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Sometimes I get very overwhelmed by something. It can be a person, a feeling or a thought. This is my motivation to paint. This is the force that drives me. Painting a portrait takes hours and it is a great and intense way of studying an object. I never share what my art is about. I think art is very personal and that it's up to every individual to find their truth in the painting they are looking at.

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copyright © www.jillianann.com

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critical mass: In a nutshell it is about how technology and machines can be amazing things to use but dangerous if they control people so the people become slaves to the machines.

Other videos may be found at: http://www.jillianann.com/videos.html

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David Lehman and Willie Perdomo speak in different dialects, and watching them side-by-side is a pretty heavy testament to the disparate attitudes that exist in the literary communities.
 

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Test Pattern - Before my sister arrived when I was ten, my tiny world revolved around TV, in 1952 a still new and hypnotic entertainment source. And nothing excited me more than the chance to stay home to watch the Today Show, Arthur Godfrey, Herb Sheldon, Garry Moore, game shows, Our Gang comedies, Western Round-up Theatre, and soap operas beamed in magically from the Empire State Building to my out-of-the-way shack in Whippany, NJ. Snowstorms added a further dimension where I could play alone outside then return to the black and white mesmerizer and the misfortunes of Ann Southern, Charlie Chan, and Amos and Andy. What a life!!

Free Will - I am an atheist. But if I weren't, the Prince of Darkness would certainly be my hero. For it is he who would give me the wherewithal to make the choice depicted in this poem. But then again, I am an atheist so ignore what I have written.

Here she is in the middle, that cubana who writes poems and essays, mouth open to receive the breezes from the bay, estuary, whatever, of San Francisco, where she left just a little bit of her heart (yes, Tony Bennett). To the left, her youngest son, Carlo, also mouth open. Carlo is the Cuban Bocelli according to the doting crazy woman he calls mami. To the right, Carlo's significant other, Stephen, whose last name is Nice, and who truly is.

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I was named, at birth, Silvia Antonia Guillermina, with the last names of my parents, Brandon y Pérez, added for good measure. I never thought much about the names until one day in Puerto Rico when I discovered that some of the conflicting parts of my "personality" actually bore names... Antonia was the rebel, she who jumped naked in the rain. Guillermina was submissive and very conventional; my hidden nun. Silvia is the one the world sees most of the time; she attempts to fuse the conflicting parts into a whole of some sort.

But some years ago I discovered a fourth person whom I named Phoenix for lack of a better name (she is my survivor). She is a mystic, close to divinity through music, dance, word, touch. It is Phoenix (with Silvia's help) who wrote this poem. We are students of the spiritual, whether it be metaphysical Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism, whether rebirthing or swimming with dolphins or recently meditating on top of a mountain on the night of the full lunar eclipse.

Namaste, the divinity in me salutes the divinity in you, is a favorite concept; so is the cyclical nature of existence. As a child I was very much a pagan creature, pantheistic in my belief that all of nature partakes of the divine. As a maturing woman, I have gone back to those early roots; all of us who live on this planet, including the vegetable, mineral and animal kingdoms, are many in one. And so it is, and joy to the world.

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I belong to a poetry group called "Athens." Several of the writers in the group live in Israel and while we were writing and exchanging work about ongoing terrorist activities and the realities of war, I had nightmares about my close friends going to some cafe to write and being blown to bits by the terrible force of this seemingly arbitrary violence. Yellow Swords was born from these dreams.

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Unremembered Roads was inspired by a challenge on the MiPo Posting Board. Answer a set of questions, then--surprise--incorporate the answers into a poem. I don't write for a challenge unless it grabs me in some way, and this one did. The title formed first. Out of that, the vision suddenly appeared of a precocious adolescent girl staring longingly out of her brownstone window in a Boston suburb, ready for her life's adventure to begin. The poem wrote itself.

