Category: Lifestyles of Poets (Page 8 of 9)

My husband and I spent NYC in Thanksgiving. I tried to read poetry to things but I was pretty distracted by food, art and bright shinny objects. I did manage to snap a few shots while I was up in Yonkers, NY, visiting my old abodes (one nice basement apartment in a the cul de sac of an Italian community and one slum apartment near the Hudson river).

Mary McCray reading poetry to a courtyard waterfall in NYC. The waterfall says "I can't hear you!" So annoying.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Mary McCray reading poetry to the ruins of Greystone Mansion in Yonkers, New York. The stone mansion would rather fall into decay then hear poems by Mary McCray.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Mary McCray reading poetry to the ruins of the old Aqueduct in Yonkers, New York. The tower is protected from good verse by a fortress of gang graffiti.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Mary McCray reading poetry to the Fall leaves on the old Aqueduct trail in Yonkers, New York. The leaves would not lay silently even for a haiku.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

See the full set of things that don't care about poetry

I'm happy to say comedian John Lehr, star of Geico Caveman commercials, Jailbait and the WTBS show 10 Items or Less, has crowned me the "official poet of 10 Items or Less."

This is very much appreciated.

 This is a good time to
revisit the very funny Caveman videos of John Lehr:

• Baltimore dance moves
  
• Tennis
• Bowling
• Therapist 1
• Therapist
  2
• Chess

Although this is not an official endorsement by the Geico caveman himself, my poetry
is so accessible, a caveman could read it.

So sometimes it’s good to step outside of your art form, see what other impassioned artists are doing what keeps them going, and how they articulate their ideas of beauty.

Current TV last summer aired a list of 50 documentaries you should see before you die. My two Sarah Lawrence compatriots, Julie and Christopher, got me hooked on documentaries back in the 1990s. So I had seen a big chunk of the 50 on the list. But I made note of about 12 more I should see. Netflix just sent me Man on Wire, the documentary about frenchman Philippe Petit who walked a tightrope back and forth eight times between the top of the World Trade Center towers back in 1974.

The documentary was made in 2008 and lovingly describes the building of the World Trade Center towers without mentioning their demise on September 11, 2001. This gives the subject understated melancholy.

Petit was obsessed with walking across the highest landmarks without a net. A tightrope walker with great technical skill, physical strength and beauty, sometimes you forget you’re looking at a man on a wire and believe he's walking out into the open thin air…like something in a Dali or Magritte picture. Petit’s ballet performances also detracts from the fact that he has huge cajones to perform these walks illegally and without a net, risking his life every time.

Pulling off the tightrope performance in 1974 was tantamount to a bank heist. Planners and schemers were involved from France, America and Australia (one working inside the towers) and the movie recreates all the strategy sessions required to figure out crucial details like how to get a wire from the top of one tower to the other.

One thing that frustrated me about the recent documentary on Rumi was how blow-hardy the experts were when pontificating about Rumi’s motivations and inspirations. Petit is a marvelous contrast to this. His is articulate and deliberate, shows pure enthusiasm without being obtuse and excluding; and although you can see he’s pretty full of himself, he still connects with you (artist to artist) as he declares who he is and why he must walk the rope.

As soon as he was arrested after his 1974 tower walk. New York City reporters descended on him, wanting to know why, why, why he did it?

So American, Petit said. There is no why. He did it because it was beautiful.

I've been away for the last week, visiting my in-laws in Kansas. My husband and I decided to drive from Santa Fe to where his sister lives in Independence, Missouri, along the Santa Fe Trail. This little trek provided many occasions for us to stop and smell the indifference to poetry. I was able to add six pictures to Reading Poetry to Animals and Things Who Don't Care.

Reading poetry to the Santa Fe Trail outside of Clayton, New Mexico. Wagon train traffic, art thou so loud this trail cannot hear me?  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Reading poetry to the beautiful Kansas grass outside of Fort Larned on the Santa Fe Trail. When the wind blew, the grass whispered "husssssh…silly poetess."  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Reading poetry to fake soldiers outside of Fort Larned, Kansas. I tried to tell them I had the latest Walt Whitman fresh off the presses. They did not seem to care.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Reading poetry to a sod house in Kansas. Although my poetry was as dense as a mud brick, this house of earth could not relate. (2012, photo by John McCray)

Still reading poetry to a sod house in Kansas. Come on, sod house! You have to admit that line from W.H. Auden was pretty funny.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

Reading poetry to one of the whirling fellows on a windmill farm. Although the blades say "I'm excited about the truths you're laying down," this reader does not believe that windmill will make any serious literary changes in his life going forward.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

To see the full set of things that don't care about poetry

Last week got out of hand with my new schedule at IAIA. I wanted to talk about so many things connected with that, some new poems I've come across, some thoughts about the amazing places life sends you when you open up your ideas for the future. Hopefully in the coming weeks…

In the meantime, we haven't spent much time talking about life tips for poets.

I'm a firm believer that any attempt to improve your writing will fail if you don't attempt to improve one or more of the following:

a) your thinking (because if your thinking sucks, your writing will suck),

b) your thinking as it relates to the spiritual (say, for instance, you feel emotionally or intellectually stuck in some way), or

c) your understanding of the way you think.

And one of the best tools to zero-in on item c is with the book Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The results for the Strengths Finder tests actually go back to years of Gallup polling and the idea is once you identify your strengths, you can put more of your energy behind those strengths instead of trying to fix your weaknesses. It's about energy management.

And when the book talks about "strengths," this don't mean something like "I'm a strong writer" or "I have leadership skills." The kind of strengths categorized in this book deal with the way your brain organizes information and the way you understand the world. Learning my strengths was illuminating for me because it showed me why I gravitate to poetry, it showed me that I am strong in "Connection," meaning I like to take disparate things and connect them together…naturally I do this. This means, however, I'm not so strong in seeing differences. My brain looks for similarities. I may be strong in putting together metaphors but I need extra help with characterization. I also scored a strength in "Input" which explains why I feel the need to read 41 books on a topic before I feel like I get it, why it's hard for me to stop researching and start writing.

This kind of self-awareness helps me understand even my weaknesses better. 

The drag about Strengths Finders is that you have to buy the book to get the unique code to take the test (which takes about 30 minutes). You cannot borrow a book and re-use a test code: total waste of paper and eBook purchasing on the one hand; brilliant strategy for book sales on the other.

We recently went camping to Lake Conchas Dam in eastern New Mexico.This is an area I've wanted to visit because it's near the Goodnight Loving Trail (although the dam wasn't there then) and also because it's near an area called David Hill under the town Mosquero New Mexico. The lake was also mentioned in this month's New Mexico Magazine as having the most shoreline-per-camper of all the lakes in New Mexico…which, in this empty state, is really sayin' something.

So I was able to add two new photos to Reading Poetry to Animals and Things that Don't Care: I was snubbed by both lake twigs and my own shadow.

It's rough out there.