I'm still not doing as good a job as I should putting up notices of my readings and other appearances. Lately I seem to engage in such activity on the Western Slope rather than the Front Range, but on Sunday, 27 September I'll be a featured part of the 100,000 Poets for Change reading in Denver, 6:30pm at West Side Books.

I won't be away from the Western Slope for long. On Saturday, 17 October I'll be leading a Western Colorado Writers’ Forum workshop in Grand Junction, CO.  Join me from 1-4pm at the Center For Independence Gymnasium, 740 Gunnison Ave., Grand Junction, CO

Poetry Workshop: The Other Perspective

Presented by Uche Ogbuji

Many people are taught to write creatively by expressing themselves, but it is just as important to practice writing to express others!

Free to Members, $20 for non-members.  Please RSVP, call 970-256-4776, or visit the WCWF page.

If you're in Western Colorado please do support WCWF with a fun night of Poetry SLAM! hosted by Bobby LeFebre at Colorado Mesa University on the evening of 24 September.

Evening of my workshop in Fruita at the Lithic Bookstore & Gallery, near GJ, I'll be giving a poetry reading along with great friend and superb poet Wendy Videlock. 7pm October 17th.

In a more virtual appearance, my mini-travelogue of southeast through central Nigeria "Road from Calabar to Abuja", is published in Expound Magazine #3, on page 43. Follow me "[i]nto the gentle basins of the delta bread basket—Sour sop lollipop land."

Following the launch of Denver Public Library and Arapahoe Library District, another Colorado library system has gone live. Anythink is the public library system serving residents of Adams County, with branches Brighton, Commerce City, Thornton and nearby. It's been fun to work with a library with such a track record of innovation, including its 2009 rebranding looking to revolutionize how people think of libraries, and its commitment to green practices, not to mention its very own brew of beer. Anythink's 216,000 or so records have become almost 1.5 million new resource pages.

And about those resources, here are some fun starting points for you.

• Need to borrow a laptop? Have you tried your public library?
• With Chile's recent Copa América victory, inspired, some say by the harrowing story of the 33 Chilean miners, here is a book for background: Deep down dark, the untold stories of 33 men buried in a Chilean mine, and the miracle that set them free, by Héctor Tobar
• Audiobooks at Anythink 
• A book of photos and maps of Molly Brown's Capitol Hill neighborhood
  
• It makes sense to learn about branding from a resource at an organization which has undergone a very successful rebranding.
• The various ways someone in this part of Colorado can learn about Nigeria 
• The Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. works get collated to the rear, as usual 
• And of course the obligatory Ndewo Colorado sighting

Stay tuned for more libraries coming along soon.

But as ever, it's all about the resources, all about the data. Here are some fun examples to get you going.

• Let's not even start with the books. Did you know that you can borrow a watt meter/power analyzer/electricity meter from your library?
• Russian language literature, of which ALD holds a lot (see the "Is subject of" list for specific items)
  
• I was just reading Young Amelia Bedelia to my daughter last night, so should I need an audio assist…
• The Women's World Cup is roaring on (I watched all the available games in 1999, and haven't missed a WWC game since), but America's great star is the long-retired Mia Hamm.
• Sadly no Nollywood on offer, but tons of Bollywood.
• With Centennial one of the towns hosting an ALD branch, it's worth knowing that Centennial statehouse is considered one of Colorado's great treasures.
• Obligatory Molly Brown sighting, Unsinkable, the Molly Brown story, a biography for young readers.
• Yay! They do also carry my book, Ndewo, Colorado! (and here's more poetry)

With the American Libraries Association coming along, we're excited to keep the initiative expanding to put libraries back where they can be found on the Web.

This past weekend I gathered under the influence of Quandary Peak near Breckenridge, Colorado, for "Mystery and the Peripatetic", with other poets and creatives, mostly from the state. In the closing session Dr. David Rothman spoke of Belle Turnbull, a poet of enormous talent and promise who moved to Breckenridge early in her career, and thus, working away from the centers of the poetry establishment on the coasts, never got her just due, despite stellar reviews of her work. She is now nearly forgotten, even by Colorado poets, and based on the samples of her work offered by Rothman, her obscurity is a true literary crime.

I thought, said Mr. Probus, there was time,
Time by the dipperful, time lipping, flowing
Out of some plenteous spring where I'd be going
With my bright dipper, frosting it with rime,
Hoarding no more than God would a dime,
Slipping time over my palate, careless blowing
Drops off my moustache, wasting it well knowing
There would be more, more always, soft and prime.

–from "At That Point Mr. Probus: Time as a Wellspring" by Belle Turnbull, for which she won the 1938 Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine, alongside Dylan Thomas, no less.

(Belle Turnbull in 1926)

Born in Hamilton, New York on December 9, 1881, Turnbull's family moved to Colorado Springs when she was a child. Her father, George Butler Turnbull, became the principal of Colorado Springs High School. Belle graduated from Vassar in 1904; after a series of teaching jobs on the east coast, she returned to Colorado Springs in 1910 to teach English at Colorado Springs High School until 1936. In 1937 she retired from teaching and moved to Frisco with her friend, Helen Rich, a novelist. Two years later, they moved to a cabin on French Street in Breckenridge, where they remained for the rest of their lives, living in a color that didn't go unnoticed. Turnbull died in November 1970 in Denver (i.e. in my own very month of birth).

Turnbull's most significant popular success was the1940 verse novel Goldboat, published by Houghton-Mifflin and offering drama and intrigue from a mining setting. Her non-verse novel, The Far Side of the Hill, was published in 1953. I believe her most significant poetical triumph was Tenmile Range, 1957 a book-length collection of verse, which includes the above poem as well. Her final publication was a chapbook, Trails, in 1968. Her personal papers are archived at Denver Public Library. I spent some time with these papers, from which the excerpts and images in this post (formally: Belle Turnbull Papers, WH414, Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library). Tenmile's reputation shouldn't be hard to rehabilitate, though Goldboat will be trickier because it's very much of its time in its depiction of black characters. This doesn't really bother me (my attitudes towards the moral element in judging art are very complex) but some of the book's passages will sound very jarring to most post-civil-rights-era ears.

Over the Great Divide unrolls the highway
And cars go wagging their tails among the thunders,
Range to range stitching, weather to weather.
In half a day you can hem up the watershed
And rush on the prairie or race on the desert again
Unaware of the infinite clues of legend,
The featherstitching of roads that thread the meadows,
Follow the gulches, follow the mountain pattern.

Or a man may twist his wheel where a wild road feathers
Under a range that marches on a valley,
Turn and be gone away to Rockinghorse country,
Wind through a park beside its swaggering river,
Creep on a shelf around a rocky shoulder,
Check in a pasture, by a waterpit
Under a rocksnake of cold blue cobbles mounded.

Still pond, no moving. And a wooden bird,
A squat hightailing monstrous waterwidgeon
Diving its chain of spoonbills down and under
Red-rusted in the turquoise pit.
No moving. And no sound from the grotesque
Impossible of vision.

                                    Only the wind,
The long, the diamond wind disturbs that water.

