doodle doodle. Dog Window is recent. I'm trying to attain competancy in sketching. the other 3 visual items are from my 1st sketchbook. Beth gave it to me 3 years ago, when I suddenly declared I was going to start doing visual work. the cartoony things make the most of very little, and somehow crack me up. Ceremonial is calligraphy without knowing a bit about it. I cando better now, but smudges such as can be seen here are still part of my method. my desk is messy too.

ceremonial 

21st century 

les drapeaux 

dog window 

I finally stumbled on this. Kasey Mohammad posted this to Patrick Herron's Imitation Poetics list some years (three?) ago. from out of nowhere, so far as I could tell. it must be my 1st meeting with flarf. so click yourself away to Lester blog. my name only appears because I posted to the list a bit.

well, I do enjoy pointing my finger at work well done. thus 2 posts by Stephen Vincent. 1st as you come to them, some thoughts on Terry Schiavo and the Pope, and 2nd, a little about Creeley. an appeal to diversity, if you will, in the Creeley post.

Site Metre notes a visit here of 3 seconds (the average good reader of Tributary likes to relax and take 7 seconds to read my sententious yet vital musings), which came by way of a Google search (in Russia, that would be a Gogol search), to wit: +01 comcast.net "allen". I wonder if the perp of this curiosity might be someone involved in the government of an African nation, who wishes to remove some funds therefrom, and could use my help...

I guess I am performing the patented blogger 180, having said that I was done with the blog, yet soon after here I am. frankly, it still may happen that I'll skip out, but I was aware as I wrote that my determination wasn't strong. so the topic of today's sermon will swirl on the stuff currently in this pool, here, that's part of a tributary, that's part of ...

1st I'm tired and sad. caregiving is wearing. I don't know how the professionals do it, because even with the emotional detachment they can bring, it simply calls for a lot from a person. let me blow my own horn that much about caregiving for my father, that I accepted that responsibility. so did Beth, and Erin too. I want to say love kept me going, love from Beth and Erin, love for my father, but one worries always using the word love: will it refuse to carry one's meaning. I'm sorry I seem to be wearing my father's death on my sleeve. it is a presence for me, and this blog is what I write in the present.

the death of Terry Schiavo and the Pope's decline brought back my father's last days. Robert Creeley's death struck me as well. if I wanted to resort to a term like father figure as regards my poetry writing, he would be one. complete with all the little squabbles to balance against the great gifts. Creeley's a poet who could be a poet all the time. that's not just speaking of his art, I mean a social thing too. there aren't too many poets nowadays who aren't something else as well. I mean, I know Creeley taught, but really, he taught because he was Creeley. no one cares how Creeley did in graduate school. so poetry is just that marginal. and I am a marginal poet. usually, I am okay with being marginal. the centre, as often defined, can be so purely social as to be trivial, an anxious network. and the work, doesn't it get done on the edges, away from the roiling masses? I think I am original, if that word isn't completely flaccid. I'm not rewriting the O'Hara oeuvre, or whatever, I'm trying to find my own way. mostly I am okay with this, but sometimes being twice marginal is too much. it's weak of me but there I am.

BUT what I recognize, is the worth this blog has for me. it allows me a public voice, albeit with scant public with which to exercise my divagations. this is public writing not private musing. it is a confrontation with what's out there. I'm introvert enough to need to make that effort. I think what I write here is worth reading in its way. how bold for me to say! I'll just end with a thank you to Stephen Vincent and Nick Piombino for their kind encouragement.

you know, it occurs to me that I should just not post here anymore. I know that such a statement seems to be code for I will be posting more than ever but I think not. I won't delete the blog, at least not yet, tho that's a temptation. I don't have what it takes.

warily, I take issue with Jonathan Mayhew when he says that Olson is overrated. by who? not by me. Olson has remained a poet of importance for me for more than 30 years. I realize that Jonathan means the rep thing but I don't know how one measures that. I can't stand Robert Bly but I can't say he's overrated if people buy what he sells. okay, their taste sucks, but. I was reading Olson yesterday, still feeling the energy. his correspondences with Creeley and Corman have always given me a charge. I think of him like Jung, who I've been immersing in: both are scientifically minded crazy people. the rational and the less so meet. I had the benefit of some reading of Olson with Robert Grenier (in class, I should say, not to sound too much of a pal), with maps, and the flush concerted curiosity and drive that Grenier had as a teacher. I wasn't inculcated, I was inspired. Olson had undeniable influence on a lot of people, I mean real poets, which it would be hard to overrate. I recognize that others may not like his work, that his energy may be seen as bullying, but his work is an important consideration out there.

