sips without straws

A New Blog

2011-09-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

It's been several months since I've updated Sips Without Straws, and during that time I was wrestling with deep, existential questions. Why does this blog exist? What is the purpose of it all? At first I enjoyed my hiatus from the blogging world, but it wasn't too long before I started reading blogs again and began to contemplate jumping back into the fray.

My original conception of this space was that it would contain intimate reflections on whatever I had been reading, and therefore wouldn't be of much interest to others. I realize now that I wanted to have one foot in and one foot out of the blogging world. In practice, this balancing act was difficult to achieve, especially when one of the most important functions of blogs is to build connection and community.

So I find that I'd like to start over fresh. I hope that you'll come visit me at Some Little Language. I'll probably be blogging about many of the same things, but hopefully I'll be updating more regularly. I'm also going to relax the restraints about what I CAN blog about, so there will be different kinds of content too. Then after a few months I'll close the door to this space. If you've been reading, thanks. I really appreciate it.

And for the record, those existential questions are unresolved. If I ever do figure them out, I will share the answers on Some Little Language. ¡Hasta Luego!

Meeting Grounds

2011-03-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

I should have posted long ago about Midway Journal and the first issue that I participated in as poetry and nonfiction editor. It's been very inspiring to be a part of this journal and I'm excited about some plans we have in the works.

The February issue contains a really cool exquisite-corpse-style drama project as well as killer short stories by Kiki DeLancey, Eileen Russell and Meg Tuite.

I was involved with publishing two essays by Priscilla Kinter as well as poems by Mark DeCarteret, Colleen McCarthy and Gregg Murray. Then I snuck in some art by the inimitable Albie Rock.

It's lovely to watch an issue come together and take shape, to admire its overlaps and juxtapositions.

More Making

2011-02-20T21:30:00.000-08:00

A few of the other artists in the MCBA mentorship program and I, along with Richard Stephens, made a collaborative broadside. Richard did the reductive lino cut and the rest of us responded to the image in some way with writing and set our own lead type. Being the only writer, I may have been glutinous by comparison with the amount of words I used... this must be the first time I have EVER been more prolific than anyone else!

Yesterday with Julie Baugnet we made mixed media journals. Mine is VERY sloppy, but it was good to loosen the reins after my experiences with letterpress (where precision is everything) and break out the paint. Here, being the only writer, I was at a disadvantage... but I stumbled along.

And finally, now that they've been sent out in the mail, I'll post my first independent project. Baby announcements made for my dear friend Molly. Molly referred to her daughter as "the minnow" while she was carrying her and I asked Shawn to do an illustration that took this into account. He NAILED it. Then I began making mistake after mistake that compromised our original design, had to simplify, cried, made errors that compromised my print run, cried, and eventually got them done, just a couple short of how many I had promised. There's a lot more to the story, but I'm trying to put it behind me. What I learned was that I still need a lot of practice with letterpress, and I'm not going to do important projects for other people until I have more experience. But in the end, it turned out okay. And Shawn's fantastic drawing masks any flaws in the printing. I love him for that, among other things.

what is known as heart

2011-02-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something--not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned with their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine.

cited: Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Penguin Books, 2006. 239.

More Book Arts Explorations

2011-01-12T23:19:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about this photo of Molly's, which I absolutely adore, and also children's storybooks when I made this second pressure print. This time was even quicker and more breezy. It's nice to feel hardly invested in the outcome. I'm working on a project now where the stakes are very high. And of course everything is going wrong. But I'm trying my best to roll with the punches.

This is my first broadside, made @ MCBA in Letterpress I. The cassette and candy were drawn by Shawn; I added the tape and cut the image out of a linoleum block. I hope to do more collabs with him soon. It was interesting to be working with my own poem, hearing those sounds in my head.

Handmade paper! This was so much fun. Very little need for precision, lots of playing around.

Close

2010-12-28T22:14:00.000-08:00

from Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines:

The words on a page

In an open book

Looked stupid to

Me when I was little

Unless I was right up close

To them. They looked

Weak: barely

There.

It made me nervous

That in order

For words on a page

To have power

I had to be close.

cited: Reines, Ariana. Coeur de Lion. MAL-O-MAR, 2007.

Book Arts Boot Camp

2010-11-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I was at MCBA from 10-4, learning artist's books and binding. I can't believe how many books we made! Pictured here:

two accordion books, one with a meandering fold (green map)
a single pamphlet (tan box)
a double pamphlet (red marble)
Japanese/stab binding (black w/ red stitching)
drum leaf binding (black w/ tan spine)

Three Tanka by Izumi Shikibu

2010-11-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

In this world
love has no color--
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

....

What is the use
of cherishing life in spring?
Its flowers
only shackle us
to this world.

....

When the water-freezing
winter arrives,
the floating reeds look rooted,
as if stillness
were their own desire.

cited: Shikibu, Izumi. The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan. Trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. 51, 109, 130.

Where Did October Go?

2010-11-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a busy month! Shawn and I returned from New Orleans yesterday where he had a booth at the Tattoo Voodoo Expo. This was our second tattoo convention this month, as Minneapolis had its turn three weeks earlier. I lost my camera and threw out my back in The Big Easy (traveling didn't help it any) but I have lots to write about now, so I'm calling it an even trade. The convention was in a gorgeous ballroom; there was great live music, serious costuming, and crazy cab drivers.

When our plane landed in Minneapolis I sped directly to my first class of Letterpress I. I'm taking this class as part of the MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Mentorship Program. Being selected for this opportunity is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me; I am profoundly grateful. Conceiving of myself as a visual artist is going to be a kind of work-in-progress, and I plan to collab with Shawn as much as possible. But last night it was just me and an xacto knife. I made a quick pressure print on one of MCBA's vandercook presses. Layering shapes creates progressively darker images.

Before we left for NOLA Shawn spent a day helping me in the basement, where we're still working to set up Molly's Kelsey. We got pretty far along and I hope to have printed on that press before November is finished.

What else? My Virginia Woolf tattoo was featured on this site. I've been doing a lot of soul-feeding reading lately, including Woolf's The Years, which was the last novel of hers I hadn't yet read.

But strangely I haven't found myself drawn to blog about many of these things. I think I'm beginning to experience a shift in the ways I want to spend time on and offline. Emails, twitter, and blogging are beginning to take a backseat to my paper journal, goodreads, and facebook. I will definitely be here from time to time, it just could be intermittent going forward. I guess only time will tell. I think often, but never conclusively, about the role of technology, information, and communication in our silly modern lives. These three nouns (tech, info, comm) are certainly important, frequently gratifying, inspiring, informative. But there is of course the deluge, and everyone must find their own strategies to manage overwhelm. I'm still searching for mine. And meanwhile I'm gaining new appreciation for the printed word, an individual's handwriting, the warm sound of voices. We are fortunate to have so many ways to reach out to others that we must be selective about how we do it.

Readiness

2010-10-04T12:15:00.001-07:00

I've been going over old poems and revising, and decided that I have ten poems I'm ready to submit to journals. That may not seem like a significant number to most people, but to me it does. By "ready" I feel I've brought the poems as far as I can, and I still like what is on the page enough to stand behind it.

I also have a handful of poems on the cusp of being ready, which is exciting. And new poems waiting to be written, new ideas on how to collect my poems together. It's an exciting time of year. The house is chilly, as we're waiting to turn on the heat, so I write in wool socks and drink tea. And for the first time in a long while, I'm not writing for a class or a workshop. It feels good.

Balls

2010-09-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Kristin Prevallet from Women Poets on Mentorship:

Ownership, possession, appropriation, balls. At some point a person who wants to be a writer must feel entitled to play around with language and trust her ideas. Feminism was a crucial movement because it sent the message that women needed to take control, to seize the power and possibilities of language. I don't think I would be a writer today had I not, at some point, decided I had the right.

cited: Prevallet, Kristin. "On Anne Waldman" Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections. Ed. Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008.

speaking of romantic poems...

2010-09-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

Doing some inbox tidying, and found more great stuff from Poem-A-Day:

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
BY NOAH ELI GORDON

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
I'd give you another day dizzy
in its bracket for the reluctant circumference
of a sad sad satellite's antiquated orbital stoppage.
You can't jump with a lead foot, can't
anthropomorphize insect anticipation, can't
pixelate postcard nostalgia, can't
trace a boy's tiny hand and call him
king of anything that crosses your path, your past,
your iconographic reluctance to let go the toehold
of ordinary New York lasting so long at night, so
lusty in traffic & another orphan absently
kicking the underside of an orange plastic chair.
Poems shouldn't make you wait for them to finish.
Like love, they should finish making you wait.

cited: Gordon, Noah Eli. "Refresh. Refresh. Refresh," poets.org.

A Decision

2010-09-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

I gave a toast at my sister's wedding last weekend, and so hunted around for a poem to suit the occasion. I discovered that there's very few poems written in English that slide into that ceremonial role well, at least in my opinion. I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has heard poems read at weddings before, which poems?

I ended up going with something from e. e. cummings, but in the process of looking I found "Altruism" by Molly Peacock. It's a fantastic poem, and after having some friends and family (wedding stragglers) over for a backyard fire last night it's still resonating with me.

Altruism

BY MOLLY PEACOCK

What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside out there, not just
our insides turned inside out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well -- just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self's heat, love become a decision.

I love this poem's formal-ity paired with the casual setting. And the conclusion is very romantic, in an enlightened way. But in the end the backyard fire was a little too casual of an image for a ceremony, and the poem's meaning too ambiguous for a toast.

I think there's a dearth of wedding poems out there, when one isn't looking for light verse or anonymous internet poetry. We poets are a complicated bunch, drawn to stir some morbidity into even our most romantic sentiments. Perhaps in the end I would have had better luck with song lyrics, but I always root for the home team.

cited: Peacock, Molly. "Altruism," The Poetry Foundation.

Tattoos and Body Modification: Puzzling Comparisons

2010-09-14T09:06:00.000-07:00

Many people use automobiles to get around. I happen to use a bicycle to get around. It's a given that car-culture and bike-culture are very different, in fact they are often in opposition to each other. Therefore if someone approached me, as a member of the bike-commuting community, to talk about the various allures of cars I would be confused. If this person then said, "well both bikes and cars involve wheels and movement, they are essentially the same thing," I would think maybe that person doesn't get out much.

The truth is that cars and bikes share a similar setting/landscape... which is the street. Many people who ride cars also ride bikes and vice versa. And yes, they have a similar goal (movement) and means to achieve that goal (wheels). Just like tattoos and body modification often share space at tattoo conventions or tattoo shops and have overlaps in their clientele. But once a person participates actively in either community what becomes striking to them are the differences, and they soon discover a wealth of serious spaces that are devoted exclusively to one form/technique.

For example, here's a picture of one of my tattoos, by my husband Shawn Hebrank:

This image of a black swan was created by needles pushing ink into the dermal layer of my skin. My skin was not pierced through or cut open. For me, getting the tattoo was not about chasing after pain or testing my physical limits or healing my bad childhood or some sexual rite of passage. It was only about what I consider artistically beautiful (if tattoos didn't hurt, I would definitely have more of them). And what I see when I look at the tattoo is pictoral: the image of a black swan. I have a hard time understanding any relation between this tattoo and implants or scarification or skin hook suspension. The techniques and visual effects of these procedures are radically different.

In one of my graduate seminars we read a portion of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater. The poems' young characters, Lucy and WillyJoe, experiment with cutting and branding. My former professor, who has been a great source of guidance and encouragement for my poetry on tattoos, asked me how I had enjoyed these tattoo poems. It took a minute of confusion (and me thinking I had done the wrong reading) before I realized that she was grouping tattooing and branding together as techniques of inscription. But in my mind, the black swan pictured above has as little to do with suspension as it has to do with kids writing their names on each other with the tips of sparklers, in terms of art, technique, character, sense experience, etc.

The modern primitive movement, which in my opinion is over-represented in academic study, has encouraged a kind of "it's all essentially the same" approach to tattoos, cosmetic surgery, piercing, and body modification. Any way that one permanently or semi-permanently alters one's appearance, especially if it involves blood, is comparable. Modify is a bloody, bloody documentary (the cosmetic surgery scenes, involving a saw, are the worst), but it includes bloodless comparisons as well like body building. Megan Milks has an interesting post on Montevidayo that negotiates between websites devoted to body modification and to anorexia in terms of what constitutes self-harm and how judgement is applied by others.

These kinds of conversations are definitely worth having. But as a member of the tattoo community, I can't help cringing when I see tattoos lumped together wholesale with body modification. I think this happens in two ways. The first perspective revolves around the politics of appearance: tattooed people look like freaks, certain piercings and body modifications are also freaky. Whether you are stretching your septum or getting a hand tattoo, your goal is to cut an extreme, imposing figure. This perspective ignores the actual mechanics of the artistic process and only focuses on how the tattoo and bod mod communities are viewed by the larger public. But of course this isn't how we view ourselves, and it often doesn't take into account how widely accepted tattoos have become in recent years.