–beginning of Goldboat by Belle Turnbull. "Rockinghorse country" is the fictionalized name used in the book for the Ten Mile range area, i.e. around Breckenridge.

My company's recent Libhub grand experiment is all about making library catalog information available and harvestable by for machines. The primary machines we have in mind are the search engine Web crawlers who have become the all-powerful arbiters of who can find what on the Web. But that doesn't mean others don't get in on the fun. Anyone with a yen to hack can pull linked data to their hearts content from Libhub pages. Here are a few notes to maybe get folks started.

First of all, you can preview the embedded linked data by using a tool such as the handy Green Turtle Google Chrome extension. Here is a screenshot based on the page for my book, Ndewo, Colorado.

You can pull this RDFa with your favorite tool. In the example snippet below I used rdflib in Python to show an n3 representation (similar to RDF Turtle) of the data embedded in the page.

So just under a week on from our big release of Denver Public Library catalog pages on the Web (in the form of Linked Data), progress is quite exciting. The Google bot is working methodically through the 3.7 million Web pages, with about 300 thousand indexed so far. The Bing bot is lagging behind a fair bit, but Google's Comscore ranking for search usage makes it our realistic priority now. A DPL Libhub page is already the #1 Google hit for the following sample searches (note, all sample searches done in an incognito window to step outside my personal Google filter bubble).

• "The wonderful wizard of Oz a community-sourced audiobook"
• "精明人买精彩车" (book about cars)
• "지은이구효서외" (book of Korean short stories)
• "National Jewish Hospital at Denver Annual medical report" (historical report)
• "National compensation survey. Denver-Boulder-Greeley" (BLS policy report)
• "Dem the best of Quang Dung" (Vietnamese music video/DVD)

And now that DPL has taught me about this particular Vietnamese musician, Here's a Quang Dung music break. Nice in a Latin/Lounge way.

A DPL Libhub page is somewhere on the front page for the following sample searches.

• "The Things That Matter women's poetry" (anthology of women's spiritual poetry)
• "Jing ming ren mai jing cai che" (note: same as #2 in the first list)
• "The poetry and life of Allen Ginsberg" (book-length narrative poem)
• "Coach John and his soccer team Alice Flanagan" (kid's book)
• "Soulz of the rockies documentary" (DVD)
• "The little green math book" (eBook)

As an engineer, I hate hearing stuff from people such as "I've never used algebra since grade school." Goodreads says this last book can help the innumerate fall in love with maths, so I hope a few people discover it at their local library, and actually, since it's an eBook, you can get it from DPL without even walking to the library, as long as you qualify to get a DPL library card, of course. If you live elsewhere, same applies to your local public library.

Of course none of these examples are very mainstream, but one wouldn't expect that so soon, and possibly not for a long while. However, libraries are most valuable as a resource for just such uncommon things, and you could imagine special interest and research needs leading people through Libhub to DPL, and into the habit of using their library. If we can succeed in that we'll have succeeded to our utter delight.

Update: Rachel Fewell, who has been leading this project from the DPL side, has also blogged some interesting findings and progress.

The furious pace of work on my big work project has unfortunately stunted promotion of my book, Ndewo, Colorado, but with a little help from my fellow poet friends I have a couple of upcoming readings and other events.

I'll be reading with Wendy Videlock & Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (absolutely stellar company!) in Grand Junction, Colorado the 21st of May. Our theme is "Ancient Myths & Legends." The three of us generally don't do your plain old stereotypical, angst-projecting poetry readings, so do come along for a treat if you're around the Western slope then.

From June 4-7 I'll be participating in Mystery and the Peripatetic, a poetry festival and retreat in Breckenridge, Colorado, run by the same, boundlessly energetic Wendy Videlock. The session I'll be leading Saturday late morning is titled "The Speakers:  A Look at Dialect and Idiom from Around the World."

Update: Photos from the retreat.

A few months ago I mentioned my big work project of the moment, Libhub. We had done an experiment with a selected dozen or so catalogued items held by Denver Public Library, related to Molly Brown. The experiment was a success beyond our expectations. Within three days the alpha Libhub page for 'Margaret "Molly" Tobin Brown Papers' shot from nowhere to a top 3 hit on Google and Bing for the search "molly brown papers," a likely search string by someone interested in that topic, but not necessarily having any library in mind. This page links and on-delay redirects to the DPL catalog page for that item, and within another week that DPL catalog page had become the #1 hit for most cases of searching that target term. We were pleased to see examples of records from the test set which were appearing above Amazon book sales pages in search results. This validated our feeling that the content hidden in library catalogues is enormously rich and valuable.

Today we have taken the next, exciting step by publishing all 840,000 or so DPL bibliographic records. The result is around 3,740,000 resources, each of which is a separate Web page, with dense cross-linking (7,880,000 in all) derived from relationships within the MARC. Here are a few interesting highlights.

• Arabic fiction held by DPL (see the "Is subject of" list for specific items)
• Starting page of many pages of maps held at DPL
• Index page of persons with Arabic, Hebrew & Cyrillic and Chinese names
  
• My own book of poems "Ndewo, Colorado"
• And of course updated Molly Brown-related things, for which a few links are: Molly Brown archives (including the papers) ... the person of Molly Brown (or rather one of them, there is some duplication you might notice, which we're working on in our refinements) ... "The unsinkable Molly Brown cookbook" by May Bennett Wills and Caroline Bancroft.
  

Have you ever noticed something missing when you do an online search for a book, music or a film you want to check out? Something big? If you're anything like me you've been lucky enough to spend valuable, serendipitous, formative hours in a library. I remember walking to Cleveland Public Library at least weekly in the few years when I lived there as a child, supplementing the supply of books my father secured from thrift shops. I'm pretty sure that's where I got the introduction to atomic theory (Democritus through Rutherford to Bohr and beyond) which cemented a lifelong fascination with science. There was Luton Public Library where I went almost every day of the summer of 1986 when my Mom bought me my first computer (a ZX Spectrum Plus) and I taught myself programming reading all the books and magazines they had on the topic. There was the library of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where I gorged on African and worldwide literature, history and esoteric religions and philosophies right around the time when I discovered my love for poetry. There have been many, many other libraries dear to me in all the places where I've lived.

And now when I search for a book, multimedia or other such resource, I'm struck by the fact that libraries have become sadly obscure on the Web, which is where my children and their generation discover and learn so much of what I did in the brick institutions. Search for a book and you'll find Amazon, B&N and other bookseller listings, Wikipedia pages, film derivations and fan fiction, but you'll go pages and pages and pages into results before you see any indication that you can stroll into your local public library and borrow it for free.

I've been thrilled to be part of a project, led by my company Zepheira, to work towards rectifying this situation. We've launched Libhub, taking sensible steps towards increasing the prominence of libraries on the Web. There are several things that make this a bit more complicated than it should be (and why this visibility problem is so persistent). Libraries have very rich electronic catalogs, but they are in extraordinarily antiquated and arcane formats and conventions. We've invested a great deal of our specialized data processing expertise to develop an engine which can ingest such library data and convert it into useful web representations, including technologies such as RDFa, Open Graph, Schema.org and the library-focused BIBFRAME which we developed for the US Library of Congress. We're planning to launch this Libhub network this summer.

