Prospecting, Indio Hills

for Phil

through this slot canyon
we have decided to explore
past the ancient palm trees
living on a waterless shore
and pillared by a fault zone
we traverse a mud walled wash
that gets thinner and thinner
while late November clouds
pillar into silent gray burdens
above our heads, you say rain
I assure you that water isn't
attracted to this dry spot,
I see walls rising higher,
you say the flood will easily
cascade past us today, the
rocks fall away beneath my
feet and I find a small stack
of black crystals, the first I've
ever found in 20 odd years
of driving the sandy back
roads now I almost get stuck
again in my battered Toyota
RAV4 once again, it's not
a new 4WD, it’s from the
wandering into narrow places
unknown except to a few
desert rats and the sand dunes
are mostly leveled on the
valley, low, now the fat rain
pushes down for birthing,
I advise a hasty retreat
to a thermos of hot tea
and you want tacos again,
good thing I didn't lose
the keys this time, you win,
the rain terrorizes windshield
and hood, now I drive away,
turn to ask whether you want
chicken or beans, you’re gone,
conversation shattered, my
fingers, around these rocks.



by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan

NP4@P Review + Desolation Tango

Here is a nice review of NP4@P (my new acronym for the desert book) and my friend Deanne Stillman's Joshua Tree book, Desolation Tango. The generous review was penned by my friend/author Cynthia Anderson, who lives in Joshua Tree. Cynthia's poetry has been featured in Phantom Seed Magazine (an offshoot publication I publish once or twice a year of contemporary poetry and prose)and will be featured again in Phantom Seed #4, coming out next month. Check my blog soon for upcoming readings, which will begin in mid-September.

Here is the writeup:

Being laid up for a couple of weeks with an injured back has had its advantages, mainly the chance to read for hours on end. Happily, I had just ordered a pile of books from Amazon and they've been steadily trickling in. Here are a few of my favorites.

"No Place for a Puritan" is an anthology of desert writing, both poetry and prose. There are heavy hitters like John Steinbeck and Sylvia Plath (!), the usual suspects like Mary Austin and Edward Abbey, and a host of others you've never heard of but will be glad you did. Editor Ruth Nolan has done a superb job of bringing together diverse voices. I devoured this book!

Last night I actually made it to an author reading at the Red Arrow Gallery that featured Ruth Nolan along with Deanne Stillman, author of "Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango" as well as a definitive book on wild mustangs and an expose about a 1991 murder in 29 Palms. Another desert writer worth checking out.

You can read the review on Cynthia's blog at:
http://cynthiashidesertblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/summer-reading.html

Thanks, Cynthia!

Desert Writers Issue, Summer 2010, Sun Runner Magazine

Salton Sea, south shore, near Obsidian Butte, photo by me but not in the summer.

Desert Writers Issue, Sun Runner Magazine, Summer 2010 is out...

http://issuu.com/thesunrunnermagazine/docs/sraugustdig10

the issue looks RAD and there's a generous review of No Place 4 A Puritan.

Enjoy! This issue is a GREAT READ! Perfect for mid-August. It's drenching hot here in Palm Desert - our tropical weather with a twist of Death Valley heat thrown in. Too hot to go bike riding, even at 10 pm. Yuck-weather, too supernovabaked to breathe. Swim-mind, body-dope. That's what this is, and I'm heading to Northern California to visit my brothers Patrick (San Jose) and John (Oakland) before.....school starts.

PS how is this for an 11 pm temperature (from the weather channel)

11:00 PM, PALM DESERT, AUGUST 16 2010
95°F
Feels Like: 101°
45% humidity

YUCK!

Crazy Creek Camp Chair

Here's a poem of mine that appeared in the summer, 2008 Sun Runner Magazine Desert Writers Issue....one I've never read publicly but that I think is...wobbly yet precise in its depiction of a relationship between a teenage girl and her mother...(for the record, the 2010 Desert Writers Issue is about to hit the shelves...I'll post the link when it's ready.)

Crazy Creek Camp Chair


Backpacking trip, mother and daughter, furtive coyote prowling

for short grouse. We plan to arrive at dusk, trade places, she hikes

front, I behind. We are close to the same height and weight but



I am wobbly on this jagged mountain range, a ledge, 9,100 feet,

seeking a campsite. It's May, and she is tall, eclipsing me, it can't be

helped. I am in her long shadow now, frustrated by her easy pace.



I slip behind to find a walking stick, imagine how the swirling hot

chocolate I’ll prepare will ease the aches of sleeping on the ground,

but she, she loves to sleep outdoors. How deceived she is, by our



sixteen-year routine, mother and daughter bundled side by side

in matching sleeping bags, expecting me to erect the tent, prime

the stove, the usual exchange. The meadow is yet beaten down and



a fresh-cheeked sunset chokes the joys of flowery smiles peeking

through the snow. I know the creek will sleep tonight. I’m not so far

behind, and the old birds sing in the new grass with winter’s last breath.


