Category Archives: WC80 Music & Poetry

WC80 Music & Poetry Issue

80 White Crane Issue #80

Music & Poetry

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Columns

Opening Words "First Amusements" The Editors
Updrafts by Dan Vera
"Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" Praxis by Andrew Ramer

2009-07-29_013343 Departments

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Taking Issue

A WHITE CRANE CONVERSATION
"Gay Orpheus" - David Del Tredici
By Ray Warman

The Creative Universe by Arthur Evans

"Come, Creator Spirit" A 9th Century Hymn Translated for the 21st 
By Rabanus Maurus, Translation by Arthur Evans

"The Peace of Gentle Waves" A Poem for Jaheem Herrera by Cleo Creech

"Big Joy" A Documentary Film Project about James Broughton
Bo Young Speaks with Stephen Silha

2009 White Crane / James White Poetry Prize

About the Prize

Winner – James Nawrocki
  “House Fire”
  “Golden Gate,”
  “Fortune Cookie”
  “From Cole Street”

Finalist – Jeremy Halinen 1cranepan
  “Afternoons Above I-5”
  “I-90 Westbound from Spokane,”
  “Buggering You under an Apple Tree”
 “Note”

Finalist – James Najarian
  “Travelogue”
  “My Big Head”

 

Culture Reviews

Didjeradoo by Dreamtime
    
Reviewed by Bo Young
Signals By Ed Madden
    
Reviewed by Dan Vera
Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing From The Antilles
Edited by Thomas Glave
    Reviewed by Dan Vera

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WC80 – Editor’s Note

20080803_3021a By Dan Vera

It’s hard not to take a defensive crouch when writing an introductory essay to a special issue on poetry and music.  Truth be told, the defensiveness has more to do with the poetry than the music.  Music everyone loves and understands.  Poetry?  That is a more contentious idea.  Or seems to be. 

I feel compelled to make the case for poetry, to argue for the importance of poetry and the desire for others to read more poetry.  Arguments of this kind usually include a mention of the endangered nature of poetry, how no one reads it anymore and how it’s tied to the decay in society.  I somewhat agree with all these things, but those kinds of essays always take on the feel of a commercial for high-fiber cereal “You should eat it because its good for you damnit!”

The truth is I’ve always found these kinds of arguments a bit boring and beside the point.  Poetry is in our lives and has been there since the beginning.  Think of it. For most of us our first real exposure to poetry occurs in childhood with rhymes and little stories.

 Jack be nimble, jack be quick… 
 Jack Sprat could eat no fat… (Jack was a busy boy.)
 Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…

They’re the indelible songs we first learned

 Mary had a little lamb…
 Twinkle twinkle little star…

These poems are the first stories that stuck because they embedded themselves in the brain.  But somewhere down the line — and it almost always happened (or happens) in a classroom — the pleasurable experience of enjoying this art form of wordplay is replaced with a mechanical exercise in pulling the little wonder apart, in dissecting the corpse of what was so alive in the ear. For most people I’ve spoken with, these approaches had the result of causing them to run for the exits.

For the last 7 years I’ve run a small reading series in my neighborhood.  Most of our work in building an audience has been rehabilitating poetry in the ears and minds of the people who come forth; healing the bad memory of poetry as an aloof inaccessible thing or a laborious exercise for the listener.  Our readings are a bit different as we choose a theme and then collect poems from the contemporary and legacy poets we know.  So if you came to our reading on “dog poetry” (every June) you would hear 45 of the best poems on dogs written in the English language (some translated into English).  So it’s more like an anthology.  I mention this not as a plug for a local series but to share that we rarely have the opportunity to hear, much less read good poetry.  With the exception of The New Yorker, it is rare to find a poem in a magazine today.  Much rarer Gay poetry.  I can’t tell you the last time that The Advocate published a poem in its pages.

This was not always this way.  Not long ago it was unheard of to publish a magazine without having a poetry editor and publishing a few poems in magazines.  [White Crane has long had a poetry editor.  Bo Young, the publisher in these parts, began his connection to the magazine as it’s poetry editor.  I served as poetry editor for RFD before coming to White Crane.]  Theories abound as to the why and when this changed but that’s not really the point here.  The point is that there is great poetry being written today but fewer places to read it and fewer places to enjoy the best.
 
