REMISS, remiss I have been, leaving this site untouched for twelve stark months. It’s not as if I haven’t had gaps before, I certainly have, even substantial ones, but in this case not only did a full year slide by, but I left you hanging with an unfinished little story. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were to ask, really, what the gosh darn heck happened? Well, I just wandered off, you see.

I took my first unexpected step in May of last year when I wandered into a performance thingy by a group called The Wandering Ensemble. It was part of the annual San Francisco International Arts Festival to-do and the description read something like, “A multi-disciplinary performance including dance, movement, music, song, spoken word, storytelling, and more, all wrapped in a healing ceremony.” Having been around performance art and healing artists for decades, I determined that it would be either really good or really bad, which was the best reason I could think of to go. So I went, and it was good, with about forty people doing all kinds of things that evoked community and joy, so strongly that I couldn’t stop thinking, Boy I haven’t worked with a happy group like this for a long time and I could sure use summa that. So at the end of the show (which had us all dancing, of course), I asked who was in charge and then I asked him, “Hey, can I perform with you?” And he said, “I don’t know, can you?” And that was that. I started dancing and doing music with them in August and haven’t stopped since.

That show was also my first proper date with this fellow Ko, who is among other things a dancer with Sakura Ren, a traditional Japanese performance group, but who wasn’t really familiar with avant-garde American performance (or whatever the fuck you wanna call it). He was blown away too, and we went on to see lots of other cool shows and also ended up becoming boyfriends or whatever and have been living together since the fall. So for the first time in years I’m in an actual relationship, and a healthy one at that (which I barely understand), possibly the healthiest I’ve ever been in. And though we each remain fully engaged in our separate lives, as you know any kind of new relationship will take you down paths of its own.

So when I say I wandered off from this site, I mean that in a number of ways. But cumulatively, I wandered into avenues of activity and creative endeavors that I hadn’t done for a long time — or never at all — and I liked it. Sure I did the occasional poetry or prose reading, but my focus was elsewhere. In fact after the first night of rehearsal last August, I posted this pic on Facebook with the caption, “Fuck poetry, I’m doin this now,”

confusing the heck outta the poets (and quite a few others). In fact a lot of them are still confused about what kind of hijinks I’ve been up to, except the few who have come to see us perform. To wit: my focus was, in a phrase, on rewiring my brain. I started dancing for the first time in thirty years and singing and doing percussion and all kinds of group work and performance. I started writing songs and teaching myself to play the violin, which was something I never expected to do. (Ko found a violin someone had left with him years ago, and asked if I wanted it. I told him I didn’t play it and in fact had stopped playing guitar a couple of years ago when my hand arthritis got bad, so I took it to the Ensemble. The director Eric told me that no one in the group played the violin at this point, and suggested that I take it home and figure it out. So I did.) The only thing I wasn’t interested in doing was poetry and word-work, except in service to the group — and not too much of that, as I mostly wanted to do the things I wasn’t good at. After a few months of this my brain (and musculature, and cardiovasc) started feeling raaaaather refreshed and kinda shiny, which was when I realized what I was doing. I hadn’t set out to rewire my brain, or even with the idea in mind; my brain, or mind, or body decided to on its own, which I was sure pleased to discover. Some might call it intuition; I call it that smells good over there.

The Wandering Ensemble operates out of Cal State University East Bay in Hayward, so it runs more or less on a school year. In fact a lot of the rehearsals are also a university class, though it incorporates a good number of community members as well (like myself, though mostly younger, haha). We do a few performances in different locations in the fall and spring, and a big capstone performance (required for the students) on campus in early May. I’ve put a few video clips from those this past year on the updated Performance page (more on that below), and here’s an excerpt from the show we did this spring for the SFAIF, at a community center called Ruth’s Table in San Francisco on May 2, in case you’re curious to see just what the heck I’ve been talkin about.

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LOTS OF NEW STUFF HERE!

I’ve been flogging myself Catholic-style over my neglect of this site, so I’ve put together some major updates just for you (and my guilt). I’ve cleared the dustbunnies out of the Events page, which now sports just those few upcoming. If you’re curious about all my readings and performances you’ve missed in the last year (yeah right), or ever for that matter, there’s an up-to-date pdf with all that info ripe for the clickin — in fact all of the data pdf’s are present perfect. The Fresh Words page is finally and totally updated with, whaddaya know, fresh words! So cheggum out. Further to the right (no not that right), I’ve amped up the Performance page to volume 11 with lots of recent and archival vids of readings and, yes, shenanigans. It’s a true shenaniganaria! Parse that, why don’cha, or better yet click on through and shenanigan down. Okay, enough with the… and finally I’m pleased to announce an entirely new tab (as of last winter, but I’d forgotten to mention) for Film, because now it seems I’m a Hollywood screenwriter or some shit. Anyway look if you dare. Don’t look at the Bio page because I haven’t gotten to it yet and it’s old and stale. And that pic! I look like I’m 17.

