I've just posted the first four chapters of a novel that I began writing last fall. I'd previously published some of the chapters from there here, but I just deleted them as I've rewritten them.
I don't know if I'll finish this book. I don't know if anyone will read what I've written. I realize that I use this blog mostly as a substitute for school in a way--if I haven't put something new here in a while, I'm flunking myself.
If you do read, I'd love to hear from you any impressions you have.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Saturday, November 01, 2008
The Portland, Maine mural by Elizabeth Morrill Burke
see: http://www.wlbz2.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=94110
An artist's trajectory: from a bachelor's in literature, to a 1/2 year in a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, back to her undergraduate university (UCSC) to study art on her own for a year, living and working out of the ground floor of a rain-flooded barn, to getting accepted to a second BA program in art, but also, at the same time, getting accepted into the 5th year (post-grad) program in studio art at UCSC; returning to homeland Maine where she was granted one of the two slots for Maine painters into the coveted Maine fellows program at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, moving on to an MFA program in fine arts at Boston University, graduating only to find herself trying to make a living designing, copyediting, editing and producing books ... and then 15 years of null-hood in either painting or writing (pursuiting premedical studies and a MSW and LCSW ... not working ... and finally back to painting ... as a living ... well, others have done better and others have done worse.
An artist's trajectory: from a bachelor's in literature, to a 1/2 year in a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, back to her undergraduate university (UCSC) to study art on her own for a year, living and working out of the ground floor of a rain-flooded barn, to getting accepted to a second BA program in art, but also, at the same time, getting accepted into the 5th year (post-grad) program in studio art at UCSC; returning to homeland Maine where she was granted one of the two slots for Maine painters into the coveted Maine fellows program at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, moving on to an MFA program in fine arts at Boston University, graduating only to find herself trying to make a living designing, copyediting, editing and producing books ... and then 15 years of null-hood in either painting or writing (pursuiting premedical studies and a MSW and LCSW ... not working ... and finally back to painting ... as a living ... well, others have done better and others have done worse.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Mural Painting--a small life enlarged.
I've been hired to paint a huge mural in Portland, Maine, through the company I work with, Peerless Painting. The size is material: the wall I'm painting is 110 feet wide and approximately 60 feet high, and the image covers about 100 feet x 50 feet. Where: the Ocean Gateway Parking garage at the corner of India and Fore Streets in Portland, Maine. The City of Portland required the owner of the building to put an image up. The owners chose a section of a panaramic image taken by a photographer in 1910 of the Portland harbor (Casco Bay) from the Eastern Promenade on a day when half of all the six-masted schooners ever built were in the harbor, and this section shows those schooners. It also shows Fort Gorges, some of Peaks Island, Little Diamond, and Cushing Island, and of course other boats in the harbor at the time. While this has been a company "team" undertaking, I have done all the historical research for the image, and most of the drawing and painting, nevermind masterminding the paint colors, since the image is in a sepia scale, rather than in color, and working in a more or less monotone is more difficult than working in color, surprisingly enough.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Fishing & Houses Don't Move
The short stories previously published here have morphed into a novel, or are trying to. Sixty thousand words so far, and counting, and then figuring after proper editing, I'll have to start fresh. To give me a bit of sense of accomplishment, after months of slogging, publishing here a poem I've slogged through enough.
Fishing
There must be a way to move that doesn’t involve every lead sinker I’ve laid down to catch beasts I turn around and sell. I keep hoping I’ll haul—what? Something that will make the day feel more than how.
There must be a way to come home with more than how to get a check, another way to see all these buoys, ropes, depth sounders and maps with cigarette burns just where I needed to see the depth. I keep coming up with the litter we make, mucking up the seas, as if we had nothing better to do than make things we throw away, eventually. I came to this life at sea because I loved it, but love gets tired and worn to ache and age, and I wonder.
What would it be like to head out in the dark of morning, as chilly as it might be, and feel my mouth were a sail, rather than an anxious metaphor? Rather than setting out with things I’ve put between myself and my blood, my heart, my stomach, and hands, what if I set out with only my ears flapping in the wind to gather up the song of the seabird diving into the waves for its daily bread?
