March 31, 2019

Scheidt on the CD. Wind outside making the wind chime frantic. I didn’t write journal entries in Portland; let’s see what comes out of me now.

Tight scheduling forced me to get to my gate at O’Hare at a dead run, or what passes these days for a dead run. The amazing part of that is that somehow my bag made it too– someone must have been quick and attentive. Contrast this to Warsaw, where there were two lazy hours and still the damn thing got mislaid. I think the airline guy foresaw that I was going to call him an asshole and pulled my bag out. Portland is not as big as you expect (though people say that most of it is hidden ’behind the hill,’) brimming with coffee shops and, in my experience, excellent food. I noticed that its woods are luxurious and (to me) exotic conifers, and on the hills between the airport and the city stand innumerable homeless camps. The homeless are very evident in Portland, whether because they are actually more numerous or because they are less persecuted. The trolley ran practically from my hotel door to the convention center, so all was well there. Daily dramas on the train; you miss that driving your own car. I asked one woman on the train if she were a native Portlander. She was. I asked her what the great river we were crossing was. She said, “I really don’t know. Geography is not my best thing.”  It was, of course, the steel-colored and inexorable Columbia. I couldn’t believe she didn’t know her own river.

The Conference was pretty much as it has always been. I managed to leave all my information behind, but they found me nevertheless. Something was mismanaged, so that the registration lines were so huge they finally gave up and let everyone in without credentials. Went to one session, and that only because Lori was in it. Half the sessions were about women. Three quarters of the participants were women. During one of my signing sessions, not one man stopped at the Red Hen Press. I spent most of my time either on the streets of Portland or in the Bookfair, roaming around or at the Red Hen tables signing copies of The Falls of the Wyona. The last corrections could not be included in the mock-up of the book they did for the conference, but it was glorious to see my little green book sitting there large as life anyway. There were bars of chocolate whose wrappers reproduced the covers of the books.

I am reminded that I can be quite convivial, but not for very long.

I reread the book in the hotel lobby. The takeaway? It is very good. It is almost flawless. I read it as though it were someone else’s, weeping at the sad passages, tensed at the thrilling passages. I was filled with gratitude, for it is very good. I can hardly imagine having written it. The Red Hen people seemed to share my amazed delight. One thing stands fully accomplished.

Met at least five men named David. One with whom I shared space at the bar had me write down the info for The Falls of the Wyona so he could order a copy for his wife. Another had written an autobiography of Frankenstein’s monster.

Drinks with MT Friday night. His presence gave me joy. He asked me what the highlight of the Israel trip was, and I said Adam’s skull under Golgotha. He didn’t like that as much I would have thought. He recites the dogma wherein Baptism and Repentance are necessary for salvation. I utter the new (to me) perception that salvation is fully and eternally accomplished, and Baptism and Repentance are sublime theater, which to enter into is delight, but irrelevant to salvation once demonstrated and fully sufficient from that time forth. We knew better than to argue about this. We met again in the Portland airport, for he and Wes and I were on the same flights home. I think all in all it was beneficial. If nothing else it was a weekend full of Something Different. But I think full confidence in my work, in comparison to the thousands of other works represented there, was worth the journey.

Call from the Grievance Committee chairman. Brian Hook is aggrieved about his firing from the humanities chairmanship, and wants me to recuse myself from the committee receiving the complaint. Oh dear God, yes. My hatred of him is just, but not what one would call impartial.

Half drunk on bloody Mary’s I sat in an airport bar and wept in apprehension of the glory of God.

Hoped to work in the garden today. The North Wind has other ideas.

March 26, 2019


Mother died on this day in 1974.

One of my first students, Keith Hall, writes:

Dear David,

“By some mercy the truth is kept from us” is a brilliant line, worthy of Shakespeare.

I am reading your book now for the second time, with joy, and in places, with tears in my eyes.

Engaging with you again over so much time is like a resurrection - of memory, of the imagination, of joy, including the joy I felt living in Asheville for 12 years, fond remembrance of life-altering moments I experienced at UNCA, of the vistas, the things The Voices told me to say, and the uncertain sense of power I felt over words back then. Thank you, (and thank you, Voices.)

