lift it to my brow in melodramatic woe, I will collapse in giggles like an insane old woman in a fruit-trimmed straw hat.

For now, it is tucked in a folder in iPhoto, and on two external hard drives. Until I have his signed release form.

God knows that when I am one hundred three and wheezing on my deathbed, my youngest will be busy saving tuna damsels in the English Channel. And he’ll have left his mobile phone tucked into one of his shoes on the pier.

So my oldest son will tape a copy of the photo to the ceiling and hold my hand tightly. With his free hand he will be sketching my death mask – no doubt strapped ironically to the head of a long-legged, balloon-bosomed Laura Croft figure.

In a fruit-trimmed straw hat.

And I'll collapse in giggles.

superheroes children family photos

Hegelian Meltdown II

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:09:00 +0000

If it can't be explained in layman's terms, and isn't going to take a man/woman to the moon, or kill germs, it is nothing more than mental hopscotch.

I hereby disavow words of more than four syllables.

And words like disavow.

(I have to go look up disavow now to make sure I've used it correctly.)

Awakening Nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:12:00 +0000

This morning I was moaning a bit. Faced with the self-assigned task of writing nasibs, I thought I would have to pack it in. And with my flair for drama, I figured I would then need to pack it all in- the whole doctorate stuff.

The nasib is about nostalgia. Forget the complicated meter and rhyme and stuff about camel humps. I have seen camel humps. I have actually touched them (though I can’t for the life of me figure out what Arab poets find appealing about them). I figured I could put the whole thing in past tense and end each line with –ed. It will sort of rhyme. And meter? Yeah. I have written lousy meter before. I could just tell myself that the long and short vowels and all that make it unattainable anyway.

The problem is nostalgia.

I have none.

I looked it up in the dictionary. Which is what I always do when I have nothing banging on my temporal lobe to have its say.

A desire to return to a former time in one’s life.

Nope. Nothing.

I have a feeling that when most people say they have never been happier, they can’t possibly mean it. They are nostalgic when it comes to Christmases and BBQs. After all, these same people are the ones who reminisce about high school or college.

I wondered if I am nostalgic about the first time I was a mother. I will admit that, there in the hospital, I was as close to nirvana as I have ever been. But then, I have never been a big user of recreational drugs.

Of course those years were amazing. But it is still amazing and I am no longer responsible for anyone else’s digestive systems. When I look at the photos of when each of the boys was small, I can feel something now that I didn’t when I took them after 4 hours of sleep.

As happy as I am to have experienced that time. I don’t want to return.

So the other thing I do when nothing is banging on my temporal lobe is make coffee.

I must have left NPR on the radio this morning. Because when I walked into the kitchen I was knocked off-center by a horrid, nasal siren. Then it kind of settled in my ear.

I decided I might just wait for the coffee to drain through the paper funnel before I went back upstairs. It has been a long time since I listed to Bluegrass music.

I think this is where people usually say, “It brought back memories”. It didn’t. It brought back a single memory.

Someone wrote me a song once. And he sang it to me. Played it on the banjo in my dorm room. The room with the cold, cinderblock walls.

I haven’t thought of that in years.

And it hurts now. Not because of what came after that single memory, but because the bluntness of overwhelming emotion is concentrated, sharpened in a specific point in my brain. Aimed at a junction of synapses that was formed and then hidden all this while.

In Arab literature one over-the-top simile/metaphor flows into another until the point of departure is disassociated from the present. So I am pierced and flooded with the same dull wash of emotions welled there then, now-as then-too fluid to be named.

I am pretty sure this sharp pain is the same I felt then. I just interpret them differently, being present in no center of real experience.

I don’t desire to return to that hour. Feeling the cold cinderblock through my t-shirt as I leaned against the wall, not even aware of what this song would mean. Not knowing I would be glad he never sang it to me again. That he didn’t take this moment’s uniqueness from me. Then or now.

So. This flooding of indistinguishable emotions. Is this nostalgia?
If so, then nostalgia is an experience, not a desire.

And if my definition trumps Webster’s definition, how the hell am I going to fit a banjo into a formal Arab poem?

Rising

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:43:00 +0000

I don’t know how many poems I have written about my body “rising like bread”, thinking maybe this poem will work and it will be sexy instead of silly.

And every time I think I’ve got it, I think someone else must have already written it.

And then I start to think that it really isn’t sexy.

I mean, the rising is good. But then, when you lift the damp towel, there isn’t a whole lot of tension there. Just a half-hearted poof when your fingers dig in. And everything is covered with flour.