Money is what everyone is after, not before. Once I traded a baseball card for a fresh peach, long before I knew about all the fancy gizmos that would save me from myself, such as this radio and cell phone and a health insurance plan owned by several international banking companies run by physics phds with new financial instruments who once dreamed of leaving this earth for another planet.
Once I heard about two professors who compared the happiness of lottery winners to that of paraplegics. After a bit, the paraplegics got more joy out of daily living. Seems that not having to do anything, of living some place else besides this place where you have to deal with your own laundry, is not the same as not being able to do what you used to; it’s worse.
I think what counts is getting closer to necessity, closer to the way your mouth works, to the way your fingers curve around—perhaps the thrashing of a fish. Seeing with your own eyes the moment the fish’s eyes go dull as you pull the hook out of its mouth and put the fish into yours.
That’s exaggerating, perhaps, but it’s the only way I know how to put what I’m after: I want to feel life between my teeth.
Elizabeth M. Burke
Long Island, Maine
03/2008
Fishing
There must be a way to move that doesn’t involve every lead sinker I’ve laid down to catch beasts I turn around and sell. I keep hoping I’ll haul—what? Something that will make the day feel more than how.
There must be a way to come home with more than how to get a check, another way to see all these buoys, ropes, depth sounders and maps with cigarette burns just where I needed to see the depth. I keep coming up with the litter we make, mucking up the seas, as if we had nothing better to do than make things we throw away, eventually. I came to this life at sea because I loved it, but love gets tired and worn to ache and age, and I wonder.
What would it be like to head out in the dark of morning, as chilly as it might be, and feel my mouth were a sail, rather than an anxious metaphor? Rather than setting out with things I’ve put between myself and my blood, my heart, my stomach, and hands, what if I set out with only my ears flapping in the wind to gather up the song of the seabird diving into the waves for its daily bread?
Money is what everyone is after, not before. Once I traded a baseball card for a fresh peach, long before I knew about all the fancy gizmos that would save me from myself, such as this radio and cell phone and a health insurance plan owned by several international banking companies run by physics phds with new financial instruments who once dreamed of leaving this earth for another planet.
Once I heard about two professors who compared the happiness of lottery winners to that of paraplegics. After a bit, the paraplegics got more joy out of daily living. Seems that not having to do anything, of living some place else besides this place where you have to deal with your own laundry, is not the same as not being able to do what you used to; it’s worse.
I think what counts is getting closer to necessity, closer to the way your mouth works, to the way your fingers curve around—perhaps the thrashing of a fish. Seeing with your own eyes the moment the fish’s eyes go dull as you pull the hook out of its mouth and put the fish into yours.
That’s exaggerating, perhaps, but it’s the only way I know how to put what I’m after: I want to feel life between my teeth.
Elizabeth M. Burke
Long Island, Maine
03/2008
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Possibilities
Possibilities
Truths don't leap out of the darkness these days. Even the meteorite shower last night got me only half way to where you left off, at the "probably not." Though that seared through the atmosphere like the punctuation of a typewriter--you could feel the bump it left--I wasn't convinced.
I could sit here for a million nights and not know anything I most want to know, such as whether the New York Times freezes to your driveway before you get up to retrieve it, or if when I use one of the words in the dictionary for the very literate you gave me you'll stop to wonder what you're doing and I'll know that. If these are magical imaginings, they know their desires.
Will there be no more of love's enigmas of arrival, the way waves move outwardly when a boat docks inwardly, the way words pull time forward as they describe time backwards, the way subatomic particles know space so well they end up where they began, and we don't have a clue how that happens. We store our hope in a hypothesis we can't even begin to prove. It's saner than waiting for a letter from space, zip-coded something like *.*.*. Such a letter could blow us to bits. Why pull the rug right out from under myself all over again by believing you? I mean, why settle for certainty, or, in these days, even probabilities?
