A Synonym for Living

i should learn to be your type / of thief

2012-02-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

my poem houdini dog is at TYPO.

the artist is tim etchells.

the song is glass from field mouse via beecharmer, as always.

the journeys in its claws

2012-02-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

gordon matta clark

--you should download Anne Carson's performance of "Cassandra Float Can" at the 92nd Street Y for free at Itunes.

--Six Winters by Tomas Tranströmer.

The wonderful Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died today in her sleep. Here is one of my favorite poems of hers:

Unexpected Meeting

We are very polite to each other,
insist it’s nice meeting after all these years.
Our tigers drink milk.
Our hawks walk on the ground.
Our sharks drown in water.
Our wolves yawn in front of the open cage.
Our serpents have shaken off lightning,
monkeys---inspiration, peacocks---feathers.
The bats---long ago now---have flown out of our hair.
We fall silent in mid-phrase,
smiling beyond salvation.
Our people
have nothing to say.

1923-2012 R.I.P

fallow, and plough

2012-01-29T14:02:00.000-08:00

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

& learns by breaking

2012-01-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

My poem Against Desire appears in the latest issue of Pebble Lake Review. There's a recording there too, of me reading the poem. I think it turned out nicely. Ploughshares just send me proofs last week, as did TYPO. A nice winter/spring publishing.

If you didn't know, Gigantic Sequins is still open for submission. The other day in workshop, Tony Hoagland said that he wanted "wet blood poems." Fresh kill. Send me some bloody poems.

Gigantic Sequins will be at AWP, at the bookfair, right next to Wave Books, which is amazing for so many reasons, including the fact that they've supported us via raffle donations for the past two years. We're having a reading too, on Saturday night. More about that later.

I am feeling quiet today, chickadees. Holding stillness. I taught my kids a little about syntax and discursive poetry and Carl Phillips and there's just so much I do not know. Off to read Transtromer and Moore and more and more.

inspiration: saga sig

2012-01-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

i really love saga sig - iceland-born, london-based photographer. her sense of the world and color and possibility. she's smart and magical. here, she talks about her personal fashion, history and beliefs ("nothing in the world is more evil than jealousy"), and here is her blog, the neverending story.

i turn you with slow animals

2012-01-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

(& in text version)

This video and this poem make me think of Chautauqua, age 15 maybe and meeting a boy who'd dyed his long hair black and red, how he and Julia (who was fair, whose bright red hair lifted when she ran) were goths in safety pins and purple ribbons and there I was in my polo shirt and brown shorts and we all ran away from club to John's house, smoking cigarettes, all of us laying on his bed together on our backs listening to The Smashing Pumpkins, if you turned your head to the side there was the lake outside down the hill, the sailboats, maybe it was drizzling or smelled like drizzling, like an old house in New York State in August on a warm gray afternoon and then I was being kissed

live the questions

2012-01-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

Chickadees,
I want to tell you about my friend Anna's journal.

Actually, I'll let you discover it for yourselves, but I'll share here some of the questions she poses, which I find inspiring. All of the below are her thoughts and questions. They fill me with a sense of longing and hope and challenge. Perhaps you will find a question that chimes with you:

could something else have been possible?

how does the specific body choose to carry out tasks and actions?

what is my body not aware of? what does my body not know?

what are the infinite possibilities?

what would it take for an unimaginably fluid, creative and adventurous 2012? what would it take for non-stop dancing, traveling and collaboration opportunities? what would it take for grand leaps of growth and expansion to all directions? what would it take for ease, space and lightness of being?

what leaps, turns, shifts, drops and changes are available for my body that i can't currently even imagine? what is the range of unexplored physical expression that is possible through the dance of frequency? where can i go from where i am today by dancing sensation, feeling and imagery?

hey universe, what would it take?

what does it take for an optimally available body? what does it take for a soft, open, empty body that listens and feels without thinking? what does it take for an unrestricted, uninhibited instrument of movement? what does it take to dissolve habits and patterns and make new choices, have new options?

thinking is such a drag. how to follow intuition, instinct and impulse without the necessity to employ the thinking mind? how about creation without conclusion, decision and judgment? how about doing it for the sake of doing it, always expanding further and not having to look back?

what are the chances?

in this spare room

2012-01-06T12:51:00.000-08:00

cass mccombs at the library, first night, boston

2nd year of first night in boston; after tom got me hooked on cass mccombs' music, it turns out that he & his friends - jake & mollie (lighting), albert herter (film) - are lovely people too. they're on tour all of january.

2012 is the year of lace, the year of john & yoko.

reading the art of losing, edited by kevin young, and AVA by carole maso. feeling a little peace in shift. another key, another bed for now, another flight. no place to go but along with it.

Bests

2011-12-21T14:16:00.000-08:00

here's some best of 2011, off the top of my head.

best books:
I Wore The Ocean in The Shape Of A Girl - Kelle Groom
Running In The Family – Michael Ondaatje
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
The Lost Father – Mona Simpson
The Caged Owl – Gregory Orr
Gravity and Grace – Simone Weil
The Captain Asks For A Show of Hands - Nick Flynn

songs listened to on repeat:
Stick With Me Baby – Allison Kraus & Robert Plant
Love More – Sharon Van Etten
Challengers – New Pornographers
For What It’s Worth – Stevie Nicks
For Kalaja Mari – School of Seven Bells
Excuses – The Morning Benders
Solitude – Girls
Marked – EMA
Flirted With You All My Life – Vic Chestnutt
Cannons – Little Scream
Too Young – Taken By Trees
Helplessness Blues: Fleet Foxes
Secrets- Silver Swans
It’s Okay – Land of Talk
Ring – Glasseer
Eleanor – The Turtles
Say No More – Humble Pie

best movies:
Biutiful
Beginners

best places:
The Ocean
The West Village

stay warm, chickadees.

3.1

2011-12-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

Gigantic Sequins 3.1 is now available for pre-order.

Featuring:

Poetry from Carrie Murphy, Ken Taylor, Jake Kelly, Chrissy Friedlander, Candice Wuehle, Laura Goode, Analicia Sotelo, Kimberly Grey, Amanda Auchter, and Chuck Carlise.

Fiction from Kelli Trapnell, Olivia Kate Cerrone, Nathanael Green, and Meg Cameron.

Art &/or Comics from Sarah Schneider, Gillian Lambert (cover art), and Goodloe Byron

& lonely offices

2011-12-09T09:05:00.000-08:00

self-portrait with the source of winter as a far-off cry

The Way Things Work
by Jorie Graham

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us; the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pulley,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head--
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

the misfit, the judge

2011-12-05T23:28:00.000-08:00

THE PRISONERS OF THE LITTLE BOX

Open little box

We kiss your bottom and cover
Keyhole and key

The whole world lies crumpled in you
It resembles everything
Except itself

Not even your clear-sky mother
Would recognize it any more

The rust will eat your key
Our world and us there inside
And finally you too

We kiss your four sides
And four corners
And twenty-four nails
And anything else you have

Open little box

by Vasko Popa

I'm writing a paper on Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, the Grotesque, the Gothic. Violence, intelligence, religiosity.

Yesterday over Twitter I had a nice chat with Kelle Groom after we simultaneously posted about Francesca Woodman. Kelle is very lovely, & said that an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir would be in the same Ploughshares as my poem in the spring.

The Fader did a long profile on our mister Cass McCombs. Looking forward to seeing him & his crew over New Year's.

Remember sleep? I remember that.

angel in the thicket

2011-12-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

There is a wonderful post today at The Rumpus today: All At Once Is What Eternity Is: Musings on Kenneth Patchen. Kenneth Patchen is one of those rare writers who truly gives his wildness permission. If you have not read The Journal of Albion Moonlight, stop reading this post right now, go to your local bookstore, and buy it immediately.

This post is written by Carolyn Zaikowski, who apparently is a strong and brilliant writer:

"...Your language does not need permission to be said, to be written. Your life does not need permission to exist. Your blur, your cliff, your bewilderment does not need permission.... You don’t need permission to be just as you are in this moment. Your strange language doesn’t need permission to be itself. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar who wants your power, who wants war, who wants your beautiful huge seed. Anyone who tries to shame or break your language is betraying you."

Amen. This is exactly the kind of voice we want in Gigantic Sequins. Yes, our submissions are open.

onwards, chickadees.

ship inside a bottle, if your body is the bottle

2011-11-28T13:43:00.000-08:00

Today is a nice day. Cold outside in Texas enough for the black coat with the two buttons sewn back on with blue thread.

Four of my poems are featured this week at The Offending Adam, with a very nice introduction by Matthew Siegel.

Also up today is my short essay,"The Passing Word," at Gulf Coast.

Here is a song by my friend Anna:

let's not try to figure out everything at once

2011-11-25T19:48:00.001-08:00

Dorothy took a picture of me at the pool this summer. Nobody much was there that day.

TO SPEAK IS TO RISK

2011-11-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

Who says what and how and whose business is it anyway?

Is this especially true in my little corner of the internet? Yes, it damn well is. If I am not writing violent things along the lines of "I'm going to blow up XYZ with (insert explosive thing here) at X time, for sure," then at worst, my words should only be a danger to a reader's worldview or comfy perception of How Things Are.

