Nolens Volens and Eidolons

The Year that Was

2012-01-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-16T10:20:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-10-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-09-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

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

One More Stop, plus 60 miles

2011-08-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

“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

2011-07-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

2011-07-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

I think buildings excite me more than words do even. I mean, there's also trees. Sometimes I can be stopped in my tracks by the shape and form of a tree, fascinated at thinking about the different factors in genetics and environment, even the day to day, that went into the tree making the choices it made for growth and then the outcome aesthetically. I find myself taking a lot of photos of individual trees. And then I upload them to my computer and I'm all like, what do I do with this? I have a folder titled "Trees that I Liked." Past tense because most of them I won't see again. I started to call it "Trees that Excite Me," but that's kind of weird. Oh, so buildings. I like houses, will sometimes spend much of a Sunday afternoon walking all over town and going into every Open House I come across. I like to see how people use interior spaces, but it's the structure itself that gets me. To see the evolution of choices in living spaces. The house across the street from me having a pantry cellar. I mean, just that one room that was cut deeper from the crawl space, the narrow and dangerous twist of stairs, and then the shelves. I went down there and I didn't ever want to re-emerge. The weirdness of that space. I could have set up a desk in there and lived the rest of my life by the light coming through the little east window. So much light! But it was underground, hidden, bomb-sheltery, everything painted white. I spend at least part of my day every day looking at sites of architecture. Sometimes individual architects, sometimes reading about their lives and influences, sometimes re-learning the names of the features on gothic cathedrals, sometimes scrolling through photos of libraries and schools, sometimes looking at how "modern" is interpreted in different parts of the world (Scandinavia! for example), more often just going from place to place online finding random buildings though. I think I would have been an architect if it wasn't for the fact that my stepfather was an architect.

The Half-Year List

2011-07-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

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. ----------FEBRUARY----------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. ----------MARCH----------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. ----------APRIL----------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. ----------MAY----------Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov

60. The Art Lover – Carol Maso

61. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligance – 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. ----------JUNE----------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

Filter III Release and Reading next Friday, June 17!!

2011-06-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

So excited to be part of the newest incarnation of Filter Literary Journal. And to attend and take part in the reading next Friday. If you're in Seattle, this is an event not to miss. And I say that not because I'll be there, and not even because of the other folks reading; you don't want to wait to get a copy of Filter. They are phenomenally beautiful and sell out quickly.

Filter Vol. III Release Party

An evening of readings from Zachary Schomburg, John Osebold, Stacey Levine, Maged Zaher, Karen Finneyfrock, Ed Skoog, Elizabeth J. Colen, Elissa Washuta, Susan Rich and Sarah Bartlett . Freshly letterpressed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Friday, June 17^th,8p.m.at the Fremont Abbey, 4272 Fremont Ave North, Seattle, WA 98103

Filter Vol. III has arrived. This 3^rd issue of the entirely handmade journal is a box of wonder: The cover has a paint-by-numbers theme, and the box structure is letterpress printed by Kate Fernandez of Fernandez and Sons. The book will be filled with brilliant work in individually bound chapbooks of prose and poetry, with art postcards and posters that you can remove and display.

The contributors in Filter III are:

Yusef Komunyakaa, Zachary Schomburg, Stacey Levine, Amanda Manitach, Maged Zaher, Sharon Arnold, Martha Silano, John Osebold, Rebecca Brown, Counsel Langely, Ed Skoog, Karen Finneyfrock, Sean Ennis, Sarah Mangold, Gala Bent, Rachel Contreni Flynn, David Lasky, Elizabeth Colen, Sandra & Ben Doller, Brandon Shimoda, Ben Beres, Brandon Downing, Sarah Kate Moore, Dan Rosenberg, Susan Rich, Susan Denning, Sid Miller, Sarah Bartlett, Shawn Vestal, Marie-Caroline Moir, Lucy Corin, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jill McDonough, Jessica Goodfellow, Jessica Bonin, Friedrich Kerksieck , Erika Wilder, Elissa Washuta, David Bartone, Chris Dusterhoff, Britt Ashley, Becca Yenser, Anne Gorrick

Tickets for the Filter release party are on sale now through Brown Paper Tickets.http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/178844

Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door, and $5 for students and seniors.

interview and new work and where I'll be tomorrow

2011-06-02T11:14:00.001-07:00

I have been a little lax in posting new things like this interview that happened between me and Jory Mickelson, in which we talk about Twin Peaks and how I can't tell the difference between poetry and prose and also some other things: Boxcar Poetry Review

*

Also, I have new work here (from what actually started as a short story and is now a 74 word poem): The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts - be sure to click on the DECOMPRESS at the bottom for a little more information about the poem.

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Also, for Seattlites (and those willing to travel great or short distances to be in Seattle): I will be reading tomorrow night with local poet Trina Burke. This is the first of several 'launches' of the new book THEY COULD NO LONGER CONTAIN THEMSELVES: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks. I hope to see you tomorrow at 7pm at Ravenna Third Place Books.

But if you can't get there, you can grab a copy of this most excellent volume of new work from me and four other flash fiction writers here: Rose Metal Press

on the way to

2011-05-31T21:47:00.001-07:00

Ohno, all of May and no post? What is wrong with me?

Maybe I'll do better in June. Anyway, here's a project I worked on recently:

And also another one:

1/3; 15; 286.75

2011-04-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

We're 33% of the way through the year. Can you believe we're hurtling so fast towards the apocalypse? Okay, maybe the Mayans didn't mean we'd all be dead by destructive and deadly weather, earthquakes, nuclear fallout, dark planets aligning weirdly with our world. But I for one am going to keep living it up on the off-chance I'll be offed. What that means to me? Well, reading. Yeah, I know. But I am getting out to live a little tonight. CA Conrad and Jeremy Halinen are reading at Open Books in Seattle. I've been totally geeking out about it for the past month. I've even requested poems. Such a nerd.

This is what I've read so far this year, strangely some of it has be revisiting favorites. I don't often re-read because there are SO MANY BOOKS IN THE WORLD. Anyway: pink is for poetry, blue for fiction, green for nonfiction:

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

Readings in Sidebar, Preorder the Flash Fiction Collection

2011-04-21T07:54:00.000-07:00

Please note the, uh, new information in the side bar. Five readings coming up in coming months (well, one is in a couple of days). A regular post coming soon...

Oh! And you can now preorder They Could No Longer Contain Themselves from Rose Metal Press (which, if you haven't been paying attention, contains my flash fiction chapbook Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, along with awesome stuff from four other authors):

http://www.rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/TCNLCT.html

a bell-shaped sound

2011-04-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

It's gotten to where my internet blinks more often than it does not. But it may be my computer. My computer has gotten to where things freeze regularly and the internet shuts down. Or things freeze regularly and whatever document I'm working on and all of Word shuts down. This is an annoyance, but not a huge problem, as I have the settings to where whatever document is auto-saved every 60 seconds. I think the default is 9 minutes? I mean, it usually saves when it crashes, but. Plus with all the shortcuts, sometimes I accidentally quit Word or close a document when I mean to underline something, etc.

I meant to get a picture of Mia's "second mouth" (what the doctor called it). When they take a feeding tube out, they just take it out. Pull the tape where it's attached to the bare and shaved kitty skin and slide the tube right out. That was kind of cool. It didn't even make me gag a little the way the pus did. Then they leave the wound open. And it sort of froths as the cat moves and it doesn't bleed except a little, but white stuff, or cream-colored stuff (what she was eating) would bubble out a little when she moved or when I picked her up. I meant to get a picture of that, but now it's scabbed over. In a day and a half is all it took. I think she's eating on her own. But honestly, I'm too exhausted with it all to encourage her.

Yesterday I got a check in the mail for a little poem that got picked up in a journal. Of all the things writing that I don't get paid for it seems weird when I do get paid for something. And for something so minor. I mean, it was just fifty bucks. But fifty bucks! That's! twelve gallons of gas. That's! almost five movie tickets. That's! some other stuff. Such an uplifting feeling of validation.

It is raining in Iowa today. Which makes the birds look psychedelic. http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

I always get so excited that it's Friday and I don't have to do anything and I have all these things I could do and then the day totally gets away from me and I've done nothing. Let's see how today goes. I will try not to be defeatist. I will also leave the house, which will mean leaving the internet, which will mean my biggest cause of slacking slowdown will not be hindering me. Evil internet and its live birds and facecloth.

I finished reading Chelsea Girls (Eileen Myles). I don't know why it took me so long. Because I'm not really reading much is why. I liked it a lot. And realized how many authors through the 90s and beyond were really maybe emulating her, this book especially, but just not doing it as well. Chelsea Girls came out in 94 and so did I. I wish this had been the first contemporary queer book I had read. I might not have scoffed and turned from it if I had. But then, I was dating someone so weirdly obsessed with Naiad books (this reference will not make sense to very many people), so I kind of had to turn away.

The conversational tone Myles does so well in this book, part short stories, part novel, part memoir (?). The character in her books is usually Eileen Myles. Which I respect. That the thin veil is not veiled further in being renamed. I don't know how much of it is actually true, but maybe a lot of it. I had no idea she worked for James Schulyer. Or was photographed by Mapplethorpe. I'm assuming both of those are true. Especially considering the photo is her author photo attributed to Mapplethorpe. I've never been particularly interested in his photography, except for where it fits in with / what it did for contemporary photography and, well, to sort of advance the public view of gay male sexuality. I mean, that's interesting. How suddenly in the 80s he was so hot. But the work itself does little for me. (Although the portrait of Myles is underspoken and perfect, beautiful.) I mean, maybe it's just that I'm not really into naked men? But that's not really true. I can see the beauty in all of that without wanting to do anything with it. I think it's the stylized nature of it all. The harsh chiaroscuro. Not that I like my light and dark to bleed softly into each other. I don't know what I'm saying. It's just not interesting to me visually what he does. I also found his life very interesting. I mean, of course it was. His work just seems so 80s. And that was an ugly decade all around. I would like someone to tell me I'm wrong and then explain what they like about his work.

The new Pickford is open. Which is really fantastic. I can't wait to see the finished space (almost finished, apparently it's not quite done). But they have nothing at all that I even remotely want to see coming in the foreseeable future. Through May. Nothing. Jane Eyre? Come on, folks. Plus a bunch of other stuff I'm not interested in. The Rocket matinees I don't even care about. The Invisible Man I've already seen too many times. I don't actually know why that is, but I'm not interested in seeing it again. And Charlie Chaplin? Come on, people. So at least the movies won't distract me today. Although I do kind of want to see Source Code. I mean, it's basically a revisited (but life or death!) Groundhog Day.

**

From Chelsea Girls:

"I have always been afraid I would vanish, would cease to be, if I ever stopped trying to decide who I was."

"If the end of one's youth is a slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room."

"Despite the fact that the world was made of something going fast I knew that I was something slow."

"I would spend hours gazing at the peace of my bookcase, all the books I had read and the pit of my stomach would drop in the midst of the peace."

"A bell-shaped sound formed in my heart but it didn't ring."

"I think I was born in a mental asylum to have known this--that time is so short or so long that exchanging cigarettes, listening to the birds, watching the light you must talk and talk so you won't be scared by the length or the shortness of it or even its ferocious speed."

a brief update on goings-on

2011-03-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Hank Henderson and Stephen van Dyck and Benji and everybody who came out to Stories Books and Cafe to make homo-centric so much fun on St. Patrick's Day.

I recently got to see the cover for They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, which will be out in May from Rose Metal Press and will include my flash fiction chapbook Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake.

How beautiful is that?!

The first scheduled reading I have will be at Pilot Books in Seattle on June 2 at 7pm. Hope to see you there!

Talk About SOMETHING

2011-03-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

Stunning interview with Adrienne Rich online at The Paris Review.

Read poetry, ye Americans. It may save you:

"Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos—its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it’s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks."

On the "obligations" of poetry (and perhaps a dig at some contemporary work):

"I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference."

I have decided to spend the rest of my life trying to get to a place where I have a fraction of the intellect that this woman has.

Cake

2011-02-07T10:31:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I was just thinking of Wayne Thiebaud, but I was. Perhaps it was that I was thinking about the delicious baked goods I consumed this weekend. Canadian coffee is generally no good, but their baked goods are often excellent. While Thiebaud is better known for his images of cakes and pies, this landscape is probably my favorite of his. Whether it reminds me of living on the Southside slopes in Pittsburgh or because the lack of distance beyond the hill makes this "place" anywhere/nowhere all at once, something in the image soothes me, feels a little like home. Maybe it's the not-quite-right proportions. Yes, that feels like home.

I fell in love with Thiebaud when I went to his show at the Whitney in 2001. At the time I had just started dating someone who really liked his work and I figured to go and report back would be a way to understand her a little better. There is something about his work (I mean, of course, as with most artists) that moves from the well-conceived to the transcendental when you're standing in front of it.

Right now there is a man outside my office (I'm not in there) pulling wood from the side of the house. Hopefully to fix the moisture problem that has been bubbling the paint on that side. Really there's no telling whether it's moisture coming from inside the house or whether it's because of the hotness of eastern exposure on the dark grey paint. Western and Southern are supposed to be the hot ones, but because of the proximity of trees and other structures the west and south sides of the house don't actually get much direct, widespread sun. Parts stay positively in the shade.

The man is making an incredible amount of noise, but I forge onward in my workday. Because the blind dog is not barking. I find this nearly impossible to believe, but it's true. I can work through hammering, Rainer barking: not so much. Cally (sighted dog) is disturbed, but not barking. She takes her cues from me. Every now and then after a particularly loud noise she will look at me, see that I am unaffected and go back to sleep. And because of my inability to sleep last night, I got a very, very early jump on the workday. Which means long as the day is, I can actually already see the end from where I am.

I didn't sleep well last night; the fall has me worried. And I don't know if I need to worry at all.

(Rainer, noise-making extraordinaire.)

What I do when I'm down:

2011-01-28T21:37:00.000-08:00

I go to the library.

And take pictures of books.

Also read.

I drive a long way to somewhere else, have coffee. Read.

Walk in the rain. By the river. Take pictures.

Happy to be not in my town for a minute.

All in all, it was a good day. I read Alex Phillips's Crash Dome, most of Dawn Paul's The Country of Loneliness, and some of Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front: True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. One comment for each. A. Alex Phillips rides into (almost entirely appropriately) weird territory here, talking the problem of accurately assessing reality and coming to terms with various ends of the world; the language was not always as beautiful as I wanted it to be, but I loved 90% of the book. B. It is brave to name a book the anything of Loneliness (thanks to Radclyffe Hall); the structure of the book is well done, something to learn from, as is the fictionalizing of the life of a family member. C. On Marcus: Read this book. I'm taking my time with it, so you'll have to get your own copy.

from Nicholas Mosley's Accident

2011-01-25T14:37:00.000-08:00

All caring was risky: you exposed yourself. It was better to be like this than the other. I was justifying myself. With the sun out. In the summer. (26)

We remember in envy, not regret; what we are now needing the past for its colour, tolerance. We know all this. The dangerous men are those with no memory; the ancient babies. Wisdom is a bit of cloth with the warp and woof breaking. The dust settling in the air; the people below choking. (67)

Charlie said "Shall we play tennis? There are millions of things happening in the world! People are starving. Murdering. Seeing visions." (74)

It might be better if we ruined ourselves. (80)

When you are too much on your own you have a feeling of profusion, of intensity. I had become obsessed with this split between our public face and our private helplessness. The men on television. The brain in the Oxford frigidaire. (88)

...the people in the courtyard began to regroup in a protective way against the stranger: a chromosome formed of things that were not alive ut which acted as if they were: the group, aristocrats. A survival of the fittest. The men had small heads and hands; the girls were smooth-bottomed cylinders with little taps and dials at the top. (88)

The words came out. There was painted furniture, sweetness, shadow. Her long and lovely back. This had happened. We make a god of it. Defeat. I am almost gutted. Let me become that thing, empty, floating past the walls of crumbling buildings. No more a person. Quick. Let me remember it. (105)

I held her. Her eyes on the edge of the precipice. Horses. The wind in fir trees. We were going deep. I thought--I am no good at this. This is what matters. (120)

"This is what I think about, what I think is important. Either you turn into some sort of gutted thing, automaton, or you have to become involved with pain and birth again, the roots, and all that nonsense. I keep on saying this. But I do feel this sort of crack-up, everything exploding, we're one person one moment and another person the next; no continuity because no illusion. I'm a different person with you than I am with Charlie or in college. I don't know if this is good or bad--" (145)

I was about to step into the car. I was about to smash something. I would pull up the stones with my fingers. I said "Thank you Mrs.--" I couldn't remember her name. I sat behind the driving wheel. I could not drive. I could not get the car into gear. I would drive it into the wall. Fast. Now this was the moment. Quietly. (171)

Also... from the Afterword (by Steven Weisenberger):
Mosley too is suspicious of received knowledge in all its effects on everyday experience. Still more significantly he is suspicious of how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen [the main character, the "I"] claims: "You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory." And Accident argues that what is "real" is not a text--for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. But Mosley adds the priviso that as "reality" becomes past it is accessible only as a "text"--when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling.

