all dressed up everywhere to go

holy snapdragons, batman, we've got 6 whole followers and no new posts since BLF! so here's the news: this social media dunderhead has posted 2010 photos to the website, that ancient device used by pre-cambian internet dwellers in the days before facelessbook & twitterbation. for those of you unfamiliar with the URL (that's geek talk for underwire restraining liturgies), it's - pause to celebrate the last of a dwindling tribe of proto-mesomorphs able to properly place an apostrophe - www.litfuse.us ALSO: desperately seeking Ann's (not Teplik) email and last name, and ditto for the incomparable THEO.

Lodging for LiTFUSE

Hi there LiTFUSIANs. Looking for cheap close clean lodging to rest your weary muse? We've reserved a few rooms at the Naches Hotel - please email michael [AT] litfuse [DOT] us to get the particulars. For an absolutely free stay, you are welcome to put down a sleeping bag/pad on the floor in Galleria Uno, where there is a bathroom & shower for your use. Also, there are limited homestays still available - please check with me at the above email address. Northwest Writers UNiTE!

RIDE SHARE to/from LiTFUSE

There are people who need rides and people who have rides to offer. I suggest we use the blog to match everybody up. Please post a comment if you have / need a ride - where from, when, how many. You could have an in-car open mic!

Poetry Stirs the Pot

At the 2007 LiTFUSE Poets' Banquet, Lorna Dee Cervantes totally blew the lid off the gathering with an impassioned reading of her poem of remembrance and anger - COFFEE - which honors massacred innocents from the coffee-working area of Acteal, Chiapas, Dec. 22, 1997. This poem is an example of the power of poetry to transform violence, which we will explore as part of this year's LiTFUSE workshop. Here's a link to Lorna Dee's poem: http://lornadice.blogspot.com/2007/12/coffee-poem-for-people-of-acteal.html / read this, then buy only fair trade

LiTFUSE Launch Party in about a month

hello litfusians
we're having a launch party on SEPT 7 @ 7pm @ hugo house in seattle - music, merriment & wonder - featuring mimi the aspiring hermit, susan rich, dan peters, elizabeth austen & more surprises - & hopefully YOU. $5 donation benefits tieton arts. hope to see you there -

Hermit Seeks Hermitage

Mikhail Nesterov. Hermit. 1889.

Poet seeks bit of fallow land to use (lightly) as a hermitage for one month. Any season. I currently reside in Pacific NW, but am considering offers both nationally and internationally. In the spirit of Basho and the wandering poets of Japan, I’m heading into the hills to practice silence and to write and reflect on life. I own a small sailboat, but currently have no land. Willing to trade poems for land use. Ideally looking for forested, valley or mountain land—high up, far out or down under—however inaccessible. It’s crucial only that it be removed from society. I plan to haul along my handmade, mini, portable yurt (collapses to 6 x 2’ and rides on a bicycle wheel) and a month’s supply of food. I will collect and treat my water and dispose of waste responsibly. I’m a grant-funded conceptual artist and former climbing ranger—respectful, quiet, clean and practiced in leave-no-trace. References available upon request. I’m interested in all serious offers and suggestions. Poet Hermit, aka A K Mimi Allin, is on the faculty this year at LitFuse.

Poet Hermit
poet.hermit@gmail.com
617 460 6110

Go Tara Go!

The National Poetry Slam is here - August 3-7 - and LiTFUSE Faculty member Tara Hardy is a key part of the 4-woman Seattle team. I had the opportunity to hear this team at REBAR in Seattle last week, and they're a hoot, they are hot, which makes them a hot hoot for whom you can root. Follow Slam results at www.poetryslam.com , and doubtless performances will find their way onto YouTube. Go Tara Go!

2010 Schedule on the Website

Hey all you nonexistent LiTFUSE blog followers - the 2010 schedule is now posted on the website. Go to www.litfuse.us and follow the link to 2010. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out whether to just eat this blog with ketchup. Blogs are for the dogs. Bark back.

Maya Deren, the poet

Hmmm... Well, I am in New York City and found out today that Maya Deren (experimental filmmaker on exhibit at MoMA) got her degree in literature at NYU and Smith College and was a poet of all things at the start of her career! I found some of Maya's poetry online here. There goes the poet, effortlessly through doors and halls, in a constant reinvention of self and art. Then I visited a flophouse in Soho called The White House. Astounding! I didn't really know what a flophouse was until today. It's a place where dry fish should be hung, a chicken coop for the weary. Did you know that for those who check in before 3AM, the price of the room comes with a sedative? Oh yes.

green mtn state

I'm finishing up a visit to mom in VT; tomorrow to NYC to be with Ava, my elder daughter, as she graduates with a masters in education. Here's a short poem inspired by eastern hiking:

Birch Poem

Suppose that old birch, its bark rolled
like a papyrus scroll, sent out its skin
for publication. What might a birch
poem say? It might reveal
the mystery of trees, not how
but why they breathe our poison,
exhale it as oxygen. How it hurt
to have that heart carved in its bark.
Reveal that it loves even the grubs
who chew its wood,
the woodpeckers who
poke holes to eat the grubs.
It might say simply:
I tend my roots
as I reach for the sky.