Ruth Nolan, Palm Desert, copyright(c) 2008 & 2010 by Ruth Nolan

the issue, which features poetry and prose by other desert-based writers, can be visited at:
http://www.thesunrunner.com/Stories/Desert_Writers_Issue_2007/Nolan_DWI_07/nolan_dwi_07.html

San Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk + Anthology

I'm honored to have a haiku series, inspired by a close poet friend and my hikes/our hikes/my late-May hike with friends and members from the Southern California Haiku Study Group - organized by my good friend Deborah P. Kolodji of Los Angeles - at the Indian Canyons in Palm Springs, forthcoming in the glamorous anthology:

an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology

My five-haiku series is a desert word walk in itself, and follows the narrator through the start of the hike, arriving at the oasis, and then hiking 1/2 mile in the cool of palm trees alongside a creek to the left, massive rocks to the right, and then stopping at the small bridge, going into the water, and seeing a tiny frog clinging to a rock.

here is one, a sneak preview, written by me:

two dragonflies
the blue one
loses a wing


Two readings by anthology contributors are planned. I will definitely be at the first one.

Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA Saturday Sept 26 @ 2 pm

The Ink Spot, San Diego CA, Saturday Oct 9 @ 2 pm

Here is a description of the anthology, by this year's editor Billie Dee, featuring some of the best haiku - and other traditional forms of Japanese poetry - writers living and writing today, from this year's editor Billie Dee:

about an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology From our first beautiful hand-made 2001 edition with eight founding haijin, we have grown to a volume of 65 poets. Our new book will be perfect-bound with a full-color heavy-stock cover, featuring 267 poems, including a fine selection of regional Spanish Language haiku with English translations. This collection emphasizes our unique climate and geography, our rich cultural diversity, and embraces the broad range of experience of our contributing haijin. I think you will be very pleased with the superb quality of work in this, our 10th Anniversary Edition!

Art VULUPS

Art VULUPS, Riverside County: an arts and city planning collaborative I'm part of - my artist-colleague and friend, Leora Lutz has posted an insightful blog entry on the project, with a generous nod to my role in the project as a contributing artist-writer. Thanks, Leora! Pictures are of Doug McCulloh, author-photographer-renaissance man and yours truly - I am teamed with Mike Harrod of Riverside County planning, and our topic is "noise-sound"

http://movement365.blogspot.com/2010/08/art-vulups-public-art-in-conjunction.html

letter to Phil

For anyone reading this blog: I am posting a commemoration of my dear friend, longtime companion and love, Philip Helland who died on April 9th of this year.

Today is the four month mark. What can I say? "nothing...compares...2 U..." you are missed every day. I am alone at the house. I burn a candle for you every night in the orange glass holder in the northwest bedroom every night, placed at the due-west corner. I had a dear, longtime friend I haven't seen in years, who now lives in Hawaii, call and text me with loving words and grace. Thank you, Lili.

Words and generosity and hugs that are so missing from you now, and saddest of all, from all the others who knew you and loved you, who seem to be moving on with their lives and forgetting about me, shutting me out. "When will you be over it?" "f-off" I don't say....as if I could ever forget about you. I know others hurt in missing you too but there is a universe between us, me, them and you. Missing from those I thought were closest to me but in truth are no more, shutting me out, cutting me out, slicing me out, for reasons unknown, adding to my own despair in this tragedy.... including most of my own "family," many of them, incredibly, offering harsh and callous criticisms of me - as if I asked for that. Adding tragedy upon tragedy. How in any way does causing additional pain help heal the pain? Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of the human condition, the reasons we remain sickeningly in war after war after f-ing war. Because people, countries, whole societies want to pass along the pain hot potato of life's most cutting events, rather than rise above to offer love, light, transformation.

You were my family, Philip, more than the others, more than words, more than life itself. That's how true it always was. And remains. If you were here now, I wouldn't have to write these things, because so much would be private and shared between us and safe in our sacred zone of what we shared. I write these things now because I want the world to know how special you remain..even for those who never knew you.

Sightings: Today: A bird lands on a fence. It feels a little like you, touching down to say hello, you haven't really gone. Saturday: a yellow butterfly, rare for this time of year in the desert, touched down on the pine tree I planted after Christmas one year. It's huge now...the butterfly landed right in front of me and I slowly reached out....and touched it. It moved its little legs and head up and down....then gently flew away to a higher branch, and stayed there for a long time, regarding me.

You added so much to the world while you were here. Wisdom, kindness, leadership, brilliance, spirituality, healing, musical talent, humor, insight, poetry, friendship to so many, and love, pure love. And a deep connection with nature. All of our hikes....starting with Deep Creek....Forest Falls...and so much more.

Subtle gestures...a yellow butterfly, landing on a brutal summer day in the desert, here at the edge of the world where beauty and terror and pain and despair and love and hope remain, somehow lifting their wings and landing gently in front of me. For a brief stay. So very Alice in Wonderland, that genius novel by Lewis Carroll...and we just saw the Tim Burton version of the movie together, and were similarly blown away. We kept talking about the symbol of the caterpillar-butterfly as transformation all night afterwards, as well as discussing the other messages of insight and universality and humanity and transcendence, too. And then we were on to our regular discussions of Carl Jung...

