MAKE YOUR OWN OZ
Oz is a non sense.
Zen is moments of awareness.
Tao is letting moments go.
Zen sees in everything that is.
Tao moves in everything that is.
Oz you make that yourself.
© Copyright Edward Mycue, Feb. 19, 2023 in memory memento mori of James Broughton author of SEEING THE LIGHT book from City Lights
POP-UP DEVILS (there’s always a new one) PUT IN & HELL
the stench and the knell and of bodies
of maggot and bell
lumped in the hall.
All the seasons of death reflect
the smell of bodies dumped
from the Putin Call – in the government hall
the knell of the last of the wars
as we’ve known them.
This I see them reflect from their call
with smooth society holds
in strife without end
mass death at bay
in a limited way.
The volcano of death
insures life.
As the Incas of old
we feed it our young.
One by one, throw them in
one by one.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue March 14, 2022
• YOU HAVE TO LET A GREEN THING GROW
• It depends on what you are trying to conserve
You can react You can remember You can repeat
- But the tree won’t grow.
You can save it You can dry it You can burn it - The tree is you You can share it You can preserve it But it will not remain a living tree.
Polish it Dust it Worship it It’s not going to breathe - Neither will you. You have to let a green thing grow.
Each takes life’s tests. There is uncontrolled damage.
Release seeks firecracker form. Life is a witch’s hair.
Each day is an auction of Who will buy me, When do I sell?
We are the early grape flat, dry, and cloudy.
The time is short, but some days never end.
There is no joyous lake.
There is no incantation
that can bend the moment back into the patterns we may see too late.
Early wine is
flat, dry, and cloudy and some days never end.
There is no joyous lake.
There is no incantation
that can bend the moment back into patterns we have seen too late.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 9 July 2022 Saturday
Squirrel’s Tale Retold*
Green History up and down a stairs’ bannister like a squirrel’s tail retold.
What looks like a weed thing
May be a string bean; what
Looks like a twig thing
may Become a lemon tree. What
Seems unpromising at first
May end up quenching thirst.
But let’s not eat ourselves up
Over the past: look to a future.
Historians say you always can
Think things first come slowly
Never come quick. Then look
To the future as growing takes
Time done and start considering
The best may shuffle in at last.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 4/IX/21 Sunday
*I’m cannibalizing from my poetry tapestry.
rime & blanket verse that escapes oo poetry.
Categories: Poetry
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
“problematic”Friday, May 24, 2013 11:44 AM (continued)
From: “edward mycue” mycueed@yahoo.com To: editor@amsterdamquarterly.nl
SONG OF SAN FRANCISCO was in limbo for a long time and in development from 1987 on until it’s emergence 26 yrs later in 2012. In early days there were many poems and spread out to 100 pages and i got to view it as my ‘bridge’ in the sense of modeling it on hart crane’s swingline, going and walking over that bridge to brooklyn and feeling the human level of it.
The times and my situation became grim, grimer. Everything melted away while ten pieces more like hard bloodless stones remained by the mid-1990’s. But i kept looking and hoping for a return to fullness. I sent what i had to Paul Green at Spectacular Diseases Press in Peterborough, Cambs. England who in mid-90’s published my BECAUSE WE SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE. He offered to do it. He wanted a special cover (showing the usual San Francisco touristy highlights) from Richard Steger my lifePainterPartnerSpouse with whom i’d teamed on books and other publication areas since the early 1970’s. Richard never takes orders. And so that was the delay. In 2000 i sent the group of 10 to Paul Stangeland who published THE POETRY CONSPIRACY monthly calender with peoms in the San Diego area, and he put it in that. Meanwhile from time to time Paul Green and i continued to laxly correspond. Then around 2010 or 2011 with Paul Green hitting 69 and losing his job over there in the UK and getting ill, he wrote let’s do it. I wrote yes on a 1937 old vintage postcard of the san francisco bay with a sketch of what the east bay bridge was to look like and said YES. and let’s do it.
he responded he wanted to use the card. i said it was some old thing from a used card bin with no source known. (i didn’t focus that it said in small print ‘san francisco queen city’ — funny that! and odd because it’s “cincinnati ohio” has always been called the ‘queen city’ — it’s where my mom lived in her teens).
maybe the above could be #10. but i don’t think of this history as “problematic”. it just was a progress and pilgrimage in the sense of my life journey or is it more trajectory: it may never have been issued as a stand alone title. but i am happy it did.
there have been 2 other books never published and plus a great pile of poems to be in an English anthology from the Shearsman Press in the 90’s (UK). There was a poet who was compiling it for them, Paul Buck. I heard from the publisher of Shearsman that project was just ended. But i never got my poems returned and this was at a time when things got so difficult for me and all i could do was just move on.
i miss the shearsman project as much as the promised book from australia from paper castle mimeographs press (that had in 1979 published my longpoem 88 pages ROOT ROUTE RANGE THE SONG RETURNS there). I also miss the book publication from the now late Paul Foreman’s Thorpe Springs press in Austin,TX –SOMETHING INHERES IN THE MARIGOLD.)
(HEY! THERE ARE A LOT OF “PAUL’S” IN THIS STORY I SEE.)
