Good Friends

GOOD FRIENDS 

They like two-ply. 

We like one-ply.

So, I need to get more into my blogging again. I get distracted. Business. Family. The Zen practice group (Both Sides / No Sides Zen Community) that sits zazen in the little office in the back of our house. All good and necessary stuff, but I miss my writing and my poetry. Not to say that I'm not writing. I do my journal, I fiddle with new stuff (I can get lost for hours), but nothing ever comes out that goes public. It's Spring again, and I need to change that.

Right now I'm putting together my new poetry manuscript--Talking to My Wife While She's Away at Church. (That's a tentative title. Another possibility is The Roshi Makes Shitty Coffee.) Lucky me: friend and poet Connie Voisine was kind enough to read the whole manuscript and make suggestions and give new ideas. She's a great poetry editor, and she knows my work well. These are poems written over the last several years, and I've chosen them because, in one way or another, they pull together all the diverse facets of my life that do all the distracting mentioned above (except business--I don't write business poems). And they are written through the lens of my Zen practice. Or, what I'd rather call, like Stephen Batchelor, my dharma practice. "Zen" is becoming such a useless word. Ice cream is zen, restaurants are zen, back scratchers are zen. Etcetera. Anyway, I thought I'd use some of the poems in the book as a way to play with poetry and some of my ideas. I'll start slowly. Like this little poem about toilet paper which I love so much.

The book, by the way, won't be published until March of next year. Cinco Puntos is publishing it. Yippee! It's a great Indie press. I know Lee the president intimately. In the meantime we'll be fiddling with a book cover. Johnny Byrd (the CPP CFO and PR wonk, also a wonderfully close good friend) says that needs to be done in the next several months. Our friend J.B. Bryan of La Alameda Press in Albuquerque will be the designer. J.B. did that incredible design for Beauty is a Verb, the New Poetry of Disability which got so much great attention and is still selling. Besides, like me, he's a poet, a book publisher (semi-retired), he sits zazen everyday and he's one of the principle organizers of the Three Stones Zen Group. We have plenty to talk about. Here's a self-portrait I did of J.B. and me. He had just finished building his adobe tea house in Placitas where his studio is. He invited me for his rendition of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. It was fun.

Being a poet is fun. Being a publisher is fun.