All writers, whoever they are, bear the mark of their masters, their Big Ghosts, as William Stafford said. Anything I wrote after your poetry workshop that I attended - in 1984-ish, 85-ish (?) bears your mark. I had read The Glaciers Daughters, and stopped wanting to be T. S. Eliot, or William Stafford, or John Berryman, or James Applewhite, or Jim Wayne Miller, or Robert Lowell, all Big Ghosts to me. I wanted to be you. I had no surfeit of ideas; I was bursting with ideas but at that time had no concept of how to channel that slow, continual lava flow of images, impressions, ideas into some complete and coherent form. I read everything in the UNCA library that had a poem in it. I was looking for something. You gave me that direction, either verbally in class or in my reading and re-re-re-reading of your own work. God gave me the voices; you gave me the inspiration, the discipline, and the structure. Anything I have written since the day I met you is partly your fault! Bless you for that.

I learned that, as a poet, I am a sprinter, not a distance runner. I am good for short poems, maybe with breath enough for a sonnet or a full page, but I never mastered the longer, more discursive and intellectual forms. One reviewer told me I had a talent for the “gnomic phrase.” Fred Chappell once said in a letter to me that my poems had “a whittled quality.” Whatever that means.

Over the years, I have met or communicated with some significant poets, most of whom would be classified as “regional” – James Applewhite, James Still, Jim Wayne Miller, James Seay, Fred Chappell, RHW Dillard, David Huddle.

The book you sent me is named "Peniel" which is the title of one of the poems that I submitted for my final project at UNCA eons ago. I was thrilled to see that and wonder if that is accidental or on purpose. God lurks in my poems, like a face on a billboard you see only for a second when flying down the highway. He's there but in the wings, behind the curtain, watching but the audience doesn't see Him. Your engagement with Him is much more direct and open and eloquent.

The poems you sent in typescript are brilliant, a joy to read. I am reading your book for the third time. You have hammered the hot nail back into my head. Thank you for your inscription. “My first baby poet.” Yes, if that is so, then I am happy to be your first born.

God bless you for reaching out to me. I love your writing. I always have.

Let’s stay in touch, regularly and frequently.

Always,

Keith

The bloodroots are in bloom.

March 25, 2019

Matthias Weckmann on the CD.

The AWP site is up, and the fact is that I have no reading. I was relying on Tobi’s having said on Tampa, “Of course next year you’ll have your own reading” and put down to disorganization the fact that I’d heard nothing more.  But I do have several book signing sessions, one with Erica Jong, who was famous among us when we were in grad school.  I signed off on the layout of the book on Saturday morning. I don’t see how they can have anything printed and bound by the middle of next week, so I am anticipating a completely useless voyage to Portland. But it will be, in any case, a voyage to Portland, where I have not been before. So, well.

Jaki Shekton Green, our new NC port laureate, on the radio. We met 30 years ago at the North Carolina Writers’ Conference, to which we were invitees and new members. We have been fine friends on those rare re-encounterings. She is sublime when talking about poetic process, about the public life of the poet. I realize that, unless I have to make something up for class, I have nothing to say about process. Never missed it when I was actually working. I suppose a bird in flight is the last person you’d ask for an examination of the art of flying.

March 24, 2019

Lazy Sunday. Looked at my materials and realized I had all the wrong schedule in my mind for Portland. Of course the AWP web site is down, so I can’t check when my presentations are.

March 23, 2019

Gesualdo, acquired in Tel Aviv, on the CD player.

Received the final version of The Falls of the Wyona and mailed in my “I approve of cover and text as-is.” Dropping my eyes on any page was exciting, gratifying. I repeat the sensation that it seemed not my work, that I was learning it rather than reviewing it.

Read part of Book I of The Iliad for Sophie’s Homerathon. Very bardic, in the cold with a cutting wind blowing under a fierce bright sun.

Bestirred myself and went to the theater last night. Excellent cider now in their cooler. Left at intermission. Much actorly energy and directorial ingenuity in the service of nothing. The script never surpassed–and seldom rose to the level of–camp skit night.  Was it funny? Sort of, but the funny of a guy in a clown costume screaming “wacka wacka” and squirting water out of his lapel, so you feel a cad if you don’t laugh from time to time. The cutest actor is going to be in my play later on, so that was a comfort.

