I love Halloween! The witches on their broomsticks or dancing. (Okay, yes, these women from the Wolf Hunter's Coven in Germany were celebrating Walpurgis, at Beltane time, but I love them, especially now on Halloween.) The harvest symbols and the idea that the veil between the living and the dead is thinner tonight than on other nights. That sounds magical, full of possibility, especially fruitful right now when I'm writing about history. And then of course there's dressing up, the invitation to be ghoulish or dark, and candy.
This year, I dressed up as Princess Leia with cinnamon buns because this is my son's first Halloween since he discovered Star Wars and not only do we just usually dress up with him, though usually less elaborately, but we're also Gen X parents who grew up varyingly obsessed with Star Wars. What's been really interesting for me though is that since Carrie Fisher died last year -- and I had loved her books but had lost track of her when I got pregnant, meant to catch up with her books, got busy, and then she died -- I've listened to her last several books on audiobook (her voice! totally worth it!) and so have heard her perspective and stories about the movies and her part in it. So being Leia is actually sort of special to me.
I'm sorry I haven't updated the blog is two-and-a-half weeks. After hitting that personal best after being really productive those weeks, I had other things going on -- my son's birthday, especially, as well as some work stuff -- and I haven't been able to focus much on anything -- not the garden, not the poems. That is, I mostly allotted the time for writing and showed up, but often felt at a loose end and that I was just wasting my time. But partly I'm not surprised that I couldn't maintain the productivity; my experience has always been that poetry resists scheduling, that writing productivity has its crests and troughs. And though I may not be driving (to mix my metaphors) very fast, I am still toodling down the road. It also occurs to me that in the last 2/3rds of the draft, I may need to have a different approach, especially as there are specific poems I want to write -- and a great many drafts still in past notebooks that must be excavated. Going through the notebooks is probably the best work I can do, though writing and trying to catch a wisp of inspiration is so much more fun.
In the last couple weeks, we've had lots of rain and lots of cold and the garden is done, and needs to be cleaned up and the garlic planted. I haven't done any of that. Starting tomorrow, I can work on that.
No pictures this time. My son is having trouble sleeping!
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Tomato Harvest, Writing Report, and Hearing Chana Read
To Tomato or Not To Tomato, with Freeloaders!
So blogging the shame of those tomatoes did the trick -- we got out there to harvest the tomatoes this past week. Not only was it about time, because we are overdue for first frost (tonight, they say), but we've also had pouring rains for two days straight.
So I started a bunch of different tomato varieties, and what came up and was hearty by the time I was ready to transplant (this is often how it goes -- I tend to garden in fits), I had a Silvery Fir Tree, an Amish Paste, a Jaune Flaume, a Nebraska Wedding, and a Roma. Now, if this is all we had, it would've been fine. But we also had an Isis Candy, which is prolific, and what I thought -- or hoped -- was Riesentraub, but what wasn't unless I had some strange strain that goes orange. The Isis Candy and the faux Riesentraub were the ones whose tomato cages went wonky several times during the growing season and finally, after one Michigan wind too many, went down altogether. Of course, these tomatoes just keep on going, which must be part of why I keep planting them because it's not because we're a family of such avid tomato-eaters.
A couple years ago, I didn't plant any tomatoes because I'd found before that we didn't eat them. Then last year I planted cherry tomatoes in droves because we'd tried out and loved a bruschetta a la Julie and Julia recipe, but the productivity of the tomatoes outstripped my love of the making and eating the recipe day after day. Then last year we discovered that we liked a particular tomato sauce with pasta recipe, so I thought I'd plant bigger tomatoes for sauce, but we discovered that we don't in fact like tomato sauce all that much -- except in stuffed bell peppers, which we discovered we love this year, though, of course, I didn't plant any bell peppers because we had too many that went uneaten the year before.
Now I admit that part of the continued tomato planting may be just because they are so fun to plant and so rewarding. But I have to get it into my thick skull that they do -- in this climate anyway -- pretty much all ripen up at once, which overwhelms me every time, especially if I'm rolling in tomatoes when it's already getting cold, when I only want warm things.
