The Year that Was

So it was a pretty good year. Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake came out (in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, which was #2 this Summer on SPD's best seller list). I did 17 readings. Which seems impossible to believe. But it was a busy, busy year in that way. The highlights were: reading at Good Luck Bar with Lidia Yuknavitch (I have to say, I am a little bit in love with her), reading at the QAF in Vancouver BC with Wayne Koestenbaum (I was totally geeked out to be reading with him, and was in the middle of one of the most horrible weeks of my life. The result of that reading was half a dozen people coming up to me after and telling me the reading made them cry. I did feel while I was reading that I had never read better, which felt good). The best reading was in Kansas though at Pages. The community I found there in Newton almost made me want to move there. Almost. The whole evening was just fantastic: the hosts, the turnout, my fellow readers, how the Q&A after turned more into a whole-audience conversation, then the porch drinking/talking until I had to leave for the train at 2am, just fantastic.

Last year I spent less time focused on getting stuff published, which was good for my sanity. That whole scrambling race is pretty tiring. I sent less individual pieces out and, once Conspiracies got picked up by Jaded Ibis Press in June, I quit sending the newer ms out as well. I spent more time revising it. I also spent some time making a few new poems for Conspiracies and reworking the stuff that I had initially cut to make it the palatable-sized <80-page ms (JI is happy to have it longer if it works that way). I traveled a lot. Focused inward on where I am in life and what I want. Which was good. Good to have some balance when the world out there doesn't always cooperate.

I am a little worried about getting everything done each week for the next three months. That is, getting everything done without getting an ulcer, having a breakdown, or becoming completely intolerable to the people around me. I woke this morning with a hot ball of stress riding high in my chest. I am working through the long to-do list I made at 3am.

I spent too much money last year, something I don't think will rectify this year. I read a lot, though sadly the quick clip slowed in Fall; I don't expect I'll read this much in 2012. Several were books I reread (The Book of Frank, Crush, Mule - which are three of my favorite books ever, btw). New to me favorites were probably: Reasons to Live - Amy Hempel, The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch, Bone Pagoda - Susan Tichy, The Madeleine Poems - Paul Legault, and A Natural History of the Senses - Diane Ackerman, which just had so much trivia for my brain to absorb.

1. Where We Think It Should Go – Claire Becker

2. Doctor Copernicus – John Banville

3. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad

4. The Irrationalist – Suzanne Buffam

5. Bobcat Country – Brandi Homan

6. The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda

7. The History of Violets - Marosa di Giorgio

8. Octopus – Tom C. Hunley

9. The Planets – Dava Sobel

10. Accident – Nicholas Mosley

11. A Natural History of the Senses – Diane Ackerman

12. Crash Dome – Alex Phillips

13. The Country of Loneliness – Dawn Paul

14. Dayglo – James Meetze

15. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

16. The Terror of Living – Urban Waite

17. Tocqueville – Khaled Mattawa

18. The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks

19. Black-Eyed Heifer – Shelly Taylor

20. Stalin in Aruba – Shelley Pahuk

21. Breaking the Map – Kim-An Lieberman

22. The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance – Ariel Dorfman

23. What Kind – Martha Zweig

24. Sasquatch Stories – Mike Topp

25. Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

26. Gallowglass – Susan Tichy

27. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem – ed. Stuart Friebert & David Young

28. Nox – Anne Carson

29. A Moveable Feast – Earnest Hemingway

30. Hunter Mnemonics – Deborah Woodard

31. Easter Rabbit – Joseph Young

32. The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel – Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

33. Recipes for Endangered Species – Traci O’Connor

34. Blue for the Plough – Dara Weir

35. The Bodyfeel Lexicon – Jessica Bozek

36. The Myth of the Simple Machines – Laurel Snyder

37. Green Cammie – Crysta Casey

38. Mad to Live – Randall Brown

39. The Nightyard – Stephanie Anderson

40. The Energy of Slaves – Leonard Cohen

41. Pee on Water – Rachel B. Glaser

42. The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

43. Chelsea Girls – Eileen Myles

44. Hinge & Sign – Heather McHugh

45. A History of the Human Family – Sasha Steensen

46. Man’s Companions – Joanna Rucco

47. Sing, Mongrel – Claire Hero

48. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits – Kim Gek Lin Short

49. One More Theory About Happiness – Paul Guest

50. The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

51. Cut Away – Catherine Kirkwood

52. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More – Mark Strand

53. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

54. The Field Guide to Flash Fiction – ed. Tara Masih

55. Alive and Dead in Indiana – Michael Martone

56. The Long-Legged Fly – James Sallis

57. The Father of the Predicaments – Heather McHugh

58. People are Tiny in Paintings of China – Cynthia Arrieu-King

59. Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov

60. The Art Lover – Carol Maso

61. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence – Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks

62. Halfsteps + Cloudfang – Daniela Olszewska

63. Strange as This Weather Has Been – Ann Pancake

64. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

65. Soot- Jeff Walt

66. The Inquisition Yours – Jen Currin

67. The Tears of Eros – Georges Bataille

68. Advanced ELVIS Course – CAConrad

69. Theory of Religion – Georges Bataille

70. Vertical Hold – Jeff Simpson

71. The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981 – Amelia Rosselli

72. How the Broken Lead the Blind – Matt Bell

73. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto – David Shields

74. At the Point – Joseph Massey

75. Rust Or Go Missing – Lily Brown

76. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel

77. Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master – Kevin Prufer & D.A. Powell, eds.