© copyright Edward Mycue
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Song from Night Boats, 1999
At night your strange heart
is music learned in love where moonmilk
is silence. San Francisco,
these are your rites. At your feet
are your children, a deep-pile
garnet rug, broken bisque porcelain
writing our histories on your
lymph that like your promise once
calf-white is now memory-tongued,
eggshell-thin, raving for healing
this desperate geography. Your
skies plum-colored, your boats
oarless bob in the marmalade waves.
Get washed you blind, handsome
city. Your harbor has a stone in
its mouth. A wingless buzzing
rises in grey fusion. This weather
mounts a holocaust song, red, full
like the hope-ruby with its rue and rage.
Now we are old linoleum, littered, torn and
we fight the sunset
climbing our blue humming.
From the ‘BUMPS’ series of poems
100. A PIECE OF ICE
IS ABOUT MELTING
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT
ABOUT LOST STRENGTH
WHITE STEAM AND A BRIEF
MEMORY OF HURRY.
55. BUMPS
BOYS ADMIRED OTHER BOYS’
MUSCLES. GIRLS OTHER GIRLS’
BREASTS. BOTH WANTED THE
BUMPS. WANTED TO SWELL-UP,
GROW-UP, TO BE SOMEBODY
BIGGER, beautiful, BUMPY.
BUMPS MEANT POWER, ROCK ‘N
SEX, WHITE TEETH, wheels,
DRINKING BOOZE FROM PAPER BAGS,
LIFTED ARMS AND pecs ALL BUMPY.
114. SCAR HUNT
SINCE THEY SPOKE THE SAME LANGUAGE ALL THE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD
ONEANOTHER AS A FAMILY WHO WANDERED LOOKING FOR A LAND TO LIKE. WHEN THEY
FOUND IT THEY BEGAN TO CHANGE IT INTO A GREAT CITY WITH DECORATED WALLS,
COURTYARDS AND A TOWER TO MAKE THEM FAMOUS EVEN TO TODAY A PROUD PEOPLE WHO
OVERSTROVE BECOMING COUPLED WITH A CURSE OF VOICES LIKE A TEEN GHETTO OF
MUSICDANCINGHUMMING PRESS-ME-TO-YOU TUNE HELPHELPHELPHELP AND LETMEALONE LET
ME ALONE EVERYTHING TODAY ADJUSTMENT ENACTMENT OLDCARSNOISE. NOW. SO TIME’S
ROUGH FINGERS PRINTED THEM OUT LIKE A STATISTIC OF DEFECTS WHEN THE WHOLE
SYSTEM WENT PIANO.
75. MEMORIES: steam
IS WHAT YOU WANT MEMORIES TO BE
INSTEAD OF BEING SUCH A MIXED BAG
OF HIPS AND MAGNETS AND DEAD CATS.
© Copyright Edward Mycue
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EDITH AND RICHARD AND HARRY, AND THE DEVIL
Disruptors previous and devious waste their lives in Hate
and Edith says “will be missed like a sore tooth.”
Edith says “As my father used to say, paper is very patient.
You can write anything on it; it will not complain.”
Richard Steger says dumbbell was the word of the age of Trump.
Harry S. Truman said many years ago about another dead:
“We are left with the creation of a myth and the invention of a devil,
repeating the big lie until it becomes an article of political faith as
smooth as the varnish on a concert piano”
Our ‘whatever’ buttons no longer deploy.
We are left with Edith’s farmer standing
out there with arms stretching-out over
fields where America’s shadow is once
again taking shape in a heroic quest to
destroy devils under life’s unfolding umbrella.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue in the Richmond District of San Francisco
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A LIFE LIVED FOR POETRY? ALONG WITH DASHBOARDS OF NO INFORMATION
Somebody will say it’s a mug’s game.
(Don’t know if that was about poetry.)
Infatuation’ll get you swallowed-up by,
quite possibly spit-out-by, followed-by
somebody’d add, shrugging, snarkingly:
that the scale of disappointment doesn’t
add-up to initial infatuations.
Yet love could have shown a fork of another mien.
You got life-dragged: we knew it already.
You’re hungry; nobody gives you a menu; you tire;
“alluring’s” not intriguing then;
what baffled now merely glisters; crisps got limp.
Life’s not the horse you rode in on — and you were
born with a dashboard of NO information.
© Copyright Edward Mycue in the Richmond San Francisco’s northwest District one
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I Am a Fact Not a Fiction: Selected Poems by Edward Mycue & Cover Art by Richard Steger San Francisco poet Edward Mycue was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and raised in Texas from age eleven. He was a Lowell Fellow at Boston University Graduate School of Public Relations and Communications, a WGBH-TV Boston intern, a Macdowell Colony Fellow, a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana, editor at the Norton Coker Press, and he tutored
American Literature at the International Peoples College in Elsinore, Denmark. He has had 18 books or chapbooks published. His poems appear in multiple anthologies and journals. Am a Fact Not a Fiction is a selection of poems culled from three areas of interest: War and Peace, Life / Time Memory, and History.