“Oh then
I stood up in my gold skin
and I beat down the psalms
and I beat down the clothes. . .

and we rose up like wheat,
acre after acre of gold,
and we harvested,
we harvested .”

(Us, Anne Sexton)

Anne Sexton was a grown-up. I think I am afraid I am going to skip from mentally adolescent to dead. Sexton’s rushed her death, but she did manage maturity. Or at least wrote as though she had.

There is an area of the country called Lofoten. The mountains there are sharp and the landscape more fairy-tale like than I have ever seen. The first time I was there we walked from the dunes to the beach in the pink light. The sun was floating down and there was a haze like gauze or cotton candy.

I thought I was getting sick from all the sweetness.

But that was the Jegermeister.

The sun was just about to touch down and we waded into the water, thinking it was cool to walk in the "golden path”. Actually it was just cold.

Then the sun bounced.

It was the first sunrise I had ever seen. Barefoot in the cold water. Beer in my hand. A sunrise that didn’t follow darkness. Someone asked if they could kiss me.

And there is no way in hell I am going to tell you what wading in the wake of the midnight sun has to do with maturity or rising bread.

NEW CALL FOR POEMS! WRITING WITH A PURPOSE!
It's not about politics, it is in spite of them.

The Uselessness of Magical Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:52:00 +0000

Sometimes I feel like an idiot. Like I'm standing at Speakers Corner in a tinfoil hat and shouting while people walk by. And across the street is a cop. Slapping a baton in his hand again and again with a grin on his face. Thank God the smug &##$%!! always dissolves into fog. It being London and all.

I think of London because it is too painful to think it would happen in my homeland. And because in my homeland cops don't carry batons.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

This isn’t the first time I have posted this poem, I am sure. And it won’t be the last.

Today I was searching for an update on the situation with the poet Saw Wei (Wai) who was imprisoned in early February for writing an acrostic poem that criticized the Burmese General Than Shwe.

I found more than one blog mentioning his imprisonment, bemoaning (I know that is a melodramatic word and I use it intentionally) the lack of free speech in other countries.

“It could happen here.” “I wish I could make the world better.”

The thing is, yes, it could. The thing is—is that when it will matter to us? When it happens here? Sort of like global warming and VAD?

I can't save the world. My neighbor can't, either. Though on days I think she could. My neighbor is really amazing. Her garden has daffodils and everything.

If we think that our voice isn’t meaningful, that someone else will step up, and that person will be the person to be “enough”—“that person” is likely to think the same of us.

Saw Wei is still in prison*.

Petitions don’t always work. Petitions rarely work.

But now and then one does. One individual is freed. One individual with a family, with a community, and with hope (another melodramatic word, but I use it intentionally).

When people protest loudly and persistently against the infringements of human rights, it embarrasses governments, shames individuals.

This isn’t about politics. It is about human dignity and human rights despite politics.

It is tapping someone on the back and saying, “I see what you are doing and it’s wrong”.

You don’t even have to say, “you $?&##!!”.

But you can if you want. We have freedom of speech. And most of us are roaming around somewhere where that is protected.

If it were someone you knew and loved in prison for writing a poem, for standing up to tell a joke, would it be worth fifteen minutes to write a note to complain?

I usually write notes in verse and wearing a tinfoil hat. If you read this far, maybe you would like to join me? I usually fold the foil into a tricorne hat and sing a little song before I start.

My Hat Has Three Corners

My hat it has three corners,
Three corners has my hat,
If it had not three corners,
It would not be my hat.

Oh! I have eye-patches, too! Arrr-hoi!

www.protestpoems.org

*If anyone has more information about Saw Wei(Wai), please pass it on.

Activism Give A Damn Campaign sam wai protest poems protestpoems.org

The Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:01:00 +0000

As an undergrad I took a course called Technology and Human Values. We were asked to design an experiment involving technology and human social behavior. As an example the instructor told us about a former student’s experiment. For a week, this student carried a tape recorder (okay- don’t laugh, you knew how old I was already) and wore a sign on his chest that said, “I am recording everything you say”.

No one spoke to him. I expect he must have learned a lot of body language during that week.

When I was nineteen I had a hypothesis to explain this. I thought it was about being caught in a lie, or words being taken out of context at a later date that would make it appear as though you had lied.

Who knows, maybe you really had lied and just didn’t know it.

Maybe you can’t remember if you confessed to shooting Kennedy and forgot to laugh a little when you said it.

Maybe he’ll cut the laughing out when he “doctors the tape”.

Maybe you declared your love for your philosophy professor.

Maybe you split an infinitive.

