Startling Little Brains

I was startled when I crouched down to take a close-up photo of skunk cabbage and saw this alien presence nestled inside. (It's actually the spadix, covered with minute flowers.) Like a cross between a sprouting potato and a little pink brain, it was just waiting to surprise me on a glorious spring afternoon this past weekend. Our paths happily intersected when I went for a hike with a dear friend at Macedonia Brook Park in Kent, Connecticut.

This image reminds me of a piece from my latest book, Stirring the Mirror. Here is the opening paragraph to the flash fiction piece/prose poem, "Brain in a Birdcage." To read it in its entirety, simply click on the preceding title and you will be magically transported to The Diagram, an unusual and wonderful online literary magazine. Okay, hang on to your chair, here we go:

The little brain looked like a gray walnut, splotched in places with pink iridescence. At the bottom of a rusty birdcage, it reclined on a balsam sachet, one with a picture of a bull moose foraging, and thought its wicked thoughts unencumbered by a body. If it had vocal chords, it would have cackled heh-heh-heh under its breath. It did have one good eye. The eye floated above the brain in a baby food jar filled with oil, perched on the bird swing, optic nerve connected to the brain by a coiled copper wire. Iris up, it swam back and forth, flashing opal then emerald, pupil dilating and contracting, scanning the dome of its prison for a way out. Its unused vessels, tied in a knot, swished behind the eye, like a red squid chasing a beach ball ....

If you didn't dare open the story with the link above, but now want to see what happens next, you may enter the story PORTAL HERE. Happy motoring ...

To see the true beauty of the spadix, simply click on the image to enlarge the photo.

Overnight, She Is Different

The Absence of a Heart Leaves an Hourglass Shape

If you click on the link/title above, you will be magically transported to an interactive online collaboration that I worked on with Rick Mullarky, artist/designer extraordinaire, and Kala Pierson, talented experimental composer, for Born Magazine: Art and Literature Collaboration. Make sure to turn on your sound first, click on "start," then move through the piece by clicking on the white plus signs.

Here's what I wrote about this heady experience in an interview with Dan Wickett from Emerging Writers Network:

This was the most fun I had had in a long time. It was a delightful experience. I worked with Rick Mullarky, an artist/designer, and Kala Pierson, a composer, doing an interactive collaboration for Born Magazine. Rick was very open to suggestions, and we had a lively and humorous correspondence. I have an art background myself, so I was curious to see how he would visually interpret the poem. I felt both free to come up with ideas and yet receptive to letting Rick experiment in his own way. His concepts were thrilling, parallel to the feeling of the piece, but capable of opening it up in new ways. Kala had previously asked me for use of a prose poem, “One Claw into the Dream,” as text for an experimental opera she was working on. In return, when Rick and I started the collaboration, I suggested asking Kala to participate in our project. She said yes and joined in the fun and e-mailing, supplying the innovative and eerie sound. It was a process of discovery and play throughout. So, yes, I had some input, but tried to let the other artists add their own unique contributions .... For fun, Rick and I just finished another interactive collaboration using one of my prose poems, “Guilt.” We may also do one for the first poem in Teaching Bones to Fly, “Secrets of Blood.”

If you would like to read the interview in its entirety, click here:

Interview with Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network, 1/31/05.

Looking back -- and I find it hard to believe this collaboration came out in 2003! -- it's fascinating that the three of us worked on this project without ever meeting each other, without ever even hearing each others' human voices!

Update: Rick Mullarky and I placed "Guilt" on The Diagram, much to our delight. I'll write about this second collaboration in another post. Since then, we've made a few initial attempts at a third piece, tentatively titled Cross-Section of a Man. We'll see what evolves ...

Literary Wildflower Walk This Saturday!

This Saturday, May 9th, come take a poetry and wildflower walk with me at the Luquer-Marble Wildflower Garden in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York. At stops along the way, you will hear poems that mirror or speak to the natural setting. Selected poems include works by Mary Oliver, Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Linda Pastan, and many others. If you're inspired, share a quote or brief poem of your choice that reflects the season. We'll meet at the Trailside Museum at 1:00 PM. A couple of days ago the primroses were on the cusp of opening, Jacob's ladder and spring beauty were in full bloom, and the Jack-in-the-pulpit and trillium were perfection. (The photograph above is of a Jack-in-the-pulpit found there, with lungwort in the background.)