***

I want Nicholas Mosley to be my literary daddy. Or something. To Shane McCrae I will forever be in debted for introducing me to this author. Nothing excites me more than to have a new favorite writer. Especially someone with soo many books.

2010: The Year in Reading

2011-01-01T11:03:00.000-08:00

1. Trust – Liz Waldner
2. Counterfeit – Christine LeClerc
3. A Thief of Strings – Donald Revell
4. Plato’s Bad Horse – Deborah Woodard
5. The Most of It – Mary Ruefle
6. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud
7. The Totality for Kids – Joshua Clover
8. The Lack Of – Joseph Massey
9. Jane: a murder – Maggie Nelson
10. Wrong – Reginald Shepherd
11. The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson
12. Bluets – Maggie Nelson
13. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
14. Fifty Poems – Liana Quill
15. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives – Tom Shroder
16. Are We Lucky Yet? – Jane Bradley
17. The Black Swan – Thomas Mann
18. The Mere Future – Sarah Schulman
19. I is to Vorticism – Ben Mirov
20. ----------FEBRUARY----------Otherhood – Reginald Shepherd
21. Other Prohibited Items – Martha Greenwald
22. Minimum Heroic – Christopher Salerno
23. The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu
24. Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson
25. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story – Paul Monette
26. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Microstudy of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson
27. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad
28. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth
29. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories – ed. Robert Shapard & James Thomas
30. ----------MARCH----------Personationskin – Karl Parker
31. Spar – Karen Volkman
32. Fast Lanes – Jayne Anne Phillips
33. Half Girl – Stephanie Dickinson
34. The Preservationist – David Maine
35. Savage Love – Dan Savage
36. Ka-Ching – Denise Duhamel
37. Silk Screen Techniques – J. I. Biegeleisen and M. A. Cohn
38. Family Dancing – David Leavitt
39. The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa
40. OK, Goodnight – Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
41. I Have to go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – Karyna McGlynn
42. World Famous Love Acts – Brian Leung
43. ----------APRIL----------The Blue of Her Body – Sara Greenslit
44. Fire on the Mountain – Anita Desai
45. When to Go Into the Water – Lawrence Sutin
46. Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics – Marianne Moore
47. Selected Stories – Lu Hsun
48. Requiem for the Orchard – Oliver de la Paz
49. 10:01 – Lance Olsen
50. Hornet Homily – Patrick Culliton
51. Dearest Creature – Amy Gerstler
52. How – Emily Pettit
53. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
54. Amorisco – Khaled Mattawa
55. Catalogue of Comedic Novelties – Lev Rubinstein
56. Team Sad - Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
57. ----------MAY----------My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer – Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
58. Dick of the Dead – Rachel Loden
59. The Last 4 Things – Kate Greenstreet
60. Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon
61. Texture Notes – Sawako Nakayasu
62. Veil – Rae Armantrout
63. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings – Gertrude Stein
64. Living Must Bury – Josie Sigler
65. Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
66. Star Dust – Frank Bidart
67. Something Has to Happen Next – Andrew Michael Roberts
68. ----------JUNE----------Want – Rick Barot
69. What Begins With Bird – Noy Holland
70. Elements – Deborah Poe
71. The Wild Things – Dave Eggers
72. Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene – Niles Eldredge
73. A Belonging Field – Andrew Grace
74. Shadeland – Andrew Grace
75. The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information – Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society
76. Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri
77. The Principles of Uncertainty – Maira Kalman
78. Dharma Girl – Chelsea Cain
79. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
80. ----------JULY-----------Rhapsodies of A Repeat Offender - Wayne Koestenbaum
81. Shiner – Maggie Nelson
82. Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano – Charles Isherwood
83. Frances Johnson – Stacey Levine
84. The Morning News is Exciting! – Don Mee Choi
85. Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje
86. Advanced Elvis Course – CA Conrad
87. Outline of My Lover – Douglas Martin
88. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone – David B. Feinberg
89. ----------AUGUST----------The Truant Lover – Juliet Patterson
90. Children of Darkness and Light – Nicholas Mosley
91. Tracer – Richard Greenfield
92. The Colossus – Sylvia Plath
93. Quarantine – Brian Henry
94. Divisadero – Michael Ondaatje
95. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
96. Crush – Richard Siken
97. ----------SEPTEMBER----------Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
98. With Deer – Aase Berg
99. Haunted House – Marissa Crawford
100. Zephyr – Susan Browne
101. Complaint in the Garden – Randall Mann
102. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art – Eileen Myles
103. Just Kids – Patti Smith
104. Zorba’s Daughter – Elisabeth Murawski
105. Scavenge – R.J. Gibson
106. Cosmos – Witold Gombrowicz
107. Pornographia – Witold Gombrowicz
108. ----------OCTOBER----------The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
109. Thirst for Love – Yukio Mishima
110. Taste of Cherry – Kara Candito
111. Clamor – Ann Lauterbach
112. In Canaan – Shane McCrae
113. Tinkers – Paul Harding
114. Cocktails – D.A. Powell
115. ----------NOVEMBER----------Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
116. Ways of Dying – Zakes Mda
117. Exquisite Pain – Sophie Calle
118. If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting – Anna Journey
119. The Tenth Parallel – Eliza Griswold
120. Plainwater – Anne Carson
121. Faulkner’s Rosary – Sarah Vap
122. Passing World Pictures – Valerie Coulton
123. Hotel Imperium – Rachel Loden
124. ----------DECEMBER----------Great Topics of the World – Albert Goldbarth
125. What Other Choice – Jeremy Halinen
126. Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings – Gore Vidal
127. Shore Ordered Ocean – Dora Malech
128. Say So – Dora Malech
129. Color Plates – Adam Golaski
130. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster – Mike Davis
131. Room – Emma Donoghue

I wonder if at some point I'll hone the magpie reading method into something more focused and determined. Generally I try to read through what I've got stacked around my office, also reading what comes recommended from friends, and whatever catches my eye in trips to the library. Maybe I'd have a better sense of the history of things if I became more purposeful. I think this at the end of every year when I look at the list. But really, part of the adventure is the wildness. If reading can be considered wild.

And, as always I choose the ten that were game-changers in some way for me. As in, when I think back over 2010, the year would not have been as meaningful without them. (And as always I won't include friends' books in the top ten, though those are always at the top of my list of favorites. I will get to know you more through what you write than anything you say.)

The top 10:
Bluets – Maggie Nelson
The Book of Frank – CA Conrad
Spar – Karen Volkman
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
The Last 4 Things – Kate Greenstreet
Children of Darkness and Light – Nicholas Mosley
Just Kids – Patti Smith
Hotel Imperium – Rachel Loden
Say So – Dora Malech
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster – Mike Davis

6 from othertimes; 4 from 2010
6 women; 4 men
6 poetry; 4 prose (2 fiction; 2 nonfiction)

Maybe it would be worth telling what each did for me. But that's for another post. Maybe. Happy New Year, y'all. Get reading.

All that there is.

2010-12-27T09:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when headlights are too bright I stare at the white outer line. Sometimes in fog I stare at the white outer line. I think as a child about coloring and about the car a crayon I am keeping inside the line white car crayon white coloring inside the white line is also a disappearing.

*

Once while staring at the white line while in fog the car moving slowly but as fast as it could it was four am and I had to get home and the car was red then and the girl was in high school and the music was loud. Once while staring at the white line in fog I was moving too fast and forgot the road rise to the train tracks and the car lifted up a little and what was in the trunk made a horrible noise and then the light from the train and the white fog became blind white and the white line became electric and the music was drowned out by the train horn and the train was moving startlingly fast. But I was looking at the outside line and the train was coming from the other direction and the fog was so thick that it hid this. Only one of the ways that I could have died but I didn't.

*

A word is a gesture. A sentence a breast stroke. When I talk when I write I am swimming. It may be in circles but it's movement. The water is warm or it's cold or it's salty or chlorinated (it's often chlorinated) but it is water and I know how to swim. In the pool alone or with a crowd of people I know how to swim in circles around myself but I know how to swim. You might not recognize the motion as swimming. It looks a lot like drowning from above.

*

L and I once thought we would form a band called The Floaters. In restaurant speak for those who do everything. But also because we could live in water a long time without moving our limbs.

*

I can still float on my head, bobbing up with the inhale, deeper down with the exhale. But I no longer play any instruments.

*

I respond in kind, so as not to be overwhelming. They say that humans use five percent of their brains, that humans use ten percent of their brains. I have always felt that I might use more. The flying alongside feeling, some strange tether to other parts of the universe. Whether that means universe or alternate consciousness I can't know. Sometimes I read a book and I want to send that book to someone who might better understand me or we or something else because of it. Sometimes I send a book. Mostly I don't send anything because people don't read. They don't have time in their busy lives. It is possible in knowing me that I only say five percent of what I want to say to you. It is possible that I say ten percent. When the give and take rises, the percentage rises, when it goes down it goes down. Sometimes the percentage may rise as high as twenty, which is maybe how much of a brain is used it contacting the cosmos. But it never goes higher. And you will never read that book. So I keep it on my shelf and I think about sending it and I think about what you would understand if I did and if you read it.

*

My philosophy: that the world doesn't exist except through the lens of the page.You only think you're seeing anything if you don't read it first.

*

I am overwhelmed. I think the pace I have set for myself is too much. I think I need to slow. If I think I need to slow and I look around at you people hustling I feel tired and I feel anxious and I want to lie down. And then I lie down for just a minute and I get up again. I hustle. But my hustle will never be what yours is. When I look around at you people just living your lives I think what are you doing? and I think get moving! And then I remember that living is what we're supposed to do not locked up in rooms. I am locked up in rooms. This room. Which is the same as every other room I've ever lived in been in waited in. I am waiting. And the pace at the pace I wear through the hardwood floor within three or four or five days max. The room built up floor relaid once a week. The floor out from under me every time I move. I move. With the floor gone I am in the cold dark dirt under the house. I wear through that a little racetrack in mud. Always without shoes.

*

That, over there. That isn't really there. This is all that there is.

*

Egads, how has it been a month since I've posted anything?

2010-12-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

So I have been a little busy finishing a new manuscript, which is probably a fantastic idea since I'm still circulating the other one. But one can't stop writing, right? Once I've had a few people look over the new ms and I have everything where I like it (it's almost there), I will probably stop sending out the conspiracies and switch to the new one. I can't afford even postage for both, let alone any entry fees. A word about those: I don't go out much anymore, so that's where that money comes from. And I know some people are all like, 'you pay to enter a manuscript?' But I look at it as subsidizing a press. That's the only way I can look at it. I have always done my best to send at least 10% of my income to various charities, sometimes cancer stuff, and I love Kiva for example, but usually animal-related stuff (Best Friends, the local shelter, etc). Sending out manuscripts means I shift most of this flow into presses. I consider it my tithe to charity. Of course, I am hoping for a return...

The conspiracies manuscript has now been shortlisted four times. Money for Sunsets was shortlisted twelve times before getting published (on top of sooo many outright rejections (mostly in prior incarnations) I don't want to say)--the 13th time was the charm. All four excellent presses. So I'm almost good enough?

The new ms is solid though, story-wise, which is silly, but I think what people like to read. I'm actually pretty convinced it will do well, and quickly. Maybe I'm just in love with it. But that's okay by me.

I also haven't updated the recent publication list on here, so I'm probably missing a few things. Today I got word that the new Gulf Stream is up, so you might want to check that out. The link is for my poem (one of the conspiracies, from the JFK section of the book), but be sure to check out all the other stuff too, like especially my friend Leigh Phillips's nonfiction, and also Josie Sigler's story. I really loved Josie Sigler's book, living must bury, so I'm pretty thrilled to be in here with her.

Okay, back to work. I promise to make another appearance soon. I mean, soonish. Sometime. Anyway...

Early Sunsets

2010-11-16T07:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get overwhelmed with the volume of literary journals that stack up around my room. At some point I break down and go through them, tearing out the pieces I don't want to miss. Here I am reading a story by Roxane Gay, "Down to Bone" that appeared in (and was ripped out of) Mid-American Review. I really like her work. Simple prose about complex matters. From that story: "She loved me as best she could in a family where no one knew how to play their parts properly."

Tinkering with Time and Expiration

2010-10-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

I finished reading Tinkers, the novel by Paul Harding that won the Pulitzer for him and for the very small, new press Bellevue Literary Press. I liked Tinkers, I mean, a lot of it. It was a good book. It feels like first book. Both with the raw narrative energy of it, and in that there are, I think, some areas that don't quite work as well as they could. My biggest issue with it was that the shifts in perspective were not recognizable enough. It tells the story of three men, three different generations, and shifts back and forth between them. And this is often only acknowledged with white space (a double space between sections), not in chapters or subchapters or anything, and a few moniker tags in the first paragraph or two. So that if you miss this, you miss it. Occasionally I would be reading with one person in my head and get many pages into it before I realized I had been imagining the wrong person. So I had to go back and start over the section with the right person in my head. A little distracting from losing oneself in a work. Or maybe I was a bad reader for this. I have been unfocused in other ways lately.

Also, though the symbolism of the title was a great detail, that's all it seemed to be: a detail. There was some feeling that much of the concept of tinkers and tinkering that ran through the book may have been edited out in the revision process. Perhaps others feel differently.

Overall a good read.

*

Parts of Tinkers that particularly spoke to me:

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough. (72)

[At least I'm not buried in rubble.]

-

Of course, Sabbatis is ancient only to me. My father is ancient, too, because both were men who passed from life when I was young. My memories of them are atmospheres. (150)

-

Nikki was an old woman who dressed like an aging former starlet whose most dramatic, and final, role was that of the aging former starlet persevering under the tyranny of time. (160)

[I can't even express how delighted I get when a sentence wraps itself around itself like this. I mean, when it's intentional. People garble things in uninteresting ways all the time. I could read this a hundred times and be happy every time. A thousand times, probably.]

2-Step up at Verse Daily, October 6

2010-10-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.versedaily.org/2010/2step.shtml

This was actually the first poem written for MFS.

catching up

2010-10-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

So a lot has been happening, dear reader(s). I need to get better about updating this blog. First off, I want you to think of the last word you read that made you really happy. I read cloister in an article today and my mouth jumped up and bit me. Say that out loud and say it doesn't make you happy. Cloister. Also nice: cluster. As in: fuck. But! it doesn't have the complication of the oi.

So. News.

First off, if you're in Seattle or the surrounding areas, or if you like planes and me and find travel for poetry worth your time... I am reading at Open Books in Wallingford (2414 N 45th St.) with Shane McCrae(!) on Friday, October 22 at 7pm. Find out more about Open Books here: http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/. Also, the event has been *starred* in The Stranger (link to that here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Event?event=5022417), which means we're superawesome and you should come. As usual, I will be taking requests.

Second, you can find some recent reviews of Money for Sunsets, here: The Sonic Imperative in the Prose Poem: a review of Elizabeth Colen’s Money for Sunsets. And here: Book Notes on Elizabeth J. Colen's Money for Sunsets. A big thanks to Metta Sama and Jory Mickelson.

Thirdly, I've just jumped on board as Thumbnail Magazine's new poetry editor. We're accepting submissions, so get on that.

So that's it for "business." I just got back, well a few days ago, from a long trip to Portland. Well, not long really. Not long enough. I'm working on wrapping up a new manuscript. Writers, what do you do when you work too fast and have several manuscripts you're sending out in the world? I tend to maintain focus on the poetry, as it is (to me) easier to place, but I'm not sure what I will do when I have two entirely finished books of poetry, orphans for a home. My thought is to take the more cohesive (the more recent) of the two and focus on that, meanwhile brainstorming what presses would be more willing to take on the riskier/boundary-pushing one. The bastard, if you will. The bastard that obsessed me for nearly two years. On top of that, I've vaguely sending out two novels. I don't have the administrative energy to go all out on sending three books everywhere I should. Again I will say: I need a secretary. I don't know how people do this. Even as relatively easy as my schedule is (I make my own hours, rarely work forty hours in a week, don't have kids), I can't seem to get Everything done. I also read a lot. Books are my drug. The one that saps hours. The one where I pull my eyes out from the pages and it really is like waking up on someone's floor and having no idea how I got there.

In other news, my town is sad. A week and a half ago a freshman at Western went missing. Wednesday they found him in the bay. A week ago yesterday a two-year old was killed walking across the street, holding her mother's hand. A car had stopped to let them pass and the driver in the next car, distracted, didn't stop. Ran into the car in front, running over the little girl. About a half-mile from my house, and right on the walk I take with Cally every morning. Every morning we walk past the makeshift memorial of flowers and balloons and stuffed animals and notes and candles that grows and grows and grows. Every morning I tear up. Most mornings some passer-by has paused, some car has pulled over to look, some bicyclist has stopped to stand there. This is the difference between living in a city and living here, which sometimes feels like a city. I didn't know either one of them, but I feel it. You know? I guess this is what community feels like. And maybe why I can never leave. I love those pausers. As much as I can love a stranger anyway. As much as I can love anyone. I wrote more articulately yesterday on my private "journal"/blog. Maybe I'll repost that here... Hm, maybe not.

