Art + Word

How to Write an Erasure Poem - Write the Sky

write the sky
Danna

different is
years later

here
is
without God

you
and I
had that type
of relationship

we were
profound,
not just
an idea
structured
for structure

that is
a different way
of talking
about nature

this is
mystery
I don't know

I'm a city
of violence and horror
that existed before
and will exist
afterwards,
in you

you are a dream,
an old memory
writing the sky,
the world

Materials:
1. A page of printed text from a book, magazine, or any text.
2. Pencil, pen, or marker.

Instructions:
1. Erase words from the text (or bold them as in the example below) to see what poem or flash emerges.

different form is Juan Luis Martínez. Are there others? No. Afterwards, there are. Diamela Eltit three years later, published a book that was like this, in 1983. But these are like two time periods. Here, there are a few translations of Juan Luis Martínez by Steven White in Poets of Chile, and now La Nueva Novela is being translated by Mónica de la Torre. For people who don't know anything about him, why is he important? La Nueva Novela, first of all, didn't have one sentence that was by Juan Luis Martínez. It was constructed purely from found texts. It's an enormous compilation. It can also be explained a bit in terms of the anti-poetry of Parra, but it went even further; Martínez's was a poetry without God. In this book the role of the author was as someone who compiles or organizes more than someone who writes. It's a huge collage. You know, we wrote some of that book together. I don't know if you know that I was married to his sister. And we shared a typewriter. There's part of La Nueva Novela that I wrote, some multiplications and divisions, so we had that type of relationship. So you were very close friends? We were almost brothers. And how did the literary world respond to Juan Luis Martínez? With a profound distrust. But something weird happened, which is typical . . . He died and they discovered his greatness? Not just that. In part when I started getting attention, then they began to pay attention to Juan Luis Martinez. And I think there was originally an idea that he was somehow copying me, but really they didn't understand him at all. And I really got his work. For him, who were models? The French writers . . . René Char? René Char, Raymond Roussell, Raymond Queneau. . . . Not the more official writers . . . He was an incredible person. He never finished high school, and he knew more about French literature than anyone else, but he didn't know French. He was incredible. And so are there now people who write under his influence in Chile, who use collage, etc. . . ? I think there are some who intend now to write like him, but no one is really able to do it, because he was extremely structured. And so those who try to write like him don't have the patience for the structure. I think there is only one writer, a young writer, who has taken Juan Luis Martínez and used his influence well. His name is Andrés Fischer; a young writer, well young for me; he was born in 1971. He constructed a poetry that is syllogistic, influenced a bit by me and a bit by Juan Luis Martínez, but he's different. You spoke a bit about the cow poems. Reading your work, one notices the use of nature and nature as a way of talking about political and cultural ideas, of talking about something other than nature. How did this happen? For me this is a mystery. It's a mystery, I don't know. The truth is, I'm a city person. I began to feel at one point that in the face of the violence and horror, nature had something permanent. That this existed before and it will exist afterwards. But why? But why so obsessively? I don't know. I think this is something that continues to exist in your work, even in your latest book, In Memoriam. Well, on the same subject the poems from La Vida Nueva that you wrote in the sky—how did this idea come about? That idea came about in the most desperate time of my life. I got the idea far before it happened, in 1975; it was at the time I burned my face and then I remembered that when I was a kid, a really young kid, I remembered having seen an airplane write the name of a soap in the sky. I didn't know if it was a dream or if I had really seen it because it was an extremely old memory. . . . And so then it occurred to me that it would be beautiful to write in the sky. This was 1975 and I was totally desperate, but thinking about this helped me to stay OK. . . .I thought about this, and I was able to escape from the horrors of life. And in practice, how did this function? How did you find pilots? Originally, we tried to do it with the Chilean Air Force, because I thought that if these same guys who bombed La Moneda (the presidential palace) for their government are capable of writing a poem in the sky, then it would prove that art would be capable of changing the world. Of course, it didn't happen. The idea went as far up as a commandante. Then we had some friends who were in the U.S. And I wrote to them and asked if they knew of any agencies that wrote advertisements in the skies with airplanes. And so how it happened . . . it was crazy. I had never even been in an airplane. But we arranged it all. Today I wouldn't be able to do it. It was through pure passion. We were able to get it filmed entirely for free. We sold in advance an

from Written on the Sky. Chilean poet Raúl Zurita talks about life after Pinochet by Daniel Borzutzky thepoetryfoundation.org

