tens for twenty-ten

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

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

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


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

slow leaving a goodbye to things

I'm terribly sad, chickadees. At 87, Jose Saramago has died. Every so often you find an author who transports you entirely - who you can barely imagine except as a kind of intuitive magician or unreal character themselves - someone whose mind you might get lost in were they not so masterfully guiding you along. Jose Saramago was one of those authors. I first read Blindness in high school, and immediately began to slowly collect his works, reading each voraciously, slowing as I neared each ending, wanted each to never end. A true storyteller, a true inventor & artist, a humanitarian. I don't think I can write an accurate description of just how much he means to me. His newest book, "The Elephant's Journey," will be published in September - his last gift to us. Thoughts on Saramago's death here. And here, Saramago's Nobel Lecture from 1998. Rest in peace, dear Saramago.

Over at Gigantic Sequins, we are just finishing up our 2.2 reading period, which ends officially on June 30th. A few days ago I was talking to Kim, our editor-in-chief, about exactly what it is Gigantic Sequins is looking for, and our conversation planted in my head this idea of an aesthetic-based community. Perhaps this description leads towards sounding superficial, but what Kim had expressed was that she wasn't simply interested in publishing poets writing poetry, and fiction writers writing fiction, but the writing of artists & musicians & all sorts of creative people. This desire to publish more expansively, not just as a literary journal, but as a journal of arts & culture, is what sets Gigantic Sequins apart from the clambering crowd of lit mags - basically, we're invested in publishing any sort of excellent & thoughtful writing, from classical verse to essays on film. And you still have until June 30th to submit!

I am slow in the world today, brimming with endings and beginnings.....

my own little fences

Inspired by the fantastic Paul Lisicky, who suggested that top-ten-of-the-year lists were "often more about fence-building than anything," I've decided to make a couple of my own little fences.

10 books read in 2009 that inspired me to write

The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
Collected Poems of Lynda Hull
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
The Book of Nightmares - Galway Kinnell
Bluets - Maggie Nelson
Museum of Accidents - Rachel Zucker
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Instructions from the Narwhal - Allison Titus
Sister - Nickole Brown
The Book of Flashlights, Clover & Milk - Joshua Marie Wilkinson


10 songs I put on repeat in 2009

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song - First Aid Kit covering Fleet Foxes
1926 - Thalia Zedek
Flightless Bird, American Mouth - Iron & Wine
Forest and Sands - Camera Obscura
Velvet - The Big Pink
Lopin' Along Through the Cosmos - Judee Sill
Vengeance is Sleeping - Neko Case
Just Didn't Need To Know - The Shivers
Two Birds - Regina Spektor
Sunday Smile - Beirut



There you go, chickadees. Hope you're staying warm.

I bring the sea in

From 'The Journal of Albion Moonlight' by Kenneth Patchen

I work in the shadow. I stab out and many words fail to land on the paper. I bang away at the stone. Nothing but the essential must go into writing - but everything is essential. I take you into my confidence. I told you that I hated novels. This is only party true, for I also love novels. I love even the cheapest, most debased novels. You make a mistake in thinking that I demand purity in everything. Don't forget that veterinaries have their place in the world. And pimps too. Even people who send schoolboys up in the bombing planes. There is a spot for everybody and everything. But this was nothing of my doing. Why should I exhaust myself shouting at a wooden Indian? What am I? a newspaper reporter? Why make a record of something that nobody can use? It is clearly my duty to come just at the right time, saying exactly the right thing. You have read many books. This book is reading you.
I exaggerate nothing. I am not a dealer in distortions. This is precisely the way I found the world. Imaginative people end by becoming tongue-tied. They talk above things. I operate from the inside. My feet never leave the ground. It is not my business that now and then the ground sinks away. I am heavy with the stars in my cap. I bring the sea in. I do no research whatever. Every problem to me is a problem of living. I make no attempt to translate. My speech is as much a part of my body as my arms and legs are. What have I to do with the cult of hallucination? Derangement is for the too-sane - everything under heaven cries to be arranged; I demand order and precision in what I do. The supreme cultivation of chaos has already been done...

Murakami Madness

... meaning that mid-March, momentum maniacal, I embraced the multitudes that make Haruki Murakami, Murakami. Had been reading Murakami before then, but in March it's become a compulsion.


Now, since December, I've read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After Dark, Kafka on the Shore, Dance Dance Dance, & am 3/4 of the way through Norwegian Wood. The last three have been read in quick succession. What is it about Murakami that makes his work entirely readable yet compelling? Perhaps it's that, as a poet, I notice that his lines themselves are not beautiful. Murakami's a storyteller & a philosopher, but he's not in love with sound. Unlike fiction writers such as Saramago or Faulkner, who use both the line & language to move their stories, Murakami doesn't depend on beauty, doesn't depend on the smaller scale - a real powerhouse of a plot-driven writer. And perhaps what makes him compelling is that those plots are sometimes so shockingly strange and twisted and dark that there's really no way of telling what is going to happen next. Murakami's not a writer of logical conclusion. Although I didn't love After Dark or Dance Dance Dance, there was also never a moment when I thought "Oh, of course X is going to happen next." Murakami's also one of those writers whose images creep into your dreams. Not always a good thing, but a testament to the fact that he's mined those places in the human psyche of irrational fear, nightmare, & whatever it is in us that desires the supernatural.

More Murakami