–“The precision of Ed Mycue’s dreamscape is laser-sharp and as warm as chocolate. Images rush pell-mell across the page, jumbling and tossing each other aside as one supplants the other in a rush to break the barrier between words and meaning, perception and feeling.” — Laura Kennelly, Ph.D., Associate Editor, Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider, Bach Institute
–“Ed Mycue’s poetry is a lifetime of surprises. He was born surprised, grew up on wonder, and now surely lives under the ever crashing waterfalls of amazement. His language is pure chirp, flip and rouse. It never ever sleeps. Savor his lines — like memory — for as long as you dare.” — Hiram Larew, author of More than Anything and Part Of
Originally an online chapbook, I Am a Fact Not a Fiction was the first collection published by Wordrunner e-Chapbooks in 2009. It is now being released as a print edition and kindle, both with Richard Steger’s compelling cover illustration.
Now available on Amazon.
ISBN: 978-1-941066-64-5
58 pages, perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches
$10.00, paperback; $2.99, Kindle
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From the publisher Wordrunner, and Kindle, and Amazon
&
Sound Cloud audio file — Stream Edward Mycue Reads Thre Poems — Audio by Hiram Larew | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
ISBN: 978-1-941066-64-5
58 pages, perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches
$10.00, paperback; $2.99, Kindle
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Link to You Tube video — https://youtu.be/UpI1ln_ou1c
Sound Cloud audio file — Stream Edward Mycue Reads Three Poems — Audio by Hiram Larew | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION is on Amazon now. Here’s the link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/194106664X/ Click on that and you land on the page for the print edition.
There is a link to the Kindle edition on that page, but you can also go directly to Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM1YMCZM/
And here is the Wordrunner Press page: https://www.wordrunner.com/books/Mycue-I-Am-Fact-Not-Fiction.html
The book cover is also on WP’s home page (with a link to details): Wordrunner Press
Wordrunner Press
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DEAR HEART
Dear heart
time’s
sausage
fingers
scraped
our teeth
burned
our earth.
Dear heart
Heraclitus
you are not
in my
memory-mind
dead
© Copyright Edward Mycue 17 February 2024 Saturday 4pm
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Kathy Nelson (of first North Carolina, but now Carson City, NY with her painter husband) quoted Ellen Voight on the Tuesday monthly Belmont California Library Poetry Zoom 19 March 2024 from her teacher Ellen Voight who also long back years now also was using the TRANS word that is used now: “NOT THE TRAN SCRIPTION, BUT THE TRANS FORMATION OF EXPERIENCE”
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NIAGARA FALLS ON THE KNIFE EDGE EDWARD MYCUE p.1 of 2 pp.
Green thunder
fresh water spray at the Three Sister Islands
Above Niagara Falls
where it crashes down to great rock mounds
Into the gorge
the rapids, the Devil’s Hole roaring past below
Niagara University
high above on east side of the River
Lake Erie to Lake
Ontario going past Grand Island and Buffalo
Going on past
the city of Niagara Falls and Youngstown then
Across the Lake’s
Toronto and Canada seen from old Fort Niagara
Hearing in the wind long-gone voices
that knew the language of flowers
tasted the bitter root, hoped
placed stone upon stone, built
an order, blessed the wild beauty
of this place where you can hear
in the wind whispers those crusts
of soul-insulted soul, scattered
ages, decided, gone yellow, thin.
I hear in the wind those old sorrows
in new voices, undefeated desires,
and the muffled advent of something I can only define
as bright, new angels.
Can you hear in the wind independent people
who never depart,
have no time for friends,
who want to go and want
to stay and never decide in time?
I hear in the wind old phantoms
and the swirl of the released mustardstar
and the cry of innocence.
It is soon Niagara
At the edges of the verges
are the margins, and the surges —
the unseen urges the same as music
never heard, and yet should we over“`
listen, stop to wonder, loveliness p. 2 of 2 pp.
page though not a thunder will pop
forward reaching ready hope
it’s color green
the knife edge.
I am a fact, not a fiction
a rite, not a ritual
a progression, not a pr ocedure
a song, not a schedule
I am in my life and I live it
— partake it, enjoy it, wonder at it
I’m green leaves aquiver
red clouds aflutter
whacky as Christopher Smart
talking to cats
and alone in dark forests
in short pants
I am Niagara River crashing
over the Falls
cascading through the gorge
to the Devil’s Hole
sweeping into the last Great Lake
— Erie to Ontario—
surging into the great Lawrence
into my mother Atlantic
rising forward & into the clouds
into hurricanes
I cut with the knife of the times
out onto the rocks
the Cape of Good Hope to India
South China Sea
sieving through Oceana’s islands
Pacific kingdoms
up past Galapagos north home shore
Mission Rock
San Francisco and my love’s bed
I am a fact not a fiction.
© Copyright Edward Mycue July 5, 2024 Friday 1:50pm afternoon revised
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I was born in Niagara Falls of old families there in 1937 and moved 11 years later to North Central Texas grasslands city of Dallas.
I moved to San Francisco in 1970 and have been living in the One Richmond District since 2011.