But we would've been okay with our harvest had it not been for. . .freeloader tomatoes!
So what happened was that last year I planted all those cherry tomatoes in this big raised bed I have. This year, I decided I would plant my son's sunflowers and pumpkins in there, trying to rotate the crops because we tend to have big problems with powdery mildew on our pumpkins. I was also worried that we needed to keep tomatoes out of there because last year for the first time we'd had what I think should be called Scary Alien Tomato Bugs (Tomato Hornworms -- yuuuuuccck -- really, just writing about them gives me the willies -- I'm embarrassed how quickly everyone in the house knows if I've spotted one -- or like the other day, touched one). Pretty early on, I started seeing tomato plants growing outside the bed. It was too difficult for me not to admire their tenacity, so, eventually, after they'd proved themselves and the pumpkins died a powdery mildew death incredibly early this year, I put up the tomato cage and wire to train the plants on.
And so we ended up having even more tomatoes. Here's what we got before the rains started.
Here you can also see some deformed Beit Alpha cucumbers. (These are amazing cucumbers, but I didn't tend them well this year. Last year they were like a dream. Yum!)
For the next few days, we'll likely also be eating our weight in green beans. Fall clean up and putting in the garlic is just around the corner (probably in November because my son's birthday and Halloween tend to just suck up my October energy). After the garlic and shredding the leaves to put on top of them, I hope to dig up my calla lilies and thin them out for the first time. (Gulp.)
Writing Report and My First Encounter with Chana
This week in accountability news I met my weekly goal of writing two pages of poetry (in this case, fairly revised), going through another section of my old notebook and pulling poems and scraps out, and moved forward on my transcription project of The Song of Songs.
I also beat my own personal best for number of new poems submitted in a single year! I am now officially more productive than I have ever been in my entire life. (It's kind of a weird feeling.)
So here's something I've been thinking about. Right after I graduated from college with a degree in English at Cal State Northridge, I moved to Sacramento. I had applied to various MFA programs in the Bay Area and had gotten into Mills College in Oakland, but had decided to delay. I got a job working as a secretary in a construction company. I regretted delaying almost instantly. I missed school, the intelligent conversation about things I cared about. I'd look longingly at Sacramento State College and the area around it (which is very funny to think about now as a professor). By the fall, I decided to audit some classes: a course on poetry in translation and a managerial accounting course. I no longer remember exactly why, probably just good sense, but I didn't continue with the managerial accounting course. I did audit the poetry in translation course. It was fascinating. That was where I first seriously studied Neruda. We read big sections of John Felstiner's Translating Neruda. I honestly can't remember all that we read but I do remember looking longingly at someone's bright yellow copy of Neruda's Canto General. I believe I did some kind of presentation, even, though I didn't have to. I wish I could remember -- or had computer files from those days.
The Poetry in Translation professor told us that John Felstiner would be reading in Berkeley at Black Oak Books on Shattuck, as part of a celebration of translation that Black Oak Books was having. So I drove the 90 minutes to Berkeley one night after work, and attended this celebration of translation. I believe there was another speaker before John Felstiner, who was probably amazing in his or her own right, but I don't remember who it was. I do remember that Chana Bloch read from her translation of The Song of Songs that night. Here's a taste:
My beloved is mine and I am his.
He feasts
in a field of lilies.
Before day breathes,
before the shadows of night are gone,
run away, my love!
Be like a gazelle, a wild stag
on the jagged mountains.
and
My beloved is milk and wine. . .
His cheeks a bed of spices,
a treasure
of precious scents, his lips
red lilies wet with myrrh.
The images were so succulent, they pierced right through me, no matter how tired I was, how out of place I felt. And this was the Torah, translated by a Jewish poet who looked a bit like my not-at-all-poetic grandmother. I was mesmerized. There she was, Chana Bloch, who taught at Mills College, where I'd already been accepted and had, for no earthly good reason, delayed. I enrolled part-time the next semester so I could take her poetry workshop. Of course, it was at Mills that I began writing about my family and Jewishness, the Holocaust and Israel, not only because of Chana, but with Chana as a role model. I remember she said her translation work was one of the ways she honored her Jewishness.
