Just got two sonnets published in the varied, lively, and well edited, by Tom Fink, journal The Marsh Hawk Review. Many Marsh Hawk poets here.

The Marsh Hawk Review

Tom Beckett Arlene Ang Daniel Morris Natsuko Hirata Mark Young Susan Terris Carlos Hiraldo Carole Stone Thomas Fink/Maya Mason Thomas Fink Charles Borkhuis Jane Augustine Geoffrey Young Deborah Golden Alecson Jason McCall Sheila E. Murphy Vincent Katz Eileen R. Tabios Tom Randall Mary Mackey Lewis F…

MARSHHAWKPRESS.ORG

The large, crunchy yet gooiest, yummiest chocolate chip chunk cookie I've had in years, was brought to me by Caitlin Allen as we had another long wait at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The outer cookie was buttery crisp and it is a wonder how it can hold so much dark, and I presume milk, chips of chocolate. Sweet but not too sweet, and all melted choco goodness. Ah... She bought them from Culture Expresso, an expresso bar on 72 W. 38th Street.
I was so happy to see Cait, cuddle, and devour the cookie, that later, while in the chemo suite, a man and wife came up to us. He said, "If I had had a camera, I'd have had a Pulitzer Prize winning shot of the two of you, so much love!" I told him I was very lucky in both my daughters. "You have another one like this!?'" he exclaimed. "Different and just as delicious," I said. "What a lucky woman you are. And I agreed.

No really, I'm not saying my sonnets are good, but the practice of writing in form: 14 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; has been teaching me to better manipulate language to express a notion. I'm getting better at not creating syntax contorted sentences to achieve rhymes. I'm realizing there's a multitude of ways to say nearly the same thing, huge strength of English with its plethora of words. I'm getting more limber and friends tell me the writing has gotten better. I'm so pleased I finally attempted something I always thought was too hard ! The practice is the process.

This weekend I wrote an essay about a lavender labyrinth; I feel the writing was good but I still wonder if it would make a better poem. This kind of cross-genre hopping helps me figure out what is the most essential way to tell something. If I try it as a flash fiction, a poem, or short story and it doesn't feel more deeply itself, then the first form is probably the right one. But the exercise of writing from another angle reveals more of what can be said.

Here it is as an essay, poem to come soon:

Laverinth: a lavender labyrinth for meditative walking.

My dog Sadie bounding through the labyrnth.

A cricket sings from the safety of the lavender leaves.

August 2014

The delicious Balthazar almond croissant is sold in many locations.

Balthazar chocolate croissant, over baked.

Balthazar chocolate croissant, lovely texture, chocolate restraint.

La Toulousaine pain aux raisins on left and the amazing raspberry croissant on the right.

La Toulousaine raspberry filling, just the right amount of goodness.

La Toulousaine pain aux raisins interior. Too sweet?

La Toulousaine almond croissant

La Toulousaine almond croissant interior.

Mary Mackey, author herself, interviewed me about designing book covers. Here it is:
http://marymackey.com/how-to-design-a-book-cover-that-sells-books/

I love drawing with my Japanese ink brush pen. I do a quick pencil sketch and expand it with wet ink line. I realized, it was a flash really, that I don't have to anxiously keep bobbing my head around to keep one person in view to do a portrait. Or gently nudge someone so I can see past them! As people move on and off the subway, or get obscured, I simply look for someone a bit like them at nearly the same angle and keep drawing. I had people on the left and right of me watching eagerly as I discovered this and they too were swiveling around to see who would model an ear or mouth or jacket. So now I've invented the composite portrait. Ta da!

Today I was on a clear liquid diet in preparation for tomorrows colonoscopy. I went out at lunch hour and bought a chicken broth from a sushi place and began searching lower midtown Manhattan for another approved item on the list, Jello. It has the illusion of being a solid. 

At the corner convenience store the manager said "Yellow? Yellow?" as I said "Jello, Jello?" We did this a few times. He clearly didn't have any.