As far as I am concerned, I can say anything I want. So can you. And so can that other guy. So can JSA Lowe, who is a poet and a PhD candidate here at the University of Houston. This is her blog, lycanthropia. and, to my complete surprise, THIS is what she wrote on HTMLGIANT after someone in her workshop at school read her blog, expressed concern to a workshop leader, and the workshop leader (I don't know who) confronted her saying something like this:

…people have come to me who are concerned…other students in the program… upset… distressed…compromising their experience of the program… haven’t read it myself, that would break boundaries for me…affects their perception of you…their sense of you as a professional…writing about very intimate matters… damage your standing with your colleagues…makes people uncomfortable…took it to the department chair [and here my brain made an almost audible shorting-out sound] and he agrees with me…run the risk of this having a real effect on your career…future employment…could jeopardize your standing in the program….really best that you not.. writing about such personal things so publicly…consider…think about the wisdom of… importance of being collegial…for your own sake….

Lowe continues:

"It’s still Monday morning. I’m sitting frozen in a strange office trying to scramble my resources for some sort of a response. And I’m pretty sure I have The Wrong Look on my face. I’m supposed to be—what, grateful for this intelligence? Contrite? I don’t know. Probably warring on my features instead: incredulity, disbelief, the deepest shame and anger. Of course I am ashamed. I was born ashamed. The blog is part of my attempt to counter some of that—

(Went to the department chair? Students are upset? Who? Why didn’t they approach me like grown-ass people? Why did they go to one of my professors, why this professor? What the fuck did I write that was so awful? If my blog is so distressing to them, why don’t they just not read it?)

(And is there any irony in the fact that my creative writing program apparently wants me to put a sock in my creative writing?)"

You can read the rest of the essay yourselves, if you are a blogger, or a writer or a parent or loved one of anyone who writes. Lowe is bringing up important issues with a lot of investigative clarity in a tone not quite as pissed off as mine. I am livid about the whole thing. I don't write much in this blog that is terrifically personal, but I have in the past. If you read the whole thing you could probably surmise some not terribly pretty things about me, but you might come to the same conclusions about me if you read my poetry. I work in a high school, teaching 14 year olds about poetry. If they're writing dark stuff, I don't tell them not to write it, I don't contact their parents, I talk to them. I use my judgement. I treat them like young adults. I use my judgement about what's a threat, what's a behavioral problem, and what's metaphor, what's creative expression, what's the sight of them processing a tough experience. For me to shut any of that down without talking directly to them would just be disrespectful.

Jennifer, yes, I "still cloak a lot of what (I) write in lyric incomprehensibility, just to be on the safe side, but also because that’s how (my) brain works," but if you don't want to, if the larger You doesn't want to, you shouldn't have to, and anyone who tells you otherwise can go marinate in their fear cave.

and i asked myself, don't you just love it? then, why don't you just love it?

2011-11-20T18:41:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year when I start to feel, well, terrible.

This year is different. There are Big Life Transitions that I'm not going to detail on the internet. I still feel terrible, but terrible in a way that pulses with placelessness, & possibilities, & love, & an odd overflow of hope / hopelessness which is somehow feeling like the same thing.

I have a big crush on dancing girl press & studio. How do people manage to keep things like this running? Are they independently wealthy? I would love to do something like this. Also, I would love to be independently wealthy. Also, I would love to own a little white llama and a patch of forest where he could live. All of the above is equally unlikely, so I will just keep my crush.

Back to Pittsburgh on Wednesday for Thanksgiving. Very excited, though I have to leave little cat for a few days. The Glee Adele mash-up is in my head on repeat. Was that scene devastating or was it just me?

Hop along, chickadees.

2011-11-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil"

ask me how

2011-11-14T16:38:00.000-08:00

forgetting something

Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob— otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.

--- nick flynn

i was a guest in the yoke / of my body

2011-11-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

At Thirty

Whole years I knew only nights: automats
& damp streets, the Lower East Side steep

with narrow rooms where sleepers turn beneath
alien skies. I ran when doorways spoke

rife with smoke & zippers. But it was only the heart's
racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want

until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke
of my body by the last margin of land where the river

mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens,
a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as

barges loose glittering mineral freight
& behind me façades gleam with pigeons

folding iridescent wings. Their voices echo
in my voice naming what is lost, what remains.

-- Lynda Hull

To Friend

2011-11-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

Facebook made "friend" a verb, which is a little unfortunate, since "befriend" was working just fine More unfortunate is the awkward verb "unfriend," but so it goes.

This is a post about friends, about poetfriends.

I really like this poem by my poetfriend Alexis Orgera at H_NGM_N.

If you are in Pittsburgh today (November 9th), you should go see the lovely and talented poetteacherfriend D.A. Powell read for free.

Today is the BIRTHDAY of my poetfriend Leigh Phillips, who is brilliant and endlessly inspiring. Sometimes she falls into despair about writing, but even the expression of her despair is poetry. Go say Happy Birthday to her on Twitter.

Our submissions are open at Gigantic Sequins for issue 3.2. This is included in a post about friends, because small journals are very friendly. They purr. Send us some writing on fire.

2011-11-06T17:06:00.000-08:00

Unexpected Meeting

We are very polite to each other,
insist it’s nice meeting after all these years.
Our tigers drink milk.
Our hawks walk on the ground.
Our sharks drown in water.
Our wolves yawn in front of the open cage.
Our serpents have shaken off lightning,
monkeys---inspiration, peacocks---feathers.
The bats---long ago now---have flown out of our hair.
We fall silent in mid-phrase,
smiling beyond salvation.
Our people
have nothing to say.

--Wislawa Szymborska

you were there, and you, and you

2011-11-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

CODA

And now I know what most deeply connects us

after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,

and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,

and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,

though we are grateful, and it isn’t even death,

though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence

of being alive, catching a glimpse,

in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is

that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

of what humans can find out about each other.

—Jason Shinder

go home go home go on get gone

thanksgiving's coming soon, thank god

next semester, if everything works out, I get to take a class with edward albee and go to the ocean as much as i want.

a friend sent me his new manuscript. it reminded me to pay attention; he'd somewhat fallen into victimhood. being a victim is easy. owning your stuff, your garbage, baggage, baloney - that's hard. owning the places you've really fucked up. cleaning up. packing up, unpacking. i understand that you can write a book about a garden without writing about the sweat it took to plant it, without the times you cursed the ground, but why would you? why write the real dark as something imagined? maybe it means you could write your way out of there, temporarily, while the lights flash and you sign your book, do interviews talking about your book; i understood that the phrase to re-write history, implied avoidance, choices. I think it means something much darker now.

i should be fair. be fare, be fine, be-yond. last month, in the back of my notebook, he wrote a note that made me cry, that i needed to press to my chest for awhile, to soothe what felt torn there. and then one day, i didn't need to. i walked into the present tense. the air was just cold enough, and the sun was out -- it is fall in texas and the monarchs are coming through on slow loping wings on their way to the gulf. today i'm writing a paper, going to workshop, tomorrow waking up at 3 a.m. to go to the ocean with zach and eric.

good morning, chickadees, get up. let's go.

Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers

2011-10-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the sun had really quite risen, but we were reading T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages in the van on the way to plant cordgrass on Bolivar Peninsula.

The place was throttled by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and is still recovering. I wasn't awake, though riding the ferry over, the ocean spray had come up and soaked my back. It was freezing, but Stacey tied one of her backdrop photography cloths around me, and the eight of us walked into the field with heavy gloves and water and shovels and willingness. The diagram went like this: 1. dig a hole 2.fill the hole with water 3. plant the cordgrass 4. water again. Each cluster of plants was marked by a little pink flag, and teams of us spread across the field. Soon we were making up planting songs. Zach lent me a windbreaker, Stacey gave me her sweatshirt, and suddenly I was entirely warm. I took off my gloves and found that the water was warm, the ground was warm. Only the wind was cold. We'd begun to sing. Come on, sweetie, Rhianna was saying to the plants, come on.

I have been thinking a lot about the environment, about what I can do, what's my part in preservation. It's very easy to sign petitions at the White House, to put your voice into the conversation that demands wildlife protection. It's very easy to get a reusable water bottle, a reusable shopping bag. It's very easy to use your bicycle a little more. That's what I can do for now. For now.

Here are some songs by Carter Tanton that you might like.

Happy birthday today to my little brother Bean, and also to my friend Ryan Walsh. I do love a Scorpio, you stubborn darlings.

Try, Try Again

2011-10-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

The Divine Image - by William Blake

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace seal'd,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

Sometimes we forget that fear makes us cruel. A friend told me a year or so ago that I could be mean. I was taken aback; I never think of myself as a mean person. You're mean when you don't get what you want, he said. We'd been a 'thing,' a romantic-ish but never-quite-official thing. When my friend said want, he meant capital W want, want that is the thin shell of the fear that we'll never be fully loved, fully chosen. Humans hold a hundred forms of fear. When it comes to other people, that fear comes out in unexpected ways - some never directly expressed, some unbelievably violent. Fear surprises us. Our impulses go sideways. Most people act by self-propulsion, and the fuel is fear. We all think we're fakes, or we're not fakes, but we're ashamed of something we've done. We're afraid of being seen, so we're too loud or don't go to the party at all. I try to live in the middle, within reason, but I fail all the time.

Most often, when I act out, I misuse the gift of being a writer. It happened recently, this morning. The thought having hurt someone, having deliberately hurt someone, is so bewildering. I don't know myself, when I am sharp and thoughtless like that, sending that poem I knew was cruel. Not mean, but cruel - pushed buttons, hit nerves I knew it would hit. It's not my sober self, it's the addict self, who wants and lashes out when want isn't met. It pushes me from people. It's the real darkness in me, the faithless place. You might think the darkness was something else, something less to do with people, more interior, less nameable. But this is the real root of it, I've come to realize, because I have so many people who love me, who have stuck with me through hard time. Fear, fear, a hundred forms of fear. All I can really do is own it. To claim my side of the street. To pray to whatever is there or not. Try again.