Local Launch, Saturday, September 11

2010-09-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

ELIZABETH J. COLEN, MONEY FOR SUNSETS (POETRY)

Start: Sat, 09/11/2010 - 7:00pm
Location:
Village Books
1200 Eleventh Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225

Set partly in Bellingham, partly on the open road, these prose poems investigate loss, innocence, and what it means to live in beautiful surroundings that remain part of a larger deficit culture. With a narrative arc that follows a hyper-observant narrator from adolescence through adulthood, this book has been described (by poet Mary Biddinger) as “Cinematic and compassionate, sexy and heartbreaking… a debut collection that will thrill you with the sound of your own pulse.”

Event page here: hope to see you there!

Like Some Runner in a Suicide Squeeze

2010-08-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes lately, well for the past several years, my life seems to be nothing about writing. Doing writing, fixing/trying to fix/improve my writing and others’ writing, reading everything I can of classics and good contemporary work, figuring out how different writing communities work, what makes them tick and how they’re different or like the work I’m doing or trying to do, corresponding with writers and friends who are writers. I don't really like the term "networking." It seems too business-y and weird. I am more likely to disregard an "in" I have than to capitalize on it. Maybe this comes from always having a job/paying my way, even as a child. From not having things "given." I always want to believe it's on the quality of my work and not that someone knows me. So I stay mostly unknown. I mean, other than people reading my work. Nothing delights me more than some stranger saying they like something I've written. All the better that I usually have nothing concrete to offer them. I am not a good contact. No affiliation with a journal or press. I just like reading, being immersed, sometimes writing. I just like words.

Sometimes I feel like all that defines me anymore is this one thing. My relationship to language.

I am not a good conversationalist, but I love to listen. I also like sitting quietly. A perfect evening for me would be sitting on a couch or bench with a book with someone who also has a book. To be together and in separate worlds. There is something inherently sexy about this. Comforting. I think a life best spent would be mostly spent in this way.

And while I said my recent travel was vaguely tangential to writing, what with setting up a few readings for MFS along the way, it was more about getting outside this rabid focus for a little while. I took the train. For a long time. I think I figured the total hours added up to six days. The total trip time was 17 days, with stops in Flagstaff, Wichita (Augusta, actually), and Los Angeles. In Flagstaff, a good friend and her beautiful baby, also a reading.

This is Kate and Max. Two people I love very much.

In Kansas: Grandpa. The impetus for the whole trip. I don't see him enough. He's been good to me, and is the only grandparent I have left.

Handsome devil, isn't he?

I also made the mistake of having to return the rental car in a tiny town in Kansas (Newton: where the train comes and goes at 2:51am and 3:25am... and so it will be forever referred to by me as "the 3am train station) the afternoon before getting on the train in the middle of the night. I felt seriously a bit homeless to have to find a place to be from 5pm until the train station opened at 1am (thank goodness for libraries, bars and my good legs that like to walk). I literally broke into the train station to leave my luggage in a locker. I found a loose side door and worked it, using my grandmother's Saint Christopher key to jimmy it open. Then got walked out/removed by someone working on the building, but not before I'd stowed my bag.

Then there was the reading in Riverside, and spending time with Kathryn and Lola.

Lola is one of the coolest kids around.

LA was mostly about forcing an old friend to reconnect with me. That went well. I mean, we're both awkward human beings. I think it went okay. I actually have little idea how she feels about the whole episode, but one must be content with the mysteries.

Inside The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

I’m actually finding some effort/trouble in realigning back to regular life, reassessing some things I had taken for fact that now seem shaken. It felt nice for a little while just to be on the move, focusing on family, friends, kids, hanging out. Spending time. Rather than being focused inward all the time. Though there's always that inward thrust towards whatever project I'm working on (or the anxiety of what I'm not working on). The whole time, for the month of August I've been in a poem-a-day writing group. Though I didn't always have access to the internet to post every day I did write a poem (or at least averaged one poem) a day. 21 poems, in fact. About half of which I'm quite pleased with.

Like this:

THE LAST THING I WANT TO DO

I did that thing where I wouldn’t put anything in my mouth for the longest time. So I wouldn’t lose what was left of you. Even after taste fades, and the feeling. Even after thirst makes everything dry. I parch, I desiccate, die; you replace me.

I rebuild the house from memory all the way home. The fireplace that holds no fire, the broken TV, that lamp everyone has. Stains on the carpet; stains on linoleum. Terra cotta tiles in the foyer, miniature terra cotta animals hunting pale yellow shelves. Stone walls, orange low sun, and you standing in the yard, red face, flushed and mud on your arms, your worn through shoe with its sliver of duct tape crowning the toe.

You were always outside, said the halls echoed. And then you would scream. “What do you hear?” “My father’s snores.” And what does that feel like? The last gun blast, sore throat of smoke and everything quiet.

The arborist had taken the tops off all the trees in the front yard. So they wouldn’t crowd the wires. But I kept thinking: decapitation. Where my head is. Where is my head? The green, another straight line, another horizon. How to get to you. What I want is messier than fire. What I want is soot-black in the keel, a balance wheel back on its heels. Hairspring and oscillation, a regulating beat.

You said the clothing got lonely, waiting for me. Shirts separated by sheets on the line. Thread counts like miles. Dead weight of my bag in the backseat. I felt imperfect again moving away from you, listening as another bee troubled the window like some runner in a suicide squeeze.

Idea like a hit song, a virus in the brain.

2010-07-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

I'll admit it. I like a big blockbuster. Quality of the plot and character development are unimportant. What's important? Explosions, the bigger the better. Good, fun things that look good big. And good looking people.

I went to see Inception today. I should mention size also matters. Sitting in an air conditioned theater for 2 hours and 22 minutes was an excellent idea. For the two of you who mightn't know, Inception is the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle about dreams. The visual effects in a word were: stunning. Especially the scenes with Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying to get the team into position for a wake-up "kick" in zero gravity.

This is not it, but here's JGL running funny:

As with most of my favorite stories, we are presented with the concept that the real world and the unreal world (sometimes fictional, but in this case the dream world) are divided by only the finest of lines. In the best of cases, we can't really decide for sure what side we're on. As a writer, I kind of feel like I live on this line. Actually, that's even pushing it. Differing from some of the characters in this film, I do not have trouble knowing what's real and what isn't. I have trouble maintaining a strong presence in the RW.

I had a conversation just this weekend about this. Over drinks and dinner with a group of writers who live in my town, and a few from out of town, we talked about babies and traveling and TV and a lot about writing. One friend writes poetry, but may be better known for her nonfiction. She admitted that her poetry tends along the lines of nonfiction as well. I contended that I am unable to write "anything true" because every time I try to tell something that happened, things immediately get added, deleted. Not so much that the story is unrecognizable from its origins necessarily (well, not always), but enough that Oprah would chide me if I tried to pass it off.

Necessarily we all do this. Our brains do this in creating memories. We can't not leave things out. But I am aware of the major changes I'm making. I do it willfully, yet uncontrollably. It's just not that interesting if I don't change things around.

From my house I often walk to the grocery store. When I get home, I often find myself adding details and characters to the deli counter and produce aisle. Right now I want to tell you about the boy behind the counter with the incredible, bushy eyebrows, but that was someone ahead of me in line. It's much more interesting if I was asking him for cheese.

I recently invented a woman dancing with tomatoes in a denim skirt. The woman was real. A quick glance gave the impression of dancing. When I turned fully to face her, I realized she had her hands full and was getting the hair out of her eyes. Much less interesting than dancing, which is what I had seen initially. Was this a lie?

Maybe it was. In this relationship C and I have an agreement never to lie about big things. If she tells me she couldn't answer my call because she was watching a house fire, when really she was just in the middle of a thought I'm okay with this. If I talk about long-haired women dancing with produce, I assume this is okay too. This works for us. And I don't mind not always knowing what's real. We tell each other stories constantly. It's who we are. Some are true. Some are better. What I want always, and what I expect from others is an emotional truth.

This is the distinction I make. The facts are not so important as the emotion conveyed. What was felt is prime. Primal.

My nonfiction writer friend of mine and I were talking about how maybe people (or writers anyway) are predisposed towards either fiction or nonfiction. Like on a continuum. I like this thought. Kind of like Kinsey's scale for sexuality. I'm much farther gay and much farther fictional on the scales.

Sometimes I like to break the world into either/ors. Binaries. Such as: 'there are two people in the world: those who like, deal compassionately with animals, and those who don't.' But it is more useful to think of all things in a more complicated way. Perhaps a book could be given a number from 1 to 6 indicating its relation to the facts. We would want most of our textbooks to bear closely to them, but for me all else could gather happily on the other side. (By the way, as expanding as I am of all definitions and breaking down binaries, I probably won't like you if you don't like animals. Although, that said, I'm not much of a cat person. Yes, I know: I have three cats. This does not make the statement any less true, and possibly more so.)

So the movie! I think it bolsters/illustrates my claim that the emotional truth is more honest. It's where we live. There's little to no character development in anyone but the main character, but that's mostly due to the fact that I don't think an audience could hold any more details in their brain while parsing the rules followed in the dream world(s). Kudos to whoever cast the film's stars though; there's someone for everyone.

Also, it's a film that times itself out. So many times (especially in long films, and with me of tiny bladder) I'm left wondering whether I can wait it out or if I should dash off to the ladies' so I can finish the film in comfort. (For those who also drink a lot... I've never used it, but supposedly RunPee.com is an excellent source that tells you when to go.) In Inception everything must happen before the van hits the water. The different dream levels are toggled between (the farther in the dream, the longer time is expanded), and the van makes it's slow descent. Actually, visually these moments were probably my favorite. Sleep-filled arms flailing in the half-light of an overcast day, the water somewhere below, everything riding on a few seconds dragged impossibly and unfelt to the man awake at the wheel.

There's no one at work in the world.

2010-07-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent some time perusing the Verse Daily archives in a successful attempt to put off work. I made dinner at 9am. I boxed and did sit-ups in the garage. I watered the plants. Mary B had yesterday's poem over at VD. Exactly a month ago Khaled had a poem up. Perhaps Shane will get one August 13! (My blurbers.) So then I started reading backwards; I like this one a lot. It's Ander Monson. Repetition makes me happy. Just keep saying bags. Keep saying stars. Keep saying beauty. Drink. Take this. It's yours. Tell me that last line again.

More Precisely  

What I meant was stars: lots of them. 
What was in the bag: a hundred other bags, 
each filled with a star. What came after the world: 
silence, lots of it. Like being in a bag for a year, 
a portable hole, losing the sensation of sound. 
After only two nights stars appear 
where there were none. So: I'm sorry. I'm here, 
not the star of this poem, nor are you. Nor beauties
in bags draped down by the river in books about bodies 
and necks stretching upwards to sky. What comes after beauty
is water, just water, nothing reflecting in it, not even the song 
of water. Drink. Take this. It's yours. There's no one at work
in the world. No dogs rambling the park. 
Nothing in darkness or pressure arising by depth. 
What was in the works but ears, ears everywhere,
on the land like leaves, caught up in updrafts like silk,
like slick maps written on it and worn on a body. 
You know it's a beauty. Even seen from a mile, 
at which point it's only a dot, it stretches and grows.
Comes closer. She's coming for you. She walks like a star.
Towards you. In her bag is a book. Each page 
draped with stars. You'll know her
when she arrives. You've seen her breathing before.

Frances and I sat in the park.

2010-07-10T12:28:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, especially when reading, I look up and am shocked to find myself where I am. So transported by the world I have entered through language that the "real" (what I'll contend is not-as-real) world has dropped away. It is also like napping in an unfamiliar place, dream state to new sometimes equals a moment of surprise. Who needs vacations? Okay, I do. And will be taking one soon.

In my studio I nap on the hard indoor/outdoor carpeting, my head on some rolled up piece of fabric I've snatched from studiomate Lisa's vast shelves. In those few moments upon waking I'm not sure if I'm paralyzed, in grass, underwater or what.

Yesterday I was in the co-op (in Mount Vernon!) and I wasn't sleeping. I was reading (re-reading) Stacey Levin's Frances Johnson. I figured it was re-released, I could read it again. New to me! Not so, but it's been awhile. It's a good book, strange. What I'll call the Seinfeld school of novelling. A novel in which nothing really happens. This is also what my most recently completed (and recently begun circulating) novel is like. Something happens towards the end, but it's not big. What happens big is internal. This, I think is more how our lives really are. No one I know has ever been shot. (Wait, I don't think. Though I did see someone get stabbed when I was a kid. He survived! It was OK!) And wild romance isn't really that interesting. I couldn't write a murder mystery (the ultimate SOMETHING happening) or a thriller or, well, no, maybe I could, but it would be an alien thing. The book and the experience. Maybe I'll write a mystery. Really most of the world (and the internal workings of everyone, myself included) is a mystery. So any novel--

Anyway, Frances Johnson. Like this (this is where I was going), this is how I feel: "Immediately, she fell into a hapless, jagged doze, only to wake moments later, frightened back from the horizon of unconsciousness, for she had seen a turtle there" (12). This is what it's like to read in public.

It doesn't always take so long to get to a point. Sometimes it takes longer.

It's kind of how I feel in opposite though. It's not the turtles I'm afraid of. Maybe falling brick. I've been dreaming about earthquakes again. (This morning I walked past a house in my neighborhood with a sign out front advertising that it had been retrofitted for earthquake proofing and had a number to call. In my usual overzealous panic I thought, should we do this? we should do this. But our house has been standing for a hundred years. I trust it. As much as one should trust a house.)

Like the day C's father died and I had just woken from a dream in which an earthquake occurred in a hospital room and the nurse and everyone in the room was freaking out and he was in the bed and said, why is everyone so upset; everything's okay. We're all fine. And then we got the call he had died. In dreams lately it's no one I know; sometimes it is, but rarely. Last week before seeing Deb Poe I had a dream about Deb Poe and Karl was showing me around their house at what they had done.

So the book's out. Luckily I read everything, Kate Greenstreet's blog interviewing poets about first books, some other personal accounts, and talked to people I know, C and others. All of this was kind of like reading What to Expect When You're Expecting. I didn't expect my life to change and it hasn't. Except this month I'm letting myself off the hook a little about submitting things and writing new things (which means I am writing new things, but relaxedly). The time off's been nice. And next month the train. I was going to give myself time off then as well (at least I can't really do submissions), but I'll make that decision come the first of the month or so.

I'm working the earthquake dreams into the new stuff I'm doing, trying not to make it at all about dreams though, but real things that happen. Backdrop of a city, buildings coming down. Not coming down, because the earthquake is mild. But enough shaking that people start thinking more concretely about a "big one."

(Read about tsunamis from a thick blue book. Read about the Big Ones, the ones that killed, the causes, how many dead. Read about velocity and volume, then go down to the water.Walk the beach, feet tipped in low waves. Imagine every tremor an earthquake—waves, birds beating quiet wings, a waterfall—then shiver as you watch the horizon for the swell.)

The above is actually from a poem in Money for Sunsets, but every time I say or think "big one" that's what runs through my head.

So I'm relaxed, sort of.

I'm also sending the book places, which takes some time. Who knew 5-line cover notes could take so long?

How else the book has or has not changed my life: holding it. I understand it's possible. That the others can find homes. That maybe I'm a Writer. Also that no one can take this away from me. Maybe I am still that younger version of myself with the threat of heartbreak in its varied and maniacal manifestations hanging over me. Any floor can drop. But this one I can walk on. I feel like a teenager who has just given birth so that someone will always love her. How's that for mixing metaphors? MFS, be a good little child.

Money for Sunsets

2010-06-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

"David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein." -Denise Duhamel, author of Ka-Ching!

“Protean like dreams, jittery montages of the quotidian-turned-nightmare, Elizabeth J. Colen’s lyrical prose poems in Money for Sunsets shed a steady gaze on our present moment.” –Khaled Mattawa, author of Tocqueville

"Here are poems that speak many minds with a single voice." -Shane McCrae, author of Mule

“Cinematic and compassionate, sexy and heartbreaking, this is a debut collection that will thrill you with the sound of your own pulse.” –Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever

Get your copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Money-Sunsets-Elizabeth-J-Colen/dp/0982416938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276661418&sr=1-1

I came home last night to a box of books on my porch. Slept with one in the room last night. Carried one around all day. Yeah, she's pretty. Prettier than me. Probably a little smarter and dirtier, too.

Excitement.

2010-05-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

Hooray! It looks like all is well in the world of the book. That is, in Money for Sunset's world. The world within the book is still a little bit messy -- what with our world being messy as it is, but the proofs are proofed and gorgeous, thanks to Tom C. Hunley and his crew.