We've been fortunate to have some great libraries working with us through this project, led by Denver Public Library, and we're been inspired by the many-chaptered story of Denver's own Molly Brown, best known for surviving the Titanic disaster. We turned a handful of DPL records into a tiny experiment ("the Linkable Molly Brown" as named by my colleague Gloria Gonzalez) as we continue to work on our Libhub engine. If you're curious for a sneak peek, and OK looking at something still packed with librarian/technical minutiae, a good place to start a click-round is with the record of her papers at DPL. Remember, this is just a quick experiment and we have a long road ahead, but one we're more delighted to travel than Dorothy was hers in Oz, starting out arm-in-arm with the redoubtable Molly Brown, and with fond thoughts of libraries swimming our heads. We'll see you along the way.

Superior, Colorado, USA

20 January 2013

Mohamed Bin Abdulla Al-Rumaihi, Ambassador
Embassy of the State of Qatar
2555 M. Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20037-1305

Dear Ambassador,

I write with justice in my head,
I write with all impulse of peace,
In fervent hope of Mohamed
Ibn Al Ajami's release.

Please might we find your magistrate
Well understanding of the fact
That poetry surpasses state,
Liberty trumps Sedition Act.

It will be poets who ensure
The glory of your fine Emir
And even when they do incur
Displeasure, they're his vizier.

I pray you grant your poets space
To work the profit of their mind.
Reconsider this Ajami case,
In which all freedoms are enshrined.

Sincerely,

Uche Ogbuji

[Crossposted]

Every now and then I cast an eye about to see the state of the art on photo storage, sharing and backup.  Like most of us I have far more digital photos than I know what to do with.  For the most part we manage the lot on iPhoto on my wife's iMac.  It's getting to the point where iPhoto is struggling to keep up and I've pondered LightRoom, but it's still a tad bit of overkill, I think.  For now we just using the various tricks of the trade to boost performance.  I think the next step will be to move the iPhoto library to an SSD drive.  Time to start saving up!

Given my technical background, one of the biggest things I look for in photo management of all sorts is preservation of metadata.  If you are not familiar with photo metadata, you should really acquaint yourself.  It's also worth acquainting yourself as to why it's important to separate photo sharing from storage.  Whether it's the EXIF data recorded by the camera itself, or supplementary metadata added, sometimes out of band, by management apps (e.g. face matches, titles & descriptions you add yourself in iPhoto or other tools), it's really important that software respect what's there as much as possible, adding layers of metadata non-destructively.

Alas this is one area where cloud photo services fail miserably.  I think the most pernicious case of this is Dropbox, which is such a handy service for the most part, but I think is nothing short of evil with regard to photos.  First of all it is loud and persistent in pestering you to switch to its photo import and storage module every time you connect a memory card or such to your computer (I understand: they want to nudge people in a direction that leads to paying more for storage.)  The problem is that if you make the mistake of succumbing to their come-ons, you'll find that they happily mangle and destroy any photo metadata that precedes them.  The comments on their blog entries about the photo features are full of customers complaining about this abuse, but they don't seem to be listening.  They are not alone.  Google Picassa also mangles metadata.  Facebook surprises me by actually trying to do the right thing, and getting a bit tied up in knots as a result.

For now I'm sticking with iPhoto, and I'll copy photos from there to Dropbox, Facebook, etc. as needed for sharing.  I'm also trying out AeroFS, and hoping for good things from them, from the general perspective of meddling-free file distribution and sharing.  I hope more people get familiar with the issues here (there are real consequences to having your photo metadata mangled), and that it adds up to a voice in the marketplace for better solutions, including on the cloud.

by Chimezie Ogbuji

I had only heard about this story briefly.  Then, while the details of what happened was being discussed, they showed some video footage of previous interviews with her.  I was very impressed by the conviction in her voice as she spoke about her desire to have young girls such as herself receive education and even more so when I considered she would have had good reason to be too scared to speak with such conviction: the very tumultous nature of Pakistan, of where she went to school (in Swat), etc.

She was speaking like a woman at least 3 times her age.  It was more than just the clear benefit of the very education she was advocating for that you could see in the way she was talking and hear in her voice, but something much more.  Something more than just a girl more mature than her 14 years of age.

Then, they showed footage of what I believe must have been her first (or one of her first interviews) with her father.  She was saying "I want to be a doctor" and was immediately overcome with emotion and couldn't finish her sentence.

Her father was sitting next to her and the moment didn't change the look on his face and it was the look on his face that tugged on some strings burried very deep inside of me.  It was the look of infinite love and pride for your child.  He was smiling with such powerful pride.  

I imagine her emotions were more than just being camera shy, perhaps the thought of the danger of her speaking out crowded her mind at that time.  Then the father says "Relax" and looks into the camera, still beeming with pride.

I'm not able to see that video without losing composure myself.  This is because I know how that deep love the father was displaying could be so efficiently transformed into the deepest kind of pain and helplessness a person can imagine.  I don't believe that the aggregate of all the pain-by-proxy Pakistan, the world at large, and even myself might feel on her behalf would come close to eclipsing the pain he (and her mother) must have felt.

The intensity of the love he was showing in that video is exactly the inverse of the pain he must have been feeling as she remained in critical condition, unresponsive, and without anything else to be done but to place his faith in the hands of the medical professionals who were fighting to save her life.

And so, when I read in the Guardian this morning that "Malala Yousafzai can make smooth recovery, doctors say," I was overcome - again - with an explosion of emotions, not just for her but for her family as well.  Yes, Pakistan needs to heal in so many ways, but that family needs to heal first and this is a great first step in that direction.

I deeply hope that she fully recovers and can use the platform she definately will now have to help her achieve the goals of her incredibly brave activism.  I may be able to empathize with how her father, when he got word of her attack and when he was on her side, must have felt, but I can't say that I know what her recovery must be feeling like for him.  

However, at least I have some sense of the magnitude of how that might feel, because I feel some of it now.

Continuing in the theme of too busy doing stuff to blog about it, this is a belated announcement of my new literary venture. I launched Kin Poetry Journal last month along with fellow founders Wendy Chin-Tanner and Eric Norris, and with plenty of help from Walter Ancarrow.  I'm very excited about some of the poets we have coming up, but then again I would say that so it's a good thing there's enough at the journal right now to let the content do the talking.

[Crossposted with the Kin blog]

Yesterday David Orr of NPR blogged, "It's A Genre! The Overdue Poetry Of Parenthood," in which he suggested that poetry celebrating childbirth and early infancy has ben historically rare, but is emerging as a new genre.  Maryann Corbett, poet and author of Breath Control, mused on FaceBook that she thought there have long been a fair number of new-baby poems, leading to an interesting conversation on her wall.  I've gathered up some of the poems that were brought up in the thread and elsewhere.

I'll start with Corbett's own "Circadian Lament, Sung to a Wakeful Baby,"(Umbrella Journal) which was linked by one of her friends, not the poet herself.

Go back to sleep. You’ve made a slight mistake

switching your days and nights around this way.

The time will come for nights you spend awake,

 

for cough and colic, ear- and stomach-ache.