I thought allowing myself to be recorded, would be like walking right up to the omniscient, or at least facing a direct representation of the All-Knowing, in front of whom I would stand in judgment, and smugly present evidence that will be used against me.

This lanky kid with a sign around his neck was God’s CIA. Or might be.

When I was nineteen it was about being a good girl. Not making mistakes. (It was probably a bit about paranoia as well.)

Today, I would like to do the experiment now myself. I would like to go downtown and ask people I know well, “How y’ doin’?” I would ask people who normally tell me about their athletes’ foot. Would they say, “I’m fine.”? Would they simply nod? Would they pick up their beer and coaster and move to the other end of the bar? Pick up their cappuccino and biscotti and sashay to the table for one?

If I promised to eat the tape five-minutes later—in front of their eyes, would they speak? Honestly?

Would you?

Would I? What if they asked me about my problem with cellulite? About my last rejection letter?

What if they are already recording me? What if there is a hidden microphone under the table? What if it is not my friends, but the government? The five-year-old kid next door who squints at me every time I walk by?

Oh! What if she is the government?!

What’s this all about? I am a good girl!

Oh, God. Did I declare my love for my philosophy professor?

technology human values paranoia college experiments sunday scribblings

Wet-Dog-Shaken Smell

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:36:00 +0000

Today I went outside. It has been so long since I’ve been outside that I was certain I’d find flying cars and people walking to the teleportation booth on the corner.

Apparently it hasn’t been that long.

The only reason I went outside was to call my dog into the house. She was barking madly at the postman, even after he had driven away in a very ordinary car. But on the way across the lawn, she smelled something in the grass. And she rolled in it.

She rolled in it again, then pressed her neck into the grass like she was trying to shove the earth into its core. Although that didn’t work, she trotted proudly over to me.

I have heard that wolves roll in the poo of other animals, so prey won’t smell the wolves sneaking up to pounce on them. My flowerbed—what’s left of my flowerbed—is hardly sporting beaver or fox poo (I would say shit, but some people get offended). And I would be very surprised and extremely concerned if the mailman had squatted there this morning.

I have tried to reason with her before: explaining that, no matter what she smells like, the blue/white glow-in-the dark, fur collar of her coat will tip the cats off. And the mailman.

My dog is a good dog. But she’s not good at reasoning.

So I sent her to the bathtub. Which is worse then being sent to the corner. She is a border collie mix, but there is no brown anywhere on her. Normally. It took me a while to get it off. Then she shook the wet-dog shake, and I got stuck with the wet-dog-shaken smell on me.

So, my turn in the bathtub (I should mention I have used quite a bit of chlorine since the dog entered my life). Clean clothes, desktop cleared (all right, I lie a little) and ready for work.

I hear my son come in the front door. The dog bounds up the stairs and hides under my desk. When I lean back, she jumps into my lap trembling. Trembling is an understatement.

I know immediately what the problem is. My son has the hiccups. New Years Eve rockets and fireworks are no problem. But when one of us has the hiccups she runs for cover. When I hiccup it can take us weeks to find her in the attic. Then she approaches us carefully, looking for the slightest sign of demonic possession.

The point is: I smell like wet dog again.

This photo was taken on a day I actually liked my dog.

dogs hiccups mailmen teletransporters

(WI) Gather Ye Rosebuds Whilst Ye May

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:41:00 +0000

When I was six, my mother converted from Quaker to toker. And the Lord left her house quietly.

And I spent Sunday afternoons outside in the dry heat, watching ants crawl in and out of the cracks in the sidewalk. Thinking how lucky I was not to be an ant crawling in and out of the sidewalk.

Looking just like everyone else, with no angel on my shoulder, just one of a line of fifty or sixty ants crushed by my stepfather’s sole.

Even when he didn’t mean to;
when he just didn’t watch where he was going.

When I was eleven, sitting on my mother’s couch watching the news – the earthquake in China crushed 20,000 without meaning to. And the rest of us kept moving on.

Angels, no angels. Like ants drawn to sugar.

Like the speaker in Elisabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”, this was my moment of understanding.

Angels, no angels, the world is unpredicted: though nothing is a matter of supernatural whim. I move within a limited room with nothing but my head on my shoulders.

There is no use in moving against/despite fear. Or with gratitude/permission. I would never tell my six your old self that she is an ant. She will find that out on her own. Seeking sugar. And it will be wonderful.

empowerment
agnosticism existentialism prose poem writers island

Snow Suits and Black Holes

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Last night my kid had a kid over to spend the night. They watched a Disney Movie they had been waiting two weeks to see, while my husband and I sat feeling quite the martyrs for giving up our evening of vicarious detective work.