Look, the frustration of hearing time pass in the night by a little light altering its patterns of excitation, the frustration of saying something to you and not being able to see what it was I said, the frustration of feeling a thought I can't get my hands around, and thinking a feeling must have happened--these are what dreams bring us to--shaggy dog stories of what started out as a great revelation about stories: They end eventually.
I'm certain life is the story I see, or you see, or as anyone sees. But, love isn't a story, even though you and I might be.
Realizing that nothing I've ever loved has stayed put, even if I don't believe the myth of Jesus, I believe in some of the metaphors. "Do not work for the food that perishes." Metaphors are what's possible. At least I've got that nailed down, however it hurts.
May 2002.
E.M. Burke
The Bougainvillea
I returned to see the bougainvillea
take the land so madly, love couldn't be far off.
Great gnarled tendrils rose in the air
like explanations obfuscating everything.
Cool morning mist trapped in the branches
changed the key int he bird's throat.
Water hiding in the ditch beneath
rambled on about the pure nature of mud.
Scents of rose, pepper and lemon
evaporated out of the burnless fire.
Why say this is like something else?
It is something altogether something else.
November 2002
E. M. Burke
The Older One Speaks
Bothersome susceptibility to lips:
Attempting Ah's and living,
yet also like someone who wishes to be
forgotten, untyped, unwritten!
I understand myself enough to understand
Fear is feeling responsible for a child.
To my internal saboteur and a cold light
you are writing, if you see the light.
An epitaph: I was not what you wanted.
August 2001
E.M. Burke
Spider Poem
In the no-face of darkness
there goes on the spread
of star-like pale spiders
upon the death of the mother.
Then to return to the stone,
that chill, a reassurance
of one place on earth, on ground
that holds childhood in firmly,
its sure shocks and enormity:
of the chair by the window
to take up a season for years
the locus of change, fall,
and do nothing but watch
and listen to molecules move.
In a very few words
the soft wound of thinking
your piano makes
sings your grief.
Cars do not go anywhere.
Planes land in snow.
Buildings stand no better
than air, and some worse.
Or to crawl to the ledge,
let go, fall vagrant in air,
tack down threads in circles,
and weave webs, light years.
1986
E.M. Burke
Compliance
Whimsies lurch me into windows,
at dog-eared walls of April.
The nurses listen to my eyes;
they can do the tango.
I dance to anything that worries;
the postman hands me music.
I can walk straight if my bra does
to a clock that shimmies.
Paddling cross the morning
a bottle is my boat back.
A lady is escorted home;
she's gracious with a warning.
My guitar remembers being plucked,
but I'm too loved to care.
I want a trailor so I can travel
where my nightmares wake me up.
Time is mine when I have fallen:
It's written down "Who counts?"
I travel anywhere I want to,
except the known unthought.
2002
E.M. Burke
TRANSLATIONS from the Russian
And there my marble figure,
the face turned in the lake water,
stood, cast under the old maple
heeding the leaves' rustle.
And the light rain washes
its old cloying wound:
cold, white, though but wait ...
I am here, and stone-like grow.
1911
Anna Akhmatova
translated by E.M. Burke 1995
Poem
With a mere artless tune
Love wins, fraudulently.
Yet for some time, strangely,
You are not so gray and gloomy.
And when she smiled
In your house, fields, gardens,
Everywhere it seemed
You were free--and in freedom.
You were light taking of her
And drinking her poisons.
You see, the stars were tremendous,
The grass smelled differently ...
Autumnal grass.
1911, fall.
Anna Akmatova
Translated by E.M. Burke, 1995
Love
Now like a snake recurling--
That same heart that conjures;
Now like a dove it coos and bills
Its image in the barren window.
Now it strikes in the bright hoar frost
Like drowsiness from the clove pinks.
And doggedly, secretly it plods on
Out of a sense of dumb joy and peace.
It alone can sob sweetly.
And to the call of a lone violin, it goes
Only to recognize itself
In yet another estranged smile.