Chana Bloch, of blessed memory, died on May 19 of this year. She was a remarkable poet, translator, and mentor. My understanding is that she was writing poems in a fever up until the end. While I can't know whether that's true, I can say that when I emailed her to ask if she would blurb my chapbook (very long in coming) last year, she didn't hesitate; she printed out my chapbook and took it with her to the hospital, where she was having a week of chemo for her aggressive sarcoma. (Imagine that. I feel so honored she wanted to blurb it that much. I cherish that. Thinking of her belief in my work makes me think I should make her proud.) Last weekend, there was a memorial for her at Mills College, that dear place, where she directed the creative writing program for a long time. Of course, I couldn't go. But I'm thinking a lot about Chana as I work on this collection of poems on Israel/Palestine, as I transcribe her translation of the Song of Songs that so transfixed me more than twenty years ago, as I read her translations of Israeli poets like Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovich, and as I only now exceed how productive and inspired I was when I was under her tutelage at Mills. What hasn't changed is how inspired I am by her still.
I miss you, Chana!
So blogging the shame of those tomatoes did the trick -- we got out there to harvest the tomatoes this past week. Not only was it about time, because we are overdue for first frost (tonight, they say), but we've also had pouring rains for two days straight.
So I started a bunch of different tomato varieties, and what came up and was hearty by the time I was ready to transplant (this is often how it goes -- I tend to garden in fits), I had a Silvery Fir Tree, an Amish Paste, a Jaune Flaume, a Nebraska Wedding, and a Roma. Now, if this is all we had, it would've been fine. But we also had an Isis Candy, which is prolific, and what I thought -- or hoped -- was Riesentraub, but what wasn't unless I had some strange strain that goes orange. The Isis Candy and the faux Riesentraub were the ones whose tomato cages went wonky several times during the growing season and finally, after one Michigan wind too many, went down altogether. Of course, these tomatoes just keep on going, which must be part of why I keep planting them because it's not because we're a family of such avid tomato-eaters.
A couple years ago, I didn't plant any tomatoes because I'd found before that we didn't eat them. Then last year I planted cherry tomatoes in droves because we'd tried out and loved a bruschetta a la Julie and Julia recipe, but the productivity of the tomatoes outstripped my love of the making and eating the recipe day after day. Then last year we discovered that we liked a particular tomato sauce with pasta recipe, so I thought I'd plant bigger tomatoes for sauce, but we discovered that we don't in fact like tomato sauce all that much -- except in stuffed bell peppers, which we discovered we love this year, though, of course, I didn't plant any bell peppers because we had too many that went uneaten the year before.
Now I admit that part of the continued tomato planting may be just because they are so fun to plant and so rewarding. But I have to get it into my thick skull that they do -- in this climate anyway -- pretty much all ripen up at once, which overwhelms me every time, especially if I'm rolling in tomatoes when it's already getting cold, when I only want warm things.
But we would've been okay with our harvest had it not been for. . .freeloader tomatoes!
So what happened was that last year I planted all those cherry tomatoes in this big raised bed I have. This year, I decided I would plant my son's sunflowers and pumpkins in there, trying to rotate the crops because we tend to have big problems with powdery mildew on our pumpkins. I was also worried that we needed to keep tomatoes out of there because last year for the first time we'd had what I think should be called Scary Alien Tomato Bugs (Tomato Hornworms -- yuuuuuccck -- really, just writing about them gives me the willies -- I'm embarrassed how quickly everyone in the house knows if I've spotted one -- or like the other day, touched one). Pretty early on, I started seeing tomato plants growing outside the bed. It was too difficult for me not to admire their tenacity, so, eventually, after they'd proved themselves and the pumpkins died a powdery mildew death incredibly early this year, I put up the tomato cage and wire to train the plants on.
And so we ended up having even more tomatoes. Here's what we got before the rains started.
Here you can also see some deformed Beit Alpha cucumbers. (These are amazing cucumbers, but I didn't tend them well this year. Last year they were like a dream. Yum!)