I've had more people ask me what the book is "about," not satisfied with the answer, "well, it's poetry, prose poetry." (Yes, I say this kind of like Bond, James Bond.) So I'm working out a description my aunts or my grandpa could spout when someone asks. Something along the lines of...

"An individual examination of our culture of deficit. You know, with sex and stuff thrown in."

Okay, so it's a working description. But that first part I like. And there is a lot of sex in the book. Appropriate sex, sex in inappropriate places, beach sex, imagined sex. I could go on.

In reading the book again while proofing I realized,

a) Hey, this is a really good book! (I hadn't read it in probably more than a year, so distanced it seems sometimes like some other creature wrote it. But they are my obsessions in there.)

b) There is a lot of talk about overconsumption, and specifically about oil. Oddly. I finished this book more than two years ago, but somehow all the environmental stuff that crops up seems way more relevant today than it did even then.

Must. Walk. Dog.

Thanks for checking in.

A poem is not an abstraction.

2010-05-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from a letter from Lee Hickman to Todd Baron (lifted from this place, if you want to read more):

You talk of “pure charge.” Pure charge is the meaning. In a poem, there is no other saying. What is said and how charged it is said are the same thing. As in life, the generosity and intensity of your love is that love, there is no separating them from it. A poem is not an abstraction. It is a product of the body. It is not the fingerprint. It is the fingertip. No poem goes beyond meaning. Meaning is the body. Yr body.

From Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body:

2010-04-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

The blue slur of oncoming sleepiness. She wants to shut down and forget all the complications, the rugburn of communication, the loss of words and fighting, the drag and stop of language as she fails Kate again and again. She hates these moments of burn and anger, and bites her nails until they bleed, copper in her mouth. (47)

The habit of meals and sleep, the patterns of pattern. Hours and streets and seasons. Leaves, new growth, then falling. Failure. Capability and time line. Endpoint and/or circular. (62)

Humans only use 60% of the oxygen in their lungs; birds 99%. (98)

Wait—

Think of all the mouths you have known: kissed, fed, envied, missed, desired, touched, grazed, imagined, fingered, fled. Your own: given, shut, blurted, silenced, sung. Enter. The room brims with words, vowels hitting our faces. Exit. Say X Y Z. If we linger here, where the alphabet runs out, never fear, our mouths loop back to A. My home is your mouth. Your home is my mouth. Remember? (125)

Wait.

You see, the heart splits both down and across. (125)

Quarterly reading check in--Title, Author (Notes to Remind)

2010-04-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

What I've read so far this year...

I like my new feature of what amounts to a <10-word personal "review." I'm a list-maker, a haphazard organizer of things, mostly words. I have this idea that everything I've ever read will be useful to me forever. I keep a notebook of quotes I like from books I read. I should say notebookS; you should see the stack of them. I started doing this when I was about 10. I should have known then that words would be what my life was made of, but I kept thinking psychology, neuroscience, then photography, before I got irritated at artists s**t-talking each other at some party and decided to focus on what had always diverted my attention anyway: writing. I'd always written stories. When I was a kid (often sent out of the house for the day) I would take a notebook and re-write stories I liked. I never had any interest in remembering them the way they were told exactly. I retold them, sometimes adding characters, plot twists. Then I started re-writing events in my life, making them turn out differently, better. Then I saw that better didn't make the story better.

Anyway, I have this idea that in twenty years, thirty years I will see some book cover or someone will mention Wallace Stegner or Maggie Nelson at a party and I will think, yes, I've read that/those book/books and will return home to look through my lists and have a good time remembering the read based on my ten-word description of it. So if you see me at that party and I have a faraway look on my face I'll either be conjuring this list, or forming a new list for something onto which I'm placing our conversation.

**

1. Trust – Liz Waldner (Not quite as engaging as Dark Would. “Passing”=amazing.)
2. Counterfeit – Christine LeClerc (Smart. Pop culture references. Nods to theatre.)
3. A Thief of Strings – Donald Revell (a bit of nature, a bit of the war)
4. Plato’s Bad Horse – Deborah Woodard (Long lines, excellent sounds, erudite references.)
5. The Most of It – Mary Ruefle (Short short prose from an excellent contemporary poet.)
6. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud (Woah. I want the Revell translation now.)
7. The Totality for Kids – Joshua Clover (Echoes of end of the world; pop culture.)
8. The Lack Of – Joseph Massey (As always, genius. I want more.)
9. Jane: a murder – Maggie Nelson (Poetic examination of aunt’s unsolved murder. Stunning.)
10. Wrong – Reginald Shepherd (Best moments=when sounds overtake him.)
11. The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson (Memoir, written shortly after Jane, while the murderer was being tried.)
12. Bluets – Maggie Nelson (She’s in love with blue; I’m in love with her. Paragraphs numbered remind me of Coetzee’s second, In the Heart of the Country.)
13. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner (Novel of the “frontier west.” Grandma Susan’s lesbianish friendship explored; both women married men.)
14. Fifty Poems – Liana Quill (Spareness I don’t get. Birds and trees.)
15. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives – Tom Shroder (Journalist’s examination of guy who examines scientific evidence for past lives—Ian Stevenson.)
16. Are We Lucky Yet?: Stories – Jane Bradley (Made me remember high school. And feel like a straight girl.)
17. The Black Swan – Thomas Mann (Mann’s feminine look at his imminent mortality.)
18. The Mere Future – Sarah Schulman (Satiric social commentary; only killers gain acclaim, riches.)
19. I is to Vorticism – Ben Mirov (“interstellar ventriloquism”=meaningful absurdity)
20. Otherhood – Reginald Shepherd (cover reminds of a Pgh photograph I once took)
21. Other Prohibited Items – Martha Greenwald (Best=Amtrak holdback; office poems also had excellent lines.)
22. Minimum Heroic – Christopher Salerno (best of the three)
23. The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu (“Not born but snapped”; best moment=showing book jacket as I.D. to cop)
24. Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson (beautiful language I would have appreciated more if not for the voice of the woman on the audiobook.)
25. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story – Paul Monette (coming out story; language)
26. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Microstudy of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson (most interesting to see the questions we do have answers to that the writer is asking in 1967; good math)
27. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad (feels like my childhood; maybe I am Frank)
28. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth (comment cards blossom epically)
29. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories – ed. Robert Shapard & James Thomas (a few nice pieces)
30. Personationskin – Karl Parker (terror and comedy of ambiguation; lots of caps)
31. Spar – Karen Volkman (prose poetry narrative interspersed with regular line-break poems; like)
32. Fast Lanes – Jayne Anne Phillips (title story one of the best ever love stories/relationship stories)
33. Half Girl – Stephanie Dickinson (swine princess; excellent metaphors)
34. The Preservationist – David Maine (retelling Noah’s Ark)
35. Savage Love – Dan Savage (compendium as of ’98)
36. Ka-Ching – Denise Duhamel (first section so good, money; parents’ mishap with escalator stunning – unable to look away)
37. Silkscreen Techniques – J. I. Biegeleisen and M. A. Cohn (a future project)
38. Family Dancing – David Leavitt (early 80s, standard storytelling, very consistent)
39. The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa (tender, fascinating conceptually, 80-minute memory, mathematics prof.)
40. OK, Goodnight – Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
41. I Have to go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – Karyna McGlynn (girl in the pool, yes)
42. World Famous Love Acts – Brian Leung (Loved, “Leases”=woah)
43. The Blue of Her Body – Sara Greenslit (Sex, drugs, and birds of prey)

Once I Had a Brother, but I'm Thinking Olivetti

2010-03-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

So I have this problem with eyestrain. I'm thinking of getting a typewriter. Really I should say 'another typewriter.' Although born at the latter part of the "X" generation, and firmly within the timeframe that should have allowed full computer access as my birthright, my family didn't get a computer until long after I'd flown the coop. This is why I'm a little slow when you talk about html, it's why I don't really know the difference between PC and Mac. I just think Mac looks slicker. I mean, it goes with things, you know?

I had a Brother typewriter when I was in junior high, graduated to a "word processing" typewriter when I was in high school. Mostly I used the computers at school, but my first experience with a glowing screen (other than TV) was the suffusion of those two lines of type from my typewriter. I was so happy I could fix those definately's and correspondance's before they ever got to the page.

I spend so much time on my computer, and word processing in particular these days, that I want to "Apple X" every time I move something in the garden and don't like the new placement. Or I want to hit save before I take dishes out of the cabinet, so I can just close the evening's document of dinner without saving and have everything be neatly back in place the next time I look. I think about things in terms of Microsoft. I like Excel. I like to Excel. I edit for a living. Which means I spend hours in front of the computer before I ever spend hours in front of the computer doing my own work. Sometimes when I get there I can barely see.

I turned 34 this year. Not a big milestone by any measure. But shortly after my birthday last month I noticed three things. 1. A new furrow growing between my eyes. I already have thick eyebrows (which I like), adding a furrow makes me feel like Walter Cronkite. 2. Gray hairs. I've found two or three. I've never had them before and I look at them like I do the bees in my yard, with a fond familiarity for their newness and an understanding that things could get painfully out of control. And 3. eyestrain. I've had this for awhile, but it's gotten worse in recent months. While I have perfect vision, sometimes my eyes feel like they're about three times their size and still trying to fit in my little sockets. It's not so much painful as it is nauseating. Luckily I have no problem reading when this hits, it's just the glowing screen. The computer. I find myself not blogging, not reading online news or online journals, and using a notebook (the paper kind) much more often.

I mention this partially as an excuse, as I've run into eight people in the past two weeks who have asked me what's up with the blog. I didn't even know any of these people were reading what I wrote here. This post is for them.

***

Also, the new Knockout is out. It has an interview with Charles Jensen, and work by me, Kim Chinquee, Charles Jensen, Richard Siken, Paul Lisicky, Joseph Massey, Sherman Alexie, Denver Butson, Matthew Hittinger, J.P. Dancing Bear, and a whole host of other folks.

Jack Spicer is my valentine

2010-02-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

So Jack Spicer asked me out. I wasn't sure if I was going to go, but he was sweet, unassuming, didn't expect anything from me. Just a few hours of togetherness.

I'd never read anything by him. I'm still somewhat new to poetry, still feeling my way. Focusing on contemporary work, while slowly filling in the back story with the classics of the 20th century.

C buys a lot of books, which is good for me because I like to read, often directionless, book to book as they appear in front of me. In this house there's no shortage.

I'd heard the name, loved the title (my vocabulary did this to me - supposedly his last words), so I picked it up the other day, daunting in its collectedness at nearly 500 pages. Well-behaved reader that I am, as expected to do so, I read the intro AND the "about this edition." I was into it. The first handful of poems though? Good lord, no. I'm not really into poets waxing all mythological. I mean, I know that's a style and there's a great tradition and I should have paid more attention to Edith Hamilton. That's on me. And I like it the way I like the Bible. For the silly stories. Kind of in the abstract. I don't want either to feature in the poetry I read, though god and gods can be done well.

Then I got to "Imaginary Elegies":

Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells—
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing dolls? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.

*

I'm hooked. We're spending the day together, just me and Jack. Maybe a bottle of gin. Maybe some Chinese take-out.

I want to be the man who has me.

2010-02-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

Paul Monette mentions several times throughout the winding coming-out narrative of Becoming a Man how he has to work hard not to let the current Paul, the one writing the story get too disgusted at the closeted Paul he used to be. This removes some of my readerly and gay sensibility of wanting to yell, 'what the hell, dude. It doesn't have to be this hard.' That said, it is hard. It was hard for me in the nineties, it was sure to have been even harder in the seventies. I guess I give it today's worldview (mine) and it all seems ridiculous to be so bent on staying sexless. In the context of 1972, just slightly post Stonewall (and though he was living 70 miles from the city, it seems to have been little more than a blip on his radar of self-hatred), even his therapist seems confused that his goal is to be straight. And he tries!

This book was written in 1992, just a few years before Monette died at age 49 or 50, young. Written as a startled response to the warm, fuzzy response his book Borrowed Time received. Borrowed Time was a portrait of his relationship with Roger Horwitz and Roger's death from AIDS. It was loving, accessible story of two men in love that made the loving look easy. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story was Monette's angry response that, sorry, no. Gay love is not that easy.

It's hard not to see myself in all coming out stories, as I'm sure many gays do. My story ran parallel to his in many ways. But where he kept celibate and then dated women to try to cure himself, mine was all for show. In the coming-out formulary, his self-hatred equals my self-preservation. He truly wanted to change; I simply didn't want to die. This has mostly to do with the time. Though my coming out pre-dated contemporary gays in the spotlight (except maybe for Elton John and a few other elders, and the bi-wonder of my idol David Bowie), I knew it wasn't something wrong with me. I just figured there was no one around like me (except the queer black kid, the double excuse for punching bag in our white, straight suburban dream), that I'd meet them in another life, find my own "city of orgies, walks and joys" like my kind had been doing for ages (or since the advent of capitalism, thank you John D'Emilio). At some point my attraction to women just evolved into a quiet acceptance of, 'oh, this is something I'll worry about once I leave this small town.' (Though I did eventually end up getting lucky in high school.) I dated boys and enjoyed it, even though my heart was never in it; I never once thought it might go somewhere.

I wonder what the equivalent is now.

While I can't really cozy up to the fact that he didn't get laid regularly until he was approaching thirty, I can understand the trend of running from people he actually liked. "I told myself to go with it, not to be afraid. I was beginning to worry that I didn't know how to have sex with someone I liked" (271). My history is littered with girls I liked and ran from. The longest relationships were always with the safe ones, the ones where I knew where I stood emotionally and so had nothing to lose. The ones I actually loved, well, I never let those relationships go anywhere. But this has more to do with being stupid than gay.

At least I got that figured out soon enough to do the right thing by C, who is definitely not safe, and whom I be a wreck by if I ever lost.

Anyway, I'm starting to use this space as more of a reading diary than anything, which I suppose is okay. An homage to lines I love. If you know me, you know that I may interrupt your speaking to let you know that what you just said would make a good line, that you should probably write it down. Unless, of course, you aren't a writer. Then I'll steal your shit, rest assured.

*

And I think of my father when I read this, he who would love his sexless daughter:

The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love. It has always been thus, the history writ by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there. Left and right, fascists and communists, they loathe us in equal measure. Then the Holy Fathers of every religion, their sick equation of pleasure and sin. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half. (25)

I can't believe it myself, how fresh the wounds of the deep past sting, how sharp the dry-eyed tears are even at this distance. The very act of remembering begins to resemble a phobic state--feeding on every missed chance, stuck forever in the place without doors. What's crazy about it is, I forget that I ever got out. For an hour or a day the pain wins. It throws a veil of amnesia over my real life... My white-knuckled grip on happiness, hoarded against the gloating of my enemies, against the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers. (172)

Throughout, Paul Monette's language is beautiful. This is the first I've read of him, and won't be the last. It seems everywhere I've gone with this book in the past few days someone has stopped me to say, I loved that book.

If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. (175)

...I had no choice but to keep on looking in the wrong places for the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing. For that was the image in my head, though I'd never read it in any book or seen it in any movie. I'd fashioned it out of bits of dreams and the hurt that went with pining after straight men. Everything told me it couldn't exist, especially the media code of invisibility, where queers were spoken of only in the context of molesting Boy Scouts. (178)

No longer invisible, we still have a long way to go. Even Weeds, a show I love, likes to kill their queers. (We're currently watching Season 5.)

Waiting numbly for a train in a place where there are no tracks. (179)

And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique--depersonalizing so completely the body embraced so they felt nothing at all. (253)

From his journals in 1972 when he was sleeping with men and women, still figuring out the sway of his orientation:

I feel fairly calm and together until I have to explain myself at all to anyone... Sex is more regular with Ellen. That is, I'm not afraid I can't do it anymore, but I can't stand the intimacy of it, can't face being the man in the situation. And yet I think of Bruce on Saturday [a trick] and get pissed thinking how irrelevant I was/am in the passive role. I want to be the man who has me. (264)

Mean Something?

2010-02-07T17:11:00.000-08:00

I understand the trend of popular readership through my family. They are not literary people. But they've always been readers. My father likes art books, he's a high school art teacher, went to school for sculpture. My mother consumes romance novels by the truckful. My Aunt Louise reads a lot of nonfiction, mostly things about the natural world. When my aunt tells me she likes Robert Frost and 'isn't smart enough' to understand contemporary poetry, I understand she's smarter than she thinks.

Some call it putting random thoughts together, a friend recently referred to it as the 'smart-aleck' school of poetry. Contemporary leanings in poetry and fictive prose have been about seeming either smarter than their readership in making references the general population won't be privy to or cultivating a camaraderie of 'you get this, don't you? look how smart and funny we are' geared towards the other smart alecks of their trade.