After the Movie

2011-10-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

From The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, by Marie Howe

the center of the earth is the end of the world

2011-10-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

turns out, that really, I am actually a Green Day fan. Who knew?

this is a lyrics fan-made video & sloppy but I sort of like it. There's pretty great narrative music video that won't be embedded here

Sometimes I forget that I was a teenager in the 90's. We listened to Weezer, to Rusted Root, to Ani DiFranco, to No Doubt, to Ben Folds Five, to house music, to Joni Mitchell. Apparently we listened to Green Day. We didn't have a clue what was happening in the world. We quoted "Clueless." We watched My So-Called Life. We bought clothes from thrift shops - old man sweaters and ugly boots we markered up and babydoll dresses and bell-bottom jeans we ripped to shreds. We were sheltered by money. I rode the bus downtown alone three days a week afterschool to dance. We read Beowulf and The Scarlet Letter and Bartelby the Scribner. When Annie died, Dorothy had me sit down before she told me. There was a point at which Madeleine and I started to sneak out during the school day to smoke on the fire escape of the white house where no one seemed to live. I hardly remember senior year; I remember a trash can fire in the sun in someone's backyard, a day I threw up in the bathroom near the theater. There are pictures of the rest, but I can't remember it. We drank beer in Sparky's kitchen, ate bagel bites, rifled through her mom's purse. We so often slept at one another's houses. There were a lot of dusks we ran through other people's yards - how was it we could be carefree? Girls with ripped jeans playing children's games. There were a lot of long walks. There was a lot of rain.

dream city

2011-10-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

Boy in Video Arcade
by Larry Levis

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it,
Or heaven's guesswork, something always to be sketched in.

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.
He's the only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.
I see the pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum on the floor.

I like the close-up, the detail. I like the pointlessness of it,
And the way it hasn't imaged an ending to all this yet,

The boy never bothering to look up as the sun comes out
In the late morning, because, Big Deal, the mist evaporating & rising.

So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy.

I don't see anything at the end of it except an endlessness,

The beauty parlors, the palm reader's unlighted sign, the mulberry trees
fading out before the billboard of the chiropractor.

The lake of fire's just an oil speck.
I don't see anything at the end of it, & I suppose that is what is wrong with me,

Among other things. And it's slow work, because of all the gauzy light,

It's hard to pick out anything.

Dreams of Ondaatje (2)

2011-10-05T19:43:00.000-07:00

7 or 8 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER - A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY

The Father's Guns

After her father died they found nine guns in the house. Two in his clothing drawers, one under the bed, one in the glove compartment of the car, etc. Her brother took their mother out onto the prairie with a revolver and taught her to shoot.

The Bird

For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from Twelfth Night, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing "Prisoner of Love". Her father's parrot could only imitate the office typewriter, along with the ching at the end of each line. Later it broke its neck crashing into a bookcase.

The Bread

Four miles out of Topeka on the highway - the largest electrical billboard in the State of Kansas. The envy of all Missouri. It advertised bread and the electrical image of a knife cut slice after slice. These curled off endlessly. "Meet you at the bread," "See you at the loaf," were common phrases. Aroused couples would park there under the stars on the open night prairie. Virtue was lost, "kissed all over by every boy in Wichita". Poets, the inevitable visiting writers, were taken to see it, and it hummed over the seductions in cars, over the nightmares of girls in bed. Slice after slice fell towards the earth. A feeding of the multitude in this parched land on the way to Dorrance, Kansas.

First Criticism

She is two weeks old, her mother takes her for a drive. At the gas station the mechanic is cleaning the windshield and watches them through the glass. Wiping his hands he puts his head in the side window and says, "Excuse me for saying this but I know what I'm talking about - that child has a heart condition."

Listening In

Overhear her in the bathroom, talking to a bug: "I don't want you on me, honey." 8 a.m.

Self Criticism

"For a while there was something about me that had a dubious quality. Dogs would not take meat out of my hand. The town bully kept handcuffing me to the trees."

Fantasies

Always one fantasy. To be traveling down the street and a man in a clean white suit (the detail of "clean" impresses me) leaps into her path holding flowers and sings to her while an invisible orchestra accompanies his solo. All her life she has waited for this and it never happens.

Reprise

In 1956 the electric billboard in Kansas caught fire and smoke plumed into a wild sunset. Bread on fire, broken glass. Birds flew towards it above the cars that circled round to watch. And last night, past midnight, her excited phone call. Her home town is having a marathon to benefit the symphony. She pays $4 to participate. A tuxedoed gentleman begins the race with a clash of cymbals and she takes off. Along her route at frequent intervals are quartets who play for her. When they stop for water a violinist performs a solo. So here she comes. And there I go, stepping forward in my white suit, with a song in my heart.

_______________________________________________________________

The poem above is by Michael Ondaatje, one of my favorite writers. I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to Ondaatje - I talked about him here over a year ago, and meant to say more. Life moves in, and takes up space. Welcome, life, you say, then turn around and find it's been a year since you last thought about answering a question you'd meant to shed light on the day before. What I mean is Michael Ondaatje, and how instructive he is. How he keeps out of the poems by being so in them, unquestionable. I'm tired, can you tell? I want to say more but can't, Rudyard Kipling is next to my desk stomping around, demanding to be read for tomorrow I'll say that this poem is one of my favorites of his. He's coming to Houston next Monday and I'm deeply deeply excited and am going to dorkily bring all of the books I have of his to be signed. Is that terrible? I'm going to do it. Maybe not. But I'd like to. I'd like to have him sign along the line of the veins in my wrist.

On a side note, my poetfriend Chuck Carlise has a new chapbook out, called A Broken Elevator Still Isn't the Stairs. It's $10.00 and it's incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

throw up your arms

2011-10-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

Green Day's 21 Guns is stuck in my head today. I'm not really a Green Day fan, but somehow today, the song skipped through my head, & I followed it, & now I'm stuck. It doesn't hurt that this is the version from the American Idiot musical...

Next Friday I'll be reading as part of the Gulf Coast Reading Series at Brazo's Bookstore with Celeste Prince and Thomas Calder. I'll read poems, they'll read fiction. Free; 7 p.m.

and hey, it's October. Beautiful.

animal / cry

2011-09-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

A little black pit bull trotted in front of my car as it crested the small slope on West Alabama by the low red bodega, it trotted in front of my car then crossed the divide and was hit in the side by a red truck the blank thud yelp weep cry muscle pulsed and turned all wrong a cry and between us shot into the night this cry I found my hand over my mouth with my car stopped and the red truck stopped and the dog had turned after the slam the thud the cry turned back and ran the other way into the dark strip of ruined fields houses yards, the man in the red truck his eyes so briefly locked in mine our mouths both open throats stopped and the dog already running back into the night, then both of us letting up the breaks, driving forward, with no cars before or behind us, no witness. The radio was on. Leonard Cohen was singing Chelsea Hotel #2. I turned it off. I tried to pray. The praying sounded like Please save the little black dog, god, the little black dog, please please save the little black dog. It sounded like failure, like helplessness, like waiting rooms of hospitals, like detoxes, like a slur on the phone, like denial. I called my father. He tried to tell me a story about a dog in Israel, how before lunch, Ben had been petting a small dog outside a cafe, how when they came back and I stopped him from telling because I could already see my small hand touching the golden dog's head its wirey frame like a coyote already feel how I'd have been with it, feeling it a friend in a place where I felt foreign, both of us strangers here on earth. To think of it, what happened after lunch, when they went outside the cafe, when they saw the dog. I could feel the terrible hole opening up in the world to swallow me then, to see how quickly all can be erased....

In the paper this summer, there was a picture of a man being attacked by a jaguar outside a village in India. Apparently the jaguar has been hanging around town - there had been a drought, and when droughts occur, animals are forced to widen their hunting and foraging areas. So the jaguar had been around. The story said that the man was killed, and the jaguar was shot. Look at that, my mother said, poor man. Poor jaguar, I said. She looked at me with a long pause. There is something very wrong with you, she said.

I have read plenty of stories and poems in which an animal is hit, heard other people's personal stories. But until tonight, I'd never seen it. I should say, really, that I'd never felt it. A small part of me thought that if there were a war, if I should be in a place where there was a war, where I saw combat, I would lose my will to live very quickly. I realize again I am deeply porous to pain and with animals, more so. It felt a piece of me flew out to the dog... no.. into the sound that the dog and I made together on impact, and that the piece of me that flew is a hole that will stay a hole, uncertainty, fragility, the hollow sound. And if you haven't seen an animal hit, if you haven't hit one, this will be just another story to you about how it happens, how it happens all the time.

My little cat is so old now that sometimes she doesn't wake up immediately when I touch her. Yesterday I put my fingertips on the underside of her sleeping belly and felt her heartbeat, felt the little ribs, listened to her snore. Her paws twitch dreaming.

The peddling boy says: Let's close our eyes.

2011-09-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I was granted the Mary Jean Irion Award from the Chautauqua Literary Arts community. Basically, it's the equivalent of winning a prize in heaven, where everybody is thoughtful and willing and interested, poets and those who don't consider themselves poets. It's not a big award but it was a very sweet encouragement.

Back on the ranch...