The second point of comparison looks at the ancient origins of tattooing instead of its modern manifestations. This is where the modern primitives come in... where every aesthetic decision involves a "ritual" of some kind. When the experience is privileged as highly as the result (results even viewed as tributes to experiences), again there is little difference between tattoos and bod mod. From this perspective the development of tattooing may as well have frozen in indigenous cultures. The innovations happening today with color blending, composition, complex/detailed imagery, etc. are irrelevant to what is essentially a raw human impulse. My black swan, a teenager's self-branding, breast implants, and suspension are all ritualized bod mods... again ignoring the mechanics of artistic process.

I am trying hard not to assert value here (although I must confess that I ride my bike because I like that better than driving cars), but instead to say that tattooing and bod mod are extremely different: in technique, visual appearance, sense experience, goal/impulse, and community. Perspectives that lump the two together usually come from outside of the tattooing community and are out of touch with what tattooing is today. And I find those perspectives a little aggravating. Perhaps I have an essay brewing inside me.

feelings fill the gaps

2010-09-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely tackles many of our uniquely American sources/outcomes of pain (pharmaceuticals, TV, prejudice, violence) but also throbs with an essential humanity that crosses borders and territories.

In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness. And from that space of loneliness, I can feel the cab driver watching me in his rearview mirror.

Two digressions:

This book took me back to those bleak years under the Bush administration, a place I definitely wasn't prepared to go. If anyone thinks they might not make it to the polls this November they really ought to read this. It shouldn't be so easy to forget.

Another thing the book has made me think about is serialized narratives (TV shows, comics and manga, ya/genre novel franchises) vs. a complete single story (a movie, a book). The ethics of the serial writer are askew, and I base this not on anything Rankine wrote but on my own experiences as a reader and viewer. They hook us and make us wait, hook us and make us wait, ad nauseam without first considering what their narrative will contain and communicate. The conclusion of a series is always disappointing because the writer isn't equipped to deliver, his/her training is solely based on teasing and frustrating the audience's desires. This kind of empty-promise storytelling has shaped our national character.

One more reason I love poetry:

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem--is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. This conflation of solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.

cited: Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004. 89. 130.

Missive from the Mountain #3

2010-08-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Here is Robert Frost's cabin, the view from his porch (including apple trees), and two juicy apples that I couldn't help pocketing. One fell with a thunk while I was taking photos, and when I stooped to investigate, it was right next to another perfectly ripe apple. I took this as a sign to eat one and take the other back to Molly. It was the best apple I've ever tasted, so poetry must have been distilled in this variety!

My suitcase is packed for a 6am departure tomorrow. I feel like I've been gone for a year! Here are some highlights from my trip:

Several talks and meetings with editors from literary journals helped to demystify the path to publication for me. I realized that too often I've looked at rejection letters (as well as lukewarm reactions in workshop or from professors) as emblematic of a flaw in my work or need for more revision. I met a poet here who told me Marianne Moore wouldn't retire a poem unless it had been rejected 40 times. He himself had never reached 40, but after one poem's 36th rejection it was taken by poetry magazine. It's exciting (as well as terrifying) to learn that validation can't be had from these external structures... one is alone with the creative process and must determine for oneself when a poem is done.

Marianne Boruch's lecture "The Little Death of Self" gave a textured account of the role of an individual voice in various poets' work, beginning with a moving recording from a reporter on the Hindenburg disaster. She was attentive to how the "I" has morphed, been overindulged and then over-pressured, but continues to have relevance and a powerful resonance. Rebecca Solnit's "Darkness and Virginia Woolf" was everything I could have hoped and dreamed. In time the lectures should be available on itunes, and a link is available here.

Ed Skoog gave a great craft class on restlessness in poetry, encouraging an emphasis on process over product (a subject near to my heart). Some of the brilliant ladies from VIDA came for a passionate talk on changing the underrepresentation of women's writing in the literary community. I nearly cried during a performative reading Ken Chen gave from his book Juvenilia.

And finally, my workshop with Carl Phillips provided everything I was looking for and more. His intuition and intellect blew me away. We had a great group of writers, a constructive and productive dynamic, and room for laughter--which is so important!

In this highly focused environment I've gotten lots of new ideas for where I want to take my writing. I've been able to come to conclusions about questions that have been nagging me for months. I have direction, I have projects, I have energy. ¡Cuidado!

Missive from the Mountain #2

2010-08-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

I've been learning, with some pain and a fair amount of whining, how to wake up at 7:30am. The sleep stupor makes the evenings startlingly beautiful, but I suspect they don't need help achieving that effect. Bread Loaf's grounds are such a beautiful pairing with the excitement and bustle of the verbal activities here. When I need to recharge I take a walk or settle into one of these gorgeous chairs and let the poetry percolate.

Missive from the Mountain #1

2010-08-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

The first couple days of Bread Loaf have moved frightfully fast, with very few hours of sleeping. It's been absolutely delicious, however, to wake up with references to Virginia Woolf in the morning lectures.

In Stacy D'Erasmo's "Influence: A Practice in Three Wanders" she made connections between her father's pornography collection, Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" and Jacob's Room, and Doveman's "Tigers." If this sounds incredible it's because it was! It might be an oversimplification of her talk to say that D'Erasmo is less interested in imitation--a process she believes inherently fails--and more interested in inspiration and the worlds that can be opened through different mediums (porn, literature, art, music) that influence an artist in unexpected ways. But my blogging time is limited, so I must try to sum up.

About Woolf, D'Erasmo spoke of her connection with the art critic Robert Fry and his interest in blurring the line between fine art and domestic decor. D'Erasmo noticed that Woolf's use of repetition and sparse description created a kind of visual patterning in her fiction, a technique not merely decorative or clever, but part of a new ethics. These ethics placed interior space (or women's space: wall paper, sheets, dresses, etc.) on the same level with public space (or men's space: politics and war) and also viewed each individual human life as a thread in a tapestry (not woven by any one being/entity).

And so through inspiration strange pairings emerge: Woolf's modernist fiction is influenced by domestic decor, Doveman is influenced by Cat Power, and D'Erasmo's literary writing is influenced by the strange dreamland she found as a child discovering her father's stash of pornography (a place where hunger is instantly satisfied and beauty easily attainable--if only for a second--and there is no room for irony/layers/complexity). The music sounds nothing alike. Woolf's writing was never neat and orderly like a pattern. D'Erasmo's artistic aims have little in common with pornography's utility. As imitation they can be considered failures. But each pairing shares a similar tone or quality as a result of (often unconscious) influence.

Jane Hirshfield's "Windows" lecture looked at places in poems that insert a new element or perspective. She explained that a window is always a transition, but one specific in effect. It will alter both the room and the view. One prose example that she used was the "Time Passes" section from Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

And so yes, I'm having a lot of fun here at nerd camp with Molly, geeking out about Woolf on a daily basis! I hope to catch up on sleep soon... even if that means next week.

The Most Obvious Part First

2010-08-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

from "Early Vacations":

The crayfish we caught crowded the sides of the big pan.
The girls held them up for me to see. Their backs a sisterly pink and
orange, a withheld sunset under blue shells. Everything
lovely has attributes of permanent longing. Time fate irony light:
the crayfish clawed their way through that list. We lay on the pier
and hung over the edge. He caught fifteen, the girls caught
ten, I caught two. I would have caught more but I saw this bloated
figure of a muse in the water. He knew just how
to lower the line among the huge boulders.
One crayfish would come out like a poem, the most obvious part
first and grab the custardy chicken fat and pull it;
I'd try to reel it up and he would put the net
under the crayfish
who was straining to hold on, life's avarice holding on to non-
life's infinity. He said the creature did not "feel" anything.
I admired that.
But the blue-and-amber backs had matched the world they lived in
for one terrifying moment. And the violent orange
they changed to was beautiful only because we'd memorized
the other color, knew what they had been.

cited: Hillman, Brenda. Loose Sugar. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. 90.

sit and stay there

2010-08-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

Saw this video on facebook and found myself still thinking about it the next day.

I cherish solitude, but I do find myself feeling awkward sometimes when I'm "out" and alone. I wish I was as much at ease being by myself at a movie or restaurant as I am in the "acceptable places" the video mentions. At the same time I agree with that quote from Housekeeping about the glow that surrounds people when they are in company... as though they are less aware of the world's stares or scrutiny but also more of a spectacle because of the warmth they emit.

I guess the real challenge is to be alone and aware of the others surrounding you, and then relax into that awareness with the same comfort that we experience in company. I'd like to be more attentive and present to the outside world when I'm alone, not always in a rush or buried in a book. Though I do really like books...

Inking the Platen Press

2010-07-25T19:54:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Molly Sutton Kiefer owns a Kelsey 5x8, pictured here. Shawn traded use of the press for this tattoo. Yesterday and today Molly and I took a workshop at MCBA where we got to assemble the press and print on it for the first time. We had SO MUCH FUN!!!

It felt very Woolfish to be setting type with my hands, dealing with the practical mechanics of something I often find mysterious: letters and words. Now I need to carve out a temporary home for the press in my basement and get started on some projects.

Lighted House

2010-07-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

I love that wistful feeling after having finished a novel, like a relationship is over. Housekeeping was a dreamy, slow read for me. Lovely, image-rich prose, offering its fair share of rumination:

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

cited: Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Picador, 1980. 154.

This Hockey Puck of a Book

2010-07-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

I'm backlogged now with books that I wanted to respond to here, so I'm not sure I'll be able to get to them all. But I did want to take a moment to reflect on Ariana Reines' The Cow.

Shortly after graduation I got into a terrible funk with my reading. I had a long list of books I felt I "should" be reading; I wanted these books to be important to me--and perhaps one day in the future they will be--but at the time I just couldn't get through them. I didn't enjoy the actual process of reading each one (for different reasons) and I was strangely incapable of disciplining myself into finishing them. Instead I hardly read at all, and began to feel guilty for neglecting books that I had made it my responsibility to finish, and to feel panicked that I might be developing a passionless attitude toward literature.

In retrospect I think the circumstance had a lot more to do with graduation and anxiety about the future than the actual books themselves. But I'm grateful for the lesson it taught me... which is that reading should always be about pleasure and not about obligation. I can make heavy commitments (in my mind) to certain books and plod through slowly and laboriously. It took a lot for me to set those books aside and say: maybe some other day, or maybe never, but I need to move on now or I'll become stagnated.

After clearing this hurdle I began reading The Cow. Dirty, smart, devastating and delightful, The Cow sucked me in immediately and kept me reading. But more significantly, through the time I spent with the book my faith in the work that words can do was gradually rekindled. The Cow asks its reader to be flexible and creative. It is often shockingly disgusting and overwhelmingly sad, but those feelings productively push one into a new space where some real grappling can begin (see this review), and the book is not without moments of humor and tenderness.

But my favorite part of The Cow, and the aspect that I credit most with pulling me out of my reading funk is its attention to the difficulties of language and texts. Reines is astonishingly generous and frank. She gives one permission to struggle and encouragement to keep at it. I am profoundly grateful for this book. Here are snippits from three of my favorite poems:

"Item"

Silt and shit could have to do with each other. As fertilizer. Learning how to be a slit in the failing palindrome this day is, this hockey puck of a book, too dense to make a room for me in it, no object but to be battered about the slick ice. Likewise a cow could be a way to be. Women: They can't get over their bodies.

"Earmark"

Eaten, gemmed with grease and herbs. Whose low language ruined our bowels. Whose lowing eventually meant nothing. We knew we were to become a ream of flesh. Another nothing.

"Valve"

My Warsawa got so hot. He wasn't going even to try to love me. Oh pooches, need me! Up her ass a maggot smelling of leather and amber and hair, Baudelaire. What does a country need a poet for. To put bunting up on the dead shanks of dreams.

cited: Reines, Ariana. The Cow. Albany: Fence Books, 2006. 35-36, 46, 54

my humungous crush on Virginia Woolf...

2010-07-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

has been made permanent. I'm lucky to have a husband who is talented as well as indulgent.

Over the years I've come to realize that Woolf is The Writer and The Waves is The Book... for me at least. Layered and gorgeous, it is the kind of text that offers new insights with every reading and continually captivates me. I wish I could crawl inside these words and live there, and I know no matter how many times I read the book I will never have enough. Which only makes me love it more, and want to have it near me always.

page 143:

They speak now without troubling to finish their sentences. They talk a little language such as lovers use.

page 238:

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.

page 295:

I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such a children speak when they come into a room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1931.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

2010-07-09T15:18:00.001-07:00

This handsome little guy got in the way of my resolution to post more frequently:

My nephew, Kayhan Siamak DePasquale. Born in the wee hours of July 5th.

He is wonderful to hold and has the best parents a boy could ask for. Congratulations to Casey and Ardeshir, enjoy that moth-breath and handful of notes.

cited: Plath, Sylvia. "Morning Song" poets.org.

I need a party dress...

2010-07-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've taken a much longer break from this space than I wanted to and now I'll be piling up posts. Them's the breaks.