My aunt says she's not smart enough and I tell her it's not her, it's writing right now, poetry, the contemporary drag. That's just where we are right now. The smart clothes we're putting on. Maybe it's the Bush years, the war years, how we were attacked 'right on our own soil,' the years of upping alerts, packing small vials to get on planes. Our culture of fear. There's so much that's so important that needs to be looked at, that perhaps we as a tribe are overwhelmed and so write about very little. We want to be smart enough to outrun the fear. We don't want to look at it. (And I'm only marking it from W's reign because I wasn't enough aware of the contemporary poetry scene prior to about 2000. I am ready to stand corrected.)

That said, there are some excellent contemporary poets and prose writers who are getting down the important things about the way we live now in understandable terms and with beautiful care to language. Richard Siken, Heather Derr-Smith, Shane McCrae, Brian Turner, Patricia Smith, to name a few. It's just that they're hard to find if you don't know where to look. And looking from the outside, most contemporary writing is not for the populace; it's exclusionary. With that in mind, I would tell my aunt to read Robert Frost and not to try to bust in and find some meaning in what's being done today. If I see something I think she'll like, something that will mean something to her, I'll send it her way.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately; it relates to much of what Codrescu's The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans talks about. The book is from more than a decade ago, but is still vital thought on what's going on.

Ted Genoways (Virginia Quarterly Editor) has some smart things to say about the current state of fiction and literary journals here: The Death of Fiction, including:

But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Reading Andrei Codrescu's Half-Naked Muse and the Boy in the Lake

2010-02-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

But here is the thing: physical intimacy or potential intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates to what really matters: words. What I want from my friends, male or female, are words. Great torrents of conversation, ramblings, monologues, infinite confidences, stories, anecdotes, confessions. I know that there are silent friendships out there just like there are platonic ones. I don't hold to those. I like my friendships warm, fleshy, verbal, sensual, sensorial... (50)

Me too, Mr. Codrescu. I think some of my prior relationships were gotten into mainly as a ruse for trapping people I admired into endless conversation. That said, I do enjoy the other aspects.

As the written depends only on the written, a poet finds himself inside a vicious circle of substance sucking by his own products' products. What was once living becomes Naturalism, Realism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc. The speaker diminishes and the speech becomes all. But this is not the same speech as the sacred speech of the beginning: this is the even speech of machines, not the unpredictable story of the gods. This is speech turned upon its own devices, speech about speech. The cosmogonic myth and the fairy tale are replaced by the novel and television. The ritual-sacred utterance becomes a bourgeois commercial proposition feeding endlessly on the demands of a self-perpetuating market that is not an audience but, precisely, a market. Who reads? Who watches? The reader and the viewer have been replaced by the Spectator. Utterly different creatures these three: they vary physically. The body of the Spectator is a strategic map for the deployment of cultural products. The reader and the viewer used to touch. That is now forbidden: art is produced for the sake of production, which is to say for the sake of storage. It is made to be noted, credited and put in resumes, not to be actually read. In fact its message may be exactly the opposite: NOLE ME TANGERE, DO NOT READ ME. Art pour l'art is art contre l'homme.

The poet today is like Scheherazade: he must tell a story each night in order not to die. (130-131)

The workshop writers masquerade as non-mainstream writers but that's only an illusion; they simply cater to the surveyed needs of a different class of consumers, namely academic institutions. Notice I said "consumers," not "readers," because properly speaking, these workshop writers do not have readers: they produce their materials for resume-building in order to fill the self-generating slots of a growing bureaucracy. These writers do not even read other members of their resume-building subgroup. ...These writers are institutional insiders disguised as outsiders. (135)

What is prompting me additional thought, and which I don't feel adequately able to speak on yet, is the alignment here of resume and commercialization. The selling and the selling. While I agree to some degree, to some degree there are differences. Part of why I read like a pig, snuffling through the muck of everything I can lay my hands on, is to avoid this sense exactly. That no one reads. I read you. I read you all, provided that you never cease to entertain me with something I can't find anywhere else. This, too, a steep order. The business.

Also why, thus far, I'm happy to have avoided cogging in the machine of the academy. Or so I think. I don't have (as much) the anxiety of gross production.

To believe this entirely would be to lose hope. So I don't. But there's something to it certainly. I'm also always shocked by how many creative writing students are so resistant to reading. The grumblings about how much reading instructors are forcing on them. How they don't read for pleasure. (What is pleasure? Vacancy?) But then, in my experience anyway, they don't tend to be the most engaging storytellers.

*

The weather continues to consume me. Sun and warm that calls for my blanket on the beach. Sand, rock, grass. I used to go to Lake Padden a lot to read, after a bike ride there, after a run around the lake, after a swim. My own triathalon (taken slowly). I haven't been there in a while, not since I moved and the bike ride got tripled. There're closer shores. The bay is just down the street.

Last weekend a young man drowned in Lake Padden when the canoe he and a friend were rowing capsized. The lake is so manageable. Like a bathtub is how I've always thought of it. I swim across, I swim back, I swim across. It's three miles on the trail around. I don't know what the diameter is the length I swim across. But I just can't imagine anyone dying there. People in boats die young in this town. One boy was drowned, the other was saved. When the authorities pulled up the canoe from the lake bottom, the two life jackets, unworn, were still in it.

Stretched Out in the Current

2010-01-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

As with any small town budding metropolis, much of the watershed is concrete. I read in the paper that 43% of the Meridian corridor is parking lot. And we’re a conservative bunch. By this I mean we like our land, our land conservation. We don’t shop like you do. While we’re the 8th largest “city” (having lived in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and having spent much time in New York I have a hard time with this term here) in the state, we’re the 35th biggest spenders. We’re tentative consumers, and most of us are leaning toward sustainability in our own ways. Carol and I have a dozen fruit trees that bear much more than we can eat. I can look out my front window and see the neighbor’s chickens scuttling across the little road. I’m generalizing. We have a Wal-Mart too that I’m sure does good business. We have our mall on the other side of the freeway that caused our city center to cave substantially. What was once Macy’s hasn’t held anything since. That was before my time. From the street I like to look at the dormant escalators and imagine what the second floor looks like.

I’ve lived a lot of places bent on paving land, but this is the only place I’ve ever been where broken concrete sits in all the water. Much of the bay is lined with it, like parking lots have tried and failed to cover over these bits of nature too. All the waterways are lined with it, the bay, the creeks and streams. Maybe we’re just reusing? Getting spent concrete to keep erosion in check. Even in the “nice” park, the one where everyone takes their parents when they’re in town has these broken bits. And broken sheets of masoned brick as well. Rows and rows of it that I can’t tell whether they were street once or buildings.

This morning I walked the dog downtown, the same walk I always do. On Cornwall we cross the creek going into town, the little bridge that blends into the road. The creek sits between an office building full of insurance and lawyers with a gym I used to go to in the basement and an antique store painted a gaudy golden yellow that clashes with the sky no matter what the sky looks like. This pocket always smells like bleach and sweat, like the gym has leaked outside. It’s assaultive really. I know we’re becoming a city because there’s been a shopping cart for some time tipped sideways, half in half out of the water, casting strange eddies downstream of it. Today there were two. And what I thought was a body was only a sleeping bag caught on a low-slung branch and all stretched out in the current.

News flash from RMP

2010-01-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

Rose Metal Press recently announced that We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton was selected by Dinty W. Moore as the winner of their Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook contest. In excellent company, my ss ms was among the finalists.

Finalists:

Elizabeth Colen for Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake
John Jodzio for Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever
Tim Jones-Yelvington for Evan's House and the Other Boys who Live There
Mary Miller for Paper and Tassels

And semi-finalists:

James Tadd Adcox for A Miracle of Some Sort
Spencer Dew for Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Roxane Gay for Things to Know about Career Girls
Tiff Holland for Wrapping Kevin
Thisbe Nissen for Etiquette
Cami Park for The Sun Has Packed So Many Suitcases

Insult to Genetic Researchers

2010-01-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

…I took the pie home with me and ate it with my mouth gaping, painfully aware I was not a moose and would never be a moose, but I had loved you in such an eerie and unnatural way. (from “Peek-a-Moose”)

I didn’t love this book the way I normally love Mary Ruefle, though (of course) I enjoyed it. It was kind of like combining Mary Ruefle with Borges and some clever contemporary poet boy (I haven’t decided which). Her (first?) book of “prose,” from Wave Books, The Most of It was published in 2008.

Poets are so coarsely bred they believe in force-feeding, arranged marriages, predestined outbursts. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)

I’m not sure what this means, but I like it. Especially the part about predestined outbursts. Yes, we do decide we’re going to explode upon the world.

My job, as far back as I can remember, was to look forward to being happy. (from “The Diary”)

I’ve always been determined to be “happy” now. To most people (and to me) this includes to a great measure not working, not having a j-o-b. Since being abandoned by my family early on, I did poverty. I decided that I could do poverty very well. By poverty maybe I mean budgeting. Regardless, for a long time I was very poor. From that time I decided never to work full time if I didn’t have to. Though just combining work-work with the work of writing, and with visual work, I almost always put in what would be considered “a lot of overtime” each week. Not working so much allows me to be something of a workaholic.

That said, I also like movies. And cocktails. Long walks with the dog and playing Scrabble.

Reading I don’t consider work or leisure. I’m not sure what I consider it. To say it’s breathing seems overused.

How many books have I read? Only one – just as anyone who is literate has read only one book, or, to be precise, is in the process of reading the one book they will complete in their lifetime. That book is the particular sum of every book they have ever read, written in the particular order in which those books were read. The book is never the same, for no two persons have ever read exactly the same books in exactly the same order. There is a great difference between The Secret of Larkspur Lane followed by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina followed by The Secret of Larkspur Lane. And if What One Can Do With a Chafing Dish happens to fall between … as opposed to Don Quixote … well, I don’t mean to insult the genetic researchers, but I have a hunch that if no two people are alike, this is why. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)

Dearth

2010-01-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

I don't really mind getting a rejection on a manuscript withdrawn from a competition five months ago.

This was my only rejection so far this year. That said, I have very little out, as I'm working on a heavy ms revision and am refusing myself other tasks until I get my head under and get it done.

This also means no blogging, even though I have things to say about the friend who did not save my life, crow instability, invisibility, and getting at the word of God by nuns neglecting orphaned infants.

2009, A Good Year For Reading

2010-01-01T11:17:00.000-08:00

What I read last year:

1. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity – Slavoj Zizek
2. The Capital of Solitude – Gregory Orfalea
3. The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) – Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard
4. Bad Alchemy – Dionisio Martinez
5. Singing from the Well – Reinaldo Arenas
6. Dreamtigers (El Hacedor) – Jorge Luis Borges
7. Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object – Kathleen Rooney
8. Only This Blue – Betsy Warland
9. In the Devil’s Territory – Kyle Minor
10. The End of Rude Handles – Jen Tynes
11. Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolano
12. Earth in the Attic – Fady Joudah
13. --------FEB---------Too Close to the Falls – Christine Gildenour
14. The Art of the Poetic Line – James Longenbach
15. Names on the Land – George Stewart
16. A Humument – Tom Phillips
17. In the Land of the Free – Geoffrey Forsyth
18. Bloodroot – Betsy Warland
19. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
20. --------MARCH--------The Bride Minaret – Heather Derr-Smith
21. Blessing of the Animals – Brenda Miller
22. Meteoric Flowers – Elizabeth Willis
23. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
24. The Massacre at El Mozote – Mark Danner
25. Becoming Abigail – Chris Abani
26. Airport – Emily Kendal Frey
27. The Doorbells of Florence – Andrew Losowsky
28. This In Which – George Oppen
29. Pain Fantasy – Jason Bredle
30. Eva Hesse Drawing – Catherin de Zegher, ed.
31. Falsework – Gary Geddes
32. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin – Lawrence Weschler
33. Areas of Fog – Joseph Massey
34. Travel – Yuichi Yokoyama
35. ----------APRIL----------Nada – Carman Laforet
36. In the Mode of Disappearance – Jonathan Weinert
37. Dark Thirty – Santee Frazier
38. Blood Dazzler – Patricia Smith
39. Quadrifariam – Frank Samperi
40. The Man Without Qualities (Part One) – Robert Musil
41. Undersleep – Julie Doxsee
42. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
43. ---------MAY---------Wetlands – Charlotte Roche
44. Annie John – Jamaica Kincaid
45. Voice of Ice – Atla Ifland
46. All the Day’s Sad Stories – Tina May Hall
47. The Boy with the Thorn in his Side: A Memoir – Keith Fleming
48. We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 – Tram Nguyen
49. Antidotes for an Alibi – Amy King
50. Dark Blue Suit – Peter Bacho
51. Fox – Adrienne Rich
52. Recycle Suburbia – Dan Nowak
53. Carnage in the Love Trees – Richard Greenfield
54. Denny Smith – Robert Gluck
55. Remnants of Hannah – Dara Weir
56. Body Language – Mark Cunningham
57. ---------JUNE---------In a Bear’s Eye – Yannick Murphy
58. Women as Lovers – Elfriede Jelinek
59. Don Juan in the Village – Jane DeLynn
60. Helene Cixous Live Theory – Ian Blyth & Susan Sellers
61. This is Water – David Foster Wallace
62. After – Nancy Pagh
63. Signed, Mata Hari – Yannick Murphy
64. The Devil’s Highway – Luis Alberto Urrea
65. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg – ed. Bill Morgan
66. ----------JULY----------Black Leapt In – Chris Forhan
67. Milestones – Marina Tsvetaeva
68. Prairie Fever – Mary Biddinger
69. Nets – Jen Bervin
70. Dutch Painting – R.H. Fuchs
71. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: the French May Events of 1968 – Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman
72. Heironymus Bosch – Walter S. Gibson
73. Some of the Dead are Still Breathing – Charles Bowden
74. Stone – Osip Mandelstam
75. Self-Portrait with Crayon – Allison Benis White
76. The All-Purpose Magical Tent – Lytton Smith
77. ----------AUGUST----------The Passion of Michel Foucault – James Miller
78. Self-Portrait – Brian Johnson
79. Ohio Violence – Alison Stine
80. Finding Water, Holding Stone – Jim Bertolino
81. The Air Lost in Breathing – Simone Muench
82. Legend of Light – Bob Hicok
83. The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano
84. Bardo – Suzanne Paola
85. A Personal Anthology – Jorge Luis Borges
86. Belligerence – Andrei Codrescu
87. The End is the Beginning – Matt Briggs
88. ---------SEPTEMBER---------Torch Lake – Brian Johnson
89. Auspices – Cid Corman
90. Names Above Houses – Oliver de la Paz
91. Plight – Cid Corman
92. Livingdying – Cid Corman
93. The Heart that Lies Outside the Body – Stephanie Lenox
94. Scary, No Scary – Zachary Schomburg
95. The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
96. Crush – Richard Siken
97. Furious Lullaby – Oliver de la Paz
98. Fup: A Modern Fable – Jim Dodge
99. Madonna anno domini – Joshua Clover
100. The Feminine and the Sacred – Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva
101. How Some People Like Their Eggs – Sean Lovelace
102. Lust & Cashmere – A.E. Simms
103. Almond Blossoms and Beyond – Mahmoud Darwish
104. The Continental Caper – Sally Alatalo
105. A Beginning on the Short Story: Notes – William Carlos Williams
106. The Bomb – Makodo Oda
107. “A” 1-12 – Louis Zukofsky
108.------------OCTOBER------------Conspiracy – Anthony Summers
109.Quiet Days in Clichy – Henry Miller
110. The Pinch Runner Memorandum – Kenzaburo Oe
111. Internal West – Priscilla Becker
112. Amulet – Roberto Bolano
113. Ties That Bind – Sarah Schulman
114. Say You’re One of Them – Uwem Akpan
115. 40 Watts – C.D. Wright
116. Boris by the Sea – Matvei Yankelevich
117. Transgender History – Susan Stryker
118. Lamp of Letters – Katharine Whitcomb
119. Stars of the Night Commute – Ana Bozicevic
120. Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants – Elena Georgiou
121. To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design – Henry Petroski
122. ----------NOVEMBER----------By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart
123. In the Architecture of Bone – Alan Semerdjian
124. Winter Season – Toni Bentley
125. The Anthologist – Nicholson Baker
126. American Husband – Kary Wayson
127. Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson
128. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
129. American Romances: Essays – Rebecca Brown
130. Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers – Arundhati Roy
131. Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel – Edmund White
132. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me – Brent Goodman
133. The Bitter Withy – Donald Revell
134. The Bomb: A New History – Stephen M. Younger
135. Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America – Linda Lawrence Hunt
136. Take It – Joshua Beckman
137. Where I Stay – Andrew Zornoza
138. ----------DECEMBER----------Anthem – Ayn Rand
139. Parabola – Lily Hoang
140. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? – Lorrie Moore
141. Lost Alphabet – Lisa Olstein
142. For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs – Kathleen Rooney
143. Summer Crossing – Truman Capote
144. Dark Would (missing person) – Liz Waldner
145. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life – Herve Guibert
146. Household Words – Joan Silber
147. Golden Days – Carolyn See
148. Source – Mark Doty
149. The Curtain of Trees – Alberto Rios
150. Radio Crackling, Radio Gone – Lisa Olstein

--

A Brief Portfolio of Recent Visual Work (Captured with a Somewhat Crappy Camera)

2009-12-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

book art

2009-12-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

from aristobrat, care of fuckyeahreading.