These days I never get it right, anyway. Either the writers are getting better, or I am getting dumber, or the wine is getting stronger.

The snowsuit guys, looking quite suspect in their fur-lined hoods if you ask me, (which no one does because I have a glass of wine in my hand) invent a time machine. Not the kind that you climb into and land on the prairie in 1803, having to come up with a great explanation. (If that were me, I would say it cuts hair like the one Dick Van Dyke had when he danced with the old bamboo, because I think that was so cool.)

This one created a vortex they jumped into. Goggles, designer jackets from 1979 and all. They went back to fix everyone’s mistakes.

If I jumped into a vortex and landed on the football field at my high school, what would I change?

I hated high school. I would probably turn and jump right back into the vortex and try to find Laura Ingels and live with her.

First I would find my best friend. The girl who was quiet and invisible walking through the hallway. Who’d never kissed a boy. Who took me with her to church once and had the consideration, when she saw how uncomfortable I was, not to convulse and shout in tongues like everyone else. The girl I envied because she looked like the heroine of a Brontë novel.

I would find her and tell her to keep her fiancé at her house just another two minutes the day of the high speed chase when the cops chased the men who’s stolen soda pop, or had been guilty of some other petty crime, 90 miles an hour on the dirt road that led to her house. The house her fiancé left with a chaste kiss whispering on his cheek.

Her grief wouldn’t have changed her.

The reason I wouldn’t change my own high school experiences, or experience before or since, is that the person I am now would be staring down a black hole. Just like the snowsuit guys who created one while doing all their good deeds. You can’t have regrets if you did nothing to regret. What kind of a person is the person who makes no mistakes? Talk about smug. . . and empty.

I don’t want to be dropped into the eighties again because it was a painful time. I did a lot of things I regret, but wouldn’t take back. I know I would save a lot of people a lot of pain, but who, then, would they be now? Sometimes hurt changes people for the better. If nothing else, they learned to stay away from people like the one I was.

All those regrets make me who I am. And I kinda like myself on most days. On most days I wonder why more people don’t like me.

So. I think,really, if I went back I would find my friend and tell her how beautiful is. How high school boys and girls don’t appreciate the Brontë beauties of this world. I am so old now, I would kiss her on the forehead and everyone would think I was insane.

Then I would go hang out with Laura Ingels until I got on her nerves.

time machine regrets high school lost loves
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Laura Ingels Emily Brontë

A Matter of Course

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:47:00 +0000

A Matter of Course

First I saw the kitten, tiny and red,
then saw, in her movements, the cat.
Then the blue eye, larger than the gray one,

the blind one
the deformity of the skull
the infection

But I saw it all too late: as I bent to pet her,
carefully. And I did it in front of my son.

Knowing it was too late to change direction,
knowing she would follow in a wide circle around us both,

I saw beyond the instant we stood at the corner:
The truck that would come around and catch her under its wheels
We don’t need death today, not today, not today.
And she would scurry off to die—

and it happens like that
she goes on her way, and at first
you think she’s all right.

And, if the bladder happens to be empty,
she can even survive a half-ton of metal on her back
for an instant.

copyright, 2004 Wigestrand Publishers, Ren Powell.
Do Not Use Without Permission.

from Mixed States, Wigestrand Publishers. Stavanger;2004 (bilingual editions)

Freezing

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:48:00 +0000

I found this at Big Window.
Can anyone explain why this kind of thing makes me cry?

Second Chance

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:45:00 +0000

Could be a matter of aging. It could simply be medication or the general fog of living displaced, but looking back from this vantage point, or perhaps, looking inward from this point in time, I see memories float together like drifting continents.

Like looking at a compromise projection of the world - the familiar upside, down - nothing is changed, yet everything is new.

Writers' Island Compromise Map Memories Vantage Point Second Chances

An Inventory of Passion

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:58:00 +0000

Passion is a pressure behind my eyes. Not exactly a welling of tears, but of energy and I wonder if my eyes sparkle. If they do, no one would notice. My passion is a private thing. Something savored alone in a rocking chair, like a pint of Häagen-Dazs. Something held behind a paperback on the subway. It is a quality, not a descriptor. And it encompasses everything that moves under the skin. It is the memory of labor, that foreshadowing of death, it is the cold of a child’s nightmare-screams. It is the moment before sex when the throat closes, and the green of fingertips meeting. And it swells beyond all that was known before. Like the rising flow.

passion prose poem sunday scribblings

The Language of Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:37:00 +0000

My son has always slept when he was tired. I don’t mean settled down to sleep snug in bed with his stuffed Mr. Bill and nightlight. I mean, fallen to sleep – gracefully actually, knees, hip, shoulder, head—halfway across the room.