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ADVENTURE IN PARADISE ©Copyright by Edward Mycue
Hot today; the horse races will be nice; the grandstand will be shady, quiet, cool. Several years ago we’d had a rainy summer as August’s
end , Richard drove us up from San Francisco north over The Golden Gate Bridge dull orange past all those towns on Highway 101
through Marin County gleaming swiftly.
through green hills this year, past Lucas Valley
into Sonoma County crossing the San Antonio
River, past Petaluma (for which Harry Partch
decades ago now composed “On The Seventh
Day The Petals Fell In Petaluma”) (and where
Richard Steger went to junior and high school
because Cotati eight miles north hadn’t any)
and then road rising with the road north from
Denham Flats to past Cotati, past Rohnert Park,
9 more miles to Santa Rosa for the annual
Sonoma County Fair where this year 1998,
the theme is Adventure in Paradise. We ate,
went to the horse races, to the Hall of Flowers
with the paradise theme show and volcano,
got ice cream squares dipped before us in hot
chocolate (then rolled in peanut pieces on sticks)
in Grace Pavilion, got a ginza knife set; judging
earnest preteen/ teen dairy goat raisers,llamas,
a small snake tent, Midway, Spaghetti Palace,
tri-tip barbecue. Then home back south on 101
Richard drove us 70 miles home to San Francisco.
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I WOULD NOT LIKE TO DIE BEFORE I HAVE EXPLAINED
On Sep 14, 2024, at 7:33 PM, edward mycue mycueed@yahoo.com wrote:
About Edward Mycue & Richard Steger (you have to wait to the very end of this for Steger): San Francisco poet Edward Mycue was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and raised in Texas from age eleven. He has been a Lowell Fellow at Boston University, a WGBH-TV Boston intern, a Macdowell Colony Fellow, a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana, and he taught American Literature. He is editor of the Norton Coker Press.
His books include I Am A Fact Not A Fiction online publication, Song of San Francisco, Mindwalking, Nightboats, The Singing Man My Father Gave Me, Root Route and Range: the Song Returns, Because We Speak the Same Language,The Torn Star, Great Country, Chronicle, Damage Within the Community, Chronicle, Edward, No One For Free, Pink Garden BrownTrees.
Magazine publications include New York Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Boston Review, Washington Review, Hawai’i Review, Fence, Open City, Stand, Meanjin, Outrigger, Malahat, Outrigger, Il Signale, Arenaria, Poetry Australia, Nicolau, La Carta Oliver, fieralingue.it, poetsagainstthewar.org. He edited and published Took magazine’s 19 issues in 1987.A new collection Mindwalking 1937-2007 was released in 2008 by Philos Press. And in 2012 Song of San Francisco (Spectacular Diseases Press, England)
Edward Mycue — Time is a Worn Thread
You are here:Home/Issues/Edward Mycue — Time is a Worn Thread
Time is a Worn Thread
An Interview with Edward Mycue
by Bryan R. Monte
During May 2013, Bryan Monte conducted an e-mail interview with poet, Edward Mycue. His books include Damage Within the Community (1973), Root Route & Range: The Song Returns (1979), The Singing Man My Father Gave Me, (1980), Torn Star (1985), Edward (1986), Nightboats (2000), Mindwalking (2008) I Am A Fact Not A Fiction (2009) and Song of San Francisco (2012) among others. Mycue has been published in magazines in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Africa, and his papers were acquired in 2011 by the Yale Beinecke Library.
Mycue was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1937 and moved with his family to Dallas, Texas in 1948. In 1950s he attended North Texas State before going to Boston University on a Lowell Fellowship. While in Boston he also worked for WGBH and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. In 1961 he worked for the Peace Corps in Ghana, then for the Department of Health Education and Welfare first in the Southwestern US from 1962-65 and then in Washington DC from 1965-68. In the late 1960s Mycue lived in the Netherlands, Germany and France before moving to San Francisco in 1970.
Bryan Monte: You moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where you have lived ever since. What was San Francisco like then?
Edward Mycue: I arrived in San Francisco in the Haight at Haight and Masonic Streets on June 1, 1970. It was just after a big shootout between rival bike gangs at the Magnolia Thunderpussy Café on the opposite corner the night before. There were bullet holes in the second-floor flat windows where I lived with my sister, Margo Mycue, the booker for the New Shakespeare Company—San Francisco. We had just come up with the Company from Los Angeles.
BM: What did you do in San Francisco?
EM: I booked the Company on its travels across the country.
BM: And what was the Haight like—after the bikers left?
EM: It was a pretty busy, dozy, buzzy place. I lived with actors, artists and sculptors in a two-floor flat.
BM: You met a lot of writers in San Francisco, also didn’t you?
EM: Yes.
BM: Who were some of these writers?
EM: Within months I met George Oppen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan and Jess Collins. George and Mary Oppen became most dear to me. George got me onto Lawrence Fixel’s group that met in his living room monthly that included Jack Gilbert, Laura Ulewicz, Shirley Kaufman, Ray Carver, Nanos Valaoritis, Morton Marcus, and Lennart Bruce. Josephine Miles and Harold Norse and others swung by too. I soon also met Paul Mariah, Tillie Olson and Jim Watson-Grove. But before any of these, I met Stephen Vincent at the open readings on Upper Grant in North Beach at The Coffee Gallery. And, within a year, I met my lover, partner, friend, Richard Steger, a painter a few years younger than me.
BM: Wow, what a list! I remember Josephine Miles reading at Berkeley when I was a student and Robert Duncan, once or twice at the Newspace Gallery on Valencia Street just before I went to Brown. Who were some of the poets outside of San Francisco who influenced you?
EM: Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Richard Hugo, Ann Stanford, Elizabeth Jennings (UK), Charles Olson, May Swenson, Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Lorca, Brecht, Montale, Valery and many others.