- Submissions are closed for Gigantic Sequins issue 3.1. This is going to be a great issue, featuring poets I'm very excited about, so far including (but not limited to) Amanda Auchter, Laura Goode, and Kimberly Gray... you can check out their websites for a little peek at the type of work we're interested in.

- Submissions are open for Gulf Coast, where I help edit poetry in Houston.

- This past Friday was the first of the Gulf Coast readings at Brazo's Bookstore. Analicia Sotelo, J.S. Lowe, and David Tomas Martinez read - good stuff. I'll be reading next month, on 7 Oct, with Eric Howerton & Celeste Prince (fic).

- Books read or begun in the past two weeks for school: The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson; The Blue Boat, by Darrel Bourque; and Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. It's going to be a very strange semester, chickadees. All about slaughter, boundaries, stripped humanity.

- For my class on Imperial Gothic literature, I watched a long documentary on Queen Victoria's England (which you can find cut into 15 minute sections on Youtube) which was horrifying and worth seeing, especially if you know very little about world history, which I do. Now I know a little more. Incredibly frightening, what people are capable of.

- To end cheerily, I'm teaching a high school poetry class. The kids are great. If anyone reading this is interested in the 70 page poetry packet I put together for them, drop me a comment and I'll email it to you.

- The neighbor's dog just made a sound like a tropical bird. The weather has mercifully dropped from the hundreds. Still no rain. Almond milk is grand.

The end.

here we go again

2011-08-24T18:41:00.000-07:00

Heart Condition
by Jericho Brown

I don't want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg.
Two people touch twice a month in ten hotels, and
We call it long distance. He holds down one coast.
I wander the other like any African American, Africa
With its condition and America with its condition
And black folk born in this nation content to carry
Half of each. I shoulder my share. My man flies
To touch me. Sky on our side. Sky above his world
I wish to write. Which is where I go wrong. Words
Are a sense of sound. I get smart. My mother shakes
Her head. My grandmother sighs: He ain't got no
Sense. My grandmother is dead. She lives with me.
I hear my mother shake her head over the phone.
Somebody cut the cord. We have a long distance
Relationship. I lost half of her to a stroke. God
Gives to each a body. God gives every body its pains.
When pain mounts in my body, I try thinking of my
White forefathers who hurt their black bastards quite
Legally. I hate to say it, but one pain can ease another.
Doctors rather I take pills. My man wants me to see
A doctor. What are you when you leave your man
Wanting? What am I now that I think so fondly
Of airplanes? What's my name, whose is it, while we
Make love. My lover leaves me with words I wish
To write. Flies from one side of a nation to the outside
Of our world. I don't want the world. I only want
African sense of American sound. Him. Touching.
This body. Aware of its pains. Greetings, Earthlings.
My name is Slow And Stumbling. I come from planet
Trouble. I am here to leave you uncomfortable.

2011-08-13T10:21:00.001-07:00

2006

Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.
-- James Wright

2011-08-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

At Chautauqua Lake this week. Lots of writing. Next week, Houston.

2011-07-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

"infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. how do they know an edge is an edge? by passionately wanting it not to be."

"where does that hole come from? it comes from the lover's classifactory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly. his. Two lacks become one."

from Eros the bittersweet, by Anne Carson

The Way You Wish You Could Live In The Storm

2011-07-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I was traveling for six days - Boston, New York - cars, buses, trains. Little sleep, movies, late dinners, rivers. Let's have a song.

I'm exhausted, sick. My system always falls apart after whirlwind trips.

I haven't seen Noel in ten years, and have only spoken briefly, over email. We met when I was seventeen, he was twenty-one, at a party somewhere, the middle of the years when I was hellbent & a spiraling little oblivion. Noel was always kind to me. We didn't really stay in touch after that summer. So when we met for lunch, in New York, it was wonderful to find that 10 years later, he is as lovely and interesting as I'd remembered. Noel's a painter. You can see some of his work here

I went out to Brooklyn to see Angelica, also a painter, who I studied theater with at Syracuse. We sat in her garden, drank strong coffee, talked and talked and talked. Angie is, I think, the strongest female I know, in all ways. She welcomed me into her studio-- I hadn't seen her larger paintings. I was speechless.

Angelica, talking about her work

It's beautiful to see that the people I hold dear, who I am bound to in one way or another, have committed themselves to the act of making in the same way I have - that they've given making a space in their lives, a central space. Carry on, chickadees, carry on.

2011-07-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

Very happy that yes, The Rumpus did publish my little essay on Gregory Orr. You can read it here.

Dreamy Sunday; after swimming, late lunch in a dimly lit Thai place with one of my oldest friends. I remember when he came out to me. We were 14 or 15, and he took me slowly by the wrist out of our friend's old mansion to stand in the dusk on the gravel driveway. I'd already known, of course, so it wasn't the information was the revelation, it was how much he trusted me.

Went to see Tree of Life last night. This is the summer of movies alone. Very needed. Writing a lot about movies these days. Tonight I'm watching A Prophet, directed by Jacques Audiard. Audiard has directed two beautiful movies in the past ten years, Read My Lips, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped -- I think I'm going to see the latter again soon, as I saw it in the theatre in Boston when it came out in 2005. I think Audiard is fascinated by brutality and beauty, how they can live so tightly knit together. He's a terrifically sensitive director.

Here are 9 poems Terrance Hayes thinks you should read, and he's right.

My fortune cookie today said "Necessity is the mother of risk."

new sight

2011-06-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

now I have a website

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.

because today the water saved me

2011-06-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

The Swimmer - John Cheever

Belle Isle, 1949 - Philip Levine

The Mermaid Song - Anna Vogelzang

is love // love more

2011-06-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

Writing about a Gregory Orr poem I love, hoping that maybe The Rumpus will publish it.

Chickadees, there's this thing about love.

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.

2011-06-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-06-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

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 Letters nominated 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...)

2011-06-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

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.

--- Henri Cole

from Blackbird & Wolf,
which I am reading this week.

2011-06-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

You cannot put a Fire out --
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan --
Upon the slowest Night --

You cannot fold a Flood --
And put it in a Drawer --
Because the Winds would find it out --
And tell your Cedar Floor --

-Emily Dickinson

2011-05-23T22:18:00.001-07:00

Hello chickadees,

I've been very busy organizing things for Gigantic Sequins. Not only are our submissions open again, but we're about to be releasing issue 2.2, and we are in the middle of our summer lovin' raffle. The cherry on top is that I'll be hosting a Gigantic Sequins reading on Wednesday, June 22, featuring contributing poets Jim Daniels (2.2) and Elizabeth Hoover (2.1). I can't say how much it means to have both of these poets on one bill. You will have to come to the reading to hear me attempt to say why.

Starting next Friday, my older sister Anna and I will be driving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (our hometown), but first stopping in Rudy, Arkansas, to stay at her mother's farm. When I was last there in August, I caught a kitten, and the peacocks were just skinny little slips of bird. There were hummingbirds at the feeder, and Pat's old dogs mumbling around the periphery of the house. Every time I get to visit Rudy, I think again about somehow, one day, having a house out in the country, where a train whistles at the edge of the property, the creek runs through it, and at night, the house becomes it's own private lantern in a world darkwashed. Anna and I have never been on a road trip together. It should be beautiful, as long as the Mississippi holds. And if not, well, we will have a great adventure. Babycat is coming along. I have purchased a black leash for her, and a black collar (being an indoor cat now, she never wears on) with a black bell, and a tiny gingham bow. I didn't have a choice about the bow, and she doesn't seem to be bothered. I'm amused at the idea of her prancing through the tall grass at the farm, alongside the sheep, with her tiny gingham bow. At least it matches her - black & white.

"A poem is not a report on an experience. A poem can't really be "about" drug use or recovery; it has to create an experience in language, and then to reach inside that language in the direction of making meaning. If a poem merely tells us a story -- well, is it a poem at all?" --- A very interesting blog post by Mark Doty today, partially on assumption.

I turned 28 last week, and the only present I received was a book of Rilke's poetry, with certain poems marked by the giver. It was exactly what I needed.

2011-05-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

Gigantic Sequins Presents
RAFFLE ME, BAFFLE ME:
The Summer Lovin’ Edition

You – yes, you- could win

books from:
D.A. Powell
Nick Flynn
Jonathan Franzen
Matthew Zapruder
The 2011 Wave Books catalog
& many others

Music from:
Blanketfort Records
Brendan Little
Emily Easterly
Emily Rodgers
VDMA

Art by:
Darla Jackson
Savannah Schroll Guz

Visit
www.giganticsequins.com
to purchase your raffle tickets
and find out more about our donors
AND
you will automatically be eligible for a prize
if you pre-order Gigantic Sequins issue 2.2.

2011-04-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

So pleased to have two poems in the most current issue of The Normal School. (Saw it at Borders today!) Aannd extra-pleased too be in the same issue as D.A. Powell - great poet & teacher & a sweet friend.

From an interview with Gerald Stern, at The Rumpus :

"...there are hundreds of prisons—sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus. The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don’t seem to have a subject. I don’t totally understand that. I did a reading recently at The New School for Best American Poetry; I published a poem there this year. Anyway, there were some very good poets at this reading, but there were also some who seemed more interested in being funny and making cute jokes and writing endlessly about nothing. It was narcissism, indulgence, no social consciousness, no sense of… We’re destroying the earth! We live in a country that’s governed by confusion and lies and that operates through greed and selfishness and cruelty. We’ve killed or forced into exile two million Iraqis. Where is the poetry? What are our important poets doing?"

Hope you're enjoying your weekend, chickadees.