How can one institution approve both last night’s fare and what I do? Aiming for breadth? Include all possible audiences? Or does my work and this have something in common that I don’t perceive?

Day of supreme  writing in the morning and excellent gardening in the afternoon. Put in quince, rhubarb, a couple of exotic conifers I saw at Reems Creek.

March 21, 2019

Since making my determination public (to one person anyway) I have felt a change. Sat in a creative writing meeting today indifferent and impatient, not really caring about anything we talked about, wanting to be elsewhere. The university is not, at this moment, going the way it ought, but it is soon wholly in other hands. One shrugs. One moves  on.

March 20, 2019

Round moon in the middle of Edgewood when I drive to school, the same moon that was a crescent over Jerusalem.

March 19, 2019

My travels are officially over, as today I drove to the airport to fetch my peregrinating bag. Travel did in this case what it is meant to do, for I feel rested and renewed and full of purpose. Student Michael reminded me I’m off again in a week.

Today I revealed to my chairman my slowly maturing intention “I’m retiring.” She got a look of horror on her face and said, “Right this minute?” I told her “end of next year,” but did reserve the right to march out the door if anybody pissed me off.

Final edits and corrections of The Falls of the Wyona. I read it through in order to find last edits (there were some), noting that it is really a beautiful book, and that I have no recollection of writing any sentence of it. It’s as though it were created by somebody else.

March 18, 2019

News this morning that Katherine has died, the day of her 60th birthday.

March 17, 2019

Blessed Saint Patrick.

Rose at an ungodly hour, which was a compromise with the time I was used to in Israel, which would have been nine in the morning and more than time to start the day.

Left Residence 26 shedding shekels in all directions. Maybe they will actually miss me a little.

Say what you will about the hotel, my bed was freakishly comfortable, and upon it I had amazing dreams.

The journey was both the longest I’ve ever hard–31 hours– and among the least irritating. I thank my attitude rather than circumstance for that. Or maybe First Class. I realized I had not read my ticket properly, and had an 11 hour layover in Chicago, so I used my phone from the First Class Lounge at the Chopin Airport to book a room at the O’Hare Hilton. I’m old enough that this is still miraculous to me. It was also a stroke of luck, for the hotel was amiable, a ten minute walk from my gate, and had a bar at which I had good companionship before tottering off to bed– at what was, at the point, 6 AM by my customary time. Slept fitfully but well enough. Excruciating muscle spasms throughout the flights. At one point I had to stand and ask the attendant to get me a bottle of water. My belly and sides are still tender, tentative.

The food was Polish. Good, but odd.

In Warsaw some airline diddling made boarding about 40 minutes late, so I was grumpy already when the ticket checker said “You have been selected for extra security screening. Please proceed to the–”
“Asshole,” I said. Now, that fact is that I had no intention of saying that out loud, but I had. His face clouded with indignation and soon we were bickering, his side being that I was rude and my side being that I was truthful. Anyhow, to avoid an International Incident I apologized and marched off to a room where the largest men I have ever seen in my life looked into my shoes and rubbed something on my hands and ran some kind of sensor across my body. Ticket boy had given me strict instructions to return to him when I came back, so I marched directly to the OTHER ticket taker and took my seat.  When we got to Chicago, it was revealed that LOT had lost my bag. The half-coherent man at the lost baggage station. Assumed it was “some kind of security event.” So, “asshole” had been right all along. Except for waiting for my bag, all is well, I think, with that.

Russell showed up at the house, and we chatted. MMc is now poison to us all.

Had time to shower before showing up at a patrons’ event at the Magnetic Theater. Chit-chat over wine, a few scenes from recent or upcoming productions, and a “playwrights’ panel” Renewed excitement over In the Assassins’ Garden. I was told, and had the telling supported from several sides, that I am a “Legend” in Asheville. You hope you forget about it, but it is exquisite and satisfying to know for that one moment.

In the photos, I am always looking to one side of the camera—

Cleaned the pond pump. Chopped away stands of incipient bamboo. Regarded the peaches and the nectarine blooming. Saw where the serviceberry needs to be pruned. Maybe lost a pear tree. Maybe not. Rewrote Invisible Husbands.

