Tag: Linda Chown

Posted in General Interest, interNational Poetry Month, Poems/Poetry, poetry

Outcasts Gate Grieving | Linda Chown

Posted on by The BeZine Editors
Photograph ©2023 Linda Chown

Outcasts have a way of touching

When I start the night
I think Eskimo’s and seashells:
Places of open abandon
Like black sheep and the wild ones-
Outcasts have a way of touching
Those forlorn places that you hide
Beside the beauty of your mind

Sather Gate

Taking me higher than I was
Pairing with my pals

To fight the Knowland police
gone hard metallic-tight

The nation had, it seems, landed in Berkeley
     to see what happened

So we had to stand
up for the prize of freedom

in this small oak-saturated space.
In a small sunny circle we were

ready to face them with the side of our eyes with our 
     cavities even,
with anything.

It was just too important 
to not let them own
our souls their way.

So we leased our 
strength into music

We rejoiced in our togetherness,
In our language, which that day more than meant 
     something:

it was,
it really was
everything.

Versions of grieving

Grief is about a whole new trip that just keeps on 
     getting older.
Grief is how it feels to have two left feet.
Grief is how it feels to be dehydrated in your arms
Grief is how it feels to be lost
in always
Grief is though how it feels 
to be perpetually free.
Grief is the birth of a new beauty only you can see.
Red peonies and orange daisies on a spree
What a feast for the likes of me.

Vietnamese Faces

It seemed a day of decay
where my eyes kept 
seeing Vietnamese faces
human expression raw in dark sun
abstract fingers bleeding light
my eyes went into a past
where feeling curves wide, 
not this gray without birds
this quiet without singing

©2023 Linda Chown
All rights reserved

Linda Chown…

…is a longtime contributor to the Bezine,and defends its commitment to justice and peace and equality. She has participated in social movements throughout the West Coast and internationally. She writes both poetry, and what used to be called criticism, that is a close reading of how a piece of writing works, or doesn’t work. She has five books of poems and multiple publications of her many writings. She likes to keep her writing and her living new. As the weeks go by and disasters and worries grow, she hopes her writing grows and changes. Her latest book, sunfishing, is for sale on Amazon.

Find In The Bezine

The 2023 (Inter)National Poetry Month BeZine Blog Bash

Pastel of European Robin perched on a small branch by Tom Higgins ©2021
Art: European Robin, pastels, ©2021 Tom Higgins
Posted in COVID-19/Pandemic, poem, Poems/Poetry

Two poems by Linda Chown

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

A Time for God

This is the time for God,
for a roaring sonorous voice,
a biblical moment, indeed,
when we’re shouldering the slaughtered daily,
trying to assuage the fire of fear in and around us,
when leaders spring forth and speak
with the hallowed tone of the ancient tabernacle.
Ages old salt smells, a smear of blood
We’re ready for the divine, dying alive in our
concern. This big, larger than life moment
when life and death waver voluptuously around us.


Modern Life Is Being

masked faces in the cubist ball
that modern life is being,
that modern life is seeing
masked ones gloved and covered
floating mindless in Edgar Allan Poe’s hives,
his Masque of the Red Death breaking,
reality cracks & strange shapes rattle
much like Robert Louis Stevenson incubates
fabulous forms his boats steering far off course, heroes double vestiges of how they thought themselves to be what they were
Poe and RLS brilliant slantwise visionaries. Besides they spun torn lives on the edge,
blooming irregular tunes, masked and twisted.

© 2020, Linda Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite. Linda’s Amazon Page is HERE.

Posted in April 2020 Poetry Month, COVID-19/Pandemic, interNational Poetry Month, International Poetry Month April 2020, Poems/Poetry

The World as a Terror Field and other poems by Linda Chown

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

The World as a Terror Field

World as a Terror-Field
Think of those sunflower petals
Flying away so yellow in a golden light
Think of the anarchists’ red shirts
Pungent in Guadalajara, overt and blood-drenched,
Think of you this sunny morning receiving a spam email
Threatening to contaminate your whole house with Coronavirus.
There is no safe place anymore to dream of La La Land.
We can be reached anywhere and pulled and tugged,
Unhinged even from the safety of our soul.

I think of Virginia Woolf having coffee, her mind,
Measuring the world of decades, stirring the sugar in her coffee.
It’s as though her mind-place reached around the world.
At a glance, with her word nest intact.
Now, we are within walls polished so transparent,
Our souls close like an x-ray’s light, all seen into.