For additional information, click here:
Poetry and Wildflowers Literary Walk

The program is free to the public, although there is a parking fee to enter the reservation. We'll go rain or shine! The walk is easy, with benches along the way.

Here is a spring excerpt from my poem, "Kisses," originally published in The Bitter Oleander, then in Teaching Bones to Fly, my first full-length collection:

The kiss unfurls feathery green
along each branch,
sets to beating the pale hearts of apples
still hidden in blossoms.
Between our lips:
an orchard in a white dream of fruit.

The Poetry and Wildflowers event is sponsored by Friends of Trailside and Ward Pound Ridge Reservation with additional funding by Poets & Writers, Inc. using public funds from the NYS Council on the Arts, a state agency.

An Icy Eye

Today's endless ice and rain formed fantastic ice sculptures everywhere. These miniature icicles grew from the handle and edges of the barbeque.

Here's an excerpt from "Winter in a Glass Eye," an icy prose poem in Stirring the Mirror, my 2007 collection from Bitter Oleander Press:

Missing the missing casts absence into a blown glass shell, an icy eye encompassing emptiness. A fracture of the heart weeps this brittle treasure. Some pain is so hard won, it forms a glittering accretion. The heart clings to its frozen jewel, shields memory in its tight fist. It holds on, so not to lose the past joy that left this cold pebble in its palm....

I'm missing my friend Jill Wood, who passed away in the early hours of December 26th. She was brilliant, artistic, creative, feisty, honest, funny, and strong -- a woman warrior. She fought for those she loved, she fought for what she believed in, she fought to the very end.

Click on image to enlarge.

The Miniaturist

Sitting here finishing my Chicken Marsala, I just remembered that I had a poem, "The Miniaturist," that would be so fitting to post on this cold and blustery November night. Then I realized that I also had new photos that I took at a strange little doll museum in Vermont. Synthesis.

THE MINIATURIST

Here, in his cellar workshop,
a human sneeze could topple a world.
He confines his vision to the rooms
of the red and blue dollhouse.
Within a cone of golden light,
his hands are steady,
everything perfectly focused.
He balances a poppy seed bead of glue
on the tip of a toothpick,
attaches fringe to a rug
sewn from a scrap of his robe.
For his silent family,
he snips the hair from his head,
paints their eyes and smiling lips
with a single-bristle brush.

At dusk he lights the tiny lamps
and dreams himself inside.
Admit it, you're in there, too --
feet propped on the tapestry footstool,
hands clasped behind your neck.
An Afghan the size of a stamp
cozily rests across your lap.
You've turned your back to the missing wall,
to November's early darkness.
A bulb is ablaze
in the miniature fireplace,
its orange glow mistakable for warmth.

-- Christine Boyka Kluge
From Teaching Bones to Fly (2003)
Bitter Oleander Press

The poem was first published in Tar River Poetry, then in Teaching Bones to Fly. The photograph was taken 11/6/08. For more on things miniature, see the June 30th post entitled "The Poetics of Space," complete with a photo of a dollhouse doll. To enlarge the photos, just click on the images.

Brittle Snap

When I first read “Life by Halves," a poem by Mexican poet Alberto Blanco, the ending gave me a corresponding brittle snap in the heart. On this rainy day, here it is, from his bilingual collection, A Cage of Transparent Words:

LIFE BY HALVES

We were in such a rush and it was raining …
a few rays of light filtered through
the dark branches of the trees.

The rusted chain was cold
and the padlock weighed like a heart
in the middle of the night.

You stuck the key into the lock
and began to force it.

A few minutes later
– and after a brittle snap –
you showed me the broken key.

The small stupidities
that seem to happen without warning
concentrated in a gesture of impatience.

Such is life:
a house locked up with chains,
one half of the key in our hand,
the other half in our chest.

– Alberto Blanco
– Translated by Elise Miller

A Cage of Transparent Words was published in 2007 by The Bitter Oleander Press. The pieces appear in both the original Spanish and, on facing pages, in English translations by Judith Infante, Joan Lindgren, Elise Miller, Edgardo Moctezuma, Gustavo V. Segade, Anthony Seidman, John Oliver Siimon, and Kathleen Snodgrass.

W.S. Merwin wrote one of the blurbs:

Alberto Blanco’s poems, over several decades, have revealed with precision and delicacy an original imaginative landscape, in language and imagery that are at once intimate, spacious, and rooted in the rich ground of Mexican poetry. There should certainly be a bilingual selection that represents his full range.