Yesterday's poem-a-day was fantastic.

About Death and Other Things
by Aleksandar Ristovic
(tr. Charles Simic)

How strange will be my death, of which I've been thinking since childhood:
A sedentary old man leaving a small-town library
leans to one side and eventually collapses on the lawn.
I've every reason to believe that I'll experience what the others have experienced
while I climb the stairs carrying my supper in a plastic bag,
not even turning to look at the one who in that moment descends curly-haired and
      wearing a party dress.

It could be an ordinary death on a train:
a man who carefully studies the fields and hills in snow,
shuts his eyes folds his hands in his lap, and no longer sees what only a moment ago
      he admired.

I'm trying to remember other possibilities and so, here I am once again,
disguised as myself in a small, merry company,
where, after emptying my glass, I fall on the floor laughing, and pulling after me the
      tablecloth with the vase full of roses.

My death, of course, would have a spiritual meaning
in some mountain sanatorium for the insane
where croaking we complain to each other in beds with freshly changed sheets.

It could happen that I'll die in some way very different from the one I anticipate:
in the company of my wife and daughter, surrounded by books,
while outside a neighbor is trying to start a car that the night has surprised with snow.

Death seems so much more comforting in the presence of these precise details: dinner carried in a plastic bag, a toppled vase of roses, the neighbor's key in the ignition of a snow-covered car. We can imagine that death is made of the same things that life is made of... and what we imagine it to be is perhaps more relevant than what it is.

I've been reading a lot of poetry lately that has made me see and feel new things, and I love this poem for making me see the same things I always do but asking me to think about them differently. There's complexity and satisfying closure in that last image... the speaker's potentially unanticipated death identifies him with the car "surprised with snow." I love surprises.

And speaking of neighbors, we've just gotten some new ones. Here's wishing their car a smooth start-up.

Upcoming Youth Poetry Classes

2010-05-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I had my first dream about teaching since graduation. In the dream I was trying to schedule an individual conference with a student and all these complications kept arising: missed emails, buses, bike trouble, etc. It reminded me a little of my waitressing days and the dreams I had then... looking for cups say, and meanwhile another table is sat in your section, and you search dry storage but they aren't there, then your food is up in the kitchen, and the dishwasher can't help you find the cups, then another table is sat and you haven't greeted the first, no one has water... where are the cups?!

But upon waking I realized that I was starting to miss teaching (and not ready to quit food service, which is how I reacted to the waitressing dreams). I really WANTED to connect with that student in the dream; it wasn't just obligatory or for a tip. Then I went swimming this morning at the Midtown YWCA and bumped into one of my favorite former poetry students at the U. Though the dream wasn't about a real person (I often create characters in my dreams), it almost seemed as though a wish was granted.

All this activity has gotten me excited about the youth courses I'll be teaching soon at the Loft Literary Center. I'm going to post the info about them here and if anyone knows kids or teens who might be interested please let them know! Also I'd love to get any ideas or suggestions of things I can do in these classes; I'll begin preparing for them soon.

(photo by the extremely talented and infinitely lovable Molly Sutton Kiefer)

Red Carpet Poems

Can poetry still be cool? We'll look at the appearance of poems in popular mediums like movies, comics and manga, fashion, music, dance and tattoos. Also we'll explore some of the recent ways poets have performed before audiences using new technologies, collaboration and improvisation. Be prepared to play with new media! From sound overlay and digital imaging to choral readings and movement exercises we'll learn how to make writing jump off the page. The class will culminate with an interactive reading and presentation. Friends and family welcome.

Age Group: 13- to 17-year olds
Location: Open Book
Day: Monday through Friday
Date: July 6 - July 16
Time: 10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

---

Hello Poet! Please Meet the Press!

In this workshop with the Loft and Minnesota Center for Book Arts, students will explore the traditions and techniques of broadside and chapbook making. Single poems will strut their stuff in a poster. Poems will be gathered and paged through in a small handmade book. Beginning in the writing classroom and moving into the printmaking studio, students will learn about words in a hands-on way and have some beautiful pieces of art to take home with them. The class will culminate with a poetry reading and presentation of the students' prints and book art. Friends and family welcome.

Age Group: 9- to 12-year olds
Location: Open Book
Day: Monday through Friday
Date: July 6 - July 16
Time: 1 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.

---

Pencil, Paper, Paintbrush

Artists who write and writers who make art are in for a treat! We'll explore the world of words and images through our own hands, learning about poetry while creating beautiful arts and crafts projects. Be prepared for collage, watercolor, beadwork, and paper-folding. The class will culminate with a poetry reading and artwork display. Friends and family welcome.

Age Group: 9- to 12-year olds
Location: Open Book
Day: Monday through Friday
Date: August 2 - August 6
Time: 10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Good News

2010-05-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

I spent the day at Northern Clay Center watching my sister throw on the wheel. She looks so cute with that pregnant belly, more photos here.

I asked Casey a question that I'm sure is a common one: Do you begin with a shape in mind or do you make it up as you go along? Her answer was both, sometimes more of one than another, but often a blend. It depends on the size of the lump of clay, how things turn out during the initial stages, and of course the larger project in mind that she's creating for. Comparable perhaps to the blend of improvisation and research/planning that goes into writing poems.

Little did I know that while I was enjoying the smell of clay an email had been sent to my inbox indicating that my application was accepted at The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. I'm extremely excited to be going with my dear friend Molly Sutton Kiefer and to be closing out the summer by turning little lumps of poem into something ready for the kiln.

MFA Thesis Defense

2010-05-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

So I'm finished with my MFA! That knowledge hasn't had an opportunity to settle in yet. I'm still bouncing from one deadline or important event to another. Yesterday: two defenses from other writers in my year and a friend's wedding. Today: art-a-whirl, the end-of-the-year MFA program party, and a Dark Dark Dark show. Tomorrow: the dead sea scrolls, brunch and gardening with the long-neglected husband. The house is a disaster area and I'm experiencing that mental fatigue that I always get at the close of a semester.

In other news, I've turned 29 and I've now been keeping this blog for over a year. Fifty posts so far--no huge number--but in that time I've managed to carve out a space for my writing and thinking self that remains here today when my classroom/lecture experiences are over. In other words: there is no more straw. But I'm still here, and the pages that need to be read and need to be written... so this ride will continue.

Last Day of Classes

2010-05-05T21:01:00.001-07:00

There's still a Lit paper to write, a Spanish exam, and the thesis defense, but today I taught my last class and took my last class at the U of M. I wanted to share two familiar sightings from the walls of Lind Hall.

Marge Piercy en el baño. This graffiti is relatively recent, and the responses even more so. But it's made me smile more than a few times during these stressful final weeks. My favorite is the "I want to be loved AND write damn it!"

I have no idea what the backstory for this drawing is... and I love it all the more for that reason. It's been on the door to my office (er, the large room that contains my desk, among many others) for the whole three years of my MFA. It's doesn't show in the photo, but someone wrote an "n" in front of the "either" with yellow highlighter.

I'd like to get a few more pictures from campus, and especially my bike commute. I can count the future trips I'll take there on one hand now.

Looking Back Was Fire

2010-05-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

from "Dairy [Surface]" by Rachel Zucker:

Spring is not so very promising as it is the thing
that looking back was fire, promising:
ignition, aspiration; it was not under my thumb.

A Boy is a Putz

2010-04-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation that needs to grow into a final paper. One of two topics I'll discuss: "the deliciousness of contemporary end rhyme."

This was arrived at rather haphazardly, which in my opinion is the best way to arrive at anything. I read a poem that was so good I had to read it out loud. But this didn't satisfy me; I wanted to share it with someone. So I recited the poem to my husband, which usually works. But my longing for more readings of the poem only grew... I realized I HAD to read it in front of a whole group of people, in fact, a classroom of poetry students. Thus, the deliciousness of contemporary end rhyme.

[dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

by D. A. Powell

dogs and boys can treat you like trash.      and dogs do love trash
to nuzzle their muzzles.      they slather with tongues that smell like their nuts

but the boys are fickle when they lick you.      they stick you with twigs
and roll you over like roaches.      then off with another:    those sluts

with their asses so tight you couldn't get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs:    who will turn in a circle showing & showing their butts

a dog on a leash:    a friend in the world.      he'll crawl into bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes.      he'll give you his nose.      he'll slobber on cuts

a dog is not fragile; he's fixed.      but a boy:    cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses.      he hisses.      a boy is a putz

with a sponge for a brain.      and a mop for a heart:    he'll soak up your love
if you let him and leave you dry as a cork.      he'll punch out your guts

when a boy goes away:    to another boy's arms.      what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs.      with the hounds with the curs.      with the muts

Anticipating my reading of this poem and its linked presentation, I realize that's an aspect I'll miss most about being in school: the captive audience. The regular sound of poems zinging through the air.

I can relate to Rachel Zucker's recent post on running"poems" There I was on my bike this morning, late to class and huffing boys are fickle when they lick you boys are fickle when they lick you...

cited: Powell, D. A. Cocktails. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004. 14.

A Day of Octopuses

2010-04-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished my MFA thesis. I have complex feelings about this... I know that I'm capable of doing better than what I ultimately handed in. But I'm also really burnt out on the whole graduate school experience, and I just need it to be over. Therefore it shouldn't come as a surprise that I had nightmares this morning about being strangled by a large octopus.

Weird. Later I log onto facebook and see that my husband has linked to the following video:

Then the man himself comes over to say goodbye before he leaves for work wearing a T shirt from Lovecraft Tattoo with this design:

I mention these strange coincidences and Shawn says that the shirt is actually a little small for him and gives it to me.

The octopus' grip isn't slackening yet... I have a Spanish exam tomorrow, a lot of grading to catch up on, a final paper to write, a baby shower to plan, jobs and opportunities to apply for.

And so I treat myself by buying things on the internet. Inspiring things I can reward myself with for clearing the thesis-hurdle and also look forward to enjoying in a post-graduation world. They include:

a subscription to Cannibal Books
a weekend letterpress class at MCBA
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing
and C. D. Wright's chapbook 40 Watts at... (drum roll) Octopus Books

The Twitter Beast

2010-04-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

Today I joined Twitter as Estudiate Torpe, or bumbling/incompetent student. I'm more excited about following than tweeting, but I'll use it to practice my Spanish in those less-intimidating 140 character bursts. Still need to configure the cell and/or facebook set up, but one thing at a time, right?

Any advice on who to follow or how best to proceed? I'd especially like to read tweets from inspiring poets and lit organizations.

Another change: I've decided to moderate comments on my blog. I hope it won't discourage anyone, but I'm tired of erasing all the Asian porn spam I'm getting from registered users of blogger. So shame on you guys; that's annoying. Actual comments won't be censored... I would like very much to hear from real folks.

Lucky Dog

2010-03-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

Woolf on the limitations of Victorian (or Shakespearean?) poetry:

The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded.

Woolf on the experiences of Flush, the cocker spaniel, in Florence:

He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat the brass, where they bake the bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice—he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1933. 137-139.

Nesting Weekend

2010-02-28T18:59:00.000-08:00

Over a month since my last post? I'm afraid that until my thesis is due in late April I won't be able to promise much better. But I'll be here from time to time whenever I can snatch a second.

Instead of catching up on my pile of schoolwork this weekend I dedicated it to homemaking, good food and good company.

Today Shawn and I went to Mother Earth Garden and stocked up on seeds. Our beds are still blanketed in snow, but it warms me to think that soon tasty things will be taking root there.

They had pussy willows at United Noodles for the Chinese New Year.

And I brought my winter bike inside for some basic maintenance and an installation of a front light. No more excuses and no more bus trips, I long to be moving again and outside. Pretty soon I'll be able to switch to the road bike.

Life seems to be moving at a dizzying pace. I'm struggling to keep up and also to fight off a cold. But when I look around me I see beautiful things, great people, and hopeful possibilities for the future.

Human Lives Are Composed Like Music

2010-01-25T12:48:00.000-08:00

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railways station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

I like how Kundera puts responsibility on the individual for making beauty in his/her life. Also how death and cognac are held together as the fourth item in each list. And I like coincidences, a lot.

cited: Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper Perennial, 1984. 52.

Some Part of Me Elopes

2010-01-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

More loveliness from Cooling Time:

Not Often Enough I Dream

that I write a consummate work, write while sleeping, on beautiful laid paper. The scripted pages float around the room, drift to the floor, onto covered furniture, and out an open casement. And sometimes when reading before sleeping, I fall into the same elated trance, having read something that so startles and pleases me it bears me aloft, and some part of me elopes with its secrets.

And some night-time images from Japan:

Cited: Wright, C.D. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Washington: Copper Canyon, 2005. 91.

Ripple of Reflected Lights

2010-01-17T05:07:00.001-08:00

My reread of To the Lighthouse in Japan was unhurried and nourishing... just what the doctor ordered. It strikes me now that in all the blogging about Woolf I've done, I still have a hard time articulating why her writing means so much to me. I want to attempt a beginning at that...

