unexpected appearance
Category: Writing and Poetry

This is a press release from Andy Jones...he called me today because someone cancelled...so it looks like I'm reading in Davis this month.


A longtime favorite Sacramento poet, Crawdad Nelson, will headline Poetry Night at Bistro 33 (226 F Street in Davis) on Wednesday, September 17th at 9pm.
A journalist, an author of fiction, and especially a poet, Crawdad Nelson has written substantively and thoughtfully on a great many cultural and environmental issues. His books of poetry include Fresh Water (Pygmy Forest Press, 1989), Truth Rides to Work (Poetic Space Books, 1993), The Bull of the Woods (Gorda Plate Press, 1997), and Bigfoot Lives (Flyway Press, 2005). His poetry has also appeared in many literary journals, including The Sacramento News & Review, Rosebud, Susurrus, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, White Pelican Review, Kerf, Cedar Hill Review and Rattlesnake Review. Crawdad Nelson has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he is a frequent speaker at college creative writing classes.
Bistro 33 is pleased to welcome this dynamic author, speaker, and poet to the Bistro 33 Banquet Room to participate in Poetry Night. Poetry Night takes place on the first and third Wednesdays of the month beginning at 9pm. The event will be co-hosted by UC Davis faculty Brad Henderson and Andy Jones, and feature an open-mic for local artists – poets and otherwise, to showcase their talent. All are welcome to this free event.

2:31 AM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

berries

I found a string and pulled it: it turned out to be part of a sweater --
I denuded an innocent bystander with huge traffic-stoppers,
causing a three-car accident, a real mess, she was quite an
attractive nuisance, there was blood on the street.

I pulled harder and the string opened
the boundary between then and now;
time turned out to be a gimmick, a trick of the light.

-- I pulled a little more and the screen loosened:
I could see how business was really done --
process-oriented mayhem and death with
structured annuities to back it up --suckers going out on limbs,
vipers, crocodiles, an entire food chain of the vicious
and predatory hunting them down, wallowing in warm pools

wallowing nude in screened mud with darling chanteuses
right off the boat, while others lie around on corners
listening to the truly crazy talking to stop signs
and into coffee cups blazed and wired infested with demons

I pulled a little more -- the fiction that anybody anywhere
can ever give you anything you aren't better off to get on your own
dissipated -- the world is a raw vegetable, not a ripe fruit.

I pulled -- the militaryindustrialcomplex disintegrated
into miles and miles of slightly rusted plowshares
emitting depleted uranium -- the class system
devolved into a ripe pudding; serfs, brahmins,
all in it together for a change -- the church,
obviously, being a crude tissue of lies,
hadn't far to go: it sank under sparkling late-afternoon surf,
the tide came in, the sea washed,
bishops floated, pope didn't,
rows of saints tiptoed out of the way.

I pulled -- the information superhighway came unstrung
and became the dirt road of ignorance -- people had to go outside,
look what they had done: the world
of endless pitiless paved earth contoured to resemble
edenic pastures, but with fences, and the soft words
used to describe hard things --

I pulled on the string and all the wrappings came off
everything was just how it was,
the sea a little warm this year and all the bait schools
wisping
even plankton fished out

every job I ever had
like a disease in my skin: the redwood grains that quilled a forearm,
daffodil sap burning in a rash, terra-sorb, in cold water,
blisters, cramps.

I pulled until it broke and the whole thing came unravelled,
everything is just how it is: discontent or nothing.
I might as well be stalking reindeer with a stone blade
or scything rye -- it's all the same
old rigamarole. i don't believe in science either --
why smash atoms whole ones smell so sweet?

All this time waiting for something to happen,
the lesson is: nothing happens.

I just get to be strange for a while
and try to eat the berries on the way by.

7:49 PM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Peak performance

I doubt I’ll ever have a reading as much fun as last Thursday at Luna’s. If you were there, you know what I mean. Or maybe I should limit myself to one ten-minute reading per year to prevent dilution.
I don’t know, it just felt good to be on stage for a change.
The moment lasted considerably into the night, which was also a nice change from the sudden evaporation which has been the norm lately.
Hydropods!

9:13 AM - 3 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

ocean stuff

11:57 PM - 4 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

keeping it Simple

Hiding Out

After the rain for two hours
frogs on cascaras
in the meadow below them
in full voice --

now that tall fir
parts the mist
and the moon is a shovel.

I go out, come in,
a breeze rattles alone through trees
empties across the valley

The frogs hold tongues
and clutch earth, a vast silvery
audience creeping over wet decay

clouds lip remote wind
disclosing stars big as pearls.

10:48 PM - 2 Comments - 11 Kudos - Add Comment

Cover Story
Category: Writing and Poetry

http://www.northcoastjournal.com/020708/cover0207.html

The link should take you to my story in the North Coast Journal. People who want a paper copy should let me know--I expect to have a limited supply in a few days, which I will provide free, as supplies last. People who just want the cover art for target practice will have to get their own. 