“Life by Halves” is reprinted here with the permission of Alberto Blanco and Bitter Oleander Press. I was honored to have my book, Stirring the Mirror, come out from BOP the same year as Alberto’s.

The photograph of a key that belonged to my grandmother was taken 10/26/08.

Lost in Looking

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I love the way Annie Dillard describes “stalking” and observing a muskrat: “But he never knew I was there.” “I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat.” …. “I have noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, ‘When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.’”

Later in the same chapter Dillard says that “…at the creek I slow down, center down, empty. I am not excited; my breathing is slow and regular. In my brain I am not saying, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I am saying nothing.” …. “Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat – not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.”

I was so excited when I read that last line. I felt a beautiful jolt of recognition, a sweet shock of related language and spirit. Here’s an older poem of mine that voices a similar experience:

ALONE

Here I witness my own silent slipping
out of skin into pewter water.
At last, this quiet,
this weightless place up the hill from my house:
moss-softened sound, low frog whistle,
slow ripples on the pond.
A breeze combs my hair to seaweed,
soothes my thoughts petal-smooth.
The gold rib of the moon floats by,
swirling gold along my liquid spine.
At last, all alone, at home
among the tongueless stones.
I am the cold current
riding their glistening backs.

The pond up the road from my house really is a “weightless place,” a peaceful place to shed one's human skin, to become only a still eye witnessing the world, lost in Dillard’s “abundance.” Somehow we feel most alive and engaged when we forget ourselves.

“Alone” was first published in Defined Providence many years ago, then became part of my first book, Teaching Bones to Fly. The photograph of the pond / vernal pool at the top of my road was taken 5/7/08. Last I looked, about a week ago, it was gone. It will return…

Secrets of Blood

Blood loves its caverns of blue and orchid silk,
its slippery tunnels, pink cushions,
fringes and ruffles of flesh.
Red is the color that worships the body,
knocking at your temples,
announcing its ownership proudly.
Amazed at what it holds,
it purrs as it circulates,
touching your inner heart from time to time,
lingering in those velvet chambers,
saying MINE.
Over and over,
deep in your marrow,
it whispers its mantra.

Excerpt (first stanza) from "Secrets of Blood," the first poem in Teaching Bones to Fly, my first book of poetry from Bitter Oleander Press.

Inventing New Bodies

....
Our nights grow infinite, blossoming into secret days. Flowers and leaves are our only lanterns. Veins of roses glow like forked lightning. Maple leaves furl and unfurl, beckoning fingers. We are always hungry. The stars call us to dinner.

Trailing silvery paths across brick walks and patios, we slip into gardens and flowerpots. We paint patterns, leaf to leaf. We fasten our mouths to petals and stems and swallow, knowing nothing but sweetness. We are lost, eating your invisible world.
....
Excerpt from "Inventing New Bodies" from Stirring the Mirror.
This is for EIK and the rocking chair. The plant is from the south facing kitchen window. I need to identify it.
Yes, Baby Muse is just a few posts away...scroll down to find her...

The Framed World

Like an arrow, your mind flies through the bull's-eye at the center of the camera's view finder. You aim it through your pupils, out through that tiny circle, into the framed world. You invest that focused landscape with all that makes you human: your longing, your love, all of your dark thorns and sapphires. Hold your hands steady, extended toward its beauty. Make it true. Press the button.

Excerpt from "Black Halo," a prose poem from Stirring the Mirror, my new book from Bitter Oleander Press.

(Baby Muse meditates two posts down. Don't worry, she's still there.)

March Poinsettia

March morning, silent. Unexpected snow keeps coming, white clumps falling from trees like frozen apple blossoms. Seasonal confusion. Spring is out there, somewhere, approaching. Today there are four crows again, wary, even after all of these offerings. We keep a respectful distance. They wait, two each on two branches, then land on the railing. Go back to the tree. Return to the railing. Each time they move, more white flowers drift down. Eyes and beaks glitter. In these moments, the snow's music changes from empty hiss to the wet sounds of the roof dripping, of invisible runnels coursing under snow. The porous membrane between seasons is leaking.

Excerpt from "Human with Little Sun in Her Hands," one of the prose poems from my new book, Stirring the Mirror, f rom Bitter Oleander Press. (First published in No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, edited by Ray Gonzalez, Tupelo Press.)