Though now you babble charmingly and play

the infant hours away (a light mistake), …

I mentioned  Catherine Tufariello's "Aubade" (The Nervous Breakdown).

Your language has no consonants.

No babble but a siren’s cry,

Imperious as an ambulance,

Yanks me upright, drains me dry,

Returns me to the languid trance

Of timelessness in which we lie.

Your language has no consonants,

Imperious as an ambulance.

Kin Poetry Journal co-founder Wendy Chin-Tanner ups the ante by touching on all the brute biology of birth, including post-partum marital sex, in "Veteran", also in The Nervous Breakdown.

When our bodies parted, it was without

violence. She slid from me like a sloop

on the crest of that final mighty wave,

the surge sucking her backwards before

spilling over, like breath, like confession,

her arms reaching forward towards the dry

open shore and mine reaching down between

my legs to receive, meeting her, round bright

bud of us combined, her astonishing

glaucous eyes staring steadily,

curiously, seeming to see.

A correspondent mentioned "The Victory" by Anne Stevenson, a taut, sharp lyric.

Tiny antagonist, gory,

blue as a bruise. The stains

of your cloud of glory

bled from my veins.

Some of the discussion was about whether such poems are a new phenomenon. I suspect some of the explicit imagery and language of recent poems is new, but the topic certainly is not, though the article seems tangled upon this point, mentioning, for example, Blake's "Infant" poems from "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." That brought me to mind of the twist represented by To an Unborn Pauper Child by Thomas Hardy. Every good poetic topic wants for a strong, countervailing current.

Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,

And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,

Sleep the long sleep:

The Doomsters heap

Travails and teens around us here,

And Time-Wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.

The list could go on and on. One of the correspondents mentioned A.E. Stalling's Olives, which includes poems on early motherhood, and the NPR article itself mentions Morning Song: Poems for New Parents. The latter of course recalls "Morning Song," by Sylvia Plath, one of my favorite poems.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

 

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

by Chimezie Ogbuji

I had the privilege of having (the equivalent of) front row seats to a jam session at the home of a fellow Taichi student was kind enough to let me come.  He hosts these sessions at his home every year, apparently.  It was a blast.  Good food, folk, and an incredibly talented group of musicians: 2 trumpets, an alto sax, drum set, viola, piano, and an upright bass.  

The drum sets and upright bass had rotating musicians (2 on each).  One of the trumpeters was also a fellow Taichi student who had never played with the group before.  I couldn't even tell as they blew some incredible music from their horns.  

The rain caught up with the set and I had to leave prematurely, but took some pictures from the steps where I was sitting right in front of where they performed.  

by Chimezie Ogbuji

Wang Bi (226 – 249 AD) attempted to provide a one sentence summary of the 81 chapters of the Laozi ( The Classic/Canon of the Way/Path and the Power/Virtue ), written in the 6th century BC:

Emulating the root [by way] of bringing to rest the stem and branches

This is a bold thing to attempt for any piece of literature, much less one of the most translated of all. However, I think it is a very thoughtful analogy. He elaborates on this sentence in his commentary on the following line from chapter 16.4 – 16.5 of the Laozi. The original text and his commentary (immediately following) are below:

Generally speaking, while [all things] are of unending diversity, each one of them returns to its [common] root. [Their] reverting to [their] roots means stillness.

The ‘root’ is the beginning. [That is], each one of them relates back to that which began it. Once they revert to [their] roots, then they [reach] stillness.

This reading brings to mind this picture I took from the roots of a big tree, looking up at its branches.

It also brings to mind the general thrust of modern quantum physics and the ongoing search [ Large Hadron Collider purpose (Wikipedia) ]:

concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity

Many of the experiments being run in the Large Hadron Collider seek to answer these questions by investigating (and attempting to replicate) conditions as they existed shortly after the Big Bang (the mother of all roots). Two and a half millennia later, we still seek to emulating the root.

Ikot Abasi, also called Opobo, formerly Egwanga, port town, Akwa Ibom state, southern Nigeria. The town lies near the mouth of the Imo (Opobo) River. Situated at a break in the mangrove swamps and rain forest of the eastern Niger River delta, it served in the 19th century as a collecting point for slaves. In 1870 Jubo Jubogha, a former Igbo (Ibo) slave and ruler of the Anna Pepple house of Bonny (28 miles [45 km] west-southwest), came to Ikot Abasi and founded the kingdom of Opobo, which he named for Opobo the Great, a Pepple king (reigned 1792–1830). Also called Chief Jaja by Europeans, he destroyed the economic power of Bonny and made Opobo the leading power of the eastern Niger delta oil-palm trade until he was deported in 1887 by the British, who established a trading post at Opobo Town, 4 miles (6 km) southwest, on the west bank of the Imo River.

Modern Ikot Abasi serves as a trading centre for the yams, cassava (manioc), fish, palm produce, corn (maize), and taro produced by the Ibibio people of the area; it also is known for boatbuilding, although a sandbar partially blocks the entrance to its port from the Gulf of Guinea. The town is linked by highway to Aba and Port Harcourt. Pop. (2006) local government area, 132,023.

by Chimezie Ogbuji

Chidi and I used a filter that was passed out during an organized viewing at the Shaker Heights Middle School athletic field to take direct shots of the sun. One of the 3 shots is a 'before' and the other 2 are with the filters. Unfortunately, you can't see the dot that is venus with the weak magnification capabilities of my Droid Razor, but it was fun do to.

In September I bundled together a bunch of news and updates from my literary work in one big update, and I continue to have trouble finding time to post updates here more regularly, so time for another big round-up.

A bike helmet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Train Tracks (Photo credit: tony_donnelly)

A little under over an hour ago, I had a near death experience that I felt compelled to write about.  To a person who isn't aware of what I'm going through now or what I have been going through for many years, this might seem a bit hyperbolic.  However, I suspect that when this whirlwind of injustice I'm going through is finished, that today's events will be even more symbolic for me.

Lately, I've taken to bike riding every day near the Shaker parks where I am.  I ride about 5 miles one day, 3 miles the next day, and so on.  I'm 35, and getting to the point where my mind still thinks I'm as athletic as I used to be but my body is telling it otherwise.  My professional life had become very sedentary and the essential hypertension diagnosis that is the downside of the genes I've been blessed with has made me very self-conscious of my health.  Major changes in my life have given me the opportunity to rededicate myself to an active lifestyle.

Yesterday, my 12-year son and mom were teasing me that 5 miles is not that much and hardly a reason to have sore muscles afterwards.  So, I was swelling with alot of hubris as I was racing down the bike path that I take everyday, this afternoon.  I normally continue on the bike path and backtrack, however, as a result of the hubris, I decided (in a split second decision) to bear a very sharp right off the path towards a train track crossing.  My intention was to lengthen the path a bit and take a semi-off road path in the process.

I had a helmet on and some open-finger gloves and was blasting Outkast's 'Elevators (Me and You)' in my ear, feeling emboldened from the adrenaline pumping through me as I was peddling as hard as I could.  As I approached the train track crossing, I noticed there was a drop from the path to the wooden planks and I think - at the time - my intention was to hop down and back up.  However, about 10 feet from the crossing, I realized - in absolute horror - that the drop was much more significant and there was no way I was going to make it at the speed I was going.

