The following poem is technically a gift from my daughter — I wouldn’t have written it had it not been for her. Maybe that sounds a little too sentimental, but it’s true.

When our daughter feeds she cups her mother’s breast like a football.
Like a football because that’s all I know to say when I see her hand
around the breast’s swollen end. I’d like to burn my language away
from male things, would like to say later when I’m holding her, see
this ball, forget this ball. You don’t need to throw a thing,
don’t need to learn the perfect spiral grip, how the index finger should rest
far back, how to throw overhand in a 12-to-6 clock face angle, snap down
with so much action in the elbow the wind in your ear cracks. But I’m made
of meat and leather. I’ve been beaten by my brothers into the grass,
have looked downfield at the blitz of red leaves only to be sandwiched
between brutes. A few face plants, dog shit on your chin and the stuff
of ball fields sticks. Now I’m doing the Heisman pose in the mirror,
baby girl tucked under my arm, my right leg suspended like blue
Shiva Nata-raja, the god who kills and makes the world. I have less
than a season to hold this dance still before my arm grows too short to hold
my daughter, before her legs twitch out of this mirror, before she dances
her own sweet destruction.

[First appeared in Rattle, issue 37, summer 2012]

This is the second-to-last week of this year’s writing workshops. I started class by telling the kids, “Fourth grade is the magical year. It’s your best year.” They didn’t understand what I was talking about. Over the next 90 minutes, all of the following happened:

• A student asked if he could use the word “pelvis” in his writing piece. I said, “Sure, why not?” He said, “Because it’s down there,” then pointed to ‘down there.’
• Later, after another student asked if I “was alive for 9/11″. I said, “Sure, why?” A different student cut in and said, “Did you actually watch it? And did you know the whole thing about the plane hitting the Pentagon is a cover up…SUPPOSEDLY…?
• Finally, when class was wrapping up, another student looked at me a little panicky and said, “I can’t find my backpack.” I stared for a second and said, “It’s on your back.” He patted the bag strapped over his shoulders and said, “So it is.”

Magical.

–

[Categorized under "Idle Chatter," the following exchange could well have been pulled from a Portlandia script]

BARISTA: So, like, what’s your day like?

CUSTOMER: Like, getting together with my band.

BARISTA: Awesome! What kind of music?

CUSTOMER: It’s, like, fusion with, like, literary punk.

BARISTA: Awesome! So, like, are you playing a gig or something?

CUSTOMER: Nah…

BARISTA: Oh, like, practicing then?

CUSTOMER: Well, not exactly

BARISTA: (confused but still smiling) Oh, like…

CUSTOMER: We’re, like, working on our website. We haven’t, you know, really played together yet, but we’re going to have the BEST website.

BARISTA: Awesome!

[Later, same CUSTOMER and BARISTA]

BARISTA: I like your jeans.

CUSTOMER: Yeah, total free pile!

BARISTA: Awesome. Me too!

CUSTOMER: Oh yeah, awesome. Like, your shirt?

BARISTA: No, like, everything.

CUSTOMER: Everything?

BARISTA: Except my socks. Everything else I’m totally wearing totally came from a free pile! I love when I dress totally in free pile.

CUSTOMER: Awesome!

Hello friends and neighbors,

At the end of February I was the featured reader/interviewee at the monthly Show and Tell Gallery’s monthly Working Artists Assembly. You can download and listen to the interview and reading here.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Dave

Greetings friends and neighborhs,

I’m delighted to be the featured presenter at the next Young Willamette Writers meeting, set for Jan 3, 2012 at the Old Church in downtown Portland. You can find out more about the Young Willamette Writers here.

We’ll be doing an hour of poetry, starting at 7 p.m. The Old Church is located at SW 11th and Clay, and the event is FREE. It’s a great way for young writers to start the new year off with some new words.