First there is the obvious: Woolf's uncanny ability to capture the experience of consciousness. The mind flickers from one thought to the next, returns continually to favorite themes, proves itself to be remarkably sensitive to the environment that surrounds it (from the facial expressions or body language of others to landscape and physical objects), but then at other times to be wholly sealed inside itself. Woolf charts that progress in detail, making a reader feel incredibly intimate with the characters.

[...] she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them.

I love the mingling of the domestic scene with the dream-like imagery of hawk, flag and smoke. Mrs. Ramsay (the "she" here) is an exceptional hostess, mother and wife. As such, she has the ability to create memorable moments, bring people together.

It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

Her presence is fixed at the center of the family, the way the lighthouse's beam always shines and radiates out. This stillness is especially poignant, because the family's loss of Mrs. Ramsay is what the book is really about. Another character, Lily Briscoe, is an unmarried impressionist painter. As different as their lives and interests are, Lily makes a connection between Mrs. Ramsay's memory-making (the thing that endures) and a work of art. A painting also captures a moment, memorializes it, moves/affects the viewer. But what I love Woolf especially for, is how she mines the artistic process through this connection. As Lily paints the landscape her mind similarly wanders:

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)-this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to her.

That conclusion that Mrs. Ramsay's homemaking inspired Lily's painting is what I love Woolf for. Throughout the book there has been a line drawn between these two women, plus Mrs. Ramsay's many inducements to see Lily marry, and Lily's resistance to assuming that role and dedication to her art. Then all this is wiped away: the women's activities are revealed as one and the same. Not only that, but Mrs. Ramsay's role in Lily's art is central. I also love the stillness, the fixity of the lighthouse and Mrs. Ramsay. It's overwhelmingly beautiful.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. 105, 161.

Border Crossing

2010-01-07T18:29:00.000-08:00

C.D. Wright, Cooling Time:

The division between urban and rural is the only serious border left to us. One serves to undermine the other. One could just as easily serve to mine the other. I am a serious border crosser.

I've been thinking a lot about urban and rural as Shawn and I traveled from Tokyo to Kyoto.

We passed through the country quickly, by bullet train, zooming from one city's center to another. Kyoto has a much different feel than Tokyo, however. There are hippies here, and Buddhists, and hip buddhist types. Tokyo was more like New York: serious, career-driven and highly fashionable... everyone in black and all the women in heels. It's nice to see some variation in that uniform.

I am a farm girl at heart, and my grandmother's land and my childhood memories of the dairy farm appear frequently in my poetry. However, when Shawn and I travel and when we think about long-term living situations it's always in the city. Firstly for the prevalence of vegan food options and secondly for more open-minded attitudes about tattoos.

We noticed immediately that there was a lot more folks nudging each other and pointing at Shawn in Kyoto than Tokyo. Thankfully the Japanese are too polite to shout and cause a scene (Connecticut). But Shawn does seem to stick out more and more as the population goes down. And it's not exactly a problem, it's just that the reactions quickly get old and we'd rather not always have to be conscious of them.

All this has gotten me thinking about my manuscript, because one of the biggest reactions that I've had from readers so far is that my farm poems transition jarringly to my tattoo poems, one group being rural and the other being seen as urban. At first this puzzled me, because Shawn has actually always tattooed in the suburbs and the poems themselves don't speak to city life. But perhaps there is something inherently urban about tattoos.

I really enjoyed this story about Stu Rasmussen, the country's first transgendered mayor. In it the journalist marvels at how, under the right circumstances, a small town can be the most progressive place in America. Because people aren't seen as symbols of a movement or subculture but as individuals who are part of that town's shared history... everyone remembers little so-and-so from choir practice or the paper route.

So I have a lot to say in defense of small towns. But I really like the city. C.D. Wright again:

I like the sticks; I am, if you will, of the sticks. I like the wreckage of New York second only to the sticks of Arkansas. [...] I poetry. I write it, study it, read it, edit it, publish it, teach it... Sometimes I weary of it. I could not live without it. Not in this world. Not in my lifetime. I also arkansas. Sometimes these verbs coalesce. Sometimes they trot off in opposite directions.

I've decided to mesh my tattoo poems with my farm poems... something keeps telling me that they belong together. Perhaps I can get them to mine each other.

Cited: Wright, C.D. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Washington: Copper Canyon, 2005. 20-21.

Cream-Colored Page

2009-12-13T11:34:00.001-08:00

My reading has slowed a lot lately, and my blogging about my reading even more so. Every day seems to come filled with new challenges, many of them welcome or at least interesting, and all of them time-consuming. Unfortunately when I'm time-managing the reading (that I don't do for a class or deadline but simply to revive my spirit) seems like the first thing to get axed. When I'm so tired that I'm not even tempted to read before bed I know something's wrong.

The good news is that this Wednesday is my last day of classes, and after my Spanish exam on Monday the 21st I'll be done with my last fall semester. I'm going to treat myself then to a reread of To the Lighthouse. Ah Woolf, how I've missed her lately! I also have some challenging reading planned for winter break, so we'll see how that goes. I want to solidify my booklist completely before the start of the spring semester, so anything that fails to draw me in this winter will be cut in favor of works that do.

I wanted to collect some thoughts and reactions here to Gillian Conoley's Profane Halo. This is one of my favorite poems in the book:

The Pox

Paleopathologists          discover          invisible balm on          3,000-year-old mummies;

like trochees          in the terrorists' letters.          And in          the Americas, covering the sores,

9 out of 10          Narraganset Indians, "They die          like rotten sheep," wrote one colonist,

when armies flee          at sunset          and deliberately fan          the flames of,          deliberately fan

this lack of I          so heaven          so no one          I know          will die.          I with skin intact.

as on a cream-colored page          or a slicked pond.          When I am dead          and

go unsaid,          stop worry, don't look          for a raft of trouble.          A sister steps back

into her vector.          Word comes and we eat          at the fugue of it,          on the morning porch

the sun's          public bath of social space-          what if the poems preserve us?

So no one I know will die,          that's my          sister in

the sundown flame, in the feeling of

intimacy that is mineral,          bitter asteroid,

"for I have the warmth
of the sun
within me at night."

It's been interesting to reflect upon this poem again while reading Richard Preston's The Wild Trees, about redwoods. Preston is careful to explain how lichen is pronounced like "liken" or how koi are "colorful Japanese carp."

Conoley does not explain anything, but her project is suggestive in it's connectivity. Simply by including 3,000-year-old mummies, terrorists, Narraganset Indians and "my sister" in the same poem a powerful historical statement is made. But "statement" isn't the right word here, it's too concrete... rather I should say a chord is struck, a resonation heard across these disparate nouns.

There's particular images like the slicked pond and morning porch... then gorgeous, communicative moments like "intimacy that is mineral" and "what if the poems preserve us?" scattered throughout the collection.

But I can't always hear this chord. Sometimes Conoley's inclusions are so thematically disparate that I struggle to find my bearings. Another of my favorite poems is "Burnt City," a long work. Here's three killer lines from the beginning:

People ARE worth the effort

though they heat and crowd one another

in the wrong quadrant of the brain,

But later, the poem becomes harder to synthesize:

hunger be luck and gangplank.

A harpy chased a dog on her embroidered pillow.

And then she blew smoke into the robocop's bosom.

These moments have a lightness to them that doesn't quite seem to belong with the rest of the poem. I think I could appreciate their absurdity in a different context, but here it feels like a distraction. As a reader I'm beginning to recognize a limit on the variety of impulses I can effectively gather and make sense of. And I enjoy reading poems like this one that challenge that limit, but I'm unable to become as involved with or invested in these works.

Cited:

Conoley, Gillian. Profane Halo. Amherst: Verse Press, 2005. 18, 60, 66.

Preston, Richard. The Wild Trees. New York: Random House, 2007. 24, 43.

Tidings of Comfort

2009-11-30T20:52:00.000-08:00

"God Rest You Merry, Gentleman" is my favorite Christmas carol, and the only one that doesn't seem (in my mind at least) to be overplayed during the season. I remember when I was 19 and full of piss and wind, singing this version in front of The Gap in Savannah, GA. Sigh! Here's a taste:

God bless you very wealthy men,
Good news I have to tell:
The market's up, you're making more each time you buy and sell.
With layoffs more, your profits soar,
You're living rather well.
O tidings of capital gains.

But the best line is: "I have a feeling that your ceiling is not made of glass." Brilliant!

Today Shawn and I picked out our first real Christmas tree. It feels strange (and a little sad) not to be spending the holidays with family, but there is a certain warmth to be found in making our own seasonal rituals. We've decorated the tree with white lights so far and I expect it will be a work-in-progress up to the day with leave for Japan. I like its starkness for now. And I especially like the smell... such a nice change from our staple eau de chien.

Taking the Plunge

2009-11-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to submit regularly to journals like a good little poetess. In service of this end, I've gone ahead and joined Duotrope. We'll see if it helps to keep me on task!

Against Forgetting... Six Month Plan

2009-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

The truth is I have very little knowledge of world history. Plus there's not enough poetry in translation on my booklist.

So I'm committing myself here to a task that I feel is important to accomplish before I graduate: reading Carolyn Forché's anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness from cover to cover. Chronologically arranged and packed with vital voices, my only regret is that I didn't do this a few years ago. Here's how I plan to move through the sections:

December
The Armenian Genocide
Revolution and Repression in the Soviet Union
The Spanish Civil War

January
WWII
The Holocaust, The Shoah

February
Repression in Eastern and Central Europe
War and Dictatorship in the Mediterranean

March
The Indo-Pakistani Wars
War in the Middle East

April
Repression and Revolution in Latin America
The Struggle for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the US

May
War in Korea and Vietnam
Repression in Africa and the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa
Revolutions and the Struggle for Democracy in China

Hopefully posting about my progress here will keep me on track. My aim is that the pace will be slow enough to be sustainable and allow for reflection/digestion (as well as other reading), but constant enough for me to be able to sustain momentum. We'll see!

Gross

2009-11-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

I can't stop myself from posting dead bird poems! This one technically has a live bird and a dead deer, by Dana Levin:

Magpie

A tendon, an eye. Hanging
         from a string of fat, steaming
in the morning light, the beak, the pincers,
         holding it tight.
Do you think it's repulsive? Do you think it is
         an amber jewel?
Black bird, white bird, unconcerned with you--
         See it hop, pick
through the frosted fur, the blood
         thawing, beginning to run--Magpie, treasure
in the mangled deer.
         Claws biting in
as it cocks its head at you,
         eye swinging from its mouth like a diamond
tear,
         cold and glittering in the icy air--asking
Do you think
         these feathers are beautiful, spread out
iridescent
         against this matted haunch? Will you be like this
with the bones of your father,
         will you radiate
a vital plumage
         and perch on him in the frozen ditch?
No pause, no grief, the heart beating
         in you--
a red scrap of flesh in your black beak.

(Photo by George Nisbet, found in the BBC Gallery)

Dana Levin's In the Surgical Theatre is... gross. "Magpie" is part of a sequence that looks at gore in the natural world, which I found to be a welcome break from the graphic images of the human body: cut open, blown apart, rotting, war scenes, domestic violence, nightmarish horrors, etc. Levin's attention to the visual is skillful and penetrative, but for me the cumulative effect of the book can be summed up in one word: yuck.

Disturbing content puts extra pressure on the reader's ability to trust in an author's intentions. Levin seems conscious of this, and her poem "Personal History" in addition to ruminating on the year of her birth (blending scenes from the Vietnam War with a baby undergoing surgery and incubation) provides several explanations for the use of graphic imagery. A long poem broken into five sections, the first begins with the parenthetic "(like lifting a curtain)" and the poem as a whole contains seemingly direct statements of author intent:

         Don't you see, how everytime I look
between the scalpelled flaps, pinned back
         to the sides of the belly, it's a war

rotting inside? Is this
         why it's important to tell you, how the baby lay strapped

And so the reader knows it is important to be told, furthermore:

I'm
trying to figure out why it's important to show you, because I have this
compulsion
to rip the shirt from my distended belly and show you the scars

I understand the compulsion, but I'm not sure I understand the importance. As the point is insisted upon, for me, it loses its resonance. The proliferation of self-conscious questioning does not help: "Is this / how I can tell it?" or "do you know what I am saying?" These are generous, communicative moments that ache with vulnerability. Yet, after being bombarded with stomach-turning images line after line, page after page... then having the speaker pull back from her assault engenders distrust in those brutal means. From there I begin to doubt the equation of war with illness, violence with surgery, hurt with healing when even the speaker won't fully stand behind her methods of conveyance.

Cited: Levin, Dana. In the Surgical Theatre. Philadelphia: The American Poetry Review, 1999. 46, 21-27.

Mental Fatigue

2009-11-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

I had the interesting experience last night of forgetting the word guillotine (this was in the context of a conversation on dog nail clippers, nothing terribly morbid). But the weirdest part was that I didn't even care that I had forgotten, and refused to summon even the small amount of mental energy needed to recall this word I've known since fifth grade. Instead I found myself saying: "Oh, what is that French machine that cuts off people's heads?"

