A Story About Movement

2000: When I applied to colleges in high school, I chose somewhere from eight to ten schools with strong musical theater programs. I fumbled through my essays, stressed out over my SAT scores, and traveled to audition in rooms full of other jittery teenagers, all trying to dance more perfectly than the next, all wanting to belt like Bernadette Peters, all hoping their image seemed smooth and professional and unique. We all believed, or were trying to believe, that we had "IT," the thing directors would sense as we walked into the room, the thing that poured from stars. Why else would we be waiting in those long New York hallways, practicing our breath, practicing how to say our names, listening to the piano vamp & stutter, watching as kids emerged from the audition room attempting neutrality but obvious in their glee or shame.
And so, and so, out of 10 or so schools, I got into, what - two programs? My academic records were blatantly awful, and the Syracuse drama department said they'd fought for the University to accept me, that I'd have to keep my grades up....

And so, and so, fast forward nine years. I expected to be accepted to maybe, maaaybe, forty percent of the schools I applied to for graduate study. The numbers, however, are nothing like that. I was accepted to NYU, Columbia, New Mexico State University, CalArts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Houston. I still haven't heard from Oregon, and was rejected from the Michner Center in Austin. What's the difference? Superficially, the difference is that I was a crappy student in high school, having skipped most of my senior year, and done things like escaped from detention out of windows, thereby receiving more detentions. On another level, the acceptances have to do with a shift of focus and lifestyle. When I started to try to stop drinking, in 2004, I was at Emerson College, and it was the first time I'd ever been consistent about schoolwork. Not only consistent, but, dare I say, dedicated. I still fucked up on a regular basis - received embarrassingly bad grades in history classes and a class on Judaism - but I was dedicated to work surrounding writing and literature. And I guess, the other important thing is that I have been out of school since 2006 - this period of time has been important for actually seeing how motivated I am towards self-education, separate from Academia. I'm grateful for the time that I've been out of school, it just makes the prospect of the fall that much more exciting.
Hi Ho Houston!

again and again

FINDING PAUL MONETTE, LOSING HIM

It's just two days since I read you
two days since your Elegies for Rog grabbed me
in the stacks at the Brooklyn branch
grief eating through the binding like dragon blood
dripping through four stone floors
into the charming restaurant in the basement
I checked you out and brought you home
so I could love you and pity him in private
and cry for him and you and myself
I never burned up grief or anger with such song
never came within two bow-lengths of the paradise
of men's hearts open to one another
I'll check you out again and again
I think I'll steal you
I don't want to release you back to circulation
I study your picture on the sleeve for signs of sickness
search the flyleaf for year of publication
could you have survived 1987
so long ago dangerous year
to be a sick fag in America
In the cafe at the gay bookstore
I'm afraid to ask Do you know Monette
Did he make it The boys are so young
thumbing through pages of naked men
putting them back dogeared The boy
behind the counter doesn't read poetry
I'm afraid of hope as I walk
to the back of the store PLEASE BE ALIVE
PLEASE BE among the M's I run my hand
along the spines Maupin McClatchy Melville
until it rests on yours
I tear you open the suspense killing me
please please be living with the dogs
in the canyons somewhere north of Malibu
writing every day doing well on the new drugs
sleeping like spoons with a guy named
Peter Kenneth Michael or Gustavo
Your picture is harder thinner
face lined eyelids sagging "novelist poet essayist
AIDS activist who died"
You're gone then
I've made it to the future a few years further
but who knows if I'll reach your forty-nine
why bother reading your book anymore
what difference do poems make or love
So this is your last face a fox and rabbit kissing
even dead your name earns a "face-out"
guarantees those big sales
who gets the money now
YOU JERK FUCK YOU
ridiculous to die so close to a cure
renders you me us absurd
shameful irresponsible
how quaint to die of this they'll think in 2030
how nostalgically sepia-toned and old-timey
like dying of the flu for godssake or the clap
like talking on a windup telephone or
buying ice for the icebox
On the Net later
I cruise a guy who says he knew you
when you tried to live and love again with Winston
I'm hungry to hear anything about you
but he interrupts with a reflection of his cock
in a hand mirror in a garden of red hibiscus
so for a moment I almost easily forget my love
my love of two days
two days in which you were born loved wrote grieved died

Oh God in whom you never for one moment believed
will I still have time

by Patrick Donnelly

Thanks to Mark Doty for posting Donnelly's poem IN LOW UNWORTHY ROOMS HE MADE CARELESS LOVE AND NOW, (and thanks for the thoughts afterwards too).

a couple of fragments by Gregory Orr and a little blah blah blah

from Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved

How lucky we are
That you can't sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.

That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn't it given to you?



from How Beautiful The Beloved

Poem that opened you-
The opposite of a wound.

Didn't the world
Come pouring through?



____________________________________


In other news, I'm moving to Houston in August. Yay super faculty. Yay funding. Yay weird, delightful city. Yay.

