Elinor Nauen

What a star! Check out Lucy Sante's shout-out in the NYT Book Review on January 30 (if the link doesn't work). BrokeDown Palace is a great book, Maggie's account of being a paramedic in Times Square in the '80s & much more: a mystery in which she tracks down remnants of the dismantled hospital, a biography of Mother Alice, the nun who set up the first AIDS ward in New York, and in general life in this city when it was at its craziest. 

Maybe he spoke to me because I did a couple of katas to warm up before class at my gym today. A potbellied man my age (or possibly quite a bit younger) told me, without preamble, that he used to run hurdles in high school & that he's only taking this class because he has a muscle strain. He seems to have had the same idea I did before I actually took an Aurora "old folks" class, that I would show those doddering decrepits a thing or 2. Ha! First class I could barely keep up. OK, hurdles. Then that he had just been elected to his home state's hall of fame. Men & their egos. Any competence, even an unrelated one, in a woman can quickly bring out the urge to one-up us. As Frank O'Hara writes in the great essay or rather manifesto "Personism": If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep." He was talking about that in the context of writing poetry ("you just go on your nerve" but apparently my (very nice) kata was mugging him. 

oops, have to strip this out of my blog so I can have it published & truthfully say it hasn't been so before. 

("Things I Didn't Notice")

Thanks for liking it, DB. We'll keep it to ourselves. 

That's Johnny reading his poignant story "Mother of God" last night at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the NY Poets Series. It's really NY Friends": not only poets. "Mother of God" is his riff on Chekhov's "Misery," set in the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York and featuring an unsympathetic Archie Bunker-type that you can't help caring about, despite how wrong he is about "homo-sexuals" in general and his son in particular, who he loves but doesn't understand. Johnny has had it hard for so many years now; it was wonderful to see him struggle & shine. 

Really, how does anyone get through all the books when all one can do is doze? And when I'm awake, I'm either buying books or ordering them from the library. I'm not complaining: one of the great joys of my life is that I will never run out of things to read. 

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

~ George Orwell

We all think every day about how to resist, how not to be complicit, how to remember what the truth even is. It's hard. 

W saw Slap! last night, about a Ukrainian artist named David Burliuk, who was a futurist in Siberia, Japan, and New York. It featured my old pal Bob Holman, full of beans & wit, and bandura master Julian Kytasty. Presented by Yara Arts Group in the small basement space on East 9th Street where Ellen Steward got her start. Well-done, informative, important, & fun: what're you waiting for? It's there til February 9.

What's the gayest city in the world?

You have to guess. 

Yeah, figure it out. 

There is an answer but I can't say it here. (The answer is dirty.) (That's a hint.)

Last year's Old Friends readings at the Bowery Poetry Club really solidified a community & this year's are doing the same. Andrei Codrescu, Lila Dlaboha, Simon Pettet, Anselm Berrigan, Donna Dennis, & Tony Towle read last night & last week. Coming up:

1/28: 

Lee Ann Brown – Johnny Stanton – Anne Waldman – Don Yorty

2/11:

Marcella Durand – Wanda Phipps – John Yau

2/18:

Edmund Berrigan – Mike DeCapite – Mitch Highfill – Joel Lewis

2/25:

Jaime Manrique – Nancy Mercado – Edwin Torres

3/4:

Ed Friedman – Bob Holman – Bob Rosenthal

P.s. Happy birthday, Lord Byron & Sam Cooke. Now there's a reading I'd go to!

Country Hit

I have to confirm that this hasn't been published. Only maybe 2 people saw it here so I think it's OK to delete it & truthfully say it's not been published.

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

~ Robert Browning

Too often it means looking away when we should face reality. Too often it means complicity. 

I didn't take a single picture on the way to Baltimore or while I was there. The only visual souvenir I have is a sketch of me that Joe Giardano did while I was reading. I'll take that, along with the hugs with Baltimore & DC friends, the laughter I got during my reading, the enchantingly gray New Jersey Turnpike (I'm not joking: I love its endless monochrome; I can keep going forever is what it feels like, a Midwestern sense that the road keeps going & going). 

On the Road with William Carlos Williams

Leaving for Maine in the morning

I can't decide:

Pictures from Breughel or Paterson.

Oh me oh my

 
I almost always take Breughel.

I used to take Paterson.

 
Once a truck driver picked me up hitching.

It was too noisy for the usual where-ya-froms

& I pulled out Paterson

which he said he'd read in school.

 
He took me to a steel mill in Gary

Indiana in the dawn.

I never get far from WCW. I still take a book of his pretty much whenever I travel. And off I go to Baltimore, WCW in hand. 

I know what's going on in the world, all right? But I get to do what I DO, which is write poetry & share it with people, & maybe cheers us all up. I can't help it, I'm from the Midwest & people laugh at even my saddest poems. And there's still a week before we have a felon fascist in the White House, so I'm gathering my rosebuds while I may. 

Johnny has had increasingly bad ("profound," the audiologist said) deafness for quite some time now. Everyone who knows him has been hollering at him to do something. Finally, he did, & what a difference. To have a conversation where I don't have to repeat &/or scream everything I say is a relief to both of us. Even though it was entirely for the purpose of being heard, he took it that I was yelling at him & I felt he was ignoring me. In just half an hour we were happier than we have been in ages. I can't see them even though I know they're there, that's how discreet they are. The world opens up. 

