Art

Last weekend the Lower Arroyo hosted an art installation from Newtown called "Re-Imagining the Arroyo." 

No description in the program matches our bird friend. I don't know who made it or what it's called. Please let me know if you have information. It's a wonderful piece. (see the comments)

Elizabeth Garrison deconstructs the California state flag. The bear is fuzzy. You can pet him. Did you know that California is the only state in the union that has an extinct animal on its flag? Notice the gun.

 

Poet Linda Dove shared this part of the exhibit with Elizabeth. I love how the sunlight shines through the plaque and projects the poem onto the ground. To partially quote Linda's poem, A Love Letter to California, "In the nation of red, a single star glows against sky. It says, the light must fall through traps and mix again with earth." 

We enjoyed the large pods (four of them) by Leonard Rusch. This installation was called "Acoustic Artifacts." Rusch's sound system wasn't working when we were there, but it didn't matter. Tucked beneath the trees as though they had always been there, the pods were cool and they had their own sounds.

Dangling from trees throughout the Lower Arroyo were several "Yo-Yo Men," by Cindy Jackson. John emulates this one for you.

We liked much of it, didn't like all of it. You would like different stuff than I liked. Such is art.

We talked about whether or not art is necessary. I think it is, but your necessary art is not the same as my necessary art. Does the world need Camelot & Vine? No, but I needed to write it.

So here's my segue: please come to the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse this Thursday night, November 7, 7-9pm, for their Welcome the Holidays party. I'll be there along with authors Dianne Dixon, Michael Mullin and Allen Griffiths. It's a family party with stories, games, free wrapping, personal shoppers, a raffle and refreshments. Get your book signed! Have some punch! Win something!

The store is full of art, some necessary, some un. You decide.

Guest Author: Linda Dove and "O Dear Deer,"

Linda Dove is that rare creature: a published poet. Besides her acclaimed books she has published poems in the L.A. Review, The Antigonish Review, Clackamas Literary Review and more, and has won several poetry awards. Please welcome today's guest author, Linda Dove.

I’ve encountered a few unexpected moments on the way to becoming a writer. After I published my first book of poems in 2009, I was surprised with the sense that I needed to take on a new voice, a new technique. Most folks would tell you to stick with what’s worked, or—more insistently—that you should keep to what you know, that you should write out of your authentic place. “Authentic” is a much-bandied-about word in writer circles, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what they mean by it. In any case, I felt like I wanted to try the sort of experimental writing that made my heart race when it was done well. I admired it because I didn’t understand it.   

So I did a lot of reading. For two years, I read everything I could get my hands on both in print and online—poetry collections, chapbooks, journals, anthologies, criticism, book reviews, theory. I followed poets on Twitter, 20 years my junior, who were starting innovative presses and e-zines. I not only read blogs, I read the comment sections of blogs, where the meatiest—some would say the nastiest—debates were happening. I once found myself sitting alone at a table in a decrepit Denver ballroom, which was sagging with Christmas lights though it was April, as I sipped red wine and waited for a packed house of Hot Young Poet Things—those who had never known a world without the internet—to present their work. If you perceive some anxiety about my age coming into play, you wouldn’t be wrong. I knew no one and was sporting the only gray hair in the room. At least I had an iphone to look busy with. 

In the midst of this re-education project, I got called for jury duty in downtown L.A. Surprise! I was launched into an alternate universe, full of odd-sounding legalisms and morgue photos and testimony about gang tattoos. My jury experience became the basis for my chapbook of experimental poems, O Dear Deer,, although I hadn’t planned on writing about the trial, which seemed too raw, too complex.  Wasn’t it wrong—sort of unholy—to experiment with so much grief? But I realized that, the more fragmented the lines, the more they spoke to human brokenness. I didn’t try to recount the events that led to the trial in my poems. Instead, I became fixated on deer, antlers, trees. Where clarity would have collapsed under the weight of its own detail, abstraction made room for what was truly authentic: the fact that nothing would ever be the same. 

My books are available at Amazon and, locally, at Webster’sFine Stationers. Please join me at two upcoming readings, where I’ll be introducing the poems from O Dear Deer, : 

Two Heads are Better Productions Presents the Kulture FaCtory’s Sundays at Ellouise, 55 Waverly Drive, Pasadena, Sunday, September 18th at 4:00 PM, $5 cover charge. This appearance is a “10 for 10” reading, which means you’ll get to hear 10 of us read for 10 minutes apiece—short but wide and sweet. It also happens to fall on my birthday! 

Webster’s FineStationers, 2450 N. Lake Ave., Altadena, Saturday, October 15th at 6:00 PM. This reading is happening in conjunction with one of Webster’s regular wine pairing events, "Latin Wines for a Passionate Evening," which will be held from 4:00 to 6:00 PM, so that’s added incentive to come out and have some vino with your verses. They'll keep pouring wines through the poetry reading, and there'll be food, too!

In Defense of Poetry

photo inspired by John Sandel

April is National Poetry Month and in honor of this great occasion I am not going to post a poem I have written.

Instead, I recommend you mark your calendar for this coming Saturday, April 10th at 5PM and meet me at Vroman's to celebrate. Five poets (real ones), including Altadena's own Linda Dove (In Defense of Objects), will read from their works. Be there or be conventional.

Wait.

Be there or be bourgeois? No. Be there or be...I'm sure there's a better way to say this.