I forgot how deceptive Portland summers are. You wake up every morning for maybe three straight weeks to a cloudless sky, dry heat, Mt. Hood visible in the distance, and you do not remember the previous ten months of darkness. You ride your bike through the wide, shady streets in Ladd’s Addition. loping around the rose gardens, looking into the blue through the branches of the ancient poplars, and for a moment, summer is the only place you are; the rest is mutable. It’s impossible to remember the heart-squashing gray from before. At The Corresponding Society reading in Seattle last week, poet, Robin Summers, called Portland “the behemoth sadness” in one of his pieces. He was twirling, alternately raising and lowering his body as though on a lever. He did not just mean the weather. The reading was held at Pilot Books in Capitol Hill, where a beautiful, young proprietress named Summer Robinson runs the counter. The books are held on suspension shelves that bang into the walls, and there’s a tiny mezzanine above the front entrance where she keeps arm chairs and a lending library. She carries only small press and local authors, and she said, “If there was ever a time to go bankrupt, it’s now!” This is her full time job.

There has been a lot of awful national headline news from Portland in the last two months, including a woman who threw her kids over the Sellwood Bridge. I was in Sellwood last night, riding around double-Dutch on my bike with Austin. We watched the Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories, and we could barely speak after it finished. There was no distinction between what the character’s life was and what he was filming, or if it was a film within a film (within a film). There was a scene towards the end where “Stardust” by Louis Armstrong is playing, and Charlotte Rampling is lying on the floor reading the paper, and she and Woody Allen are just staring at each other while he eats yogurt. It’s black & white but all the light is visible. It was a puzzle, hinting at the unknown center. Austin and I had spent the day trying to invent a genre for literature of that kind. Hinting at an unknown center. It was 3 o’clock in the morning.

The junk is just rolling in. My mom and I start early in morning, and then continue on into the day, with a late afternoon gap where I go to the cafe to write and she practices her flute. She, John, and I end up in the backyard around dinner time, usually. Sometimes Noel is here, cutting up playing cards for his voodoo bookmarks. I visited my brother at the state hospital last week. We sat by the koi pond and didn’t talk much, but he looked good. He was relaxed, and I might return soon to look at old photographs with him. It’s the only evidence of a different life, and if I don’t look at them every once in a while, I forget, too. My mom and I got a milkshake on the way home, and then we found a free vanity on curb and packed it into her hatch. Hopefully we are making money.

While we were traveling, I read a lot of Richard Brautigan; even found a $6.50 Pocket Edition of Willard and Hist Bowling Trophies, which usually only comes in hardback and goes for $45. Then Hawkline Monster, In Watermelon Sugar, and  my favorite stories from Revenge of the Lawn. At our event in San Francisco, I read a story called “A Short History of Oregon” I’d written as an homage to my revisiting him. He commit suicide in 1984, in Bolinas where we harvested the garlic. I also finished Gender Trouble yesterday, and in Oakland I read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. I recently finished The Violent Bear it Away, which completes my reading of Flannery O’Connor’s entire body of work, and it was staggering and merciless, and all her repetition of messiahs and gruesome endings and waxen mothers and retarded children was all for a reason. If she hadn’t died so young, her power might have crushed us, the Americans. We would have eventually known too much.  Her face got so small the sicker she became.

On the longest day of the year, we rode my old bikes through Southeast Portland residential neighborhoods, speeding toward Powell Book’s before it closed. At sunset, we ended up at my childhood friend’s house with all her family in the den, wedged in their sectional sofa. Robi, Sweeney and I sat around Kelsey’s kitchen table eating a marion & blueberry pie she’d baked that afternoon. The filling was soft and tart, and bound by tapioca instead of gelatinous pectin. The berries were the color that the sky had turned. The crust was a sugar cookie. It was perhaps the best slice of pie either of us had ever had, and we said so. Later we rode our bikes farther south to my house, and Kelsey told us Borges plots in Spanish on the back deck. In the morning, I recycled the beer bottles and saw the boys off to Seattle via their thumbs. By evening I was on a bike again, scaling the city with Mckenzie. Our very old, very dear friend had built a fort in her living room, and so had invited people over to hotbox it. Her house was on an unimproved road darkened by trees, and the fort was of circus proportions. She had tipped her futon on its side. She told me about her brother’s new baby. She said she had enough money to buy land in Canada, and that she thinks she’s going to. Start the Hemp Kingdom (fibers, oil, food) she’s been dreaming about since middle school. At best she can homestead.