Now that he’s nearly a teen, he does make it up the stairs before throwing himself more or less across the bed. Then he starts talking in his sleep. With his sleep language, he is emphatic and earnest, sometimes he gestures, wide sweeps of his arm that grabs my attention from across the hall, where I sit procrastinating in my office.

I have made it a point to never listen to my children’s sleep-talk. I respect their privacy and nothing is as private as dreams, but sometimes (honest) he calls so earnestly I believe he is in this reality and I listen.

It’s not English. Not Norwegian. It is a private dream-language with its own grammar.

I read a newspaper article about Nushu, a language only written and spoken by Chinese women. It was declared dead when the only woman left speaking it died*. My partner was puzzled and asked (rhetorically, of course, because he just is one of those rhetoric inquisitor-types) if the language didn’t die when the second to last woman did.

So. I guess the real question is whether language only exists when it is functional in the space between human beings. Between apes. Bees.

If the language of my son’s dreaming isn’t real, then his dreams aren’t real.

But I know they are.

When I crawl into bed at night, the dreams of the last night are still there pressing against my ear. I pick up the conversation where I left off.

*Since then, a region full of Nushu-speaking women has been “discovered”. Damn if nothing exists until it is functional between the space of Western ears.

dreams language Nushu

A Valentine with Consequences

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:15:00 +0000

An Acrostic Poem

‘February 14th’
by Saw Wei

Arensberg said:
Only once you have experienced deep pain
And madness
And like an adolescent
Thought the blurred photo of a model
Great art
Can you call it heartbreak.
Millions of people
Who know how to love
Please clap your gilded hands
And laugh out loud.

---
Trans. Anon

Code: the first syllables say Ar (Arensberg), Na (pain), Yu (mad), Gyi (great), Hmu (Blurred), Gyi (age/big), Than (million), Shwe (gilded)

Which spells

Ar-na-yu-gyi Hmu-gyi Than Shwe - Power-crazed Senior General Than Shwe

---

Please help bring attention to this blatant disregard of the human right to speak one’s mind. Saw Wei is one man, but he represents many. And he and those many represent the right we take for granted.

Express your outrage today. Be loving by sending a poem to the Burmese Diplomat in your country.

There is a simple way to find the address, fax, and sometimes the email to the person in your country here:

http://mm.embassyinformation.com/

If you can't do it today, do it tomorrow.

A sample letter of protest:

To the Diplomatic Representatives of Burma/Myanmar

On this day set aside for the expression of love, we choose to express our love for our fellow writer Saw Wei, and for the human right to freedom of expression.

We are deeply concerned for the welfare of this poet arrested on January 22nd, and for the well-being of all those currently detained in Myanmar in blatant violation of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We celebrate Saw Wei’s poem and, as fellow human beings, demand his immediate release.

Writing with impunity granted by our human right to free speech and respected by our countries, this independent, international group of writers show their solidarity by writing in the spirit of Saw Wei:

Saw Wei protest human rights freedom of speech free speech compassion valentines day

Spell it Out NOW!

noreply@blogger.com (ren.kat) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:31:00 +0000

On January 22, 2008, the Burmese poet Saw Wei was arrested for publishing an eight line poem entitled “February Fourteenth” in the weekly publication Love Journal.

The acrostic poem spells out “General Than Shwe is crazy with power”.

Wei is a popular poet and performance artist who has headed up a poetry recital group called White Rainbow, which has raised funds for AIDS orphans. He also participated in the 1988 uprising, and has been an active proponent of human rights. He is now in prison, held incommunicado. No information regarding charges has been released to the public.

Babel Fruit would like to call for submissions for a special supplemental: a selection of acrostic poems to be published on February 14th.

We encourage each reader/contributor to print out the PDF collection (including Saw Wei’s poem) and mail it to his or her diplomatic representative to Myanmar.

Let’s make this happen! There are only five days left until the deadline, but we can do it. Don’t revise and revise this time. Rage!

I am hoping there will be so many poems I will be totally overwhelmed and will need many, many people to help compile the poems.

Send poems to editors@babelfruit.org and put “Wei” in the subject line.*

We also encourage poets to send work on their own or begin their own compilations for this Valentines Day.

Ren

protest burma maynmar poetry acrostic human rights freedom of speech activism