wound / drown

He lies first, says the skinned chin & swollen eye's from play-fighting. Look at me, she says, take your sunglasses off. When he does, he looks in the passenger side mirror, looks away, replaces the glasses. The eye is nearly swollen shut, she's seen, she blinks a thousand times for strength, focuses on traffic lights, away from his thinning frame. What are you afraid of, he asks, and she says, I'm afraid that you're using again, I'm afraid there's something about you that you won't touch. He turns to watch pedestrians outside the hospital with a numb quiet, then it's time for his appointment & he's gone. He lies second, says okay, here's the truth: it's from falling face first on a metal dog crate, I'm sorry I lied. A dog crate shaped like a fist, she thinks, a fist shaped like a lie shaped like a resentment shaped like a raft on which one floats away from God. He's sleepless in all cities, sleepless in himself. He finds a new friend to disappear inside. She closes her hand, cries into dusk on a folding chair amidst strangers. Somebody gives her a tissue crushed into the pocket of a purse. Brother, she thinks, I cannot help you. Go where you must go. Come back if you can.

desire, desire, desire ...

Growing in Spirit - C.P. Cavafy

He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience & respect.
He will hold to some laws
but he will mostly violate
both law and custom, and go beyond
the established, inadequate norm.
Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him.
He will not be afraid of the destructive act:
half the house will have to come down.
This way he will grow virtuously into wisdom.


I've been reading a slim volume of Cavafy and read this poem about ten times this morning in the gray kitchen light. An important guide & teacher from college, Richard Hoffman, has a stunning memoir entitled Half The House, but I'd forgotten that the title was taken from Cavafy.

Here is Patrick Wolf at Heaven (a London club that had accrued terrifying meaning over the past few years, terrifying in Rilke's sense; a place my imagination returns to repeatedly). Patrick Wolf is my age, a month younger than me. I love his awkward magic. I like to imagine that we'd get along. I'm still baffled as to why someone hasn't proposed to him a full-scale rock musical - I can see him writing an incredible love story... The song is from his new album "The Bachelor," Go get it.

summer recommendations

Fiction: the first show I was involved with in college was called "The Street of Crocodiles." I ran the light board - it was one of those ancient slide boards, no easy buttons. It was like playing an organ - the play was so deeply magical that there was a light shift at least every two minutes. Years later I came across something else called "The Street of Crocodiles" - a film by The Brothers Quay, with which I became similarly entranced. Eventually I was to find The Street of Crocodiles in it's (almost) original form - a book by Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer murdered by the Nazis. His work drips with sensation, with strange birds & light & honey, with thick tensions of realities co-mingling. Here is the opening of "The Street of Crocodiles," from the first story entitled "August":

In July my Father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, it's pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.
On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun - the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted; apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with they keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids - the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredients of dinner, exuding a wild & rustic smell.

Schulz has received some attention lately; There is an article about him in the recent fiction issue of The New Yorker. I have been reading "Sanatorium Under The Sign of The Hourglass" - another deeply strange & entrancing book. His murder, and the frenzy of WW II, alas, swallowed the manuscript his last novel - a book apparently called "The Messiah," which no one had ever read....


Poetry: In my recent workshop with Mark Doty, he arrived one day with a box full of books to give away. HUZZZZZAH! A feeding frenzy ensued (or, rather, my insane urge to gather free things kicked in). One of the books I went home with was "Shells" by Craig Arnold, who earlier this year went missing on a volcanic Japanese island. I had never read his work before, and as I read shells, I'm struck by the loss of such a poet. I'm only in the middle of the book, reading & re-reading his poem "Grace," for Jeff Buckley. It's deeply refreshing to read someone who (if pressured to label), I'd call a narrative poet - I go adrift sometimes in the sea of ...what? Poems I can't find a heart in - poems that are all machine & no blood. (Thank you, Mark.)

