Time off from the blog.

I'm still really swimmy from the rear-ender on our way home from Miami on Friday. Too dizzy and tired to try to post what I found out there. Just over this last year the readership of this blog has dropped from an average of over 60 a day, constant for years, down to a low of 12 and an average of more like 15 over the year. I don't have the energy to visit other blogs very often either.

So....I'm going to take care of the immediate problems and just post fun things (for me) as I feel like it and stop feeling an obligation to post. I love this blog so I don't plan to abandon it. I'm just at my energy limit /health limit right now and need to respect that and stop for now.

xxPris

Well, it's my birthday Sunday July 18.....

....and I'm not yet telling how old I am:-)

A day of rest and a lobster tail for dinner. I'm ready for it!

This is my fifth, with my childhood home behind us. I'm the one holding the presents.

Stardust by the man who knows how to sing it

This really takes me back. I could play it over and over again. Today is my last day on CIPRO for an infection. I get goofy and it's not been easy, but necessary. Friday is my day to go back to Miami for the results of my blood work and recommendations. I'm eager to hear about those. We're combining it with my second visit in Nancy Klimas' good day bad day study since I'm due (every 6 months for a total of 4 visits). I don't have a lot of energy so I'll see how I do. The cognitive test on the computer is the hardest since images flash on and off the screen to test both skills and memory. I can't look at a flashing Christmas tree without feeling like I'm drifting into the ozone. My first time, first visit, I had to keep stopping to close my eyes for a few minutes. Wish me luck!

Publication in Outlaw Poetry Network

Go to Outlaw Poetry to read the three poems.

Any comments in the comment box on the site would be greatly appreciated.

Pris

Interview just up on the Oranges&Sardines blog

Interview on the Oranges&Sardines blog

Click the above link to see an interview on the blog. Didi Menendez, publisher of Oranges&Sardines, super journal filled with art and poetry, is interviewing poets/artists who've been published in the journal. This is my page. Enjoy. Leave a comment if you can. I know I would appreciate it.

Pris

Fading (post of an earlier poem I still like)

Celibate for longer than
Rip Van Winkle's nap,
Sara dreams in technicolor,
breasts firm like freshly scooped ice-cream,
and go-on-forever legs wrapped around
some sexy man's waist.
Sean Connery maybe, or
Denzel Washington.
She wonders if sex works like
heartbeats in animals, if
she used up her quota in her
too many men too little time
communal days.
She remembers when her face
blazed a fire in men's hearts.
Between their legs, too.
Now she's forgotten what an orgasm
feels like with a man still inside her.
She climbs out of bed, puts on her
Give Bush a Blow Job PLEASE sweatshirt,
joins other graying ex-hippie
women who wander the streets
and coffee shops after midnight,
minds still alert and longing,
bodies fading like ghosts
between every streetlight.


Pris Campbell
©2006


Published in MEAT, a semi-regular broadside by S.A. Griffin, co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

Republished in Empowerment4Women, June2008

Still in a crash

When I get energy I'll read more blog posts and also post about my Miami visit. Just can't right now. Am limp.

Pris

This and that....

I'm in another crash. Yes, my regular readers have heard it before. Throat raw. Muscles limp. I have the good fortune to have an appointment, finally, down at Nancy Klimas' clinic at the U. of Miami Medical School this Thursday after 6 months on the waiting list. Since it's at the Medical School and not at her new pay clinic Medicare will cover an hour and a half evaluation and any follow up visit.

I know there's no magic bullet, but maybe hope that something might help is good medicine right now.

I've not had the energy to respond on blogs in a while now. I'll get back to it when I can.

And, on the subject I wrote about earlier...social sites such as facebook or myspace taking readers away from the blogs, I just got my stats for this site and my website recently. Lowest numbers on both since I started them years ago. No, I've not been posting as often, but I went through periods in the past when I didn't, either, and the numbers stayed up there. I use this blog just for meanderings such as this now or fun things I'd like to keep as long as blogger.com stays open.

