Marion Kimes is a pale, near frail-appearing FIREBRAND of a poet,
Red Sky's perdurable mavourneen/doyenne. On the muses/Manifest
video, she plays a deceptively simple self-accompanying drum
pattern, her voice slowly building to an operatic crescendo that
brought tears to my eyes upon a recent re-viewing/re-auditing.
And yet her nine muses c-bk, CROWS' EYES. of multiplication and
light., is taut with elegant restraint. Her whole ploy is black
print on whitest glossy paper, so that the text, focused as it is
on every least nuance of her compact with light itself, has
nowhere a design to amplify its aetheric distract, only that
white, valenced by that black. Extra-text, her wrapping of the
book is very, very meant, with a binding solution as witty as the
twinkle in her Texas, far-horizon eyes, and a cover lay-out as
proclamatory as the muted appointments of a sanctuary. This book
is perhaps the highpoint gracenote of the entire nine muses list.
As ever, it is too difficult to choose, so allow this one
favorite, its barefoot joy, of lesser delights conflating the
grand design after all:
the last sparkler
"stitched among stars"
-Jeanette Winterson
three in each hand - my brother, his friend.
tumbling from hiding, "give me that one!" I beg.
on the run reaching for the feared-and-loved,
wildly I dance away with the one sparkler left
a child offers a hand again & again trust
that rapid raucous light unfolds born to
a drum's call some lean back, they hesitate
yet they have to join-in when drums begin.
palming the drumskins, eyes glitter -
like children's eyes clutching the very last
sparkler drawing lit circles in air, hearts
pound a sparkler's pinpoints prickle the skin
eyes dance laughter's far-flungs rumble & rip
soul music & no plan untethered free-fall
excitement both lungs hang up words rise
& the heart leaps (we know that drum!)
always barefoot, "stitched among stars"
light's concordant laughter lit.
On the performative case when margareta first arrived in Seattle
was the poets' collective previously alluded to, the Red Sky
Poetry Theater, founded several years earlier by Cajun congas
poet Don Wilsun. Red Sky was multi-involved in the public poetry
life of Seattle: they maintained a weekly open reading series in
addition to mounting special poetry events. For many years, Sky
published the yearly literary anthology for Seattle's community-
wide Labor Day shebang, the renowned Bumbershoot Arts Festival;
additionally, free spirit poet Roberto Valenza's public
performance poetry pachangas, the inimicable Alternative To Loud
Boats street fests, could not have continued their years-long
August runs without Sky's energy & backing. Occasionally, poets
in the Red Sky family also issued self-published books under the
Red Sky imprint, as was the case with Mr Wilsun's own first book,
ORCAS ISLAND, published in 1980.
Significantly, Mr Wilsun would issue two books in the 90's under
the nine muses imprint: SWEET SKIN (1993), and the 1996 chapbook
FROG LEGS (LES CUISSES de CRAPEAU). Over the years, mainstay Red
Sky operatives, such as the afore-considered Marion Kimes and
Michael Hureaux, were also to publish via nine muses. The very
fact that the founder of the precedant collective subsequently
published with the come-lately collective is instructive, for not
only was Seattle graced with two simultaneously active public
poetry collectives over this period of time, but the two
organizations acted in symbiotic concert to form a notably
fertile, non-competitive synergy. When nine muses, in 1989,
evolved into video documentation (under an offspring strategy it
called nine muses mystery theatre, which, as braintrust-in-thrall
to video-grapher James Markham, spawned Manifest Arts Videos)
much of what its cams documented had to do with the poets and
events of Red Sky: the work of Red Sky associates such as
Charlie Burks, Louise Dovell, Martina Goodin (whose own earlier
video work in Seattle also served as inspiration for margareta's
project), Bill Shively, Carletta Wilson, Marion Kimes, Michael
Hureaux, and David Lloyd Whited, are among some 16 Seattle
performers preserved in the nine muses/Manifest Arts video
archives, which videos were originally aired on Seattle public
television. Whereas nine muses nudged Red Sky towards the arts
of book design & videographic documentation, the Sky learned not
only was it not alone, it had a dynamic and inspiring partner.
The nine muses/Manifest Arts video project has great historical
value, given that these are the poets who were the public
performance standard bearers at a crucial time in the city's
inexorable torque toward hyper-clogged gleaming Northwest Coast
money-bub super behemoth status. What is that city today? What
were its poets singing a scant ten years ago? The nine
muses/Manifest Arts videos record the poets both in conversation
with the camera and in performance modes. The styles of
presentation depart from there, each one as odd, as acute, as are
the books. See poet Charlie Burks' head lift slowly from the
glassy surface of the waters-- he's wearing sunglasses, he
delivers a poem, his head slowly sinks back under those waters.
