Elinor Nauen

I've done the training & will soon start volunteering in a program that helps new immigrants improve their English language skills by means of conversation. I think it will be fun & right now feels like something useful without being fraught. "English in Action" is part of the English-Speaking Union, a huhdred-year-old organization that also sponsors speakers and a Shakespeare contest, among other activities. 

4 good readings last night at the Bowery. Very bold to have 4 men poets on the bill: Joel Lewis, Mitch Highfill, Mike DeCapite, Edmund Berrigan read, in that order. Each different & well-prepared. Joel read about his upbringing as a jazz fan, Mitch riffed on Emily Dickinson, Mike read a moving story ~ how he loves New York City! & June!, and Eddie's works were compact, witty, & wise. The series, in its second year, continues to attract & create a community. 

In many ways, a perfect day, because what I like to do on my birthday is have a long soak, in part while yakking on the phone ("Are you in the BATH?!") then enjoy all the messages from every corner of my life, starting with a friend from kindergarten. Lunch at Mogador with my beloved & tonight, poetry at the Bowery. This is as good as the parties I used to throw. 

Our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice.

~ Upton Sinclair

It's easy to see the cowardice of Republican senators like Collins & Murkowski but less easy to see exactly what any of us not in a position of power can & should do. Rush the barricades & be taken out in the first wave? (I hope I'm speaking symbolically.) How many opportunities for bravery are any of us going to have? I'm not even sure what the right questions are. 

In 1971, we had a 1970 dayglo calendar of a carrot on the wall of The House in Maryland where most of us were in the Air Force (or the Air Farce as we called it) or part of a larger group that had managed to find each other & share values, goals, ideals, and LSD. Those of us who were really there are always there. We wrote phone numbers & sayings & reminders on the carrot calendar. An artefact of the time: "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope" was one of the witticisms. I ended up with the carrot & eventually sent it to Teresa, who has it framed in her house in Cuenca, Ecuador, where she has lived for the last dozen or so years. (She gave me Sam's AF shirt, still after all those years only a little ragged around the cuffs.) Every Thursday Steve in SC makes a flower arrangement & tags whoever is having a birthday that week. For the last many years he has included a carrot in my birthday arrangement. People always love it, speculate on the meaning, "unique" is a common descriptor, a sign of spring. We know it as a symbol of our lifelong love & friendship & fellowship of The House. 

Ah all that flying caught me in the lungs. No sleep: instead I KOFF. 

I plan to be coherent tomorrow. 

Or soon.

For a long time I knew all the neighbors in my 16-apartment building: their names, occupations, hometowns. Then apartments began to turn over faster, and less-friendly young people moved in, generally to renovated spaces where they were paying 3 or 4 times the rent of the long-timers. I suppose they didn't have time to socialize when they had to work 2 jobs to pay for a place with a real bathroom, rather than a tub in the kitchen like I have.

Yesterday, my neighbor told me she had let the police in to do a wellness check on a nanny, except the guy in that place isn't, & is fine, & I realized which apartment they must have meant (if they had the right building at all). And I realized that I once again know most of my neighbors, at least by sight & to nod to. I believe the next few years have to be about community, standing up for & protecting each other. Knowing who's in the Ezra Pound: it's a start. 

Promise the weak strength and have the strength of a thousand weak at your bidding.

~ William Carlos Williams, from "Red Eric," In the American Grain

I'm more interested in moving forward than parsing how we got here but because it's my main man, WCW, saying it, & a hundred years ago at that (In the American Grain was published in 1925), I'll lay it here. He certainly didn't mean to be congratulating anyone for being strong, but analyzing "weaklings holding together to appear strong" and how hard it is to be alone. 

That beautiful South Dakota sky and a historic church in a place where my friend Nils had generations of relatives. I'm grateful I could be there for his funeral, despite how sad & wrenching it was and is. Most of all grateful to be there with old friends, all of whom go back to 7th grade and one who was in my second-grade class. We all marvel & rejoice that we've stayed connected all this time. It was worth traveling 20 our of 40 hours to be there & be home the next night. 

I was giving my health history & she asked if I drank coffee. Yes! When did I start? I knew the answer: as a hitchhiker, people often offered to buy you a cup of coffee & it would have been rude not to accept. I guess it made the transactional ride become more like a favor. I didn't drink coffee until the, but that was when I began to. Occasionally, a driver would buy me a sandwich or, memorably, a fantastic Italian lunch in Worcester, Massachusetts, but usually it was coffee.

That memory is locked in! she said. 

This morning I have an appointment on the Upper West Side. Tomorrow I'm flying to Sioux Falls. Going uptown feels more adventurous. I don't think I ever go up there without looking at a map. Where is Amsterdam Ave in relation to Broadway or Columbus (is that even the name of the street)? What a hick I am! Whereas, LaGuardia Airport is a familiar destination & then I don't have to look at any map at all. I will deplane in my hometown & someone I have known most of my life will pick me up. I didn't always like the coziness of being from somewhere, a small hometown at that, but I do now, from so far away & long ago. 

Update: I got off the train at 72 St, what turned out to be 2 short blocks away from where I was going, and spent 20 minutes circling around trying to find the address. 

Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic is a wonderful account of the author's relationship with his father and with the classics. It made me long for the pleasures and difficulties of ancient Greek, and also has taught me a lot about Homer and his work. 

Even an indifferent OK bad cook ought to be able to make a decent plate of pasta. You would think. Even Johnny, the most unfussy eater, picks at what I make. It was full of vegetables! it had sauce! And "that stuff" (Parmesan)! Well, at least I won't be cooking again until March. 

Shouldn't you know this? 

