Renee Marie

How Water Is Drawn

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:05:04 -0700

Boulder Creek by Cosmography

The rush and push
of the water
foamy near rocks

and brown like
morning coffee
pouring and pouring itself

forward, forward
pulling along sticks, leaves
detritus.

The old, old rock
good place to sit
dangle feet in water

watch splash of
water meeting
rock--

I remember Joanne
Kyger poem about
a stone from Boulder Creek.

I remember Lorine
Niedecker's "Paean to Place":
'And the place was water.'

The water flows
downward, goes
back to its source.

I flow with it, know
I can sit
by it without thought

of anything pulling
at me or making
me do.

The water flows
from mountains, from reservoirs
full of melted snow--

not for swimming, those reservoirs
but my inner
reservoir

I draw from
like Lorine's
'fish and fowl'.

I draw from the water, sip
pristine liquid,
laugh.

And if my reservoir
is drained
how to refill it?

Can I draw from
the mind-reservoir
and not deplete it?

Can I sit by the water
and take nothing
from it?

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Epic composed of lines from About Now: Collected Poems of Joanne Kyger

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:20:32 -0700

Yabyum

                                                                    Superabundance

                                                                                  May it shower

                                                                                                     down
                                                                    like baby
                                                                                  peony
                                                                                           petals.

I am brave
I tell him the truth.
I need:

Replacement Buddhas...
The secret of the spoon...

which although they do not exist in reality
seem to do so.

                            --I thought I could be his nurse
                              & heart & soul
                              and I see he is the leader
                              I look at him emotionally
                              sexually...

                             Deer Lady
       is dressed in human clothes
Someone wants to make love to her.
She kisses him...
                                   In the dark
the spotlight shows the passionate couple
in a yabyum embrace. She is the rustle of
the top most branches and the sigh of
new green grass.
                     His eyes they are the same
he has been here for three
thousand years.
                      "I see the unicorn before me"
                      thinks she.
An excitement from the position of
his body.

He is poised as if to make
balance
in the universe.

           For how long we sit
                                      in quiet
                                               no speech
                                    creates a
                                                tie
                                 between us
                                                for I am young & yet
                I know what I am doing.

Heaven
explodes the walls
against the pattern of fleur-de
-lis and marigolds

And seasons spring
and fall.

                               Soft as
           a throw of silk
           she said, perhaps
           I dreamed it all.

           The length & breadth
           of all that chasing
                     &
           how Homer dislikes Paris
           sneaking through his home.
           He has              little rival
           and lets no one know.

The real earth
moves and falls away into pieces
in the north.

I am mortal.

                                                                       You dream of me

                            a deeper forest I came from

running for

                      the center where                    you look too.

A jeweled tree poet's tree--

I look around at the                                         shimmering

                                           energy

                                                          from things that seem as symbols.
I am curious

                      for what you can bring
                                                                from the tree.

You called to the words
and the waters went up in mist
then the soft earth came to sight.
We shall circle here
singing for the evening star.

Time is moving out from under us

Who are we
                          Who are we

                 violet of memory's flat plain

we embrace, swallow the sea

walk, past centuries into poetry

form pleasant contemplation of innocence

in lucid suspension sing.

Monkey man is leading me by the hand
past lovers so entwined
I levitated
in the most elevated
State of the Union.

And back to the body
where I was born:

                        pink tips that are fingers
                        eyes sparkling
                        heart-shaped bottom...

            I love her
                         and him.

Can you see you're it
Oh Moon

              He makes love to you
              a life time.              Plays
              to as many people as he can...

Who am, was, I?
All of it, all of it.

I am here at 3
now it seems I lead.

A lady in white
bathed by my own silver light.

FATHER TIME
& MOTHER EARTH

thought about all of you last night
and a great blue heron came up
and the other animals came close
all gods in the human breast.

O don't let me swoon

You intercepted my vibes.
that's fine.
Now you have a sweet tone.
tree holes.
boobies.
smooth countenance mind transmission.

                  I am a writer.
                  I will not dwell
                  on the question
                  of why.

Psyche is not a personal
but a world experience.

                  I am in a bed in a hotel
                  having a talk with consciousness.
                  OK, I am actually in bed with _____.

                  I exist outside time &
                  this world I called my own
                  opens out.

Sometimes I lay in the bathtub chanting OM

I know I don't suffer more than anyone

I read Cixous, Jung

The feminine spirit infuses these words.

I sing:
          You showed me the meadow
          and milkwood and silkwood
          and you would if I would
          because threads that are golden
          don't break easily.

Joanne sings:
                      Me is memory
                                              take me out

                      May your flowery face
                                                        bow

                      In the teeny
                                          trembling world.

I am that which god wants
brilliant quince in bloom
we meet once again, friend.

                     Electric enlightenment
                                 is in
                     your   sexy   heaven

which I am inventing

O My Big One

(we make it up as we go along)

Come back!