Needless to say, I've reached That Point in the semester, where my cognitive abilities are completely exhausted and must be rationed out where they are needed most. Dinner conversations and dog nail clippers apparently don't get priority here, I'm conserving it all for late poems and Spanish presentations. But even those things, I fear, are not quite up to snuff... More sleep would help, surely. Better still a two week vacation in some tropical locale!

Subject and Object

2009-10-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've made a couple changes to the blog of late. First, Shawn made me a beautiful header. No more plain text! Secondly, I've enabled comments again. Somehow I had gotten the idea that no comments looked "more professional" in some way. But of course this isn't a resume, and more importantly, if anyone has something to say or add to a particular post I desperately want to hear it!

I feel like I'm settling into my blogger skin a little more. A new blog with Molly has been helpful to this end as well. The questions: what do I have to say? who am I talking to? why should they care? have a way of popping up in both my poetry and my blogging, often simultaneously, and it seems as though the two have a way of leaning on each other when searching for answers. Or more accurately: resolution/definitive answers are impossible (thankfully, delightfully), but my blogging and my poetry cooperate when navigating these questions. And I'm beginning to enjoy that.

From Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red:

What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let's say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.

We've been studying direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. This has forced me to realize that even (and especially) in English sentences are (for me) slippery, mysterious animals. As Woolf says "Words and words and words, how they gallop⎯how they lash their long manes and tails" (The Waves). I like the physicality of a sentence without having an exact understanding of how the parts function: anatomy, structure, subject, object.

For instance, in Geryon's question I believe the subject is the "she," the photographer... the object the photograph she could take. But of course for an artist, the "subject" of her work would be the man in jail (and indirectly the lava), the object is the photograph taken. Is this the confusion? What interests me is how in autobiography the subject of this question and the subject of the work would be one, a self portrait. Then how absurdly pleasurable it is to consider that Autobiography of Red is a poetic NOVEL Anne Carson wrote about a red mythological monster named Geryon.

All this is to say that I've been thinking a lot about subject and object, and not always in a productive manner. More usefully perhaps, I've been reconsidering the role of self in poetry, and particularly the role personality and personal experience plays in my own work. My efforts to avoid that personal "I" have been striking me as absurdly futile. What is served, really, by all this coyness and evasion? Certainly not my poems... because they often seem flat and lifeless!

Then recently I read "The Glass Essay" and holy fucking shit, there's a lesson in the power and relevance of the personal "I"! Thirty pages long and worth every second. Here's a taste:

Out the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland
and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth.
At the middle of the moor

where the ground goes down into a depression,
the ice has begun to unclench.
Black open water comes

curdling up like anger. My mother speaks suddenly.
That psychotherapy's not doing you much good is it?
You aren't getting over him.

Within the space of these pages Carson can drop and pick up threads like Emily Bronte's life and writing, the moor, her parents and a devastating break up... uncovering many electrifying intersections like this one. This is the kind of writing that grabs me by the throat.

It's funny how that old adage "write what you know" seems to have been snatched away from poets. As though confessionalism was too much of an indulgence and now a generation later we have to pay for it by eating our porridge cold and bland. There are so many things that interest me more than myself, in writing and in general, but I'm starting to recognize that that "self" is still an essential ingredient in the stew. Maybe in particular when one is first starting out.

And so I'm going to try writing what I know, in addition to the things that fascinate me because I don't quite understand them, and see where it takes me. Es verdad que me gusta el autorretrato.

cited: Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. 52.

Mi Amor Nuevo

2009-10-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

Firsts, Continued

2009-10-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm fresh(ish) from a really interesting event with Anne Carson and Merce Cunningham dancers. Again, I was armed (evil) w/ the point-and-shoot (flash off).

First two photos are from “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets.” Asked to give a talk on pronouns at Harvard, Carson instead developed a smart and sensual sonnet sequence. The performance features projected and live dancing to choral/overlaid recorded voices and live reading. Together the dancing and reading formed fascinating intersections of coming-from-here (this room now) and coming-from-elsewhere (other rooms, other times).

Next is "Bracko," a piece developed from Anne Carson's translations of Sappho's fragments (where brackets signal missing/illegible parts of the papyrus scroll). Different voices chimed in and overlapped w/ Sappho, Carson's notes, the word "bracket," and the number headings of the fragments. Then silences, always gorgeous dancing.

Q & A. I like the casual/comfortable feel of this photo.

So I learn that dancing to poetry = cool. Really cool.

But this weekend brought another important first for me: meeting a writer one idolizes. I managed to conduct myself well enough at a lunch in the English department on Friday. But tonight in the book signing line I fell into the "this book meant a lot to me..." slurred babble. Sigh.

But Autobiography of Red did mean A LOT to me. The first time I found it I thought: wow, if poetry can do work like this I want to study it more! If it wasn't for this book and Woolf's The Waves I don't think I'd be here today. Teaching Autobiography of Red this semester has reaffirmed and strengthened my connection to it... but that's a matter that deserves its own post. Maybe soon.

Firsts / Newness

2009-10-17T16:10:00.001-07:00

This week has been jam-packed! I kicked it off w/ my first "professional artist" as opposed to "coffee shop mc" public reading. I was REALLY nervous; that's why the face is flushed. (photo by Molly)

But when all was said and done it went really well, and I found myself wondering what I had thought was so terrifying. So much support came in from friends and students (+ Shawn, don't want to take that for granted!)... it felt wonderful.

I'm in the process now of writing my first (and likely my only) graduate-level critical paper. It's a strange road for me to navigate, but an act I'm finding new value in. The research part I love... and if deadlines didn't stop me from lingering there forever I very well could!

Today I bought a new laptop, a MacBook Pro. Right now it's sitting calmly in its packaging, waiting for me to scratch some time out to perform the transfer. This little machine will open many worlds for me... like skype, the new microsoft office suite (finally!), face-recognition software, and many other things I don't yet understand. Most importantly, it will try very hard not to have meltdowns during finals week, to be young and resilient.

The last first I'll relate here is a show I saw tonight with my sister at Heart of the Beast puppet and mask theatre. This wonderful space is only a few blocks from my house, and while I've seen the May Day Parade they organize twice now, I've never actually been inside the building. I had to be evil and take photos (of course without flash).

This is from Janaki Ranpura’s Lovesick Sea Play, which kicked off the evening. It combined shadow puppetry w/ physical acting and was really funny and interactive.

These next photos are from Bart Buch’s Ode to Walt Whitman. Heart of the Beast can explain it better than I can:

Recently returned from delighting full houses in New York, Bart Buch’s Ode to Walt Whitman is a tender, silent puppet-poem that uncovers contemporary queer cultural identity alongside an exploration of Whitman’s love and dreams of America. In an online gay chat room, the words of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass poems and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem Ode to Walt Whitman become an intimate dialogue. This multi-media performance features a dazzling array of puppet forms as well as organic electronica music composed by Martin Dosh. Recommended for ages 18+

The choreography was really impressive, and I loved how the show moved between shadow, hand-puppets, text/projection, masks, and other kinds of puppetry and visuals I find hard to categorize. It was a moving performance.

And now? I'm behind in my classes. Caught a cold. Have a Spanish exam on Monday. I need a second weekend, por favor!

Short Poems

2009-10-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

I have been in the process of trying to get myself to write longer, lately revising some older poems to embody scenes more fully and take more time developing their ideas and associations. Perhaps this (sometimes painful) activity has made me develop a new appreciation for brevity in my reading!

Moving through Adam Zagajewski's Without End, I find myself responding most to places where a small image or moment is captured with economy, then blown open in a line or two.

Here he does it with an image (and it's not just the dead bird thing that I love!):

Dead Sparrow

Among all objects
the dead sparrow in its gray topcoat of feathers
is the least unusual.
Even a roadside stone looks like
life's prince when compared
to a dead sparrow.
Flies circle it,
intent as scholars.

I really enjoy that breathy feeling when you realize what you had thought you were reading about wasn't what you were reading about at all. The trojan horse effect. Here he does it with a (seemingly) small circumstance:

Death of a Pianist

While others waged war
or sued for peace, or lay
in narrow beds in hospitals
or camps, for days on end

he practiced Beethoven's sonatas,
and slim fingers, like a miser's,
touched great treasures
that weren't his.

I love how this whole poem takes place within the boundaries of a single sentence. Yet it covers a vast amount of ground and its critiques are pointed and devastating.

Okay, now back to the long and arduous task of re-envisioning!

cited: Zagajewski, Adam. Without End: New and Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 18. 32.

Crazy People Drink Water Too

2009-10-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

Maxine Hong Kingston spoke last week at the U and for months I've been frantically excited. I even assigned a portion of China Men to my intermediate poetry students... we were studying prose poems, why not poetic prose? But somehow it wasn't until the week before she came that I realized I would have to be sitting in my Spanish class while she spoke. Curse my poor planning and bad luck! However, the lecture was videotapped and should be available in a week or so. I look forward to snuggling on my own couch, perhaps with a hot cup of tea, and watching it soon.

Anyways, my first encounter with Kingston was in the very first class I TAed at the U, Multicultural Lit. We read China Men and it blew my brain straight out of my skull. I've decided it needs to occupy the one true-blue CNF slot I have on my booklist. There will also be prose by poets (more on that to follow) and some NF writing by Woolf, but those are really not the same. I've read a few good memoirs and creative essay collections (Nick Flynn, Terry Tempest Williams, Joan Didion, etc.) in the last couple years, but China Men is the one I'd like to return to most and interact with in my thesis essay.

Recently I finished Woman Warrior, and what has lingered with me is its meditations on mental health:

"The difference between sane people and mad people," Brave Orchid explained to the children, "is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people only have one story that they talk over and over." (At the Western Palace)

I love the role that storytelling occupies in this narrative. Especially this recognition that the ability to respond to one's changing environment in a myriad of ways can be lost.

I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves. (A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe)

Vocalization is important, but perhaps even more so this pressing need to understand the difference between sanity and insanity. Because the line is of course a blurry one, and just as one person's story can spill into another's, so too can mental states.

"She's only getting drinking water," said my mother. "Crazy people drink water too." (Shaman)

We all need water. Kingston's texts have refreshed and challenged me. I hope to drink in more of them soon.

cited: Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. 159, 186, 95.

Investigate Them

2009-10-03T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a little Marianne Moore lately, and there's something about the darkly treated landscape of "A Grave" that makes me homesick! Surely I'm helped along by the yearning in Moore's gorgeous lines:

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it
yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
...
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

But I guess I have to face the fact that in the end of the day, no water body will hold the place in my heart that the North Atlantic does. Especially when considering how:

the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave

This is such an essentially New England premise. It's a "three cheers for Nantucket" Moby Dick kind of premise, and I find myself longing for the salty smells and the particularly blue-green-gray that is the ocean with its delicious mixture of sunny rocking and unknown dangers beneath. Moore nails this with such delightful verbs:

... the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;

And:

... the fish no longer investigate them
for their bones have not lasted:

So fantastic. Forget this academic enterprise shipmates, I'm ready to put to sea.

cited: Moore, Marianne. "A Grave." poets.org.

Dialogue in Fiction / White Space in Poetry

2009-10-02T16:22:00.000-07:00

Molly sent me a link to an excellent review Virginia Woolf wrote on Hemingway. At least, not being a fan of Hemingway, I think it's excellent. And I'm happy to have that Hemingway-hesitancy in common with Woolf! Anyway, the essay appears in a Tin House Books anthology edited by J. C. Hallman, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature.

These two sentences have aligned with some recent poetic musings:

A writer will always be chary of dialogue because dialogue puts the most violent pressure upon the reader’s attention. He has to hear, to see, to supply the right tone, and to fill in the background from what the characters say without any help from the author.

I never realized before how dialogue performs the same function in fiction that white space does in poetry, particularly when considering fragmented or collage-based forms. It quiets the authorial presence and requires the reader to participate, filling in the blanks. In moderation this makes for a more interactive and intimate reading experience. Instead of breezing through on autopilot, or settling comfortably into the passenger seat, the reader becomes more connected with the material through the work he/she must do.

In over-abundance however, dialogue and white space can cause the reader to say: "there is nothing here to connect with!" He/she throws up her hands, finds the writing flat or the author lazy, and refuses to do this work or engage with the material.

I don't blame Woolf for finding little of interest in Hemingway's characters, and wishing "to cry out with the little girl in 'Hills Like White Elephants’: ‘Would you please please please please please please stop talking?’" But Woolf loves Jane Austen, without any reservations, and no writer has a more dialogue-heavy style than she does.

I suppose that when the writer asks for more reader participation, he/she simultaneously invites more of the reader's personality and biases into the work itself. And the type of reader who feels an affinity with Elizabeth Bennet (strong enough to help him/her create background details and tone) might not relate as powerfully with Jacob Barnes (and lose interest in doing this work).