At midnite Mckenzie and I were back on our bikes and the roads were clear, and the traffic signals were blurried by the summer night. We were laughing and cursing Portland for lack of 24-hour food vendors. But deep in, on a dark and closed-up road, we found Palm State Gumbo: a late-nite window surving hot dogs (I got the “Short Bus”) and Po’ Boys and fried shrimp with spicy fries. We ate those, plus doughnuts, on a table outside. We slept snugly in the basement room she’s been renting, next to five baby chickens that were incubating in a sod box. They warbled and chirped all night.

Before now, we were hitchhiking. There was a raw foodist truck driver. He taught us how to make our own sauerkraut and beer. He chopped open a coconut and handed us straws. There was an Italian working for the US Special Forces who picked us up in the middle of no where on an Interstate. A trooper had juts pulled over to tell us what we were doing was legal. “Did you say legal?” And he said, “Yes, but good luck finding a ride. There’s not another exit or business for ten miles.” The Italian was friends only with other feds, and he hated hitchhiking and loved Yugoslavia. “Best country, by far,” he said. There was a van-full of Tahoe punks who picked us up at 10:30 in the morning on their way to get a keg. I rode on their roof. They took us to a 2,000 acre flaxen farm in Lomerica where their friend was turning twenty-one, and where they were staging a music fest. We laid in the hills. We had passed out before sundown. The head engineer of Burning Man picked us up outside of Nevada City, and stopped in the Sierra’s to show us petroglyphs. A middle-aged man in Colusa who lost his family and had a heart attack told us that all he does now is drive around giving people rides as a service to the Lord for sparing his life. There was an elderly backpacker, a young father on his way to pick up his Boy Scout, a Stage Coach that took us to Bolinas (there’s no sign on the road pointing to that magical town) where we harvested garlic for three days. Romanian guys doing business and trying to sell their van. We stole a free ride on Amtrak from Sacramento to Davis. An elderly lady drove us over Mt. Tam and evoked the longest explanation I’d ever heard Sweeney give of his work. Almost every California citizen was a grower, and one ride told us that %70 of California’s agriculture economy depends on marijuana.

While we were on Lake Tahoe a couple weeks ago, Sweeney remarked that there is a lot more money on the East Coast and “boy, does it make for a different culture.” It was a full moon and we were camped out behind a fallen cedar, sleeping directly on the sand outside of Sugar Pine State Park. When we arrived in Portland, I remembered a lot of other things about the West. There are few things I love more than big, poetic abstractions about the East and West of America. “If all goes as has been,” Robi said that night on Tahoe, “we’ll make it home in due time.” For instance, a local coffee roaster (e.g. Stumptown) is no longer enough. Now every coffee shop is roasting their own coffee, in small batches, in their very own branded bags. And in Berkeley, my God: they drip the stuff from individual filters into mugs upon ordering. The sheer variety of coffee consumption is enough evidence! A substance as readily available as water being treated like gold. Oh, it’s hard to quit. The coffee is so good, and I swear, it never wakes me up when I’m here. I can drink coffee noon til night in Portland, Oregon and be groggy all the same.

You are invited:

The Corresponding Society is reading in San Francisco, with local poet Julien Poirier, on Monday, June 15th. The event will be held at Books & Bookshelves at 99 Sanchez Street in The Castro. The shop has a highly comprehensible & endlessly exciting collection of all small press activity in the You-nited States.

