My poetry reading/interview at Prosody airs tomorrow night 8 pm EST. Click the .mp3 (.pls) link to stream in Itunes i.e. tune in to see if I say anything coherent.
Just went over the proofs for the long-ass poem of mine that will appear in the first issue of OH NO magazine. Excitement. Next week is AWP in D.C. Traveling into the ridiculous cold = not thrilling. Seeing poet-friends I only see once a year = THRILLSVILLE. Even though AWP can be sort of a really intense mindfuck, it's also a great way of connecting & reconnecting & buying way too many books. Every time I go I get a sort of literary/social networking blackout, where I realize that I have no idea what's happened in the last 3 days, then shut down & eat some peanut butter & then very very gently begin to unfold the piles of scrambled notes & papers I've slung back to wherever home is at the moment. A little more about that soon, as I have something to tell you about Gigantic Sequins whose submission deadline, by the by, is at the end of the week.
Here below are links to people using the internet / technology to bring beautiful, interesting, joyful things into the world.
1) girl walk // all day. Dancing in the streets, or rather, on a boat, & then in the streets. Brilliant. Anne Marsen is the most naturally investigative & invested dancer I've seen in a long time.
2) Sleepover Shows: sweet online project of intimate shows shot in interesting places. I am particularly enamored with Emily Hope Price, but you knew that.
Happy Birthday tomorrow to two of my favorite people, this one's for you, the beauty that comes with age:
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
things disappear and she lets them go
My new teacher, Martha, said in class yesterday that to hope to fear anything takes us out of the present. It's been very cold for Houston, or rather, I've been feeling cold here because my expectation was that it'd be warmer, and when Martha said this, I was thinking about how I was going to stay warm in my apartment that night, if I would go buy a blanket, or maybe stay somewhere else. These were the two options in my head. Yes, I could have, as I'd done the night before, put on a sweatshirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a hat, a scarf, legwarmers, sweatpants, two pairs of socks, & gotten into bed with the heat blasting, but finding an entirely new mode of keeping warm seemed preferable. In class we were talking about the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell, who may be the best translator I've ever come across) without having yet read it. Someone said that space & time don't matter in eternity, but what does?
After eating some pho with my friend D, I went though the night & looked for a blanket. I went first to Goodwill thinking there might be a home-y blanket there, but on the stack of televisions was a crime show where, in a flashback, a now-missing girl was confronting her dad about abuse & I decided that really nothing in Goodwill felt home-y because it had all been discarded then stacked under florescent lights in a white-washed warehouse. Instead I went & bought a blanket in Bed Bath & Beyond. The punctuation of "Bed Bath & Beyond" makes me smile. The full moon was very slow & pressed me a little harder to the earth & I bought a bottle of milk & for a moment I did not fear or hope for anything.
After eating some pho with my friend D, I went though the night & looked for a blanket. I went first to Goodwill thinking there might be a home-y blanket there, but on the stack of televisions was a crime show where, in a flashback, a now-missing girl was confronting her dad about abuse & I decided that really nothing in Goodwill felt home-y because it had all been discarded then stacked under florescent lights in a white-washed warehouse. Instead I went & bought a blanket in Bed Bath & Beyond. The punctuation of "Bed Bath & Beyond" makes me smile. The full moon was very slow & pressed me a little harder to the earth & I bought a bottle of milk & for a moment I did not fear or hope for anything.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
at the lowest aperture / of winter
* Lykke Li's forthcoming Wounded Rhymes. as if knowing when to follow was just another way to lead.
* song of winter, Sharon Van Etten's Love More.
* wanting to see Wings of Desire again.
* I stepped on a wasp on the beach. 24 hrs later, it's astonishingly painful. Last time I stepped on a wasp I was six or seven and it left something like a scar, a tiny red star with a dozen fingers.
* Tomorrow, Texas.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Here I Stand, Alive Unto You
Today my father sent an email to my siblings and I titled "VITAL INFORMATION." He and my mother are going to Chile, in a few weeks. The email contains a document, the heading of which is "Vital Information Upon My Demise." All sorts of things are listed, the things that everyone lists, banks, passports, birth certificates, safe deposit boxes, cars, executors of the wills. All this tumbledown, the things we keep ourselves busy with after funerals.
On the list of items in the safe deposit box, filed under Miscellaneous: "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." I repeat this to myself twice. "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." It makes me weep, immediately. This small thing. I can see myself perfectly, standing in the anonymous bank, on an unknown day, in a black coat, in a gray room full of boxes, doubled over, holding this trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it.
Do you know about The Rumpus? I subscribed recently, to receive "overly personal emails from Stephen Elliot." Lately these emails have been making me cry. It's as if you've just moved to an apartment in a city you've lived in for years, and these letters start coming. They're not addressed to anyone. You've been hoping for this sort of thing, this type of intimacy. The letters are perfect. They keep coming. You keep reading. One day the writer says, "If you write back, I won't respond," so you write to him. He keeps his promise.
It's not so bad, chickadees, to be alone. But it's good, too, to be in Boston & moving so quickly it's unclear exactly who you were or where or what with whom. And that's fine for awhile. While I was in Boston for New Year's I got to spend some time around Cass McCombs and music/art mates, including the artist Albert Herter and director Aaron Brown of Focus Creeps. All sweet & talented people who I hope to cross paths with again. This song's on repeat in my head:
On the list of items in the safe deposit box, filed under Miscellaneous: "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." I repeat this to myself twice. "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." It makes me weep, immediately. This small thing. I can see myself perfectly, standing in the anonymous bank, on an unknown day, in a black coat, in a gray room full of boxes, doubled over, holding this trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it.
Do you know about The Rumpus? I subscribed recently, to receive "overly personal emails from Stephen Elliot." Lately these emails have been making me cry. It's as if you've just moved to an apartment in a city you've lived in for years, and these letters start coming. They're not addressed to anyone. You've been hoping for this sort of thing, this type of intimacy. The letters are perfect. They keep coming. You keep reading. One day the writer says, "If you write back, I won't respond," so you write to him. He keeps his promise.
It's not so bad, chickadees, to be alone. But it's good, too, to be in Boston & moving so quickly it's unclear exactly who you were or where or what with whom. And that's fine for awhile. While I was in Boston for New Year's I got to spend some time around Cass McCombs and music/art mates, including the artist Albert Herter and director Aaron Brown of Focus Creeps. All sweet & talented people who I hope to cross paths with again. This song's on repeat in my head:
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Meditation at Lagunitas -- Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
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