Israel 4

March 14, 2019

Rain. Rose and walked through Joppa to the sea, in and out of driving rain. The beautiful sea sent up a mane of salty mist. A red cat ran to me when I opened my bag. He was used to having treats given to him when people open their bags, and I felt improvident that I had nothing. He let me pat his head, but he grumbled at me all down the beach. This trip has been fine and good and memorable. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Never have. The woman in the bookstore knew that the bird I had wondered about is a mynah.

Just after I went to bed, sirens began to wail. They wailed like a terrible old war movie. Then there was an explosion and the wailing stopped.  Discovered the next day that mortars had been fired from the Gaza Strip for the first time in several years. Most were filtered out by the defense screen, but one had landed, by the sound of it not far from us. War in a city is loud, and chilling.

Israel 3

March 13, 2019

          Strange that I have not obsessively recorded, as I usually do abroad. Part of it is mechanical; I fear this computer is failing, and the work will be lost. But today was the best and longest of days. It started at 7 with the tour to Nazareth and Galilee. It was my father’s hundredth birthday, and finding some way to engage that, to commemorate that, lay at the center of my thoughts. A little cat waited with me until the van arrived. We saw Megiddo and Armageddon and Nazareth and Cana and the Hill of the Beatitudes and Tabor of the Transfiguration. On the first tour there was a woman who corrected the guide’s Portuguese pronunciation—though he was fluent in six languages right before our eyes—and on this one a woman who had taken a bible class (or something) and corrected or questioned everything that guide said. How can we be SURE the rock under the Dome was the very rock where Abraham prepared his sacrifice? Is this really the house of the Holy Family? What if it isn’t?  Our guide’s mind was methodical and her English halting, so by the time she got something explained I was ready to explode. “Just tell her to shut up,” I counseled silently. The Holy Land in spring is lush with flowers. The Sea of Galilee is bigger than I imagined. The Jordan River, though smaller than the French Broad (it’s like a twisty Cam) is beautiful, and moving to behold. Unlike depictions in the movies, it’s not a stream struggling through desert, but a long oasis overhung with trees and loud with birds, tropical and jungle-y. Parrots screeched through the sky overhead. Happy people—including one of our tour group--donned white robes and had themselves baptized in the sacred place. I watched a moorhen paddling. A girl and I watched anoles cavort on the ruins of Capernaum. We were gruesomely late getting back, and I had them drop me on Rothschild, where I had a burger at Moses’ and began a poem—on the subject of my father’s 100^th, as I had wanted to do. Something came upon me, and I wandered afterward up and down the boulevard thinking of my father and my life, weeping bitterly and anonymously in the blessed dark. When did I ever know the right thing to do? How could I have known? What could I have done to change things? I heard myself say, “I miss my dad.” It was the first time I had ever said it. It should not have been. I do not think it was my fault. I came home and, again, had a night full of elaborate and revealing dreams.

Israel 2

March 12, 2019

          Fantastically rich and abundant dreams.

          Turns out there’s a school next door, or very close. Loud, happy sounds.

          The men of Tel Aviv go about perfumed. I like that. The beautiful part-owner is called Uriel. 

          My horrible room is decorated with horrible black and white prints of Paris. What inspires people?

          Lunch and talk with Elizabeth Grober. She sounds so like her mother one must look at her to be certain. She’s leaving a fantastic job pricing Israeli artwork at Sotheby’s.

          Kids were dancing on the boulevard. One beautiful boy came over and asked me to dance. I said, “I’m old and tired. I’m dancing in my heart.” I realized for the first time it is true. I wept, bitterly, briefly.

Israel

March 10, 2019

 American cartoons with Hebrew subtitles on the TV. Arrived about 24 hours ago through flights on LOT (Polish airlines) not notable except for my heroic sleeping. I went to sleep over Canada and awoke over Denmark. Some mountains between here and Warsaw were covered with snow. The taxi ride was heroic for humor. I told one driver the address and he declined to take me. The next one, in his scant English, kept asking for directions. “Is that the one near the bus station?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do I turn left here?”