I next tried the upscale healthy mini-lunch, artisan coffee, artful minimal decor place. There the terribly buff and shellacked looking guy said "Noooo, we don't sell...Jello." You know, as if I'd asked for beef jerky or a jar of pickled pig trotters. "I'm on a liquid diet today, I really need to find Jello!" He sniffed. I left.

I tried and tried, diners, bagel shops, delis, a pizza place...no Jello.

Finally, realizing there were several bar/eateries on the street, I waddled into the first one wearing my Nepalese knitted cap, two coats, pink scarf, and neon red plastic knee high boots. Brisk walking just is not possible in an ice storm wearing this gear while carrying my take out bag with the soup. I asked the wait staff "do you have Jello, like in Jello shots?" They sort of backed away from me. "Actually all I want is the Jello part?" They glanced at each other and with barely smothered smirks said "no."

In the second bar I asked the hostess if they had Jello shots. She stared at me for a moment and said "we don't serve Jello" and when I pleaded "but I'm on a liquid diet today," she looked at me with something like pity and said "no Jello, we don't serve that here." She glanced meaningfully at the exit.

I gave up. Midtown is officially a Jello-free zone. And I don't even like the stuff.

Two weeks ago I noticed my left leg was a little swollen, a trip to the ER, two CAT scans, one X-ray, an MRI, and several sonograms later I'm scheduled for surgery to remove a sizable ovarian cyst. Navigating in-network tests and care amongst an array of often unconnected doctors has been difficult. But even wait and worry, novelty and reaction are material. Thought I'd start posting the poems and sketches these difficult weeks have evoked.

 

I'm doing daily ink sketches and I generally can't resist adding color. I may try black line and gray wash as a compromise--so I will get more line aware. I'm still startled by drawing with a bold thick line...but I'm having fun.
Will soon go back to a daily poetry prompt too. Having Pocket Park published is great, but it also leaves me empty of a current poetry project. And until I get obsessed with new themes, time to just do it, keep writing and drawing. It is so good to do throwaway creative exercises. Occasionally something worth keeping, developing, comes out of it.

October is for familiars and witches.

Houndlet performs the Danish play.

This time, just ink and ONE color.

Friday, November 15, 2013, 7 p.m.
Poet's House
10 River Terrace, New York, NY
(212) 431-7920
poetshouse.org

Yes, October 1st came and the status of my book is no longer "forthcoming" but "adopt me!"

Going on press to check color was a huge good thing to do. I was sick with a cold, but with tissues on hand, I took the LIRR out to East Rockaway, NY. where Sandy McIntosh, publisher at Marsh Hawk Press, picked me up and drove us to the printers, Sterling Pierce. After four tries we approved a better cover than Michael Arguelles, the color tech guru, had at first shown us. He was patient and ultimately shifted the cover to another machine that was able to deliver more contrast and saturation than the one printing the interior.

The interior looks really good, it helps to be on glossy brochure style paper. After getting a first set of proofs at home last month I'd adjusted color slightly on nine of the interior photos (too dark or too light) and now they printed just fine. I've created a color setting in Photoshop for each printer I use so the screen emulates their color. It's working, I'd guess about 90% on target, since a piece of printed paper will never be as bright as the stained glass effect of a glowing monitor. Or in design-speak, two different color spaces, CMYK vs RGB (like comparing Olive Oil to Popeye in a battle of color strength).

Digital color printing still isn't the equal of a traditional full 4-color press...but...it's gotten a lot better in the last several iterations of the machines that churn these pages out. The digital printers are basically a seven foot long photocopier. Traditional presses can be the length of an Olympic sized pool and wide as a semi! My photos don't depend on subtle shifts in skin tone, that would be hard to do digitally. Pocket Park, visually, is about mid-tone gray and tan geometric urban planes contrasting with saturated hues of water and foliage. An urban park in color. With poems in black ink Garamond.