1911
Anna Akmatova
translated by E.M. .Burke 1995
Truths don't leap out of the darkness these days. Even the meteorite shower last night got me only half way to where you left off, at the "probably not." Though that seared through the atmosphere like the punctuation of a typewriter--you could feel the bump it left--I wasn't convinced.
I could sit here for a million nights and not know anything I most want to know, such as whether the New York Times freezes to your driveway before you get up to retrieve it, or if when I use one of the words in the dictionary for the very literate you gave me you'll stop to wonder what you're doing and I'll know that. If these are magical imaginings, they know their desires.
Will there be no more of love's enigmas of arrival, the way waves move outwardly when a boat docks inwardly, the way words pull time forward as they describe time backwards, the way subatomic particles know space so well they end up where they began, and we don't have a clue how that happens. We store our hope in a hypothesis we can't even begin to prove. It's saner than waiting for a letter from space, zip-coded something like *.*.*. Such a letter could blow us to bits. Why pull the rug right out from under myself all over again by believing you? I mean, why settle for certainty, or, in these days, even probabilities?
Look, the frustration of hearing time pass in the night by a little light altering its patterns of excitation, the frustration of saying something to you and not being able to see what it was I said, the frustration of feeling a thought I can't get my hands around, and thinking a feeling must have happened--these are what dreams bring us to--shaggy dog stories of what started out as a great revelation about stories: They end eventually.
I'm certain life is the story I see, or you see, or as anyone sees. But, love isn't a story, even though you and I might be.
Realizing that nothing I've ever loved has stayed put, even if I don't believe the myth of Jesus, I believe in some of the metaphors. "Do not work for the food that perishes." Metaphors are what's possible. At least I've got that nailed down, however it hurts.
May 2002.
E.M. Burke
The Bougainvillea
I returned to see the bougainvillea
take the land so madly, love couldn't be far off.
Great gnarled tendrils rose in the air
like explanations obfuscating everything.
Cool morning mist trapped in the branches
changed the key int he bird's throat.
Water hiding in the ditch beneath
rambled on about the pure nature of mud.
Scents of rose, pepper and lemon
evaporated out of the burnless fire.
Why say this is like something else?
It is something altogether something else.
November 2002
E. M. Burke
The Older One Speaks
Bothersome susceptibility to lips:
Attempting Ah's and living,
yet also like someone who wishes to be
forgotten, untyped, unwritten!
I understand myself enough to understand
Fear is feeling responsible for a child.
To my internal saboteur and a cold light
you are writing, if you see the light.
An epitaph: I was not what you wanted.
August 2001
E.M. Burke
Spider Poem
In the no-face of darkness
there goes on the spread
of star-like pale spiders
upon the death of the mother.
Then to return to the stone,
that chill, a reassurance
of one place on earth, on ground
that holds childhood in firmly,
its sure shocks and enormity:
of the chair by the window
to take up a season for years
the locus of change, fall,
and do nothing but watch
and listen to molecules move.
In a very few words
the soft wound of thinking
your piano makes
sings your grief.
Cars do not go anywhere.
Planes land in snow.
Buildings stand no better
than air, and some worse.
Or to crawl to the ledge,
let go, fall vagrant in air,
tack down threads in circles,
and weave webs, light years.
1986
E.M. Burke
Compliance
Whimsies lurch me into windows,
at dog-eared walls of April.
The nurses listen to my eyes;
they can do the tango.
I dance to anything that worries;
the postman hands me music.
I can walk straight if my bra does
to a clock that shimmies.
Paddling cross the morning
a bottle is my boat back.
A lady is escorted home;
she's gracious with a warning.
My guitar remembers being plucked,
but I'm too loved to care.
I want a trailor so I can travel
where my nightmares wake me up.
Time is mine when I have fallen:
It's written down "Who counts?"
I travel anywhere I want to,
except the known unthought.
2002
E.M. Burke
TRANSLATIONS from the Russian
And there my marble figure,
the face turned in the lake water,
stood, cast under the old maple
heeding the leaves' rustle.
And the light rain washes
its old cloying wound:
cold, white, though but wait ...
I am here, and stone-like grow.
