Inspired by the fantastic Paul Lisicky, who suggested that top-ten-of-the-year lists were "often more about fence-building than anything," I've decided to make a couple of my own little fences.
10 books read in 2009 that inspired me to write
The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
Collected Poems of Lynda Hull
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
The Book of Nightmares - Galway Kinnell
Bluets - Maggie Nelson
Museum of Accidents - Rachel Zucker
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Instructions from the Narwhal - Allison Titus
Sister - Nickole Brown
The Book of Flashlights, Clover & Milk - Joshua Marie Wilkinson
10 songs I put on repeat in 2009
Tiger Mountain Peasant Song - First Aid Kit covering Fleet Foxes
1926 - Thalia Zedek
Flightless Bird, American Mouth - Iron & Wine
Forest and Sands - Camera Obscura
Velvet - The Big Pink
Lopin' Along Through the Cosmos - Judee Sill
Vengeance is Sleeping - Neko Case
Just Didn't Need To Know - The Shivers
Two Birds - Regina Spektor
Sunday Smile - Beirut
There you go, chickadees. Hope you're staying warm.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
all is bright
It's raining a cold rain here in Pittsburgh. This Jew has adopted at least the smell of Christmas, an orange stuck full of cloves like tiny fragrant stars. Whatever you celebrate, wherever you are, stay warm.
edit: My ex-boyfriend, the inimitable Tait Johnson, has garnered national attention for a project he completed this last semester for a course in Narrative and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh. You can now read about The Unlimited Story Deck at the LA Times Book Review. Congratulations, Tait!
Sunday, December 20, 2009
to howl
Where the Wild Things Are is the best movie I saw in 2009. It's incredibly cathartic - I get choked up just thinking about the sense of longing that permeates the movie. As practically my sole employment has been with children for the past three years, there's a whole other level to my involvement with the film - I have allowed myself to be pretty vulnerable to the kids I babysit. I'm able to be hurt by them. I respect them. I've learned their limits, their resilience; I've seen them take terrible falls & rise unscathed, I've seen splinters reduce them to weeping. I've let them eat too much or too little, I've made them go to bed, I've let them stay up late. I've read them books. They've hit me with books. We have run together to an urban field with nothing to play with but imagination. We've collected rocks. We've collected potato bugs. We have drawn monsters in chalk through alleyways. We have sung at the top of our lungs. They have told me to leave. They have told their mothers to leave. They have kissed me suddenly on the mouth. I don't know how I started taking care of children, or why they like me, or if I'll ever have any of my own. Okay, okay, but hey, as my ex-boyfriend recently wrote to me, "enough with these dramatics!" Who cares if I have kids or not! This movie is great and so is the soundtrack! Oh, and p.s., I like how you destroy stuff.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
the night like something dying
Currently reading Tory Dent's HIV, Mon Amour. The book tosses me into something like a miniature process of grief - anger, disbelief, bargaining, depression, acceptance... Is that what it is? Could that be the process so simply?)
A couple weeks ago, while visiting California, I had hoped to stay with one of my best friends, who happens to be HIV positive. He discovered his positive status a few months before I started trying to get sober, five years ago now, when we were still students at Emerson College. We helped each other from the start - two kids, 21 and 22, trying to come to terms with diseases that were not only potentially terminal, but subjects of widespread misunderstanding in the mass culture. After graduating, my friend moved to San Francisco, perhaps the one U.S. city with the most resources for gay men and HIV positive people. For a long time, I think just being in SF helped, living near the Castro's rainbow flag. There seemed to be many free resources: acupuncture, counselors, doctors, medical marijuana, therapeutic groups. Unfortunately, something has started to happen to my friend, not a physical infection or complication, as far as I know, but an emotional breakdown, involving an alienation so intense that even I was deemed as someone who doesn't, and couldn't possibly, understand. The longer we know each other, the more I realize how different our diseases are, how little overlap there truly is in what sort of actions are necessary for each of us to try to live in healthy ways. Reading Tory Dent's book, I keep thinking of my friend, wishing there was something else I could do, hoping that one day he'll find a way to recognize me again.