Denner photographed with Lu Garcia.
Photo by Pamela Shivola

Author: Richard Denner
Contribution: Dialogue Between Safe Crackers

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My friendship with Lu Garcia goes back to the Berkeley Poetry Conference, in 1965. We met in the Mediterranean Cafe, and he helped me get my shit together as a poet by giving me a thesis binder with a spring-activated spine, so I could hold together the poems I had written on miscellaneous scraps of paper. Confidence in myself as a writer took a quantum leap. The other night I watched a film by Kore-eda Hirokazu, a brilliant little film called "After Life," whose theme was about what memory one might take to eternity. Lu and I have enjoyed many walks and drives through the Berkeley hills. We walk and talk and look at houses. These excursions have been wonderful, and I will carry these feelings of friendship with me into the velvet future.

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You Be the Girl - We were dancing at a party. And for fun, wanting to jive, I said to my male partner, (very cheeky) ‘this time, you be the girl’. And he was, for a song or two, a good sport, till he reasserted his birthright. Somehow that idea stuck with me, latched on to others and helped launch this poem.

a blue tree - There is so much, call it enchantment, which floods me when I remember staring at the Mediterranean through the leaves of an orange tree. And then that other mystery, old age, dependency and all that and how these two realities can co-exist and maybe intertwine.

photo by Michael Eivaz

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This poem concerns itself somewhat with a snip from a book I nearly read many years ago:

"There is a further break, which is the desired result itself."

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I'm on a writing sabbatical at the present time, editing older work. After four years of consistent writing, it's not that I'm burned out or bored with the process, but rather that I think it's very important that my non-literary life catch up with me. This may also be the only way I ever finish a chapbook.

Photo by A.D. Winans

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I wrote Thelonius Monk In California recently, simply because you can never say enough about Monk. The piano is my favorite jazz instrument and I often listen to Monk when I write. His fingers hopping, the interpretation of emotion in each note, inspire such a clear message of what art really is: the > adventure of creation.

"Killing All Roads" came out of the experiment of facing the blank page and writing despite the lack of inspiration at that particular moment. If you're a writer, you should write. No matter what. If the illusion of the road block appears, I like to drive right through it with my headlights on.

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As with many of my poems, this one started with a real-life experience at the seaside cabin last summer. But there was no speech-bubble...

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My poem, One Year, was written at a time when I was filled with a gallon of self-pity, a quart of self-loathing, and a fifth of just plain self. Twenty-five years of floating on a stream of misery (which I mistook for a sea of happiness) left me with such feelings. The line: "It’ll give me something to kill other than myself," was my choice of one of two things. Either explode my liver with another bottle, needle, etc. Or stick it out and hope a miracle of attitude would arrive. I stuck it out.

Photo by Jenni Russell
digitized by d. menendez

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As the first installment in my critical column, I am reviewing recent work by the poets John Eivaz, Ron Androla and Carol Muske-Dukes. Each one of these poets has a very different style. Eivaz and Androla provide examples of contemporary poets working "outside the academy," i.e., without the benefit of university teaching jobs. Muske-Dukes works from inside the academy. If you read these three reviews, hopefully you will get a sense of how each of these writers has a very different existential situation, yet at the same time, they all start from the same place: human. I have tried to adapt the style of each article to mirror the context in which each poet is working: for Eivaz and Androla, more informal and wild; for Muske-Dukes, more formal and restrained. I have also loaded each article with plenty of quips, quotes, cites, notes on other authors, speculations on Nietzsche's sex life, a sad epigraph on the death of Keats, dotty remarks on other poets living and dead, some gossip, and even some long funky quotes from a young man named Ankush who lives in India.

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This poem is really an attempt to understand the passing of my grandmother. It is cathartic, in that I needed to capture these things, but it isn't only about me or my grandmother; it is about death and the ambiguity of that state. It's about a hole in the ground; mine, yours, anyone's. It is also a moment of knowing that, if nothing else, suffering is abated.

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Two considerations inspired this poem. I was outraged when I heard that aerial reconnaissance had identified a missile emplacement in Iraq -- and a strike was ordered -- only to find out that the missiles were old and out of commission, and the destruction of the surrounding village brutal and pointless. I was also concerned about how the media edit and distort stories so they can attract and hold their audience, in order to maximize revenues from commercials.

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I believe the words of the poet, Li-Young Lee, "that the past lies ahead of us, before us, and the future is behind us." Things visible to us are already gone. That is why he says, "We are constantly inhabiting the immediate past."