1911
Anna Akhmatova
translated by E.M. Burke 1995
Poem
With a mere artless tune
Love wins, fraudulently.
Yet for some time, strangely,
You are not so gray and gloomy.
And when she smiled
In your house, fields, gardens,
Everywhere it seemed
You were free--and in freedom.
You were light taking of her
And drinking her poisons.
You see, the stars were tremendous,
The grass smelled differently ...
Autumnal grass.
1911, fall.
Anna Akmatova
Translated by E.M. Burke, 1995
Love
Now like a snake recurling--
That same heart that conjures;
Now like a dove it coos and bills
Its image in the barren window.
Now it strikes in the bright hoar frost
Like drowsiness from the clove pinks.
And doggedly, secretly it plods on
Out of a sense of dumb joy and peace.
It alone can sob sweetly.
And to the call of a lone violin, it goes
Only to recognize itself
In yet another estranged smile.
1911
Anna Akmatova
translated by E.M. .Burke 1995
Monday, October 08, 2007
Some Summer's Work
"Traps." Oil on panel.
This is a 3/4 fragment of the entire image.
"Skee's Dream." Oil on panel.
Another 3/4 fragment of entire image.
"The Annunciation." Oil on panel.
Another 3/4 fragment of entire image.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Chapter 1b draft: Life at Sea
Two weeks ago, I had been alternating between jobs as a sternman on a lobster boat. In one position, I was opening lobster traps, pulling out lobsters to put into a keeper's tank or throwing others back into the ocean, throwing various sized and species of crabs, sponges, or sea-squirts back into the ocean, or perhaps small sharks called dogfish, then passing on a trap to a stern-mate, and then finally banding keeper lobsters--those big enough to pass as mature-enough lobsters to sell to eat. In the second position, I received an open trap, strung dead fish on a bait line in the trap, closed the trap, and swung the 90 plus pound trap onto a table-like contraption in the stern of a boat, in a certain configuration. We wanted a string of four, or seven or eight traps, when the captain was ready to set a line of traps, to slide off the back of the boat in an orderly way without all the ropes getting entangled.
My captain had started using five-foot traps, whose weight is of less issue than their length, since swinging 90 compact pounds is a lot easier than swinging 90 pounds spread out over five feet. I had to slide and swing and inch the five-foot long traps as if I were moving a cadaver--all dead weight. Being only five-feet five inches tall and 120 lbs, it wasn't as if I could "throw my weight" into a five foot trap.
I had to stop this work, but not because I wanted to. One might imagine that the work sounds like, in its repetitive nature, working on an assembly line, such as I once worked for a few weeks for a tea company--receiving boxes of tea, packing them in larger boxes, and making sure the boxes were taped up properly. But, despite repetition, life at sea is absolutely nothing like working for Tetley or Lipton or any other tea company manufacturing plant. I may have sung Irish ballads in both instances, but after that, comparisons stop. In a factory, as I recall working in a factory, there is no day or night. There is no wind. There are no swells of sea. There are no porpoises appearing out of nowhere, their fins dancing out of the waves like well-placed but unexpected commas, nor are there the colors and textures of dreams. Strange and wonderful forms do not arrive on an assembly line, since there is no assembly line, but one string of traps after the next, each set in a slightly different environment of sea.
Life at sea is also fundamentally more dangerous, if for those who have grown up at sea and may not feel the danger inherently, just far more joyously fascinating than working any factory or office job out there.
Getting up for work at 4:30 a.m.isn't that hard, after all. Then there's an afternoon to do something else.
My captain had started using five-foot traps, whose weight is of less issue than their length, since swinging 90 compact pounds is a lot easier than swinging 90 pounds spread out over five feet. I had to slide and swing and inch the five-foot long traps as if I were moving a cadaver--all dead weight. Being only five-feet five inches tall and 120 lbs, it wasn't as if I could "throw my weight" into a five foot trap.
