Category Archives: Poetry

General, Language, Laura Grimes, Poetry

A poem to catch a writing breeze

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Sharp-shinned hawks, chromolithograph, 1908, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook/Wikimedia CommonsBy Laura Grimes

I’ve been blog quiet much too long. I can’t explain these things, but just accept them. My writer brain has languished. I’ve seen glimpses of it, fragments, but capturing a cohesive sense has been a struggle.

For me, poetry often serves as a toddling way back to recovery, a voice for the broken. Not broken as in destroyed, or sad, though sometimes that can be the case, too, but in this instance, I consider it more a voice for the misshapen. It’s a bunch of puzzle pieces that need realigning. Again, I don’t question these things, I’m just grateful.

I thought I lost my poetry touch a few years ago. I never realized it was leaving, it just wasn’t there anymore and it took me a while to notice it was gone, but by then it was too late. So I’m surprised now by its sudden return, unannounced and unbidden, like a shadowed figure seeking shelter from a storm who shows up wet on my doorstep smelling of the natural order of things. Irresistible, really. But why?

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Bob Hicks, General, Humor, Poetry

Mitt and Newt: On to Florida!

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By Bob Hicks

Seeing it as our duty to help sort out this most perplexing of civic seasons, we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters have hired our first political correspondent. He’s a veteran newspaperman named Eugene Field, and we’re proud to add him to our mix.

Here is Mr. Field’s first dispatch, filed from the late 19th century on the morning after Newt Gingrich’s tooth-ripping victory over Mitt Romney in Saturday’s South Carolina GOP primary election. Well done, Mr. Field! We look forward to your continuing reports:

THE DUEL

Exclusive report from the primary battles

THE GINGHAM dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’ other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate 5
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I was n’t there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)
The gingham dog went “bow-wow-wow!” 10
And the calico cat replied “mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face, 15
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Never mind: I ‘m only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)
The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, “Oh, dear! what shall we do!” 20
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw—
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew! 25
(Don’t fancy I exaggerate—
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)
Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day 30
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so, 35
And that is how I came to know.)
Bob Hicks, Books, General, Poetry, Visual Art

Link: On mad hatters and picture books

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By Bob Hicks

melodyowen_alice3In Down the rabbit hole: Melody Owen makes a book, which is new on Oregon Arts Watch, I tell the tale of … well, of Melody Owen making a book. Actually, it’s more about the publication party for the Portland artist’s new book, Looking Glass Book, at Publication Studio, in a tuckaway corner downtown. The book consists of collages inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, and the whole thing makes for an interesting tale.

Also well worth checking out at Oregon Arts Watch is ‘My Flashlight Was Attacked by Bats’: Farewell to poet Marty Christensen, in which Leanne Grabel, Doug Spangle and Mark Sargent offer heartfelt, eloquent and only mildly profane tributes to the late poet, who died January 5. Farewell to another cantankerous player from the old and gritty Portland.

Bob Hicks, General, Poetry

Till death do us part: the junk’s in the mail

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter is getting old.

"Grave-digger," Viktor Vasetsov, 1871. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Wikimedia Commons.At least, judging by his junk mail, the world seems to think so.

Rest homes (or “active senior residences”), pharmaceutical companies, retirement financial planners, purveyors of musical nostalgia in the Pat Boone mold have got their hands, if not on Mr. Scatter’s obituary, then certainly on the records of his birth date and semi-antique Social Security number. This even though Mr. Scatter is not now nor has he ever been a card-carrying member of the AARP.

Today’s mail brought one of the less welcome of these geezerly come-ons, from an outfit called Neptune Cremation Service. “FREE Pre-Paid Cremation!” it shouted on the envelope, which Mr. Scatter refused to open. Frankly, the offer burned him up. On the other hand, something called the University of Western States also sent an offer, this one on the perkier side: “Teen Back Pain? 12-18 Years Old?” Back pain, yes. Teen, thank the lord, no. (The two teens in residence at Chez Scatter are often pains, but not in the back.)

Mr. Scatter has no immediate plans to go gentle into that good night, although he recognizes the eventual inevitability. He asks only that the eager entrepreneurs of the world hold their horses and stop trying to push him prematurely into the abyss. Today has been a chilly but gloriously sunny day, and Mr. Scatter fully intends to enjoy such pleasures to the hilt before the eternal rains settle in.

Maybe it’s the inspiration of recently reading Charles Deemer’s poetry collection In My Old Age, but Mr. Scatter has decided to versify his thoughts on biting the big one in rainy Oregon:

Ashes to ashes

dust to dust

in Portland

we just

turn to rust.

*

ILLUSTRATION: “Grave-digger,” Viktor Vasetsov, 1871. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Poetry

In his old age: Deemer at 3:17 a.m.

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By Bob Hicks

So this is the way it gets.