Sundance Film Festival - Snowstorm Photos

Snowstorm in the avenues above 7th and Main Street.

Festival traffic on Park Avenue.

Olympic Park on the way out of Park City.

Every year I see at least one film, in Salt Lake City rather than Park City, (to miss all the traffic and crowds). This year I didn't get tickets for a single movie. Big mistake. From all the buzz, local and national, this year will prove to be the best showing in the Festival's history. My stepdaughter attended the women art revolution film, and Gloria Steinem spoke. My brother-in-law saw his first festival film this year and said it was the most fun he'd had in a long time.

My daughter and I drove up last Saturday for the flashmob dance. We got there an hour early, so we hung out at the Starbucks people watching. We saw only one or two holy jeaned, high-heeled, or mini-skirted Festival goers. We also spent some time at the District Gallery taking in Sloane Bib's multi-media art and Ingrid Blixt's encaustic paintings.

Almost everyone we saw on the street was wearing the ubiquitous fur-lined parka, flat knee-hi boots, and fur lined flap hat.

The weather was so balmy at home, (around 45 degrees), that despite the storm warning, despite the knowledge that Park City is in the mountains, I only wore a turtle neck, heavy sweater, and a poncho. I left my fedora home. I thought I'd roast. I froze. So much so, that in case you can't tell, all the photos were taken from the comfort of my heated car.

The snowstorm quickly turned into a whiteout and it seemed improbable the flashmob would go forward, but even so, baby girl walked down the precarious wood stairs to the meeting place, while I waited in the avenues above Main Street. She returned freezing and snow-soaked. The Utahflashmob went on, an hour later.

We're going to the award ceremony tomorrow night, thanks to my sister, who is giving up her tickets.

What to wear? My daughter thinks she's wearing a mini and heels. I don't think so. I have no idea exactly what I'll wear yet, but I do know I'll dress for warmth. It's the mountains. It's Sundance, not the Oscars, so the vibe is Indie, authentic, warm. I can't imagine Harry Winston will adorn every earlobe, wrist, or throat. I may be wrong. I do know I will be wearing leather boots, layering sweaters and turquoise jewelry, and sporting a warm coat rather than a poncho.

Watch the Utahflashmob video on here.

Next year I'm getting over myself, getting a new coat, and going to the Festival. Idea: I think I'll blog from it, have my own version of flashmob, a flashunit where I'll flash interview random people in the streets, art galleries, movie goers, and barflys.

Poem Therapy: January 25, 2011 Beth Bachman - Erato

ERATO
Beth Bachman

Because of the struggle,
her arms and legs resisting,

you might take one look at the shape in the snow and say,

swan or angel,
something to do with the divine, the light,

always, bending back.
Or you might remember the way

a girl's tongue razes ice or catches the root of the word

muse: an open mouth,
a muzzle.

Perception is reality. Reality is not perception. Which is it? Must it be one instead of the other?

Our eyes lie to us. So do our hearts. We rush headlong to our destruction and negation thinking the mirror before us reflects love, fidelity, veracity, anything but our shadow. In the end the mirror reflects what we brushed away, that which we refused to see. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of our mistakes. We tell ourselves we will be careful next time, vigilant, eyes wide open.

We see what we need to see, hear only that which we can at the moment, accept only that which vibrates with our world view.