Tory Dent : R.I.P., My Love
A couple weeks ago, while visiting California, I had hoped to stay with one of my best friends, who happens to be HIV positive. He discovered his positive status a few months before I started trying to get sober, five years ago now, when we were still students at Emerson College. We helped each other from the start - two kids, 21 and 22, trying to come to terms with diseases that were not only potentially terminal, but subjects of widespread misunderstanding in the mass culture. After graduating, my friend moved to San Francisco, perhaps the one U.S. city with the most resources for gay men and HIV positive people. For a long time, I think just being in SF helped, living near the Castro's rainbow flag. There seemed to be many free resources: acupuncture, counselors, doctors, medical marijuana, therapeutic groups. Unfortunately, something has started to happen to my friend, not a physical infection or complication, as far as I know, but an emotional breakdown, involving an alienation so intense that even I was deemed as someone who doesn't, and couldn't possibly, understand. The longer we know each other, the more I realize how different our diseases are, how little overlap there truly is in what sort of actions are necessary for each of us to try to live in healthy ways. Reading Tory Dent's book, I keep thinking of my friend, wishing there was something else I could do, hoping that one day he'll find a way to recognize me again.
Tory Dent : R.I.P., My Love
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
..there might someday be fog
As I am currently working on my application to Columbia University's MFA program, it is impossible to not think about the late Sarah Hannah, Columbia alumna & my thesis adviser & confidante at Emerson College. I can't believe she's been gone for two years now, and that I'm still so shaken by her suicide. Haven't been able to bring myself to read her book from Tupelo Press, but soon, soon. Anyway, here's a poem of Sarah's that I always liked.
For the Fog Horn When There Is No Fog
Still sounding in full sun past the jetty,
While low tide waves lap trinkets at your feet,
And you skip across dried trident trails,
Fling weeds, and do not think of worry.
For the horn that blares although you call it stubborn,
In error, out of place. For the ridicule endured,
And the continuance.
You can count out your beloved - crustaceans -
Winking in spray, still breathing in the wake,
Beneath the hooking flights of gulls,
Through the horn's threnody.
Count them now among the moving. They are.
For weathervane and almanac, ephemeris and augur,
Blameless seer versed in bones, entrails, landed shells.
For everything that tries to counsel vigilance:
The surly sullen bell, before the going,
The warning that reiterates across
The water: there might someday be fog
(They will be lost), there might very well
Be fog someday, and you will have nothing
But remembrance, and you will have to learn
To be grateful.
For the Fog Horn When There Is No Fog
Still sounding in full sun past the jetty,
While low tide waves lap trinkets at your feet,
And you skip across dried trident trails,
Fling weeds, and do not think of worry.
For the horn that blares although you call it stubborn,
In error, out of place. For the ridicule endured,
And the continuance.
You can count out your beloved - crustaceans -
Winking in spray, still breathing in the wake,
Beneath the hooking flights of gulls,
Through the horn's threnody.
Count them now among the moving. They are.
For weathervane and almanac, ephemeris and augur,
Blameless seer versed in bones, entrails, landed shells.
For everything that tries to counsel vigilance:
The surly sullen bell, before the going,
The warning that reiterates across
The water: there might someday be fog
(They will be lost), there might very well
Be fog someday, and you will have nothing
But remembrance, and you will have to learn
To be grateful.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Hello, Insomnia
....I used to have this recurrent dream of walking down a long glass-encased hallway, suspended in blank, black space. I was always walking slowly toward a bend in the hallway - it curved off to the left. As I began to reach the curve in the hallway, I would glimpse a tiger bounding through the space, seemingly in slow motion. I walked, and the tiger galloped towards the curve. Every time, we would reach the curve simultaneously and he would leap, his huge body falling precisely, inevitably towards the glass, filling the frame of my vision, my anticipation of the breaking glass, his weight against me -- that's when I'd wake up. There was also the recurrent dream of enormous wolves, but that's another story. I can't remember the last time I had either dream, though recently I dreamed of a talking rat, similar in essence to the dream of the tiny dog I didn't know what to do with, so wrapped him in tinfoil like a baked potato.
