~unmasking~

The mexican sunflowers are happy in the garden - it is warm, beyond warm - and the sun is strong.  With much optimism, I have planted Kentucky Wonder pole beans this week, as well as cucumber (Marketmore 76), yellow crookneck squash, giant scarlet zinnias, sunflowers (misc), and garden heliotrope (Valeriana officinalis).

I plant.  I pack.  I weed.  Today I swam (for the first time in a long while, and it felt like -- like something I need to do regularly again.  It's the breathing I think, the rhythm of the breathing).  I write.  I edit.  I prepare food for the Ancient Wonder Beagle.  I sit in the Airstream.  Today I found myself opening storage areas under the sink and the living area's 'couch' and thinking that they were spacious.  That was positive.

I meet with my architherapist late tomorrow afternoon.  He has given me 'homework' and tomorrow will be important:  we need to decide where the stairways will go, how I will enter the house and from where - meaning that a decision on decks and porches should probably be made.  I want porches wrapping around the whole place, but I don't know if that's in my budget.  He and I emailed back and forth numerous times today -- where is the drive?  between which trees?  what about the setback from the tidal areas?  have I heard anything back from FEMA regarding flood zone?

Katherine returned this week from LA (not my LA, Lower Awendaw, but the other one) and Summer Poetry in Idyllwild - it seems that she had a fantastic time.  Her spouse, the poet Richard Garcia (who I've mentioned on these pages before) was one of their Poet's in Residence and helped teach the workshop in Intensive Poetry Writing.  The workshop sounds - fun, challenging, perfect - from their website:

In the Idyllwild Arts tradition - which holds that the diversity of participants enriches the learning experience for all - workshops are open to anyone with a serious interest in writing poetry, from beginners to published poets. The workshop faculty is comprised of award-winning poets who are also devoted teachers, and whose commitment is to creating a workshop environment that encourages creative risk-taking, discipline and attention to craft, and the building of a community of writers - with those more experienced writers taking a leadership role, and the newer writers offering the freshness of their perspective on the creative process.

Katherine talked a bit about her time in Idyllwild (including the accomplishment of being the first member of the lab to donate her hair to Locks of Love -- and yes, mine has a ways to go), and about how she got to spend some time working with Terrance Hayes, a poet that she speaks very highly of, and one that I'm suprised has not been presented in these pages before (is that possible?).  Here's a bit about Hayes, a biography that I found here:

Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina on November 18, 1971. Raised by his parents, James and Ethel (Seabrook) Hayes, Terrance became a well-rounded athlete and scholar. In high school, Hayes was an accomplished athlete as well as a creative writer and artist. His accomplishments on and off the basketball court paved the way for his acceptance into college and Hayes eventually earned a scholarship allowing him to attend Coker College.

Hayes continued to do well in college, and his athletic and academic achievements earned him Academic All-American distinction. During his senior year, one of Hayes' professors turned his attention to poetry and Hayes knew he wanted to write poetry for the rest of his life. Majoring in English with a minor in Fine Arts, Terrance received his B.A. at Coker College in 1994. Three years later, in 1997, Terrance's love life prospered along with his education. He married poet Yona Harvey and the couple eventually had two children, Ua and Aaron. Hayes went on to earn his M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Pittsburgh that same year and decided to put his teaching, writing, and artistic skills to the test.

After his education was completed, Hayes became an assistant professor of English at the Xavier University of New Orleans from 1999 to 2001. While teaching, Terrance became concerned with African American culture and decided to write poetry focusing on the culture itself rather than how it is defined by American society. His first book of poetry, Muscular Music, was published in 1999. The images within the poetry refer to dominant white popular culture and the way it impacts African American identity. This imagery can be found within Hayes' poem “What I Am” in which he says

I'm standing in the express lane (cash only)
about to buy Head and Shoulders
the white people shampoo, no one knows
what I am.

Hayes also used cultural icons such as Shaft, Fat Albert, and Miles Davis within Muscular Music to address societal issues and show what it means to be an artist and a black man in American culture. According to Black Issues Book Review critics Duriel E. Harris and Kelly Ellis, Muscular Music is “an original, provocative read” showing the “melodies of a thoughtfully evolving male self.” Other critics agreed, and Hayes' first book of poetry won him the Whiting Writers Award in 1999 and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2000.

Hayes went on to confront racism, sexism, religion, family structure, and stereotypes in his 2002 book Hip Logic. The cover of the book even featured one of Hayes' oil paintings. More importantly, though, were the poetic works found inside. Terrance's overwhelming imagery can be found in one particular poem, “Gun/Woman/Son.” Here, Hayes describes the 1952 shooting of a mother as she holds her son and the escape of the shooter afterwards. In the poem, Hayes focuses on how the mother

shifts
the baby, my father, to her clean side
& drops the bullet in the ashtray beside her pipe.
The shooter runs, his gun shucked into high grass
like a crow with no beak.

Powerful images such as this allowed Hip Logic to become the 2001 National Poetry Series winner, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry lovers throughout the World are eagerly anticipating more works from Hayes. His third book of poems, Wind in a Box, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2006 and has already won Hayes a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2005 Best American Poetry selection for works featured within it. Terrance Hayes currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife and two children and enjoys teaching in the Creative Writing Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Yep, Hayes is a South Carolina man.  Katherine mentioned something that he said during the time she spent with him, something about how amazing the world would be and our lives would be if we presented our true selves to the world at all times - if we all unmasked ourselves.  Tonight I think about this, and wonder how unmasked I am, how unmasked I could be - given the necessary comfort level.  But I suppose it should be regardless of comfort.  Perhaps?  I don't know.

That's something to think about on this warm, still evening.

So Katherine presented these two anagram poems, by Hayes, for the lab yesterday during our weekly   meeting.  Yes, the silly, hard-working, and passionate lab.  The lab that puts up with me asking them to pose as if they're pondering amazing data (when what they actually said was that we would have to take a photograph of my head, and have my floating head be what they were looking at...and as you can see, that hasn't happened, and hopefully it will not!).  The summer is coming to a close, and the three undergraduates have only a few more weeks left.

Oh, the poetry...      

Ambulance by Terrance Hayes

Some fool ignores the manual
Accompanying his sparkling ACME
Chainsaw.  Or maybe someone orders spoiled cube
Steak from a diner menu.
Or can't refuse his twelfth shot of Jim Beam.
Whatever the case, those who balance
Mercy on a gurney of red & blue
Light will come to the rescue.  One medic able
to juggle bags of blood while his partner zigzags the fast lane.
The ghosts of your grandparents will lean
Above you asking your name, but you won't have a clue.

<><><><>

Beckoned by Terrance Hayes

Has your memory ever been
an unfenced county?  A bend
in the road?  I was down on one knee
forging a bond
with an unlucky leprechaun.  I said Bring the Eden
of first love here!  Suddenly, my neck
was leeched with hickeys.  The keen
finger of a ghost clacked down by backbone
& I was lost in the district of need.
I'd known the way home once,
but now the past had its own area code.
--
   

Comments

[The County Clerk]

Too many thoughts.

But mostly I'm stuck on: "Has your memory ever been
an unfenced county?"

I'll come back,

[Pam]

CC: The past having it's own area code isn't too bad either - but I suppose that we should always be grateful for such an expanse...don't you think?