Sandy asked me to pick some photos from the book to put on the Marsh Hawk Press gallery section of their website. And to talk about how the book came into being, including my experience working with digital color. So here is my day wearing three hats: poet, photographer, and book designer. All three happy.

The skilled Michael Arguelles with me at Sterling Pierce, printers. Due to head cold, I'm having a massive bad hair week.

Sandy McIntosh, publisher at Marsh Hawk Press.

4 pages to a sheet.

Look! My title page! Sandy tends to blink into the flash, honestly he looked lots happier than this.

Good color all the way through.

Approved to print & bind.

October is Inktober. Who knew? Now you do too. One a day.
Here is Mr. Acorn, based on nuts stolen from squirrels on a walk with my daughter Caitlin 2 weeks ago in Central Park. She also draws in ink, in her case, the blue and black of everyday ball point pens. This was drawn with a Pentel marker/brush and colored pencils.

My Julie Harris story.
When I was 9-3/4, my mother took me on her yearly weekend trip to Vermont to visit her old high school. We stayed at the Woodstock Inn for a night and visited the town, woods, and ski slopes where she'd perfected her "Christys," and drove by the turn-off to the Woodstock Country School as she extolled the delights of hiking and fresh air in her Brooklyn accent. Larry Hagman had also gone to that boarding school, a year or so ahead, but they weren't friends, especially since Mom wasn't a bit interested in dating boys.
On our way back from the pilgrimage to my mother's youth, we pulled into a restaurant in Connecticut to get a late lunch and help me recover from the car-sickness I felt from my mothers smoke filled-car and its rough rocking suspension.
"I'm sorry, we just closed."
"My girl really needs something to eat, could you please see if someone in the kitchen could help us with a bite?"
I was pale and swaying.
"All right," said the waitress returning from the chef, "but you can't sit in the dining room, we have a private party there, we can seat you in this side room."
As we followed her, Mom glanced through the dining room door as it swung shut and grabbed my arm and hoarsely whispered "Oh My God! Julie Harris. JULIE HARRIS!!! is sitting in there!"
Mom kept muttering Julie Harris to herself.
We sat down. I gulped my water and ate a breadstick. Mom stared at me. She tentatively tried to straighten my bangs (impossible), push the topiary of curls out of my face (hopeless), and reposition the cat-shaped tortoise shell eyeglasses that habitually slipped off-tilt down my nose.
"You're cute, all kids are cute," she began. I could see she was doing her best to believe this. The drool stains from when I'd managed to fall asleep sucking on a stick of licorice hardly showed on my shirt.
"Look, you're out of water, you walk in there with that empty glass and nicely ask the waitress for more water and then when Julie Harris looks at you tell her how much you loved her in The Member of the Wedding. She played a kid in that. Perfect. Go on." She wiped my mouth with a corner of her napkin. Squinted. Removed my glasses. Then wet her palms with water and squashed down my hair. "Go now. Better without the glasses, go on."
I was deeply myopic. I only bumped into a few chairs heading into the dining room peering about for the waitress… Julie and the man were absorbed in one of those tense weird adult conversations full of silences and conversational stabs. I tip-toed over. My heart hammered. Julie was skinny and not that much bigger than me.
"Could I please have some waaaa…." I began.
Julie and her companion startled and stared at me with the same expression one gives a newly produced hairball.
"I told you we wanted privacy, privacy, get out, get out!!" She shouted over my head.
The waitress ran in, a white aproned blur.
"Get out!"
I ran.
"We're never coming back here! Get me the check." was the last I heard.

I rejoined my mother, breathless and red-faced.
"How did it go, did you get her autograph?"
I shook my head.
"No…I don't think she likes kids."
"Mmmm, actresses, probably don't know what they're missing not having a girl like you."
I put my glasses back on and decided I'd earned French Toast with whipped cream for lunch.
"How could she not like you, you're so cute?"
"I dunno."
"Why didn't you get water?"
"Waitress wasn't there."
"That's where you went wrong! You should have waited to ask the waitress for water, you don't ask Julie Harris for water."
"I'll never do it again, Mom, promise."