They are young, and they sent all their thirty-forty-something friends into a stupor. During Maggie and Eric’s reception dinner at the Olde Caspar Community Farm House, a former peer held his glass high and said, “When I first heard you were getting married, I thought, ‘What the hell are they doing? They have their entire lives ahead of them!’… and now that I’ve had more time to think about it, that’s not such a scary thing after all. Congratulations. You have your entire lives ahead of you.” We drank deeply from our sapphire wine bottles. Maggie’s jaw dropped lower the longer the toasts went on. The rest of the bridesmaids and I draped gold and chiffon tapestries around the walls and hung white string lights and made boquets beforehand, and had to run back to the Jughandle Inn where the wedding party was staying, forty-minutes till the ceremony, to change into our dresses and brush our teeth. We gathered on a sea cliff under an arbor they made out of madrone branches, and though Sweeney had to dash back to the camp to pick up the forgotten boquets, the procession assumed without a hiccup. They washed each other’s hands with rose water. Mckenzie and I cried as Maggie came up the grassy path in her gown, and her Tiger Lily hair, and we took photographs at the Headlands at the end of Mendocino.

We danced all night. Robi was their poet-bartender, and the three-tiered, coco cake was vegan-but-you-wouldn’t-know-it, and it was the queerest wedding this side of the Mississippi! There were jugglers and babies and drag. During the rehearsal, a raven circled the site, and later I read from a deck of medicine cards that Raven is “the messenger from the void.” Sweeney’s eyes were wet, but he blamed it on allergies. Later we tried to salsa, and I ended upside down on his arm right as the bride and groom were taking their dance. I stood driectly across from both of Maggie’s grandmother’s, whose hands were on their faces and chests. “I’ve been married for forty-five years,” I heard one of them say, slowly, as Cat Power sang “Sea of Love.”

Photoed above was in fact, much later into night, after Robi had served us from the large keg of IPA from Fortuna (they were sure to use only local & organic food.) Kate, the official wedding photographer, and I dancing to “Lip Gloss” in a room full of hippies who liked it just as much. It took several more hours to break down the decorations, because we were laughing so hard. Everyone had gone home except us ‘maids & ‘men, and instead of folding the tapestries, we wrapped them around our heads and re-enacted nativity scenes in Cockney accents. In the morning, there were goodbyes and leftovers. Kate, Mckenzie, Robi, Sweeney and I drove up the California coast. The first stretch were the hairpin curls of Highway 1, which at first, made us rapturous (the Northwest is so beautiful), but soon had us vomiting. It is a long, long road, and we were still a little ravaged from the night before. Where it finally intersected the flatter 101, we found a shack that served oysters, wild blackberry sundaes and salmon burgers, and stopped long enough to feel better. We went through the redwoods, the One Log House, giant Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox, the Hill of Confusion. We rolled around on the beach, and watched a thunder storm in the distance, with purple fork lightening, and entered Oregon like a promised land. There are many Promised Lands, and we struggle to live in each one. The sky was bright blue. “Headin’ out West to the land of the pines…”  7PM and the air was hot.

What a long strange, trip it’s been. Or so the leftovers from the Rainbow Gathering sang to us when we were dropped off on the California border by our third hitched ride that day. Some kids were sitting around a water fountain, singing Grateful Dead songs and spanging. We camped in a grassy ditch one night, and I woke up with a tick in my neck. We tweezed, and poked out (even the tiny head!) and amply disinfected, but still: they seem to be quite a presence in my life. Two of our first rides were older women, one of them at six in the morning. Sweeney was swollen with allergies (the Rouge Valley has collected all of America’s pollen), and the woman jerked to the shoulder and yelled, “Get in! I’m late for work!” We did just that. She was wearing scrubs and chainsmoking. On her way to a medical lab job, an hour down the road. Every few minutes, she divulged details about her life. Probably fifty-five, sixty years old. Six kids. And then she told us that a few years ago she divorced her husband, abandoned her children, and went hitch-hiking around the Northwest for three years, mostly fishing, “finding small jobs here and there.” She said, “I’m a recovering alcoholic, so I drank a little, too. Haw haw.” She said that one day, she realized she had no idea what she was doing any more, and decided to go home. Her husband took her back, and also her kids, and she got sober. One year sober. “Do you mind if I smoke another? This is usually my cigarette-coffee time.” She told us to be safe.