2011-04-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary.
- Simone Weil

a.) the hug - nan goldin b.) galveston beach c.) paul thek d.) a hard day

you and me both, kid

2011-04-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

You, Darkness

You, darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(via Kimberly Gray. Thanks.)

	The New Pornographers - Failsafe .mp3

	Found at bee mp3 search engine

c'mon, darling

2011-04-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

enchanting music blogger becca darling is: the beecharmer
& she's curated today's guest post!
swoon with me:

st vincent & the national // sleep all summer

yeah yeah yeahs // little shadow (acoustic)

neko case // star witness

cat power // lived in bars

the shivers // just didn't need to know

pj harvey // sweeter than anything

.....&.......&......

Economically, not

emotionally this
color is connected
to that color
the waves
break

they really
do.

I hold on,
I hold on to you

by Eileen Myles - "The Beach"

.......&.....&.....&.......

run through the west village in flames (mishearing)

2011-04-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

Insect Life of Florida
by Lynda Hull

In those days I thought their endless thrum

was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells

enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe

through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever

parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid

Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled

to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she

murmured of alligators that float the rivers

able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.

And always the trance of blacktop shimmering

through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand

and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding

white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part

of the singing, their thousand wings gauze

on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water,

the motel balcony, singing calypso

with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson

of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed

over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our

shadows—Father’s face floating over mine

in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night,

metallic with cicadas, musical

and dangerous as the human heart.

Vampires

2011-04-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

The other day I went to a reading, where one of the two featured poets did not vary his tone at all. In his half hour reading, he gave the same weight to nearly every word, the same pause, the same pitch. Every so often a word would jump out at me - vampires - - factory - - pastries -- and then I'd sink back into the effort of merely trying to make coherent what I was listening to. It was very disappointing. It made me feel good about my self-conscious effort to read well, to record myself before giving a reading. I don't much like to give readings, but as long as I'm giving one, I care about the audience, and our communication.

Speaking of communication, some kind journal has nominated me for the Best New Poets 2011 anthology. I was notified of the nomination, but not of the nominator, so it's all very sweetly mysterious. Thank you, mystery journal! (If you haven't been nominated, you can still enter the open competition for a small reading fee.)

My poetfriend John Sherer recently sent me a poem he liked by Zbigniew Herbert, which you can find here. John and I share the habit of occasionally handwriting or typing up poems of others, just to get a sense of their motion. A few years ago, I was fascinated with a poem by Raymond Carver called Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In, and typed it up many times. Here it is, in full :

Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In

by Raymond Carver

You simply go out and shut the door

without thinking. And when you look back

at what you've done

it's too late. If this sounds

like the story of a life, okay.

It was raining. The neighbors who had

a key were away. I tried and tried

the lower windows. Stared

inside at the sofa, plants, the table

and chairs, the stereo set-up.

My coffee cup and ashtrays waited for me

on the glass-topped table, and my heart

went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,

or something like that. After all,

this wasn't so bad.

Worse things had happened. This

was even a little funny. I found the ladder.

Took that and leaned it against the house.

Then climbed in the rain to the deck,

swung myself over the railing

and tried the door. Which was locked,

of course. But I looked in just the same

at my desk, some papers, and my chair.

This was the window on the other side

of the desk where I'd raise my eyes

and stare out when I sat at that desk.

This is not like downstairs, I thought.

This is something else.

And it was something to look in like that, unseen,

from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.

I don't even think I can talk about it.

I brought my face close to the glass

and imagined myself inside,

sitting at the desk. Looking up

from my work now and again.

Thinking about some other place

and some other time.

The people I had loved then.

I stood there for a minute in the rain.

Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.

Even though a wave of grief passed through me.

Even though I felt violently ashamed

of the injury I'd done back then.

I bashed that beautiful window.

And stepped back in.

another song

2011-04-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

For a limited time, you can buy Glenrose, the beautiful, home-recorded 4 track album of my friend Brendan Little. His band is The Painted Lights

It's National Poetry Month. I want to tell you not about a great poet, but about the first poetry I really felt was mine. I was 17 years old, in New York City & nobody who knew me knew where I was. I was in a bookstore on St.Marks. I picked up a little book called Living at the Movies & read it all day in the park, smoking cigarettes, watching people who seemed to know themselves & their skin & move easily through the world & suddenly I felt more like them, felt for a moment very real. It's not that I hadn't read poetry before - I'd read Frost & e.e. cummings, & Ferlinghetti, & Dickinson, & a handful of others. In Pittsburgh, I'd write poems on the bus afterschool, going Downtown to my dance classes. It's not that Jim Carroll's book was great, but it was that I'd found it and felt that it'd found me. "look out Manhattan" it said "your prince's sorrow / might be back again tomorrow." And that seemed to make sense.

when you can't speak

2011-04-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Beecharmer is back. Go get the April mix. Some recent favorites of mine on there, including Cannons by Little Scream, and Forget That You're Young by The Ravonettes (who I am going to see in two weeks!)

My musical theater geekheart has re-emerged with a second look at the work of Kerrigan & Lowdermilk. I really can't help myself. Their songs are funny & sweet & totally heartbreaking, & musically interesting. Here's a song about road trips i.e. Freedom. If you like that, then you might want to watch the following, which has been in my head & weepy heart for a few days:

These are split days, & each day a little closer to The Unknown aka summer. I just sing, & keep going. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but sing.

Reading : Houston : Saturday 6 p.m.

2011-03-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Once you're done at this Saturday's amazing Houston Indie Book Fest, mozy a few blocks over to The Joanna for a killer FREE event!

You'll hear readings from OH NO contributors Jesse Donaldson, Greg Koehler, Ben Pelhan, Becca Wadlinge, and yours truly. Check out the main page of Houston's Indie Book Fest to read more about OH NO in the exhibitor spotlight!

You'll view a screening of BEBE ZEVA, a documentary (mdmafilms.org)!

You'll take part in a Q&A with directors Megan Boyle and Tao Lin!

See you there? See you there.

The Joanna
4014 Graustark

light to light

2011-03-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

If you missed my reading & interview with Renee Alberts on Prosody, (WYEP 91.3) it is now available for free on iTunes, (or here ).

Cool ass literary shit happening this spring. In Pittsburgh, a pop-up bookstore is taking over an abandoned Borders books. In Houston, around the corner from my house this weekend is the indie book festival.

All's a blur these days, chickadees, a blur.

go ahead

2011-03-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

via the lovely becca.

netflix is bringing me jules et jim tomorrow.

[artist friend spotlight] : Dorothy Hoover

2011-03-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

My oldest friend, Dorothy Hoover, happens to be a crazy-talented artist. You are not surprised? Neither am I. Dorothy was my first introduction to all kinds of culture - I took ballet lessons because she was, got interested in theater because she took acting classes, started listening to music other than Seal & No Doubt (cringe) because one day she brought me an Ani DiFranco tape. We used to be mistaken for (and say we were) sisters. So now, she is a mega-artist living in Los Angeles, studying set design at CalArts. Being mainly a poet, I'm consistently amazed when artists put their imaginations into 3 dimensions. Dorothy's work has been seen in a number of venues in LA - most recently she designed the set for A Theatre@Boston Court's production of Camino Real and was a major player in the design of the wish-I'd-been-there art happening Sneaky Nietzsche. Dorothy's work is especially resonant with me because it's so literary. She's not just an "Oh, this play takes place in a field, so let me paint a backdrop with a field" set designer. She's sensitive to language, she doesn't leave it all up to the actors, but creates something like a visual language, letting the script itself resonate within the form of the set. Don't ask me to explain this further, just think about following her blog from now on, (which she runs with our friend Phil, also an artist & smarty) which I hope & pray she will fill with more pictures of her work. Or, better, check out her most current project, an adaptation of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. Here's a peek:

Also, Dorothy is classy. She is classy cook and a classy dresser, & the last time I saw her, she was wearing gold sneakers. Now that's classy.

Oh No ? Oh Yes!

2011-03-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of Oh No magazine. A great looking magazine for a first issue. While it's the habit of some writers to send young magazines writing they consider to be of a lesser quality, saving the big guns for more established publications, I have to speak up for the benefits of submitting work you really like to newly born magazines. They may, in fact, be more likely publish darlings that you'd be surprised to place anywhere else. I'm super pleased that Oh No has published my poem "River-heart Radio" which came out to 8 (count it, 8) pages. The poem is an experiment of 100 fragments after Michael Palmer, but that's all I'll say. If you want to know more, you can keep an eye out on the Oh No website - magazines will soon be available for purchase online.

Hope all of you chickadees are having a pleasant Tuesday. I'm off to a new coffee shop in the neighborhood to read Emerson. Houston is kind this season, open windows, the air with a slight warm wind. I'm filling my apartment with plants. It finally feels a little bit like I live here.

GIGANTIC SEQUINS KICKSTARTER : GO!

2011-03-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

We have 30 days to raise AT LEAST $500,so please, spread the word about this thing! You will have our undying love.

If you happen to be in Baton Rouge, LA tomorrow, come to this small press panel & reading:

2011-03-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Delta Mouth Literary Festival is a two-day event on Thursday, March 17, and Friday, March 18, 2011, presented by LSU's New Delta Review. For more information, visit the DELTA MOUTH event page at http://tiny.cc/be5zp

It wasn't just that you were just waving to me, but that we were waving to each other

2011-03-12T11:20:00.000-08:00

Good afternoon, Chickadees, I'm on spring break and have spent the entire day so far indoors making art and thinking about art.