I've seen some feedback already, though it was hard to understand. Somebody e-mailed the editor and used the word concilatin, which may be a typo but if not I guess I have something to learn. Well I guess I have things to learn regardless.

But if you're just looking for something to read, follow the link.

6:31 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

vacation vacancy
Category: Games

Careful, even casual visitors will note that I haven't blogged in 4 or 5 months. But who's counting? that doesn't mean I haven't written anything. Look at this: http://prosilence.wordpress.com/

Of course since September I've written five research papers and read a shitload of history and science texts. The last paper of the semester isn't quite done, but it's probably my favorite. It's about the Aquatic Ape theory. If you don't know what that is, just imagine a miocene ape diving out of a banyan tree, landing in a warm lagoon, enjoying a helping of clams, mussels and shrimp, with a little seaweed on the side, and liking it. It goes into much more detail, but that's the general idea.

Sooner or later I plan to get back to writing poems on a more regular basis, and with any luck I'll be doing some posting, not to mention visiting my poetry group a little more often, and reading some other people's blogs.

But first, and if you know me you realize how important this is, I need to get up under the tanoaks and scratch around in the mulch for a nice bag of cantarelles cornucopiodes and dentalium hydnums. Then get a pound of butter, a few shallots and a bottle of wine. Let the good times roll!

6:13 PM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

poetry

I'm not writing a poem today, in fact I'm not even really thinking about it. But I still care. Don't know why, really. There must be something to it, but after the reading I went to last week, I can't say I know what it is. Red bird on white snow, a friend once told me.

But sitting for hours listening to vapid rhymes isn't it.

6:58 PM - 6 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

outgoing tide
Category: Travel and Places

Thinking about what I might do at the reading tonight, I was going through files over the weekend. Found a few odds and ends. Got to thinking about how pretty much everything is made up of odds and ends. It's all a matter of how someone puts them together.
One afternoon about 8 years ago I took a canoe out onto Humboldt Bay. The tide was falling, wind blowing. By the time I got out into the channel I realized that the tide was falling so fast, there was now about 200 yards of impassable mud between me and the shoreline. And the canoe was caught in the flow, also mastered by a north wind. In other words, I wasn't going to be able to land where I came from. the only choice was to stay afloat and let the wind push me into Eureka. That was about two miles of open, slightly choppy baywater south of me.
the dog didn't much like it. It was a little spooky, but it was easy as going downhill.
When I landed on the Adorni Center dock, I felt like I had done something slightly irresponsible, but somehow, you know, fun. If the weather had been severe it might not have gone so well. But it did.
The lines below are about that.




I got caught on the outflowing tide with a tailwind
I got blown across the water like light scum,
dog hunkering anxious at my feet, wavelets
driving over open water, sucked right into Eureka

11:10 AM - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

desert madness
Category: Writing and Poetry

This is fiction

My upbringing was a violent storm. I can say it now: everyone's dead, there are no feelings to hurt. We lived on the road. I can't say where it all started, but I can say how it ended. Slow and protracted. Grievous, painful, redundant, unremarkable. A fence in the wastelands of Nevada. The coyote tracks in the morning when we found the car puncturing an inch of hard snow, the frozen wind. You fall asleep. There's too much of the same thing. It's finally more than anyone can handle. A world of lights, between them just what you carry, enough to see by.
An old Mormon cabin, some rotted fence under juniper and pinon pine, the gulch a thumbprint into an isolated mountain range, far from any kind of town. Tonapah somewhere out there, but what's that? Las Vegas? An all-day drive on dirt roads just to find a highway in that direction, but yes, Vegas. Reno a little closer but that's where we started and there's no return.
Navy jets on maneuvers break suddenly over snowy peaks. Articles of war, of national defense. And after them more showers of sifted snow, temperature about ten degrees. Playing with guns, muzzle flashes, because after all that's what you do. Fire back at the U.S. Navy mach 4 over empty blazing nothing but what about that redneck taking potshots.
A light fall of snow that had frozen by morning to stone. You could stand on it and sled yourself along.
Back in the woods on all sides branches popping, snow flustering around, no voices.
The woods quiet as one's final afternoon.
After dark the belt of orion plucked holes. I might have wondered if the gods had anything to say. The march across time and deep space to no apparent result. After all how much can you get with food stamps, with what you can carry?
The Mormon had tucked in here because of a little spring with a pond. It must have looked promising, after traveling across Nevada. You can see ten or fifteen miles of fence along a road, maybe a slight rise or a hump, and sagebrush, and collars of old dead snow around piles of rock or fenceposts, coyote tracks threading, or pouncing where they discovered rodents, and wild horse tracks. The old bastard probably tried to make the desert fruitful with a little barbed wire and a tin of biscuits every morning. But things had not worked out.
The Navy flies out of Fallon, about the least nautical location conceivable. There are years when there's not enough rain to rinse the sand off that season's bones.

3:13 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment