Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "hew-wolff"

Oh boy! Going tonight to hear our poet-friends Dale Jensen and Judy Wells read in celebration of their 10th wedding anniversary at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts tonight in Alameda. Jeanne Lupton will host. Can't wait! My husband Hew Wolff and I will read at the open mic -- I wrote a special tribute poem for Dale and Judy. 7 PM.

Hew's out hanging paintings. Wanted to invite anyone in the SF Bay Area to his reading Monday, May 14 at Poetry Express at Priya Indian Restaurant on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley, California. It's hosted by Jim Barnard, Nance Wogan, Jan Dederick and Odilia Galván Rodriguez. There's an open mic, and poetry fans get 20% off their delicious Indian Food. 7 PM - 9 PM. Hew's formal poetry is lilting, clever, conversational and lovely.

Right now Hew's hanging a painting in the Pro Arts Gallery at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, California. We'll attend the free reception there at 7 PM on Friday, May 4.

On Saturday and Sunday, June 9 & 10, from 10 AM to 5 PM each day, we'll be having an open studio in the back yard. We'll hang Hew's paintings all along the fence, serve snacks and drinks, and hang out with anyone who shows up. I'll get the details up on Facebook soon, or, if you aren't on Facebook but want to come, just message me on Goodreads or email me at jmsteckel at aol dot com for details.

Happy end of National Poetry Month!

That's the title of a delightful blog by Sara Chittenden, a bi woman who plays bass in the indie band Soundmeetsound. If you want to learn more about bi people (or get a shot in the arm of pride!), check out her inspiring and beautiful Tumblr at http://thesunnysideofbeingbi.tumblr.com

You can find her great review of The Horizontal Poet at
http://thesunnysideofbeingbi.tumblr.c...

Soundmeetsound's first album is coming out soon.... I can't wait.

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I'll be doing at least three San Francisco Bay Area readings in September. Save the dates:

September 5 PM I'm featured at Sacred Grounds Cafe Open Mic in San Francisco, hosted by Dan Brady, who recently read his own work at the SF Public Library.

September 8 PM I'm cofeatured with my friend and mentor Julia Vinograd at an open mic hosted by the lovely Tanka and performance poet Jeanne Lupton at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda.

September 22 PM I'm featured with my husband Hew Wolff and several other queer and/or kinky erotica writers at Perverts Put Out, San Francisco's literary smut salon hosted by Carol Queen and Simon Shepard at the Center for Sex and Culture.

Details and invitations to follow!

Bill Brent published my husband Hew Wolff’s fiction in his magazine Black Sheets and his anthology Best Bisexual Erotica. Years ago Bill co-founded a recurring literary erotica salon (with Carol Queen) in which Hew and I performed (our literary work, for crying out loud!) We were scheduled to read there again this fall. Instead, we’re going to his memorial. Week before last, Bill Brent jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Last night I read Liz Highleyman’s obituary for him in the Bay Area Reporter.

I had my first back operation in medical school. For twenty-three years now, I’ve felt like someone poured molten lead down my left hip, buttock, leg, outer ankle and foot. I’m not talking sciatica, people. I’ve had that. This is much more severe and unremitting neuropathic pain in the distributions of L4, L5, and S1 spinal nerves.

In the middle of my medical residency, going to work at the hospital felt like hitting concrete at terminal velocity. I'd wonder if I could just jump off a bridge into the freezing Charles River instead. The thing was, by the time I reached the bridge I'd be late to work, and I can't stand being late, so I'd just go to work.

Still, I kept an IV needle connected by plastic tubing to a big syringe in my bottom dresser drawer. If I killed a kid by accident on the wards or just couldn’t bear life for one more minute, my plan was to give myself an intravenous air embolism. Once the hell that was my medical training was over, though, I didn't want to jump off anything anymore and was glad I had survived.

Five years after I left the practice of medicine, I’d had two more back surgeries. Bed-bound for months on end, I wished I had bought a gun before I became dependent on other people so that I could shoot myself. By the time I started to feel better physically, I no longer wanted a gun. There are ways to make chronic pain more bearable and alleviate the depression that almost always accompanies it, even if I can't be "fixed."

It unnerves me that a man as talented and kind as Bill Brent, a man only a couple years older than I, a man loved by so many, a man who made it easier for Hew and me to be who we are, despaired and committed suicide. Not being inside his head or his life, I can't judge whether it was right for him or not. From my window, though, it looks like tragedy.

If you have chronic pain, see a pain management doctor. See a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist or get a CBT-for-pain book or do CBT-for-pain exercises online. Meditate. It will raise your pain threshold and make it easier for you to cope. Take the stupid antidepressants--even if they don't lift all your depression, they'll help up-regulate endogenous opiate receptors in a part of your brain involved in pain processing.