I’m delighted to post the following three poems (with a very thankful nod toward William Carlos Williams) written by three of my very favorite local (Portland) writers, each of whom I’m happy to know. Their poems came from a prompt in which they chose four words from Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow, then ran with their own poem from there. Have a read.

RED DEPENDS UPON WATER

so much waits upon
rain

ten thousand pewter
trunks

dry gray barrows of
bark

cinnabar leaves fractured red
wheels

ready and willing to
decay

— B. Campbell Ford

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
rolling

through a white sky
agitating

molecules until atoms breathe out
blue

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
mounding

scattered clouds
glazing

gray undersides
coral-red

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
tearing

through static
wool

freeing whorls of white
rain

loosening skeins of black
thunder

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
spinning

purple-black opaque silk
shielding

our eyes from the
plasma-

maddened Midas
touch

of the white-wheeled
sun

— Pattie Palmer-Baker

WHITE RAIN DEPENDS, WHEEL

the world depends
upon

the wheel turning
steadily

moving the earth
surely

keeping the seas
contained

maintaining mountains’ upright
positions

sending flowing rivers
seaward

always the wheel
turning

earth and sky
singing

all systems dancing
gaily

world radiant in
white

from hot sun
shining

and cool rain
shimmering

wheel keeps turning
turning

— Mary K. Moen

–

I had the pleasure of writing pieces for Reed Magazine and The Chronicle Magazine back in the spring of 2011.

The Reed piece is a profile of the poet Elyse Fenton, “Rugby, Nails and Verse,” while the Chronicle piece, “Hunting Spiders,” is a review of the book, Silk & Venom, and a conversation with its author, Greta Binford. Have a read.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Shawna Harch, a local writer and member of the Reading Local community, and she was kind enough to share our conversation on the Reading Local site. Here’s a little bit of it:

RL) Can you talk about process vs. content? What’s the significance of cultivating a process?

DJ) I think we live in a highly content-driven society and it starts affecting us at a very young age. The focus is on the product, the final grade. When I teach at public schools, I tell students that it’s okay to make a mess. Rather than dictating a word count or a due date or a structure, I emphasize the drafting process. When I work with adults, I tell them they need to write 1,000 words to get 100 good ones.

I had a dream once that Hilary Clinton and I were at a conference and had to write a haiku. She insisted on writing the perfect haiku, and I was trying to convince her to write a mess. We went back and forth with battling philosophies.

I maintain you have to trust the mess and trust that you will work your way out of it. Most people become gifted writers over time, with practice. I think of Malcolm Gladwell’s “ten-thousand hour” rule. You have to put in those ten thousand hours. The more you trust process and the mess that comes, the faster you will arrive at the “right words,” if they even exist.

And here’s a link to the interview in its entirety.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Howdy and hello – I’m in the process of dusting the blow off of DaveJarecki.com and thought I’d start by highlighting a few new things you can listen to.

If you head over to ye olde listen page, you’ll find six poems added to the online radio. These are audio clips from a recent appearance on “Talking Earth,” the twice-monthly poetry program on Portland’s KBOO radio. The poems, in alphabetical order are:

• The Distance Between Here and Montana
• Feeding Emu
• Marital Affair
• Sand
• Seeds
• Why Men Fly Into Buildings

Wait, there’s more . . .

You can also find some other clips from “Talking Earth” as well as a few Caffeinated Art performances over at Archive.org.

There’s still more . . .

Finally, I’m pleased and honored to be included on Oregon Poetic Voices, a site that provides a “comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that will complement existing print collections of poetry across the state”. Stop by and have a listen to more than a 100 different voices from across Oregon.

Thanks for reading and for listening. It’s good to be back.

I’m pleased to be sharing the bill tomorrow night with Peter Sears at the Press Club (2621 SE Clinton St., Portland). It’s part of the Mountain Writers reading series. The reading starts at 8 p.m. Stop in for a cocktail and enjoy some poetry in the process.

For more info, check out the Mountain Writers site.

Thanks –