“Good God man I have never been to Tel Aviv in my life!”

Residence 26 is a new hotel that declared itself to be a “residence”—ie apartments—to cut down on cost. The first sight of it told me why the price was remarkably low. It’s in the Tel Aviv ghetto. When Yuval picked me up for the Jerusalem trip, he said, “Why are you staying here? It’s all prostitutes and drug dealers.” And so it is, though in my two night here they have not seemed to notice me.   But the young men who opened the hotel are eager and attentive, and I hope there may be some way for it to go well for them. In two cases they are also ravishingly handsome.

My first night here was agitated and sleepless, perhaps because I’d slept so much on the plane. Heard every noise, which is not like me.

Sleep deprived, I was standing on the street at 7 yesterday AM to take a guided tour of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Yuval Bigio was our guide, an attractive, humorous man enthusiastic about everything. To watch him drink a beer you’d think it was ambrosia. How he ran down the streets to find his clients! Far and away the best guide I’ve ever had, he is a polyglot who could manage conversations in five languages, including Haitian Creole (There was a Haitian grandmother on the bus). Lots of Hispanics, and I must say I got sick of hearing Spanish, though it was amazing how much I could maneuver through it with my bits of French and Italian, and the fact that everything said was vaguely biblical. I even sort of followed an anecdote Yuval related to the driver in Hebrew, clearly concerning an observant Jew giving him grief for working on the Sabbath. I was sort of his pet, he asking me questions, showing me special things, calling my name if he lost me in the crowd. I told him he reminded me of my son, which was a spiritual truth if not a physical one.

Got money from an ATM that spoke only Hebrew.

The tour was both amazing and disappointing. The landscape of the Holy Land is as the bible illustrations led us to believe, though more beautiful and various. The land feels curiously young and untamed, even the terraces near Bethlehem that are three thousand years old.  “Here is the plain where God stopped the sun and the moon so Joshua could defeat the Amorites.” . . . “On this hill David housed the Ark while he was building Jerusalem.” The Vale of Kidron is actually in Jerusalem. The Galilean desert (a rain shadow desert) starts at the city limits with absolute desolation. I wept when we saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus. Wept seeing Gesthemane from the bus, but “from the bus” is the operative phrase. Everything was seen from the bus or fighting our way through throngs anxious to experience what you are anxious to experience. I could not really encompass it that way. I have to get a hotel in Jerusalem and wander at my own pace.  Besides, my days of lunging up stairs and hills at any rate but my own are over. Thought I was going to die. I didn’t.

Bethlehem is a rope of limestone mountains without a single patch of flat earth. I didn’t expect that. The ancient church is under renovation, so it looks like the local Methodist, complete with Christmas decorations. I’ll contemplate the holiness of it all as it sinks in.  

Rejoiced today to find that the real Tel Aviv lies within a 15 minute walk of my ghetto. Did so. Sat at cafes and wrote. Walked from one end of Rothschild Blvd to the other. Ate at the Philharmonic café for lunch. When I found a supper restaurant on Rothschild, it was exactly the same, same menu, probably the same owner. Some truth must lie in that. Sat on the walk while the Mosque-of-Omar crescent moon passed over.

March 8, 2019

Sound of torrential rain on the roof. Does rain stop the airlines? Nearly everything else does.

Final proofs arrived from Red Hen yesterday afternoon. I emailed Natalie that I couldn’t possibly get them done before I returned from Israel, but I sat down after rehearsal and did them, and still had time for TV before bed. I couldn’t believe there were so many errors left from the first editing, or maybe they were new ones. It is a very short book. While I was correcting the proofs I said “thank God” to that.

RH was forceful about my not using the word “retard.” I insisted. We’ll see what happens.

Found a perfectly good pair of jeans in my closet. “Why don’t I wear these?” I asked. I put them on and remembered that if my left leg is swollen anywhere near its limit, it won’t go into them.

The measure of my recover is that I think nothing of taking the stairs to the study. Used to prepare carefully so as to go only once a day.

Overprepared and prepared too soon. It’s better than the opposite.

March 7, 2019

Last preparations for the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I needed another day, so I gave myself a preview of retirement.