BM: That’s also quite a list.
EM: It’s hard to choose. It changes.
BM: What were some of the literary things you did in San Francisco after meeting or studying the writers mentioned above?
EM: I “curated” (as is said nowadays) a reading series at Panjandrum Press in what has come to be termed “The Duboce Triangle” within the Castro, Market, and Church Streets area and, later in the decade, I attended one at the Grand Piano on Haight Street, where my sister, Jane Mycue, cooked.
BM: In the early 80s, you were also active in a gay men’s writing group run by Robert Gluck out of the back of Small Press Traffic Bookshop on 24th Street. That’s how I met you. I think there were the three of us, (you, me and Gluck), plus Kevin Killian, Richard Linker, Paul Shimasaki and David Steinberg. Is there anyone I forgot?
EM: Roberto Friedman, Bruce Boone and maybe Roberto Bedoya.
BM: Tell me a little bit about Lawrence Fixel’s group. I know he played a great part in your development as a poet. What was his modus operandi as a workshop teacher?
EM: He came up with what I call Fixel’s law for poets and writers; four simple injunctions about writing that are: 1. begin where you are; 2. learn from the material; 3. believe in the process; 4. become your own reader.
BM: Could you explain a bit more about the role of process in your poetry?
EM: My work, as I have seen (it) from the start, is more (a) weaving of a tapestry of different threads and themes that recur in all our lives. I create and earn my own vocabulary and alphabet to enter into again and again as I mix and remix the cannibal/ pirate motifs (motives). Paul Valery explains in The Art of Poetry how a true artist proceeds: “A work of art is never necessarily finished, for he who makes it is never complete.”
BM: I think your poem, “Time is a Worn Thread”, which was published in AQ4, especially reflects your ars poetica.
“poetry” is an odd and restricting term.
marianne moore (“i too detest it … but find in it … a place for the genuine.”)
william carlos williams (“men die every day for want of what is found there ….”)
avoid and don’t censor with the corset of “poetry.” just write.
grow into technique, your own vocabulary.
fight.
bang out your stuff.
operate simply.
(pulse).
get a move on.
time is a worn thread.
BM: You’ve published nine major poetry books in 40 years. What has been your favourite book, both in its content and its realization?
EM: That has never happened though it was partly achieved in 1973 with Damage Within the Community through Richard Steger’s artwork and vision for the book, Dennis Koran’s publishing and editing skills, typography imagined by master printer Martin Ilian, and myself exercising a discipline learned from Lawrence Fixel, George Oppen, Ann Stanford and Josephine Miles.
BM: What was one of your most problematic books?
EM: Song of San Francisco. It was in limbo for 26 years, from 1987 to 2012. In the early days there were many poems and it spread out over 100 pages. I got to view it as my “Bridge” in the sense of modelling it on Hart Crane’s swing line. Then, the times and my situation became grimmer. Everything melted away while ten pieces, more like hard, bloodless stones, remained by the mid-1990s. I sent it to Paul Green of Spectacular Diseases Press in Peterborough, Cambridge, England, who in the mid-90s published my chapbook, Because We Speak the Same Language. He offered to do it, but he wanted a special cover showing the usual San Francisco touristy highlights. I asked Richard Steger my painter, partner, spouse with whom I’ve teamed on books since the early ‘70s. Richard, however, never takes orders. And so that was a delay.
In 2000, I sent the group of ten to Paul Strangeland who published the Poetry Conspiracy monthly calendar with poems in the San Diego area, and he put them in that.
Then around 2010 or ’11 with Paul Green hitting 69 and losing his job there over in the UK and getting old, he wrote: “Let’s do it.” I responded: “Yes, let’s do it” on a 1937 postcard of the San Francisco Bay with a sketch of what the Bay Bridge was to look like. He responded that he wanted to use that card (on the cover). I didn’t see that it said in small print “San Francisco Queen City”—funny that! And odd because it’s Cincinnati, Ohio that has always been called the Queen City—that’s where my mom lived in her teens.
BM: We’ve just talked about your last book, let’s talk about the two that preceded it—Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (2008) I Am A Fact Not A Fiction (2009). I’m curious, how did you choose 61 poems from your hundreds if not thousands of poems that you’ve written for Mindwalking?
EM: Laura Beusoleil, the book’s publisher from Philos Press, chose the poems. I sent up fistfuls/manila envelopes of copies of poems to her that I raked up—at least a couple of hundreds. She wanted to choose, and that was just fine. When she decided, she asked me if I had others I wanted to include and she chose the order. I chose the title. And Richard chose the cover painting.
BM: Well, it’s a very impressive collection, a poetic, biographical retrospective of your life from your birth to 2007. Do you have any poems in this book that are particular favourites?
EM: “A Fight For Air” in six parts covering four pages in Mindwalking is part of my history beginning with a road trip from Niagara Falls to Dallas when I was eleven and ends when I’m 24. It also includes a speech, as if from a play, by my dad, a dream, and a summation. “San Francisco Bridge” describes what I saw on a hill in Oakland looking back over to San Francisco on a day trip. And “Always” is a meditation in the form of a psychological autobiography, written in one, formless exhalation.
BM: Your next book was a little bit different, your first e-book. What was your experience publishing it online?