We care about poetry here.  For no other reason than poetry is Gay.  Yes, I wrote it.  Poetry is so Gay.  It’s impossible to know the history of the art form and deny that it bears a huge resonance for Gay people and that Gay people have mastered it in powerful ways.  Do I need to make the list?  Okay then: Whitman, Dickinson, Lowell, Cavafy, Stein, Bynner, Lorca, Lorde, Bishop, Auden, Jordan, Ginsberg, Hughes.  All Gay.  The list is too long to write here and I haven’t even touched the contemporary poets.

So no defensiveness then.  We publish poetry because Gay people write poetry.  Damn good poetry too.  Which brings us to the damn good poetry in this issue (see how these things flow?). 

We’re delighted in this issue to publish the poetry of James Nawrocki, the first winner of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Gay Men’s Poetry.  Nawrocki hails from San Francisco, and we here at White Crane are proud of the fact that his work has previously appeared in these pages.  The prize itself was judged this year by the powerfully good poet Mark Doty, who has honored us all by looking through the work of the finalists and selecting Nawrocki’s manuscript for publication.  We are also proud to publish some poems by the two other finalists Jeremy Halinen of Seattle and James Najarian of Boston.

In striving to honor the muses of Poetry and Music, we have a fantastic interview with the Pulitzer-prize winning composer David Del Tredici and an essay by Arthur Evans on the creative universe.
So enjoy! And I hope you are amused.

Amused. That’s the word the poet Frank O’Hara used when he came across something that really moved him.  Something that “touched his muse.”  If he loved something, he found it “amusing.”  If he was not impressed or moved, he found it “unamusing.”  It’s perhaps one of my favorite phrases and I share it with you.

Be amused.  Be very amused.

Dan Vera is the White Crane's managing editor.  He is also the author of the recently released book of poetry, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books).  He lives in Washington DC.  For more on Dan visit www.danvera.com

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WC80 – James White Poetry Prize – Finalist

James Najarian
Finalist for the 2009 White Crane / James White Poetry Prize

Travelogue by James Najarian

Our travel papers are seldom in order.
We lack a visa, or the proper stamps.
More often than not, we're stopped at the border,

Our documents held to the light, just like this.
Our endorsements are in the wrong color ink,
Our signatures void, our persons suspicious.

This isn't the first time we've been refused entry.
You are a country we will never visit.
We view your coast from a deck on the sea,

Or get a hold of photographs, somewhere.
The kind of pictures that reveal nothing –
Cloudy landscapes taken from the air –

They tell us nothing we're not meant to know.
No one responds to calls at the consulate.
There's no national airline or tourist bureau.

You are a nation whose borders are closed:
A tiny state in the hills, like Bhutan.
The ridges and valleys stay unexposed.

Or you are a gap on the map of the world;
Your body, a continent, could be Antartica:
Cool, pale, and barely explored;

It could be perilous – the Khyber Pass,
A place without settlers – the Serengeti,
Or a place found only on a prewar atlas

Where half the globe is either pink or blue
Ubangi-Shari, or Bechuanaland,
Or someplace even harder to get to:

Cathay, Cibola, Lemuria, Mu.

James Najarian teaches nineteenth-century poetry at Boston College.  He is the author of the critical work Victorian Keats: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Desire published in 2002 by Palgrave Macmillan.  He lives in the Brighton section of Boston.

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your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed
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WC80 – James White Poetry Prize – Winner

NAWROCKI_photo2 James Nawrocki
Winner of the 2009 White Crane / James White Poetry Prize
His winning manuscript House Fire will be published by White Crane Books.

House Fire by James Nawrocki

It seems too staged, too weirdly poetic this way,
the house where we first met going up in flames
but this is exactly what I come out from my yard to find
as the sirens die at their loudest just up the street
and I follow the uphill stream of spectators
and the trail of the smoke blowing down to us

to find the fire has picked this one. The truth is
we never really came to much: a few torrid meetings
when you were renting a room there and I
trudged up the slope to your door. The truth is
we fell into each other too fast and lasted
just as long as our particular heat required, as if
desire had been stored up in us like so much fuel
and its reckoning had come. We’ve moved on

and now this haunt meets its end as well, the orange flames
like the arms of a maniacal crowd tearing at the wood,
flinging their colors out the ruined windows as if
to answer the gaze of all these witnesses:
the curious, the bystanders, none innocent, none without
a bit of that gleaming-eyed thrill
that regards all destruction.