It is a china blue day in Pleasantville. After the graduation at Radio City Music Hall, Sweeney’s mother threw a party on the lawn. At Sweeney’s mother’s house there is meat every night: Beef stroganoff, sausage & peppers, chicken marsala, steak, steak, and steak & potatoes. She is a kind, quick woman, and she leads her children around like some kind of mama fowl (a duck? a hen?), her children at her heels, leading with their foreheads. Last summer she bought us ice cream cones one evening at Cape May, and as we stepped from the sandy snack deck, I noticed I’d fallen in line. The family does not know much about me, but they know some. They know the big things, the big-weird things, parents’ jobs, and sometimes what I do in Brooklyn. They certainly know that I don’t drive. Regardless, I am on their escape-plan docket if New York City is ever attacked again. I trust them with my life. Families are wrecks, divorce sucks, but even though his father didn’t come to the graduation party, couldn’t come, O tragic bonds, they have an escape plan that starts in Pleasantville, and that escape-plan includes everyone. Amen.

At the party, all we remember about the ceremony was Judy Collins: she was the keynote speaker for Pratt this year, unbeknown to us until: she got to the podium and first, she sang. She sang and then she quoted Emerson, saying, “Don’t omit the the thing you meant to say.” And honestly, I don’t know what she meant to say, whether it was fifteen things to do on a rainy day, trivia about May West, or just simply reminding everyone to eat. She is seventy years old. She sang ”Gypsy Rover” and Leonard Cohen songs and wished everyone good luck, good luck, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” 

Post-ceremony, the writing graduates, and the writing faculty, and even some families, met up at a bar in midtown called Rudy’s that sells pitchers of OK house amber ale for just seven bucks. Also, free hot dogs, but you’ve got to ask especial. I sat next to Samantha Hunt, one of the finest professors & writers(she’s off to win the Orange Prize!), on stools, talking about projects, parents, poets who claim prophethood in their work (”Yeah,” she said, “as a fiction writer, when I hear a poet talking about that, I just think, ‘Oh, poor poet. The world doesn’t acknowledge you.’”) She went on to say that I “run with a tough crowd” for standing up to that though. We smelled like beer and I was getting louder. She said her mother grew up in Pleasantville. She said, “A cute little house on Sutton Place…” I said, “That’s where we’re staying right now!” 

Sutton place is a one-sided Dead End road, and because it’s so small I knew just the house she was talking about. In fact, I can see it directly across the street right now. It has a diamond shaped window, just like she said.

The end, the end. There have been so many final celebrations, readings, bar crawls, dinners. Too many. No time for desire or nostalgia. Too much cake can make you fat. Robi has fallen in love just two weeks before he was supposed to leave. Sonny’s Bar on the river in Redhook, in the middle of no where. Blue grass. And/or Amanda’s show Sweeney and I saw at Tony’s Tavern, through the swinging doors, like My Bloody Valentine but all fierce-lipped, soft-chinned ladies. I think we are trying to court her. I’m listening to a recording of ”Wagon Wheel” right now. Lonely Christopher says he always begins with a title, and that the title rarely changes. We’ve moved out of the apartment. I will not feel wistful until later, when I smell something far away familiar.

This version of “Wagon Wheel” is by a young woman under the name Prolly, and it’s more like a hymn these days. We ran into her one night in Santa Fe, singing it in the park. We’d been listening to the recording for several months at that point, and we had just been walking by. We had just been getting ready to leave. We were almost to our car. We were going back to Brooklyn in the morning. And there she was. In the park. It was dark, and I heard some one singing, and I said, “That’s fucking Prolly.”  

 The Gates Salon

RIP

October 17th, 2005 - May 7th, 2009

Photo by Mae Saslaw

(see Lonely Christopher’s introduction to Ray Ray Mitrano’s chapbook at The Corresponding Society’s website library, wherein a complete history is divulged.)

We’re pretty sure our neighborhood bodega is selling crack. Sometimes we take late-night strolls for a beer or a candy bar to accompany the work that will take us into the early morning. While we’re putting our items on the counter, a bedraggled man reaches over us and hands the cashier two dollars. The cashier hands him a small paper sack, and the transaction is over. Another guy comes in and does the same thing. There are not many things you can get for two dollars in Brooklyn. After we leave, we see the other cashier (there are usually two or three) kissing a woman against a running taxi just outside the awning. It is two o’clock. We are wearing slippers.

