The Old Days

I've been thinking about vaudeville lately. This clip of Baby Rose Marie encompasses only part of what I really appreciate about the history of entertainment in America. I think I'd like to get a pair of tap shoes again. A toast, to the old days.

I noticed a dark room, I noticed a dream

The documentary is called Dream of Life. Tait & I went to see it at the Harris Theater downtown when we got back together, before we broke up, what feels like yesterday, what feels like a million years ago. I haven't stopped thinking about the movie since, not really.

Uh oh... I have been called go to work, suddenly. Chickadees, life is very confusing. But the following is clear.

What a funny place to rupture!

Chickadees, my heart is full tonight. It's a strange period of new beginnings - my computer died, due to the strike of an electronics atom bomb of sorts (i.e. I dropped my digital camera INTO a cup of coffee, spilling a large quantity of coffee onto my laptop, phone, and ipod) and I lost most of my photographs of the last five years, and all of my music. Seems appropriate -- it's time for reassessment, to let go of some memories that I keep replaying, which I've already written poems about, so at this point it's just pointless masochism. Here to celebrate a time of change is a stunning poem by Frank O'Hara, re-posted from my dear Matthew Siegel's blog :


MAYAKOVSKY

1
My heart's aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it's throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I'll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That's funny! there's blood on my chest
oh yes, I've been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.


FRANK O'HARA

Love & Ladies

I wanted to share this song with you by Emily Hope Price. I have been listening to it a lot in the past 24 hours. It is a perfect winter song. Although I don't personally know Emily, she has collaborated with my dear friendAnna Vogelzang, who is coming to play a show in Pittsburgh in a few days, right after Valentine's Day, which is perfect, because I completely love Anna. We've been close friends for five or six years now, although we've never lived in the same city. It's a long story, but the short version is that we fell in, what, creative lady love? When I was going to school in Boston (Anna's hometown), she was going to school in Pittsburgh (my hometown), and so we'd have these little overlaps on school vacations. Anna's splendid:



While on the subject of lady singers who I might just hug if I saw them on the street, I should mention also Christine Lyons (who's song "I Will Love You" has been stuck in my head for months) and Emilyn Brodsky. Anna has collaborated with both of these ladies (which is the only reason that I have had the pleasure of being exposed to their music) in various ways.

Exhibit A: Emilyn Brodsky singing my favorite of her songs, "Any Other Way," while Anna Vogelzang sings harmony:



Exhibit B: Christine Lyons & Anna Vogelzang's hilarious "Timothy Blackberry" "documentary music videos". I'm going to tell you, right now, it was really difficult to choose just one to post. But maybe after you see this one you'll go watch all of them. Or watch all of them again, like I just did.



As Valentine's Day approaches, Lady-singers, I choo-choo-choose you.

edit: Although I didn't know Annie Palmer when I originally wrote this post, now I do. She has been touring with Anna and her songs are quite beautiful i.e. she deserves to be included in this post about ladies who write songs that stick. Listen.

Just be with me, like you are, / And that will be enough

Hard times, Chickadees, hard & beautiful times. This is what they mean by winter: the streets a wreck of sliding cars & snow piles, the sky at night either white with the approaching onslaught or incredibly clear. Shivering, I eat my little bowl of spaghetti, hunker down & try to use the time wisely. Because I love Noelle Kocot, below is a poem of hers that appeared originally in Pilot magazine. I admire how thoughtfully plain & precise the language is. Perhaps that what catches me about much of Kocot's work. Anyway, here you go. Stay warm, sleep well.


S y n c h r o n i c i t y B o o k


The paranormal doesn't agree with me.
The normal, you, sending me signs of love
And freedom, does.
Lies and arrogance make me ill.
Sweetness, you were truth,
Even if at the end you were caught in the lie of a needle.
Who understands? Because I am seeking understanding,
Even if I know I shouldn't.
Philosophy. Metaphysics. Fuck.
Just be with me, like you are,
And that will be enough,
As it was when you walked and ate and slept
Beside me, no plan on either of our parts,
No understanding from anyone else necessary
To create what will outlive us.
Help me to look outward, on the driving wind.
And please don't stop your messages;
I read something like happiness for me in them.

Please

The poems of Please are sneer & shudder, the twisted pleasure of a chokehold & a voice in your ear with demands, a dream moment in the hallway of someone's childhood home & the picture on the wall you cannot turn away from. The voice of Jericho Brown's sensuality is almost shocking, not in & of itself, but because I have not, in recent memory, read poetry with this type of sexual urgency. The sheer number of poems concerning homosexuality in Please compound into a type of ferocity, an insistence to be held. Brown never turns away from writing about race or sexuality, but his work carefully, illuminates & penetrates the everyday moments when society or a type of fear have created small moments of rejection & blindness. I... Actually, honestly, I don't even know what to say. Should I mention that Please is Brown's first book, that it won the 2009 American Book Award? All of that seems besides the point. Brown writes with the kind of bravery I would like to write with. Bottom line. Exhibit A:

Runaway

Barefoot in the actual dark, I packed a paper bag
And found the way out of my lover's house.
I had only the glass coffee table as obstacle; I slipped
Around it without stump or stumble. I left
The door slightly open; no draft lives in Louisiana's summer.
And how could I not move so quickly and away
When twenty years earlier I had learned this skill--
How to shake the night's hand in confidence,
How to trust that no start will talk? I deserved this,
My anniversary--I had run from the sound of my father's sleep,
The front yard's magnolia, understood its promise to shed
And cover, that tree's duty to that
Smell and knew too my duty to tear like a switch through
Air, to strike the street's edge in a pair of tattered shoes,
Unconnected, alone. I made it
To Fairfield Street before the headlights of Daddy's pickup
caught me
In mid-blur. But I left my lover better: I knifed a tired before I went
So no light could find my back, no right hand could break from
Steering. One fist clenched
My brown bag as I sniffed for magnolia and made a deal with
the dark.

Snag

Sometimes you stumble across a poet you've never heard before, like Sarah O'Brian. Here's her poem that gave me pause:

Observatory

It begins as an attempt to untangle light. In some cities there were, still are, room-sized camera obscuras, the world comes in flipped and intact. In this case the pictures move. The heart of the blue whale is as big as a room. You could stand up in it suddenly; you could stay. Like in India inside the clock that is big enough to wander through. But the light there doesn't change; the guard tells you to go. Like the viewing machines on the shore that only last for a quarter, so gone and soon. The audible departure, a brief persistence of vision. One sun less, some measure, some minute. In a heart where it's dark and unwindowed, and sounds like this, and this, and this.