 

Golden Gate by James Nawrocki

Brian and I step off
the road into sloping dirt,
down steps molded from
arms and feet of roots,
the trees’ bodies bent down
and standing up, like prayer,
the light there and gone
and there again
as we run
beyond the halted trees
and land safely
at each leap down
from shade into the pitch
of sun and rock,
our feet passing,
pressed in the dust
with other feet as we come
toward the Pacific.

Maybe this is the only way
we will ever free ourselves,
not up from the world, but down
to front the double vault
of heaven and ocean,
the beach like the brief margin
between two states,
the vastness
that teaches the body to be small.

A native of Ohio, James Nawrocki has lived in San Francisco for over 13 years where he works in corporate communications.  In addition to having appeared in White Crane, Nawrocki’s poems have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Chroma Journal, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Poetry, Poetry Daily, modern words, The James White Review, Mudfish and numerous other publications.  His fiction and essays have appeared in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and Geek Monthly.

For more White Crane, become a fan on Facebook and join us on Yahoogroups.

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to
your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed
above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available
for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC80 – James White Poetry Prize – Finalist

Jeremy Halinen
Finalist for the 2009 White Crane / James White Poetry Prize

Afternoons Above I-5 by Jeremy Halinen

We used to drop acid
and sit on the overpass
to watch the dragon faces
the cars would make at us
as they raced
beneath our dangling legs.
Cars like it when you’re high enough
above them to notice
more than their surfaces.
It’s the story of their exhaust
they want you to care about,
not their paint jobs
or the treads
on their tires. They want you to lean down
and touch them.
Halinen-photo I know what you’re thinking.
It’s dangerous,
what we used to do. But
the cars told us they’d catch us if we fell.
You say, So what if they did?
And you’re right.
There’s always a catch.

Jeremy Halinen is a coeditor and cofounder of Knockout Literary Magazine. Some of his recent poems appear in Arroyo Literary Review; Best Gay Poetry 2008; Dos Passos Review; OCHO, Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets; and Rio Grande Review. He holds a MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, where he served as poetry editor of Willow Springs. He resides in Seattle.

WC90 – Arthur Evans – Come, Creator Spirit

Come, Creator Spirit
By Rabanus Maurus,
Translation from the Latin by Arthur Evans

Come, Creator Spirit,
Visit the minds of your people.
Fill with grace from above
The hearts that you have made.

You, who are called the Inspirer,
Gift of God in highest Heaven,
Living Fountain, Fire, Love,
And Spiritual Anointing,

You, benefiting us in seven ways,
Finger of the Father’s hand,
You, the Father’s faithful promise,
Enriching tongues with speech,

Light a lamp amid our senses,
And into our hearts, pour love.
Fortify with lasting virtue
The weakness of our bodies.

Push back the foe, far away.
Let peace be near at hand.
Be thus our leader, out in front,
To save us everywhere from harm.
May we, through you, discern the Father
And learn as well the Son,
And also trust in you,
Their Spirit, throughout all time.

Glory be to God the Father,
And to the Son, arisen from the dead,
And to the Inspirer,
For age on age to come.
Amen.

= = =

Veni, Creator Spiritus,
mentes tuorum visita.
Imple superna gratia
quae creatis pectora.

Qui diceris Paraclitus,
altissimi donum Dei,
fons vivus, ignis, caritas,
et spiritalis unctio,

Tu, septiformis munere,
digitus paternae dexterae,
Tu rite promissum Patris,
sermone ditans guttura,
Accende lumen sensibus,
infunde amorem cordibus,
infirma nostri corporis
virtute firmans perpeti.

Hostem repellas longius,
pacemque dones protinus.
Ductore sic te praevio
vitemus omne noxium.

Per te sciamus da Patrem,
noscamus atque Filium.
Teque utriusque Spiritum
credamus omni tempore.

Deo Patri sit gloria,
et Filio, qui a mortuis
surrexit, ac Paraclito,
in saeculorum saecula.
Amen.