....for my MFA application to Columbia University, I have to write an essay under 1,000 words in response to a book of poetry written & published in the last 10 years. I'm thinking of writing about Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems or maybe Nick Flynn's Some Ether. My responses to each collection have been equally strong; I have revisited the books equally in the past four or five years. With Flynn's book, I respond firstly on a visceral emotional level, whereas with Kocot, my lyric and linguistic imagination is what first becomes activated. What to write about? What indeed. A long afternoon with coffee & these books will help me to decide.
.... I have finished my soup. It is 4:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. There is no one, really, to speak to at this hour, which is a good hour for thinking and writing. At night sometimes the world feels more open, I can think more clearly. When I lived in Boston, I loved this hour, loved looking out over the Fens, especially in summer, smelling the slight hint of sea air & strange marsh, the sweet stench of the city, the YMCA lights winking their song from a few blocks away. I should attempt sleep again. In four and a half hours I am promised to a two year old girl who will want to play, want to tell me again about the cat who has died, the horses she imagines. She believes that Christmas is a place, cannot understand the concept of a holiday, will ask again, "When are we going to Christmas?" She will hold up the dead phone to her ear, nodding, whispering to someone, "Yes, I love you. Okay. I love you too."
....for my MFA application to Columbia University, I have to write an essay under 1,000 words in response to a book of poetry written & published in the last 10 years. I'm thinking of writing about Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems or maybe Nick Flynn's Some Ether. My responses to each collection have been equally strong; I have revisited the books equally in the past four or five years. With Flynn's book, I respond firstly on a visceral emotional level, whereas with Kocot, my lyric and linguistic imagination is what first becomes activated. What to write about? What indeed. A long afternoon with coffee & these books will help me to decide.
.... I have finished my soup. It is 4:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. There is no one, really, to speak to at this hour, which is a good hour for thinking and writing. At night sometimes the world feels more open, I can think more clearly. When I lived in Boston, I loved this hour, loved looking out over the Fens, especially in summer, smelling the slight hint of sea air & strange marsh, the sweet stench of the city, the YMCA lights winking their song from a few blocks away. I should attempt sleep again. In four and a half hours I am promised to a two year old girl who will want to play, want to tell me again about the cat who has died, the horses she imagines. She believes that Christmas is a place, cannot understand the concept of a holiday, will ask again, "When are we going to Christmas?" She will hold up the dead phone to her ear, nodding, whispering to someone, "Yes, I love you. Okay. I love you too."
Monday, December 7, 2009
Jiggity Jig
It's always wonderful to go away when you like coming home, especially if where you've been visiting was lovely as well. During my all-day travels yesterday, I read most of Galway Kinnell's "The Book of Nightmares." It is an astonishing work. Here's a taste:
7
Dear stranger
extant in memory by the blue Juniata
these letters
across space I guess
will be all we will know of one another.
So little of what one is threads itself through the eye
of empty space.
Never mind.
The self is the least of it.
Let our scars fall in love.
Song of the day:
The Microphones | I Want Wind To Blow
7
Dear stranger
extant in memory by the blue Juniata
these letters
across space I guess
will be all we will know of one another.
So little of what one is threads itself through the eye
of empty space.
Never mind.
The self is the least of it.
Let our scars fall in love.
Song of the day:
The Microphones | I Want Wind To Blow
Friday, December 4, 2009
San Francisco Treat
Spent a wonderfully nourishing afternoon in San Francisco with the generous & inimitable Matthew Siegel (see entry of 11/16/09) talking relationships, Judaism, poetry and poetry. Matt took me to Green Apple Books which is (dare I say it?) one of the best bookstores I've ever been to. We could have probably explored the place for hours - spent 40 minutes alone in the used poetry section. Invested in the following:
HIV, Mon Amour - Tory Dent
The Throne of the Third Heaven... - Denis Johnson
The Cinnamon Peeler - Michael Ondaatje
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Selected Poems - Robert Duncan
The Book of Nightmares - Galway Kinnell
The Promises of Glass - Michael Palmer
Mosquito - Alex Lemon
(also expecting, via Amazon)
Overlord - Jorie Graham
Dark Things - Novica Tadic
Total spent, including Amazon purchases : approximately $70. Well spent.
Take that, Loneliness! I now feel ready for winter.
HIV, Mon Amour - Tory Dent
The Throne of the Third Heaven... - Denis Johnson
The Cinnamon Peeler - Michael Ondaatje
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Selected Poems - Robert Duncan
The Book of Nightmares - Galway Kinnell
The Promises of Glass - Michael Palmer
Mosquito - Alex Lemon
(also expecting, via Amazon)
Overlord - Jorie Graham
Dark Things - Novica Tadic
Total spent, including Amazon purchases : approximately $70. Well spent.
Take that, Loneliness! I now feel ready for winter.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
a poetfriend (2)
I met James aka J*me aka Jamie Caroline the September day he moved into the ramshackle house I shared with a few other students in Boston. Jamie introduced me to performance poetry. My perception of that part of the poetry world had been very narrowly defined by the odd brush with slam here & there; what I'd run into hadn't interested me, as it seemed more about an awkward emphasis on seemingly random words than anything else. But Jamie had... at that time he'd been named Best Erotic Male performance poet a few years in a row I think... Let's keep this simple, say it blunt. Jamie changed how I felt about writing. He made me open to reading out loud, be it in a dim room under a red light or on stage in an auditorium. He changed how I wanted to write - by 2004, at 21, I'd started avoiding passion, anger, keeping things gauzy & introspective & philosophical for my workshop classes. Jamie taught me how to say "Fuck that" in the most beautiful way that I could. I'll let his poem, one from the days we lived together, speak for itself.
Among Safe Moments
I’ll be your trigger,
unbridled steel itching in the cylinder of doubt.
Fury of scars kicking up moth wing dust
cause I know you’ve been fucked with,
silent and cool as a bonfire beneath fog.
The bustle of day has taken dreams
you’ve not held since you were a gutless child.
I know how the world does crazy things with courage
so I’ll be the gathering of gray in a false blue.
Turbine voiced and hammer fall,
wind-throated veil,
mouth quilted with your name.
I’m your lucky gun and warning shot.
City or mountain town
I’ll find you music in cascading willow branches
or a bar gummed up with noise like thunder in April.
I’ll be the embrace at stage right,
the sickle and hammer of youth,
distract the glory boys while you get away so clean
a tornado couldn’t dirty you up.
I dig our weather.
But I’ve been called hurricane child,
voodoo stare backlash from knowin' better.
If you come near my heart
—I’ll cut you.
But if your wish starts to dilate
ask yourself if a song ever gets shy
and wants to just whisper, sneak out the back
and fade into some smoky ghost
with a life no one witnessed to remember.
If you fall
ask yourself if raindrops scream during descent,
if fear changes their velocity or direction,
or if they just explode
loving the breaking after being formed by laws governing
all matter that moves without armor.
If you fell
I’d hit the ground 1st to catch you,
attack a God at your forsaken frame
cause once he met you I’d be forgiven,
sainted and graceful as a shower that takes all day
to decide if it wants to kiss some tired ass planet
and yes, so you know where I stand,
it does.
Everyone’s gonna tell you I am instigated by pain
but it’s me beggin you to put every last gorgeous card on the table,
to lay filth on the line and trade in some bit of you
for table scraps from 7 continents, billions of people,
earth fucked by time into shapes you can’t climb,
countries who’ve seen so much war
they can’t watch a movie’s mock crucifixion
cause even the Lord of your enemy
deserves better than torture in front of his mother.
