Today is Poem In Your Pocket Day in NYC, so I wrote a poem and carried it in my pocket. Here’s the Poem:

Pocket Poem NYC

After lunch in the cafe, I wrote a poem
on a napkin—my pen sinking into soft
paper, words framed by a design like linked
chain, raised and skirting the edge,
neat as a hem.
The poem is for my jacket. This low-tech
activity—a city scribbling words and folding
them, pocket-sized, ready to walk a block
to the corner, run for the bus, hop on
the subway.
These are the words I’m wearing today. Moving
with them, I contemplate the trailing off—how
they can follow us when connections drop or
crackle to a halt. Words like hem or him,
link and chain, words like paper. These are folded
in my pocket, along with the word you.

This week I wrote two haiku poems about walking outdoors to post on Twitter. The first one, written about a full-moon night in the country, combines images that made me stop, slow down and wish that a camera could capture and preserve everything I was experiencing. The second one was composed in the city, inspired by a photo snapped with my iPhone a couple of hours before in Central Park.  The word “just” links the poems for me, unifies the ramblings of a city/country week:

The Spring moon rises / just past my neighbor’s garden / luminous birch trees.

Central Park today / sidewalk says Become Your Dream / just before the rain.

I enjoy documenting life experiences with haiku. The form can be a journal entry, a lyrical snapshot, a 5/7/5 rendering of a moment. You can use a camera first to find the idea, or you can write haiku to grasp a landscape or feeling more vast than any camera’s frame. Try it…

Inspired by the NCAA basketball games, I wrote quick basketball haiku last weekend and posted five on my blog. This week I’m taking one, using the last line as a start sentence and typing out a free-write post. Here’s the haiku:

Practicing foul shots / focused as summer sun sets / over and over.

Here’s the free writing:

Over and Over

There was a rumor that the Dalai Lama would speak to the town of Woodstock on the recreation field, a meadow shadowed by Overlook Mountain at the edge of Rock City Road. But the Dalai Lama’s talk needed to remain a secret. No media announcement, no confirmed time, no promise that he would show. In fact, if too many people found out, the visit would be canceled. The last thing the local police needed to deal with was another Woodstock, 1969.

The Dalai Lama did show up. On that sunny fall afternoon, he emerged from a car and—surrounded by dark-suited security detail and Woodstock town dignitaries—climbed onto a wooden podium built especially for the occasion. After a minute, he spoke to us. He pointed to the Woodstock Cemetary and laughed, his opening remarks handed to him by town geography—a quick lesson on impermanence.

No one shot basketball on the town courts behind us that day, but when I turned and saw the courts after listening to the Dalai Lama, I thought about all the hours I’d spent as a kid down South putting a leather ball through a metal hoop. Over and over. On those Woodstock courts, you square up, shoot and wait for the sound of nets. You can predict the echo of ball bouncing off backboard. Just like we did down South. Someone sinks a jump shot, then another one. Over and over in the shadow of Overlook Mountain.

Since UNC is playing for the East Regional Finals tonight, I decided to sit down and write five basketball haiku quickly and post them immediately on Twitter. When I was a kid and teenager in NC, I played a lot of basketball. It was fun, and I was pretty good. (FYI: Woollen gym is on the UNC campus.) So this exercise is sort of like the haiku form of practicing foul shots or running in a five-on-five pick-up game.

Here are the poems:

Practicing foul shots / focused as summer sun sets / over and over.

When the game begins / a basketball becomes the / object of desire.

In a quiet gym / she hits another jump shot / seven out of ten.

The Woollen Gym courts / a basketball master class/ every afternoon.

When I was a kid / street ball was a lot more fun / than doing homework.

The photographer David Morris Cunningham‘s solo show, Remembrance of Things Present, opened at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum last weekend, filling one of the galleries with beautifully toned images of the artist’s favorite possessions. The photographs are simple, yet textured, representations of single objects. A tower of stones, a small wooden box, linked rings of birch bark and origami. I met with Cunningham often while he was shooting and printing this body of work. Repeatedly, he spoke of zen, poetry, and nature as influences. Once he said that he hoped each photograph created within the viewer the feeling of visual haiku—calming, centering and restorative. Cunningham’s work is well-priced and accessible. I recommend it.

This is going to be a short post, just a moment taken from my notebook, and an example of how I use free writing. Sitting in a cafe, I began with the start line “tomatoes” and put pen to paper for ten minutes without stopping. This is part of what I wrote that day, and I included the paragraph in an essay for a restaurant’s cookbook. The beginning of spring feels like the right time to post it. When you have a few minutes, try a free writing exercise. You can also look back at my 9.12.2010 Writing Post for some free writing tips.

My grandmother started her tomatoes by planting tiny seeds in Dixie Cups that she placed on her windowsills in spring, transplanting them to the garden after the last frost. The plants grew strong and deep green. In the summer she went down to her garden early—before the mid-day heat—and picked the ripe tomatoes, carrying them back up the hill cradled gently in the folds of her apron. She then peeled each tomato with a paring knife and was careful not to break the spiraling skin, performing the task just like her grandmother had taught her mother to do. We ate the tomatoes sliced and lightly salted along with fresh green beans and corn and fried okra. My grandmother also canned from her garden. Tomatoes were put away in clear Ball jars for winter stews and soups and pasta mixtures. The recipes she made with her tomatoes were my favorites.