I love you. What more can I say? May I drift and walk in beauty, too, the way you always knew and led the way the best you could, which was infinitely more than most others can and will do. In the end, love is all that remains, and this is the last gift, that love is what remains. "prema" = "love" and I try every day and hope to always do so, to add a little bit of beauty, light and love to this human condition, no matter how bad things get, everywhere I go because that is what you believed in me to do and now I do it for you. In your name, in the spirit of you. And thank you for finding me in this life, and helping make me into someone better and new.


Philip in the Anza Borrego Desert, spring 2008, photo by Ruth

And here is a song by Moby (descendant of Herman Melville)...one of our favorites and the music video captures a bit of the spirit of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Fcaro25Ek

more hugs and love...

Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Hwy 111, Palm Springs

On July 24, my friend Dr. Maja Trochimczyk attended and wrote about the gala concert of the 13th Festival of International Laureates at Disney Hall in Los Angeles,
Chopin in Transcription at Disney Hall, performed by the IPalpiti Orchestra, conducted by Eduard Schmieder.

Maja's stunning review, part of many performances commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of the great and enduring Fryderyk Chopin - one of my life's inspirations as a poet and musician - occurring during the year 2010. In addition, Maja, a Chopin scholar and well-established music historian, compiled an amazing anthology of poetry, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (Moonrise Press, 2010.) I am extremely honored to have one of my poems included in this collection, which came out this past winter.

In her review, which can be read in full at http://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2010/08/chopin-in-transcription-at-disney-hall.html Maja generously includes discussion and the body of a poem I wrote last summer, Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs.

Excerpt, below, from Maja's review::

In any case, hearing Chopin's concerto in an elegant and nuanced strings-only version and Schumann's concerto luxuriating with the aural delights of romanticism at its best, reminded me of Ruth Nolan's masterly poem Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs. Nolan heard the Chopin concerto on the car stereo while driving through the desert and an abundance of youthful memories ensued:

"Caressed, by the windy desert mid-night,
tickling your hair as you lean
your head against the open window
tantalizes your imagination, you are 12 again
and your hands, together, devour the major
and minor keys until you are one
with the dark void, foot pressing down,
long chords that will linger into dawn"

The final image of Nolan's poem (published in the anthology Chopin with Cherries) remains with the readers, resonating in their memories:

"Styled by elegance of motion, staccato, fortissimo
cresting on the car stereo as you leapfrog
between the lines on the highway
between the spaces of darkness and sound,
blown across the sand dunes into magnificence"

Chopin's music - heard, played, experienced - echoes in the memory with an untold magnificence, withstanding the test of time.
(end of review)

a sample of movement four from the Concerto - so much energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nwcn_o866Q&feature=related

I first heard this as a very young college student in my UC-Santa Barbara friend's dorm room....on a record. He was from the hills of Corona del Mar (the O.C.) and a rock star guitarist studying classical guitar and he laughed every time he put this record on. I was from the desert. Thanks, PR!

The next reading from Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse will be held at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on Sunday, September 12, at 2 pm. The event is open to the public and will feature readings from anthology contributors. A $7 fee is charged, and contributes to helping keep the historic and prolific literary arts center open in these difficult economic times. For more information on this event, and/or to order copies of the anthology, contact Maja Trochimczyk at maja.trochimczyk@gmail.com, or visit Beyond Baroque at http://www.beyondbaroque.org/

Barnes & Noble Poetry, Palm Desert

It was a lovely evening...hosted by the indefatigable Patricia d'Alessandro, poetess supreme at 86 years young....she is hosting poet Wanda Coleman at the March, 2011 reading! Not to miss!



Among the readers, photographed above, are my colleague Tim Johnson from COD (next to me,) and local poets Frances Stanley (center,) and to the right, Dessa Reed and Lee Balan. Patricia is the lovely lady wearing the scarf. Two of the people in the photo read for the very first time! I love it.

Trigger is coming home!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20683&id=118470144843233

to my hometown of Apple Valley, the town that Roy Rogers & Dale Evans built. Thanks to my Mojave Desert O.G. homeboy Dave Pike for taking and posting these.

Ladyfest I.E., Sunday August 8th

An all-day, interactive, music, e-zine making, arts, yoga and more! Back to the Grind coffee shop in Riverside...FREE and open to the public!! This is part of a national program and one of many Ladyfest events occurring throughout the U.S.
For directions.....http://www.back2thegrind.com/



From 6:50-7:15 PM I'll be reading feminist-desert poetry think: Sylvia Plath meets the ghost of Mary Austin and the bones of Shoshone woman buried at Soda Springs, with a little desert firefighting and music-keg-raves situated somewhere between sunset and sunrise on a dry lakebed just big enough for a small airplane to take off!

I am honored to be part of this....I also read last year and was and am inspired and motivated by the energy of the young people in downtown Riverside who are making it happen, keeping their voices alive, and loud, and real.