We had an oyster dinner at our place last night. Greg went to China Town and bought three dozen, ready to be shucked. He baked three crusty French loaves, and we bought white wine, lemons, spinach and things for a salad. Zucchini fried in egg, flour and salt, that, honestly, mostly tasted like scramble than batter. Oyster shucking is the closest thing to the Western man as hunting lions. It is the only organism we feel safe to eat live, prying it open (and dead!) with our own hands, drowning it with juice and then slurping. Sweeney slurped his down without an astonished peep. “Drink faster,” Greg said, “Keep drinking. It’s the only way to do it.” Our hands were covered in mud, and our knuckles were bleeding. We were bleeding at the table under the light. Our blood was in our wine. The oysters were gone.

The end of the year has come. The seniors read their work on a gray day in the sculpture garden, and later we filled Rope, professors and all, and Sweeney and I were so hungry afterward we stopped at two take-out places on our walk home, one after the other, and ate heartily, leaning against the walls, moaning. One which was White Castle, for my first and last time. It was not even like dog food, but like doll food.  Reminded me of the time right before my father was getting married, and all of Tessa’s relatives were staying with us for the week. Desperate, we all went to Taco Bell one night. I was seven. I got a sticker dispenser in my Kids Meal and was full of wonder. Fast food! My dad, wincing and pale under the neon lights, said, “This is the first and last time I eat at Taco Bell.”

We invited people over, but fell asleep right away. It had been a long, good week. Dreaming wistfully of critical introductions, portfolios, George and Mary Oppen sailing around North America, back and forth, “The Language of New York,” salmon cakes, book making (the paper shop had been there for thirty years, and had grown accordingly, but in the city you can’t just up and expand, so there we were, jammed in both the check-out line and the bone-folders). The ladies from A Wrecked Tangle Press came and presented their endeavor to our studio. They live together, and hang their writing on a clothing line to let it air, and make intricate books with souvenirs, for people, for free. Because the idea is that books are not dispensable. It made me long to live with an industrious girl. In no time at all, we will all be living in different places. The last-ever Gates Salon is on Thursday after a heaving three-years (as Lonely Christopher said, “We followed her into hell”).  (And we did.)

Certain foods are only good depending on the weather. For instance, a citrus smoothie (let’s say, pineapples, mango and lime) does note digest properly on a rainy afternoon, nor (as Chanelle and I learned in Tarrytown last weekend) should one indulge in Cafe Cubana on the first hot week of the April. The thick, sugary viscosity, no matter how small a cup it comes in, is a force meant for a time of year where you’re getting ready to turn in (say, November, or a dreary week in March.) We had just gone swimming in the Crotan River, but only for a second because, as muggy as it was, the mountains were still cold, and so were their waters. But we climbed down a cliff, and sat on a rock under a tree hung with fishing buoys.

Today I walked around the city for the first time in two months. There are the mornings I go to an acupuncturist whose office faces the Episcopal steeple of the church near Union Square, but that doesn’t count. Those mornings are so quiet, people aren’t even at work yet, and my flight path so small, that it never reminds me that I live any where in particular. Today, walking past line partitions for the Tribeca Film Festival, I remembered. It is so disorienting to know that just across the river this is always happening. That there is this place, that is just a place, but big, after all. It was warm, but rained like crazy. A man, dry under the Four Seasons awning gave me calm directions to the Austrian Cultural Forum where I saw Uljana Wolf read for the PEN Festival.

Festivals, at least the contemporary form, are strange places for poets. They are muffled, not only by the large rooms, but by the themes and pretenses each festival is formed under. A non-profit must appeal for funding by giving a reason for their occasion, but then, in the end, poet, moderator, and curator all seem kind of squashed under the obligations posed by their benefactors. Wolf read a series of poems called Dichtionary, where she took antagonyms (i.e. “bound for Chicago and bound by ribbon”) between German and English and composed quick, playful, sort of nostalgic pieces out of their differing meanings.  

Sweeney and I walked through the cherry blossoms in The Botanical Gardens yesterday morning. They have erupted.  

Now that it’s spring, I may as well say it to whomever is in doubt: Hot pants are the only flattering style of “shorts,” if we must use that clumsy term.

