Memorial

 

The Marin Poetry Center held a memorial for Linda Gregg last week that was very moving. Forrest Gander spoke of visiting her in New York in her small, very spare apartment near St. Marks Place. She had just gotten home after a chemo treatment, and had no one, as he said, to make her a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. But she was uncomplaining.

It made me think of this poem of hers:

Staying After

I grew up with horses and poems
when that was the time for that.
Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky
in the Fillmore West when
everybody was dancing. I sat
in the balcony with my legs
pushed through the railing,
watching Janis Joplin sing.

Continue reading “Memorial”

Sunday breakfast

I cut out a recipe from the Wall Street Journal on Saturday and modified it for breakfast this morning. Essentially, you soft boil eggs and cool some eggs, fry sourdough bread lightly in olive oil, sear some asparagus in the oil and lay it on the toast. Cover with burrata or ricotta mixed with herbs, lemon zest and salt. Open the egg on top:


I had to take a picture. Then I had to eat!

Correction!

Here is last week’s poem as it’s supposed to be:

Trespassing

Teens, the street, night nothing to do so they split
off in two’s, find an ark  like Noah’s, unfinished.

A wooden-frame, all two-by-fours and exposed pipe
dreams, she won’t go in but he takes her hand.

They wander, imagine walls, windows, become temporary
residents in a sketch of someone’s future disappointment.

A playhouse, rehearsal, with him as Man, her as
wife mother daughter, every living thing of all flesh.

Then on the plywood floor, it’s just a boy pounding a way
and a girl, her quiet cries turning stars into doves inside.

Lisa Mecham

A terrific essay

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Ted Gioia, an essayist who is right up there with my favorites. In “Bach at the Burger King,” he writes about the “weaponization of classical music” as well as the damage caused by its use as advertising enhancement. Worth a read!

Ted is the son of the poet Dana Gioia, so he comes by his prose style naturally.

No poem today

But the story of Annie Edson Taylor, who had her 15 minutes of fame in 1901, when she was 62, going over Niagara’s 160 foot Falls in a barrel of her own design, pumped full of oxygen and stuffed with pillows, and lived to tell the tale.

This is the woman, who when her stagecoach was robbed refused to disclose the $800 tied in the seams of her dress. A widow, facing poverty, she went over the falls as a way to make some cash, and succeeded for awhile, before she lost it to unscrupulous managers. It was hard to make and keep a buck as a woman in 1901.

It seems like a good story for a poem; let me know if you write one.