A couple of years ago, I was roaming around MoMA, not really going anywhere, just looking, and I turned a corner and saw a basketball hoop on an outrageously-tall pole leaning against the stark white of cavernous gallery wall. The glass backboard, surrounded by a metal frame brandishing flurries of fan-like ornamentation, was topped with a three pronged candelabrum. I stopped. And I looked, really looked. Thinking about this now, the question that keeps coming back to me is: “What’s it like to find the artist through the work, to know the artist as spirit behind the assemblage?” Maybe I didn’t ask the question out loud that day, but I thought it. I knew what basketball goals were supposed to look like, and this amalgam of rust, glitz, and hoop translated to chandelier or jeweled earring, took me beyond a game I had spent years playing. It took me to David Hammons.

This week I hurried across the park and buzzed for entrance at L&M Arts, a gallery housed in a mansionette on East 78th St. in Manhattan, not far from the Frick. The doorman let me in, and on the first floor beside the grand curved staircase the artist’s signature, in what appeared to be pencil on a blank wall, announced the show. The New York Times’ review headline that day had been, “The Upper East Side Goes Grungy in David Hammons’s Gallery Show,” and the contrast of Hammonds’s work with the mansionette’s ornate dentil moldings and grand staircase reinforced L&M’s mission. In the The Times’ review of this show, Holland Cotter wrote, “We think Modernism, but we also think street people, construction sites, trash.”

I was prepared for the trash bags because I’d read the review. Trash bags—torn, ripped, gaping—draped over large works on canvas. An armoire was pressed face-first against a painting, left there as if abandoned by careless movers. And tarp—crinkled, almost sparkling material—hid the details of paintings. The piece that stopped me though, like the basketball goal had at MoMA, was upstairs. The “painting” was in a parlor overlooking 78th St. and was approximately the same size and shape as the three other large pieces in the room. This “painting” consisted of two large sheets of clear plastic simply placed on top of each other with randomly frayed holes creating texture and space between the translucent square sheets. This was my favorite piece in the show—part useless plastic, part evening gown, part shroud. I felt I had met the artist again. There was no work, only intention and the whisper of experience.

The show closed on Friday, but some of David Hammons’s work is in the permanent collection at MoMA.

More poems I’ve posted on Twitter recently:

Behind the live oak trees / where boats dock, men mending nets / marsh grass, tides mark time. ~me, NYC  (haiku)

Rain comes early / from a far range of mountains / no pink sky today. ~me, NYC  (haiku)

Ice drips off my roof / splashing onto frozen stones / everything glistens. ~me, UpstateNY  (haiku)

Wind-ruffled branches / thin sticks, tumbling over snow / pine trees bend, dancing. ~me, UpstateNY  (haiku)

Frozen creeks melt and startle with crack boom thunder, solid crystalline forms shatter. ~me, UpstateNY  (poem fragment)

“You there, do not call yourself / a dream, just show yourself to me.” ~Myongok, Courtesan Poetry

“I regret the passage of this dream / will not have left any traces.” ~ Imniwol, Courtesan Poetry

“Blossoms at night / and the faces of people / moved by music ” ~Issa

“From now on / it’s all clear profit / every sky.” ~Issa

Last week I wrote a post about jumping up on stage and reading poetry. Yesterday in a cafe in Greenwich village, I saw one of the people who helped me realize that it’s possible to perform poetry—just like guitar players jam on stage and singers sing—and that there are audiences who want to show up and listen. When I looked up from my notebook and steaming bowl of hot chocolate and noticed Anne Waldman settling into a nearby table, I stared for a minute. Waldman is one of the New York poets who helped pave the way for open mike nights and poetry slams, and her performances are as much about her physical being as the words. She is a presence—on stage and off. I’ve seen her read in a venue where I’ve read, and I think that’s pretty cool. Waldman co-founded the Naropa Institute with Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and is often considered one of the Beat Poets, but I believe that activist and performance poet are better descriptions.

One of the things I value about writing a Notes blog is that a commitment to posting every week requires that I pay attention and contemplate my interests—and try to share how writing and art can enrich life. Hopefully, this encourages others. I want to thank Anne Waldman for making and performing her poems and encouraging me.

If you spend much time in upstate New York, you quickly learn that winter settles in and stays for a while. The layered ice ruts on the driveway will reflect sunlight until spring. Sometimes at night the wind sounds like a wild animal hiding in the woods, reminding you of childhood fairy tales—the grim ones. And snow drifts can cover things you remembered were once in the yard, making you wonder if you should run out and check—maybe dig the patio furniture out of a snow bank—but you don’t. It’s too cold. All of this sounds like a good reason to stay indoors and go nowhere after dark until the thaw, but actually, I’ve discovered that terrible weather can roust poets out of hiding. It’s gotten me out to read.

My upstate town is filled with poets, and a lot of us like to be on stage. Over the years, I’ve read at open mic nights and also as a featured poet at venues barely heated or heated by a giant fireplace. If you huddle, the excitement keeps you warm enough. So this post is just a reminder to stand up to the weather. Get out there, read your work, organize an open mic night, grab a guitar player and get on stage. Be a cold weather poet. It’ll warm you up and keep you writing.