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To wander means to live. That’s it. You’re in a field, then in another field, even if one of them looks like a building and one like the sky. Then you get a drink of water. The water wanders through you as you wander through other water. Molecules. Sweet and breezy. You turn a key and start a series of explosions. They are also wandering. They have lifetimes and eons. They’re in a field, then in another field. Other water goes inside them and they are you. You are everything, even as you remember being nothing. Other water takes a drink of water and all the fields burst into bloom, burst into you, burst into all the squirrels in the world as they wander off to breakfast.

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UPCOMING EVENTS  ::  Three readings in the pipeline, and a few more things lined up for the fall. First up, on Wednesday, August 26, I’ll be reading for Collapse Press at the Lyrics & Dirges series at Pegasus Books in beautiful downtown Berkeley. Co-con-spirators will be Han Raschka (!) in from Wisconsin, Taneesh Kaur and Kim Shuck boating in from San Francisco, and Paul Corman-Roberts tunneling his way from Alameda Island. Hosted by the lovely Sharon Coleman. Maaaaybe I’ll read a bit from my new book. My new what?! Keep reading!  ::  I  am grateful to be taking part in a memorial reading for Khalifa Mitchell (RIMFP, poet-brother!) as part of Kim Shuck’s ongoing Poetry Jam at the San Francisco Public Library on Thursday, September 10 . The full lineup is yet to be announced.  ::  Just after that, and early notice here so don’t miss it, Saturday, September 12 will be the release reading for my new chapbook Breaking Crown from Collapse Press. Yes you read that right — this is a surprise pub and you wanna see it! It’ll be an online event so there’s no excuse not to be there except the fall of the internet, which ya never know might happen by then. There are a couple of samples and more info on the Fresh Words page and below at the official announcement. Break it!  ::  Finally, just a heads up that if you’re curious to see more of what The Wandering Ensemble is about, and in person, we’ll have a few Bay Area performances in October and November. So keep your eyes and ears open. You kind of need to if you want to see and hear.  ::  As usual, lotsa deets on the Events page. It’s like I was never gone!  😛

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Wander will away again when a-wiggle a-waggle are why, we watch the warble and wash the sky a-woogle a-wuggle awry, and when we wallow a-wriggle a-wrangle and worry a-wobble a-web, we wile a willow while warhammers billow and witch away which a-way stich a-day snitch a-bay sliding and fiding and riding and biding till wawa and woowoo will shine.

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UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS  ::  Collapse Press, who published both editions of Unit of Agency, my collection of pissed-off leftie poems, has graciously agreed to sponsor a pop-up chapbook of my recent crown of sonnets titled Breaking Crown. Can you say yayayayayay? Or sononononnet? I can. It’s a series of fifteen interlinked sonnets that address how we might view and begin to reconstruct our currently broken culture. You’ll find a bit more about it and a sample of two sonnets on the Fresh Words page this month. I’m really proud of these pieces (this piece), and would be grateful if you’d give it a gander. Excited to have a surprise pub!  ::  ALSO there’s a very interesting book coming out in September on which I worked as developmental editor for fifteen months. It’s a fascinating exploration of social and cultural structures, new and old, that impede attempts at sustainability and creating a better world in general. The book is Overton’s Garden, authored by Tom Greenwood, a sustainability expert in the U.K. who became frustrated a few years ago after decades of work in that field with how impossible it seemed to make actual progress. So he started asking himself why that might be the case, and ended up writing this elegant series of arguments not about how to move forward but about what some of those impediments are and how they work. That said, the book actually creates momentum in the reader to break old thought patterns and move forward in new ways. That’s all for now and more on it soon. Full disclosure: I have a chapter on generative writing in the text, but believe me that is not why I’m waving this flag. Click on the book title above to check out Tom’s gorgeous website, and be sure to pick a mushroom at the bottom.

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So, will I keep this up monthly for a while, and even finish the “Operator” story? I guess you’ll just have to tune in to see. In the meantime, maybe you can take a few minutes, take a few breaths, and

WANDER HERE

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Sincerely,
Richard

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