I'm waiting for someone to join the conversation - meanwhile, I'm working on the 2010 schedule. The objective is to have no objective. I'm not working on it. BeWell!

rain rain

blogging seems to be the process of finding out whether you have anything to say. that's all i've got to say for now. what about you?

Poet en route to Mongolia

Bother bother bother. I'll bother you! I'm alive, but I'm stowed away in a hold on Capitol Hill. I'm alive and living in a stuffy, windowless, lightless hold in a studio in a warehouse in a city block in Seattle. I'm en route to Mongolia. Out of this world, going by boat. I'm more than halfway there. LitFuse is over the horizon. Tieton, place of open air, fat brown hills, dusty roads, bright red globes. Wind. I could use your wind now. Push me on across the Pacific, over top India and China to Mongolia. I promise, I'll come home. I'll be there in October, in my leather coat in my striped blue scarf, standing out on the town green, whispering what the wind told me, harking what the birds said. Whispering why. Harking the sky.

A K Mimi Allin, three times LitFuse faculty member, is the current artist-in-residence at Project: Space Available on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Her project is called HAM--Hold All Movement. For this, she earned her Ham Radio License, built an 8x11' hold and outfitted it with a cot, teapot, personal library & communications station (shortwave, marine VHF & HAM radios). She's residing full-time in the hold, listening to radios by night & turning that info into gestures by day. Radio gestures. Mimi is hoping to explore a continuation of this work for showing and sharing at LitFuse and hopes by October to have her General Radio License and to know some Hams in Yakima. Given that public broadcasts are illegal, what would Ham radio poetry look like? Leave it to me. I'll figure it out.

"oh bother" said pooh

wow even i don't know what i was saying with that last post
what i'm doing now is opening the litfuse blog to other voices
litfuse itself is more choral than solo
more cacophony than monologue

i'd like to ask you (yes, the ubiquitous as yet invisible you)
why bother write / read poetry?

ribbon candy

?litfuse is what ?workshop poets' a - did you mirror write when you were young - or even write in ribbon candy forward & back & fore & back, free as a river flowing to the sea? you can we can

I that determined is technology this though can I even maybe

good soldier return left then march right, one can't hear you!

tree to count, three a climb

we will get together in tieton octoberpus eight - 10 / more info www.litfuse.us

soon soon

be won't i

talking to

self my

all this buttoning & unbuttoning

how they work, ed, is a mystery to me too, though apparently i'm "in charge" of this little cybershack. but one thing i suspect is that you have to become a follower to know that a new post is up. without followers, there's no conversation. to become a follower is a devotional exercise; not subservient but reverential in the true manner of reverence - a surrendering to . . . the uncertainty of relationship. in cate's profound idiom, an unbuttoning. ahhh, for a fruit fly - only a poet would wring ink tears for a sucked & dusty fruit fly. let's embrace that poetic impulse.

in a poem i once said

Dead poets like religious zealots

sure beat living ones,

their stock trades higher

they’re less ANNOYING,

they ask for nothing

no grants readers sex

proofs breakfast adulation,

even the big lie

TRUTH

is now a matter of complete

indifference to them;

they never bathe

leave no wadded towels

no toothpaste in the sink

don’t howl, don’t stink

(except the newly extinct),

they’re loyal as the dog,

they don’t blog.

ergo, live poets of the 21st century BLOG - come hither, LiTFUSIANS, annoy me out of my coma. once we've got uncritical mass (vernacular), we'll talk about ingrid, this year's featured artist. about how grateful we are that she will be joining us. about inspiration without ostentation. about poet stew. but first, we need YOU.

Launching the LiTFUSE blog

being intrinsically a mugwump aka luddite, the time-suck of blogging has deterred this step over the digital precipice . . . but, the enticement of hearing back from LiTFUSIANs in a truly interactive environment has - tentatively - won my heart, if not my mind. PLUS this might just be the ticket to tickle other like-minded and unlike-minded spirits hither to TIETON which is in an unknown corner of central WA-WA, and if the center how could it be a corner? well that's part of the fun, and so I invite you to chime in with your views of the matter: what has LiTFUSE meant to you? what do you think of LiTFUSE 2010 so far? what shall we do? who with and will you please be there? & most of all, the work, the work, the work. post a poem, and fragment, an insight, a slight of hand. be not merely the FUSE, but the MATCH. yes, at last, it's ok to play with matches. please visit our website - do I need to post the link here? www.litfuse.us