In this way white space or dialogue matches author types more closely with reader types, and limits some of the work's potential to reach a broad audience. But for the readers who do respond and participate, a more lasting bond is forged with the material. And so much of it depends upon balance, a balance that is different for each reader.

cited: An Essay on Criticism: Virginia Woolf on Hemingway. Tin House Blog.

Rubbing Stick to Stick

2009-09-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

Today, tomorrow, and Sunday we have the Minneapolis Tattoo Convention looming large. I'll go tomorrow and stand by my man, but yesterday and this afternoon has afforded some desperately needed time to be at home with the quiet and do what Mrs. Dalloway calls "rubbing stick to stick." To gradually revive and unfurl after the first two weeks of the semester dashed me against the wall.

Reading has been the absolute best thing for this... it's too easy to forget the moments when the activity becomes a kind of lifeline. I'm grateful to get a reaffirmation of the reasons I came to graduate school in the first place, and also grateful to realize that this is the last fall! I'm sure a 9-5 will offer different challenges, but I'm ready to be finished with the academic gauntlets (the ms, of course, isn't quite as ready to be finished).

But enough of that. It was exciting to stumble across C. D. Wright, one of the poets I revere most, in this month's Harpers. This fantastic image was a balm in itself:

The scent of woods clings to the hair, the skin. Nevertheless the scene brings to mind a classic cold-water atelier in a protracted raw period. A stove that needs constant banking. Dogs spoked around its hot belly.

It's been weirdly interesting to be reading this ekphrastic in conjunction with Forrest Gander's Science and Steepleflower, knowing for the first time (yes, I live in a box) that these two poets are married. C. D. Wright has what I think is an intentional misquotation of T. S. Eliot's "Time and the bell have buried the day" (Burnt Norton). She writes:

These two have until the end of hours. (Time and the day have buried the bell.) The somnambulist lunges into the rectangularly lit field of rug. Stairs punish the hindlimb. But a stallion could be saddled in half sleep. In fly season. Gently so he does not start.

C. D. Wright also mentions "A man's horsey buttocks, family Equidae." In "Deflection Toward the Relative Minor" Gander begins with horses and steps:

They went at large like horses. His foot
Wore the steps to her porch.

Part of me wonders is that's supposed to be "out large." Funny how much meaning can ride on a little word. Hopefully this gbooks embedment will honor his spacing better than I can here:

In the middle: "With resin, pitch, tow, / And small wood we stoked the oven." And finally at the end there is a bell, a burying:

And no one of us followed but wrote down their names
and buried the paper in the evening ground when the bell
Sounded for prayer.

Much of these overlaps amount to shared landscape and influences - each poet's work is fiercely unique - but there's still a kind of voyeuristic joy in discovering them. And Four Quartets provides a new lens for considering Gander's meditations on time... if only I had enough time to read them both all over again!

I'm also enthused to have made some small headway with the tattoo research. I read Takahiro Kitamura's Tattoos of the Floating World from cover to cover this afternoon. No more of this dipping and skimming! I'd like to write a poem that in some way addresses the overlap between ukiyo-e (woodblock printing) and irezumi (the traditional Japanese tattoo); so hopefully today's reading will get me a few steps closer to that.

cited:

Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. San Diego: Harcourt, 1943. 18.

Gander, Forrest. Science & Steepleflower. New York: New Directions, 1995. 77-78.

Kitamura, Takahiro. Tattoos of the Floating World. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2008.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1996. 203.

Wright, C. D. "Closer" Harper's Magazine. 319.1913 (2009): 22-24.

Animated Poses

2009-09-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across a poem in Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours that is ilovedeadbirdstastic. Since only photos can be posted there, an excerpt from "Audubon" here will have to do:

Audubon perfected a new way of drawing birds that he called his.
On the bottom of each watercolor he put "drawn from nature"
which meant he shot the birds

and took them home to stuff and paint them.
Because he hated the unvarying shapes
of traditional taxidermy

he built flexible armatures of bent wire and wood
on which he arranged bird skin and feathers--
or sometimes

whole eviscerated birds--
in animated poses.
Not only his wiring but his lighting was new.

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight
roving shadowlessly up and down the brain

until you turn away.
And you do turn away.
There is nothing to see.

The poem moves on from here, making connections to other figures and aspects of Audubon's bio. Carson's curiosity is one of her chief poetic strengths, she has such a large and varied appetite. But she's not a shallow sampler, once a subject is caught in her net it gets thoroughly "eviscerated." I love the strange connections she forges, and I love them best in long form, over the course of a poetic novel like Autobiography of Red or Beauty of the Husband. But this excerpt has such a feeling of wholeness to it, I like the breath it offers... like a hawk hovering before the plunge.

cited: Carson, Anne. Men in the Off Hours. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 17.

Stammering Answer

2009-09-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

Wrestling with a deadline, so haven't had as much time for reading as I'd like. But I did want to take a moment to reflect briefly on Orlando. This was a fun book, by which I mean funny, and frequently absurd. There were several places where I laughed at loud. But more interesting, and perhaps more frequent, were the tense moments where Woolf seems determinedly un-serious, struggling to stay satirical about the things that matter most to her. Considering that the book is essentially a long love-note to Vita Sackville-West after Woolf had been spurned for Mary Campbell, there's more than a few tears behind the smiling mask.

But the parts that appealed to me most concerned Orlando as a writer, the writing life as applied to women, and the relationship between love and the literary act. Beneath the humorous tone a very deep chord is struck. First up, Orlando's longing for a husband (brought on by society's expectations, or as Woolf says "the spirit of the age"), begins to suppress and poison her creativity:

For it would seem--her case proved it--that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

In service to her writing, Orlando falls in love and marries... but to a sea captain who is frequently away and therefore can't interfere with her time for her manuscript. For centuries Orlando has been laboring upon one poem: "The Oak Tree." Towards the end of the book the outcome is announced in an off-hand manner as Orlando's thoughts wander while driving, the "biographer" interjects with parentheses:

Fame! (She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening papers (here she alluded to the 'Oak Tree' and 'The Burdett Coutts' Memorial Prize which she had won; and we must here snatch time to remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination and peroration should be dashed from us on a laugh so casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place--culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man).

But what really seems casually "dashed from us on a laugh" is this idea of the differences in women's accents, sentences, or oratory styles, which will form the backbone of Woolf's next work "A Room of One's Own." Here it comes just as a suggestion, an embryo.

As a "symbolical" gesture Orlando returns to the oak tree that had originally inspired her manuscript, with the goal of burying a copy there and returning it to the land. But in the end the action feels too silly and her mind wanders to other silly moments: being compared to Milton, being handed a prize check:

She had thought then of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do with this, she wondered? What has praise and fame got to do with poetry? [...] Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself--a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and more like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries?

Orlando is itself both a secret transaction between lovers and a public performance, sometimes with unnecessary flourishes. Its duplicity is what makes it so appealing. But behind the light-hearted mockery Woolf's sacred subjects show through: life, love, literature... and how each bleeds into the other.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1928. 243, 312, 324-325.

all this, and love too, will ruin us

2009-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

With Richard Siken's Crush it's been a joy to read poems quickly and hungrily again. I realize that most of the poetry collections I've read recently have had slow, contemplative echoes... pleasurable in a wholly different way. But these obsessive love lyrics are dark and sexy and made to be devoured.

Siken's lineation doesn't translate well to a blog post, so here's an image of the opening poem:

Nell Casey's article "Nerve-Wracked Love: A Profile of Richard Siken" addresses Siken's cultivation of this fever-pitch tone, consistent throughout the book:

He [Siken] began to write some of the poetry included in Crush when he was in his 20s, and later decided to preserve the mood of that age. “I wanted to talk about reckless, romantic love, and that has immaturity to it,” he explains. “There comes a point where it gets silly or you can’t get invested in it or you’ve had so many experiences or so many comforts, it doesn’t seem as terribly tragic.”

Crush reminds me a little of the kind of book I wanted to write when I first came to graduate school, a love story that was fundamentally early-twenties, immature, and all-consuming. But I lacked the skill (and perhaps the drive that could've made me find the skill) to accomplish it. I've revisited some of the old poems from my first graduate workshop, and as I expected they do seem flimsier on craft matters... yet they have a certain heart beat, a confidence in the poem's power to connect (that may well have been bravado and hot air) that is lacking in my recent work.

I'm not sure yet what this means. Maybe I don't have access to that zone anymore, or maybe I can reconnect with it through treating subjectivity as a responsible trait, or maybe I spend too much time thinking about writing when I ought to just write and see where it takes me!

Back from the East Coast

2009-08-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

We touched ground at MSP yesterday, and I've just finished uploading all the trip photos on flickr. Seeing the number of places we visited makes me feel tired! But it was a nice, full visit. Here's a few pics:

Now I need to catch up on the reading, Spanish lessons, class prep, and poetry writing that I've let slide while traveling! Though I did squeeze time in to post on the poetry group blog about Kimiko Hahn's Narrow Road to the Interior and to choose and order the poetry collections I'll be teaching next semester.

I'm also about halfway through Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography which has proven nice travel company. A fictional biography, her writing is at its most playful here, mingling the tongue-in-cheek voice that frequently emerges in her nonfiction with the rich characterization one expects to find in her novels. This passage in particular has aligned with my thoughts of late:

...things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour... But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect on the mind of man.

It's been interesting to visit my old haunts in Connecticut. My grandmother's farm, a landscape that continues to influence my writing. The graveyard where I used to take Shamira for walks while I was working on my gradschool applications. And especially the people, friends and family, whose lives keep changing alongside ours. There is never enough time.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1928. 98.

Decisions Made!

2009-08-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

This fall I'll be teaching primarily from a course packet I still need to put together. But I want to assign three individual poetry collections, and the debate on those books is officially over...

1. Anne Carson Autobiography of Red

2. Kevin Young For the Confederate Dead

3. Tracy K. Smith Duende

Carson is visiting campus this fall and Autobiography of Red is a seminal text for me that's due for another revisit. I taught Federico Garcia Lorca's "In Search of Duende" last year and am excited to work with Smith's text in conjunction this time. For the Confederate Dead was an impulse decision, but I was caught by the poems' jazzy rhythms and wanted to assign a text that demonstrated a lot of sonic engagement.

I think these collections will offer students a range of styles and subject matter choices, but they are linked in that each is interacting with another, older text... and there my own aesthetic interests are apparent! I'm looking forward to digging into these.

So Much For Culture

2009-08-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

A collection of Matsuo Bashō's work, Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings translated by Sam Hamill, became an impulse purchase and impulse addition to the summer reading list. It couldn't have turned out better. Firstly, it is profoundly comforting to know that whether one lives in the 17th century or the 21st the fundamentals of the writing life never change:

Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the security of court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of its ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously. (The Knapsack Notebook)

Each line of this paragraph shot straight though my vital organs. I love how he turns his own interest in poetry into a windblown spirit, that instead of issuing from him acts upon him. I also relate to the consideration of other paths, but how the spirit wouldn't permit poetry to assume a diminished role. I'd love to have a print of this passage, hung in a place where I'd get to read it often.

I've also been surprised and delighted to see how a master of the haiku form can be so... SAUCY:

Planning to ride down the Mogami River, we were delayed at Oishida, waiting for decent weather. "This is haiku country," someone told us, "seeds from the old days blooming like forgotten flowers, the sound of a bamboo flute moving the heart. With no one to show us the way, however, local poets try new style and old style together." So we made a small anthology together, but the result is of little merit. So much for culture. (Narrow Road to the Interior)

But Bashō's quirks, skill, and sense of humor are most powerfully apparent in his haiku itself, and the selections and translations here are absolutely fantastic. Here's just a few examples:

After morning snow
onion shoots rise in the garden
like little signposts

That's my sake cup!
Don't come dropping mud in there,
nesting swallows!

A rolling cloud--like
a dog pissing on the run--
dense winter showers

Yesterday Shawn and I were having brunch on the back patio of Seward Cafe. The squirrels pelted us with chewed-up nut shells from the trees overhead. I dove to cover my glass of oj, laughing all the while. But mud in sake? That's going too far...

cited: Bashō, Matsuo. Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings. Trans. Sam Hamill. Boston: Shambhala, 2000. 22, 55, 95, 125, 160.

Hooks

2009-07-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

It seems hard to care about literature without confronting the topic of suicide, particularly if one is: 1. a poet, 2. American, 3. female. Sylvia Plath was my gateway drug into poetry, and now I'm getting as deep into Woolf's work as I can, so I often find myself asking: what is it that you love so much about these tragic white women?

The question has gained new resonance with my rereading of The Waves. This innovative, poetic novel follows the lives of six childhood friends: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda through their interior soliloquies. Upon rereading I've found myself paying particular attention to Rhoda: the dreamer, the loner, the One Who Commits Suicide.

But I didn't recognize a connection to Plath until I came across a passage at the end of the book. Rhoda and Louis (his character is based on T.S. Eliot) are lost in their imaginings when figures begin to approach from a distance. First Rhoda sees them as creatures of unnatural size, then men and women who are relics of an army, and finally as her friends:

Now light falls on them again. They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville, people we know. Now what a shrinkage takes place! What a shrivelling, what an humiliation! The old shivers run through me, hatred and terror, as I feel myself grappled to one spot by these hooks they cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the finger and searchings of the eyes.

