I was looking through old pictures of myself last night, trying to find one that would be appropriate for a press release / posters for a Gulf Coast reading in the fall. 90% of the pictures really aren't appropriate, but they reminded me how much I used to live with my camera. Tom shared this Sally Mann/Nan Goldin transcript with me the other day - also a reminder.
Official-reminder-to-self #2 - get your camera.
The Gigantic Sequins reading on the 22nd was very lovely. It felt like a family affair. Elizabeth Hoover has a chapbook called "Love In The Wild" that is just fantastic You can find a few pictures of the reading here, along with some reminders ( submit! buy a raffle ticket! ) and an announcement that we're having a reading in NYC, July 12th, in a pop-up bookstore. There's a 70% chance that I will be there.
Okay chickadees. I'm going to try to convince Jason to pick me up in his Cadillac and take me to the drive-in tomorrow night. Take care of yourselves.
I have a friend who called crying one day from California. She said that she was tired of people saying that it'd be okay, that the last guy just wasn't the right guy, that one day she'd meet someone. She said she was tired of that shit, that she wanted to hear instead how to start to accept being alone. I don't know what I said in reply. I'd like to think I took the middle road, said maybe, maybe. Said something like, I'm sure you'd be fine alone, I'm sure you might meet someone. Soon after, she called, said she was dating an actor, or maybe it was a fellow artist. A few phone calls later, there was an additional guy, someone she'd gone out with a few times. She was excited, seemed relaxed. And soon after that, she said she was alone again, and she seemed fine about it, focusing on her art. She said she'd started running really fast, that it felt great. Working hard, you mean? I asked. No, she said, running, literally running. I started to think that for some people, no matter what walls we put up to life, desire always crept in, heat, and need, and that made us lucky, because if we didn't have someone else to pour ourselves towards, we poured towards art. We poured towards art anyway, and in the end, wasn't that most important? Wasn't that connection the thing that would never break?
And in the next breath, how could one say there was anything more important than love. I understand this as much as I understand a sneeze, or hiccups, or laughing at a time when one shouldn't laugh, being unable to stop laughing. As many walls as one tosses up, it seems there's always someone who gets in, someone who we're pulled to, kicking and screaming, with all the knowledge of the past and all that pain. When it's inconvenient. When it's not moral. When we promised ourselves otherwise, again. I'm baffled, chickadees, I give up.
On another topic (but not), I'm home for the summer. This means the large wooden desk, the lace curtains, nights with a nervous energy, the old house, and rivers, rivers, rivers. I'm trying to photograph more - the above picture is a reminder. A friend who can't sleep without the radio on. I'd begun taking portraits of friends awhile ago - this was one of the pictures that got me into CalArts, where I slightly regret not going. I haven't really taken pictures since I decided not to follow the multi-media art path. But just because I'm not in school for it doesn't mean I can't follow it. So, here goes.
By the way, it's Father's Day. Happy Father's Day. I'm making enchiladas for my dad and the family. Here's something I wrote about family & poetry awhile ago, partially about my dad's early influence on my creativity. Sometimes it's very easy to forget that my dad is an accomplished psychologist, really ground-breaking in his field. There's a Wikipedia article about him for pete's sake. I never realized what a big deal he was until this Festscrift that CMU had for him a couple years ago. It became evident that the name "Klahr" in the world of developmental psychology garnered an "oh, yes of course, his research blah blah blah." I'd always just used his office as a place where I could draw monsters on a white board. That's an exaggeration of course, but until the festscrift, I didn't understand where my slightly insane and stubborn ambitiousness came from, where my willingness for experimentation came from. Thanks, dad.
Go thank your fathers, whether they're alive or not.
Carry on, chickadees.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The forms fade and are no more than a dream, / a sketch slow to come / on the forgotten canvas, and that the artist completes / only by memory. - Charles Baudelaire
.. . . .Remembering well requires reopening wounds in a particular way, one which people cannot do by themselves . . .
—Richard Sennett, from “Disturbing Memories” p.283
Francesca Woodman was not trying to disappear. She was not recording a slow erasure. Maybe she was recording how knit she was to the world. How terrifying that is. Maybe she was trying to reveal herself in things. I think there was an essential undoing and regeneration that Francesca saw and felt pulled by. Her work is full of movement. This is not the movement of erasure, it is an aching push within time. Saw this documentary the other night that ostensibly was about her:
But it wasn't about her, it was about memory. We don't get to choose how we are remembered. What happens is other people's memories of you blend, the more they talk about you; those left remake you in their minds. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil says we suffer because the departed, the absent has become unreal... his absence is very real - henceforward it is his way of appearing. To not embrace this absence creates suffering in us, because our memory, our memories, are incapable of bringing that person back to the physical world. We are incapable of creating their wholeness, and by such an attempt, by repeated attempts, create in ourselves a palpable void. Whether or not we have a choice about the creation of this void is the mystery.
NEXT WEDNESDAY: Gigantic Sequins presents: Shine On (celebrating the publication of issue 2.2) A reading featuring Jim Daniels, Elizabeth Hoover, and Alayna Frankenberry. ModernFormations Gallery, 4919 Penn Ave., Lawrenceville; doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the readings follow at 8 p.m. Cover charge, $5 includes dessert. 412-362-0274. Jim Daniels’ recent collections include Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry, and From Milltown to Malltown, a collaborative book with photographer Charlee Brodsky and writer Jane McCafferty. Forthcoming books include All of the Above, Adastra Press, Trigger Man, his fourth collection of short fiction, Michigan State University Press, and Birth Marks, BOA Editions. He recently wrote and produced the independent film “Mr. Pleasant” which premiered at the Three Rivers Film Festival in November. He lives in South Oakland, near the boyhood homes of Dan Marino and Andy Warhol.
Alayna Frankenberry graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in Creative Writing and Hispanic Studies. Her work has appeared in Weave, Open Thread, OH NO, and Night Train. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She serves as the unofficial Poet Laureate of Munhall, Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Hoover received her MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University and has published poetry in The Adirondack Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Atlanta Review, and The Other Journal. Recently, New Lettersnominated her for a Pushcart Prize.
Gigantic Sequins issue 2.2, and tickets for our summer raffle will be available for sale at the reading, as will books and chapbooks of our readers. Hope to see you there (and the next night too, at the Cave Canem reading...)
Saturday, June 4, 2011
photobooth at the Andy Warhol Museum 6/2
Gravity and Center
I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel. I want the force of attraction to crush the force of repulsion and my inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man. I don't want words to sever me from reality. I don't want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling -- as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured into a bowl.
THIS IS THE OLD BLOG OF Sophie Klahr, a poet from Pittsburgh. Her current blog is HTTP://WWW.SYNONYMFORLIVING.WORDPRESS.COM
Her poetry, essays, and reviews appear in spaces such as Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, and The Normal School. She was the poetry editor of Gigantic Sequins (2010-2014) and now serves as contributing editor. Her first book, Meet Me Here At Dawn, is forthcoming in fall 2016 from YesYes Books.