Keep your eyes open
and the AV cables plugged the fuck in.
I wanna see you awestruck by cities of 16 million,
lost in the quiet of a library
looking for me in the Autobiography of Red,
researching ways to measure us in milligrams
cause we either jones or overdose.
I wanna see you cry before the ocean,
tiny and useful.
I’ll be there,
telling you Jackie Paper never left
he just had to figure out how to love a dragon.
We are lightening
across the constellation of our body.
I got your back
to belly full of guts,
a wall-less courtyard
and peacocks struttin' color like art deco on acid.
Logic is a dime store knock off
and terror is the free gift with purchase.
I don’t need you clean,
I just need you real,
rigged cogs and pulleys hustling magic.
Pry open the rusted lips of an oyster,
milk-churned granule of sand,
drop of moon blood pearl lodged in your chest.
I want you full of world.
We are guilty and wet
lives spent diving for treasure,
ugly diamonds and pretty rust
every time you open those eyes.
Find Jamie here, here, or his band Miette here.
Among Safe Moments
I’ll be your trigger,
unbridled steel itching in the cylinder of doubt.
Fury of scars kicking up moth wing dust
cause I know you’ve been fucked with,
silent and cool as a bonfire beneath fog.
The bustle of day has taken dreams
you’ve not held since you were a gutless child.
I know how the world does crazy things with courage
so I’ll be the gathering of gray in a false blue.
Turbine voiced and hammer fall,
wind-throated veil,
mouth quilted with your name.
I’m your lucky gun and warning shot.
City or mountain town
I’ll find you music in cascading willow branches
or a bar gummed up with noise like thunder in April.
I’ll be the embrace at stage right,
the sickle and hammer of youth,
distract the glory boys while you get away so clean
a tornado couldn’t dirty you up.
I dig our weather.
But I’ve been called hurricane child,
voodoo stare backlash from knowin' better.
If you come near my heart
—I’ll cut you.
But if your wish starts to dilate
ask yourself if a song ever gets shy
and wants to just whisper, sneak out the back
and fade into some smoky ghost
with a life no one witnessed to remember.
If you fall
ask yourself if raindrops scream during descent,
if fear changes their velocity or direction,
or if they just explode
loving the breaking after being formed by laws governing
all matter that moves without armor.
If you fell
I’d hit the ground 1st to catch you,
attack a God at your forsaken frame
cause once he met you I’d be forgiven,
sainted and graceful as a shower that takes all day
to decide if it wants to kiss some tired ass planet
and yes, so you know where I stand,
it does.
Everyone’s gonna tell you I am instigated by pain
but it’s me beggin you to put every last gorgeous card on the table,
to lay filth on the line and trade in some bit of you
for table scraps from 7 continents, billions of people,
earth fucked by time into shapes you can’t climb,
countries who’ve seen so much war
they can’t watch a movie’s mock crucifixion
cause even the Lord of your enemy
deserves better than torture in front of his mother.
Keep your eyes open
and the AV cables plugged the fuck in.
I wanna see you awestruck by cities of 16 million,
lost in the quiet of a library
looking for me in the Autobiography of Red,
researching ways to measure us in milligrams
cause we either jones or overdose.
I wanna see you cry before the ocean,
tiny and useful.
I’ll be there,
telling you Jackie Paper never left
he just had to figure out how to love a dragon.
We are lightening
across the constellation of our body.
I got your back
to belly full of guts,
a wall-less courtyard
and peacocks struttin' color like art deco on acid.
Logic is a dime store knock off
and terror is the free gift with purchase.
I don’t need you clean,
I just need you real,
rigged cogs and pulleys hustling magic.
Pry open the rusted lips of an oyster,
milk-churned granule of sand,
drop of moon blood pearl lodged in your chest.
I want you full of world.
We are guilty and wet
lives spent diving for treasure,
ugly diamonds and pretty rust
every time you open those eyes.
Find Jamie here, here, or his band Miette here.
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