For the next few days, we'll likely also be eating our weight in green beans. Fall clean up and putting in the garlic is just around the corner (probably in November because my son's birthday and Halloween tend to just suck up my October energy). After the garlic and shredding the leaves to put on top of them, I hope to dig up my calla lilies and thin them out for the first time. (Gulp.)
Writing Report and My First Encounter with Chana
This week in accountability news I met my weekly goal of writing two pages of poetry (in this case, fairly revised), going through another section of my old notebook and pulling poems and scraps out, and moved forward on my transcription project of The Song of Songs.
I also beat my own personal best for number of new poems submitted in a single year! I am now officially more productive than I have ever been in my entire life. (It's kind of a weird feeling.)
So here's something I've been thinking about. Right after I graduated from college with a degree in English at Cal State Northridge, I moved to Sacramento. I had applied to various MFA programs in the Bay Area and had gotten into Mills College in Oakland, but had decided to delay. I got a job working as a secretary in a construction company. I regretted delaying almost instantly. I missed school, the intelligent conversation about things I cared about. I'd look longingly at Sacramento State College and the area around it (which is very funny to think about now as a professor). By the fall, I decided to audit some classes: a course on poetry in translation and a managerial accounting course. I no longer remember exactly why, probably just good sense, but I didn't continue with the managerial accounting course. I did audit the poetry in translation course. It was fascinating. That was where I first seriously studied Neruda. We read big sections of John Felstiner's Translating Neruda. I honestly can't remember all that we read but I do remember looking longingly at someone's bright yellow copy of Neruda's Canto General. I believe I did some kind of presentation, even, though I didn't have to. I wish I could remember -- or had computer files from those days.
The Poetry in Translation professor told us that John Felstiner would be reading in Berkeley at Black Oak Books on Shattuck, as part of a celebration of translation that Black Oak Books was having. So I drove the 90 minutes to Berkeley one night after work, and attended this celebration of translation. I believe there was another speaker before John Felstiner, who was probably amazing in his or her own right, but I don't remember who it was. I do remember that Chana Bloch read from her translation of The Song of Songs that night. Here's a taste:
My beloved is mine and I am his.
He feasts
in a field of lilies.
Before day breathes,
before the shadows of night are gone,
run away, my love!
Be like a gazelle, a wild stag
on the jagged mountains.
and
My beloved is milk and wine. . .
His cheeks a bed of spices,
a treasure
of precious scents, his lips
red lilies wet with myrrh.
The images were so succulent, they pierced right through me, no matter how tired I was, how out of place I felt. And this was the Torah, translated by a Jewish poet who looked a bit like my not-at-all-poetic grandmother. I was mesmerized. There she was, Chana Bloch, who taught at Mills College, where I'd already been accepted and had, for no earthly good reason, delayed. I enrolled part-time the next semester so I could take her poetry workshop. Of course, it was at Mills that I began writing about my family and Jewishness, the Holocaust and Israel, not only because of Chana, but with Chana as a role model. I remember she said her translation work was one of the ways she honored her Jewishness.
Chana Bloch, of blessed memory, died on May 19 of this year. She was a remarkable poet, translator, and mentor. My understanding is that she was writing poems in a fever up until the end. While I can't know whether that's true, I can say that when I emailed her to ask if she would blurb my chapbook (very long in coming) last year, she didn't hesitate; she printed out my chapbook and took it with her to the hospital, where she was having a week of chemo for her aggressive sarcoma. (Imagine that. I feel so honored she wanted to blurb it that much. I cherish that. Thinking of her belief in my work makes me think I should make her proud.) Last weekend, there was a memorial for her at Mills College, that dear place, where she directed the creative writing program for a long time. Of course, I couldn't go. But I'm thinking a lot about Chana as I work on this collection of poems on Israel/Palestine, as I transcribe her translation of the Song of Songs that so transfixed me more than twenty years ago, as I read her translations of Israeli poets like Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovich, and as I only now exceed how productive and inspired I was when I was under her tutelage at Mills. What hasn't changed is how inspired I am by her still.
I miss you, Chana!