A Very Good Explanation

2009-12-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

I'm working myself up to posting something substantial. For now, this gem from the start of Alberto Rios' "Don Gustavo, Who Had a Hand for an Ear":

One sees the world differently from the rooftops of a town. The people are a little smaller, with bigger heads and smaller feet. One looks down onto the tops of trees and bushes. A small horse is like a large dog, a dog is like an awkward cat, and a white cat is like a comet or a falling star, only sideways, along the darkness of the street.

On a rooftop the air is colder, and the sound of people's talking is indistinct, no different from the turning handle on a meat grinder or the loading and unloading of boxes from a delivery truck. A woman's sharp laugh is a bicycle bell, but from up on the rooftop you yourself had better not laugh.

It might be all right if one has business on the roof--if one is, say, installing a new cooler or fixing tiles. Then a laugh heard by a woman on the street seems like no more noise than a mosquito flying by. But if your business is something else, the mosquito bites, and the lady points and yells. And there's never a very good explanation.

Check out the new Anti-

2009-12-22T07:02:00.000-08:00

Once again in excellent company, I have work in issue #5 of Anti-, which you can find here.

The work in Anti- is always top-notch, but I do have to say I often return just to read the "Anti-thesis" for each poet.

Happy solstice, dear reader. Here's to longer days!

Post In Which It Never Occurs To Writer To Mention Tiger Woods

2009-12-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

Jesus on Toast: the Pareidolia

A few years ago a friend got me one of those plastic cookie-cutter things that make Jesus imprints on toast. This was after a long conversation of pareidolia, something I’ve been captivated by since I was a small child.

As a child my brother and I did not much go to church. Sometime in middle childhood (I think I was seven or eight and my brother was ten) my mother gave us the option of going to church or not going to church anymore. I don’t remember whether my mother ever went with us to church the few times we did go, but I don't think so. We were either Episcopalian or Methodist. Methodist, I think.

No, definitely Methodist.

I have a memory of my mother dropping my brother and I off in front of the church, then an older woman scuttling us into some basement for lessons on God. But maybe it just felt like abandonment and she really was up there somewhere above, listening with the other believers to the organ buzz vibrating the walls.

My brother and I were thoughtful children. When given the option we didn’t answer right away. I remember a few moments huddled in his room, the dog and us in a trinity of thought, before emerging and letting mother know that, no, we didn’t think we wanted to go anymore.

As a result of this The Bible has always been my weak category on Jeopardy.

As a result of this I started seeing Jesus everywhere. I was convinced the face of Jesus watched me while I slept from the back of my bedroom door. With dark knots for eyes and a beard shaped by dendrochronology, he watched while I slept.

I saw Jesus in the popcorn ceiling over the stairs. In oil stains in our garage. In patterns of leaves at the side of the road. And in clouds, especially in clouds.

In my bedroom in high school, I was persuaded to make a move on my best (girl) friend by the fact that the bare branches of the tree outside my window spelled love. This I noticed for the first time while we sat on my floor talking about U2 and REM and Losing My Religion,

Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees failed
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I've said too much

and never stopped seeing until the leaves returned to the trees.

I never once thought being gay was like being straight. Not once did I underestimate the anxiety of letting on I liked a girl. I knew what it was to like a boy. The tremors that came with this were nothing like the earth-shattering and possible brain-bashing of liking a girl.

Sarah was religious. She was born-again, evangelical. If at 17 I’d had any idea what these things meant, I probably would have kept my distance.

She played golf, she played drums, her family read from the Bible every night, sometimes her mother spoke in tongues. When I had dinner there, I too read from the Bible, but the words meant nothing to me.

This isn’t where I meant to go with this. In short, it all worked out. I mean, for a little while. There was violence (though not between us), there was excitement of subterfuge, the shock of revealing our relationship to a handful of people. Of course she wasn’t gay then; it was just about me.

I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. –John Lennon

Under directions from her mother, Sarah’s brother buried her CDs next to the creek behind their house. Her mother went in and out of thinking all music that didn't exalt Christ was created by the hands of the devil.

It took a few weeks before she found the CDs again, covers wilted and stuck together with the ground’s perspiration.

The year before I met Sarah, I was hanging out a lot with Ali. It wasn’t the same kind of adoration (deeply into hairspray and lipstick, oh, and boys, I never would have tried anything on her), but we were close. Her parents were my parents briefly, I too hated her brother, that kind of thing. I don’t remember why she had friends in Youngstown, but there was a party and I went along. I remember somebody’s kitchen, the linoleum especially. I spent some time drunk on that yellow tile.

There was plenty of alcohol. There was the standard pairings of one girl and one boy making out here and there. And the girls who weren’t latched to a boy seemed to be aching for it. At this point I’d done nothing about my affection for girls. I had had a boyfriend the year before whose best friend (a girl) had kissed me, but that was all.

Let’s call the girl at this party Maggie. When we got there, Maggie was strumming a guitar in the kitchen. She did not look up, she did not say hello. Her dark hair fell over her face. I had no idea what she looked like except for her hands, which gnarled out to pluck at the notes, but were lovely when ever they paused.

The end of the night would find Maggie and I curled up in some strange bedroom, the door locked and all of the furniture against it.

In the kitchen she played a Beatles song. I said I shared my birthday with George Harrison, a bit of trivia I liked to share. George Harrison and Pele (I used to play soccer, a lot). I knew George was the ‘lesser’ Beatle. John was the best for his glasses and early death. Paul came in second for song-writing. Ringo, by pure virtue of a cool name kept him firmly not-in-last. But George was better than nothing. “Oh, really,” she looked up. Blue eyes, beautiful. In that instant I knew I would always favor girls with blue eyes. “I share my birthday with John.”

Sometimes with Butter

I like toast. A lot. Breakfast, if I have it, is usually a piece of toast and a few swallows of orange juice. Always the same kind of bread. Always the same brand of orange juice. It’s been this way for years.

Friday the man was coming to look at our furnace, to make sure we weren’t poisoning ourselves. I’ve been smelling a smell whenever the heat’s on. C doesn’t notice it at all.

We have the ritual now of coming home to me saying, “There. How about now? Can you smell that?” It makes my throat burn. “No, but we can call someone.”

We have finally called someone and I’m waiting for him to show up. Between 8 and noon; it’s a busy time of year. I want toast, but I don’t make it. Toast smells good and I’ve cranked up the heat in the hopes that the burly, dirty man who shows will smell the same terribleness that I do.

I’m starving. I could have some Grape Nuts, but it’s not what I want. I’m making tiramisu for a holiday party on Saturday. I forget and brew a new pot of double-strong coffee to dip the ladyfingers in.

Gary shows up and I ask him, “what do you smell?” “Coffee,” he says. “And rum.”

Telling Them Stories

At the local coffee shop a new artist has put their work up. The photographs aren’t bad, but there’s some tacky plaque up that I misread at first.

I don’t have children, yet. But in my dreams I’m telling them stories.

I read this as in my dreams I’m selling them.

Perhaps it’s best I don’t have kids.

Mexico’s Futurism

I want to talk about Stridentism, but maybe not today.

Absinthe, the Poet’s Third Eye

I want to talk more about Rimbaud. And the concept of potential, realized and unrealized, and what that means. If somewhere in the universe floats all the books he never wrote. The books Bolano didn’t write. All the artists who died young.

I want to talk about playing board games and about Christmas trees. How my grandmother never let me win Scrabble, and what that means to my competitiveness.

C and I don't go out a lot. Like most cozy couples with nothing to prove, we often prefer Lost on DVD and hanging out with cats to real socializing. Between Garth and Pierre's holiday extravaganza and game night at Debra and Cata's, it was a busy Saturday. I learned Rummikub, which I'm probably spelling wrong, and of which I've discovered one can play at many different levels of comprehension. I'm sure I played at one of the lower levels. But it's also got more to do with luck than I'm generally looking for in a good rousing game. All in all, a good time was had.

At Garth and Pierre's party, we really couldn't help staring at the tree. Get two talented artists and combine two and a half decades of gathered ornaments and a love of detail and you've got something that really shines. Blindingly so. For a few minutes I actually considered convincing C that we too needed to put up a tree.

Having another commitment, we didn't stay nearly as long as I would have liked. Hopefully we'll see them again soon.

On the Bookshelf

I’m currently reading Kathleen Rooney’s For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs, Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (from a writer I adore, not one of her best, but still worth a read), Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I’m taking a break from reading poetry. I won't go into why, but it has to do with this:

There’s Something to be Said for Chronology

So I wrote this novel. I haven’t sent it very many places, and have gotten excellent “not quite”s every time time, several close calls from very nice presses. And have had in the back of my mind that I need to get back to it. To mold it around some central emotion. I mean, it has that. But more. Make it more while making less. You know. What you Do.

I took a year to write it, two more to revise it and revise and revise and revise. Looked at it more the way a poet would a poetry manuscript. The rearranging of parts. Like a mix-tape. It’s composed of short sections.

Revised for two years. Every day. Then couldn’t think about it for more than two years. I wanted my character crazy. Unable to trust and untrustable. Unlodged in time, omniscient. Reaching into minds the way you once feared your mother could.

So I’ve gone back to it now, though a few places are still looking at it.

The characters have begun obsessing me again. In that unhealthy way that I can’t take a shower without them. That I find them tying my shoes, steering the car, throwing the ball for my dog. Like bodysnatchers, they take over sometimes.

But I’m finding it hard to re-read when I’ve already read the 500 pages so many times. So instead I’m recreating the book from the sum of its parts. Developing Re-versions, if you will. One will hold to strict chronology. This isn’t something I’m used to. I don’t believe we live this way, all at once moving forward.

I know what Time really looks like, and it’s got more than two hands.

Anyway, I’m in love with it again. This I have needed.

Sometimes I Think Maybe Everything That Needs to be Said Might Be Communicated with Cumulous Cloud Formations

I don’t really think I see Jesus anywhere. I’ve never believed in the sightings, except that first one on my bedroom door.

It’s all about patterns. I know this. And focus. About staring at a wall long enough for Jesus to come looking for you. For words to emerge. Military formations. Constellations. A little bit of butter on a thin slice of bread.

Sharon Stone and a Bag Full of Books

2009-12-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

I’ve been neglecting this blog. I’m a bad blogger. Honestly I blame it on a) living, b) the damn cold (how can I blog if my fingers are freezing?), and c) books.

I recently thought about re-reading The Savage Detectives. I liked that book so much and I’m putting off reading some of Bolano’s others (the few I have left). I really wish he wasn’t dead. Anyway, instead of rereading, I ended up flipping through and looking at the notes I had made while I read it the first time. And reading a few reviews of it online. It's funny to me that several reviews didn't actually get past the first 150 pages. I wouldn't have any idea anything about the book if I'd only read that much. Anyway, I don’t know why I write notes. I have no papers to write, don’t belong to a book club, and I haven’t written a review in a long time. God, what a book. Anyway, you should read it.

Also distracting me from blogging this week: Lily Hoang’s Parabola, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Arthur Rimbaud, who I’m currently in love with. I’m reading/rereading/gorging myself on A Season in Hell like it’s a Thanksgiving turkey. Parabola is also a force to be reckoned with. Stretching the definition of “novel” to a nearly unrecognizable form, this book is entertaining like nothing I’ve come across. The book wants me to figure out who I am. Or at least that’s what I think the tests are for. I’m closer, anyway. I might be a De-Constructor or a Doer. Also, a Sadist. Generally also anytime a writer wants to throw science in, I’m pretty delighted. If you need a book to shake you up a bit, to look at your own work a little differently, this is a good place to start.

And Anthem? Well, I don’t think Rand writes anything that isn’t one. The scope is always larger than the pages in your hands. For some reason this slim allegorical tale makes me want to try my hand at filmmaking. Maybe it’s just the image of the light in the tunnel, maybe the glass house on the hill. Ah, collectivism. Perhaps I’ll get a group together to make the film. (No I won’t.)

This week also saw me on the road. I can be fussy on the road, but this was mostly a good time. Carol and I read in Portland with Emily Kendal Frey. Like I’d special-ordered it, Emily read Airport, which you can find here: http://issuu.com/bluehourpress/docs/airport.

I read some of the new conspiracies, and also from Money for Sunsets. Carol, in my opinion, did not read nearly long enough. Also, she did not read the poem about the girl in the photograph with a plastic gun. I will make her bend to my will on this soon.

The Democracy of Bad Food

When I travel I eat a lot. Every coffee is a soy latte (which I never get at home, too candy-like), four dollars for a drink seems like nothing when you're moving at rapid rates of speed, when you're away from and feel you'll never get home. I eat on the road. My favorites: Subway sandwiches, waxen chocolate Donettes, fruit leather, scratch-off lottery tickets.

On Wednesday we did not take the train. Instead of the 8am departure, I walked the dog in the morning, walked the little lady to the yoga, cleaned house, packed the car, rolled around on the (newly cleaned) floor with the dogs, picked the little lady up from yoga, all her duds in the trunk and ready to go. On the way we stopped at the Mount Vernon co-op, a half hour south of Bellingham, oh land of richly organic produce and fantastic prepared foods. The sandwich I got tasted like soap. Or rather, the first bite with cucumber and pepperjack cheese tasted like soap. The turkey was smoked and not what I asked for. And every bite I was waiting for soap. I ate half the sandwich, not good for me (I'm an eater) and all of a great big Snickerdoodle to rid myself of the memory of (what I thought was) goddamn soap. Cookie for lunch=excellent start to any trip.

In Portland, I did not ask where the Indian restaurant was. I was a little turned around, but I knew there was a really good place close by that I'd been to before. We walked a few blocks, it was cold. Or, I should say, C was cold. So we picked a nice-looking Thai place. The boys working there were nice, it was clean, they gave us water, smiles, got tipped well. Back in the room, hotel towels for napkins, bad TV going, we ate Thai food that tasted like paper towels. I ate just to feel the texture, then scraped all the peanuts off the top and nibbled on those. Then had a great big chocolate chip cookie. Peanuts and cookie for dinner=excellent continuation of trend. I also had a soda, which I never have. Thank you traveling belly.

In the morning (starved), I had bad coffee at the corner coffee shop and a tasteless and stale croissant. Back in the room, cozy and showered, I spied something with baguettes in the window on the next block and had the best salad I've had all week. Okay, the only salad, but it was good. Walnuts and apples and bleu cheese. Lettuce, too.

Dinner was a pizza delivered by an uncool boy with a bad faux hawk. The pizza was cold-ish, but excellent. I also had a soda, drank directly from a two-liter bottle C wanted nothing to do with. In the morning I had another piece and got all the way to Everett before I was hungry again (more than two-hundred miles). Had a Subway sandwich, the bread of which tasted ridiculously sweet. They put sugar in that? Seriously? I picked the nine grain. What does that mean to them? Is sugar the ninth grain? Then C cooked vegetables when we got home, though I went to happy hour and Art Walk and didn't get home until 8 (much earlier than I should have, tired, tired, for Art Walk). Ah, vegetables.

I made soup last night.

And How the City Could Have Failed Us

The drive down was peaceful, easy. The last few times I've taken the train because the last few times before that it's taken me, respectively, 10 hours to get to Portland, 10 hours to get to Monmouth, 6 hours to get to Oly. It was that last trip to Oly (only 140 miles) that made me give up on driving. Portland should take 5-6 hours; Olympia, 3 with bad traffic. This time it took 5 hours to get to the Fremont Bridge in Portland. It's the bridge you take just after you get onto 405 and is the second-longest tied arch bridge in the world (I like reading about bridges; I do not like driving on them).

My mother used to joke that she'd close her eyes while she drove over bridges. I don't do this. I open windows. You know, just in case I end up in the water. I don't want to die all boxed in and watching water.

We hit traffic, bad traffic. Enough to sit on the bridge for nearly an hour, feeling the breeze and the tremble from the weight of traffic. I understand about failure factors and how most bridges are constructed with a factor of at least 7, weight-wise. I should be calmed, but I'm not. I've seen far too many videos about bridge failures to want to be one of the cars that feels the weight give away, hear the whine of metal and the thundersnap of everything going wrong. I don't panic while driving over them. I panic while sitting still on them. C rolled down the window. It was bone cold and I rolled them up again. "But," she said. I said, "I know, but at this height it would be like hitting concrete; there's no way we'd survive the impact. I'm not at all worried about the water."

The drive back, even with all our stops only took us 5 hours. I have faith in traffic again.

Boys Who Look Like

Jay Farrar hasn't aged. I went to see Son Volt night before last, kind of with Oliver and Meredith, kind of by myself because C didn't want to go. I never saw Uncle Tupelo because I only knew about them after they broke up. Some people followed one second marriage (Wilco), some followed the other (Son Volt); I've always liked both for different reasons. I think they were stronger together still. Anodyne is a genius album. No Depression too. Neither Wilco nor Son Volt have (in my mind) achieved this kind of greatness.