Lying in bed awake

at 3:17 a.m.

my wife’s heavy breathing

the weight of the dog on my leg


I am visited by the ghosts

of past mistakes

and dance to a symphony

of regrets


I wouldn’t change a thing


This is who I am

counting my blessings

in the dark morning

320That’s Portland writer Charles Deemer’s poem The Bottom Line, from his new collection In My Old Age, just out from Round Bend Press. Those of you who follow Deemer’s bracing, political, personal, sometimes crotchety blog The Writing Life II will remember a while back when poems started poking out, almost on their own, as if demanding voice among the general background noise of sports rants and teaching woes and struggling with scripts and ramming one’s head against the broad national venality and extolling the virtues of a simple cup of coffee and a good plate of scrapple in the morning. Old men, Deemer has discovered to his delight, get to say and do pretty much what they like, or at least what they’re still capable of saying and doing. This book is the result of that irascible fit of creativity, and I, for one, am happy for it.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Journalism, Music, Poetry, Theater, Visual Art

Tuesday Scatter: arts world in brief

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  • Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam
  • Closing the books: Powell’s layoffs, Looking Glass R.I.P.
  • Patrick Page plucks praise from “Spider-Man” carnage
  • In the room with Egypt’s fierce cultural protector
  • Alexis Rockman and good news at the Smithsonian

picture-21

By Bob Hicks

Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam: My old friend and neighbor Jaime Leopold dropped me a note about his friend, Andy Stein, a fiddler who can often be heard on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. “Andy has been compared to jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and he’ll be performing in a duo with Conal Fowkes, a Wynton Marsalis alum and wonderful pianist from New York,” Jaime said.

Jaime wanted me to know this because Stein will be performing Feb. 19 at Tabor Space. And as it happens, Jaime’s own band, Padam Padam, will be opening. If that sounds self-serving, I suppose it is a little bit, but mostly it’s not, because Jaime simply loves music, and when he knows good music’s coming ’round the bend, he likes to spread the word. If he says Andy Stein is worth going to see, I’m taking him at his word.

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Bob Hicks, Poetry, Theater

Vox at bat: poetry swings for the fences

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By Bob Hicks

Cy Young baseball card from 1911, the last of his 22 years pitching in the big leagues. He won 511 games, by far the most ever -- and lost 316, more than a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers won. Wikimedia Commons.Today we offer a quick link to Mr. Scatter’s review for The Oregonian, under his non de plume Bob Hicks, of Achilles’ Alibi, the latest evening of choral poetry from Eric Hull and his company Vox.

The program repeats this Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 22-24. Good stuff; catch it if you can. You can also read about Mr. and Mrs. Scatter’s previous visit to a Vox performance, in April.

As the review suggests, the poems of William Stafford are at the heart of this edition. But lots of other fine poets are along for the ride, and in honor of the baseball playoffs and impending World Series — like fresh apple cider and the ritual bringing-out of the sweaters, they’re part of what makes autumn special — we quote from one of them, May Swenson‘s bases-clearing double off the wall, Analysis of Baseball:

Sometimes
ball gets hit
(pow) when bat
meets it,
and sails
to a place
where mitt
has to quit
in disgrace.
That’s about
the bases
loaded,
about 40,000
fans exploded.

*

Cy Young baseball card from 1911, the last of his 22 years pitching in the big leagues. He won 511 games, by far the most ever — and lost 316, more than a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers won. Wikimedia Commons.


Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Poetry, Theater

Scatter and yon: life in the old stories yet

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Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell'sd "The Sleeping Beauty" at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By Bob Hicks

Scatterers have been sowing their wild oats elsewhere lately, and old topics are coming up new again. A quick update:

Meanwhile, some old friends are knocking on the door again.

  • Susan Banyas‘s fascinating memory play The Hillsboro Story, about a little-known but extremely telling small-town skirmish in the 1950s vanguard of the war for civil rights, returns for a two-week run at Artists Rep beginning Wednesday. The play has been getting lots of attention since we first wrote about it in January of this year, when it debuted in Portland’s Fertile Ground new-works festival, and it looks to have a long life ahead of it — as well it should — in school tours.
  • VOX, Eric Hull’s fascinating “spoken-word chorus” of poetry rearranged as a sort of spoken music, with the language conceived as if it were written as four-part sheet music, returns to Waterbrook Studio for shows October 15-24. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter plan to be there one of those nights. This version is called Achilles’ Alibi, and includes works by, among others, William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, William Stafford, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michele Glazer, and Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen. We wrote about a night with the VOXites back in April, in the post Poetry off the page, or, the fat lady sings.

*

Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell’s “The Sleeping Beauty” at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Poetry, Visual Art

If it’s Tuesday, this must be art season

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By Bob Hicks

Hard to believe, but here it is late September and already Portland’s fall arts season is in full swing. Somehow things snuck up on Mr. Scatter (he knows he should say “sneaked up,” except he prefers the ancient and slightly disreputable “snuck”), and now he must do some serious catching up.

Some cool-looking things he sees on the near horizon:

Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka of San Francisco Taiko DojoTAIKO UNLEASHED and ROMP STOMP BOOM! A little bit of modern-music history storms the Newmark Theatre stage Saturday and Sunday when Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka and San Francisco Taiko Dojo join Portland Taiko for PT’s fall concerts. In American taiko circles, this is a little like having Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton dropping by a modern jazz club for a jam: just how cool can these original stick-swinging cats be?

In a sense, Tanaka is the father of North American taiko (the contemporary, ensemble approach to the ancient Japanese drumming traces only to 1959 in Japan), and over the years since the young postwar immigrant founded it in 1968, San Francisco Taiko Dojo has gained near-legendary status. Stylistically and inspirationally, Tanaka and his group have been key players in the extraordinary spread of modern taiko across North America.

The players of Portland Taiko, one of America’s handful of professional ensembles, are no slouches, either. (Mr. Scatter likes Portland Taiko so much, he’s on its board.) Wear your raincoats: this could be a tsunami of sound. 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 3; shorter family matinee Romp Stomp Boom! at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2.

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