EM: It was a nice experience because again I was among friends I respected, even loved. Jo-Anne Rosen asked me to do it. She had seen the zillions of my poems. Laura Beausoleil shuttled down from Lacey, Washington near Olympia (where she was the Olympia poet laureate) to help Jo-Anne. We knew each other also. Laura was admired by Larry Fixel and had done some work for him. I’ve known Laura since early 1970’s and she is a fine poet, grand storywriter, and artist of collages (we used them at Panjandrum Press for the readings series fliers and posters.)
Jo-Anne had wanted to establish a literary publishing arm to her enterprise (she had a commercial design business producing books, pamphlets, and fliers). I was to be her first in her literary choices where the writer didn’t have to pay. She chose 25 poems. I okayed it. She suggested the title, I Am A Fact Not A Fiction, from one of the poems.
BM: Would you like to publish another e-book in the future?
EM: Yes, I would like to have another.
BM: How did you come up with the sections of this e-book: “War/Peace”; “Life/Time/Memory”; “Histories”?
EM: Jo-Anne divided the book into three parts and she named them. She also already had images of Richard’s work and she and he decided the one to use for the cover.
BM: Do you think your poetry is becoming more self-reflective or do you see yourself moving outward with your poetry or are you doing both? In I Am A Fact Not A Fiction, for example, in “My Policeman,” you write about a man you knew in your 20s (I assume), who later killed himself in his 30s that you wrote about 30+ years later. In “Tale of Outlaws in the Commons” you retell your experience in the Peace Corps in the early 1960s.
EM: I don’t know about the self-reflection. Maybe. I’m old enough that that could be a natural development. But I am a storyteller in my poems usually with a language I have to make because most models aren’t adequate to my ‘story.’
BM: Let’s talk now about your last book again. What inspired you to write the series of poems or “Song Cycle” as Sean Carey refers to them in the introduction refers to them in Song of San Francisco?
EM: I wonder. I started the Song of San Francisco poems as a group: one day it began and one day, years later, it stopped. I didn’t have a title then. But the clouds of knowing were there. It started, then stopped.
BM: Did the AIDS epidemic inspire this cycle and/or something else? I say this because you tackle the big question, the meaning of life in your first poem, “The Song of Cities Like Viruses.” I will quote it in its entirety.
is survival about leaving a message of what works
accruing gradually out of a pool of variations
because up to now evolution has no message call waiting.
Do you see yourself as a survivor?
EM: It was a hard time. Yes, these were the AIDS years. As if they were book-ended by this and that other side of the world. I don’t see myself (as) a survivor, but I am here.
BM: What is your writing discipline like? How and when do you write? Do you write only when you feel inspired or do you follow a schedule? How often do you send work out to be published?
EM: I am always writing, even in exhausted reveries. I am better especially nowadays in the mornings. I write little parts often and gather them up when sometimes I get this energy too. Other times I am writing and there is a space and I hear parts of previously written pieces that seem to fit as if these themes went back in for further viewing from some other perspective. I write all the time.
BM: How often do you send work out to be published?
EM: I used to send poems out often, very often, and if as usual, they were returned, then I just sent them out again. I made mistakes on what I sent to magazines and strange how they took it. So I began to feel what a mag said it wanted wasn’t what they might take. So it I got that I just didn’t care what I sent to WHOM. The ‘whom’ wasn’t important to me – only what I sent was important because I had no belief in editors except just a few special ones. But some periods of hard work on poems and successes I felt, there would be a poem that seemed to come whole effortlessly and be good in a way that I could see its completeness and quality but not in a way that it was my effort and my poem.
I don’t have compulsions to scale a schedule ladder. I have sent out poems this last month (May 2013) five times. But in March, I only sent out once and maybe in January once.
BM: Some of your correspondence and publications were recently acquired and are being archived by Yale. How did that happen?
EM: Yale, through a middleman broker at Bolerium Books on Mission Street near 17th Street, took 110 boxes (some really big and crammed) and 10 more packages of odd and oversized objects including tubes and posters and artwork. I didn’t catalog things. I had to move, was disabled, and at the point of putting them all in a dumpster or two. A lot of stuff did go that way.
BM: What was in those boxes? What did they take?
EM: I am not sure what they have. About 7,000 books, mostly pamphlets, and slim volumes that I cared about I gave away to Friends of the San Francisco Library, to numerous little bookstores, and to thrift stores such as Out of the Closet, the Salvation Army, etc. I’d valued them as a collection of the five decades of writers I felt part of even when I didn’t care for their work. But they were from my time.
What went to Yale of mine was most of the 2,000 zine and mags and papers I’d published in, and this huge/jinormous group of rejection slips and letters. And all sorts of letters and stuff and I don’t know what else (I can’t pull up a visual picture). It was a trip that took a year and the local weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, took this material to hold (as I couldn’t take it with me to where I was moving and I couldn’t find the money to store the stuff). The Bay Guardian had favorably reviewed my first book in 1973, Damage Within The Community, and from time to time published my poems, usually in the spots where advertising hadn’t been sold and thus, were so small you had to look really hard even when you knew a piece was supposed to be there.