I remember a shriek of horror escaping my lips - barely audible - and me panicking and pressing on the brakes.  Either I pressed only the front brakes or the back breaks were not as strong as they should have been, but the nearly fatal result was that my bike began to capsize forward in slow motion as I was thrown off the bike towards the crossing comprised of wooden planks and solid-iron train tracks.  I was flying towards the tracks at about 10 miles an hour and at an angle of about 45 degrees, head first.

My instinct kicked in and I tucked into a tumble, taking a majority of the impact on my left shoulder, then my helmeted head, and eventually my right knee.  I'm certain that were it not for the lucky angle in which I was thrown from the bike, my tuck, and the helmet which took a direct hit after my tumble, I would have been more seriously injured and probably would have been knocked unconscious.  This would have had fatal consequences, as I'll explain later. 

Now, when I started to get up, lying sprawled in the middle of the train tracks under the rays of a sun overlooking an incredibly beautiful day, I took measure of my injuries and was stunned to find out that the most damage I had sustained was a series of surface wounds on my left knee.  The back and left side of my head, which crashed into the floor of the train tracks, was not hurt in the way that would have led me to be concerned about a concussion.  In a previous life (so to speak), I had my skull bashed in such a way that I needed several stitches on my skull and was therefore aware of the sensation of a serious head injury.

However, the helmet did its job.  I got up, and my immediate emotions were: shock at being able to walk off the tracks, sheer joy from being okay, and then eventual embarrassment.   

I looked around and saw there was no one in sight.  I think no one witnessed this horrific bike accident.  I walked off the tracks to my bike, which was also relatively unscathed, with the exception of the back wheel which was wobbling a bit.  I gathered myself, pushed the bike to see if it was still functioning, and then froze in a chill as I heard the rush of a train ride through the spot where I was, no more than a minute or two after my incident.

I'm certain, that if I had been knocked unconscious, with no one to witness what happened or warn the oncoming train, there would have been yet another horrible chapter added to my life, except it would have been the last one.

I rode my bike gingerly to determine I hadn't broken anything, which is a good thing because I have no health insurance anymore.  I turned back around, stopped, got off my bike, and immediately sat under a tree to meditate first and then contemplate my near death experience. In retrospect, my life didn't flash in front of my eyes in the moments I realized I was tumbling at full speed towards the depressed crossing.  Rather, the only thought I had was: "I don't want to die, I have so much unfinished business!"

It wasn't until I sat down under that tree that it all hit me and I realized how petty all the craziness I have been going through is in contrast to all that you stand to lose when you die.  It was then that I realized also that the only other injury I had sustained was the shoulder that I tucked to break my fall and that took the initial impact.  

There was an ugly bruise on it, but nothing more.  The bruise, which doesn't show so much on skin as dark as mine, partially covered the inconspicuous tatoo I have had there since Halloween night in New Orleans, 1996 that reads: Umunne Kwenu.  It is a formal address given when speaking to a gathering of Igbos and literally means: 'Son's of my mother [my brethren], affirm yourselves.'  

So, I got up, smiled from the knowledge that I escaped a horrible death, called my mother to let her know what happened and rode my injured bike and body home.  The three lessons I take from this: 1) There is always a small victory in being able to walk away from a horrible situation 2) Bike helmets are life savers, for real 3) The fragility of life always has the power to wipe away hubris and almost any other such emotion in a split second.

I wandered lonely as a cloud and tried to figure out

Where all my customers had gone, to bring them back about;

But from a million visitors how could I see the trend?

What made them walk out of my store, and what did make them spend?

And so I bought some software which could crunch the number stew

And tell me as a business just exactly what to do.

The best such tools let me explore without insisting on specifics;

I asked a geek "so what's that called?" He said: "Smart Analytics."

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro which came with a 120GB SSD. I ran out of space on the drive and took it upon myself to upgrade to a bigger one. Found a great deal ($220) on this SanDisk Extreme 240GB 2.5" SATA III SSD and was ready to swap it out with the old drive.  It turns out I'd lost out on the lottery and received one of the slower Toshiba SSDs rather than one of the faster Samsung ones, so I knew the SanDisk was bound to be an improvement. After making sure my Time Machine backup was up to date I cloned my old SSD to the new one using a SATA-to-USB dock and Carbon Copy Cloner.

I started by watching this video to get a sense of my way around the inside of the laptop. The video covers a slightly different task, but I wasn't looking for hand-holding, but just the general layout and gotchas.  One of the things I gathered is that it's important to use high-quality philips and torx bits, and in my case I used a Wiha set.  It was pretty easy to take out the old SSD and plug in the new one. I couldn't find my anti-static wristband, but I made sure to wear only cotton clothing, and to touch the power supply chasis of a nearby, plugged-in desktop PC every minute or so to avoid zapping anything.

With the new SSD in place, the first boot took an eternity. Almost ten seconds from pushing the power button to the grey Apple icon, and almost another ten seconds before the little spinny boot process indicator, but it did boot up fine. I've heard that SSDs need a few days to "settle in" before they're at proper performance levels, but other than the super-slow boot-up , I haven't had any other problems. I was back to working normally right away with the new SSD.  Using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test I get speeds of around 220MB/s for read and 260MB/s for write, which is quite an improvement (and this is before any possible "settling.")

In the case where fear presses back
Through the air, where the torch has expired
On the orphan river,
In the forest, soulless and tired,
Under the anxious and faded trees,
In the wan woods, squalling trunks
Ululate without respite
Over the accursed tom-toms,
Black night! Black night!

Dans la case où la peur repasse

Dans l'air où la torche s'éteint,

Sur le fleuve orphelin

Dans la forêt sans âme et lasse

Sous les arbres inquiets et déteints,

Dans les bois obscurcis

Les trompes hurlent, hululent sans merci

Sur les tam-tams maudits,

Nuit noire ! Nuit noire !

I've watched the "Kony 2012" hype and the subsequent controversy with both amusement and bemusement, thought I've thought whatever comment I might have better kept to myself. I wasn't even paying much attention to the whole affair except for a few nuggets that would strike me, usually from when it was on the news my wife was watching in the other room. The first case was when I believe NBC said they would be sending a crew to Uganda to do some fact-checking on the story. That really annoyed me.

Here is a list just off head:

• Major unrest in Burkina Faso last year
• Ethno-religious strife in Nigeria's middle belt
• Al-Quaeda-inspired terrorism in Nigeria's North
• The Nigerian fuel subsidy removal unrest
• An oil spill by Shell almost as bad as the Deepwater Horizon disaster (in terms of environmental impact rather than barrels of oil)
• South Sudan's independence
• Eradication of Rhinderpest
• Famine in East Africa
• The arrest of Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire following the mayhem he caused after elections
• The election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia
• One of the most engaging African Cup of Nations competitions in my own memory (OK I had to throw that last bit in there).

So many compelling stories coming out of sub-saharan Africa, and it took a viral Youtube video to get NBC to send a crew to the continent.  Even if you were only interested in Uganda, the non-violent protests led by Besigye against Museveni alone were more newsworthy than "Kony 2012".