I love this camera. Thanks, TLK.

***If you are here searching for Baby Muse and her magic words, simply scroll down to the previous post.

Stirring the Mirror Book Launch

Please join me at the official book launch for Stirring the Mirror from Bitter Oleander Press this Thursday, December 6th, at 7:00 PM at Ruth Keeler Memorial Library in North Salem, New York. (Click for directions.) I'll be reading prose poetry and flash fiction from the book, as well as a sampling of even newer poetry. Signing to follow. Happy December!

Aqua Phrenology

Here's another collage, "Aqua Phrenology," again created from antique illustrations. Now that I have your attention, I'll invite you to upcoming readings and book signings!

Please come to the Riverine Anthology Book Launch at SUNY New Paltz tomorrow, November 13, 2007, at 5:00 PM, in the Honors Center (part of College Hall, a two story building on the quad). Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, edited by Laurence Carr, is published by Codhill Press. This will be a celebration of the collection's release with readings and signings by authors. One of my prose poems, "The God of Falling Objects" (first published in Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics) is included in this anthology. It's also part of my new collection of prose poems and flash fiction, Stirring the Mirror from The Bitter Oleander Press. (Additional book information in postings below...scroll way down to my first entries.)

Also, come enjoy the galleries and shops of Catskill, New York, this Saturday, November 17th, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. I'll be signing copies of Stirring the Mirror at Bowerbird from 7:00 to 8:00 PM as part of their Saturday Studios, a gallery stroll on third Saturdays of the month. Bowerbird is located at 393 Main Street. Questions? Call lovely owner, Kate Altman, at (518) 943-5776. She is also carrying my Shrunken Worlds paper sculpture ornaments. (Think ship-in-a-bottle...)

For those organized souls who can see past Thanksgiving, please come to my own book launch for Stirring the Mirror on Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 7:00 PM at Ruth Keeler Memorial Library in North Salem, New York. I'll be reading selections from the collection as well as new work, and signing books. More information will be posted as the date races closer.

I look forward to seeing you soon!

Space Doll

Writing and art enhance one another, but I rarely use my own art as inspiration for poetry. For a while, I got a kick out of making collages using fragments of antique illustrations. It was fun to experiment with strange juxtapositions, to create new miniature worlds with their own swirling atmospheres. (Of course, I also loved the meditative act of cutting paper with tiny scissors.)

Something about this collage, "Space Doll," triggered a prose poem. I later made it into a tiny dark blue booklet that I gave to friends and passed out at a reading. It became part of Stirring the Mirror, which is a collection of prose poems and flash fiction.

SPACE DOLL

Loneliness launched her toward a far-flung planet. Now she endlessly circles, looking down at the pointed rock fingers and craters of a dusty orb. She still wears patent leather Mary Janes and the fingerprints of humans. This is all she retains of civilization. The only life forms below are ones she imagines, humanoid or avian, startling with boredom or beaked hunger. She keeps her arms to her sides. When she turns her head, her crisp orange curls flow like rocket flames. However, neither blink of blue glass eye nor kick of jointed leg can change her orbit.

She coasts in silence. The only sounds at all come from inside. She listens to the shell of her pink plastic flesh to hear the faint whoosh of pulse, the gurgle of a thimbleful of oil. How easily her inner gears spin. How effortlessly her useless metal heart beats with nothing to weigh it down.

(Fittingly, this piece first appeared in Flights.)

I just went upstairs to find a copy of an interview with Paul Roth, editor of The Bitter Oleander, where we discussed the parallels of art and writing. I felt that his "comparison of my writing to painting fit[s], especially with reference to visual emphasis, to imagery." I continued:

In fact, I draw in a way very similar to the way I write. I never have the whole picture/idea in mind at first; it is a gradual building up from one small image, a series of leaps from thought to thought. I might start with a single curved line, a tiny eye, or a splayed claw, then see where it takes me, what each added line suggests. You might compare some of my poetry to collages, the seamless placement of disparate images side by side. With luck, a surprising/vivid juxtaposition elicits a mood or idea, like a good metaphor. Writing metaphors is my passion. They give old concepts a jolt, more color, a sense of newness. I enjoy the density of images working together, playing off one another, sending out sparks.... You want imagery to be meaningful and energetic, not just a decorative surface hiding a vacuum. You want to inspire intense thought and emotional connections.