Your presence is an aphrodisiac.

I know this is a detective story
of passions, blood stuff
around which our lives crank
in a friendly sinuous manner
sultry as a New York poetry trip
where we danced all night under
electric candlelight. Worthy
to uncover the hidden home
of the Dakini, wash, bathe, lay
papers with meaning aside.
The rare jewel, the rare jewel
caught in the net invisible.
I must be transplanting thoughtforms,
like transplanting poppies,
I am noting your strong ripply
vibration aura
and making you a new flower
from my inner world.

--Ann Arbor to Pennsylvania
May 11, 2008

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"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing"

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:44:23 -0700

Uploaded on January 10, 2007
by conceptvessel

"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing
or known to have existed
but differs from other animals
more in his extraordinary mental
development than in anatomical
structure . . ."
Well when I think of men
I think of then in a sexual manner
Otherwise, I don't notice the difference, you know

being absorbed as being one just thinks 'people'
and not 'male' and 'female' so much as someone
to talk to. And how men are all

the same being born from Man and Woman and out
of a woman's body commonly known as 'Mother.'

"And God said let us make MAN in our own image,
after our likeness and let them have dominion."

And "Nature may stand up
and say to all the world,
'This was a MAN!'"

And then "I pronounce you MAN
and wife."

Daddy you is dandy

when you're here. Shrill and soft old Autumnal

wind blow and we are tucked below

the shallow soil where seeds spring
up and wither quickly
flirting madly.

I've got him now,

the beautiful one for my part

of the year here in my dark
and expensive underground
all mine before he is shared

and killed again by the fearless boar
he is hunting and torn apart
and his blood runs out and red roses and anemones

bloom and it is spring and
he is gone again

That man about town gone again . . .

~Joanne Kyger

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I have been reading Joanne Kyger again...

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:18:54 -0800

During Naropa University's Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :

Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching at Naropa University and The New School in San Francisco.

Joanne Kyger’s writings include:

Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000

About Now: Collected Poems

In her essay "Joanne Kyger's Poetry" in Coming After: Essays on Poetry,

Alice Notley states:

Kyger's influence on my own practice--and on many other women's--has been considerable; she's one of the women who's shown me how to speak as myself, to be intelligent in the way I wish and am, rather than suiting the requirements of established intellectuality. Universities are frightfully conservative because they love their traditions and especially their language; idiomatic truth can't get born there, or anything that has to be new, not just wants to be.

Yuppy Wittgensteins Arise!

She writes

and drinks

coffee

and writes:

"I want to point out that I am not up tight"

"You believe this stash of writing is 'scholarly'?"

"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing..."

and

love

her dailiness, which is to say her everyday manner of setting down

her life, one day at a time. Visiting Gary's [Snyder] house last night... I was

no longer in waiting as this world I called my own opened out.

She is full of personality and pizzazz, she is witty: It was suggested

by Robert Duncan that we all write/ Cock Poems for the next class. Splendid!

Like Anne Waldman, I wish she was my neighbor. As she is still alive, and as

I took a class with her, I have a mind to write to her. I once

sent her a beautiful wave painting that my friend Robin made and

I like to think it is on her window ledge in her writing shed where sit:

Tiny light grey moth

New Delhi bronze rabbit

Roy de Forest dog

Kwan Yin

Joanne Kyger once wrote "The Life of Naropa for Ted Berrigan," in which

she told about the sentient blissful brilliant light that was Naropa. (Ken

gave me her Collected Poems for my birthday, but also, I have the limited edition

Just Space, printed in Ann Arbor, which she signed:

Write in your journal

every day!

And Joanne wrote It's terrible what's happening in this war

atmosphere when 'your' government lies to you and neglects the people...and:

"The expression of my thoughts

in music as natural

and easy as breathing

my greatest consolation

to this day."

Here is Joanne Kyger reading at UC Berkeley in April of 2007:

Lunch Poems: Joanne Kyger

In honor of Joanne Kyger,

may her work flourish.

Above photo by Allen Ginsberg, 1963

EPC page on Joanne: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/

Bio Notes & Publications

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You left

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:26:29 -0800

"You left

your heart behind, over there, back there

Sleepy slow Buddha, you catch up to me, ok?"

~Joanne Kyger

While I

am easily thrilled

by a strand of bright red ribbon

marking my place

in my book.

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O fresh day in February

nobody@vox.com(Renee) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:42:11 -0800

O fresh day in February

Come along

with me under pine whose new cones

make flowers. In a mellow mood

let's take anything

and you're better

in the peaceful flowing

in the beach

in the bird who flys up

out of coyote bush,

bob cat who crosses the road

For who could think I could see

the grace of other souls born, and reborn

before in crab shells

snail shells, the head of a grebe

moleskin, new onions up. Drawn by

your clever sleigh of tortoise

I listen for the melody

to sing along.

~Joanne Kyger

Illustration by Arthur Okamura

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