Example 1: new page in "The Humanity of Words," the collage book I have been making for almost ten years:

example 2:
This poem Anastasia and Sandman by Larry Levis makes me stop breathing a little bit.

example 3:
Listening to a very disembodying track by Patti Smith from Wave.

Here's the latest poetnews:

-- You can now order the latest copy of Lo-Ball, in which my work appears alongside that of folks like Steve Almond, Bob Hicok, Fanny Howe, Honorée Jeffers, Paul Lisicky, Cate Marvin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Matthew Siegel, and David Trinidad. Honored to be in such good company.

-- Next Friday I'm driving to Louisiana to be part of a small literary festival called Delta Mouth, hosted by LSU. I'll be reading at Highland Coffee, after sitting on a panel discussing small journal publishing, alongside Adam Atkinson (OH NO books), Johannes Goransson & Joyelle McSweeney (Action Books), Blake Stephens (Delta Magazine), and Lauren Tussing-White (New Delta Review). And then I might drive to New Orleans for a night, if someone will feed my cat.

That's all. Hope you're having a good weekend.

On the line : movement in Anne Carson's poem “Water”

2011-03-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

Any line of poetry is a risk. As in painting or dance, there is no room for a movement to be separated from intentionality. Poetry and dance are inherently linked, as beneath an articulation of a physical movement, and beneath the articulation of the content of a poem, there lies energy in the form of sound and rhythm, and, at a further depth, the unteachable -- impulse and instinct. Each poetic line depends on the “success” of the line before – if the line prior has energy, if it draws in the reader, if it moves the poem, we read on. When given the assignment to consider the poetic line, I thought immediately of the poet Anne Carson, who has habitually (and successfully) pushed form in both line and margin. The entire form of her novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red, is composed of very long lines and rather short lines knit together. Part of why this alteration works is that the book swings between conversation, omnipotent narrative, and lyric. The movement of her lines frequently embodies the consciousness of the protagonist, Geryon, and the emotional or physical action of the present. This is clearly seen, for example, in the opening lines of “Water”:

It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart
then he remembered. Sick lurch
downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock
to return to the cut soul. (70)

Part of the success of Carson’s narrative is her sensitivity to where punctuation is and is not needed within her lines; the only punctuation in the four lines I’ve quoted, composed of four heavily enjambed sentences, is the period. For the second sentence of the above section, “He forgot for moment that he was a brokenheart / then he remembered,” to be grammatically proper, a comma should be inserted between “brokenheart” and “then.” Carson decides to put grammatical rules aside, punctuating with a line break instead of a comma. Additionally, the emotional content of the sentence is mirrored by the line break. In the sentence there are two types of past temporal awareness – “forgot” and “remembered”. Geryon only remains in forgetting until the description of his emotional state (“ a brokenheart”) arrives, and immediately, the line breaks. The next line, beginning with “then,” is a movement through time into consciousness, into the present, and physically, on the page, has been a move into the next narrative space. The long, somewhat loose, scenic line is followed by a sharp five-word line in which a difficult emotional state is not only “remembered,” but, snapped into, by the syntax that the line breaks. This sharp line -- “then he remembered. Sick lurch”-- also pushes forward emotionally. After the snap into the present with “then”, immediately followed by knowledge -- “he remembered” – Carson chooses to end the sentence. She has already told us that Geryon is “a brokenheart” in the previous line, and instead of expanding upon how, or further describing the emotions, Carson both keeps us at a momentary linguistic distance from the inner life of Geryon, and allows our imaginations to move towards the him with a sense of catharsis.

In the second part of second line, we arrive at one of the more obvious places in Carson’s work where physicality, sound and rhythm are inextricably intertwined. Following the moment of memory, in the first half of the line, there is a “sick lurch” – these two stressed, monosyllabic words, a one-two punch. This “sick lurch” presents an uncomfortable, immediately understandable image – we might imagine someone physically ill, drunk, or less than fully in control, as lurching. Again, Carson breaks the line where emotion and consciousness change. The full third sentence of this section – “Sick lurch / downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple” – has a type of unnerving placelessness, a heavy metaphor, a interiority that the omnipotent narrator chooses to translate in the most raw way possible. This language, as before, does not follow the rules of grammar, nor of sense. Placing “downward” as the beginning of the fourth line, Carson repeats the device of using emotion or knowledge to move her lines physicality, as we see in lines 1-2, when Geryon moved from a state of hooded consciousness into a state of knowing the present.

In the third line, reading “downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock”, there is the embedded cliché of a “bad apple”. Carson re-energizes this cliché by using maneuvers based on physical space, sound and emotional reasoning. Firstly, Carson places “bad apple” directly in the middle of the line, at the end of a sentence. The phrase is physically confined; there is a sense of the phrase “bad apple” being landed upon with a thump, partially because the line begins with the directive “downward”. This sense of a thump, of bumpiness, is assisted sonically by being embodied in the long ‘A’ vowel sound that is repeated in “trapped”, “bad”, and “apple”. Aside from these sounds, on a more surface level (it’s debatable, I suppose, if sound or reason is the surface), Geryon is described as being “trapped”. A lesser writer might have come up with something like the phrase, “Geryon was trapped in the feeling that he was a bad apple”. However, Carson complicates the “bad apple” cliché; Carson doesn’t make Geryon a bad apple, she puts one inside of him. This decision turns the cliché from a derogatory label towards someone thought to be a source of moral corruption, into a more abstract, condensed idea that indicates something like a psychic wound.

Another fragmented sentence ends the selection from “Water”, again engaging and balancing sound, emotional movement, and physical space. In the sentence “Each morning a shock / to return to the cut soul”, sound is doing much of what we would colloquially call “the heavy lifting”. Alliteration appears between “Each”, “shock” and “cut”, as well as between “shock” and “soul”, and also quietly between “morning” and “return”. The overlapped alliteration on “shock” directs the reader purely by sound to the emotional heart of the four lines I’ve selected from “Water”. At the point when this particular poem appears in Autobiography of Red, Geryon, our protagonist, has just been pushed away Herakles, his first love. The relationship itself – as all first loves are – has been a shock into delight, and so the sudden and cool truncation of the relationship creates a full inversion of that joyful shock into a previously unknown type of pain. By starting with the directive of “downward”, the third line has built momentum towards “shock” as its last word, despite the period appearing in the middle of the line. In a sense, Carson inverts the usual way we might imagine the passage of sleep into wakefulness; instead of using images or language surrounding rousing oneself from sleep (for example, “get up” “wake up” “arise”), Carson envisions Geryon’s gradual wakefulness “each morning” as a descent. “Shock” is left hanging at the end of the third line, as the rest of the sentence – “to return to the cut soul” – is enjambed to create the fourth line. By splitting this last sentence, Carson sets up a question: What is a shock each morning? The answer is: “to return to the cut soul”. Carson gives this phrase its own short line, leaving the image to resonate. The idea of “cut soul” is not alone, however, it has, gathered into it, the verb-noun constructs that have appeared before it. The syntactical echoes of “brokenheart”, “sick lurch” and “bad apple” inevitably rattle within “cut soul”.

These four lines from “Water” function like gears interlocked, moving through emotion, through syntax and enjambment. A mentor once asked if I’d rather that my poems be animals with mechanical hearts, or machines with animal hearts. Reading Carson’s work, it strikes me that perhaps when poets are most successful, the poems they create are equal parts machine and animal, equally invested in music, emotional truth, and structure.

[meditation written for a course in Poetic Forms, 5 March 2011]

Oh Absence & a poem by Jean Valentine

2011-03-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

Absence in the shape of faith. I stopped trusting what looked stable, what called itself stable, and started to trust those people that owned their failings, that said those failings were inherent, that joked at the idea of their own perfection, their own completion. This tack seemed more real than anyone who said things like "I'm living the dream," or "I've been rocketed into the fourth dimension." This seemed more real than anyone who said, "this is a simple program for complicated people." The thing was - the idea of completion began to seem so entirely false that I started to let myself hang on the edge of things. The air was clearer there, because fewer people were willing to stand straddled between two lives, which was different than the illusion of balance, for this place acknowledged the continual potential a crash. The air was clearer, the sky was wider, the fields looked like I thought Texas would look - desolate, unexpected, small towns rising and disappearing as quickly into the land. Dry fields of machinery, a path of cacti and fossils, a creek bed and beetles, the living wind.

This following poem by Jean Valentine made me cry, albeit very quietly and shortly, in my poetic forms class:

X

I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. --from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt

The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.

one of my dearest

2011-02-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

Please consider supporting Anna Vogelzang's next album. She is a lovely & talented person. Keep an eye out for our Gigantic Sequins kickstarter page, coming soon! In the meantime, check out Anna. She will make you glow inside.

On Major and Minor, by Anne Carson

2011-02-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the name of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct ...time. There are more major things than minor things over all, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.

-- Anne Carson

so it goes

2011-02-22T11:44:00.001-08:00

The new issue of Matchbook, in which I have a tiny Batman poem, is now available for purchase.

I have a new post up at the Gulf Coast blog, entitled When We Were Very Young. This may be the most purely sweet piece of prose I have written in years.