~ Miss Ellen Skaff (1912-97), Latin teacher at Washington High School, Sioux Falls. South Dakota

in honor of her & her devoted student & my friend since junior high, Nils Grossman (1951-2025)

She also frequently told us that we have an advantage because of studying Latin, which turned out to be totally true. 

What a star! Check out Lucy Sante's shout-out in the NYT Book Review on January 30 (if the link doesn't work). BrokeDown Palace is a great book, Maggie's account of being a paramedic in Times Square in the '80s & much more: a mystery in which she tracks down remnants of the dismantled hospital, a biography of Mother Alice, the nun who set up the first AIDS ward in New York, and in general life in this city when it was at its craziest. 

Maybe he spoke to me because I did a couple of katas to warm up before class at my gym today. A potbellied man my age (or possibly quite a bit younger) told me, without preamble, that he used to run hurdles in high school & that he's only taking this class because he has a muscle strain. He seems to have had the same idea I did before I actually took an Aurora "old folks" class, that I would show those doddering decrepits a thing or 2. Ha! First class I could barely keep up. OK, hurdles. Then that he had just been elected to his home state's hall of fame. Men & their egos. Any competence, even an unrelated one, in a woman can quickly bring out the urge to one-up us. As Frank O'Hara writes in the great essay or rather manifesto "Personism": If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep." He was talking about that in the context of writing poetry ("you just go on your nerve" but apparently my (very nice) kata was mugging him. 

oops, have to strip this out of my blog so I can have it published & truthfully say it hasn't been so before. 

("Things I Didn't Notice")

Thanks for liking it, DB. We'll keep it to ourselves. 

That's Johnny reading his poignant story "Mother of God" last night at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the NY Poets Series. It's really NY Friends": not only poets. "Mother of God" is his riff on Chekhov's "Misery," set in the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York and featuring an unsympathetic Archie Bunker-type that you can't help caring about, despite how wrong he is about "homo-sexuals" in general and his son in particular, who he loves but doesn't understand. Johnny has had it hard for so many years now; it was wonderful to see him struggle & shine. 

Really, how does anyone get through all the books when all one can do is doze? And when I'm awake, I'm either buying books or ordering them from the library. I'm not complaining: one of the great joys of my life is that I will never run out of things to read. 

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

~ George Orwell

We all think every day about how to resist, how not to be complicit, how to remember what the truth even is. It's hard. 

W saw Slap! last night, about a Ukrainian artist named David Burliuk, who was a futurist in Siberia, Japan, and New York. It featured my old pal Bob Holman, full of beans & wit, and bandura master Julian Kytasty. Presented by Yara Arts Group in the small basement space on East 9th Street where Ellen Steward got her start. Well-done, informative, important, & fun: what're you waiting for? It's there til February 9.

What's the gayest city in the world?

You have to guess. 

Yeah, figure it out. 

There is an answer but I can't say it here. (The answer is dirty.) (That's a hint.)

Last year's Old Friends readings at the Bowery Poetry Club really solidified a community & this year's are doing the same. Andrei Codrescu, Lila Dlaboha, Simon Pettet, Anselm Berrigan, Donna Dennis, & Tony Towle read last night & last week. Coming up:

1/28: 

Lee Ann Brown – Johnny Stanton – Anne Waldman – Don Yorty

2/11:

Marcella Durand – Wanda Phipps – John Yau

2/18:

Edmund Berrigan – Mike DeCapite – Mitch Highfill – Joel Lewis

2/25:

Jaime Manrique – Nancy Mercado – Edwin Torres

3/4:

Ed Friedman – Bob Holman – Bob Rosenthal

P.s. Happy birthday, Lord Byron & Sam Cooke. Now there's a reading I'd go to!

Country Hit

I have to confirm that this hasn't been published. Only maybe 2 people saw it here so I think it's OK to delete it & truthfully say it's not been published.

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

~ Robert Browning

Too often it means looking away when we should face reality. Too often it means complicity. 

I didn't take a single picture on the way to Baltimore or while I was there. The only visual souvenir I have is a sketch of me that Joe Giardano did while I was reading. I'll take that, along with the hugs with Baltimore & DC friends, the laughter I got during my reading, the enchantingly gray New Jersey Turnpike (I'm not joking: I love its endless monochrome; I can keep going forever is what it feels like, a Midwestern sense that the road keeps going & going). 

On the Road with William Carlos Williams

Leaving for Maine in the morning

I can't decide:

Pictures from Breughel or Paterson.

Oh me oh my

 
I almost always take Breughel.

I used to take Paterson.

 
Once a truck driver picked me up hitching.

It was too noisy for the usual where-ya-froms

& I pulled out Paterson

which he said he'd read in school.

 
He took me to a steel mill in Gary

Indiana in the dawn.

I never get far from WCW. I still take a book of his pretty much whenever I travel. And off I go to Baltimore, WCW in hand. 

I know what's going on in the world, all right? But I get to do what I DO, which is write poetry & share it with people, & maybe cheers us all up. I can't help it, I'm from the Midwest & people laugh at even my saddest poems. And there's still a week before we have a felon fascist in the White House, so I'm gathering my rosebuds while I may. 

Johnny has had increasingly bad ("profound," the audiologist said) deafness for quite some time now. Everyone who knows him has been hollering at him to do something. Finally, he did, & what a difference. To have a conversation where I don't have to repeat &/or scream everything I say is a relief to both of us. Even though it was entirely for the purpose of being heard, he took it that I was yelling at him & I felt he was ignoring me. In just half an hour we were happier than we have been in ages. I can't see them even though I know they're there, that's how discreet they are. The world opens up. 

He said, What's that noise? And it was the microwave, which shows how deaf he'd gotten.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

~ Samuel Johnson