On methods. While working through assignment, the class was tasked with choosing and imitating one piece of Bernard's work. I chose The Biggest, Most Beautiful Balcony in the World. I attempted to recreate the same chronological transitions, where Bernard begins by regaling us with a tale of his nieces development, in a list-like fashion incorporate a game that builds a frame of background for getting to what culminated in a wistful longing for better times. I also tried to keep detailing to my closest approximation of his work.
     He begins by creating a scene, "A lone balcony jutting out from a stucco apartment building. It over looked an alley and paring lot, the pavement potholed, lumpy and littered, flanked by trash bins painted a flaking industrial green and caution orange, like large bonded barges." I tried to use descriptive detailing describing an old swimming pool that my younger brother almost drowned in. "They had one of those large above ground swimming pools, the painted metallic sides and the slick polyurethane floor. A blanket of bright blue bubble wrap covered the shimmering thalassic basin, casting dancing patterns of sunlight off the cool metal railings." It was a peaceful scene, but the next second my brother fell in, while the lining was covering the water. I panicked, frozen, my neighbor who was a year older than I jumped in and saved him. That entire process took maybe one minute, but in my mind time warped, it took an eternity.
     Bernard's work typically follow some type of narrative arc, with a beginning, climax, and resolution. I've seen works by other writers that don't seem to have any concrete or definitive "end." It's easier to just leave a piece unresolved, a true master can make a complete work. Bernard does this. I will work to do this.

     Bernard. Is there existential value in a name? Resoundingly, yes, yes, yes. As a quality of human perspective, the existence of a thing is symbolically denoted by a name. The name generates and abstract cognitive perpetuation resembling the names physical likeness. If one is determined to bolster the global lexicon, then neologism is the incontestable avenue for which any mind should wander down. 

     On to other things. Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere, a collection of essays recounting events in his life explores the relationship he had with his parents as a child, and later as an adult. The first section Beacons Burning Down is a tribute to his mother, one in which he regales tales of his youth, and the constant dejection he felt towards his name, Bernard. He describes his name as "the connotations of myopia, introversion, and bookishness that my destiny has borne out." All the while he manages to string along a collection of stories ranging from a death defying headless rooster that his father comically represents in court, to a quixotic tale of his mother and grandparents swimming the Bering Strait (at its shortest point 51 miles across) to arrive in America, from Russia.

     The language Cooper uses ranges from a pithy colloquial evocation towards free verse that is at times writhing with heavy words. It may not be an easy read for all, keep a dictionary on hand, and partake in the journey. A journey laden with dread, "I can't possibly go about my business day in and day out, parting the curtain of space before me, with any greater sense of apocalypse than I already have." And yet a sense of mythical hope "For eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, those subaquatic octaves formed in my mind a conception of refuge so sweet, I felt as though I were living in Atlantis..." Exploring the vestiges of his memory before they are depleted.

     Dawn Lundy Martin's Violent Rooms while not outright clear what she's referring to, leaves room for interpretation within the ambiguity. The adjectives used are not wholly visual but rather they are figurative. For instance when describing a thing that many had done before she says, "The wound is rupture. Blood-faced. Between sailing and anchor. No, between shipwreck and burial." Where the last part of that could either be a time or a place, or neither. Just some intangible construct of an existentially nihilist mind.
     As an entirety the poem evokes the image of either a birth or a rape, but it's probably neither; or it's one or both. The line "A rancor defines the split." Signifies a level of unwanted parting. "Rip into."? "That urgent flex peels off the steady layers." Possibly an undressing of clothes. "A girl, I say. Girl. Gu-erl. Quell." An attempt at maintaining self identity. And then the quell. A forced silence. The victim under assault. Or it could be something entirely different. Probably, yes. That's the beauty of poetry. I'm sure if I read it tomorrow it'll mean something else to me. If at this very moment it represents a rape room or an wanted child birth, then that's what it represents.
     This CAConrad chap. Traveling poet, what an interesting character. I wish I could have gotten a chance to hear him read yesterday. His existence is poetic. Eat, breath, sleep. A dedicated soul to his craft. Very respectable.