I also was reading Spicer, whose work I have yet to do justice to in reading, yet which I find to be utterly wonderful. not long ago Maggie Z wrote about going thru Spicer archives. I wish I were serious enough to do such a thing. I was thinking as I read last night, I need more of Spicer's work in me. one thing I already have, a sense of serial. I can remember long ago piling papers fresh from the typewriter into chrono piles. Spicer's use of books fits my own thinking and method. I don't have the energy right now to do much writing. as piddling an experimentalist as I am (but I am an experimenter: for instance efforts to make flarf), I haven't the push to do such. overwhelmed in feeling. maybe I should take the time to work visually. I've been sketching, which maybe I'll scan and post, when my computer is returned. at one time, Jung set aside a block of time everyday after lunch for play. child's play, even: playing with blocks. words don't exactly fail me now, nor I them, but I am tired. sometimes, there are too many words, or too many things for the words to do.

apparently Eileen Tabios snapped a picture of 2 reviewers for Poetry in her backyard! or did 2 foets discover where Jorie's been hiding?

a columnist for the Boston Globe wrote about Foetry.com yesterday. that pretty well indicates that the whole foetry thing is about over. when daily rags decide it's time to look at a poetry subject, you know that said subject has grown seedy. bring your Jorie books back from the bonfire, and discover other ways to be trivial.

I've admitted a powerful influence from Robert Creeley, but I am equivocal about him nonetheless. read Jack Kimball's take for good critical acumen concerning Creeley. Creeley is a writer who will be missed. he was an active, pro-active poet, out there in the lists. us cloistered types owe him that, for sure.

Nada Gordon relates a comment made about my father's death to the death of Robert Creeley. please excuse the smell of self advertisement here. Nada's words are apt, and that's why I write this. death is natural, as she writes. which is the crazy part about the Schiavo tug of war. in the Christian view of her proponents, Jesus' loving embrace awaits. yet the defense of her life is timor mortis. the sad thing is that stiff impervious sesne of fundament. but death is natural! we meet something unimaginable in death as well. just before my father died I sent to my brothers a picture I took around Christmastime. a lucky, lovely shot of my father sitting at the table. he looked with it, with the firm qualities I remember still apparent. the person lost in time, that was not the only father I had, tho at the end that is mostly what one saw. he's not to be at this table anymore, except as we might bring his image back in conversation. it's hard to wrap around that at times, as natural as his dying was. and Robert Creeley's gone? I've related my brief meeting with Creeley. it was just a moment, and I've offered it as a humble humourous glimpse, of me as well as him. some of Creeley's work has taught me keen lessons, some has angered me that I cannot fathom its reputed import or beauty, some has bored me. he did his work, and I did my work trying to engage it. there is no loss for me with his death, as his writing, all I really knew of him, remains. the influence of his writing resides in me, I couldn't eradicate that if I tried. what I can carry of Creeley is right here. I shan't hear again how my father met and talked with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller at a Gene Krupa show. what I carry of my father is right here. I sound like someone who can't get past the news, but that's not so. I'm just trying to see the spectrum, and how the spectrum merges into white.

nice to see Ron what's his name mention Susan Schultz. I enjoy her poetry a lot and the stuff Tinfish puts out is wonderful, highly recommended. the design of Tinfish work is always frisky and fun. Beth and I met her and her husband and son a couple years ago. the boy, whose name is on the tip of my tongue, was sweet and happy, very into baseball. he and Erin played Pokemon together. I have so few author stories. I hope she is suitably mortified that Mark Magwire (jeez I can't remember how to spell his name) kinda embarassed himself while visiting some friends in Washington. Susan is a Cards fan. the Cards are the team that didn't quite beat the Red Sox in the last World Series.

yesterday's post was harsh. people gain from ceremonies, tho I think we have lost our main grasp of such determined expressions. not like the old days. and the ceremonial eulogy, I guess people find value in those. it's a certain writerly strictness on my part that keeps me from accepting such expressions. part of my training, if you will, as a writer, involves this sort of rigour. I think that's a reasonable thing. I am securely enough a writer to think that the craft exists at all times for me. one might, that is, need to write well in one's job, or for some organiazation's newsletter, or whatever. and one takes that seriously, but not in the way of one who declares writing as his or her craft. but why blithereth me so? I have been released from a duty that was hard, grew harder over the years, cost me, and yet gave me something I wish anyone to have as well. at least 3 emotions are actively affecting me at this time, yet I feel good. looking forward. and hwo are you?

