 Red Room Writer Profile
|
|
Marilyn Kallet's Blog
November 4, 2009
- This week my fave is Deisel Books in Oakland, because they are hosting my poetry performance on Sunday, November 8th, at 3 p.m. Independent bookstores are very brave to host poets and assorted non-John-Grishams in this economy!Please patronize your local independent bookstore. And my goddess, if you're in Oakland on Sunday, please do show up to whistle and coo. Drinks after? Reading is ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
October 28, 2009
- When I was seven or eight years old, we lived in a working class neighborhood of Rockville Centre, Long Island. It was all blue collar, the place my mother wanted to emerge from, to rise out of. But for me as kid it was largely paradise. Sure, there were scary moments. They weren't Halloween-y. They had more to do with the older neighborhood boys who abused small girls for sport. We ...
- Continue Reading » 8 Comments
October 24, 2009
- My favorite city is not a city, it's a tiny village with 900 inhabitants--more a large family than a metropolis. It's Auvillar, where I go to commune with the poplars and the Garonne River, to interact with my dear friends the villagers, who are so welcoming. I go to eat well (the crepes, the olives, the prosciutto), where the wine makes me swoon. The place is laced with poems--they are ...
- Continue Reading » 8 Comments
October 17, 2009
- I'm excited about performing poems at Diesel Books in Oakland, 3 p.m., Sunday, November 8th. I'll see old friends and hope to meet some online friends--just as "real"--at the bookstore event. There must be a good bar nearby where we can toast each other's health and writing. It would be great to meet in person! The November 6th reading at the Art Institute of California in ...
- Continue Reading » 10 Comments
October 15, 2009
- It was Baudelaire, not Baum, who said, "Anywhere out of this world!" He recommended that poets stay drunk, "on wine, on virtue," by any means. Ordinary life for him was torture. Of course, he had syphilis, and the attack on his brain and body probably didn't help him feel more comfortable on earth. But he was a fan of voyages out, altered states of consciousness, achieved ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
October 12, 2009
- Red Room did not rescue me from the edge of a cliff, from a burning building, from a crashing plane. But rescue me it has done several times: from isolation, from feeling alone in the universe as a writer. When I first began blogging at Red Room, I was on my way to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and I was nervous as hell. Belle Yang wrote to me on Red Room to encourage my ...
- Continue Reading » 10 Comments
October 5, 2009
- I should have titled this "Writing Paradise for Less." If you're thinking about going with me to Auvillar, France, this May (17-24), don't delay in making a deposit. We'll keep the workshop small (under twelve), and several people have made commitments already. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts is offering discounts for writers who enroll before February first, but ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 25, 2009
- Just posted: next workshop in the South of France! Your writing will love you for it! You can't get a bad meal; great wine can cost under 4 Euros; the people are friendly, and the light will make you want to be a painter! Come with! Your life and work will be enriched! (And you can get the "early bird" discount!) http://www.vcca.com/kallet.html/
- Continue Reading » 5 Comments
September 25, 2009
- May Sarton was sickened almost to death by a bad review of her poetry in the New York Times Book Review. The review by Karl Shapiro, which appeared on Christmas Even, said, "May Sarton is a bad poet." She decided to give up on public acclaim and moved to a house in New Hampshire, where she began writing Plant Dreaming Deep, and then Journal of a Solitude. The next move was to a ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 23, 2009
- Saying Goodbye We embraced, there in the parking lotof the ordinary. How could I know your arms were arguing last things?Your cheek in my hair.For a moment I pressed against you. Goodbyes can be vast.In a breath, we traded lives. I didn't knowyou were a cliff I had reached the edge of.Your touch echoed.I simply followed it like song. First published in How to Get Heat Without Fire, ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 19, 2009
- "What power has love but forgiveness?" the aging poet William Carlos Williams asked in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." He was bed-ridden, being cared for by Flossie, his wife, whom he had married when she was very young. He proposed to her on the rebound from her older sister Charlotte, the pianist, who had turned him down. In his later days, depressed by the House ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
September 10, 2009
- The High Holidays are just around the corner for those of us who are Jewish. We honor those days by celebrating creation--the creation of the world and all its beings--on the evening of September 18th, and then on the 19th. We begin the ten Days of Awe as we contemplate the beauty of creation, and ask ourselves how we can enhance that beauty by our thoughts and deeds, by our spiritual ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
September 8, 2009
- Seriously, how? If you're any good at teaching, you'll give it your best energy, and you'll come home depleted. Perhaps you write during the blessed summers, on the rare sabbaticals. And maybe you've made your peace with that. You are fortunate to have a good teaching job, you know that.But this is the year of the new book, the collected poems, and you have invitations to read across the ...
- Continue Reading » 6 Comments
September 4, 2009
- I've been on non-teaching leave for eight months, traveling to southwest France and to the Big Island of Hawai'i. Writing my heart out. Return to the classroom is always a difficult transition, though I love my job. Return after eight months of pure poetry and eating Tuscan loaves with homemade brie, macadamia nut cream pie and passionfruit donuts--well, one needs strategies in order to not ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
August 31, 2009
- "Makeup can only do so much," Marco at Bendel's said, when I went for my wedding consultation. He would "try." To bulk up the fairy tale aura, he glued my turquoise-and-candlelight lids with spidery lashes, and presto! piled on a braided hair piece, a kind of hairy challah." That's the first stanza of "No Make up"--a ...
- Continue Reading » 10 Comments