This is just an excerpt from this issue.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Arthur Evans is the author of Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978) The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysus (1988) and Critique of Patriarchal Reason (1997).  He lives in San Francisco.

WC80 – David Del Tredici Interviewed

Outside_with_scarf A White Crane Conversation

Gay Orpheus
Ray Warman Speaks with David Del Tredici

Generally recognized as the father of the Neo-Romantic movement in music, David Del Tredici – over a compositional career spanning five decades and (stronger than ever!) still counting – has received, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Music, a Grammy nomination and an OUTMusic award. His music has been commissioned and performed by nearly every major American and European orchestral ensemble.

“Del Tredici,” said Aaron Copland, “is that rare find among composers — a creator with a truly original gift. I venture to say that his music is certain to make a lasting impression on the American musical scene. I know of no other composer of his generation who composes music of greater freshness and daring, or with more personality.”

Copland’s observations would be borne out in a way that, as a closeted elder composer, he could hardly have foreseen: The very daring Del Tredici would prove not only to be conspicuously Gay in his personal life, but also to enrich much of his music with Gay-focused texts, creating a “lasting impression” indeed. Most recently premiered was his setting for narrator and string quartet of James Broughton’s landmark poem, “Wondrous the Merge.”

Del Tredici was interviewed for us by White Crane contributor Ray Warman.

Ray: Gay Life … Queer Hosannas … Ballad in Lavender … My Favorite Penis Poems … David, your titles couldn’t be more exuberantly Gay! When did you first introduce Gay themes as subjects of your music, and how did that come about?

David: Long before I set explicitly Gay texts to music, I was for many years drawn to the poetry and stories of a man with a sexual secret, Lewis Carroll. In Final Alice, I was particularly explicit about Carroll. I set not only his nonsense poetry, but also the Victorian originals that he parodied – and the originals in fact speak of the love of a man for a girl named Alice. My music for the original poems depicted the forbidden – Carroll’s hidden desires – by using blatantly tonal harmony, which at that time had become a forbidden musical idiom. I was, in brief, drawn to forbidden things – forbidden sexual leanings – and in that sense, Carroll’s closeted love of little girls resonated well with my Gayness.

Ray: When were you first publicly identified as Gay?

David: When I was about 30, while an assistant professor at Harvard, I did a naked interview – something then the fashion for artistic people – for the magazine After Dark. I don’t think it was explicitly Gay, but with no mention of a wife or children, the message was there. For a mainstream publication at that time, right around Stonewall, it was as Gay as it got. We were still quite coy, then.

To that degree, I had always been “out,” in my personal life and with my friends, but – as with Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber – it was something not talked about publicly.

For me, the big change came in 1995, when I discovered the Body Electric School and attended one of their week-long workshops, where I was filled with pride at being Gay and wanting to be more out. I returned from the workshop to a residency at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in upstate New York. I brought with me several poems by workshop members that celebrated being Gay and at Wildwood (where the workshop took place), and I set them to music as a kind of homesickness remedy and a way of continuing the connection while back at Yaddo. Those settings, which became the first two songs of Gay Life, were in fact the first Gay poetry that I set, and from then on I began to seek out, and to set, poetry celebrating sex. Take, for example, my Chana’s Story – not Gay, but very sexy. Beyond Chana Bloch, I met a lot of Gay poets at these art colonies and become interested in their work – Alfred Corn, John Kelly, Michael Klein, Jaime Manrique, Edward Field – and likewise, delving into the past, I found Gay poets like Rumi, Allen Ginsberg and Federico García Lorca. And I have a special place in my heart for the poetry of Antler, a kindred spirit.

Ray: How did James Broughton and his “Wondrous the Merge” enter the picture?

David: Again, my quartet, Wondrous the Merge, was Body-Electric-influenced:  It was at Wildwood that I first heard James Broughton’s poem – an exultant embrace of his long-repressed sexuality –, and I was deeply touched by it. A commission for a string quartet came along, and I thought I might set “Wondrous” to be declaimed in collaboration with the string quartet – in other words, to compose a melodrama, like Richard Strauss’ Enoch Arden. Though I had combined singing and declamation in previous works (such as Dracula), I had never before made narrative the dominant element.