There’s a terror of no intimacy, leaking passwords and invasive viruses.
Megabytes of someone else’s knowing
When all we need is what we know
Curse those who disparage the robin
Plucking away, the stalwart bluejay.
Curse those who say we don’t matter
Anyway, any way.

Rebels everywhere

This talk of corpses likely to be,
These flat charts with hollow corporate names
Remind me of the 50s when people popped into mushroom clouds.
Those consonant-heavy names Malenkov, Andropov, Chernenko
and Stalin loomed large in unseeing brutality.

This was a time for the feminine way,
a time for pockets of air and lavender,
That way to reach between things, to slither love
like Dickinson finding new feet for poems
to say what wasn’t said, for Emily Bronte to
take love out of bounds.

While HUAC measured people as
stones and lashed at pinkos
I voraciously read of rebels everywhere,
Those who spoke for something
I found latent
In my sick little-girl heart.

Death into this spring

Spring finds us speechless
to say, to say how terror is,
how death turns our head.
We’ve been used to letting life go by without us.
I breathe hard for life with addled lungs.
After all, we are life, all there is of it.
Now in the heart of growth,
death is climbing hard
toward us all over.
Now, we have to stand out in the balance
and ring our life for living,
jump and plunge
over the edge into what comes next.
Quick the blue iris is coming
And the red peonies
And all your wonderful life.

© 2020, Linda Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.

Posted in Poems/Poetry

Alphabet of Love

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

Living this life again
as though I were six sick
again and grasping about in silence.
I will learn to breathe again,
how to go beyond it
So that I can dance and fly
to those zones of magic.
Stones and burning light
and the kind of openness
you can never plan.
Tones of people touching.
The taste of food licked and loved.
As HD says, “I must read some hours every day, it is food.”
Now, I must write some hours every day.
It is my alphabet of love.

© 2020, Linda Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.

Posted in disability/illness, Poems/Poetry

Feeling Good Was Good Enough For Me

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

When being sick was all you knew
Sweet Jesus, the doc last week asked
“When was the last time you felt good,”
Me and Bobby McGee and I saw black
Roses. Could not thread my way to good.
Life a Harlem-globetrotter procession of sham
Dunks and wheezes. Born RH negative all my
Blood exchanged. Lord have mercy then
Coughing times in bed over and over again.
I hadda find good feeling cuz i was an other early
Outcast over and over. Put the music on
And I would play the piano
Rocking to peace my outcast soul.

Sickness made me hold on to my
Strange and play it on an Aeolian harp
To woo the good places and make me me.
Thank you Kris Kristofferson,
Good enough for a life to live,
To share with you the secrets
Of my soul on the edges
Of strong all along. Be a pearl
On my own making the
Good happen. Jiving Janis.
Feeling good was good enough for me.

© 2020, Linda Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite. Linda’s Amazon Page is HERE.

Posted in General Interest

Neurological

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

You’ve Become Neurological

What a fetish we have
for being in balance, for
homeostasis in a golden mean, drone balancing the books of life.
Scales, balance, dead weights.
This dubious insistence upon equalities kicks out the untoward: albinos frozen in their pale,
stammerers and limpers struggling with impatient eyes looking on.
Like they’ve crossed over the line “for whites only.” And certainly you neurological ones should stay in place, out of sight, too.

If your proprioception snaps, too,
it’s the granddaddy of the bombing out of you as you know you to be.
This is the medical tyranny of the majority as de Tocqueville cautioned about democracy.
Now what you touch is somewhere, but just not here,
It’s always a reaching.
Your fingers lost your nose to feel find. Feel find has gone.
Like your whole being’s gone dyslexic: you neurological zoo.
No more you for you.
There is anger, too, when people don’t get that it’s out of your hands.
Slithering along between neurons,
that there’s nothing to do
when your nerves fail you.
This new kind of notness,
this neural obliteration
where you can perhaps start reconnecting you.

© 2020, Linda Chown

Linda Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.

Linda’s Amazon Page is HERE.

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Being Greta Thunberg, a poem by Linda Chown

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

Thunberg in front of the Swedish parliament, holding a “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (transl. School strike for the climate) sign, Stockholm, August 2018 courtesy of Anders Hellberg  under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

to be like Greta Thunberg
you must become yourself
completely as though there
were no prison of skin to stay inside
no ego to say don’t try
no doors to close
the kind of bravery that moves
lives is not second hand
it is the ultimate it’s like an
we can do it trip
the magic liberation of person
we’ve been dreaming for
the closeness of fish in water
pure semiosis and pre-verbal closeness

© 2019, Linda Chown