Plus my sister, Margo, had been with the New Shakespeare Company—San Francisco and the San Francisco Mime Troupe after teaching at Santa Clara University in the 1960’s. (See how lucky I was.) Bolerium Books knew me from years before with my Wobbly friends and marginal political friends I was palsy with. So Yale, the rare book and MSS library part called the Beinecke, bought my stuff.
BM: Why do you think Yale was so interested in your particular collection?
EM: They used to do all the right-wing capitalist stuff and hadn’t taken any real people’s stuff and thus I lucked out because of the big hole they had. Plus, I was seen as some sort of old fag, maybe an überfag, since I was in the early gay liberation movement 40 plus years before and because before that I’d cut my teeth on the Civil Rights Movement causes and activities and that got me blackballed in some southwestern states when I worked for a federal government agency back when the world was just as bad but better camouflaged.
BM: What is your current project? What are you working on?
EM: My current project I began several months ago. It’s called Vanishing Point. It actually began two years ago when one of Richard’s nieces, who is in her late 20’s and a striving graphic designer, asked if I could send her something to use as a project. Then she changed jobs, etc., and hasn’t asked for more and I just got the oars and have kept going. After that I want to resurrect some poems that keep coming into my mind and haven’t been published in any book.
BM: Thank you for your time, Ed
EM: You’re welcome.
I WOULD NOT LIKE TO DIE BEFORE I HAVE EXPLAINED – A SUITE OF 6 POEMS by Edward Mycue
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue Thursday 25 March 2021 9:34pm
Thinking of my godmother and aunt Jane Delehant Ryan who died at 96 and of
Old Jack as Ruth Witt-Diamant refered to Jack Lyman
when he was in his 90’s in the 1970’s as “the oldest poet”
during the times I was her gardener and she’d go up to Bayles Mill in St Helena in
Napa County and bring him down for days at a time and worked it so we got together.
He was almost 100 or 100 when he died. W.W. Lyman.
And later when with Richard Steger I’d go up and stay in Calistoga at Dr Wilkinson’s spa/ motel we’d go down to St Helena (passing Bales Mill State Park)
and go to the St Helena Library with the Silverado Museum (with all the Robt L Stevenson materials and the really swell paintings)
and I’d go to the library where after surrendering my credentials (Dr Lic, etc) I’d go to the rare book room and read in the 3 volumes of closely typed carbons
on onionskin pages of Jack Lyman’s memoirs. I think I only did that thinking back no more than 4 or 5 times. I’d a lot of writing.) I’ve written about him and of
Helen Hoyt poet his wife
and their son who was still alive into the 1980’s I (the R word) remember. He’d been Ruth Witt-Diamant’s teacher at UC Berkeley way back there. What lives!
I maunder on, but sometimes within the blather is such real history and much of it in my tapestry of writing.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 25 March 2021
INDIGO MIST>SCHILLER SHINE>TOURMALINE GLOW
And still we seek
beyond circles
twisting,
continuing,
turning
what was then
back< forward>
because then
here returns,
not here’s beginning.
A word dreams motion.
A motion
makes life glorious
puts raw silk to silence
gives music tongue
erupts nature –
as it becomes—
revealing
the prairie garnet
leaving the wind behind
in all the rainbow colors.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue Thursday March 25, 2021 2:16pm
Childhood desire turns life’s wheels,
these large hoops, propelling them with sticks
under the tall park elm trees. Movement of wheels.
Everyone there is here now
within you and all of your
kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to
flower and to fly and to sail this sea of
thickening light.
Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering
of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices:
they live here now without forgetting the way
back under the surface of consciousness, the
bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model,
and grim ire.
Life pushes, photography wins over
life, death Charon, the ferryman, carries souls across
Dante says there are five rivers and that Styx is for the
greatest damned living their wrath cursing war with each other for all
eternity My mischances shaped my apprenticeship-muscles
When you are young you don’t know what’s coming
Life is not the same poetry now, just verse
My inner sanctum let joy become lost in Cairo
I grasped failures through a lengthy history
Wanting to learn dying before severing life’s link
Welcome the far shore before you miss it
Notice the far shore before you reach it.
River of life life river the river life life a river bed all pass through Our
earth is a riverbed our river of life River Styx forms a boundarybetween the compartmentalized and the streams of consciousness sailing away
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue
A. INDIGO MIST
2. You don’t need contrition for a condition. Maybe an explanation will do. Maybe it’s an act– not a crime. You don’t need permission to seek sublime. It’s the condition. Don’t ask vindication. Brighten the dark. No negatives first. Follow your thirst. Trust intuition. It’s the condition.
4. We now begin to see that our ‘strangers’ within us are the sharpie fine pointed pens we thought “we” wrote with, but really are the life force, forces who lead, encourage, lift us through our nights. What this is baffles me.
5. You’re not mythic. It is here now. We pass out of history. This life force continues. While we live we are stewards, mechanics, actors, helpers.
6. Our actions matter, our thoughts matter. Our beginnings organize into this great matter.
B. SCHILLER SHINE
Here’s mind’s province. Beyond here worlds have no cause looking back. Out there becomes then a here. From personal to political to spires, further and higher to travel. What was here then, there, remains. Here, now, resting time, still we seek.