Body size is no issue. It’s like the romper phenomenon: hot pants just look good on everyone! Whereas most other “shorts”, no matter your size, look terrible, always. Something about how the hem comes down to the middle of your thigh, calling attention to neither thigh, nor leg, nor hip, but plain, pale girth, making everything look bigger and disproportionate. A successful piece of apparel isolates a specific part of the body. This goes for tight and loose-knits. Clothing should act as a careful frame, a complimentary container for something that is already fantastic (i.e. your bod). Throw your shorts in the fire. Do like Daisy [Duke].

I used to be really vigilante about clothing, and I’m not so much these days. I keep all dresses, which I never wash, in a wooden, pirate trunk we found on Cambridge Ave. last summer.  Been eating coconut rice, and then just cooking the coconut pulp like rice and eating it with vegetables and a big spoon. One weekend we watched China Town (Oh, Faye Dunaway! A vision in taupe!) at the top of the Willoughby building, which is to say seventeen floors up. When you get off the elevator there’s a wind tunnel and a great silence. Last night Robert and Amber and I found a different television, an old one from the late-eighties tucked in another forgotten room, and we watched Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog, which was fantastic. The screen was so dirty I couldn’t tell the dust from fog. It was a standard noir story, with plenty of couples squabbling, a circus, Lily Tomlin and script seemingly lifted right off Husbands and Wives and placed in a circus trailer! We ate doughnuts. I have been riding my bike and the flowers are blooming and it has been raining like no-man’s-land.

Amber and I sat in Pratt Coffee Shop and talked about Universalist Unitarinism (I went to her church last Sunday), wondered what we were good at. We had a great Critic Practitioners class, and I was finally able to say that I don’t like Nabokov (I don’t!), and that his cherishing of details is too narcissistically “artistic” of an idea for a “form that must surrender itself to the freedom of its characters.” (see a great correspondence re: Nabokov between James Wood and Richard Lamb.) 

We went to see The TEAM (Theater of the Emerging American Movement) do a workshop of their play, The American Capitalism Project (formerly Boys and Girls of America, I am taking a Sick Day), at The Bric play labs. They had no props, and sometimes read from scripts, and only performed maybe five scenes from the whole piece, and it was still the most thrilling performance endeavor I know of. It was not overtly political, nor focused on any particular commentary or judgment, but simply enacting the ambivalence of capitalism through a story set in Las Vegas. There was an open beer bar afterward, and Chris and I raved about the play, and found vintage hats on the sidewalk on our way home.

Soon, it seems, I will only watch Woody Allen films and TEAM plays, and read only Southern Gothic fiction, and be Flannery O’Connor in hot pants.

That had completed a week of events, it seemed. We saw a panel on Influence Outside the Literary, which featured (among others) Zadie Smith and Jennifer Knox, that was generally entertaining, for many reasons, but didn’t go very deep. Talked more about influence over content, as opposed to form, impulse, relation. We also saw Alice Notley give a fantastic reading of some unpublished work, and she told us that “anyone can read minds, it’s just a matter of wanting to. One time I smoked really good hash with a woman I really didn’t like and we shared minds, but it was a bad experience. I did not want to read her mind. You have to be careful who you let in.”

We celebrate several birthdays today. One being Vladimir Nabokov’s, incidentally. But also my sister’s, Mr. Greg’s, Jane Ferguson’s (the most enthralling woman of my youth), and Wm. Shakespeare’s.

After an arduous cesarean-section birth, Correspondence. No.2 is alive and well, and available to the masses! It took six months, half of the United States, a mis-print, and a wet nurse, but we made it.   

As we prepare for Correspondence No.3, we call for your submissions. We hope to have it to the printers by early August.

We will be accepting work of all lengths & styles: poetic, aesthetic, dramatic, or prose-etic. Because Correspondence is not unified by a theme, it is important that each contributor be amply represented in their own right. We ask then, that you be prepared to submit a minimum of five [printable] pages, which may warrant our requesting further.

The final deadline for submissions is July 1st.

For further submission guidelines, please visit our website: www.thecorrespondingsociety.com, or email us at thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com.

Thank You.