The image of hooks reminds me powerfully of Plath's Tulips, where a hospitalized speaker describes the nurses that tend her and the objects in her room:

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

Hooks injure. Both speakers find it painful to be interrupted by loved ones, but more so to be recalled. Because they find comfort in non-identity, in extinction, which friends and family break with their recognition of connection. Plath writes: "And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself." Woolf writes:

"That is my face," said Rhoda, "in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder--that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face."

Relationships have a way of reeling the speakers in from the abysses they seek. Rhoda describes it as shaking her purpose. But there's something about the image of a hook in particular which forces the acknowledgement of a face. A hook punctures the skin, the outer covering. One is not all consciousness but must recognize the body. A hook's line establishes a connection from one being to another. The movement of reeling in the line prevents the mind from wandering freely into dark little crevices, which is mental illness at its most basic definition. As Plath's speaker says of her tulips:

They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

Relationships put demands upon us but those demands provide focus and momentum. They force us to commit to a thought, a task, a face, a self. Why do I love tragic white women? I'm not sure, but something about this kind of writing captures my interest, hooks me.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1931. 43, 232.
Plath, Sylvia. "Tulips" poetry foundation.

Busy Sunday

2009-07-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

We're expanding the number of sweet reading nooks in the DePasquale/Hebrank household (yes, we need a cooler house name... suggestions?). The hammock out back remains unchallenged as the shadiest, swingiest, breeziest, spot to crack a cover:

However, I took a journey to Roberts, WI this afternoon (facilitated by my dear friend craigslist), and picked up this lovely white wicker set for the 3 season porch in front:

This poor little corner has been unfurnished since we moved in A YEAR AGO. But no longer! Once we get a mattress for the white antique cot that's also in this room we'll really be in business. Who knows? I might even move ahead with my reading list! More on that to follow...

Edit: We've got a name! The Louderhorn Inn. In honor of Shawn's storytelling, our many visitors, and of course Powderhorn Park.

Rereading The Waves

2009-07-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

Rereading The Waves has been just what the doctor ordered. This book is certainly Woolf's most dramatic literary achievement. It was better than I remembered, perhaps because I had already found my balance inside the text and was able to notice more. But my memories of my first reading, when it blew my developing literary mind and continuously sent me teetering, are very dear. It was also special to be reading a copy marked up by a close friend, seeing what she noticed and feeling her presence with me even though she's far away. My... I'm getting progressively more sentimental!

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.

Repetition is the law of the land in this book. But the language is so lush and the narrative so nontraditional that one is always thankful of being recalled and reminded. There's many things I want to do with this book later: poems, essays. But for now I just feel like cooing over it...

I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such a children speak when they come into a room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.

In other news, I've posted on Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah here.

cited: Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1931. 238, 295.

Slacking on the Tattoo Research...

2009-07-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

Eeks! The summer is more than halfway over and I've made little progress on the tattoo iconography/culture thread of my studies... I guess it's time to reassess and prioritize.

I've felt drawn more powerfully towards literature, and especially poetry, of late. And at this stage it's vital to read whatever will inspire me to write, and write as much as possible. Spanish lessons occupy second place in task-ranking, then Woolf reading gets the bronze. So from here the podium appears a little... full.

Luckily I still need to take an independent study during Spring semester of next year, and the debate on the subject for that class is officially over. I can crack open those research books then. For now: poetry, spanish, woolf, poetry, spanish, woolf, poetry...

Whodathunk? ...Employment!

2009-07-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

A strange accident and a few kind friends landed me back in the classroom today with eight enthusiastic 9-12 year-olds. We read several bird poems, including this one by Kay Ryan:

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

One of the more interesting moments of the day came from contrasting these images with Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." I explained what "coming home to roost" means... then concluded that if the Dickinson poem is like President Obama saying "Yes We Can," the Ryan poem is more like Lord Voldemort saying "I'll be coming for you!" They've requested more Harry Potter comparisons, I'm only too happy to oblige.

cited: poets.org

Spanish Word of the Day...

2009-07-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

La Jinete

a horsewoman or experienced/professional rider.

Creepy Crawlies

2009-07-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

The last couple days I've been doing some housecleaning and finishing up Wayne Miller's The Book of Props.

My policy with bugs is generally to look the other way, and it's always disturbing when cleaning makes you confront the sheer volume of eight-legged, furry, bitey, nasty things snuggling into the curtains and unused corners of an old house... ugh! Miller nails it:

...I made my place like
like a spider crossing the kitchen table--
a few needles of contact, the rest
just shadow...

His images are so precise and lovely ("Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons / in a broth of wind"). But the various linkages and broader narrative elements to the book make it even more striking. I particularly enjoyed the third section "What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse)" where all the poems alternate between the lives of (and collisions between) three characters. I may assign this collection to my students next semester, it's definitely in the running. Here's one section from the long opening poem "Sleep Suite":

[Death]

Out where the wheat fields met the road,
a wood door lay flat on its back: pink
paint faded and peeling, brass knob

blackened and lying off by the shoulder.
You mentioned its beauty, which was
undeniable, and we imagined the house

in which it once had served as a valve
between--what rooms? what eyes?
You took comfort in thinking

of the hands that had touched it--
lovers' hands, children's hands--
but all I could see was the hard light

smacking it to an unbearable
brightness--the same light that once
struck it through a window.

The moment is expansive while retaining its specificity. There is tightness in the progression ("surprising but inevitable" as we say...) moving from dark hints like "blackened" to the explosively violent "smacking." Miller's work seems suited to the classroom environment: impressive but not bewildering and likely to appeal to a range of tastes. Many more collections to consider of course, but I'm on my way!

cited: Miller, Wayne. The Book of Props. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2009. 23, 17, 9.

Jorie Graham and Voyeurism

2009-07-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

I've been spending more time with Jorie Graham's Dream of the Unified Field lately, which I've read in fits and starts all summer. To be honest, sometimes I find her writing a little TOO smart, but I appreciate its sensuality and firm sense of voice.

Reading through this collection, I was struck by how much stress is placed on watching and observation. There is this constant experience of images imprinting themselves on the speaker, searing into her consciousness and identity in a way that feels less like actions and more like being acted-upon. The range is incredible: a snake in the grass, her daughter dancing on the other side of a window, the river Ganges, Kubric's Lolita, her father sleeping with another woman, etc. Sometimes the viewing is traumatic, sometimes intensely contemplative, sometimes infused with a sense of awe.

In "Salmon" Graham begins simply enough:

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way though
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping a gold river
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.

Graham gets a lot of milage out of the commas here, coming quick and plentiful almost like the fish themselves. Then she solidifies the "imprinting" of the scene on the speaker:

They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the eye
is helpless
when the image forms itself, upside-down, backward,
driving up into
the mind, and the world
unfastens itself
from the deep ocean of the given....Justice, aspen
leaves, mother attempting
suicide, the white night-flying moth
the ants dismantled bit by bit and carried in
right through the crack
in my wall....How helpless
the still pool is,
upstream,
awaiting the gold blade
of their hurry. [...]

The extreme vulnerability ("helpless" 3x) that characterizes these visions is startling. The images are in motion and in control, the mind must surrender itself to the ride. What sold me on this poem is the way that Graham changes the subject suddenly mid-line, jarring the reader's expectations. Picking up from there:

of their hurry. Once, indoors, a child,
I watched, at noon, through slatted window blinds,
a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,
climb onto each other,
on the terrace floor,
and ride--two gold currents
wrapping round and round each other, fastening,
unfastening. I hardly knew
what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world
it was the one each cast
onto the other,
the thin black seam
they seemed to be trying to work away
between them. I held my breath.

She fuses this encounter immediately with the salmon, something "watched" years and years later in her adult life. In my opinion Graham is best when she's doing this kind of work: straddling opposites and finding strange similarities. Still that passive tone lingers, apparent in her very next phrase:

As far as I could tell, the work they did
with sweat and light
was good. I'd say
they traveled far in opposite
directions. What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
the air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time where it is useless, merely
beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance
one from the other
and slept, outstretched,
on the warm tile
of the terrace floor,
smiling, faces pressed against the stone.

I love this poem! But sometimes during this book I've found myself craving for the speaker to take a little more responsibility for what's happening to her, or at least commit to an action more substantial than holding her breath. Even the personal stuff seems viewed more than experienced. There's a distance of some kind that's both stimulating and frustrating... but it intrigues me enough to keep me reading Graham.

cited: Graham, Jorie. Dream of the Unified Field. New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1980. 38.

Goodbye Manga, Hello Independence

2009-07-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

I had my last day of manga classes yesterday... which turned out to be my last day of employment for the summer, as my poetry class for 6-8 year olds had low enrollment and had to be cancelled. There should be an odd job here and there, but more time for the writing and reading and important stuff I've been neglecting lately, which is good. I had a great time with my students, they were so passionate about manga and sweet to each other... lots of good energy all around.

Today is an important and noisy time in the Powderhorn neighborhood. I just found out that our fireworks display is the only other in Minneapolis besides the big one over the Mississippi downtown... yeah! Shamira's been having panic attacks just over the neighbors' bottle rockets, so tonight should be interesting.

I'm almost caught up with my review of the Rosetta Stone Spanish lessons that I had started two years ago, and hoping to move into new territory with the software in the next few days. I love this language, it feels almost like an old friend at this point... but maybe one who sometimes stays too late at night saying the same things over and over. And you try to remember the names of their family members and coworkers, but only seem able to recall them when someone else brings them up. Is that too cynical?

In other news, I broke down and joined facebook today. This is a big part of my ongoing journey to become more comfortable with pieces of myself living online. The next step is to either find or replace my digital camera's cord so I can post pictures here and on flickr. I figure if I end up getting freaked out I can always duck back under the cyber water, but first I'm going to give this whole "web presence" thing a try... we'll see how it goes!

Little Wassername

2009-06-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Been neglecting the blog lately, first because I was too busy junking out on manga and anime... and later because I just sort of forgot it in the mix of travel, getting tattooed, etc. But now my manga courses are starting on Monday, so I'm basically finished with those preparations, and starting to go through poetry/lit/language withdrawal.

So to recommit myself, I'll start with some reflections on Susan-Lori Parks' play Venus. I would really like to SEE this someday, but enjoyed reading it. The language is really engaging. I mentioned that it had an epigraph from Between the Acts. That is: "'You don't believe in history,' said William."

It's an interesting choice, as both works deal expressly with history and performance. Woolf with a town's pageant of English history amidst WWII, Parks with her historic character, the Venus Hottentot (a woman brought to Europe from Southern Africa in the early 1800's and exhibited in freakshows because her curvaceous figure startled colonial notions of femininity... a plaster cast of her body, along with her skeleton was once displayed in the Musee de l'Homme).

There is a second reference to Woolf in the play, and it's a grim one. It comes when The Young Man has abandoned The Bride-to-Be because he wants a love more "wild" like the Venus Hottentot (their relationship/engagement up to this point has been characterized by extreme banality... and a good deal of insincerity on the part of The Young Man):

THE MOTHER
His head has turned from yr bright sun.
He roams in thuh dark.
Let me speak plain:
He dudhnt love you inny more.

THE BRIDE-TO-BE
Aaah me!

The section that follows Parks indicated as an optional cut for production, but for me it is one of the play's more jarring and interesting moments:

THE MOTHER
Uh multitude of responses are available.
Thuh antiquity response would be thuh Asp.
Get yrself uh poison-snake. Clasp it tuh yr bosom.
On thuh left side. Let it fill yr heart with death.
Cleopatra. Very moving. Old hat now though.
Thuh classical response would be tuh hang yrself.
Phaedra did that.
Elizabethan response would be tuh drown yrself.
A la little wassername.

THE BRIDE-TO-BE:
Ophelia.

THE MOTHER:
Good girl.
They also drank poison. Fell on their swords.
In modern dress they slit their wrists.
Fill their pockets with rocks.
Jump from bridges.
Infront of trains.
Sleeping pills...

How strange that Woolf's method of suicide appears as one item in this "tragic" litany! Especially when Ophelia's drowning is discussed earlier in the deadpan fashion characteristic of Parks' style, why do we need the "pockets with rocks"? The other examples have men tangled up in the decision, but that can hardly apply to Woolf. It seems almost like the play is haunted by Woolf's presence, in more ways than one.

After reviewing this multitude of suicide options, The Mother and The Bride-to-Be settle on an alternate plan: to "disguise" The Bride-to-Be as a "Hottentot." The line between real tragedies and aped tragedies becomes more and more blurred...

cited: Parks, Suzan-Lori. Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990.

Love and Hate

2009-05-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

While Between the Acts has a wide scope and a public feel to it, the uneasy relationship between Isa Oliver and her husband Giles is the closest contender for a "focus" within the narrative. The dynamic between them is subtle, unnoticed by most of the other characters. They never speak to each other directly during the course of the novel but Woolf reveals tension by showing how closely tuned to the other's body language they are:

Giles glared. With his hands bound tight round his knees he stared at the flat fields. Staring, glaring, he sat silent.