There’s an interesting serendipity associated with my completion of Wondrous: I went out for lunch and found my neighbor, the writer and artist Tobias Schneebaum, sitting nearby with someone. When Tobias introduced us (“David, do you know Joel Singer, who was James Broughton’s lover?”), I asked whether he was “the Joel” who figured in the poem. When told that he was, I remarked upon the coincidence of my just having set the story of his love affair with James. Joel moved in with Tobias, so our connection continued.

Ray: Wasn’t the Wondrous premiere somewhat controversial?

David: Yes, indeed! Wondrous had been commissioned for the Elements Quartet and was to be premiered by them at the 2003 Great Lakes Festival. The Festival had been told long before of the work’s Gay subject matter, but they didn’t see the text until the programs were to be printed, with the scheduled performance imminent. Even though the poem’s language was relatively mild, its subject proved disturbing for the straitlaced Festival: It’s the true-life story of a curmudgeonly, married, 61-year-old professor – securely packed into the conventional heteronormative mold – who is seduced by his 26-year-old hippie student! It defies “normal” expectations, as it takes the reluctant, protesting elder, not only into the younger man’s bed, but also out of his staid, “somnambulist” life. And so at the last minute, the Festival management said it couldn’t be done because there’d be “children present” and the “text” was unacceptable. (They avoided bringing the word “Gay” into their objections.) A last-minute compromise led to the quartet’s being performed without the narration, though with the aria on the word “wondrous.” I came to learn that the Festival was co-sponsored by three churches – Catholic, Protestant and Jewish – and that censorship remains alive and well in the US!

Ray: What other performance problems have you had with “Gay” titles and texts?

David: The San Francisco Symphony commissioned a big song-cycle that I called Gay Life – and, though it was San Francisco and the conductor was Michael Tilson Thomas, and they had already heard two or three of the songs –, there seemed, when it was premiered in May 2001, an inordinate amount of hostility coming my way as a result, and not just because of the music. The piece was Gayness-in-your-face, starting with the title – which, by the way, they asked me to change (and that speaks volumes!), but I declined.

Ray: Is it fair to conclude that Gay poets are more “out” in their work than Gay composers?

David: Indeed! In fact, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Antler and Edward Field have inspired me to keep up with them in terms of creating work suffused by a Gay sensibility. In contrast, I found the history of Gay composers in America bereft of any comparable Gay role-model. In England, of course, there was Benjamin Britten, with his operas Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice – but even they seem to be whispering their Gayness only by implication, and with no proud, bold declamation. Perhaps, of course, it was the times – but Ginsberg and Copland were contemporaries!

Ray: Tell us about your more recent “Gay” pieces.

David: Early December, 2008, there was premiered my perhaps-most-explicit song cycle, My Favorite Penis Poems, on the same Symphony Space program that also saw the long-delayed premiere, with narration, of Wondrous the Merge. With MFPP, I ran into the problem of finding singers willing to sing certain words and content on stage: Though they never point to particulars, many of them wind up saying “It’s not for me.” Rob Frankenberry rose to the occasion, however, and Melissa Fogarty likewise came around; they were troupers, taking marvelous relish in all the pieces, most especially in the naughtier words.

The last of the Penis Poems is Ginsberg’s “Please Master” – which is, if you will, a blow-by-blow sketch of an S/M scene. This poem also has a Body Electric connection for me: While assisting at the school’s S/M-focused workshop (called “Power, Surrender & Intimacy”), I and the other staff assistants would recite – and, through movement, express – “Please Master” as a bold celebration of the other side of desire, so it kind of got into my system.

Ray: S/M may no longer be the utterly taboo subject it once was, but it’s not on everyone’s playlist. How did it get onto yours?

David: I was in an exploratory mode, and very favorably disposed towards Body Electric’s offerings generally, when I first enrolled, as a participant, in the “Power, Surrender & Intimacy” workshop. When I took the workshop a second time, a year later, I met you! And, because S/M is your passion, you’ve had a lot to do with expanding my S/M horizons. In fact, you’ll remember, for the first two years of our relationship, you wanted me to take you everywhere – and I mean everywhere: down the street, into restaurants, onto airplanes! – on a leash and collar. Although at first I was troubled by this strange-seeming request, when I spoke with my therapist about it, she had the insight simply to ask, “How does it feel? Do you like him? Is it hurting anybody?” And so, I concluded it was okay, and it in fact became enjoyable…and thus, a ferocious top was born!