Last night I was sitting on a curb with my transgender friend E., bemoaning some of what's going on in my life. E. said that he is broke, so he can't complete the transition yet from F to M, which he's been wanting to do for years. I think I'll make a funny-looking guy, he says, I'm so short. I have to look at him like he's crazy, because he'll be attractive no matter what. It's his spirit that's attractive, his faith. I talk a little more about my issues & start to cry out of frustration, even though I'm also somehow calmed by the warm night, the little dot of the moon. E. asks me if I want to trade problems. I don't even think about saying Yes. We hug and say goodnight. He gets on his little yellow scooter and zips off. I get in my silver car and count my blessings. As tangled as they may be.

let's just call this a teaser

2011-02-18T20:14:00.000-08:00

http://giganticmagazine.wordpress.com/

While writing submissions are closed at Gigantic Sequins, we are still open for ART & COMICS submissions for issue 2.2. This is because we do not get as many of these as we do writing submissions, and we can always use more.

Keep an eye out for an upcoming announcements about 1. our Kickstarter page 2. our 2nd annual fundraising raffle...

I left the world & felt a world

2011-02-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

Below is a poem that Major Jackson brought to his craft talk yesterday in the Honors College at U of H. These InPrint craft talks are always scheduled smack in the middle of my class on poetic forms, but yesterday's talk was partially a continuation of a discussion we'd been having in class about line length. Jackson kept using the term utterance, a word that I love for its type of stuttering sound and scoop, the implication of gravity. "It is the structure of one's utterances," said Jackson, "that elevate beyond the conventional." The Philip Levine poem below is a precise example of this. The movement of the first five lines, in contrast to the fifth & sixth. This sweeping, continuous, specified but not quite grounded action, followed by - plop - a name, a normalcy, a jeer. There's more to say but I have work to do. Anyway, here you go. Great fuckin poem.

M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School--Detroit, 1942
by Philip Levine

He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one
in particular, "What have I done?"
From the back of the room Freddie
shouted, "You've broken a piece
of chalk." M. Degas did not smile.
"What have I done?" he repeated.
The most intellectual students
looked down to study their desks
except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised
her hand before she spoke. "M. Degas,
you have created the hypotenuse
of an isosceles triangle." Degas mused.
Everyone knew that Gertrude could not
be incorrect. "It is possible,"
Louis Warshowsky added precisely,
"that you have begun to represent
the roof of a barn." I remember
that it was exactly twenty minutes
past eleven, and I thought at worst
this would go on another forty
minutes. It was early April,
the snow had all but melted on
the playgrounds, the elms and maples
bordering the cracked walks shivered
in the new winds, and I believed
that before I knew it I'd be
swaggering to the candy store
for a Milky Way. M. Degas
pursed his lips, and the room
stilled until the long hand
of the clock moved to twenty one
as though in complicity with Gertrude,
who added confidently, "You've begun
to separate the dark from the dark."
I looked back for help, but now
the trees bucked and quaked, and I
knew this could go on forever.

often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. / nobody is ever missing.

2011-02-11T19:42:00.000-08:00

Over at Gigantic Sequins, where I am the poetry editor, we are getting ready to close the doors on this submission period & snuggle up to the work we think has got that je ne sais quoi. But - you have 4 MORE DAYS to submit your writing and art. For more information, hop on over to the Gigantic Sequins site. You can purchase issues online over there, or at the following fine bookstores:

Trident Booksellers & Cafe | 338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA

St. Mark’s Bookshop | 31 3rd Ave. New York, NY

bluestockings | 172 Allen St. New York, NY

Flying Object | 42 West St. Hadley, MA

We're revving our tiny journal engine & kicking this thing into the next gear. If there is an independent bookstore near you that you think would be a good match for Gigantic Sequins, please let me know.

Speaking of matches, check it out:

that's me holding Matchbook 3, from Small Fires Press, in which I have a tiny poem about Batman. I love love love tiny things, so it's very lovely to be published in this particular handmade form, an obvious labor of love. This issue debuted at AWP and will soon be available for purchase online at Small Fires Press.

I have been living inside this poem by Robert Duncan for a year

2011-02-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

(I have been sick on & off for two weeks. IV antibiotics, fearful nights, hundreds of dollars. I am sitting in my apartment again, feeling sick. I was sick at this time last year, for what felt like months. I don't say this to ask for well wishes. I think I need a medicine man. I need a spirit journey to search into the cause of my continual sickness, why my body so easily breaks down. I need to go into the desert and howl.

In the middle of all this sickness, I saw the best movie that I've seen in a long time, Biutiful. I can't stop thinking about it.

Whole and Without Blessing | Linda Gregg

2011-02-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.

( listening: Banditas )
( reading: Rules of the Dance )

hi ho the glamorous life

2011-02-03T00:10:00.000-08:00

Illness knocked me out this week. I saw parts of Houston that I've never seen and/(and/or) may not be visible except to the very ill. My eye swelled up. I took to calling it Quasimodo, or Quasimodi, really. Now at least I can see and stay awake for more than 4 hours at a time, but I'm not in DC in the literary world whirlwind, I'm in a little heat cave in Houston, healing with lots of school work & a little ginger ale.

If you didn't already know, Nick Flynn's new book of poetry "The Captain Asks For A Show Of Hands" is now out. Go get it. If you have no prior introduction to his work, listen here. And now go.

If you are in DC - look for Gigantic Sequins, OH NO Books, Small Fires Press/Matchbook, Lo-Ball, Pilot Poetry, etc. etc. & get the inevitable hotel spins for me. Stay warm, chickadees.

flea in the river

2011-01-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

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:

things disappear and she lets them go

2011-01-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

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.

at the lowest aperture / of winter

2011-01-13T17:34:00.000-08:00

* 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.

Here I Stand, Alive Unto You

2011-01-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

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:

Meditation at Lagunitas -- Robert Hass

2011-01-02T08:20:00.000-08:00

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.

tens for twenty-ten

2010-12-23T08:09:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-21T21:38:00.000-08:00

A poem by Jane Hirschfield

2010-12-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-13T21:06:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

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..

The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (excerpt) by Audre Lorde

2010-11-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.

And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

(Originally delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980)

(Thank you to Leigh, for pointing me towards this excerpt.)

A More Impossible Girl

2010-11-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

There are, in fact, certain perks to spending too much time on the computer and being impulsive. These perks include things like buying cheap books at Powells.com, and buying tickets to see a band who reminds you of a type of home, or of a time, or of, oh, maybe it was just being twenty, in Boston, loose in the world and drawn (stunned) by the theatrics of it all, the sexual tension, the narrative. It's been a long time since I've seen the Dresden Dolls - haven't listened to their music in a long time really either - Amanda Palmer's solo album has gotten a bit of play with me, but it's not as if, when I lived in Pittsburgh & she came through town on tour, I ran out to see her, jumping around & screaming rabid-fan style. Last night was closer to that. Seeing Amanda & Brian come onstage - I felt as if Mass Ave had just been painted in front of me, as if Central Square, and Harvard Square, & Anna & Becca & the Fens & Landsdowne St. & crusty eye make-up & being hungover on the T & drinking coffee & smoking cigarettes on Boylston & lady crushes & jars of martinis &,&,&,&,&, - all of it there, all at the same moment. I've been homesick in Houston. Boston's a home to me, and the Dresden Dolls not only represent a home but a whole period of time, a whole emotional landscape. Epic satisfaction last night. I loved the whole fucking thing, and thought I somewhat regret not staying (as invited ) to have a drink with the sound guy David, I was spent and perfectly contained.

Last night's opener: Girl In A Coma - this song's been in my head all day (happy to find this video, as it's the only one that does justice to how extremely sexy lead singer Nina is. I mean, JEEZ.)

and... I don't know... I'm posting a song from the Dolls that I had a crazy visceral reaction to at last night's show. So much love. I found a version of the song online from around the same time (2004-5) when I would have first seen them in Boston.

[Reminder to self: you enjoy going out to rock shows alone in hot boots & dancing like a motherfucker. This has been a promotional message from the committee in favor of living it up. ]

That's all for now, chickadees. Go dream.

Acceptances, fall & shining

2010-11-17T19:39:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of lovely acceptances in my world lately - I'm just quiet about them. Here's some poems of mine forthcoming in Winter/Spring 2011:

~ long poem (5 pages!!) called River-heart, Radio in OH NO Magazine

~ in Lo-Ball Magazine, my poem For Derek, Missing for 8 Months

~ in The Normal School, look for two poems - The Closest I Come To Prayer These Days and The Night Life.

Also, not sure when this will air but, while visiting Pittsburgh, I'll be taping an episode of Prosody down at 91.3 WYEP, with guest host Renee Alberts, a woman who I think is fast becoming one of Pittsburgh's poetry saints, who, among so much else, curates a free poetry reading at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, each Sunday afternoon.

Speaking of Pittsburgh and kind stars, a holler of congratulations to dear mentor Terrance Hayes, who tonight won the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry . Not just a mentor but a gracious, funny, generous guy and a good dad to boot. Hell yes, Terrance! Well-deserved, to put it mildly.

Tons of [Gigantic] Fucken Sequins

2010-11-16T21:10:00.000-08:00

Submissions at Gigantic Sequins are open, so editor-and-chief Kim Southwick and I are all stirred with excitement. It looks like the female/literary version of this man's enthusiasm:

go directly to our Submissions site HERE

If you haven't heard of us, well, we're a small print journal based out of Philadelphia/Houston. We like all types of writing with guts. Bones & muscle & guts. But also, ponies, say, if you are really jazzed about some beautiful ponies, we might like that sort of poem/non-fiction/fiction too.

Looking forward to reading your work !

Sotto voce

2010-11-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

Last night my friend John Sherer and I went to see Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Houston Grand Opera. It is - to simplify - the story of a fisherman accused of killing his apprentice - a story of 'stories' and guilt.