Pris

Following the Gulf Stream north

My husband had a chance to crew on a convoy of charter boats returning to Quebec from their 9 month long charter season out of Nassau last week and next. In the two weeks he has off of work he's able to go the legs from Nassau to West End, then is now on the four day trip to Beaufort, N.C. where he'll get off. Right now he's incommunicado out there riding the stream north, but a spot tracker on the boats tracks their location every ten minutes. Below is a snip of where they were as of about 7 15 this morning. You'll see a series of locations. Their present one is on top.



Besides fulfilling part of his long time dream to do some open water sailing, the experience of sailing with a bilingual crew (French/English) has been fun. He was able to call me from Nassau before leaving to fill me in briefly. He's sailed for years but not on a boat so well equipped or so yar.

Thanks to Audrey Nicholson, poet friend from Quebec, whose son captains one of the boats and whose brother owns ,I believe , three of them, the offer to do this first came to me after she read my book , Sea Trails. She didn't realize I have trouble navigating walks through the house these days so I asked if Steve might sign on. I may not be out there but I can travel vicariously with them and if that's the best I can get I'll take it.

I'm adding a few photos emailed from Audrey before they left Nassau. They can get an internet connection at dock, but not at sea.


\

Some crew and family on the docks. Audrey is the only female crew sailing.


You can see my husband to the left in the aqua shirt in this one.




More partying at a popular Nassau bar. The guy in the white shirt is 'Norm, the storm', captain of RIO, the boat my husband's on.



Dinner in the cockpit with a few of the crew. They caught two big mahi mahi between Nassau and West End, so those went onto the grills for dinner.

TWO NEW PHOTOS ADDED BELOW:

My husband holding a mahimahi before it got eaten!



and....the wild ponies/horses on the barrier island across from Beaufort, N.C. This was all dunes with a few trees in 1977. We rowed over then and picnicked. Now you have to take a ferry over. The freedom of a visit has probably been abused over the years and this is for the protection of the horses.

Review of Sea Trails, my book from Lummox Press, by Sue Jackson!

Sue just wrote me that she had posted this. What a wonderful surprise! Thank you, Sue. A wonderful review.

Please read it at her blog HERE

Sea Trails is available through Lummox Press and Amazon. Would love if you read it, too!!

The Poetry Bomb Tour is in North Carolina. Go, S.A. Griffin!

S.A. on the go with THE BOMB
(Click to enlarge)


Helen Losse, editor of the Dead Mule, will be reading one of her poems and adding it to the bomb this Saturday night. She graciously offered to read one of mine. The following is the poem I sent her. Thank you, Helen. Thank you, S.A.

The Trombone Angels


The trombone angels have no teeth.
No ears.
Lips like a frozen kiss.
Their last dance was in the air,
ghost band hovering over the flames
at Auschwitz, Cambodia, Iraq.
Dressed in black raincoats,
they shuffle to fresh graveyards
and bone laden ditches,
feet cut and dirty.

What did they think
when they once flew,
ground rushing beneath them so fast?
Did they see gods reach
out to snatch soul from body
before flesh died?
Is that too much to believe?
Too much to hope for?

They blow a sweet tune
for those who no longer buy lies
from bible-rumped matrons
about lesser gods
for those not washed by Christ's blood
or chained to a catholic sainthood.
Those matrons claim we're all sinners.
They cast the first stones to prove it.

The wail of the trombones rises
as night tosses its net of stars.
A cock cries three times.
The silence from the graves is deafening.




(This was published in The Cliffs: Soundings)




Shot taken while the bomb was still being created.

Book Recommendation -Passenger Flight by Brian Campbell

Brian Campbell is a talented Canadian poet whose poetry I've had the pleasure of reading numerous times. He also is a songwriter, editor, translator, and teacher. I really enjoyed reading his latest collection out and would highly recommend Passenger Flight, a book of prose poems. Order it here at at AMAZON . This LINK gives you more detailed information about the book, including a review. Please take time to read it. The link opens in a separate window.