Then if you still want to off yourself, that’s your right. The truth is, your chronic pain may never go away. Your pain probably won’t ever get completely better. You, yourself, though, might get better. I’ve survived twenty-three years. If you can stand it long enough, life gets better.

Bill Brent was a bridge. He connected people. Now that bridge is broken. He burned it. He’s dead. I hang over the smoking, splintered edge, looking down at him. He’s lost his beautiful Hawaiian tan. His face looks white as a shroud. Nothing I can shout or write can touch him.


Bill Brent

San Francisco Bay Area readers, save the date! I'll be reading Friday evening, Nov. 16, 2012, with Betty Blue, (aka Jane Kindred) at BiFabulous Authors, the kickoff event for the 25th Anniversary celebrations of the Bay Area Bisexuals Network (BABN). The reading and reception run from 7 PM to 9 PM at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St. (between Castro & Collingwood streets) in San Francisco, California.

It's gonna be a great party, people. I joined BABN when I moved to the SF Bay Area in 1998. Soon after, at a meeting of Berkeley BiFriendly, I met the host, Hew Wolff. He had been a member of BABN almost since its inception. We have been partners now for 14 years. Today is our wedding anniversary. Happy Halloween, y'all!

Betty Blue is a bi erotica writer, one of whose alter egos is the fantasy writer Jane Kindred. I'm thrilled to get to read with her and to celebrate one of the biggest reasons I live here in Oakland -- the peer group of other bisexual people I found here in the beautiful Bay Area.

Halloween is my wedding anniversary. Hew and I went to Luka's Taproom in midtown Oakland to celebrate. Afterward we lit candles in our front window around a sugar skull we bought Sunday at the Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebration in the Fruitvale, our exuberant Latino ghetto. A sky gravid with rain (or perhaps the per capita murder rate) kept the usual few trick-or-treaters away this year, leaving us a satellite-dish-sized bowl of Snickers and Milky Ways on the coffee table. The tiny candy bars sing siren songs to me now from the living room, but I'll stop my ears with foam earplugs and lash myself to the headboard.

Several years ago, I wrote this Halloween poem, "Luminaria," for Hew. Valyntina Grenier was kind enough to publish it in her online journal Back Room Live . Valyntina is a talented artist and poet with an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California. She has shown her visual art in solo and group exhibitions in Oakland and Tucson. She curated the Oakland reading series Back Room Live, from which her journal drew its inspiration.

Watching on today's news patients being evacuated from Bellevue Hospital in New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy reminds me so of this poem I wrote after Hurricane Katrina, "Charity after the Hurricane." It's about Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where my grandfather Morris Steckel trained to be a general practioner. The poem was published online by Kemble Scott in SoMa Literary Review and in my first chapbook, The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006).

My heart goes out to everyone in the waterlogged states.

Charity after the Hurricane

Hydrocephalus Boy is doing okay.
His shunt’s the only thing that’s draining around here.
The gomer with the Marines tattoo boxed his beans.
Guy hasn’t peed in two days,
and we got no dialysis,
no power,
no suction,
no lights.
Rick’s sewing people up by flashlight in the OR
since the ER’s an aquarium.
Jeannie’s suctioning green crap
out of the Funny Looking Kid’s trach
with an ear-bulb and a syringe.
Looks like a giant turkey-baster.
Kid’s circling the drain.
We’ve been bag-ventilating the guy
with Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome
since Monday. We take turns.
My hands ache.
No more water to drink, but if you’re thirsty,
I can put in an IV and fill up your tank.
You look like an easy stick.
You want potassium in that, doctor?
Got no coffee, but there’s Ritalin left in the pharmacy.
I sent the derm resident
to salvage some crackers from the cafeteria.
Yeah, I know it’s underwater.
He’s from Harvard.
Don’t they have a swimming requirement there?
He’s gotta be good for something.
Stay out of the east stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors.
That’s where we’re stacking the bodies.
There’s ten feet of water flooding the morgue
and fluid filling up the lungs
of the Little Old Lady in heart failure.
She sounds wet.
She may have made it off her roof,
but she’s drowning from the inside.
Water, water, everywhere.
My throat’s dry.
My lips are cracked.
My knuckles hurt.
We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
one by one.
We carried them up eight flights of stairs
to the parking garage roof.
We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
ARDS-man just croaked.
My hands are sore from squeezing that bag.
I kept him alive for four days
and now he’s kicked the bucket on the motherfucking roof
because the helicopters haven’t come.
Little Old Lady’s chest is too stiff to move.
The bag just won’t push it up and down anymore.
She’s toast.
Too much water on the inside,
nothing but water on the outside,
and not even a Diet Coke to drink.
I’m just going to sit down here.
I’m just going to put my head in my hands.
I’m just going to let my shoulders shake.
I’m not crying.
I’m too dry.