The work, a tragedy, is troubled by the same themes and allusions as works like Shakespeare's King Lear and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. There, Man caught by, and raging out of, the elements of himself and nature; what catches in the audience's sense of humanity -- in Grimes as in Lear -- is the protagonist's harmartia - hubris. Then, there is Britten's strange and fascinating choice to include the figure of the author within the work, but as a silent almost inactive character referred to by the others as Dr.Crabbe. There is nothing, to me, quite as unsettling as seeing the maker within the made, particularly on stage or screen. That making figure, watching what unfolds, without interference (perhaps no longer with the ability to change or manipulate the outcomes) - there's something amazingly chilling about it. Perhaps this feeling comes from being aware that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are what makes us who we are. The idea of there, somewhere, being a maker, one who had molded, set the scene, stands back to watch -- part of what's so horrifying about this in Peter Grimes is that one eventually has the sense that the author, Dr.Crabbe, has lost the ability to manipulate the outcomes. He's created the characters, set the scene, and now, his characters have gone loose in the world. He seems to regret, to be helpless, even as he's received the gift artists hope for - don't they? - that their art will have a life of its own.

More to say about all these ideas (AND the fact that I saw one of my most dear sweet teachers, Lee Anne (insert married name, but used to be Pokego) last night for the first time in ten (!) years...) but the mundane mechanics of life call.

More about Peter Grimes and Benjamin Britten - here. And here, for more about the Houston Grand Opera.

For Fall:

2010-11-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

[The poet] diffuses a tone & spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power . . . reveals itself in the balance of reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities. (304)

-Coleridge
~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~

Sleepwalk Ballad - Federico García Lorca

~ ~ ~ ~

say hello to my leetle friend

2010-11-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

sometimes a monster makes everything better.

Two poems I'm thinking of today, rattling around with a wild fever

2010-11-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The Inconsolables

2010-11-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

I'm about 50 pages into "Heaven's Coast," a memoir by Mark Doty. The book found me precisely when I needed it, in the middle of a season of old trauma and grief. It's an incredibly, incredibly beautiful book. I wrote Mark a note today on Facebook, but thought that I would share it here - why not? The questions I have are so gnawing, I might as well fling them into whatever space is available.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with a friend about elegy, which has spread into a conversation also about consolation and catharsis. My friend's basic thought can be summarized inthat elegy "does nothing" - he finds no consolation in writing poems about the traumatic events of his life, but returns to them over & over involuntarily - this time of year, for both of us, the record skips.

The act of writing elegies for the same event or person over and over seems perhaps to be nothing more than the wild impulse of disbelief focused into page, the clearest, smallest space we can understand, a place where, as writers, we have the illusion (maybe) of manageability. My friend writes with no hope for consolation, with no hope that others might find his work cathartic (if they do, I think he's pleased, but he doesn't "aim" towards it). I haven't quite gotten there - I've an odd sense of responsibility surrounding trauma, surrounding death. I wonder, lately, if my sense of responsibility comes only from wanting the experiences to feel extremely unique - the desire to have been "chosen" almost, as some sort of voice to speak for those unable to express their traumas that are like mine. To have terrible things happen, and to not have a sense that they've happened for a reason - it leaves us with nothing almost, doesn't it? But there must be a space after reason - these things happen...and then life continues happening, and we go on, or we don't..

My friend suggests that there are some of us who are inconsolable, and I began to wonder if what's inconsolable gives us a type of terrible privilege, this sharp access to a sense of mortality, and perhaps, humanity.

I could babble about these things for awhile, as they've been a kind of film over the rest of my life lately, but perhaps as I continue to read "Heaven's Coast," I'll find more answers, or at least different lenses, which, in fact, might be as close to consolation as I'm going to get. Not so bad for a poet.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.

2010-10-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

From The Duino Elegies - R.M.Rilke

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

rest of the elegy here, along with the second (i'm sorry about the mess this format's made of line breaks)

Woman Walking On The Road - by Terrance Hayes

2010-10-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

We were in the car. We were heading home when Christian
with his wholly American name & manic chatter told his
girlfriend
the woman we saw walking on the road with no umbrella
was a sign of torment. We were in the backseat⎯
you with that face making the windows & the black world
beyond the windows beautiful, the roadside figure of a woman
in the rain beautiful & I knew later I’d be writing these lines,
caught in that space between personal & public:
a woman’s torment or symbol of it & our love & goddamn
everybody’s sins scribbled here for show. We were in the car
heading home when Christian said the woman on the road
was probably fresh from a fight with her husband,
but he didn’t say his fists gave his last girlfriend bruises
& I didn’t say it either… The woman was walking alone
on the shoulder & meant something different & utterly the same
to each of us⎯ her lit up life & husband left looking
from a window, as I have looked from a window, guilty.
But Guilt ain’t nobody’s business. We were in the car, we saw
a woman walking on the road. There was a woman who,
after our quarrels, would steal my car, a little blue Datsun
with a dented fender. She’d drive from our dorm to the blank
streets
of the town we lived in; she’d drive past the empty classrooms,
the soccer field, to God knows where & I wanted her, then,
away from me⎯ two red lights, a tired engine leaving smoke.
But one night I groped in the darkness beneath my hood
until I disconnected something & if there is such a thing
as malice,
that was it⎯ a man sabotaging his own car so his lover
couldn’t run…
I’m shaking my head because I want to say I’m different now,
like Christian⎯ someone with a new face beside him & a pain
no one can see, perhaps, settled in his chest. Your new face
beside me. I am damaged, I have bruised. We fought over
something
stupid & she came so close I knew she could smell my blood.
Have I come far enough to say I hit her; to say my hand left
a cloud
on her cheek. Have I come far enough to say, I’m sorry?
We were
in the car, you with that face making the windows & the world
beyond the windows real; the figure of the woman on the road
telling the truth. Once in my small brutal past a woman left me,
walked from my lit up fingers to the street with a storm
on her face.
It was raining. I watched from the window & could not follow,
my car sat in the lot disconnected, unopened, unmoved.

When It Don't Come Easy

2010-10-25T22:37:00.001-07:00

Announcement: I am god-damn tired of all this slippage, all these moments of almost-gone. Once, before he disappeared Derek and I were talking about his frustrations surrounding the HIV positive community - a community he never felt quite comfortable with. Sometimes, you know, I'm just tired of all these damn gays with the HIV. He pronounced HIV like "Live," but without the L. I must have laughed, said something about being tired of all these damn drunks.

So Derek's gone now, not dead, I don't think, just done. I wrote "done" meaning "gone," but I'll keep it -- why not? "Done" is a lie though.

This month - we got word from D's family -facts- about just how crazy it seemed he's gone; my brother struggled harder, raged around, dropped out of college; J (at 27) had heart attack, a collapsed lung; R relapsed again. Again, but this time I wasn't there, this time it was two hospital trips.

All this distance, all these times I would've sat in hospitals, by beds, held the hand of someone barely there, or there, and scared. Maybe it's something in me that wants to be needed, and hearing all of this - these people I love fallen to pieces, and slow healing... you know, maybe it's that they don't need me, not like I thought they might have. Better this immersion than to live untouched, said Lynda Hull. But she died young.

Boston Book Festival : Backstage at The Book Revue

2010-10-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

[1] Silence Please [2] Dean Wareham [3] Steve Almond [4] Nick Flynn & Kristen Hersh [5] yrs truly

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

2010-10-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, very suddenly, I found myself in Boston -- Chickadees, I cannot tell you how giddy I was, when I stepped out of the airport, to have that Northern chill hit me. More awake than I'd been in months. So, I went because my dear dear friend Tom Johnston curated a really great event to tie up the Boston Book Festival titled The Book Revue, a great mix of writers who rock & rockers who write - but wait, first I should tell you about the concert we went to on Friday night, where Dean & Britta opened for Belle & Sebastian. Chris Colbourn (Buffalo Tom) was so kind as to give me one of his comp tickets (THANK YOU), which happened to be in something like the 10th row, center. AND he shared his junior mints. Belle & Sebastian were fabulous, but what's in my head is this song from Dean & Britta.

By the way, if you think you don't know who Buffalo Tom is, you do, maybe you just don't know that you know:

Belle & Sebastian put on a ridiculously fun show - I never would've guessed that B&S fans are...how shall I put it... headbangers? But apparently they are. Everybody dances like crazy.

Saturday was spent zipping around, Mike's Diner in the South End for breakfast, then to the Boston Public Library where our friend Nick Flynn was on a memoir panel along with Marianne Leone, and Jerald Walker. Afternoon, again, a flurry of running, and eventually getting over to John Hancock Hall in Back Bay, to basically hang around while some of the performers - Dean Wareham, Kristen Hersh, Joe Pernice, Steve Almond - got ready. Fast forward to Au Bon Pain, split pea soup, a nice BU professor whose name I forget reciting Hopkins, Steve Almond vaguely discussing truth through a story about Steven Elliot's expression of love. Spent half of the show backstage, watching next to Nick Zinner (guitarist of YYYs) and his book friends, and half in the audience.

Jumping into Tom's life is always wildly energizing, or, really, simply full of a crazed energy. It's so out of my hermetic, interior life, all that banging around, meeting rockers, running from venue to venue, staying up too late, eating meals in groups of eight or nine. There's more to tell, Chickadees, (about a great, great play called The Method Gun.. about how excited I am for New Year's Eve) but I have to go read some Wordsworth. More later perhaps...

follow

2010-10-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

things that inspire me lately.

the Oregon coast

an upcoming tattoo

the wild party

hildur yeoman