Again, you laugh till tears come, and you know you've been
afforded an image of Seattle poetry that might not come again.
So it went--
So it goes.
************
By 1992, nine muses was actively reaching past the gravitational
field of Seattle proper, even as the collective maintained a
principal and ongoing active linkage to that city. And although
it is terribly unfair to only hint at what margareta is finding
south of the Sound and west of the Cascades, here following is a
series of quotes from several of her further-flung seekers &
provocateurs: 1992 was the year Carol Barth (CA/WA, in transit,
to Montana) came aboard with the self-illustrated peach-colored
chapbook, "A WHITE HUMMINGBIRD." Typical to nine muses running
concerns with holy landscape & light, these lean, lucid lines
occur in her poem, "THE LACEMAKER"...
iii
In this valley of death
An eternal silence
Bathes the Panamints
In ethereal pastel.
Now and again
the cry of a raven -
After -
the silence hums.
A single rock sings arias
Of ochre and turquoise
And the vermillion blazes,
Glows, and dims
To the inky violet dome
Thick with stars and myth -
In 1994 came Kentucky resident Josef Knoepfler's poet-afoot-in-
the-Orient chapbook, CHINA POEMS, which includes ten short poems
(some very short, as in, say, the three lines of "THE HAN"... "In
a single line thin as thread the Han can read his history: //
Heavy the finest web: // Heavy the hand, heavy the heart.") And
I found myself haunted, oddly enough, by images of West African
mmigrant peddlars on 14th Street in Manhattan when Knoepfler, a
native New Yorker, recorded a vision from one of his walks on the
other side of the world:
In the courtyard shills sell whistles, toy trucks and t-shirts.
They have come from no place and they have no place to go.
The lines grow longer; their history stretching
into the next generation even before their parents wed.
Only four lines out of the book's longest poem, a mere convenient
lifting from a 38-line meditation on the Chairman, "SHAO SHAN",
in which dead-gone Mao's continuing influence is found out to be
grey, bloated, shabby. Yet the eerie echoing resonance of those
long o sounds is enough to effect a priority revolve rather like
a treadmill. Knoepfler's China overwhems minutely, & in just
brevity.
*
1995 saw the publication of Gary David's masterful "TIERRA ZIA",
already mentioned. And in 1997, editor/publisher poet dan
raphael of Portland, Oregon, a word-rapt visional spellbinder,
calmed his trademark witty overload just enough to spark with
uniquely raphaelean scathe thru the "senselessness // of what
can't benamed or resisted." dan remains restless & wary, full of
hope yet paranoid as all get-out in his c-bk, "trees through the
road." Here are the last lines of the book's finale, a rich
warning of a poem entitled "set a name=emanates" which carries
this quote-dedication snippet from the fugs, a heroic poets' band
from the 60's, "beware the man not moved by sound" ...
capitalism's precarious geometry requires no questions,
requires internal confusion,
that only professionals sing and dance, that a name
--soon to be a non-mathematical number--
is forever, is legally sanctioned.
as life can be copyrighted, so can names, words, ideas;
energy is owned by those who steal it from rivers, coal and atoms
in the name of progress in the name of democracy
in genesis, god didn't bother to name things--
she knew them, was intermingled with her works.
we label jars in case we forget,
for the benefit of others who are sent to the larder:
whatchu makin? whatchu call that?
whose names do i whisper or scream in peaks of darkest terror?
in my dreams, no one has names
no one talks much--
things just happen
Ah but, enough & too much histo-detailia & clumsy critique doth
bog the tale. E-mail margareta, write to her, phone her up:
nine muses is a still viable, still evolving & utterly self-
cognizant collective (as is, incidentally, the Red Sky Poetry
Theater). Forsooth, each & every poet is a secret in their
community. And the calling of attention to their being in the
ville is dangerous work, often because the very activity of
calling that attention-to shines a mutating light on a fertility
that is always contingent and mycelial, a fertility nowhere
guaranteed. We whisper to one another of the existence of these
rare birds for good reason: were we to raise our voices too
loudly on their behalf, the manifold vulgarities of the epoch
might well turn them into star system cult figures, bought-off
folk, shills or worse, hungry wee peddlars of canard and
anecdote, fable and faux-flux flummox & beggar. This is one
reason a small-scale collective of poets might be crucial in our
time: would that the poets hold the throttle mutually, would that
they check and balance one another with volunteer alacrity, that
they themselves take responsibility both for each others humility
and for each others' tending to the mycelial & to the contingent,
which intangibles comprise the living stuff of actual day to day
poets' practice. Stay humble, viable, on task, and utterly unapolo-
getic, unbeholden. Alive as secrets, their pursuit of the sacred
is yet protected and honored. And if that collective goes about its
work in the creative mines of a city that worries odd & hoary quo-
tients of greatness, so much the better: an articulated substrate
is demonstrated, a sublime complaint is present and accounting.