What did I want? I wanted to work with Blue Raincoat. I wanted to have a show at Project Arts. So let’s get on to something else.

Excited almost to the point of sickness over my trip. This is a good thing. A sweetly childish thing. Did not leave the country in 2018. My new passport is a virgin.

March 6, 2019

Sang and received the imposition of ashes. Hunkered down against the bright-eyed blade of cold.

March 5, 2019

I believe I sold Whitman to my 8 o'clock.

Read “Ash Wednesday” to my poetry class.

“Se Vuol Cantare” is a view into my past, exorcising Mr Fillmore and all that. Once in that country, I had a look around.

I remembered the first day of first grade when we kids from Goodview walked to school together. Our parents had set it up so we could go in a protective mob. Once we got to Newton Street, the kids ran away from me into the Park. It was not an accident, not an incident. They turned and shouted at me “You can’t run. You can’t keep up.”   They had contrived together to mock me and leave me behind. I said, “Of course I can keep up,” and I ran across the street to them, but my heart burned inside me. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die. I knew I had a “bad heart,” but I’d found ways of avoiding crises until that day. From then on I walked to school alone, or with one or two who had not gone in the group that day.

I remembered being on the great ballfield in Maytree, the first time I ever played baseball. I watched carefully to get the rules. When I got up to bat, there was a cry of “easy out! Easy out!” and all the fielders ran in close. I had never had a bat in my hand in my hand before. How did they know I was an easy out? I was so mortified I set the bat down and walked away. Unless forced or coerced, I never played baseball again.

These things are as clear as if they happened yesterday. That is a gift to a poet, and a curse to the man.

March 4, 2019

Oral reports in class. Finished “Se Vuol Cantare.” Downtown in the evening to hear Bruce and GGD read from their new books at Malaprop’s. In a generation I may not need to say “It takes more than being gay to make a story.” GGD was so used to being a beautiful young man adored by the whole Los Angeles scene that it never wore off. That’s what his poems are about, whatever the ostensible subject. Stopped a Zambras for a couple of cocktails. Felt very downtown citylife.

March 3, 2019

Phone call as I wrote in the darkening evening. The voice asked for me and then said, “I’m from the National Republican Committee. Do you think President Trump is doing a better job than President Obama?”

“Oh dear God no. Somebody gave you the wrong number.”

Pause. . . “OK, we’ll update our records. . . .”

Todd preaches against the “blood sacrifice” theme of Christianity, which have always hated with sanctified hatred.

March 2, 2019

Excellent dawn at High 5 followed by an excellent morning at the studio. Lots of people were on the street, but no one came upstairs. It was OK. I was happy. Cocktails later to see if we could get DJ situated. I saw where I had gone wrong with Sam-Sam. It is two books rather than one.

March 1, 2019

Saint David’s Day

Recent days have been turbulent–muddied waters– so who knows what will end up being remembered? The significant thing is that my statement on Facebook about the Trans community elicited a huge, unexpected, humbling response, overwhelmingly, astonishingly positive. My presence in the Asheville community is more public and far more positive than I anticipated. My anxiety about Miss M and her dirty-minded calumnies has, for the moment, gone. Maybe gone away forever, if I can remember the lessons as they come. Small people make you small to fit into their cages. You must recall your true dimensions.

Taking down Perimeters from the library was far less labor than anticipated. I had in fact anticipated not being able to do it, rather sitting exhausted at the roadside with rain pelting down on a pick-up full of ruined paintings. But everything was accomplished by noon and the rain didn’t start until 1. I’d expected that to be the worst event of the week. Perhaps it was, but it wasn’t so bad. At least this show garnered some comment. 

Finally in good voice for rehearsals.

Checked on my travel plans, and all seems to be in order. Warsaw will be a new addition.

Working on Jason the Ape Man.

A discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the myth of the happy slave led my American Lit class far afield, and we ended with footage from A Band of Brothers about the discovery by American soldiers of the Nazi death camps. They were stricken. Looking out upon those faces I thought THIS is education. Tears ran down my face. As time goes by, the number of things I can’t get through without sobbing grows; it’s time to retire.

I’ve never been better as a teacher. It’s time to retire.

Nephew Jonathan has finally a profession, in Memphis.