He said, What's that noise? And it was the microwave, which shows how deaf he'd gotten.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

~ Samuel Johnson

These days we seem to need more of an excuse to get together for a party than when we were in our 20s & anyone might end up with anyone after drinking, smoking, dancing. And so it was a birthday, & we sang & ate Texas sheet cake, & caught up. More sedate but all the better for being such longtime friends & colleagues. And still with grudges! animus! gossip! 

We keep having the flood, though, too. 

The Pacific Palisades fire alone, one of several uncontaine fire in the LA area, is bigger than Manhattan. 

" Malibu beach lifeguard tower dissolves into ashes, no help in sight, 100 feet from the limitless blue waters of the Pacific." See "Apocalypse Los Angeles" in the Washington Post.

I opened a box on the back shelf that was labeled "Do Not Open Until 2025: This means you, Elinor." High hopes for excitement but it was a bunch of Johnny's old mss (which is exciting! but he gets to look at them first), some crap & this rotary phone. I think a phone came when you installed the phone line, although the long cord was something I bought so I could talk anywhere in my apartment. That phone was good as new for at least 25 years. What does a smartphone have on a solid machine like this? 

I remember a kid somewhere saying he had come up with a great idea: What if there was a way to attach your phone to a wall so you didn't lose it. 

Tiny Instructive Poem

I was grubbing around for poems, which I only do when someone asks for poems for a magazine or I have a reading coming up, & found this. I very well could have put it here in my blog before. It kind of falls into Ron Padgett's category of "poems I guess I wrote" but have no recollection of.

Update: I have to unpublish this so it can be published for the first time in a very nice online mag out of Baltimore. 

Unexpected & lovely, it stuck around long enough to make me happy. I'm such a PR machine ~ I push out the praise like the snow machines on ski slopes wallop out the snow. I think people realize that I won't lay off until they tell me they maybe like snow a little better now. 

And "something potentially significant" this weekend, according to WillisWeather, my bespoke forecaster. 

It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

~ J. M. W. Turner

Or as the poet Murat Nemet-Nejat said, If no one's buying the bread you're baking, you can make it as salty as you want. 

Or the late Kris Kristoffersen: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. 

It's hard to know you're playing your cards close to your chest till you trip & drop everything & it all changes. 

A walk in the briskness of New York January... Tremblay Apiaries had the honey I like without me having remembered to order it in advance... I made plans for the future with visitors I really like but I can go home today as early as I want... I had a good hard class at the gym: stronger every day! ... Met the son of the terrific poet Mary Ferrari, still kicking at age 96, & am full of plans to throw light on her while she's here to enjoy it... Words are life, ord er liv....

Issue 5 is now out & they just keep getting better. A retro presentation of absolutely contemporary work. A community like I haven't felt in years. I'm thrilled & energized to be part of this project with my old friend Maureen Owen. 

A young man (I must have asked) told me firmly that I should stop doing my blog. It's 2025! he exclaimed, which I understood to mean I needed to get with the many newer ways to communicate. 

I hadn't thought of taking a pause but now I am. My original goal was to finish something every day, to know it was finished because I published it. I have come up with different strategies over the 12 years I've been doing this & while there are definitely stretches where I'm more interested or less, I still enjoy finding out what I'm thinking about by writing something here. 

No conclusions. Maybe he'll be back tonight with next steps. 

How I pay for internet: I take my neighbor across the hall out to lunch every month.

He would share it for free but why should he? We like to hang out & I would take him out to lunch. Everybody wins. 

Proving yet again that where I live is indeed a village. 

Also: HAPPY 2025! 

Two little-known facts about the 39th president & me: 

1) I moved into the apartment where I still live the same month he was inaugurated, January 1977. 

2) Maggie & I won the Village Voice Jimmy Carter joke contest in 1978 or 79. And we took that joke on the road. The prize, worn by Maggie, was a rubber head of Jimmy. I was Rosalynn in a prim pastel skirt. Maggie had stagefright in those days so instead of reciting her lines, you'd just see Jimmy's big head shaking. It was all way more punk than we thought, I suppose. 

We spent a lot of time writing the dialect. They almost rescinded our prize when we went to pick it up & casually mentioned we had repurposed an old pimp joke. 

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Never thought of Wittgenstein as whimsical but what do I know. 

An hour past sunset & it's 53° in the East Village. 

And I'm late for dinner. 

The snow is gone & so am I.

Peta was the oldest of my five first cousins. She died two days ago after several months of health problems. 

Pete was born & raised in England. We met for the first time, as far as I remember in 1964 or '65 (she could tell you the exact date), when she visited us in Sioux Falls. I brought her to my junior high, where she was lively, interested, glamorous & English. I felt like the coolest person in the state. She had a good time ~ nothing was ever beneath her. 

She ended up living in LA, & one time we drove around meeting her Mexican friends & eating tacos. Also impossibly glamorous. 

Peta loved her family, all of us but especially her two kids, Dave & Julia. That they are so devoted to each other is a tribute to her. 

She was brilliant, with a vast memory for dates (oh no, our family encyclopedia is no more!), kooky, utterly fair & tolerant by nature.