Now don't get me wrong. Joseph Kony and the LRA have been shocking and disgusting me for at least fifteen years, and of course I'd love to see him brought to justice, but the problem with Kony 2012 is that it perpetuates the approach of over-hype and lazy hyper-focus on one topic that has characterized so much popular Western attention on the continent. It's "Do they know it's Christmas time at all" all over again, and don't let me start on that unspeakable nonsense.

Anyway another snippet from the "Kony 2012" affair that struck me was the clip of the video's creator I half caught in which he was itching about some U.S. city street in the nude while muttering loudly. It instantly brought back a very powerful reminder of Birago Diop's short story, which Professor Willfried Feuser translated in his collection as "Sarzent the Madman." The "Sarzent" ("sergeant") of the story has returned from his military education in France loudly determined to "civilize" his home village. He becomes possessed by the spirits of his ancestors and goes around raving in poetry. I see the broader lesson of the story about the peril of insincerity couched in self-righteousness, especially when rooted in alien, Western values. That's certainly how the story struck me as a child, and in that wise I find the correspondence to this madness of Jason Russell extremely creepy. A friend of mine mentioned that it's as if the man was stricken by the Igbo deity Agwu Nsi.

Some of the ravings of Sarzan/Sarzent come from Diop's earlier poetry, including his lovely "Souffles" ("Breaths"):

Écoute plus souvent 

les choses que les êtres. 

La voix du feu s'entend, 

entends la voix de l'eau

écoute dans le vent

le buisson en sanglots.

I found the above video with the poem's recitation. I translate it thusly:

Listen more often
To things than to beings.
The fire's voice is heard,
Hear the voice of the water
Listen in the wind
To the bush a-sobbing.

Ubu’s work has, in part, been published. The attached paper is from her research. This will one day be regarded as a very important paper IMHO as it turns one of the theories of adhesion on its head. It shows weak adhesives give better strength in bonded structures than strong ones which is very counter-intuitive!

Out! Out! You must be prised right out
Joyless desire and love's conceit!
You've cranked at my heart such a treat,
Nothing's left there for your grubby onslaught.

Now for my own good may I forget about,
Shrug off this tenant of my very suite.
Out! Out! You must be prised right out!

I took you in without sufficient thought.
Get out! Go find yourself another beat!
Don't even skirt my heart's remotest street!
Too long I've dwelled cowed by your harsh, grim clout.
Out! Out! You must be prised right out!

Untitled - by Alain Chartier

I turn you out of doors
tenant desire

you pay no rent
I turn you out of doors
all my best rooms are yours
the brain and the heart

depart
I turn you out of doors

switch off the lights
throw water on the fire
I turn you out of doors

stubborn desire

I turn you out of doors.    Alain Chartier.  BoLoP tr. by Edward Lucie-Smith

Rondeau/Chanczon XI

Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier
Desir sans joye et pensee d'amours!
Tant aves fait en mon cuer de voz tours
Qu'il n'y a plus pour vous que fourragier.

Nonchaloir vueil desormais hebergier
Avec oubly pour moy donner secours.
Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier!

 Je vous receu ung pou trop de legier.
Departez vous! Allez logier aillours!
N'aprochez plus de mon cuer les faulxbours!
Trop ay vescu soubz vostre dur dangier.
Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier!

Doubting truth in unseen things
I seek the literal tree,
The prickly fruit, the leaves, the flowers
Some posit it to be.

Uproot the tree of vegetable love
And plant a swooning spray—
I'm well across the gospel of
Our prelate Chartier.

If love is nectar blossoming
But fades to autumn grief,
What heroes championing what gods
Are left to my belief?

I caught rumblings of the fuel subsidy removal affair while on my holiday travels, but only in the past few days have I gained a sense of just what a delicate moment in time this is for Nigeria.

  

Nigeria needs to keep to a formula based approach for determining fuel prices in the short term, while expediting actions in respect of putting in place a vibrant domestic refining industry.

by Chimezie Ogbuji

I recently had a need to manage a set of queries against an OWL2 EL biomedical ontology: the Foundational Model of Anatomy. I have an open source SPARQL service implementation that I had some thoughts about extending with support for managing queries. It’s called Triclops and is part of a collection of RDF libraries and tools I have been accumulating. The name is a reference to an initial attempt to build an RDF querying and navigation interface as part of the 4Suite repository back in the day (circa 2002).

This later evolved to a very rudimentary web interface that sat in front of the Oracle 11g and MySQL/SPARQL patient dataset that Cyc’s SKSI interacted with. This was part of an interface tailored to the task of identifying patient cohorts, known as the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA). A user could dispatch handwritten SPARQL queries, browse clickable results, or return them as CSV files. This capability was only used by informaticians familiar with the structure of the RDF dataset and most investigators used the SRA.

It also implemented a RESTful protocol for ticket-based querying that was used for stopping long-running SPARQL/MySQL queries. This is not currently documented. Around the time this was committed as an Apache-licensed, Google code library, layercake-python added core support for APIs that treated remote SPARQL services as local Graph objects as well as general support for connecting SPARQL services. This was based on Ivan Herman’s excellent SPARQL Endpoint interface to Python.

Triclops (as described in the wiki) can now be configured as a “Proxy SPARQL Endpoint”. It can be deployed as a light-weight query dispatch, management, and mediation kiosk for remote and local RDF datasets. The former capability (dispatching) was already in place, the latter (mediation) can be performed using FuXi’s recent capabilities in this regard.

Specifically, FuXi includes an rdflib Store that uses its sideways-information passing (sip) strategies the in-memory SPARQL algebra implementation for use as a general-purpose framework for semweb SPARQL (OWL2-RL/RIF/N3) entailment regimes. Queries are mediated over the SPARQL protocol using global schemas captured as various kinds of semweb ontology artifacts (expressed in a simple Horn form) that describe and distinguish their predicates by those instantiated in a database (or factbase) and those derived via the semantic properties of these artifacts.

So the primary capability that remained was query management and so this recent itch was scratched over the holidays. I discovered that CodeMirror , a JavaScript library that can be used to create a relatively powerful editor interface for code, had excellent support for SPARQL. I integrated it into Triclops as an interface for managing SPARQL queries and their results. I have a running version of this at http://metacognition.info/sparql/queryMgr. Note, the service is liable to break at any point as Webfaction kills of processes that use up alot of CPU and I have yet to figure out how to configure it to restart the service when it dies in such a fashion.

The dataset this interface manages queries for is a semantic web of content comprising 3 of the primary, ancient Chinese, classical texts (the Analects, Doctrine of the Mean, and the Tao Te Ching). I record the information in RDF because it is an intuitive knowledge representation to use in capturing provenance, exposition, and other editorial meta data. Below is a screen shot of the main page listing a handful of queries, their name, last date of modification, date of last run, and number of solutions in the recent result.

Above the list is a syntax-highlighted text area for dispatching adhoc SPARQL queries. This is where CodeMirror is integrated. If I click on the name of the query titled “Query for Analects and the Doctrine of the Mean english chapter text (Confucius)”, I go to a similar screen with another text area whose content corresponds to the text of the query (see the screen shot below).