     "There are two kinds of women: day women and night women." The juxtaposition examining the qualities of night women and day women. The time of day the woman in the story exists in is not arbitrary but influenced by the care she devotes towards her son. Her character develops over the span of her dislike for the time she has to spend at night,  to the ambivalent resignation "The night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend on it." This transcends the simple concept of time and really is an examination of her means of survival as she deceives her son.
     Throughout the nightly "grind" she's hyper aware of her son. She never alludes to performance anxiety but I imagine it's a persistent issue for her. "Somehow in the night, he always calls me in whispers. I hear the buzz of his transistor radio. It is shaped like a can of cola. One of my suitors gave it to to him to plug into his ears so he can stay asleep while Mommy works." Demonstrates her auditory attention directing towards her son. And "The stars slowly slip away form the hole in the roof as the doctor sinks deeper and deeper beneath my body. He throbs and pants. I cover his mouth to keep him from screaming." shows the actions she takes during coitus to maintain her sons ignorance. What further actions would she be willing to take?
     Whatever the outcome, there doesn't appear to be any end in sight. She's internally concocted fabrications for the boy, preparing to tell him that any one of her nightly clients is the poor kids father, should he discover them. It's a twisted amalgamation of Russian roulette and Schrödinger's Cat in which the kid's image of his father(who he was told died) will be determined by whether or not he peaks behind the curtain on any given night. Pick your poison.

     The Girl With the Blackened Eye is a powerful piece of short writing. Whether or not it's true, based on true events or fictitious the heart wrenching story of a teenage girl abducted and rapped is chilling. The types of details the author Joyce Carol Oates vividly describes not only being rapped but having to witness as her abductor violently rapes other women. You get a sense that she no longer attaches herself to this world, she says "you are there, and not-there." Her body may have been present, but the essence of what made her, "her" was shelled away. 

     Her inability to escape when she had the opportunity really shows you how much her psyche was affected over this eight day period of time. That coupled with her inability to communicate her past to her current family shows that she masterfully compartmentalized her experiences.

     Details and imagery that are incorporated into a story that are pulled from real life tend to add another layer of immersion throughout the story. Things that are so real that they can't possibly be made up trick your mind into whole heartedly accepting the story.     

     I remember it was November a few years ago. I'd been at work all day, and through part of the evening. It was a routine sort of day. Until, I got one of those phone calls, the type that everyone dreads. My mom's trembling voice was on the other end, struggling to exhale her words, "Grandpa, is in the hospital. He's on a ventilator, they're keeping him alive until the family arrives. Can you make it here?" "Of course." CLICK. Thirty minutes later, I pulled aside a hanging cloth door and stepped into another dimension. Twenty of my family members, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, parents, grandparent were all standing in a tight perimeter, circling my dying grandfather. The machines beeped rhythmically, pale blue tubes ran down his throat, as I watched his chest peacefully rise and fall like waves rolling through the surf.
     It was one of the most beautiful nights of my life, and yet I'll forever miss my grandfather. Death is something that units us all, while at the same time it separates us. What if you had some fix on the events of your life? The ability to have a conversation with yourself on your death bed, what questions would you have? I wonder what my grandfather would have said, if he had the opportunity to give a younger version of himself some advice. Bacon and beer won't kill you. Jorge Loius Borges August 25, 1983 tells of how one man has the chance to talk to himself on his death day. The story is written with rich environmental detail. Bringing to life an interesting concept, to know the totality of your accomplishments. It really intensifies destinies role. When the younger version defies the older version of himself, claiming he won't fulfill some of the events that has lead him to this death bed, the older version says matter of factly, "Yes you will." Once the ball is rolling its hard to stop it. We find the same thing in Dino Buzzati's The Falling Girl.
    A young girl hurls herself off of a skyscraper, in a contradictory rush to reach the bottom. The main character acknowledges that there is no going back, there is no stopping our march towards death. She has the strength to momentarily slow down, which I find interesting, it may point to the things she was missing from life. Her desires to have more time for romantic pursuits, as she slows for the gentlemen on a balcony and taps him on the nose. Never escaping the relenting pull of gravity, which is used as a metaphor for death. Are we being pulled to it? Or is it rushing towards us? That cataclysmic collision is mind shattering, life ending, life bringing, mind altering, rushing and exploding, brilliantly, and radiantly, the star ashes twinkle, full of secrets.

     After reading the packet that was assigned to us. A couple of the pieces really stuck out to me. I enjoyed Michael Van Wallenghen's poem Walking the Baby to the Liquor Store. His precision for word choice adds an ambiguous sense of purpose for walking the baby. On going to the liquor store he says, and I quote "Believe me, I wouldn't miss these excursions for the world. I wouldn't miss them even if it meant giving up the National Book Award." He's willing to give up a book award for his trip to the liquor store. The baby is just how he rationalizes taking the walk every day. As he comes home, immediately he has a drink, puts the baby to sleep and passes out on the porch. The poem ends with a bleak passage.

     The last line "...watching the fireflies coming on and going out again in the long grass like so many sparks flying off the anvil of the world." Is such a beautiful line. It evokes this primal sense of creation, banging on the anvil, forging the world.  But I ask myself what type of world is he forging for his baby, as he's passed out on the porch?

