Dime

She danced, but she had a pocket --
she danced, but she had a thin
-- boys like her -- like her thin
-- boy likes her -- likes her thin
(there was a "k" to her thin back then)
-- he likes her -- speaking man-to-man
likes her thin, her dancing pocket
air, hips-lightening-lily -- likes her thin
-- then he splits her like a hair -- to give air
to her decision to like only him,
to stay thin,
to dig her own pocket,
to seed secrets as best & oily friends,
-- boy likes her -- likes her thin.

Technological prose

I found these prose/journalism/feed poems while searching my own name at google.com. In both, a line or two from my weblog, including my copyright statement, is repeated throughout the journalistic exercises. Has anyone seen something like it? Been named in one like it? The poems are based at commercialized-looking blog sites:

Ex. #1

Ex. #2

Dutch Elm Disease

Three of the largest trees in our front yard are to be removed to prevent spread of this disease.

Coneflower

Echinacea purpurea

Other letter (excerpt)

A., ... due to our recent revelation about I-Ching, I asked again about writing & me. ... It gave me "3" again, w/ several changing lines, so I read it carefully. Then I asked more simply about me, and it gave me "59". This is identical to what it gave in Houston, when I was so intent on studying it. So, I can look at those two hexagrams together or meditate about them. In Houston, you were "11" wh. is Peace. The hexagrams were that way as I phrased the questions -- about the person-in-the-world but also about their writing places in it. If that makes sense. The top line in "3" is very difficult & explains years of feeling luck ... there is a way, apparently, for the difficulties to be overcome, but sometimes they are too serious in that line. I am thinking so much of genre, as you likely know, and of "letters" wh. I wrote a lot (of editing those), of books (if any), of other designs, such as short story (where I started following earlier poetry), of poetry (of pub'g) if any. ...

... All of it [genre studies] sort of emerged by definition, as did spirituality in the main culture.

... B.L. mentions her dread of the abuse of language, and in some ways I feel that is how to define my pugilist arrogance in talking up to God, how breaking that was, how Greek & against Aries. ... Higher power, something no one in AA could help discuss, no one I met there, is more reasonable (for audience), lighter, sweeter, or God on high is watching on not addressed. I had none of that then & if anyone did, due to the nature of anonymity in the structured spiritual groups, no one said. The new agers/short-form poets/experimentalists-in-the-wings (waiting for others' falls) danced between lily pads w/o that strain to their next. ... Books I tried to find then in the stores were not there, bec. they had not been written yet, books I used later as "recovery" from that mistaken direction/path, defined as bipolar. ...

[This is all right.]

Today: Journal, July 21, 2007

"Today" is supposed to be the best day there is; today is the day that matters, the one that counts, the one to concern ourselves with, to live. Today has been a day of non-stop turmoil & panic & yesterday (who is my friend) brought awakening, knowledge, interest, intrigue, and some fear. I woke in the middle of the night. This has been happening, due to the telephone ringing, and I am good enough to answer, then plagued by the decision, and faulted for it if I lose sleep. We are not to answer the telephone in the middle of the night. Who calls besides drunks? No one. I used to call my manfriend crying in the middle of the night. I cried that I would not have sexuality afterall -- that was a big sob when I was thirty; I wasn't drunk. I can see crying about that. I would comfort someone crying about that. I understand that -- it's natural to believe sex is essential, but in reality, in practice, romance & sex do not work out for most people much of the time. People use each other to stave off loneliness & to get past despair & they create new boxes. Sex is a sad reason to be alone with someone. Yesterday I learned so much in one quick hour, that I would have hired me on the spot -- anyone who can learn as much as easily deserves glad recognition & constructive work. The decisions I am facing lately relate to smoking, coffee, stress, and men. I want women friends very earnestly & might do many new things to meet new ones. I do not want sex. This is just true & no longer a sad subject. I believe writing will result from my new direction.

Journal (continued), July 21, 2007

Because what is sex, afterall, besides conformity? Sex is produced by television. Sex is a bag of potato chips with a fat man. Why isn't he fat at the time? Why doesn't he stop whining & wincing & rejecting everyone foolish enough to get to know him? What is sex, really, except a false arrangement? A bypass to a trip to the gym? Why doesn't the fat whiner go to the gym & try his whining on someone there? It sounds like I’ve met a fat man; I haven’t, but I've met them before, and it’s always the same -- that I take a dim view of them later -- fat men are all alike. Why, if that is so, do I not like thin men, then? I have taken a stand against thin & short men -- not in themselves -- but for me. This has resulted in a mistaken willingness to meet fat men who joined the military or who snarl at their loved ones or who are too mean. Why are fat men mean? Does it make sense that they would be mean, when someone has been willing to know them? They ought to hide in shame if so, but they are fat, so they take up spaces. Not so with fat women. Fat women come in two sizes. Why do fat men & women not enjoy each other? Why don’t the good fat women take up with the good fat men? Let the snarling & whining fat ones enjoy it. At least I am not too thin to be restive. I look like a doe in the mirror. I look like a doormat, someone said, a two-cent; but to my eye, I look like a doe.

Texta on genre

from "Do It Yourself," a weblog entry by Christa Forster:

"I explained how I choose a genre in which to write: blog entries are about turning the daily into the daily bread. Fiction is about crafting art from an experience that seems ripe with symbolism. Poetry is about turning to the ether, pulling something from it, and through the imagination, creating something "Fanciful" from the sheer air: a rarity of the imagination, so rare that it makes the indecipherable plain. Poetry clears the mind's eye with all its glorious confusion. And there are no resolutions in poetry, only pauses."