Isabella felt imprisoned. Through the bars of the prison, through the sleep haze that deflected them, blunt arrows bruised her; of love, then of hate. Through other people's bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt--she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon--a desire for water. "A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water," she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass. (Acts 46)

I love the physicality of Isa's thirst; juxtaposing the clear image of the beaker with the abstracts of love and hate, prisons and arrows, works well. This attention to extremes reminds me powerfully of the first few pages of The Waves when as children Susan sees her friend Jinny kiss Louis:

"I love," said Susan, "and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard... Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate." (Waves 15-16)

For Susan these emotions signify one of her first moments of awareness of the body and desire: she recognizes that she wants Louis for herself. For Giles and Isa with their various infidelities these emotions are part of an elaborate and well-worn game: marriage and cohabitation. But Between the Acts adds another layer with the pageant itself, the story-within-a-story. The plot is confused and overpopulated, and Miss La Trobe does not come out of the bushes to clarify her intentions. As she watches Isa realizes:

...she could make nothing of it.

Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. (Acts 63)

Then a character in the play "dies" onstage and Isa amends her conclusion:

Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. (Acts 64)

This premise really interests me: that all emotions are formed from some combination of these essentials... but I'm not sure that I buy it. I can read "peace" as "indifference," with death as the ultimate act of detachment from the "ply of human life." Love and hate then are not opposites, indifference is their opposite. And I can see how the two work in combination: if you love someone strongly you end up hating them a little, in order to truly hate someone a part of you loves them.

But there ARE other emotions that apply to different people and situations: embarrassment, excitement, resentment... the love/hate thing seems to me to be rooted in only certain types of relationships: monogamous ones, or in the case of Woolf's characters, trying-to-be-monogamous ones. Partnerships.

Giles now wore the black coat and white tie of the professional classes, which needed--Isa looked down at his feet--patent leather pumps. "Our representative, our spokesman," she sneered. Yet he was extraordinarily handsome. "The father of my children, whom I love and hate." Love and hate--how the tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes... (Acts 146)

The problem is that there is no other plot: the self wants to possess the lover fully, but chafes against any restrictions imposed by the lover (who also has a self). Love and hate. And that's how Woolf leaves her characters in the last lines of her novel: to duke it out between these two impulses...

Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of the darkness, in the fields of the night.

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (148-149)

cited:
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Orlando: Harcourt, 1941.
--. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1931.

Cleopatra!

2009-05-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

I finished reading Between the Acts, the last book Virginia Woolf completed before her suicide, about a week ago. I have complex feelings about this novel, and am tempted to read it start to finish all over again to help me sort them through. But hopefully teasing out a couple prose-reactions here can get me closer to a poetic-reaction in the next couple days. A strange coincidence is that the Suzan-Lori Parks play I'm reading now, Venus, has an epigraph from Between the Acts... but more on that to follow.

This is a different kind of book for Woolf. Her lens is usually small, probing the individual's consciousness, but here she has a wide scope that addresses a collective identity through one village and also "Englishness" generally. It's public, performative; there's a pageant. Her language is very poetic, flexing the muscles she developed in The Waves (on the re-read list for this summer). Here's a couple passages that struck me:

He would carry the torch of reason till it went out in the darkness of the cave. For herself, every morning, kneeling, she protected her vision. Every night she opened the window and looked at leaves against the sky. Then slept. Then the random ribbons of birds' voices woke her. (Woolf 139)

....

"Yes," Isa answered. "No," she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted. The old boot appeared on the shingle. (Woolf 146)

I have NO IDEA what that old boot is doing there, or the singles, but I love it! This is a response to a relatively minor question for Isa, but one that speaks to the heart of the novel: whether we act different parts but are the same. Yet the title obviously draws the reader's attention to what happens behind the scenes, and I would argue, between the sentences of the novel. It seems like the kind of story where what is written matters much less than what remains unsaid. Enigmatic images and rhythmic prose create this dynamic, which Woolf characterized beautifully in her diary as "that feeling slipped between the space that separates one word from another; like a blue flower between two stones" (Briggs 375).

During an intermission in the pageant, "batty" old Mrs. Swithin intrudes upon the actors to congratulate the writer/director Miss La Trobe. The play has caused Mrs. Swithin to examine her mundane and sheltered life in light of the infinite possibilities she had felt were before her in childhood, concluding: "What a small part I've had to play! But you've made me feel I could have played... Cleopatra!" Miss La Trobe revolves this strange comment around in her own head concluding: "'You've stirred in me my unacted part,' she meant" (Woolf 104).

So every person has the capacity to be both Cleopatra and old Mrs. Swithin, and in that way "we act different parts but are the same." The novel is continuously playing with ideas of unity and dispersion. For Woolf to be probing the concept of shared humanity during the acceleration of WWII (fascism, nationalism, public demonstrations) is ambitious to say the least. But her work on Three Guineas had prepared her to use that wider lens, and this time employing the poetic/creative skills from The Waves brings beauty and complexity. With more time (revisions, later books) I think she could have fully realized that ambition.

Woolf debated publishing the novel, but despite positive feedback ultimately decided it wasn't ready. She talked of revising it, but by this point Leonard had become deeply concerned about her health. In a letter to his partner John Lehmann he described her as "on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown" concluding "It is out of the question for her to touch the book now and so we must put it [publishing] off indefinitely" (Briggs 391). Between the Acts came out posthumously.

cited:
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Orlando: Harcourt, 1941.

Trying to Shift the Teaching Gears

2009-05-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

Finished grading last night. I'm realizing I'm not really a "tough" grader (despite my perception of myself and the impression I give to my students) in terms of the final outcomes, my students usually end up doing pretty well. But I definitely make them work hard for those good grades, and they earn whatever they receive. For the record: I am conservative with my solid A's, they're attainable but rare.

If I didn't micromanage ("communicate with" might be a better way of looking at it) my students: letting them know about missing work, reminding them about due dates and requirements, etc... those final grades would certainly be lower, closer to what the U wants. And if I'm ever teaching 4/5 classes at once, I might be forced to become less hands-on. But for now I feel good about my teaching style. I really found my groove in the classroom this semester: I felt like I was teaching more effectively than ever before and also felt like myself while doing it.

It will be interesting soon to be working with youth and teaching something I still have a lot to learn about: manga. No grades, no critiques, just encouragement and creating a fun environment.

Right now I'm concentrating primarily on popular, mainstream shōjo (marketed to girls) and shōnen (marketed to boys) manga. I need to find a couple shōjo titles I can stand working with, and towards that end I've read the first volume of Fruits Basket. This video should give an idea:

Fruits Basket Episode 1, Part 1
Uploaded by akanaakazen. - Click for more funny videos.

As is typical of the genre, the heroine, Tohru, is generous, naive, and self-sacrificing. Then she finds herself stuck between two REALLY cute boys (who happen to magically change into two REALLY cute animals). There's a part of me that loves how unapologetically girly the whole premise is. One boy likes gardening, the other martial arts. Tohru gets books from the library on gardening and martial arts in order to understand them better. No, she doesn't have any of her own interests, and could probably use more time to study because she's not doing well in school. Her talent: housekeeping. And that's how it becomes a little too much for me to handle... but I'll probably still read a couple more volumes and bring copies into class because the story is funny and well-paced.

Molly has me thinking about poly-vocal poetry again, and cultivating different voices/speakers. Most of my poems don't have a distinct voice, but I have noticed the emergence of a "mean female lover" who is the polar opposite of the shōjo heroine. She's a little carnal, and very unconcerned about her lover's feelings. She considers her attraction to him with a kind of morbid fascination but never a sense of empathy or obligation. I'd like to develop other voices... maybe not a Tohru-ish speaker as a counterpoint but some of that shōjo warmth and vulnerability could balance the mean female lover's guardedness. We'll see...

What I do love about shōjo is that it forces the reader to deal with the sexuality of teenage girls, which frankly, almost everyone would rather filter or ignore. Most popular American narratives (Twilight comes to mind) do put some kind of filter or restraint on their female protagonists. Teenage boy sexuality is not as threatening to us it seems... So hats of to shōjo for embracing as well as aestheticizing (really, really cutely) girlish desire.

The Laptop Returns, the Grading Begins

2009-05-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

The good folks at apple were fast in shipping, fixing, and returning my aging machine. Apparently it was the logic board, which sounds important. It's a relief to have access to my ical and address book and all those other good things...

So now it's time to get a move on with my grading and close out the semester. I had a great time with my students and look forward to reading this last round of writing from them. It's been really inspiring to attend thesis defenses this week. Also took an invigorating long bike ride on Thursday with my sister.

I'm itching to get more reading done, but nothing seems ready to slow. Tonight I'll be at Art-a-Whirl with Shawn, and tomorrow we go to see The Intelligent Homosexual at the Guthrie. Monday, weather-permitting, another long bike ride. But hopefully by Tuesday I should be done with grading and on a regular study-schedule. Whew!

Empty Spaces

2009-05-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

I've been reading these Tattootime magazines from the mid 80's, edited by D. E. Hardy. A couple are borrowed from Shawn's amazing boss Todd, they certainly aren't easy to find anymore.

Some of the material is a little dated, but more often than not I've found these articles (Hardy's in particular) to offer information and perspectives not found through traditional channels. He writes with an authority formed from a mixture of personal experience and academic study, precisely what I'd like to be doing in my poems.

In that vein, there was an article on the symbology of spirals, tracing the shape through Maori, Dayak, and Japanese culture. I couldn't help thinking of poetry here:

the indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, professes that anything containing empty space provides home for a spirit. (9)

This fits my conception of white space in poetry, not blank or negative but full, additive... room that other ideas and associations related to the words can inhabit. Kind of like an in-law apartment, but for the reader!

Later when discussing the light, delicate tattoos of Dan Thomé (created with hand tools, not the electric machine)

Hardy writes:

The work finds its elegant power in line rather than mass, nuances perfectly harmonized to the various human surfaces... (Thomé's creations) accent rather than smother the form. (40)

This is probably every poet's goal with his/her "lines." Working with spacing and the surface of the paper itself, the physicality of the pen's glide. But this idea of form is particularly relevant to poetry. Hardy is thinking of the shapes and curves of the human body, but poetic form also has the potential to be either accented or smothered. I like a poem that seems to be haunted by couplets or a sonnet... and white space is often the feature that facilitates this dynamic. Direct adherence to form or the dense anarchy of the prose poem can't provide this ghostly touch.

A Very Happy Birthday To Me

2009-05-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the calls, emails, and online shoutouts, Albie's especially made me smile.

Shawn was mighty impressive in the planning and present category. We finally made it to the science museum in Saint Paul where I got to hear alligator noises: first the baby crying from inside his/her shell, then the sound of da wittle claws breaking through, and finally that cry carrying through the open air... awww! We walked around the river a bit, caught the last bit of sun, played like big kids on the jungle gym (Shawn bumped his head), then headed off to a Kurdish veggie feast. Baklava is perhaps one of the world's most perfect foods... especially with tea, especially on your birthday.

Now the plan is to read and get to bed at a decent hour. Tomorrow needs to be a productive writing day!

Eight-and-Twenty

2009-05-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

In a half hour I'll be in birthday territory! 28 is dangerously close to 30, dredging up all the milestones I've associated with that age: a career job, a second language, a foothold of some kind in poetry... Numbers are superficial of course, but I hope that this blog will function as a space where I can visibly see myself working towards the things I want to accomplish.

In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf challenges an educational and financial system that enables war through the lens of gender. Women's traditional exclusion gives them unique perspectives on different social mechanizations, which translates into pointed critiques. Within this framework even small acts of defiance can have an impact: "If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster up the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture" (204).

But what really interests me is Woolf's footnote to this statement. She decides that the "words 'vain and vicious' require qualification" and is careful not to apply them to all lecture subjects, but specifically to literature "for the reasons that it is an obsolete practice dating from the Middle Ages when books were scarce" (379). Woolf's creativity and snarkiness come out as she builds momentum:

If, as is sometimes urged in excuse, what is desired by college literary societies is not knowledge of literature but acquaintance with writers, there are cocktails, and there is sherry; both better unmixed with Proust. None of this applies of course to those whose homes are deficient in books. If the working class finds it easier to assimilate English literature by word of mouth they have a perfect right to ask the educated class to help them thus. But for the sons and daughters of that class after the age of eighteen to continue to sip English literature through a straw, is a habit that seems to deserve the terms vain and vicious; which terms can justly be applied with greater force to those who pander to them. (380)

Woolf is hyperaware of class differences and the shades they bring to these issues, though her firm personal class-identification can chafe a contemporary reader at times. It's clear that Woolf believes a text is best experienced through direct contact: no lecturer, no intermediaries, no straw. That's what I plan to do here, hope you'll join me!

cited: Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: OUP, 2008.