78. Goat Song – Brad Kessler

79. Deviant Propulsion – CAConrad

80. 2666 – Roberto Bolano

81. Saint Monica – Mary Biddinger

82. Refinery – Claudia Keelan

83. The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions – Debra Di Blasi

84. Dear Ra – Johannes Goransson

85. When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris

86. The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch

87. Everlasting Quail – Sam Witt

88. Discipline – Dawn Lundy Martin

89. Speech Acts – Laura McCullough

90. Mascara – Ariel Dorfman

91. The Nights Also – Anna Swanson

92. No one belongs here more than you – Miranda July

93. Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel – Patrick Smith

94. Glean – Joshua Kryah

95. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World – Haruki Murakami

96. Lord Brain – Bruce Beasley

97. Dien Cai Dau – Yusef Komunyakaa

98. The Good-Neighbor Policy - Charles Ardai

99. Coal Miner’s Daughter – Loretta Lynn (with George Vecsey)

100. Humiliation – Wayne Koestenbaum

101. This is What Happened in Our Other Life – Achy Obejas

102. Bossypants – Tina Fey

103. Reality Sandwiches – Allen Ginsberg

104. Daughter – Janice Lee

105. Notes from the Red Zone – Christine Pacosz

106. Citizen – Andrew Feld

107. Feel This Book – Janeane Garofalo and Ben Stiller

108. Birdland: The Story of a World Famous Bird Sanctuary – Len Hill and Emma Wood

109. The Descent – Sophie Cabot Black

110. April Galleon – John Ashbery

111. The Price of Light – Pimone Triplett

112. Betty Superman – Tiff Holland

113. Bone Pagoda – Susan Tichy

114. Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality – Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

115. Music and Suicide– Jeff Clark

116. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction – Michel Foucault

117. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue – Samuel Delaney

118. Shoulder Season – Ange Mlinko

119. Epistemology of the Closet – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

120. The Queer Art of Failure – Judith Halberstam

121. The Cloud Corporation – Timothy Donnelly

122. The Madeleine Poems – Paul Legault

123. Predatory – Glenn Shaheen

124. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State – Chandan Reddy

125. Crush – Richard Siken

126. Earth Day Suite – Joseph Harrington

127. The Rest of Love – Carl Phillips

128. The Displaced of Capital – Anne Winters

129. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination – Avery Gordon

130. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex – Stanley A. Stanley & Nat Smith (eds.)

131. Cruel Optimism – Lauren Berlant

132. A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood – Allen Braden

133. The Evolution of the Flightless Bird - Richard Kenney

134. Tell me the Truth About Love – W.H. Auden

135. Mule – Shane McCrae

136. The Grief Performance – Emily Kendal Frey

137. A Little White Shadow – Mary Ruefle

138. Awe – Dorothea Lasky

139. Lake Antiquity – Brandon Downing

On top of this, Distraction.

So it's been a month and a half since my last post. The one word that describes life right now would be: Stress. It is hard not to put that in all caps, but I don't want you to think I'm yelling at you. It is capitalized. It is big and has fingers reaching into every part of life.

Hard as it has been to shift from doing part-time editing work (from home) and focusing so much on my own writing and spending hours every day just reading whatever it occurred to me to read to (continuing work while) becoming busier than I have ever been (including reading 30+ hours of theory each week and driving 500 miles), I try to focus on the positive each day. I have good people in my life. I have met some new good people. It is nice to be around people who get geeked out about writing, for sure. I wrote one new poem. That's good, right?

Good golly, I miss free time. Free time for me never meant lazing about watching TV. But it meant lazing about getting stuff done. It meant having The Things I Have To Do stretched out over some plains of time where I could watch everything. Now I literally do not have enough hours in the day. Every day I make decisions on what gets cut, on what Does Not Get Done. This is a hard thing. I am more of a perfectionist than I ever realized.

As such, I also continue to tinker with Conspiracies, while also letting anxiety build that next quarter will be busier, and that will likely come to the forefront as well.

(image above by Alessandro Pagani)

If you say hide, we'll hide.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven't gotten farther. That disease that every writer has. Then sometimes I feel shy about the things I have. The wondering of 'Should I have this when people I know who are just as good as I am don't have what I have?' In the past two days this has come up. To which one person replied 'I don't know anyone who works harder than you do.' And another replied 'All of getting anywhere is more about persistence than anything.' I do need to own up sometimes to how effing hard I work. I mean, when I work, of course. Today I hiked with the dog all morning and afternoon, talked to Sheri on the phone for two hours, then watched three episodes of Dexter. Now I am weighing the options of sleep and theory. Specifically many many many many pages of theory on small-print blurry pdf that I have to have read for Tuesday.