From here queries can be updated (by submitting updated CodeMirror content) or cloned (using the name field for the new copy). Alternatively, the results of previous queries can be rendered. This sends back a result document with an XSLT processing instruction that causes the browser to trigger a request for a stylesheet and render an XHTML document from content in the result document on the client side.

Finally, a query can be re-executed against a dataset, saving the results and causing the information in the first screen to show different values for the last execution run (date and number of solutions). Results can also be saved or viewed as CSV using a different stylesheet against the result document.

The last capability added is a rudimentary template system where any variable in the query or text string of the form ‘$ …. $’ is replaced with a provided string or a URI. So, I can change the pick list value on the second row of the form controls to $searchExpression$ and type “water”. This produces a SPARQL query (visible with syntax highlighting via CodeMirror) that can be used as a template to dispatch queries against the dataset.

In addition, solutions for a particular variable can be used for links, providing a small framework for configurable, navigation workflows. If I enter “[Ww]ater” in the field next to $searchExpression$, select classic from the pick list at the top of the Result navigation template area, pick “Assertions in a (named) RDF graph” from the next pick list, and enter the graphIRI variable in the subsequent text input.

Triggering this form submission will produce the result screen pictured below. As specified in the form, clicking any of the the dbpedia links for the Doctrine of the Mean will initiate the invokation of the query titled “Assertions in a (named) RDF graph”, and shown below (with the graphIRI variable pre-populated with the corresponding URI):

SELECT DISTINCT ?s ?p ?o where {
    GRAPH ?graphIRI {
      ?s ?p ?o
    }
}

The result of such an action is shown in the screen shot. Alternatively, a different subsequent query can be used: “Statements about a resource”. The relationship between the schema of a dataset and the factbase can be navigated in a similar way. Picking the query titled “Classes in dataset” and making the following modifications. Select “Instances of a class and graph that the statements are asserted in” from the middle pick list of the Result navigation template section. Enter ?class in the text field to the right of this. Selecting ‘Execute..’ and executing this query results in a clickable result set comprised of classes of resources and clicking any such link shows the instances of that class.

This latter form of navigation seems well suited for exploring datasets for which either there is no schema information in the service or it is not well known by the investigator writing the queries.

In developing this interface, at least 2 architectural principles were re-used from my SemanticDB development days: the use of XSLT on the client side to build rich, offloaded (X)HTML applications and the use of the filesystem for managing XML documents rather than a relational database. The latter (use of a filesystem) is particularly more relevant where querying across the documents is not a major requirement or even a requirement at all. The former is via setting the processing instruction of a result document to refer to a dynamically generated XSLT document on the server.

The XSLT creates a tabular, row-distinguishing, tabular interface where the links to certain columns trigger queries via a web API that takes various input, including: the variable in the current query whose solutions are ‘streamed’, a (subsequent) query specified by some function of the MD5 hash of its title, a variable in that query that is pre-populated with the corresponding solution, etc:

../query=...&action=update&innerAction=execute,templateValue=...,&valueType=uri&variable=..

Eventually, the API should probably be made more RESTful and target the query, possibly leveraging some caching mechanism in the process. Perhaps it can even work in concert with the SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol.

by Chimezie Ogbuji

The response by the Health Care industry to the quality reporting requirements of the ACA and the subsequent response to that response (by the Dept. of Pres. Obama's HHS) of slashing the number of measures that need to be reported demonstrates how much the use of information systems (and informatics) in the medical information systems of the US is in the dark ages (as a director of clinical research once put it to me many times).

The informatics needs of converting relational healthcare data into various target variables for the purpose of aggregate "reporting" is a solved problem from the perspective of database theory, however risk averse healthcare providers shell out millions to hegemony-oriented software companies (whether it be those that sell shrink wrapped products or those that sell services) to solve trivial informatics problems.

I think there is a great opportunity for AI (in general), and logic-based knowledge representation (specifically) to be resurrected from the graveyard (or winter) of pure research into playing a prominent role in the engineering underlying what really needs to be done to lower the cost associated with leveraging information to make the provision of care more efficient.

Perhaps, even the idea of the Semantic Web (separate from the WWW-related technologies that enable it) can avoid falling for the same fate and be a part of this. However, the stewards of the places where peer-reviewed scientific research is done and literature is produced on the topic(s) of informatics (web-based informatics even) need to jettison the cancer of obsession with aesthetic / academic purity: novelty of methods described in written material, citation history of authors, thoroughness of literature review, etc. This cancer is what seems to separate pure (computer) science research from informatics, or the promulgation or accreditation of professional engineering (software or otherwise).  

The development of standards, curricula, system methodology, and (ultimately) scientific literature needs to be more problem-focused (ergo engineering).  The things that will make a difference will not be the things that are truly novel but those that involve the combination of engineering solutions that are novel and others that are mundane.

This world glistens like a summer lamp saying open, open
In the time it takes to speak, everything could disappear.

What is that spark when you meet a friend, which crackles with instant recognition? And what is that spark multiplied like a moonless night sky's field of fireworks? It might be something like what I experienced at the Western Colorado Writers' Forum's annual conference in Grand Junction this past weekend.

I was introduced to the group by Wendy Videlock, who appeared on TNB Poetry at my behest and who then suggested I lead a workshop on submissions to online journals at the conference. I gave that workshop Saturday to a sharp, attentive group who had just heard María Meléndez's advice about submitting to print journals.

Earlier that morning I had encountered what this conference was really about, at heart.

What better place to call home
than this high desert cloud mesa wrong turn
rippling of the continental plates
before they slap down
fanning towards the Coast?

—from "The Wright Stuff" by Art Goodtimes

I woke up on the crisp, autumn morning to ride with Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason and his sweet, effervescent lover Cally Conan-Davies up Monument Canyon into the sort of jaw-dropping landscape that Colorado offers up to casually. There at the visitor center of the National Monument, a group of poets learned from Park Ranger Liz of the eventful geological and human history of the place, as well as present climate, flora and fauna. Fingers bit by the chill, we nevertheless scribbled scraps of what she said and what figments the vista inspired in us.

We then gathered in a room at the center where David Mason recited selections of poetry which exhibited rootedness to land.  He finished with Bristlecone Pine, his own poem written after visiting the oldest tree of that type in the Rocky Mountains; he started with:

We have no prairies 
To slice a big sun at evening  
Everywhere the eye concedes to  
Encroaching horizon, 

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye  
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country  
Is bog that keeps crusting 
Between the sights of the sun. 

They've taken the skeleton  
Of the Great Irish Elk 
out of the peat, set it up 
An astounding crate full of air.

—from "Bogland" by Seamus Heaney

I wrote a poem, "Parachuted," that seemed to emerge, great elk skeleton, from the dew-soaked sponge of my brain.  I also remembered that beginning of "Bogland" throughout the day, and when one of the organizers urged us to write and share weathergrams to post on Grand junction trees, "Bogland" wove into my offering.

I've since worked that weathergram into a tanka.

We have no tarn to

Mottle the copperplate face

Of rough entrada.

We've no black peat, dry fossil

Colorado, we repeat.

