Marilyn Kallet's Blog
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Sep.10.2009
The High Holidays are just around the corner for those of us who are Jewish. We honor those days by celebrating creation--the creation of the world and all its beings--on the evening of September 18th, and then on the 19th. We begin the ten Days of Awe as we contemplate the beauty of creation,...
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Sep.08.2009
Seriously, how? If you're any good at teaching, you'll give it your best energy, and you'll come home depleted. Perhaps you write during the blessed summers, on the rare sabbaticals. And maybe you've made your peace with that. You are fortunate to have a good teaching job, you know that.
But...
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Sep.04.2009
I've been on non-teaching leave for eight months, traveling to southwest France and to the Big Island of Hawai'i. Writing my heart out. Return to the classroom is always a difficult transition, though I love my job. Return after eight months of pure poetry and eating Tuscan loaves with homemade...
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Aug.31.2009
"Makeup can only do so much," Marco at Bendel's said,
when I went for my wedding consultation. He would "try."
To bulk up the fairy tale aura, he glued my turquoise-and-candlelight lids
with spidery lashes, and presto! piled on a braided hair piece,
a kind...
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Aug.29.2009
It was dark out, maybe eight p.m., when my I heard my husband's key in the door. "Where's Heather?" I asked.
"What do you mean 'where's Heather?' You were supposed to pick her up from day care!"
"No, you said you were going to pick her up!"
"Miss Becky closes...
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Aug.26.2009
My husband asked me for one gift from my writing residency in Hawai'i. The only thing he wanted was a cotton Aloha shirt from a thrift shop. Problem is, everyone else on the Big Island must have wanted one of those. They were hard to find.
I went into the thrift in Punalu'u, and asked for Aloha...
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Aug.24.2009
I'm working on the travel details of my November 6-9 Bay area readings, and I'm sure hoping to meet a few of the great people I've corresponded with on Red Room. On Friday, November 9th, I'll be reading at noon at the Art Institute of California near the U.N. Plaza on Market Street. I'll get the...
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7 comments
Aug.19.2009
Father Trey Makes an Offer
At the friary lunch Father Trey asks,
"Do you have laundry?"
Lean, young Kevin Costner.
We three women poets nod.
"I'd be happy to do your wash," he says.
"Leave it on the porch."
When he leaves we gasp,
"Oh my God!"
Margie...
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Aug.16.2009
I've always had a hard time with the transition from creative time to back-to-school time. Yes, teaching is a creative act, but the energy it requires, and the focus on others, take one out of the meditative mind.
I always tell myself I'll carve out time for myself, my work, but that space slips...
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Aug.12.2009
Hedwig Schwarz, my great-aunt from Horb, Germany, in the beautiful Black Forest, was the lone survivor of deportation in her town. At the old Jewish cemetery in Rexingen, one can find her gravestone set apart, topped with stones left by each respectful visitor who wishes to pay homage.
When the...
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8 comments
Aug.10.2009
When I turned fifty, I indulged fully in my obsession with Orpheus--by falling in love with a dark-haired incarnation, and writing about it. Not acting on the passion, but embodying it in language. The resulting book, How to Get Heat Without Fire, a sequence of love poems ranging from erotic...
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Jul.30.2009
Baxter Hathaway at Ithaca House opened the literary door for me when he published my first book of poems, Devils Live so Near, in 1977. I walked into his studio with a little chapbook of my poems, and he read it in front of me--and said, "It's good! I'll take it!" In that moment I...
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Jul.23.2009
Aloha! Tomorrow morning I'm off to The Big Island, to Red Cinder Creativity Center, an artist colony founded by painter Helen Chellin. It looks beautiful from the online pictures and the director is gentle, kind, and engaged. She called me on my cell phone to answer a question I had emailed to...
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Jul.22.2009
I'm not talking about the courage to set words on paper, what Bukowski called "that small bravery of knowledge"--that's a given. We write. That's what we do. The blank page is nothing to be afraid of.
Hungry mountain lions, brown bears, riot police in Iran, cops on the streets of...
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Jul.21.2009
The two sweetest words in a writer's lexicon are "on assignment." These words validate your skills. You have been recognized as a writer, as one whose words are flexible enough to cover a range of topics. You're the one to bear witness to the shocking, the new, or the heavenly. You...
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"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."”
—William Blake
About Marilyn
Marilyn Kallet was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in New York. She is the author of 16 books, including The Love That Moves Me (poetry); Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press; Circe, After Hours, poetry from BkMk Press; The...
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Causes Marilyn Kallet Supports
Southern Poverty Law Center, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, ACLU, Amnesty International, Save Darfur.