I had to stop this work, but not because I wanted to. One might imagine that the work sounds like, in its repetitive nature, working on an assembly line, such as I once worked for a few weeks for a tea company--receiving boxes of tea, packing them in larger boxes, and making sure the boxes were taped up properly. But, despite repetition, life at sea is absolutely nothing like working for Tetley or Lipton or any other tea company manufacturing plant. I may have sung Irish ballads in both instances, but after that, comparisons stop. In a factory, as I recall working in a factory, there is no day or night. There is no wind. There are no swells of sea. There are no porpoises appearing out of nowhere, their fins dancing out of the waves like well-placed but unexpected commas, nor are there the colors and textures of dreams. Strange and wonderful forms do not arrive on an assembly line, since there is no assembly line, but one string of traps after the next, each set in a slightly different environment of sea.
Life at sea is also fundamentally more dangerous, if for those who have grown up at sea and may not feel the danger inherently, just far more joyously fascinating than working any factory or office job out there.
Getting up for work at 4:30 a.m.isn't that hard, after all. Then there's an afternoon to do something else.
Chapter 1 draft: Life at Sea
In 1992, two artists comrades and myself drove to New York City to see a few shows and visit some galleries. I parked my Volvo station-wagon on Prince Street, or thereabouts, as I recall, between SoHo and Chinatown. When we returned, my camera, my Ricoh manual, entirely manual, had been stolen out of the car.
The two parts of the event that I remember are the car I was driving and the type of camera I had. The Volvo stationwagon drove like a insect, maneuvering turns on a mere wing-beat, had the weight of a small tank and so could plow over snowbanks and sidewalk curbs without disturbing the driver much, and sounded like wind over sand--quiet. I also knew it had a steel interior frame with resilience of the body of a 20 year old. It also had enough space between the front seat and rear window to carry six-foot paintings that were five feet wide. I also knew my Ricoh camera could operate as well as any high fancy $1000 camera, so long as I knew how to use it. I was the operating instructions, rather than the camera itself, and being a painter, someone who likes to be in entire command of all aspects of how she structures her life, I knew the instructions.
To me, a painter, an artist, is someone who make conscientious choices about their values. They think about what they're choosing and why. Also, they're journeymen, rather than employees.
One also might consider them hysterical beings, by and large. Not necessarily obsessive, but by and large generally hysterical--having trouble with authority figures, needing authority figures in order to survive, getting confused about who they are (bodily, financially, emotionally) in relationship to authority figures, and then becoming paralyzed in the process of trying to do all this.
The current definition of hysterical is portrayed by an overly seductive woman--short skirt, tightened boobs, and pouting lips, if sexually frigid, but this is not what Freud originally portrayed when he named his female clients "hysterical." He was seeing women who were paralyzed in some area of their bodies, or, I think now, their minds.
The two parts of the event that I remember are the car I was driving and the type of camera I had. The Volvo stationwagon drove like a insect, maneuvering turns on a mere wing-beat, had the weight of a small tank and so could plow over snowbanks and sidewalk curbs without disturbing the driver much, and sounded like wind over sand--quiet. I also knew it had a steel interior frame with resilience of the body of a 20 year old. It also had enough space between the front seat and rear window to carry six-foot paintings that were five feet wide. I also knew my Ricoh camera could operate as well as any high fancy $1000 camera, so long as I knew how to use it. I was the operating instructions, rather than the camera itself, and being a painter, someone who likes to be in entire command of all aspects of how she structures her life, I knew the instructions.
To me, a painter, an artist, is someone who make conscientious choices about their values. They think about what they're choosing and why. Also, they're journeymen, rather than employees.
One also might consider them hysterical beings, by and large. Not necessarily obsessive, but by and large generally hysterical--having trouble with authority figures, needing authority figures in order to survive, getting confused about who they are (bodily, financially, emotionally) in relationship to authority figures, and then becoming paralyzed in the process of trying to do all this.
The current definition of hysterical is portrayed by an overly seductive woman--short skirt, tightened boobs, and pouting lips, if sexually frigid, but this is not what Freud originally portrayed when he named his female clients "hysterical." He was seeing women who were paralyzed in some area of their bodies, or, I think now, their minds.
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