Below are two poems I especially like from the book.

(note: there is no line break in the first poem, but blogger.com insists on putting it there despite several efforts deleting, then recopying and pasting, to make it merge into one whole poem)



CLAIRE OBSCURE



All this shadow, shifting in nebulous darkness. I speak of you, pursing your lips to
kiss, making me step down into my body to experience the surprising pleasure. There is something in me that resists your affections. Something else that wants to blend, annihilate me, so that I urges into verb. Curious, this back and forth within my skin’s parenthesis. And now I see you there, the gentle slope of your shoulders, the scoop of your breasts. I will inevitably enter your softnesses, snuggle. Within me also, this describing self, this circumscribing self that stabs with a compass, etches circles, half-moons. Shouldn’t moon have an irregular plural, like mooni? Odd that one is an odd number. Even is so complacent in its evenness, it’s odd. But rounding again to a sensual knowing: there is something very conversational about blankets, the way they rumple and bunch and collapse, form hills and valleys with each toss and turn. And when you get up, the blanket slips away unveiling you, a statue, smooth, alabaster, yet soft in the lamplight. Your body eclipses the lamplight: penumbras slide about the room. All this play of light and shadow. Now. And thousands of years ago, in a cave.





FISHY

The poetry editor of a magazine to which I had recently submitted sent me an e-mail asking permission not to print my poems, but to kindly let him grind them up into fish food. "In our aquarium," he explained, "we have several exotic fish, and we are of the opinion that your poems, ground up, would make an ideal nutrient for them." "Will you eventually publish them?" I wrote back. "No, we're afraid your poems, however worthy they may be, do not meet our editorial needs at this time." "Will I be able to publish them elsewhere?" was my next question. "Only," he replied, "if the publisher agrees to print them with this credit underneath: —Originally ground up as fish food for The Barracuda Review. However," he added, "we also think that your poems, grated, might serve as an excellent condiment for Italian food. If you agree, we'll try them on our Fettuccini Alfredo tonight." Reflecting on this, I realized it's true: poems don't have to be read to be appreciated. So I accepted his offer, although not without feelings of regret and chagrin.


See Brian's blog at briancampbell.blogspot.com

(Brian and I share the same last names, but we're not related)

Featured in Blogging Along Tobacco Road....Thanks, Curtis Dunlap!

Curtis Dunlap is posting an interesting series right now. He asks the poets he featured to send a photo of themselves either where they usually write or in a place that inspires them to write, then adds one poem by that poet. I'm working my way through the series and am enjoying seeing poets I know and don't know in their favorite spots and am reading very good poetry in the process. Your can see my feature at http://tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com/2010/04/poets-and-poems-pris-campbell.html.

Now, before you look, try to guess where you might find me:-)

Curtis, you're doing a great job!

(I'm sure Curtis would appreciate comments on his blog on any of the poets he's featured. Feedback lets us know what's working)

New Book by Pris Campbell and Scott Owens is now released.

My collaboration with Scott Owens, "The Nature of Attraction," poems focusing on a relationship featuring a repressed Norman and wild-childe Sara, is now available for the unbelievable pre-publication discount of only $3.50. Orders will be accepted at that price until July 12. The book will be released and mailed on July 26. This book will be a one print run, ie once Main Street Rag Publications sells all pre-publication copies plus extra copies it prints and Scott and I sell all of the copies we order to sell on our own, there will be no more. The price after the pre-order period will be 7 dollars.

Collaborating with Scott on this collection of poems was truly fun.

Below is a link to Scott's and my page which includes our photos, BIOs, ordering link and sample poems:

http://www.mainstreetrag.com/Campbell_Owens.html

To view the entire series of Main Street Rag's Coming Soon page of chapbooks, go to this link (orders can be made from this page, as well).
http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/ComingSoon.php"