still sans computer, and this library one has a view such as I can barely read my own blog, and I don't know how to rectify that. I'm scuffling now, it's just a time to scuffle. reading a lot of Jung and Nietzsche because that is what I'm studying. I miss the dailiness of this blog. I have to store up a day or more of stuff, for when I can get to an internet portal. it eats at me when I can't write. but life is life, live on. I would guess, can only guess, that my father's refusal of food and water was something of his right to death. the Schiavo story is just, as Stephen Vincent says, gothic. acceptance is at the end of everything, isn't it? religion is so unreasonable, just as science is. I'm sick of the pathology of these divisions. brazen definitions. burial of my father seemed a ceremony outside me, didn't touch me. certainly not like the burial of Beth's father on a green slope in West Virginia. just my 3 brothers, their wives, Beth, Erin, and 6 other grandchildren. I felt very emotional until each person (almost) said a few words. and tho the emotion was real in all cases, the expression just left me cool. standing in the cold before a silly little urn. dad? I didn't want to say platitudes. my father was a good man in a way I can be proud of. and I took worthy lessons from him. but I didn't want to dissolve him into such words, or eulogical extensions. Beth piped up a few remembrances of him, which stayed inside the human picture that we knew. I managed to say simply, mom was the light of our family, dad was the keel. we as a family lost our centre when she died. I feel, with my father's death, that the family no longer exists as such. religion in the sense of regulated orthodoxies is a poison. it has us speak of things outside our ken. it makes us assert what we don't know. I say religion, but I wouldn't want to exclude such affiliations as the Democratic and Republican parties. Beth regularly gets on the phone with the offices of our esteemed senators and representative, to indicate her dismay. Kennedy and Cave In Kerry go along with the Republican crunch as easy as kiss my hand. I had that problem during the presidential debates when Kerry started huffing like GW about chasing down terrorists. such a declaration didn't define him versus Bush (so why vote for him?), and maybe, hey maybe some alternative thinking could be offered. it's just machines running on their own. that's the orthodoxy I'm railing--yes, this is an example of railing--against. orthodoxy takes our poetry away.

tomorrow a private (family only) burial of my father. his ashes. a week from saturday a memorial service. neither of these have much meaning for me. Beth, Erin and I will go to Provincetown this weekend, and say goodbye. neither Beth or Erin have been there before. a place where my father spent a lot of time, his mother grew up there, his grandfather owned a store and wharf there. and it seems like there is where he wished to go, when he said he wanted to go home. or Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge, the worlds of his childhood. so that's the best significance I can make. goodbye and hope you find your home. today I wrote an angry anti-church diatribe. I think some churches have social value beyond the crass commerce of people getting along. I mean they can be there in many moments of a life, not just those emotional apexes when people feel the duty. I did not see this in dad's church. it was just going thru the motions in 'thinking of dad'. a church he was part of for 60 years. I can't recall if I've written here of the funeral we gave Beth's father. who wanted truck with no such thing. but all we did was read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. on the most beautiful hillside in West Virginia (that's saying something!), a family plot overlooking a farmstead that belonged to his family, on a bright autumn morning. the worn out patterns don't mean anything. I'm not looking for comfort in that sense. something spiritual not mere opiate. a sense of connection in some wider sense, a poetry amongst us.

having to write this. my father died saturday afternoon. Beth and I visited him about an hour before. he'd made a marked decline since the day before. he was aware but couldn't speak. a nurse (named Angel!) was shaving him. it occurred to me that it wasn't his electric razor. she said, oh that one's too loud, this one is mine. she finished and kissed his forehead. this is the same nurse, I mean aide, who hugged me. in fact I teared up and she hugged me again. we held his hand and talked to him. his breathing was terribly laboured. after a while, Beth left me to be alone with him. I said what I could, assuring him that his family was okay, that I loved him. thanking. all this stuff. I started to cry and he shook his head. a couple of times there were pauses in his breathing such as made me think he was dying. I might've stayed with him, but I remember that it seemed like my mother waited till she was alone to die. we went home and I called my brothers, telling them if they wanted to say goodbye they should do it soon. we had an end of winter party planned, something Erin wanted badly. he has been suffering in his teenage way, way inside. we went shopping for the party. soon after we came back, my brother called to say dad died. they were ready to give him morphine if he started to suffer but luckily that didn't happen. he died just before two of my brothers arrived. I don't know why I write of this here, except that it is part of whatever. and I couldn't do so sooner because my computer broke. it is still broke, but I managed to get to the library today, and with time. we cancelled the party, sent Erin off to some friends. Beth's cousin called and she invited him over. we talked Red Sox and West Virginia. of course my father's death wasn't a surprise. in caring for him, in growing up to that extent, I gained a lot. I am a little cut adrift now. yesterday a neighbour from across the street stopped by. Beth had told her recently that my father was failing. it was kind of shocking, telling her that he died. later she came back with a pot of tulips, and Beth and I talked with her. well I guess I am going too far. this is just like your story, only all the details are different. I'm calling it my story, but that in itself is a story.