Whatever greatness accrues will come frisked, not celebrated, by
Song. Yea, and margareta waterman, small-scale to an infinitely
delicious degree, is nothing if not frisky. In her, the town had
another conscience, and the poets of the town had a hungry new
labor-intensive champion: nine muses books, in Seattle over the
course of the late-80's to mid-90's, was doing Song's unsung deed
with dispatch, calling attention to the existence of an actual
Sacred. The evidence ongoes: seek said secrets for yourselves . . .
To conclude this overview, a paragraph quoted from the 1997 nine
muses c-bk, "THE DEMON IN THE BENCH," a prose work written &
illustrated by Jean Ferner(CA). Let the bench & the vision it
contains project nine muses' muse:
"She sidles up to the bench, trying to avoid looking at the
monster, yet unable to keep from obliquely glancing at it. It has
scared her from the moment she first saw it, this monster in the
bench. So real, it seemed to her, that she could see it moving.
Sometimes it stretched. Sometimes it looked right at her and
grinned. Several times now, she had thought that it might be
gaining on the little running man. Its out-stretched hand could
easily grasp not only his heel but his ankle. Yet, it held off,
perhaps playing with its victim. Finally, as her hands clutch the
bow and attempt to wrench it from Amos's fist, she looks
directly at it. The monster is, indeed, moving. One of its arms
cradles Amos's head. The other has reached under his knees.
The monster is holding Amos as if he were a baby. And then, it
looks at her over Amos's shoulder. A look of love. It is not a
monster at all, she thinks. It is the magician's mother. A huge,
strange mother who lives in the bench. The bow comes loose,
and the child holds it to her chest. The huge mother nods, shuts
her eyes, sleeps. It's only a carving, the child thinks.
************
contact & list information
nine muses books nine muses mystery theatre
3541 kent creek road winston oregon 97496
541-679-6674 mw9muses@teleport.com
nine muses publications/productions 1987-
1999
books by 11 writers (titles listed below):
Carol Barth, Gary David, Jean Ferner, Martina Goodin,
Michael Hureaux, Marion Kimes, Josef Knoepfler, dan
raphael, Roberto Valenza, margareta waterman, Don Wilsun
2 poetry broadsides: Marion Kimes, margareta waterman
84 postcards in 2 sets, 21 poets:
Jim Andrews, Carol Barth, John Berry, Gary David,
Rajkhet Dirzhud-Rashid, Noel Franklin, Michael Hureaux,
Paul Hunter, Marion Kimes, Josef Knoepfler, Barbara La
Morticella, Martha Linehan, Ezra Mark, Carla Perry,
Steve Potter, Robin Schultz, Roberto Valenza, Nico
Vassilakis, margareta waterman, David Lloyd Whited,
Carletta Wilson
2 audio cassettes of performed poetry & music:
Willie Smith, Don Wilsun 15 1/2-hour poetryvideos, full
feature of 15 of Seattle's best at the turn of
the 90's: Charlie Burks, Louise Dovell, Martina Goodin,
Michael Hureaux, Marion Kimes, Gretchen Matilla,
Tom Prince, Judith Roche, Robbo, Donna Sandstrom,
Bill Shively, Wally Shoup, margareta waterman, David
Lloyd Whited, Carletta Wilson, and Theresa Clark
************
Carol Barth: A White Hummingbird
Gary David: Tierra Zia
Jean Ferner: the demon in the bench
Martina Goodin: An Ordinary Housewife
Michael Hureaux: black dog blues
hallelucinations
fool moon risin
Marion Kimes: Crow's Eyes. of multiplication and light
Josef Knoepfler: China Poems
dan raphael: trees through the road
Roberto Valenza: poems for the glancing eye
maha kala in the center
precious umbrella
margareta waterman: the seed of osiris
eleusinian theatre
red sky sketches
moon riding backwards
cracked crystal
egyptian night
walkin' occam's razor
lady orpheus
astarte calling clytemnestra
some south american colors
five songs from the primordial alphabet
tara's consort
Don Wilsun: Sweet Skin
Frog Legs (LES CUISSES de RAPEAU)
(author's credit: Ralph La Charity is the poet/percussionist
who, since 1986, has edited & published the monthly samizdat
poets' magazine, W'ORCs/ALOUD ALLOWED, based thru the years in
Europe, Texas, &, currently, southwestermost Ohio. He is the
author of the legendary lost Seattle ur-text, SEATTICUS NIGHT,
among many other titles. As a performer, his precise
incantatory fire is but one more whispered Amerishan secret,
loose across America's abundant hide.)