Tonight I wish my vortex worked. Or that I could fold the 5. I will take theory to bed instead. I was going to do a post on recent things read. Or about sadness of leaving planted things. About my dog's negative type and how I hold her collar and rub her chest until the bad men pass. I was going to post on changes and things staying the same. What does and doesn't. About the reading the other night. And conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies. And how everyone I talked to had something else I needed to read. And now people don't understand that this is like handing a junkie a needle. You tell me I should read something, I read something. It is a problem. I could have worse problems. But you can see the anxiety in this, right?

Happy birthday, 'dolf.

Know that I still miss you and love you wherever you are.

One More Stop, plus 60 miles

TITANIUM HIP CHECK



There's a way that I've been pretty anti-poetry lately, anti-writing. Maybe it's burnout, maybe it's recognition that starting in a few weeks and for some long time, I will be expected to "perform" (i.e. write). Or maybe it's some current need for unfiltered, unfettered experience. Maybe I want to see things, feel things, do things without any thought for how to translate anything into anything "meaning"ful. The thought of all that exhausts me. Even just sitting down. To tell you what I'm seeing, feeling, doing. Not to mention the parsing out and piecing back together.


SHOTGUNS 20% OFF

What the flashing LCD light says. As I write this - in a notebook, my computer not having been turned on in days - 3am on the train outside of Hutchinson, Kansas, where I lived as a very small child. I watch two small, unaccompanied children gather their things. They are probably 6 and 9, about the age my brother and I left this land already too familiar with caring for ourselves, each other, our mother. Already too familiar with "adult things." I wonder as I watch the younger child shake his brother, pointing to the land outside, dark fields, scattered streets at 3am, if there is something to this land that ages children prematurely. The conductor asks "are you traveling with anyone?" The older kid responds "no, sir."




EVERYTHING LIKE OCEAN

I remember the heat, the dust, and then the snow drifts in winter, scooping up to the roof of the house. Where we could climb there. Everything extreme. And slow. Days spent corralling toads and digging ditches just to watch the creatures get nervous in a crowded bucket, just to watch the ground blow by from under it. And the trees caked with dry ivy we climbed in. Sometimes poison ivy. That I made my brother eat. I did it. I was not allergic. Sorry. Everything unattended. And when we fell, we fell. Trees and red splotches. Wounds and underwater.


OSAGE, CAN YOU SEE

Grandpa knows none of this history, though some he can guess from when we were younger, even younger. The condition we were in sometimes when we were "dropped off" for a day, a few days, a week. Until Grandma said No More Of This. That she wouldn't deal with my mother, the loose, loose cannon wrecking my father, her only child. Or deal with the children - chapped, bruised, silent, bleeding - who were never part of her.

I don't want to write about any of this. It might be days before I turn on my computer, before I post this from the tiny Public Library, the only place in grandpa's town with wi-fi. I will walk five blocks through 115 degree heat to check email and to maybe post this. Right now as I fast approach the town of the 3am train station (now 4am train station, train late for the crazy weather in western Kansas) I just hope my rental car is there. I haven't more than napped in about three days. And I've got a long dark drive yet to go. I will take a few minutes in my overtired to learn the car's controls. Find the lights. Find the windshield wipers. Find the FM stereo. The radio will be playing what was playing when I left in the early 1980s. It always is.

from Haruki Murakami's HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD

“Listen. I may not be much, but I’m all I’ve got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven’t got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with this life. It could be because this split personality of mine has made a stand-up comedy routine of it all. I wouldn’t know, would I? But whatever the reason, I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want any unicorns behind fences.”

[Book #95 for 2011]

Innovative structure got me thinking about the duality of living multiple lives. Like the way we move through the world as it is, but then when we're (or I should say, when I am) in the middle of a writing project we are also simultaneously moving through that world. Sometimes time moves similarly in both worlds, sometimes not.

Every time I read something with a fantasy / surreal element to it, I think: sure, why not. And then for a while that's what will make the most sense to me. Unicorns. Walled cities. Shadows cleaved from bodies. Subconscious shuffling of numerical data set off by a sequence of tones. Underworld with flesh-eating inklings. Hot librarians. And the end of the world. But I don't believe a switch will be toggled for permanence in either field.

from Ariel Dorfman's MASCARA

If I began to send drawings to her, it was because I wanted to be invited to her birthday. No matter how unsightly those drawings might be, they were a way of asking for attention. Each morning, when she arrived at her desk, she found the gawky colors I had worked on so hard. It is true that she never thanked me for them, not even casting me one of those smiles which you fabricate, Doctor; but I comforted myself with the thought that she was receiving them like a remote queen who, however accustomed to the cheers of the multitude, nevertheless could feel gratified by an offering from a worm.