So Little to Fight Over

recently I have had the chance to write prose which is very much like having a lover who is not your wife when you are a poet....

**************Baseball season starts Sunday I know this is true because all my conversations with Mark Tardi end with the following phrase "World Champions"

Catherine Daly is coming back to the Midwest she has got to be one of the most glamourous poets I think that it is the LA thing no body is glamourous in Chicago we have too much blood under our fingernails...

I have been getting up early like 4 AM to write... the cats are confused

It is one year since Robert Creeley died I miss his presence and miss that there will be no more books well at least Peter Gizzi is alive....

My grandmother had to go into a nursing home she is 92 there has been allot of familial sadness about this she is quite a figure when other people were hiding in rootcellars or collaborating with the Nazis she was running a business, alone as a young woman, negotiating the vaguries of Fascist Italy, enduring bombings and deportations feeding deserters from the army hiding in the alps, helping American and British flyers to escape all while having SS soldiers sleeping in her hotel...

Been reading allot lately just finished Liz Willis' new book, rush out and buy it she is really something.

Saw Mark Tardi last night, I like the fact that I dont have to explain anything to Mark and that we share the same manias... his only fault is that he is a South Side Cubs fan which is kind of like being a dog with gills...

I am tired of Chicago maybe I will move to Des Moines :) or Dallas somewhere without loudness..

read in Gary last week at Bill Allegrezza's IUNW really engaging people met a couple of nice younger poets

" Paulo Leminski Poem"

let me vanish
let me melt
let me fall apart
until
after me
after us
after all
nothing but charm
is left

-Paulo Leminski translated by Regina Alfarano and Robert Creeley (C) Green Integer