We see clear evidence of violence and search for metaphor and image to explain it slant: a rape scene is a lovely, if strange snow angel, as if only Jacob and the angel were come back to Earth and struggling against each other. Persephone is dragged to Hades by her robber groom and in consolation is made queen, her story muzzled in explanation and excuse. Blame the gods.

Blame our blindness on the muse, Erato, so lovely, so desired, she charms us into the vivid realm of our senses.

What I Made Today: Turquoise Cluster Charm Neclace - January 26, 2010.

Turqoise with pearl, cinnabar, turquoise cluster charms and vermiel findings.

The Coffee Project - January 20 - 25, 2011

January 25, 2011. Shaved, showered, and sporting a new shirt.

january 24, 2011. Scruffy and looking forward to a shower, shave, and a new shirt when the painter is thorugh painting.

January 23, 2011. Better.

January 20, 2011. Something of a bleak day.

Poem Therapy - January 20, 2011 at 2a;24 P.M.: The Teacher - Hilarie Jones

The Teacher
Hilarie Jones

I was twenty-six the first time I held
a human heart in my hand.

It was sixty-four and heavier than I expected,
its chambers slack;
and I was stupidly surprised
at how cold it was.

It was the middle of the third week
before I could look at her face,
before I could spend more than an hour
learning the secrets of cirrhosis,
the dark truth of diabetes, the black lungs
of the Marlboro woman, the exquisite
painful shape of kidney stones,
without eating an entire box of Altoids
to smother the smell of formaldehyde.

After seeing her face, I could not help
but wonder if she had a favorite color;
if she hated beets,
or loved country music before her hearing
faded, or learned to read
before cataracts placed her in perpetual twilight.
I wondered if her mother had once been happy
when she'd come home from school
or if she'd ever had a valentine from a secret admirer.

In the weeks that followed, I would
drive the highways, scanning billboards.
I would see her face, her eyes
squinting away the cigarette smoke,
or she would turn up at the bus stop
pushing a grocery cart of empty
beer cans and soda bottles. I wondered
if that was how she'd paid for all those smokes
or if the scars of repeated infections in her womb
spoke to a more universal currency.

Did she die, I wondered, in a cardboard box
under the Burnside Bridge, nursing a bottle
of strawberry wine, telling herself
she felt a little warmer now,
or in the Good Faith Shelter,
her few belongings safe under the sheet
held to her faltering heart?
Or in the emergency room, lying
on a wheeled gurney, the pitiless
lights above, the gauzy curtains around?

Did she ever wonder what it all was for?

I wish I could have told her in those days
what I've now come to know: that
it was for this--the baring
of her body on the stainless steel table--
that I might come to know its secrets
and, knowing them, might listen
to the machine-shop hum of aortic stenosis
in an old woman's chest, smile a little to myself
and, in gratitude to her who taught me,

put away my stethoscope, turn to my patient
and say Let's talk about your heart.

About five years ago I wrote a related flash short story Step into Suffering Not Your Own for a subtitle. Jones's Teacher alludes to this, the young woman holding in her hands the heart of an anonymous sixty-four year old woman who is left to wonder about the details of a life only through the clues of a cadaver.

I almost didn't read this poem because I hate teacher poems almost as much as I hate movies about teachers. I can not abide all the sentimental or vituperous portrayals. I'm glad I got over myself and I read this poem.

Each of us rarely find our true teachers in a classroom. Most of us stumble across our teachers at work, in the grocery store, in marriages, family, animal shelters, driving on the freeway, in a book, through adversity, illness, a crisis, friendship, in an enemy, shopping, at coffee houses, in nature, in the pages of a book, sitting in the crook of a tree.

Strange as it sounds, water is a great teacher for me. So are trees. Not so strange, books have always been my teachers. Now that I've been married twice, I understand the institution has been a great education even if I didn't pass, both times. Of all my teachers, it is my daughter who is my greatest teacher.