C. TOURMALINE GLOW
Beyond circles is twisting, continuing. Turning what was then back, forward, Here returns, but not here’s beginning. That words dream motion makes life glorious puts raw silk to silence gives music tongue reveals nature becomes the prairie garnet leaving the wind behind and in all the rainbow colors.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 18 February 2021 11:00pm Thursday
its root, route, and range as a song, of minute, uneven, parts mostly lyrical in –something similar to a series of novels known as roman-fleuve, a French term that literally means “river-novel” and that I refer to my poetry that I see as a similar series of minute pieces, of poems, that are in some ways novels written by one author, me, Edward Mycue, in my life, and are about situations, ideas, characters (sometimes family members or friends)–a saga, where a historical backdrop plays a prominent role in the presentations, often sketching an era.
Once I’d considered, in reveries, memorizing many sacred books: the Koran, the Bible old & new, the Book of the Dead, the Kaleval, plus the I Ching, that once seemed almost ‘like sacred, man’ during some San Francisco hippy days practiced by us on our nailed-down living room carpet with Connie, Vincent, Barbara, Margaret, Kevin, Ruth, Michael, Joe, Beverly, David, Elizabeth, Phil, Margo/Lee, Mom, Jane, Nick, Rachel, Richard/ me–drifting back into some Mime Troupe& New Shakespeare Company-San Francisco Haight & 1200 Masonic Street night/day recollections and has all come to seem hitting speed-bump apprenticeships some later pheromone breakdowns as lesson by lesson we found ways leaving paw prints on parchment.
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 23 March 2021 Tuesday 10:36am
The San Francisco poet Edward Mycue writes of Richard Steger’s painting and drawings with their bold objects, rich and evanescent colors, landscapes, patterns, noises felt as elemental, windy, hot delicate
Finishing to cover a cultural waterfront including the tough strong that flow the way fish in the Oakland Art Museum koi pond can be both physical and abstract as the towering and the delicate are built from pieces into spiritual entities as a new old master artist.
He was born in Chicago, grew up in Cotati, Ca, and having studied first at Santa Rosa Junior College under Maurice Lapp and moved south to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, later receiving his Master of Art in Painting from San Francisco State University.
His initial show was in 1974 at the Labaudt Memorial Gallery. His most recent was at the Richmond One Gallery in 2019.
His lilting art lifts my spirits because here remains a new voice in these recent years. Without bowing to any reigning panjandrum styles and schools, here is a painter who just can kick the eagled out of their seven main heavens
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue 23/ III/ 21 Tuesday
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The dead have no voice
Ecclesiastes 9:5
“For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.”
but they speak echoing pasts
cultivating winds in gardens of worlds
where sable crepe drapes the doors
where Quasimodo matures from Adonis
where every scarlet aberration becomes a memory
where Hastrubal’s wife and kids must flee into the flames.
The bitter lingers.
Events stamp themselves cumulatively
on place, period, progeny.
There’s no grand opera in a puppet play.
The soldier marionette is mute.
The dead have no voice.
Speak for them
Copyright Edward Mycue
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EVERYTHING FOR ME AT 16 CAN SEEM BEAUTIFUL
Art Lund sang Joey from THE MOST HAPPY FELLOW (‘in the whole Napa Valley’– from Frank Loesser’s musical of Sidney Kingsley’s depression-era play THEY KNEW WHAT THE WANTED ), Vaughn Monroe deeptoned Mona Lisa; Nat King Cole, had his easy way with Nature Boy. Then it’s Ebb Tide, The Unchained Melody (‘Time goes by so slowly/and time can do so much….), & Teresa Brewer wailing: Let me go/let me go/Let Me Go, Lover ./Let me be/set me free/from your spell.’ [—oh, yeh. yeh, yeh.] My brother David’s absolute favorite: Perez Prado’s (It’s) Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (‘when you’re in love’—That must have been his Joanie Parker song.). [I was sixteen that summer working as old Mr. Flanagan’s helper at the Campfire Girls’ camp, south of Dallas, on a ridge above the Big Brothers’ camp below, where my best friend Frank ‘Nicky’ Knickerbocker worked-his mother got us our jobs.] Spin to Perry Como singing No Other Love (have I/only my love for you,/only the dream we knew,/into the night I cry/hurry home, come home to me,/set me free/ free from doubt/ and free/ from longing.- from Rogers & Hammerstein’s ME AND JULIET). Now switch into ‘It’s always like this/I worry and wonder,/your lips may be near/ but where is your heart?’ (The Song From Moulin Rouge). After that is Shake Rattle & Roll (‘You wear those thin dresses/and the sun come shining through./I didn’t know honey all that belonged to you.’ Adults were shocked at those lines, yet we were not so lascivious as they were I think.) Now skirl/ swoon to Vic Damone crooning Eternally the soaring theme of Charlie Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT movie [By the end of that summer of nineteen fifty-three I thought I loved Ellie the Campfire Girls’ summer-camp cook’s boy friend also from her North Carolina college a football hunk working in that Big Brother camp in that valley below]: “though the stars may cease to shine/my love shall always be/forever true and loving you / eternally.” My youth now seems a good earth original today so achingly beautiful. Great grandmother Jane Kennedy Delehant had often intoned “Backward, oh backward/ o time in thy flight/ make me a child again/ just for tonight.” Night! So now in this time/ over time I think it, write it here and say it now recalling that summer in 1953 when I was 16.
© Copyright Edward Mycue
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