Sunday, October 8, 2017
Back Again: On Artichokes and Writing Goals
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine did a lovely thing, sending me a Facebook message booting me in the arse for not having gotten going on this blog. And since that moment (and before, when I was watering my garden and imagining how I would introduce my little garden to you), I've been wanting to get back here. I've thought it many times, but it's taken me until now to actually physically get back here and do it. (I had to finish out the teaching term and rest this past week blah blah blah.) But here on this blog, I want to focus on two things: my garden (and associated projects, like recipes, maybe, or herb experiments) and writing.
My Artichokes
I am from California, and I feel it, here in Michigan. We won't talk about my challenges with winter just now or the impossibility and anxiety that is snow driving -- that's just the obvious stuff. But though I've lived just about half my life now away from Los Angeles, I still have Angeleno eyes. When I look in the sky and see a real clear blue, just gorgeous, it's still a surprise, like my eyes expect to see the haze and smog, the gray skies of the San Fernando Valley. When will this place bore into me and change my eyes, my expectations? The trees here are a real yellow green, spring true green grass green here. The trees in southern California are all brown green, unhappy denizens of chaparel, not the gorgeous woods. Here I easily grow the peas and cucumbers I found difficult elsewhere. (Luckily my husband is also from southern California, so he shares my wonder. More than that -- he inspires me to see a lot more because he loves animals, and we have a pond and lots of animals. More on that later, I'm sure.)
But one thing I've never seen in the grocery stores here (not that I go all that much -- my husband does most of the shopping) is artichokes. Where I grew up, we had them in the grocery stores; my mother would buy them sometimes, and we'd steam them and eat them petal by petal dunked in melted butter. At the Renaissance Faire, you could buy them with homemade mayonnaise. But I've never seen them here at a grocery store (we don't have Trader Joe's here), never seen them at a farmer's market here. It's really important to grow what you love to eat (or suffer the fate of the tomatoes that are being ignored in our garden), so I started them super-early in the basement, then transplanted into one of our bigger raised beds. Here's what they look like now.
The artichokes are small, but there are quite a few. I'll have to harvest all of those tomorrow, I think.
In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamovitz says that plants can sense when we're standing over them. I'm pretty sure that my plants, especially the tomatoes and green beans, have lost all patience with me because they know all that I don't do. I'm the kind of gardener who lovingly tends each new tendril when I have time, but the harvest always comes rolling in when I'm super-busy or tired. In a play, you could suggest so much by a garden like mine, with the tomato cages blown over and bright red tomatoes popping out all over the place, signaling to the audience the gardener has been ill. (Wait, am I stealing that from Trifles?)
**************
On Writing Goals
I've been writing poems with serious intention (if not seriously) for over twenty years, and having written in a variety of situations, I know that I do better writing-wise, when I have community and accountability. Now, honestly, I've been doing incredibly awesome this year so far in terms of writing productivity: I have gotten more poems out this year than in any other year except when I was in my MFA program and focused, mostly, on writing poems and had as much community as I could handle (okay, it wasn't always perfect -- I can barely remember now, honestly). But this year has also been incredibly difficult for me in other ways, and I could really benefit from some more community. Not only do I not want to remain as isolated as I have been, but the project I'm working on -- about Israel/Palestine based on a citizen delegation I was on, but also my own study -- is difficult. And I also have a new tribe of poet and teacher friends and remember especially right now from friends old and new how wonderful it is to feel more connected. But right now I want to focus on accountability.
Goals until the end of the year:
-writing at least 30 minutes per day, but ideally morning and night, leading to
-2 pages of somewhat-revised poetry per week
-1 section of a past notebook gone through and poems or scraps pulled out per week
-continue with transcription project, which is currently The Song of Songs, translated by my recently-deceased teacher, Chana Bloch, of blessed memory (I have a lot to say about her, her influence in general, and her influence on this project -- another time)
If I can manage these goals, then I'll have a first draft of my collection of Israel-Palestine poems by the end of the year.
For the week that ended yesterday, I totally nailed it, writing 2 pages of poetry, going through one and some sections of a past notebook. (I write a lot -- but my problem is when I get busy, like the last nine years, I don't pull my writing out of my notebook and revise it often enough -- so I know that I have many workings of some central poems still not yet written drafted in these notebooks. I must rescue these proto-poems!) I also just radically revised a poem tonight. I'm on a roll, which, I'm learning is a good time NOT to push it, but to end.