I was out here listening all the time

On FIRE ! My dear Matthew Siegel sent me some work by his friend Leigh Phillips, and now I have to say,

Please, Leigh, wherever you are, keep on. You're wonderful. Come find me?

Her work:

In Fringe: All Speaking Was Like Singing

In Shampoo: two poems


I can't help myself sometimes, when I read work that clicks, chimes, quickens the blood. Oh, chickadees, the world is so exciting.

I was born when I met you, now I'm dying to forget you.

I am obsessed with Brandi Carlile right now. Hard. In the base of my throat.

Reading this Saturday :

This Saturday I'll be part of the first ever Tin Front Reading!

Saturday, March 20, 2010
7:00pm - 8:00pm
216 East Eighth Avenue
Homestead, Pa 15120

A flashflush of delight

Nickole Brown makes me swoon. I can barely type this post. The newness of her verbs is dizzying. Gorgeous in person besides, the kind of woman who ties your tongue. Her book "Sister" is brilliant... I'd fail to describe it, so I'll let her latest work speak for itself : "How To Seduce Superman."


Here's the song of the day, Small Faces & P.P. Arnold singing "Tin Soldier" in 1968. Steven Marriot influenced everybody. Listen to that voice. A white man, singing like that, with a black female back-up singer... it just hadn't been done yet...

Do your work, then step back...

I've recently become the poetry editor for Gigantic Sequins. Our reading period just reopened, and will close on June 30th; please submit! I've been having a great time reading submissions - haven't done any editorial thinking since being editor-in-chief of Gangsters in Concrete at Emerson College from 2005-2006. It's a very interesting position to be in, especially for someone who's been out of school for awhile (i.e. the impulse to give constructive criticism is stronger than my desire to give a blunt yay or nay).


The graduate school decisions have begun to roll in. Three acceptances, one interview, one rejection. Waiting on three more schools. Have heard from some programs how, having certain possibilities (and funding!) makes me more anxious to hear from those last few schools so that I can just make a decision already and begin to build a picture of what the fall might look like. ACK! So exciting.

March is flying by.

Laughing. Sweetheart,

Resolutions in a Parked Car

After I’m done pleading with the steering wheel,
after I’m done screaming at the white doors
of the Friendship Inn, no, even while I’m spitting

and howling, I know, yes, this is the way
we find out about ourselves: crying in rental cars
in parking lots in strange cities that are already

too familiar. The huge ship in front of you,
don’t you hope it will soon disembark? Don’t you
hate hotels? Don’t you hate to travel

just to see the same old pockmarks and limps,
the weight carried below the waist
and above? Just look at what we have done

to ourselves, and topped it off with a club sandwich,
a scribble of neon. I’m wailing
like some foreigner in a foreign country

we don’t give a shit about because how could we
understand something as subtle as the mutilation
of ears and lips? Please, I beg you,

perform some crazy rite over me so things can either
finally dissolve or finally become solid.
Please, I need something primitive and complex

to relieve me of this world subdivided into better
and better ways to avoid life. Sicker
and sicker ways. Death cruising
down 90. Laughing. Sweetheart, Death is the least of it.

I’m in a parking lot in Spokane reintroducing myself
to myself. I’m feeling like throwing up.
In a parking lot in Spokane I am resolving

to read Nietzsche, to pierce and tattoo myself,
in a parking lot I’m determining things
about my labia and nose and heart.

- Olena Kalytiak Davis

C'mon, Get Happy

It's sunny in Pittsburgh, I'm dancing to Metric & this poem is now:


Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

-- James Tate

Sick Days

Freezing to death, dying of heat. One cough, another, waking into an ache. Another pill and come on evening, let's get dark. I've been sick for over a week now, though last week I pretended to not be terribly sick & went about my way. Now there's no mistaking it: from this bed I've watched sixteen dozen variations of light come through the gold curtains, dragged this bag of flesh to the doctor for the same diagnosis as always : strep throat. Again the discussion of tonsils, surgery. I watch the snow melt on the tenement rooftop across the street. Now, now the sky's a gauze baby-pink, dusk creeping up all gentle, 6 o'clock so I can drop a drop of medicine in my eye, take two blue pills.

In this condition, absences become stronger. Sarah Hannah, gone from this body; my friend Derek, gone into a silence. I cannot help it, at night, I want (or need?) a story. When I was young, I was sick often. I don't remember much about being little - I was sick, home frequently, missing school picnics, dances, seemingly always ill on the beautiful day or the special occasion. Our pediatrician lived next door, and (arguably) over-medicated us into weak immunity. Perhaps we (I) was always weak. Blind as a bat, dreadful teeth, a handful of maybe-true-or-not diagnoses of mental illness.... it makes an annoyingly strong case against procreation. But then sometimes my mother's voice seeps in, that voice which says the most insensible things.. that children are always there, that family is always there... In states like this, in the seventeenth type of light (gray-blue teeth light) coming through the curtains, I wonder. I just wonder. The medicines help the physical pain, but something cries out for a story, for a voice like a boat to send me off to sleep.

p.s. I love this video

Jónsi - Go Do from Jónsi on Vimeo.