i have a blog where i put poetry stuff, and another blog where i put carbondale stuff, but the poetry reading last night, which had its own blog too, was really a convergence of all those different aspects of my life and really belongs here because this is where i ramble and bring it all together. i originally got two other poets besides myself, so that there were two out of three of us from cesl, and two out of three of us quakers, but the quakers were the more loyal of the lot at at the beginning, out of the eighteen people there maybe ten were quakers. three or four more were from cesl and then a few more showed up too including my two older sons. the lead poet was home with a newborn baby but another cesl teacher read for him and when it got to my turn i talked a little about haiku and belted out some of my favorites from my collection which as it turns out was really my time to tell my town about my travels which now were about 38 years ago. here i'd held it in all that time, raised a family, some people knew about it, but, i'd never put it out there and said, this is what i did when i was nineteen, guatemala to alaska, about a year on the road, 1974 to be exact. and then iowa took the brunt of my rough landing so iowa was well represented in there also.

it's cold out still but it's been raining a lot and believe it or not some flowers are beginning to poke up through the cold ground. as i got ready i noticed how haiku had made me always aware of the natural world and whatever we know as the seasons; here it's still february, but winter is really loosening its grip and even though valentines and abe day and those february things could be considered winter, according to the calendar, around here they could be associated with the first nice days when you see those shoots and begin to realize the worst is over, spring is really about to pop. international festival, with its food, and chinese new year, with its spring symbolism, and this other stuff comes along too, but here we were in the back room of a coffeehouse belting out poetry and it was actually kind of fun.

then in kathy cotton's set she invited a friend from the performance poetry crowd, a woman who got right into her poem about those tigers in ohio that were involved in that situation in the news a while back. some guy had collected a whole crowd of tigers, maybe 1% of the total number of tigers on this earth, but then he committed suicide or something and let the tigers loose, and it being rural ohio and all, the authorities ended up killing most of them though they certainly didn't enjoy it. i may have gotten some of the details wrong here but the woman got kind of into it and didn't think highly of the 'public safety' that was the cause of their deaths, and especially got wound around the idea of 1% until she sounded like an occupy kid and i wondered, what happened to those occupiers anyway? and she's going 1%! 1%! theatrically, bringing in those performance poetry skills. performance poetry is big these days and i really enjoyed this, it's like watching rap, you realize there's a lot you can do with everyone's attention, once you direct it successfully upon yourself. not that i would ever try such a thing.

i got a little embarrassed, going back and dredging through my book, and finding a few typos and repeated poems, and ones that were too true to life, or said stuff i really didn't want to say. i've got my work cut out for me, as i make it a little bigger and do the research to fill in the gaps. i brought out all my angst about the haiku itself: how the haiku community has rejected 5-7-5, almost universally, but i haven't; how i want it to fit together as a body but don't know exactly how that will look (right now they're alphabetical, alabama first, and boy that's a bit of a push, going straight into alabama and from there to alaska, arizona and arkansas...california is still on that first page too, but connecticut has been pushed off by my little poster advertisement for the reading itself, so i could conceivably make that first page include whatever i wanted, and force people to delve in to really get it all). i'm talking the web version here, which has typos of its own and dead links and needs a little work too. getting it all into the light of day was, overall, quite good for me, but i'm now thinking, hustle & i can get another version out pretty quick here, one that would have more of the newer, better stuff.

that's assuming it's getting better and not spiraling downward into the muddled fuzzy golden memory of a guy who's way too busy and ever farther from the moments that actually made up that journey. it's another thing i learned, and my son told me later about having to go back to work immediately, and crossing the train tracks in front of a train so i reprimanded him about the inherent danger of stepping by those rails at night right in front of a train that can't or won't stop if you happen to get stuck. but he's nineteen, fortunately respectful and taking my advice but almost certainly not following it. one of the things i said as i belted out my train set was, they're always going faster than they look, they're actually quite dangerous, and it was a love holiday & people had love poems, but i loved trains so i had train poems.

actually it was the day after valentines day, a day in which americans spend what, three billion, but fortunately they had three hundred for the homeless which i duly scooped up and set aside to take it over there sometime as soon as possible. it included one money order for a hundred dollars by itself. a good donation to the shelter in a way feeds the ghost that follows me and reminds me how that sense of out there-ness which is like my shadow, it turns when i turn, it recedes in the dark when i curl up and try to get some sleep, it's really not so bad in this small town where i know everyone, and actually have very little chance of having to call on that shelter again. but when i go down there, to talk to the guy who runs it or whatever, i catch a glimpse of some of the people who are sucked up into the vicious-cycle treadmill: no job, no car, no life, no hope, homeless-shelter soup and you have to wait to get it, and in fact, register with the government. it's scary. but three hundred ought to be able to buy them a dinner or two and it was successful enough to get me thinking of doing it again. next year. with more of that tiger-like performance stuff, or maybe just more and/or different stuff in general, at least on my part.

to see what works and what doesn't, that's haiku, you get these moments, and sometimes some of the moments reach some of the people some of the time. i try to keep track. some of course have special meaning but only to me, the general public has no clue. rout out the inside jokes, the cliches & the stereotypes. though i must say, there were a few of those out there, at the same time i was.