I just received my copies of The Portolan, journal of the Washington map society. In 2011 I gave a talk in the map room of the library of congress to the society. The editor of the journal, Tom Sander, asked me to turn it into an article, with some of the images that had been in my PowerPoint slideshow. Since I'd sort of gone off script in the talk, my nervousness just miraculously evaporated as I spoke, I recreated the jist and added more to explain what I've learned over the years of making literary invented worlds become visible. I also looked at how changes in technology shaped how I worked. Not to mention fitting a universe in a tiny poorly printed paperback page. I got a bit more personal than the journal was expecting, but hopefully, their readers will enjoy hearing, again, about the joys, and sometime failures, of this particular craft.

Creating the ad for Fall 2013 Marsh Hawk Press books...there are two launching. Pocket Park has met its final count down. So will it be PATH, REFLECTION, or TREES?

I thank everyone who voted on the covers I put together yesterday, your comments and reactions got me thinking about getting more mysterious, abstract, and focused. So here are today's contestants (click to see larger):

A, front runner from yesterday

B

C

D

E

F

G

I'm finishing my book Pocket Park and getting files ready to go to the printer. The inside is done, the library of congress data arrived and I put it in its slot on the copyright page, I've made final corrections, and it will soon fly out of here on it's electrons.

But now—the cover. Do I have the best photo for it?

The one I picked is rather dark, suggesting the poems are likewise, and mostly, they aren't. But I'm afraid of using something too bland, too meh. So tell me, which ones look best?
Note, A is the current cover.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

 
Sculpture in plastic clay of a character for a kids book I'm writing. Oh this is fun.

I used to sculpt a lot in high school. But when I got to college the studio art department was in the grips of worshiping abstract and conceptual art. Especially in artist's statements.

"Carlson, paint what you feel!"
Me, "I'm a freshman, I don't know what I feel. Can't I paint what I see?"

They thought they could quickly turn us 18-year-olds into Pollocks just by skipping the whole old fashioned training in anatomy, perspective, and color theory. Talent trumped technique.

They didn't much like realism. They sneered at illustration. The word "cute"was the worst insult. Sigh. So I became an English/Art History major. And turns out life is funny that way, discovered how much I liked writing and reading poetry. And kept reading children's books and cartoons.

My second book of poetry (Pocket Park) will be coming out this Fall, but thanks to sequesters and unknowable seethings in the Library of Congress, my library data is held up. This offers the self doubting poet an excuse to revisit the entire book looking for awkward verbs, sad near rhymes, and potentially horrifying verbal gaffes on a par with my recent sartorial mishaps (the navy blue and black sock debacle on Tuesday). And in my deepest soul I wish I had written the deeper, funnier, more astonishing and intelligent book I envisioned at the start. But this is the truth of it, like watercolor, once the paint of a poem dries, it looses some gloss and movement. Unless you're effing brilliant like Plath but god knows I don't want her self-imposed deadline.

THE LESS AND LESS PART
Last week I visited the Utrecht Art store, near where I work, and discovered their big redesign of all their retail outlets meant they dumbed down their offerings. Gone was the large cutting table where I could layout boards and decide how to frame my art. Gone were the useful array of books on art and technique (now down to one woefully inadequate kiosk with a dozen fairly useless titles and not even one book on calligraphy) and the general air of being a place that mattered was gone. I had remembered an energetic knowledgeable staff, dynamic manager, shelves with many good choices of tools, papers, and paints...and discount tables. It is now a sort of E-Z artsy store, akin to the art section in the Micheal's Craft stores. The place was like the cat that had gone to be "fixed" and came back with depleted interests... clearly the digital world is affecting viability of art stores. Will they mostly go the way of bookstores leaving behind just a few small specialty shops catering to real artists?