     The other piece I enjoyed was Wallet by Allen Woodman. The story picks up with an old man who's been pick-pocketed and he's intent on playing a trick on the thief. His actual baiting process, is written well by Woodman, describing this bumbling old man that's really hamming it up dangling a fat worm on a hook. It's comical because you get this sense that the old man really wanted no contact with the thief other than giving him a bogus wallet. Was it a waste of the thieves time? Was it a waste of the old man times? Or the narrators? As Woodman says. "Life is the same old story told over and over." The thief tries to run, the old man tries to run, the narrator runs. And so the world goes on running. 

     Inescapably, we characterize, categorize, and conceptualize a world perceived by our very own human brains. Our brains are particularly good at pattern recognition. Its the difference between stopping with traffic at a red light once you realize a sea of break lights signifies deceleration; and mistaking the stripped fur and size of a tiger for the common house cat. Pattern distinction is an essential part of surviving. If you realize that gravity constantly forces you to the floor every time you jump off the last step coming down the stairs, you'll apply that pattern of jump and fall to everything else.
     I make this point because, like life poetic verse relies on distinct patterns. The more amiable that pattern is the more relatively accepted the poem. But what happens when any sensible pattern is undetectable? Our brains immediately become engaged in discovering its existence. So much so that to not find a pattern triggers an overt dislike or rejection. Particularly when verse lapses intro prose and the message is so convoluted, you may as well pour out a can of alphabet soup and decipher any hidden meaning you can. But why not enjoy the soup? Soup and poetry are both cooked in a relatively small pot, allowing all of their flavors to amalgamate. The mistake is thinking that they were ever anything different. Don't read so much into the message, just tell me how it tastes.

     Khaled Mattawa offers us a tragically beautiful look into his soul with his poem titled Terrorist. The piece sets off painting a grisly conflict scene in which fire crossed skies and streets decorated in "arabesques of strewn corpses" are an all to familiar alternating occurrence that continuously wear down his humanity. 

     The affect of savage death is universal in its finality. However, the value of a life is subjectively situational and culturally debatable. Mattawa does an interesting job depicting the denizens of destruction as his twin. Birthed from and into the shared condition "Everything leads me back, unified and cellular, to the womb we shared." Demonstrates this conflicting rubber banding that no matter what direction life takes him "everything" leads him back. Beginning with nonexistence to birth, we run away from nonexistence as fast and hard as we can, until we get to the end and the rubber band and it tightens, pulling us back to nonexistence.

   "Rubbing the ashes of his bones unto my face I become his blue screams at birth." is a powerfully connecting statement, ashes paint his face blue amalgamating his existence with their death. As he awaits his own death, he counts it down with each breath "Every breath I inhale is the cold wind that makes us embrace like statues of eternal lovers. In every exhale there's a wisp of silver smoke from the warm clay that binds us." From the coldness of death to the biblical reference to creation. We all breath in death, breath out life. Until we fill ourselves with death. 

     Biting off a piece of the Writer Within and spitting out the bones. There's a lot of meat on Natalie Goldberg's newest edition. It's been delightfully fattened and when served up it offers a complexity of deep flavor for not only the aspiring writer, but for anyone who seeks a deeper perspective of their every day life.
     The location for much of this perspective comes through the form of repetitious practice. Goldberg equates writing to many things, all requiring practice, she say's "like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it." The words we choose to fill our pages grow as we grow, they see as we see. The more comfortable we are with ourselves, the more we learn to trust our inner voice. But what if nobody gives a shit about that voice? Should it be silenced or should it be given the opportunity to wander around, with a blind vulnerability that desperately yearns for something worth saying? Let it wander I say, and I think Natalie would agree.
     Most of what we actually experience is inhibit by our brain, things it intuitively decides to disregard as critical for our survival. These small observations, the detection of nuance between ceiling tiles, the silence of stars in a brightly lit city, the perpetual taste of the inside of our mouths, are probably things your brain would filter out under normal conditions, unless you were open to them. These occurrences are what Goldberg would consider the ingredients for making a cake. Together an unorganized collection of experiences such as these may seem like "goop" but if you keep adding more, "a beautiful cake may rise out of the mixture of your daily details."
     The point that she makes regarding adding, the "heat" to the collection of experiences or daily details is an abstract concept. What is the heat? It isn't some literal mechanism you can activate in order to produce an engaging piece. Much of the book is directed at kindling the fire that will produce a lifetime of our own deeply personal brand of heat and then finding the guts to cook ourselves over the flames.