tens for twenty-ten

Top 10 Whatnots , because it's that time of year, in no particular order

Books Read
Quiver of Arrows - Carl Phillips
Dark Things - Novica Tadic
The Ticking Is The Bomb - Nick Flynn
Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty
The Lover - M. Duras
In The Skin of A Lion - Michal Ondaatje
Short Talks - Anne Carson
Selected Poems - Robert Duncan
Please - Jericho Brown
The End of Beauty - Jorie Graham

Songs Listened to Repeatedly
Sea Talk - Zola Jesus
Headache for a Heartache - Emily Hope Price
Rowing Song - Patti Griffin
Your Love is My Drug - Ke$ha
Just Didn't Need to Know - The Shivers
Here Come Those Tears Again - Jackson Browne
Instruct Me - The Drums
Fembot - Robyn
The Story - Brandi Carlile
Black Rain, Black Rain - AA Bondy


That's all for now, chickadees. Stay warm.

air & earth & in between

A poem by Jane Hirschfield

Sentencings


A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

* * *

Blinded by light or black cloth—
so many ways
not to see others suffer.

* * *

Too much longing:

it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.

* * *

From very far or very close—
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

* * *

As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.

* * *

Any point of a circle is its start:
desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.

* * *

In a room in which nothing
has happened,
sweet-scented tobacco.

* * *

The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

* * *

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

Slapdash

Here's Speaking Out, my brief essay/rant on questions about creative responses to the rash of LGBT youth suicides & the search for voice, published on the staff blog for the literary magazine, Gulf Coast.

I can't quite stop thinking about Untitled, a film of pornstars reading poems by Laurel Nakadate, based on text by Dora Malech. It's not actually that I think the film itself is perfect, or even entirely well done - maybe I would've chosen different girls? some better spoken? set up filming so the sound would be more clear? given different direction? BUT.. but.. but... as I'm watching this whole thing sort of lazily, scanning through it, I come to Stacy Adams (at around 5 minutes) reading 'Hush Money' and think - What? I feel bad for her somehow, but intrigued. I watch it again. I go find the text of the poem, read it, watch the video again. I can't tell whether I feel tricked or disappointed or something else. The film's not what I'd call capital A art, but neither is it merely pedestrian. In any case, it made me think -it made me think about the poems, about poetry, and disrupted my daily. Maybe that's capital A art after all. It caught my attention doubly too, since after reading the text of 'Hush Money' and some others of Malech's, I realized, this is a poem I might not have stopped to take a second look at. I've been so caught up in narrative for so long, here I'd nearly forgotten this type of tight, splendid music. Below is the poem by Dora Malech that Stacy Adams reads, and there are more over at No Tell Motel, it's an easy sift through the archives.

Hush Money

Pretend this is legal. Pretend this is tender.
Composed of one carpel a pistil is simple.
Inside the engine, the piston's a-thrusting.
Spleen's an impostor, gland-like but ductless.
Chrysanthemums bloom and God's in Havana.
Shift the sandals and stand agape.
The corpse is in the copse, of course.




(and yes, yes, this is the inside of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - stacks reflected in the window that looks into the dinosaur exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. Pittsburgh, I love you.)

Splash it so / Fast.

This is Daniel Citro's poem, which appeared today in RealPoetik Magazine. I think Citro is doing something that poets too often put out of mind, which is, ahem, use the paper they write on for something other than lining up tidy little stanzas for the ark, which is, of course, easy. It's easy to swallow, it's easy to do. The moment that text is not flush left on the page, the stakes of the poem raise. It's a self-conscious action, an action that moves poetry towards the effort of visual art, it gestures, terrifyingly, towards time. I love Citro's patterning, the colors, the weave & cross-over, and what makes it even better is that as your eye moves through the visual web, you move into this vibrancy of images - " wild licked" "outside the shipwreck" "the carcass shines" - I'll let you explore the rest yourself. Take note, chickadees, take note.

Because we live in these odd days where everything moves so quickly, an hour after reading the poem on RealPoetik, I'd become Facebook friends with Citro, exchanged pleasantries, and asked him if there was any place I should point others to where his poems might appear. He said that no, there wasn't really, but that I should look at Montevidayo, because it was worth it. I have peeked, and agree, it is.

Onwards, chickadees. Keep yourselves warm.

Stars you are mine / you have always been mine

The Under Voice

I saw streaming up out of the sidewalk the homeless women and men
the East side of Broadway fruit and flowers and bourbon
the homeless men like dull knives gray-lipped the homeless women
connected to no one streaming no one to no one
more like light than people, blue neon,
blue the most fugitive of all the colors

Then I looked and saw our bodies
not near but not far out,
lying together, our whiteness

And the under voice said, Stars you are mine,
you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table
when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silver-blue stirrups,
I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me?
Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive.


-- Jean Valentine
Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems

and more..