Ray: Spanking the keyboard, you’ve been celebrated as a ferocious pianist as well! Have S/M and other Gay subjects found their way into your piano-music?

David: A few years ago, a dear friend commissioned a piano piece from me. It wound up being so formidably difficult – a pianistic terror – that I decided to call it S/M Ballade. Being a pianist, after all, is a masochistic pursuit, don’t you think?

Ray: I suppose so, just as being a composer is a sadistic one!

David: Yes, we get to do all the imposition. It was a nice coincidence, too, that the commissioning pianist, Marc, has a partner named Seth – making them an “S/M” pair and giving the title a very welcome double-meaning.

I’m reminded of another piano ballad I’ve written – Ballad in Lavender. I wrote it for another friend, also a Gay man who in fact seemed quite proud of his Gayness. When I came to title the piece, he at first objected, rather mildly saying the word “Lavender” was unnecessary. But I wanted the word precisely because of its Gay associations, which I like to have in all my pieces nowadays. After considering lots of alternatives, I finally insisted on that title (it was, after all, my piece!). It so upset the commissioner that the title would contain a word even vaguely associated with being Gay that it ended our friendship and, even though he loved the music, he refused to play the piece. It was later premiered by a pianist who took no particular notice of the title and whose sexual orientation I don’t even know!

Ray: Is there such a thing as “Gay music”?

This is just an excerpt from this issue.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

For more White Crane, become a fan on Facebook and join us on Yahoogroups.

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to
your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed
above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available
for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC80 – Cleo Creech – Poem for Jaheem Herrera

A Poem for Jaheem HerreraJahHerrera

The Peace of Gentle Waves

By Cleo Creech

This is our child,
if not by blood
then by heart and spirit.
We hold him close
as we must all children
as we must hold all
innocents who cry alone.
Those sad and lonely ones,
solitary and surrounded,
by those who care,
by those who listen,
and those who turn away.
We mourn as brothers,
as sisters, as family
he never knew he had;
those who know his pain,
united by kindred spirit.
We tend the signal fires
on safety of sandy beach,
a distant light some never see.
Send out the boats,
for there are other spirits
far from shore, from home,
who know only the
violence of the crashing sea,
and not the peace of gentle waves.

Jaheem Herrera was a Georgia fifth-grader who committed suicide in April.
The 11-year-old hung himself at home after relentless bullying at school.

The poet and artist Cleo Creech was last featured in the Fall 2006 issue of White Crane (#70).  He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.  For more on Cleo, visit him at  www.cleocreech.com

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Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to
your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed
above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available
for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC80 Updrafts

Updrafts
Edited by Dan Vera

Help these boys build a nation of their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literature for words they can speak. And should you encounter an ancient tribe whose customs, however dimly, cast light on their hearts, tell them that tale, and you shall name the unspeakable names of your kind, and in that naming, in each such telling, they will falter a step to the light. Jamie O'Neill

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses.  Sight goes.  They have no time to look at pictures.  Sound goes.  They have no time to listen to music.  Speech goes.  They have no time for conversation.  They lose their sense of proportion — the relations between one thing and another.  Humanity goes.
Virginia Woolf

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.   Leonard Cohen

I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly.
Colm Tóibín

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.  Ishmael Reed

The beauty of words in a democracy is that anyone can offer them up, and they live or die not by the ruler’s dictate, but by their ability to permeate hearts and minds, to ignite passions, and to provoke action. Throughout our history, we have learned that words with enough resonance — whether from a slave, a student, or a songwriter — can change history as dramatically as any decree.  Joannie Fischer

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think.
Music is immediate; it goes on to become.      W.H. Auden

Oh fellow mortal out there in the world!  Until you learn how to join together once more, to fuse your sorrowful and lonely hearts in some new communion, you can never make true music.  The sound you will produce will continue to be the agonized expression of separate and unshared life.  Mabel Dodge Lujan

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet,
music in some living form will accompany and sustain it
and give it expressive meaning.   Aaron Copland