Blessings and good vibes all!
My Artichokes
I am from California, and I feel it, here in Michigan. We won't talk about my challenges with winter just now or the impossibility and anxiety that is snow driving -- that's just the obvious stuff. But though I've lived just about half my life now away from Los Angeles, I still have Angeleno eyes. When I look in the sky and see a real clear blue, just gorgeous, it's still a surprise, like my eyes expect to see the haze and smog, the gray skies of the San Fernando Valley. When will this place bore into me and change my eyes, my expectations? The trees here are a real yellow green, spring true green grass green here. The trees in southern California are all brown green, unhappy denizens of chaparel, not the gorgeous woods. Here I easily grow the peas and cucumbers I found difficult elsewhere. (Luckily my husband is also from southern California, so he shares my wonder. More than that -- he inspires me to see a lot more because he loves animals, and we have a pond and lots of animals. More on that later, I'm sure.)
But one thing I've never seen in the grocery stores here (not that I go all that much -- my husband does most of the shopping) is artichokes. Where I grew up, we had them in the grocery stores; my mother would buy them sometimes, and we'd steam them and eat them petal by petal dunked in melted butter. At the Renaissance Faire, you could buy them with homemade mayonnaise. But I've never seen them here at a grocery store (we don't have Trader Joe's here), never seen them at a farmer's market here. It's really important to grow what you love to eat (or suffer the fate of the tomatoes that are being ignored in our garden), so I started them super-early in the basement, then transplanted into one of our bigger raised beds. Here's what they look like now.
The artichokes are small, but there are quite a few. I'll have to harvest all of those tomorrow, I think.
In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamovitz says that plants can sense when we're standing over them. I'm pretty sure that my plants, especially the tomatoes and green beans, have lost all patience with me because they know all that I don't do. I'm the kind of gardener who lovingly tends each new tendril when I have time, but the harvest always comes rolling in when I'm super-busy or tired. In a play, you could suggest so much by a garden like mine, with the tomato cages blown over and bright red tomatoes popping out all over the place, signaling to the audience the gardener has been ill. (Wait, am I stealing that from Trifles?)
**************
On Writing Goals
I've been writing poems with serious intention (if not seriously) for over twenty years, and having written in a variety of situations, I know that I do better writing-wise, when I have community and accountability. Now, honestly, I've been doing incredibly awesome this year so far in terms of writing productivity: I have gotten more poems out this year than in any other year except when I was in my MFA program and focused, mostly, on writing poems and had as much community as I could handle (okay, it wasn't always perfect -- I can barely remember now, honestly). But this year has also been incredibly difficult for me in other ways, and I could really benefit from some more community. Not only do I not want to remain as isolated as I have been, but the project I'm working on -- about Israel/Palestine based on a citizen delegation I was on, but also my own study -- is difficult. And I also have a new tribe of poet and teacher friends and remember especially right now from friends old and new how wonderful it is to feel more connected. But right now I want to focus on accountability.
Goals until the end of the year:
-writing at least 30 minutes per day, but ideally morning and night, leading to
-2 pages of somewhat-revised poetry per week
-1 section of a past notebook gone through and poems or scraps pulled out per week
-continue with transcription project, which is currently The Song of Songs, translated by my recently-deceased teacher, Chana Bloch, of blessed memory (I have a lot to say about her, her influence in general, and her influence on this project -- another time)
If I can manage these goals, then I'll have a first draft of my collection of Israel-Palestine poems by the end of the year.
For the week that ended yesterday, I totally nailed it, writing 2 pages of poetry, going through one and some sections of a past notebook. (I write a lot -- but my problem is when I get busy, like the last nine years, I don't pull my writing out of my notebook and revise it often enough -- so I know that I have many workings of some central poems still not yet written drafted in these notebooks. I must rescue these proto-poems!) I also just radically revised a poem tonight. I'm on a roll, which, I'm learning is a good time NOT to push it, but to end.
Blessings and good vibes all!
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