Jay Farrar had a bandaid over the bridge of his nose, a little tummy, and a spot of grey in the scruff of his facial hair. Other than that, he looks exactly as he did when I first saw him in 1996.

The lead guitarist was strangely attractive to me. I haven't looked him up, he's nobody I recognized. Younger than, probably 30. I had a sudden thought that he was probably good in bed. And maybe why the woman next to me never took her eyes off his tremolo-ing hands.

Sera Cahoone opened. Not my type, and her stage presence didn't add anything to the music, so I hung back and talked while she played. I liked the music though.

The boy at the Mac store yesterday also had a huge gash on the bridge of his nose. A theme. He was blonde in that way that made me think of all the boys in Salt Lake City I saw the first time I ever went there. Blonde boys at the gas station pumping gas. Blonde boys pouring Slushees. Blonde boys holding the hands of their blonde children, crossing streets.

At a coffee shop before the reading Thursday night, the barista reminded me so much of B I almost missed her. The good B. The quick wit and innocently seductive way of moving. The one that didn't ultimately hate me. But really, I suppose all incarnations would have disliked me eventually.

I bought a pastry from her, just to go up to the counter again.

A Son Volt standard:

The Biggest Fan

If I'd been on stage I would have been terrified of him. I don't think there was anything wrong with him, he was just really into the show. He looked like somebody's dad who had just been let out for the night after a rough few weeks locked in a house where no one talked about anything but female issues. Balding, short hair rimming the shiny pate, a straight-man's jacket, ill-fitted jeans (everybody has jeans that will fit them right, but hardly anybody wears them), a polo shirt. Maybe he was drunk. Right up against the low stage. The stage is elevated only about a foot and a half higher than the rest of the crowd. One good step and anyone could be up there with little effort. The man rocked out, hands alternately in his pockets, alternately cupped to the back of his head (as in, oh-my-god-i-can't-believe-it's-really-them?), lots of movement from the upper torso, lots of singing along. People around him had to stand back. Seriously. By half way through the show he probably had an equal audience to the band. I could see the guys in the band look at him from time to time, never laughing the way the fools in the crowd did, probably waiting for the inevitably gun or knife or broken bottle to come at them. We live in crazy times. This man looked the part.

The Dirt of Powell's and Other Bookstores

Looking Glass Books actually had a surprisingly good collection. Lots of stuff from Dalkey Archive, a press I really admire.

If you look at their website it's a caboose and they say it's much bigger than it looks. It is much bigger than it looks. It's a caboose connected to a house porch closed over, connected to the front of a house, all of which contain walls of books. I didn't buy anything, I was too distracted by talking to people and talking to my wonderful aunts who made the long drive north to see us. C bought a couple of things, right now all I can remember is David Rees’ Get Your War On.

At Powells, everything seemed strangely gritty. Like the front room, mud room of a house will seem in winter. The gravel wants in. I felt it everywhere. But maybe I was just irritated they didn't have everything I wanted. What I did buy: Noy Holland's What Begins With Bird, Lawrence Sutin's When to Go into the Water, Lance Olsen's 10:01, Denise Duhamel's Ka-Ching, Rimbaud's Illuminations (though not the Donald Revell translation I wanted), and Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.

Basic Instinct

I watched this on TV.

The last time I saw it was on a little TV in Mark's room in high school. Neither of us knew the other was gay. I knew that a) Sharon Stone had gone to high school near where we were and that she slept with the whole football team and also my neighbor who went to school with her, and b) that I would sleep with her if I had the chance. Mark and I ate popcorn. And talked loudly enough that his mother told us to shut up; his father had to work early the next day.

It's still a good movie. Sharon Stone is still hot. It occurs to me that I'm probably now about the age she was then. She seemed so old and untouchable. I have little interest in her now.

How have I not mentioned this yet?!

2009-11-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

Our Portland reading has been rescheduled for Thursday, December 3rd!

Emily Kendal Frey, Carol Guess and I will read at Looking Glass Books at 7pm.

Hope to see you there!

Of unsolvable cause.

2009-11-08T09:08:00.001-08:00

Last night I started reading Kary Wayson's American Husband. Last night I made plans to go to the movies this afternoon. Last night I had a dream about going to the movies with Kary Wayson. I'm not going with her. This book, however, is fantastic.

Though I read and love reading a lot of poetry, a lot of contemporary poetry, I get the sense that much of it is well-worn territory, that most of it I don't "need" to read (like I need to read Roberto Bolano, to use a recent obsession).

Yesterday I had a headache and all I did was read Nicholson Baker's new book The Anthologist, in it the narrator talks about John Ashbery, how cool it is that missing r, and says, "I'd never really cottoned to Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the book that won three awards and made him known throughout the free-verse universe. I'd tried to read it a few times and failed. It's arbitrary. It reads as if it's written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator. It doesn't sing" (233).

I enjoy reading a lot of poetry, but I don't often get those moments where I feel like something has shifted in me that needs to be shifted. Kind of like a chiropractor working on alignment. A bad analogy because I think most chiropractors are crooks or madmen (there is history here). Some molecule or muscle has been moved back into place, or into a new place that makes the body work better. Now I have a word for that, singing. So many contemporary poets seem to work in the cleverly programmed random-phrase generator style. Sometimes it works well, I can't tell why, but perhaps it's that singing that has little to do with sense, and more to do with the primal force of naked language. That said, I myself won't try random-phrasing. I have little confidence that I could make a page sing without saying something.

Anyway, Kary Wayson's work sings. And makes sense. There's none of the in-vogue randomness. Her words mean something. The play is Dr. Seussian at times, the word play is so convoluted it becomes sharpened knifelike, or better wound nooselike, if we're not mixing metaphors, but one never loses what she's saying. It's astonishing to say the least. And I've been waiting a long time, since 2004's chapbook Dog and Me came out with LitRag Press, to read more of her.

AMERICAN HUSBAND

O, Empty-of-Hours, the doctor’s a clock. His hand
is a serrated knife. Heavy his books, his
medical meanings,

his pharmacological eyes.

Father Infallible, Doctor Indelible, Goat
you’ve got, my goad–You, and your mal-
practice suits, your wingtips and tuxedoes.

Doctor Parenthesis, Father
for emphasis, Stepmothers Must
and Because: Doctor dismiss
my dire diagnosis—my god’s

a blot—of implausible pause.

Dear Doctor, Dear Proctor, ad-
Minister my test (your office assigns
your affections.) Dear Doctor, Dear

Forceps, my Father, forget this—
I’ll ration your attention.

I’ll wait
and I’ll wait. I’ll compile
and I’ll plate
an unending compendium of
juvenile complaints:

American make me, American take me
with you when you go. You do not do, you do not do—
Faster, Bastard! American
Fetch! you do not do—you don’t.

American Father, my General Boss
I am your lather—and you
are my loss. Professor my lecture, mother
my tongue—I live
with a desk where nothing gets done.
Inhibit my habits and dress me in gauze—my god’s
a clot. Of unsolvable cause.

American Husband, American Head, nobody
stopped me, nobody said Surgeons
must be very careful/ When they take the knife!

-Kary Wayson

It's not my favorite poem in the collection. But it's a great place to start. And you should.

Portland friends!

2009-10-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

The November 5th reading has been canceled. We're working on rescheduling. More information soon!

(You could drive up for the Seattle reading on the 12th. I'm just sayin'...)

Upcoming readings in Portland (Nov. 5) and Seattle (Nov. 12)

2009-10-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

Thursday, November 5, 2009: Portland
Looking Glass Books, 7pm
with Emily Kendal Frey and Carol Guess

Check out more from them here:
http://carolguess.blogspot.com

http://issuu.com/bluehourpress/docs/airport

*

Thursday, November 12, 2009: Seattle
Seattle Public Library, Ballard Branch, 6-8pm
with Carol Guess and Jeremy Halinen

To learn more about Jeremy:
http://www.pw.org/content/jeremy_halinen

Or the journal he co-founded and co-edits, Knockout:
http://www.knockoutlit.org/

Hey 'dolf,

2009-09-19T23:31:00.000-07:00

There's still a few minutes left, so I'll say it here: happy birthday to my brother who dropped off the face of the earth several years ago. Some of us miss you, some of us should. I hope wherever you are that you're well and happy and surrounding yourself with good things and good people.

Official News Update from Steel Toe Books:

2009-08-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2009 poetry book prizes.

Guest Judge Denise Duhamel, the 2009 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University, selected MONEY FOR SUNSETS by Elizabeth J. Colen as winner of the Judge’s Prize. In her judge’s citation, which will serve as a foreword for the book, Duhamel had the following to say about Colen’s haunting sequence of prose poems: “If I were Colen’s agent, I’d pitch these poems to a movie producer as “David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein.” MONEY FOR SUNSETS, like TENDER BUTTONS, is syntactically rich and varied, using fragments, repetition, and word association. If I were Colen’s agent, I might not mention her complicated and smart observations on women, violence, and money – since I’m assuming that most movie producers are capitalists. . . . Innovative and evocative, these poems have arrived at just the right cultural moment. And I, for one, am grateful they’re here.”

Tom C. Hunley, Director of Steel Toe Books, has selected ZEPHYR by Susan Browne as winner of the Editor’s Prize. Browne’s poems have both heart and smarts, both gravitas and a sense of humor. Here is a short poem from Zephyr which we read as an ars poetica as well as an example of Browne’s keen, compassionate eye:

A Robin with Ragged Wings

perches on the edge of the roof, chirping feebly
to the sky, his head turned at an odd angle
as if his neck is broken, and some of his feathers
look like the cat tried to saw them off
with her claws. He’s about to die any second,
but he doesn’t stop his song,
reminding me of the many on earth who ask
and never receive. I stand by the window,
wondering how can I help, searching the apple
tree for his buddies to come save him.
I go outside for a closer look. He’s gone.
The yard is weirdly quiet without
that wretched singing.

MONEY FOR SUNSETS and ZEPHYR edged out these finalists:

SMILES OF THE UNSTOPPABLE by Jason Bredle
DEATH OBSCURA by Rick Bursky
MY BODY, TORN FROM ME by Anna Evans
AMERICAN BUSBOY by Matthew Guenette
DEAD MAN’S WORD by Greg McBride
DISAPPEARING ADDRESS by Simone Muench and Philip Jenks
CANNOLI GANGSTER by Joey Nicoletti
NOTHING FATAL by Sarah Perrier
WHAT REMAINS, PERSISTS by Doris Umbers
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF A DISAPPOINTING APOCALYPSE by Gabriel Welsch

On queue

2009-08-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

I learned yesterday that my first book of poems, entitled Money for Sunsets was chosen by Denise Duhamel for Steel Toe Books' 2009 Judge's Prize and will be unleashed in 2010.

The year 2010 looks space-aged for some reason. It's only next year.

More later!

For now, should you need a brief morning read, I have a new little story up at Juked. Click........ here.

Great prize, great journal, honoring a great poet.

2009-08-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS (LAST DAY TO ENTER):

The 2009 Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize.
Final judge: Carl Phillips.
Deadline: 8/1/09.
Prizes include $300, $50, and $25 gift certificates to Powell's Books and publication of winning poems in Knockout.
Guidelines: http://www.knockoutlit.org/rsprize.htm

A few cases of which means I wouldn't have been here.

2009-07-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

I know I’ve mentioned it before. My life could have stopped at age 14.

But it started with this: when my mother was 8 months pregnant with me she was in a head-on collision. At relatively slow speed, but there were injuries. My brother's forehead shattered a corner of windshield. He had a concussion, had been standing in the passenger seat. My mother was scraped up as well and had internal bleeding.

Today I watched a documentary about languages and the way the voice explodes out of the head in all directions, how two sound waves coming together create something different. Propagation, sinusoidal, interference, diffraction. When I’m writing or speaking I get snagged on some words. I can’t say Ibuprofen without slowing considerably. With some words in their similarity (perhaps only similar to me), I get frozen for a moment waiting for the word correct to the usage needed to step forward. Vocabulary and documentary are like this for me. Just now I wanted to say I watched a vocabulary.

When I was 14 I lived in Holland, Pennsylvania. Bucks County, not far from Joan Rivers’ place, though we lived in a townhouse, nothing like her stately affair. Every Friday my mother drove me to George’s Music in Feasterville, a few towns over for guitar lessons. The man who gave me lessons had hair like Slash from Guns n’ Roses. He smelled like sneezes or new blossoms before they take on fragrance. I don’t remember his name. I can still see him sitting close, in grave concentration, his Les Paul on one knee, lines just beginning to form around his eyes. I thought he was old, but he was probably 30 years old. Too old to be teaching stupid kids the guitar.

When the lesson was over Tim would drive me home. He taught drums, was in his early 20s, and lived fairly close to me. I’d been taking lessons for two years and had gotten a ride from him every Friday for the better part of a year.

The way it would go: I would finish my lesson and wander the store for awhile looking at strings and at sheet music (which I couldn’t read). I would listen to the end of the drum lesson, muffled thuds from the soundproof room that sounded like small fists punching a feather bed. When the punching stopped I would stand outside. In a few minutes, Tim would come out and we’d get into his car, a Buick, once his mother’s, bought cheap. We’d chat about nothing, music, he’d tell me about girls he would date. We’d stop at the gas station a few blocks up on E Street for him to buy beer, then turn left and head back the way we came, down E Street, to Buck, to Old Jordan and then home. He’d drop me off in front of my house and say “next week?” as though I would ever say no.

I wasn’t in love with him. He never left room for that. There wasn’t any question of clean divisions. I’d never hugged him, had only shaken his hand once or twice after meeting. The one Friday in two years I missed my lesson, I had strep throat. I’d had it all week. That night the six-pack was in the passenger seat where I would have been. Tim turned out of the gas station and someone speeding struck the back of his car. Because of the speed and how he was hit, the car spun a half turn into the on-coming lanes. A truck coming from the opposite direction hit the passenger side hard enough to cut almost the whole way through the car. Tim died instantly.

Tim’s organs, harvested, went to 17 different people. This included eye and heart transplants and skin grafts. There was an article in the paper about it. I took it out regularly when I wanted to cry about him.

We moved six months later, six hours away. My mother told me no more lessons. Money was tight. I’ve never gone back.

I’m writing this for a particular purpose, but I’m not getting there fast. Those who know me know I’m fascinated by almost deaths. This accident made it easier for me after we moved. I didn’t care to fit in. I didn’t try. I read a lot. I wrote. I drew pictures of cities I’d never been to. I taught myself about trees, taught myself Roman history, then Italian, ucello, ragazza, prendere due piccioni con una fava, about painting, sculpture, a lot of things.

Memorial Day weekend 2005 I got into a fight with Lynnea. From the time I started walking out the door, had I not hit traffic, I would have been precisely where a truck pulling a travel trailer went left of center, crossed the grassy median and hit a few cars heading northbound. Two hours later they were still cleaning up. It took a long time to get through Marysville, the accident was just north of there, within sight of the casino. There was paper all over the road. I wondered if someone was a writer.

My father tells a story of falling asleep at the wheel on a road like the one up to Mount Baker. Switchbacks, steep drops in elevation, nothing but rocks and trees and bears, lots of looking off in the distance. He was with a girlfriend who would leave him after the accident. He woke with the car more than half way to vertical, trees whipping past the windows, fast, growing speed, a branch snapping into the windshield, shattering, then the forward thrust being stopped by a large Douglas fir, the back end of the car rising from the force, falling sideways, coming to rest against another tree. From their perch they could see there was still a long way down. Though a tow truck was called, the car is still there today. The man took one look at it and said, no.

There’s a difference between my story about Tim and looking death in the face. Surely I would have died had I been there. But I can take nothing visual away with me, except the idea of what the car used to look like and what the paper said it looked like after (they wouldn’t show pictures on the news).

When I was six I tried to touch the bottom of the neighborhood pond while near the lip of it. I knew I should be close, but every time I swam in a little I’d feel around with my feet and still feel nothing. I swam a little closer in and tread the water, then threw my arms down in one big motion to lift my body up, then arms up to push my body down. The bottom was right there. And I was stuck in it, my eyes just above the water line, my mouth and nose below. If I stretched with everything I had I could get my nose out, breathe. I couldn’t get my mouth out in order to yell. Yelling underwater did nothing to get the attention of the boys walking away from the shore. My brother and his friends, a few older boys. There was a wind I hadn’t noticed until then making small ripples on the surface of the water. Small ripples became massive waves that entered my nose. The littlest bit of water. So close to the surface. I flapped my arms to splash and it made it worse and no one saw. Everything seemed quiet, except for my heart. Without even closing my eyes I can imagine this scene perfectly. I know what each of the boys was wearing. I know the placement of trees. I know the white look one of the older boys gave when he finally turned around. All of this watched while swallowing water, with water pouring into my nose. He pulled me out.