Dan Vera is the White Crane's managing editor.  He is also the author of the recently released book of poetry, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books).  He lives in Washington DC.  For more on Dan visit www.danvera.com

Updrafts is a regular feature of  White Crane.  If you have a little bit  of wisdom to share with us, send it to us at dan@gaywisdom.org

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WC80 – Andrew Ramer’s Praxis

Andrewramer_sep_3Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

By Andrew Ramer

Earth spins and wobbles. Landmasses drift, shudder, slam into each other. Waves hiss, thunder, and crash. Wind whips through trees, whispers through grass. Rain patters, thunder rumbles, ice cracks. Rivers rush, streams babble. Animals sing, chirp, bray, hiss, bellow, howl, buzz, croak, roar. Our bodies throb, gurgle, inhale, exhale, cough, sniffle, wheeze, belch, fart. And we chatter, laugh, sob, scream, moan, wail, chant, hum, sigh, cry out in ecstasy. All of which contribute to the music we’ve created on our lovely damaged traveling sphere. Many years ago a disembodied friend told me that one of the reasons he likes hanging out on this planet is that more different kinds of music are played here in an hour than are played on most other planets in ten thousand years.

In honor of music and its diversity I offer a variety of spiritual practices.

If you were to describe yourself as a musical instrument, which one would you be? (I envision myself as an old dusky pink cello.)

What musical instrument would best represent each of the people in your life?

Is music purely mental for you? Do you listen to music without moving, or are you a rocker, a swayer, a dancer? Finger snapper, head bobber, foot tapper?

Do you like to sing? Alone or with others? In the shower? In concert? What do you like to sing? Do you sing the same songs or add new ones to your repertoire? If you don’t sing, why not? Did you ever? What were you told about your voice? What keeps you from singing now? If you don’t sing, start. If you do sing, keep singing.

Plato said: When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.

What was the first piece of music that shook your walls? (Mine was Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.”) Do you still like it, or are you embarrassed by it now? Do you still listen to it, or do you no longer need to, because it’s encoded in your DNA from playing it so many times? What else has shaken you, sent shivers up and down your receptive undulating spine?

What music are you listening to these days? Do you listen to music at all? What are your favorite pieces of music from the past year? Several friends of mine make CDs of their annual favorites and give them out as holiday gifts. Do you? Might you? What would your choices say about you and your year? (My last year’s treasure was bluegrass, “From the Windows of a Train,” by Blue Highway. I listened to it over and over again for weeks, to the great distress of my easy-listening housemate.)

What kinds of music do you avoid, hate, wish we’d never played on this planet? What are your associations with these forms of music? Too loud, too slow, too emotional, too cold? What aspects of your life might they represent?

Chart your coming out, love life, sex life, breaking up, marriage/s or ritual equivalents if you had any, through the music that you were listening to then. Are there common themes, issues, recording artists, musical styles in your choices? What does this tell you about yourself and your romantic/sexual/intimate life?

Write your autobiography by listing the music you listened to in each stage of your life, or the music that describes each chapter of your life. Record these pieces of music and share them with others, perhaps on your birthday. Many of us have photos that document our lives. Why not create a document in sound of your life?

Would you like music played at your funeral or memorial service? Record it and give copies to your dear ones. Weddings have rehearsals. Consider having a funeral rehearsal and playing these pieces of music for others. If you do this, how does it feel to hear your musical choices as if they were being played in your physical absence? Do they adequately express the ‘you’ that you want others to remember, or do you need to make other choices?

Do you play an instrument? What or which? Did you play any in the past? Why did you stop, if you did? Consider taking up an instrument again. It’s one thing to listen to music, but quite another to make it. Like making love. What music can you make?

Are there musical eras that you prefer? Are you a fan of music from particular cultures, regions, groups, composers? What does this tell you about yourself? Are these past life clues or evidence of expanded aspects of your personality?

Recently I visited the home of a newish friend who’s thirty years my junior, and was startled to discover that he


Andrew Ramer is a writer and educator.  He is the author of numerous books including Revelations for a New Millenium, Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age and the Gay classic  Two Flutes Playing: A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men  from White Crane Books.

Ramer lives in San Francisco. Praxis is a regular feature of White Crane.

For more White Crane, become a fan on Facebook and join us on Yahoogroups.

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to
your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed
above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available
for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org