—untitled, by Uche

There were several fossil-marked rocks at the home of Danny Rosen, professional astronomer, director of the Western Sky Planetarium, poet, and host to a group of us. The first night Danny treated us to jaw-dropping views of the moon, Jupiter and its moons, The Pleiades, The Andromeda galaxy and more through his large telescope.  Friday evening I taught a couple of Igbo and Efik songs to Art Goodtimes, San Miguel County commissioner and Western Slope Poet Laureate and Rosemerry Trommer, runner, linguist, singer and proprietress of a large fruit orchard.  Rosemerry sang me a few Yoruba songs in turn. From there we joined the chat and debate at Danny's legendary poet's bonfire with Jack Mueller, Wendy, David and Cally.

It wasn’t the moon
that swooned me, but
the edge of the moon,
cratered and rough,
the shadow line
where substance ends
and space begins.

—from "After Watching the Moon through a Telescope Big as I" by Rosemerry Trommer

Plenary sessions were held in a lovely converted church with high, NBC peacock stained glass windows. Highlights included a poetry reading in which I took part, and offerings of words from elders. Saturday night, before the headlining presentation of Leslie Marmon Silko we had a bit of history from Ute elder Clifford Duncan. Sunday morning the conference closed with a series of reminiscences by elderly representatives of various cultures in the local Grand Valley: Hispanic, African American, Basque, Italian, Japanese, etc., as well as from a gentleman telling the history of geology, miners and military installations in the region. I was very impressed at the amount of time, attention and respect given over to those who have known that land the longest, and to their stories.

Maybe that is why we go on talking,
always trying to show someone we're here,
and look--I have a past just like you do,
a stream of words that fills the empty night
and sweetens troubled dreams, or so we hope,
and tells us not to linger long on bridges
staring at all the water passing by.

I thought my whole ambition was to make
the past and present come together, dreamed
into a vivid shape that memory
could hold the way the land possesses rivers.
They in turn possess the land and carry it
in one clear stream of thought to drink from
or water gardens with.

I learned that I must first talk to myself,
retelling stories, muttering a few
remembered lines of verse, to make the earth
substantial and to bring the sunlight back.

—from "The Country I Remember" by David Mason

Stories were how my long weekend began, as well as how it ended. I arrived at Wendy's household, met and had supper with her charming family, after which Wendy and I discussed lives and poetics, our own, and of others, into the night.  Then it was time to sleep, because in the morning Wendy was leading a workshop, "Totem Poems and the Subconscious Muse," which was my first writing workshop, an experience I approached warily because my remote impression of workshops had been rather dire.  On the day I enjoyed Wendy's approach, and was very impressed at the quality of poems written by participants. I wrote a couple of poems which seem worthy of further attention, including a leopard poem, which I'm always grateful to receive.

Only bone, like the shadow, knows
that lasting metaphors are born
of architects and alchemists,

of those who love the arch
and beam, and of the fleshy need
to leave and have something remain.

—from "In Praise of Form" by Wendy Videlock, from Nevertheless, Able Muse Press, 2011

Sandra Dorr was too busy running the show for me to have much opportunity to hear her poetry, so Desert Water was my first read this week of the many volumes I'd bought at the conference. In the way she switches from the telescope of landscape to the microscope of intimate personal detail, Sandra is like so many of the remarkable poets I met that weekend. Something very special is welling from the ground in Colorado, and I'm excited to be a part of it. I spent about a half hour with Sandra walking to lunch one of the days, and she told me of how she had gotten involved in local literary initiatives, pointing out the many points of artistic interest in the small town of Grand Junction. I have no doubt that her tireless efforts, and that of her collaborators at the WCWF, will continue to bear fruit, and that I'll always be of a mind to witness the resulting magic in person.

It has been a crazy past few months. Not only has the day job been running at a gallop, but it's been full-on on the family front and back-to-school and all that. No shortage of activity in my corner of the poetry department, either. I've been posting a lot of interesting work at TNB Poetry, and other have been publishing a gratifying run of my own poems.

Maenads are snarling their decree:
‘So who d'you think you are,’ they howl
‘To seal your bonnet from the bee?’
Those bouncers at the Muses’ hill
Take down attendance in their hall—
You’re conscript to the gathering
To rouse the skaldic clan again
With clinking roar of brannigan.
Yield bruckle skin to miching flea.

I've mentioned The Flea several times in Copia since I discovered it this year. I'm in the first place delighted to find a journal featuring the sort of witty and expressive poetry I love, and in the second place excited to have my own work in such brilliant poetry. In the same broadsheet are too many superb poets to list here, but I must give special mention to the contemporary Australian master Alan Gould. As for my own poem, I had a good deal of fun writing it specifically in response to the call for carouse-house poems to celebrate the anniversary. "Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief"--Hamlet, III. ii. 146

Next my poem "Fortune of Chi" was published in Soundzine, with my recitation. The poem is fairly typical of the manuscript on which I've been working for a few months, with its dash of Biafra and undercurrent of Igbo cosmology, so it was great to place it in such a great journal.  An excerpt:

Some randomized permutation of genes
Spelled these very left and right brain cortices–
Spotlight nerves on sheer possibility;
Some Mendel melody conjured these eyes,
These muscles, grafted these veins under this skin;
I am too many pin-point faults to be
By design yet I crown my own life's fitness:
I am perfected fortune of my chi.

Close on the heels of "Fortune of Chi" came the appearance of "What Belief" in Lucid Rhythms. An excerpt:

I've stroked it while it gently weeps,
Caressed each trembling string,
Cranked up to weapons grade at times
I undertake to sing.

And yet I disappoint, I rip,
I charm a wicked scar;
Hot venom as the scorpion bows
To cantor de Ronsard.

If poetry and song provide
The island with a reef,
What heroes championing what gods
Are left to my belief?

And shortly afterwards my poem "Rhapsody On Q A" appeared in Red Fez., where it was classified as a villanelle but is actually a variant of the villanelle created by Lewis Turco and named the terzanelle. Lewis Turco then added "Rhapsody On Q A" to his exemplar list of terzanelles. An excerpt:

Light on temples, Nepal to Sri Lanka,
You glide, traveling soul, earth-bound fixed foot,
Each step mounting from base camp Casablanca,

From past-life luxury of Hatshepsut
To present serene, composed asana;

Last month I was selected to read at The Poetry in Motion Project at the Boulder Fringe Festival on the basis of my submitted poem "Cabeceo de Niwot." I recited that poem and another, "Run It!" to great response by the audience.

And mixed into all that I found time to write and record a spoken word piece flowing into an old school rap to celebrate TNB's 5th anniversary, and I also wrote a great deal of verse in the 2011 session of Heather Fowler's poetry marathon. I'll also be co-leading (with María Meléndez) a workshop on submissions at the Western Colorado Writers' Forum October 7th-9th in Grand Junction, Colorado, which should be a great time to meet many of my fellow Rocky Mountain poets, including Wendy Videlock, whom I've mentioned on Copia, and David Mason, Poet Laureate of Colorado.  Busy, busy times. Fun, fun times. And I'll have more to report soon, with poems forthcoming in The Flea (again), IthacaLit and The Raintown review.