Music: for dancing - Lady Gaga; for driving - Regina Spektor's new album 'Far'; for walks at dusk - Flying Club Cup by Beirut; for Sundays - quiet Velvet Underground songs

To Eat: Yogurt with honey; cherries

notes on an unfamiliar process

It’s unnatural for me to write prose. In college fiction classes, I was caught in crafting the line, unable to move plot ahead effectively; pieces written in non-fiction classes proved largely masturbatory. “Stick to poetry,” I was told. And why not? My poetry had received awards, approval, no important criticism that had not proved useful. For five years I have stuck to poetry, published, received more awards, more approval, more important, useful criticism. One morning a few months ago I sat down with a cup of coffee to revise a prose poem & realized, with no mild terror, that the story required more prose than a poem’s worth.

I stopped myself at 9 pages of non-fiction, uncertain whether the piece was anything more than a very long journal entry, and sent the work off to a friend who teaches and writes fiction. On Tuesday, we had coffee, and I came with a retrospectively ridiculous assortment of questions that now feel superficial. “What is this piece about?” he asked. “Well it’s about, you know,” I said, “the impact of urban spaces on our psychologies… um.. how forced proximity affects our presentation of self, puts us on performance so much of the time that we forget the character behind the mask.. um..” I faltered, as his look of incredulity told me that I was full of shit. “You’ll do very well in an MFA program with language like that,” he said (and he would know, having graduated from the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA some time ago). We got down to business, or rather, he proceeded to talk about the basics of narrative, and I commenced to scribble down what he said.

I went home with a head full of possibility. My friend had pointed out that I’d omitted nearly every piece of conflict that might have made the piece more than “a lovely meditation.” Fear of (and actual) violence, feelings of betrayal, uncertain commitments, arguments, contested spaces… the story I’d been trying to tell is full of these types of things, but I’d somehow managed to leave all of it out. The piece had felt so risky to write in the first place that I’d neglected to write out the actual risks of the undercurrent human drama in what I imagined was going to be a more general piece … but the undercurrent story, my friend argued, is what’s interesting.

(an aside: after being in Amherst, MA for a week, my cat is much relieved to spend every possible moment on my lap, drooling, with her head jammed into my armpit. Sometimes it’s so weird to be a pet owner. How do I love this territorial ball of fur & teeth who bites me unexpectedly when I’m trying to go to sleep & spends every morning sitting immovable next to my head & meowing at regular intervals? Oh, affection is strange. It’s a shame the old lady’s remarkably anti-social towards other animals. Still want to have a little cat named Mr. Fahrenheit someday.)

I suppose the thing I’ve begun to wonder is : how much information is necessary? I’m used to non-fiction works by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson, Albert Goldbarth and.. not much else. I’ve read a few addiction memoirs here & there (mostly terrible), and read Neruda’s memoirs a few years back. I don’t think I’m trying to write simply memoir though - what I love about Goldbarth’s book (owch, owch, cat claws owch) “Many Circles” is that he weaves so much information & so many influences into each essay. In my favorite essay “The Space,” Goldbarth writes space itself into the piece - he leaves room for the reader to connect things how they will, depending on their own associations & understandings. I’ve read that essay a dozen times or more & find something different each time. Goldbarth doesn’t leave himself out of the picture, but he doesn’t focus on himself as a protagonist in the way that a piece of fiction might; shards of Goldbarth's personal stories in 'The Space' are only important insofar that they provides solid human ground for the reader to relate to as an example for the types of distance Goldbarth's interested in. He cites Jung and Bly and anthropology and all sorts of other things for the reader to sink their teeth into, but it seems there's still something about the personal, the written "I" that remains important, cathartic....

(questions to be continued)

Non-fiction writers or readers : any book recommendations?

A few selections left from Portrait of the Years !

A few selections from my photograph & poem project Portrait of the Years are still for sale! (with the exception of the ocean picture, which has been spoken for, and the hands/flower petals, which sold at the most recent Art All Night)

Each physical work is 8 & 1/2'' x 11''. The gallery price was $80.00 each, and the midwife who bought the hands/flowers one gave me a generous $100, but I'm willing to barter...