Lately I've had a "Potemkin Shelf" feeling at the big Barnes and Noble (Broadway and 82nd Street). As if the books being turned face out were the last in line. There's a subtle thinning of the stock...just what Borders went through in its final months. It makes me sad. Bookstores have been a mecca for my cover design eye and a feast for my insatiable reading heart. And big mega stores just means more walking and looking and browsing—a place where I pleasantly split into two selves in one, my body relaxes into a slowly strolling trance and my mind and eye are darting and diving—reuniting at the end of the checkout line. Luckily I still live in a college neighborhood where print books will last as long as there are students and professors to read or assign them. Also, I thank the graces for the New York Public Library....

THE GOOD NEWS PART
Yesterday I ran over to Book Culture and bought a used paperback copy of William Carlos Williams book long poem Patterson. I am writing a book of poems about a small urban park—sharing space with my photos. I'm looking for inspiration, other ways of seeing. This tip came from Paul Pines, "one of the best collections of cityscape poetry is by my old friend and mentor Paul Blackburn in a book called The Cities, published by Evergreen. I recommend it highly. And in all of his work Paul had an eye for detail and ear for sounds and speech that was peerless and informs his work. He was a protege of Williams, whose classic book Patterson is another great one (both alluding to Lorca in some way, his Poet in New York). That book by Paul contains his great good-bye to W.C., "Phone Call to Rutherford," that great moment when Williams, unable to speak because of his heart attack, says, "...you have made a record on my heart."" I had looked at passages from Patterson back in college but what a different rich cornucopia it is to me now! Thank you for the leads.

So this brings me to my news, my book, Pocket Park, will be coming out Fall of 2013 from Marsh Hawk Press!!!!!!! I have 4 months to take the rough manuscript and finish, rewrite, reimagine, and find where I can add or subtract. What are the best city park poems you have read? Let me know, I'm stoking my imagination for the work and play ahead.

I read an article in New Scientist about super-recognizers. People with a freakish ability to recognize faces. Useful in law enforcement, such as matching blurry survalence screencaptures to mug shots or recognizing persons of interest despite their wearing a Mets cap and purple lipstick.

While I am not a super-recognizers, I suspect I am closer to the top of that bell curve. When my husband and I attend events or watch TV I'm constantly recognizing people and he can't. But he frequently recognizes voices while I rarely can.

I've been drawing portraits a long time. I love looking at faces. People, including other artists, will  say it must have taken me years of practice to be able to capture a likeness. I nod in agreement, not wanting to hurt their feelings, but it just isn't so. Yes, it has taken time to get comfortable with the materials, such as watercolor, ink, pastels, and now digital. What I don't tell them is this, I was able to do it the first time I tried.

When I was nine years old my mother, at one time a dabbler in art, sat me down and put a pad of good charcoal paper in my lap and handed me a stick of charcoal. Up to this point I'd only drawn the usual princesses and horses with crayons in a style that would be universally recognized as uninfluenced by observation of reality.

"Draw me" she said.

I remember that first portrait so clearly, gauging the widths and planes, the way some parts of her face seem to repeat themselves in style—a signature pointiness in ears and nose wings...what I now think of as fractals of facial development. I am back in our den, in our fine small house in West Hartford, the scratch and slur of my lines echoing my mother's face.

20 minutes later she demanded to see what I'd done.
She looked startled and then pleased. It looked like her. After that, I got extra art lessons.

I don't know if this ability is a genetic gift or oddity of development, but my father, Elof Carlson, as a young man, before he pursued a career as a geneticist, was able to draw portraits that also captured a likeness.

Unlike the super recognizers I do forget faces and almost always names. I'll walk by someone and get a flash of recognition...if you see me on the street and I'm staring at you while alternately looking off to my left it isn't sleepwalking or lack of meds, I know I know you and cannot approach because your name is a blank. However, your nose or chin will stay with me, until next time then.