The best poems might be most like living sculptures, Frankenstein "monsters" carefully stitched and glued from unlikely bits of flesh, with transplants of pieces of the creator's own heart and brain. Sometimes these creations achieve a form of grace, a clear voice and unexpected intelligence. Other times they are awkward and tongue-tied, or can't be jump-started. Each time, you hope that your monster will be able to stand up and walk on its own out into civilization, singing, embracing people without crushing them.

(The Bitter Oleander, Fall 2001 author feature, interview and interior chapbook)

Although it's most beneficial to order directly from the publisher, Bitter Oleander Press, Stirring the Mirror is also available through Amazon.

Stirring the Mirror

Stirring the Mirror, my second book from Bitter Oleander Press, just came out! I have been floating next to the ceiling since its arrival from the printer. It's a collection of prose poetry and flash fiction, with an extraordinary, eerie cover image by Malgorzata Maj, a Polish artist. The photograph is a wonderful match for both the title and the atmosphere of the book.

Again, I must thank my wise and compassionate editor and publisher at Bitter Oleander Press, Paul B. Roth. Another thank you to my generous blurb suppliers, the gifted writers Peter Johnson, Mary A. Koncel, and Ray Gonzalez. Here's what they had to say about Stirring the Mirror:

In Stirring the Mirror, Christine Boyka Kluge displays a mastery of metaphor, gliding effortlessly between myth and reality until these two states are indistinguishable. Her focus is on the paradoxical nature of our lives, which seem alternately fueled by loss and possibility. In one poem she writes that the "heart [is] the part that refus[es] to settle down" - a perfect description of the engine guiding Stirring the Mirror, a book characterized by wit, craft, but, most of all, heart.

- Peter Johnson

Stirring the Mirror is a collection of contemporary myths to live by. Traversing the boundaries between poetry and prose with her usual grace, Christine Boyka Kluge generously invites us to reflect on what makes us human. Her vibrant language and unfettered narratives, her cast of archetypal and everyday characters, her wit and wisdom - all delightfully combine to create a book of immense pleasure.

- Mary A. Koncel

As a poet of the earth and the imagination, Christine Boyka Kluge returns these gifts of creation through poems that redefine what it means to be in the world. These poems involve a private sense of vision and exploration as they encompass the outer existence of human understanding. To read this book is to know that Christine Boyka Kluge is writing poetry that touches us all.

- Ray Gonzalez

Pieces in Stirring the Mirror won the 2006 Hotel Amerika Poetry Prize and the 2003 Creative NonQuiction Contest sponsored by Quick Fiction, Brevity, and Del Sol Review. Two works received Pushcart Prize nominations. Selections from the book were finalists in the 1999 Dana Award in Speculative Short Fiction competition, Quarter After Eight's 2000 Prose Contest, and both the 2002 Tupelo Press Chapbook Contest and the 2002 New Michigan Press/The Diagram Chapbook Competition.

Writing from Stirring the Mirror has appeared in many anthologies: No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press), PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books), Sudden Stories (Mammoth Books), Diagram: Selections from the Magazine (Del Sol Books), and Text: Ur - The New Book of Masks (Raw Dog Screaming Press). Some of the prose poems will be reprinted in the forthcoming Online Writing: The First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press) and Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers (Codhill Press).

Last week I received an e-mail from Marion Roach, who does The Naturalist's Datebook program on Martha Stewart Radio Network. She will be reading "The Eye of the Beached Whale" from Stirring the Mirror on Friday, August 17th. I believe it is broadcast at intervals all day long. So, if you have Sirius Radio, listen in!

If you are interested in ordering Stirring the Mirror, here's a link to Bitter Oleander Press. My first book, Teaching Bones to Fly, a poetry collection, is also offered here.

Order Form

If you click on "Books" and scroll all the way down, there is a description of Stirring the Mirror and a sample prose poem. If you are inspired, you can click on "Orders" to print out an order form. You may also find Stirring the Mirror on Amazon. Thank you!

Here is a link to "Guilt," an interactive online collaboration I did with artist/designer Rick Mullarky on The Diagram. "Guilt" is one of the pieces in Stirring the Mirror.

Guilt

You will need to turn on your sound. Click "Launch in a new window," then "Start." Progress through the piece by clicking on the small white arrows. Enjoy Rick's amazing art!