This is consistent with quantum physics. We are constantly observing what happened to matter but never what is happening to it -not even always what happened to it in our universe.

Spirit is not visible and, hence, behind us and behind all things.

Word participates in both the material and the spiritual but is bound by neither. It becomes "flesh and dwells among us" and then leaves us to plead for us. Again and again.

On some level, both "Hind Quarters" and "Still Life" speak to riding this train through our lives, sitting in a seat facing backwards where the wor(l)d blind-sides us and appears before us in our own past.

To be visited by the word is to be visited by the words of others. I am indebted to Glenna Luschei for her explanation of "Horse Latitudes" -both the legend and the title poem of her, literally, wonder-full chapbook.

I am also indebted to the writer of the old testament book of Exodus who had God instruct Moses to hide in the cleft of the rock so that when His Glory passed by, Moses would not behold God's face, lest he die. Rather, Moses would only see God's Hind Quarters.

And, finally, to the Maker, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all reality.

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I wrote this poem because I sometimes allow other people to "push" and "pull" me toward and away from them -- especially people who use jargon rather than speaking plainly. I end up feeling like a messy animal by allowing the other person's perceptions to cause me mistrust in my own. One particular situation reminded me of the two-headed llama from Dr. Doolittle. One head is wanted and the other isn't: the chiaroscuro in all of us. It is my expression of anger toward people who only want to deal with the easy or "good," rather than accepting that every yang comes with a yin.

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Denise Levertov wrote, in "Conversation in Moscow":

                                                         the poet now out of his stillness is talking: 'Poems,' he says

'poems are of two kinds: those with mystery, 
                                those without mystery.' 
'And are poems without mystery poems at all?' 'Well...yes; 
one cannot say 
a poem wellmade, effective, but unmysterious, 
has no value. But for myself -- 
I prefer the mysterious...'

I prefer the mysterious, as well, and the Yin Yang pairings of poems by different authors on the same page radiates a bit more of that magic with contrasts. These combinations of suns and moons evolved with the submissions themselves, an edition of MiPo that carved its own path.

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Upscale in Escondido is a tale of a modern American family-fragmented and broken and lost in the pursuit of their patriotic dream.  Along the way they discover they've managed to loose themselves, and each other, in the process.

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I feel these poems speak for themselves and really don’t need an introduction.

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The experience of menstruation, and the way it links us to nature's cycles, is largely ignored. I wanted to try and express the sense that this is not a choice, or an intellectual process, but a part of the bedrock experience of women. Whether we thrive and enjoy the womanliness of bleeding, or survive it longing for the moment that will free us from the burden, we are women who share a common thread of life. In past ages, this common thread was the power that generated religions and societies and Diane is the unconscious avatar of that female history.

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The metaphorical value of sinkholes occurred to me when one opened up on the corner. Public Works filled it--fills it, in fact, every three months. Children flock to the site every day, egging it on to its inevitable collapse. While writing "Holes", I worked backward with that image in my head.

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I write poetry, fiction and nonfiction. I edit a magazine and several columns. I owned a bookstore. I had to read a LOT of eclectic writings. It got to where I became very cynical and expected perpetual entertainment for the work my eyes were being put through. I feel that these pieces by Denner, Nordlund and Sexton fulfilled that for me. Each one of them are something I wish I had written myself and have made me a tad jealous. I feel there is a freshness here. Something I always appreciate when saddled down with dozens of review copies to slog through. These authors have given me hope for the future. I will gladly reach for my glasses to read more of their work.

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In writing this poem "What I Learned From Descartes," I was remembering how my college professor illustrated Descartes concept of how we each perceive of the world in unique ways. He said we would always "see" the tomato differently.

Photo A. D. Winans and Kit Knight, Sacramento, California, 2003.
Photo by Arthur Knight.

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I was born in San Francisco and have lived my entire life here, except for a brief 5 month period and three years in the military. San Francisco has changed over the many years, and I guess I have too, but not my commitment to social justice, despite the Nazi like thinking of Attorney General Ashcroft.