Cafe Barbette in Minneapolis

Dear Physical Man:

The realtor I befriended in the cult once admitted that she had cellulite and then she apologized for her dark thoughts, and I didn’t know what was dark in it. It was a cloaked confession, since we were both in longer shorts, waiting for a picnic to start by Unison Lake. She said, we aren't even allowed to have cellulite, and I knew she didn't mean by the cult because neither of us perceived we were in a cult; she meant by her man. I thought my thoughts were darker. The headlines harm my gentle soul. If you were to read my thoughts, the day’s news might flash before you -- news I reject at the barrier between me & it -- and you might think I were news too. You cast me to your left, then your right, in your seeking a better woman, but you do not know me. I am so afoul of my genuine likes & dislikes that I write you, and you ignore me. I think of you before sleep. I protest to my non-cat, my bunched pillow, that people need to engulf someone at night. You're a sign in glorious physical gear.

Distressedly,

Donna

Dear Eunice:

That you wrote to me regarding our writing "experiment," our little coalition to create a new form of writing -- our fantasy to be in Playboy released -- isn't that how it came out? -- is a tremendous honor. I wanted to be in Playboy; you wanted to be in Playboy. Instead, you live in South Carolina with a husband who used to look at Playboy until he met you at 18 -- isn't that what you wrote? And I never even think about my Playboy goal, anymore, ever since I grew up & left high school & started to vote & came back home to Grange. Unbeknownst to me, under my surface, there was this aged, mouldy-bread, rock-hard former wish to be featured nude, and you had the same one, and we wrote, using a new form of writing (people in Grange are not my audience; people in South Carolina not yours). Probably, our audience is in England. Didn't the provost at the writing conference talk a lot about England? (I thought it was weird that a provost was leading a writing session, but maybe it's just me.) I've thought about your offer to move in with you and Lawrence while I recover from a.) my cult exposures (thank you for the offer, to be sure) and b.) from the rumor that I had probably had a baby & left it at a train station in Wyo. The cultists were making up stories like that about people, and we were required to attend the groups, anyway, even though they were basically ruining every day we ever had lived with their lies & invented religiosity. After going through that horrible set of years, I could not have believed that I harbored that old fantasy to be in Playboy. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be ironic in it or not. If I take you up on your offer, and at least visit you in S.C., we could try to write a collaborative story about the cult years -- I'll give it to you. The provost & his team would not like it, do not like collaborative or new writing, and would much rather read something conventional -- wouldn't they? We could knit a sign that reads, "Experimental Short Story," to hold up at the next conference. I'm just glad I met you & that we are friends.

Love,

Donna

Rose garden

Rida, rida ranka

To hear the tune & a sample of this folksong, visit Minnesota Folk Arts Directory. To read the words in Swedish & English translation, go here.

Housekeeping

If you are trying to find one of the following entries but unable, write to AMBogle@aol.com.

My Jane Eyre
Visiting in New York
Depression & poetry
Dr. Abuzzahab
The recent death of poet Sarah Hannah
Millness: On a stretcher
Diagnosis
Love
Waylaid (1999)
Ms. Sandman
Substance at stake
Honest Life
Growing Up Normal
The Cool Report
Idolatry
Working Numbers
Father-time
Subj: re: ...
What is a blog? What is a bogle?

Our House

Main flower garden, driveway, house ...

Yellow Stargazer (Lily)

Black Cohosh

Thinking Again

I certainly notice in your next post the use of the term "falsity," wh. I like, when describing fiction, better than the term "lies." I've heard two novelists (w/ whom I'm personally well-acquainted) claim that fiction is "lies." It's demoralizing to see it that way, I feel. I like "falsity" and its counterpoint "accuracy" better than "lies," since they might convey an adherence to or straying from artfulness as well as a certain relationship to facts that pertains differently to fiction and memoir. I like the feeling in "truth." I disagreed [with those & other writers & artists] when I felt expected to suggest that "truth," at best, meant hope of "honesty." "Decency," bet. people & bet. writer & reader, a controversy.

Rock band days

I said to a new person, "I had had this rock band thing" -- by way of saying my life had gone out to sea -- but since it hadn't been my rock band thing, but someone else's rock band, it took years to realize what I should have said when I showed up safe on shores of heaven, of home, "that rock band thing," instead of my faults & errors & the need for religions. The sailors were living in New York and Madison and Binghamton -- they had their addresses -- there had not been a sailor in any of the rock bands in Houston. There were guitar players, and as happens with talent sometimes, the guitar players were too talented. There could not be places for all of them in a single rock band. Too many of them were too talented and their birthdays were May 1 and Oct. 31, 1966. One was born on the same day & year as JFKJr. One was a Cancer and could overhear voices. Korn was one of their bands. They were mean or neglectful or cavalier toward women. Cavalier was kind of nice. In fact, I had myself wishing that the new person could be cavalier, to let there be a door ajar to the past. Instead, the new person was nice and I did not resemble the me from my rock band thing. He had been a bodyguard and had met many famous people -- not famous like my Pulitzer- and Nobel laureates -- famous like B.B. King -- and had once broken the arm of a man who had messed with a woman. He was telling me this in an Irish public house, and an American with an Australian accent, a sea-nymph, was listening to us -- he said she was rubbing up on him during the story, but I couldn't see it because she was on his other side. I had dreamt of it, to know that fury (to break an arm) as he quoted MacBeth.

Lake Minnetonka

Wayzata Bay at North Coast

Feather Reed

Karl Foerster grass; Hydrangea; red tuberous begonia

Garden vegetables

Flowering broccoli & garden lettuce

Footpath

This is where I pace, smoking, talking of poetry.