To repay, I had to take a shower with him. I remember this was quick. I think once we were naked he lost interest in me. I didn’t look like the women he’d seen in his father’s magazines.

It was like this Sunday. I can tell you the color and make of the car, a white BMW SUV. I can tell you what the woman was wearing, could describe her face and hair exactly. If I ever see her again I will know it is her. I will thank her for being no worse of a driver than she is.

We were driving to Oliver and Meredith’s for dinner, and to play with Lucas, playing with rocks. It’s 30 miles to get there on a two-lane road. I used to go to the mountain every weekend when I first got here, but don’t get out there much anymore. Traffic was light, as it usually is. There were horses and cattle, stables, farms, a place to pick berries, a place that will work with you on properly inseminating your horse.

She was probably distracted. Maybe texting, maybe answering a call, maybe grabbing her purse from the backseat. Her car dipped off the lip of the pavement onto the narrow shoulder at 60 mph. She overcorrected into my lane, right in front of me, then righted herself just in time. I felt my heart the whole rest of the drive. It wouldn’t slow down. Carol didn’t say anything, which is how I know she was scared. Five minutes later I said, “we almost died, you know.” “I know,” she said. I would guess that our cars, with possible mutual impact of 120 or so miles per hour came about three feet from colliding, which means it was probably at least double that, maybe more. It was close enough that I didn’t even react, which is probably good, considering I had nowhere to go.

The Fourths of July

2009-07-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

I don't care about the fourth of july. I think it's a cruel holiday. I don't like to blow shit up. My pets get upset. My 9pm bedtime gets screwed up. I don't complain. I just think of all those horrible little people out there with nothing better to do than throw their dollars at cheaply made explosives that may blind them. I've still got a scar on my foot from when I was so stupid. Dropped a firecracker on my foot. I was 13, I think. And drunk. I was in love with a boy named Terry. I mean in love with his jean jacket and the way he let me touch his hair.

Sometimes I still think I don't know exactly what love is. Just the thing that makes my organs thrill. That lights me up inside.

Memorable fourths: last night I dreamt I was on the monorail at Disney World, I woke up and read that someone had died on it last night. The first fourth I can remember was at Disney World. I was a small child and terrified by the noises outside. We were in a hotel that had a balcony and my brother and mother and father were outside on that, watching the sky. I was inside with the glass door shut, marveling at the colors. But I didn't want to hear it. I imagine I had tears in my eyes.

In Pittsburgh it was a pain to watch the fireworks, which are of the best in the country, I think, due to the fireworks giant being headquartered there. I never went to the Point to watch them. Once I stopped on the 12th street bridge on the way home from work and watched, elbowed in between drunks. Usually I went to whoever had a rooftop. The last few years there that was Kate, who I was also nuts about (partially thanks to her hair, mostly to the way I couldn't have her. It was only later I learned that maybe I could have). The year I left '98, I was mad at everyone. Everyone knew I'd been duped and no one told me. I went to the party anyway. By then Kate had had her fridge fixed. No more hot beers drunk on the thin slice of roof between two taller buildings in the row on Penn Ave. She lived in the Strip District. I drew in sharpie on the wall above her stairs. Stalks of corn, knee-high by the fourth of July. Good midwestern girl that I grew up to be. Mark's "band" played. His was the tambourine. The drummer couldn't keep time. Everyone was happy, except for K and I. We both knew I was leaving. I hadn't told very many people. Most of the night I was just pissed there were so many people there. I threw bottle caps off the roof (which was accessed through her kitchen window). I wanted to throw bottles, but there were too many people in the street. I was drunk enough to sit on the edge with my feet dangling, knowing there were enough crazy people who might just push me off. I wondered if I'd die that way. I don't even think I saw the fireworks. Someone had pasted Kate's prom picture over the toilet in the bathroom. She had long hair and looked like anyone else. I didn't love her quite as much in that picture, but I still did a little. Later in the night, after so many people had gone home and the roof had gone pitch black, we smoked cigarettes and she cried because I was leaving. I cried because she did, but I was mostly numb by then. We kissed, then Sarah came home and they went to bed. I couldn't decide whether to spend 15 bucks on a cab to get home or if I should sleep on the couch. I had a red wine stain on my jeans and had no idea where it came from. I wasn't drinking wine. I lay on the couch for an hour until I heard someone laugh in the loft. I don't know which of them it was. I went downstairs and almost slammed the door before I realized I don't believe in slamming doors. I walked all the way home, partially through the Hill District, which scared me, but I didn't care if I died.

That fall I would fall in love again. First with a picture on a refrigerator, later in a cramped spare room with mahjongg. Of course it wouldn't work then, it wasn't supposed to. I wasn't even in a place where things could, even if she wasn't my best friend's girl. Then the next year Rita and I took a road trip. Plan: to be gone all summer. We left Atlanta in June and made it to L.A. by the 2nd or 3rd of July. That first night we'd driven from Santa Fe, leaving after lunch. I knew it was a drive. What really exhausted me was all the highways once we felt like we were close. We got there at 3am. We got high and watched The Blair Witch Project, which hadn't come out in theaters yet and I'd never heard of, so D could try to convince us it was real. I was scared for a minute. On the fourth we went to a neighbor's rooftop. I almost thought he had forgiven me for liking his girlfriend so much, but he never really got over it. I knew I'd disobeyed that seminal rule, not to mess with your friend's girlfriend, but it never really felt like she was his. Maybe it's arrogance to think she was always more mine. I'm not a fan of arrogance, but I'll be the first to say I've got it. Sometimes bad. Especially when it comes to pretty girls. I remember what the rooftop looked like, the building lobby. But I remember nothing of the rest of the night, except feeling sad, smoking pot, and cigarette after cigarette. I think this was as far as I could see of the sky lighting up, just that small ember right in front of my face. That's where everything was.

Hey pretty, look at you. Maybe one day you'll be the bride

2009-06-19T10:37:00.001-07:00

Through paying so much attention to news from Iran this week, I somehow missed this. Again the mixed emotions. Yeay for being shortlisted; ugh for losing again. This makes 8 times as a finalist for this ms.

Congratulations to Mr. Finn as well as all the other near-misses. I look forward to reading From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet. It looks like a winner!

Hudson Prize 2009 Winner:
From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet- Patrick Michael Finn

Hudson Prize 2009 Finalists:
New to the Lost Coast- Joshua Butts
Dreams of People Waiting in Line- Elizabeth J. Colen <-----lookee!
Birthplace of Television- Joshua Foster
The Portable Son- Barrett Hathcock
Westward Expansion- B.J. Hollars
Bad Numbers- Evan Lavender-Smith
Ms. Yamada's Toaster- Kelly Luce
The Trees of Mars- Mary McCray
Owner's Manual- Morgan McDermott
Fuse- Marc McKee
Sidewalk Dancing- Letitia Lehua Moffitt
Longing to Love You- David Philip Mullins
Possum Nocturne- Doug Ramspeck
Most Likely to be Remembered- Midge Raymond
Kissing Jesus- Tree Reisner

A Place I'm Determined to Live

2009-05-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

This morning, walking, I was half asleep. I always walk the dog when C walks to yoga. Then we start the day together. Sometimes I'm sleepy and grumpy (I often wake a mite irritable, usually just from naps though if someone else is around, not usually from night), sometimes I'm grumpy and/or quiet because I've been working for several hours already, sometimes I've woken up three minutes before and something about being in this space between awake and asleep sparks the hilarity in me. This morning I was hilarious, even though I was annoyed that I didn't have time to have C change my bandage (I can't reach it well and it doesn't go well when I do it myself. Hopefully just another week of this). One of the things I like about my relationship is that I'm way funnier than she is. And she laughs at all my jokes. Sometimes it takes a while to go to sleep, just for this simple fact. But when she says something that's actually funny (and not just what she thinks is funny), it blows every clever comment I've ever made out of the water. This morning after blocks of my supposed hilarity she asked why I get all the good lines in this script.

This morning I cut the lawn. I am reminded of a sticker I saw once that said "I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself." The job I actually do of mowing looks kind of like an emo boy's haircut. I think. I don't bother with the edging.

Yesterday I think I walked about 14 miles. Give or take. I was so excited to try that new mexican place in Fairhaven. But it made me sick. I don't think it was the food's fault. I think my stomach is changing. It wasn't terrible. I just felt a little ill for an hour or so, slept on a bench on the green. Then everything was fine.

I have a list of things I need to do today, but all I want to do is walk around town again, me and my ipod looking at girls and men in the park who shouldn't take their shirts off no matter what. Or sit under the trees out front with a book.

Last night nobody showed up for drinks. I felt like a loser. But I was a loser with a book, as always. I had a drink by myself. Then to show I didn't care that no one showed up, I had another, which is all it takes for me these days to get to the edge of sloppy. I was tipsy and walking downtown and there was a parade. Mostly children. I cut through it, nearly sideswiped some girl with a baton.

I do love a marching band. I don't know what it is. Sometimes in the afternoon I can hear the high school marching band practicing, even though the high school is more than a mile away. I can also hear the highway on cloudy days. Just a little. It sounds like water.

I want to live in a world that looks like this:

It's Narelle Autio, which I'm probably spelling wrong. I think she's Australian. Takes lots of underwater photos, which are cool, too. But I like the beach ones better.

My new favorite timesuck, is "i can read." Often the entries are uninteresting or downright dumb, but there are some gems. And anyway it makes me think of different ways I can integrate text into my visual work. I don't know. So much of it makes me melancholy, a place I'm determined to live. Here are a few examples from this week:

on running away

2009-05-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

*

HAILSTORM

I had dreams of walking out the door for months before I left. The first one I remember: a hailstorm. Great pock marks and blocks of ice in the yard, holes in the road, the roof caving in under so much thunder. The car groaned from the pressure, but perhaps that was me with hands over ears bending the back of my throat to drown you out. Your hands on the wheel, your head cocked sideways under the concave arc of the roof. It was my fault you said. And our front door seemed so far away and the night still so treacherous what with the sky spitting white bricks, ice breaking weakened limbs off of trees. It was my fault, you said. But it was you who dented the car. Night after night drunk on the ways the world had gone wrong. Drunk on her memory. Your mother was dead. And I left the car, moments before your tongue left your face forever, circled the sky and ate up the clouds in an attempt to get at the cold. But what would I care? I took one last look at your hair, which was the only part of you I was certain I still liked. The car door barely opened. I thought of broken bird wings and downed planes. I thought of you in the sky above me. Dodged bricks. I walked in the front door only so I could turn around and leave. In the car you carried on, beating your hands on the seat as though it were me.

Composition Book Clouds

2009-05-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

I always marvel when the air is so clear that from certain places I can see mountains all around--the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west and the smaller blue bumps of foothills and the San Juan Islands. Often it is near sunset when I notice this, the low angle of light baking the Cascades in a pink alpenglow--a term I learned just after moving here (and just as Voltaire said if god did not exist we would have to invent him, I would have to invent a word for this effect if one didn't already exist).

Today the cloud cover is thick, pretty with striations, stripes of darker and lighter clouds. So like lined paper I put down my book and the words exist there in negative.

The rain stopped. It was brief and hard. Sharp, big drops--all of it unusual for here. Like a regular spring storm elsewhere. We don't get those. I can't see anything of the peaks, the ragged mountains, but the smooth ridge of Lummi Island radiates with purplish hue, the light just right that everything there has such clarity. I feel I can see individual trees and the spaces between them, and the small stretches where the slope's so great nothing but rock and dirt will hold.

And across the bay to the peninsula, the monopalette of gray shades is broken by a flash of bright green as just a bit of light rips through.

I like this place. It's like no other.

Grass, Blood, Books

2009-05-02T15:07:00.001-07:00

Today is day three of recovery. Much of the bleeding has stopped and Carol's mom is on her way home. The patient is at present sleeping soundly on the couch with the (big) dog. Both snore quietly, but don't let on that I said so.

Outside the sound of lawnmowers is comforting, even considering I know what damage they do (putting more crap into the atmosphere per gallon than any other engine). It seems as soon as one mower stops, another starts up. The boy next door just mowed their small patch and now the house on the other side of us has started up. Soon, if the skies stay dry for now, I'll probably go out and make the big squeaking sound that I make when I mow. The sound that does not sound like the rest. The push mower. It takes some sweat, and I'm my own self-propeller. A week and a half ago (the first mowing of the year), I learned that the extension cord for the trimmer only reaches half the front yard. If the neighbors didn't think we were batty before, me on my hands and knees trimming the grass around the picket fence with a pair of scissors probably pushed the general consensus over.

I haven't felt much like writing lately, not writing anything, emails, poems (napowrimo be damned), revising the novel, none of it. Somehow getting dirty on long dog walks and from gardening (you should see my backyard!) seems more vital to me than it does. It ebbs and flows. I try not to get too anxious when I don't want to write. It's like getting infant me to eat peas or carrots. It was a mess and most of it ended up on the floor or in my hair. I'm not sure the metaphor is right, but there it is. I just don't want to. In the past three years I've accomplished more than in the rest of my life combined. I'm pretty happy with where things are. Reading also takes precedence.

This year, thus far:

1. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity – Slavoj Zizek
2. The Capital of Solitude – Gregory Orfalea
3. The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) – Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard
4. Bad Alchemy – Dionisio Martinez
5. Singing from the Well – Reinaldo Arenas
6. Dreamtigers (El Hacedor) – Jorge Luis Borges
7. Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object – Kathleen Rooney
8. Only This Blue – Betsy Warland
9. In the Devil’s Territory – Kyle Minor
10. The End of Rude Handles – Jen Tynes
11. Earth in the Attic – Fady Joudah
12. Too Close to the Falls – Christine Gildenour
13. The Art of the Poetic Line – James Longenbach
14. Names on the Land – George Stewart
15. A Humument – Tom Phillips
16. In the Land of the Free – Geoffrey Forsyth
17. Bloodroot – Betsy Warland
18. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
19. The Bride Minaret – Heather Derr-Smith
20. Blessing of the Animals – Brenda Miller
21. Meteoric Flowers – Elizabeth Willis
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
23. The Massacre at El Mozote – Mark Danner
24. Becoming Abigail – Chris Abani
25. Airport – Emily Kendal Frey
26. The Doorbells of Florence – Andrew Losowsky
27. This In Which – George Oppen
28. Pain Fantasy – Jason Bredle
29. Eva Hesse Drawing – Catherin de Zegher, ed.
30. Falsework – Gary Geddes
31. Seeing is the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
32. Areas of Fog – Joseph Massey
33. Travel – Yuichi Yokoyama
34. Nada – Carman Laforet
35. In the Mode of Disappearance – Jonathan Weinert
36. Dark Thirty – Santee Frazier
37. Blood Dazzler – Patricia Smith
38. Quadrifariam – Frank Samperi
39. The Man Without Qualities (Part One) – Robert Musil
40. Undersleep – Julie Doxsee
41. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
42. Wetlands - Charlotte Roche

Zumalacarreguy

2009-04-09T09:31:00.001-07:00

1. Got a note from a dead woman today. My grandmother's been gone seven years, so I was kind of startled to see her handwriting in the mail. My aunt has been planning on moving west for years and got canned last month. I'm sorry, "laid off." In going through her stuff for the move she found a book my grandmother wanted me to have. Un Chapitre de l'Histoire de Charles V par Le Baron de Los Dalles, first printing 1835. It's actually in radically good shape for being 175 years old. With it came, of course, the history of the book (of course if you knew my grandmother). The explanation was written by my great grandmother in some time of thin paper. She loved her typewriter and printed everything perfectly with it. The book belonged to Angelica Singleton Van Buren and bears her signature on the title page, along with her address at the time. She was my great-great-great-great-grandfather's sister and she married the president's son. Because the president was a widower she served as first lady during his tenure in office.

2. I think the babies next door are controlling my cycle.

3. Things are in bloom.

4. I just started reading a fantastic book, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I mean, wow. He could be contemporary. Not that I'm only into reading contemporary fiction, it's just that I've been reading a lot of it lately. I don't really understand how he wrote this book in the 1920s. Or reversely, how I haven't come across anything else comparable to its style. It feels new, but without the pointlessness of most contemporary fiction. If you're the one who suggested it to me, thank you. I keep a list that sometimes gets pretty long and I forget who suggested what or what I read that made reference to something else.

5. I also wrote today, so I'm happy. I started off doing Napowrimo this month, but that started seeming forced because the poetry project I'm working on needs longer legs than that. There's the research, then the fact that I can't really force myself to think of the subject matter in the right way. There's some coercion as with anything, sure. But to some degree it just has to happen. I worked on another piece of TBM. I know it's done, but I'm considering making a few cuts towards the end and filling in a tiny bit more back story, parts that delight me. It's interesting to me now how with this book I sat down and actually did what "they" say you should do and got to know all the characters before even attempting the actual story. I'm so fascinated by these people that some of the minors may get their own stories told in subsequent novel attempts if nothing fresh emerges. I like my people. There's too much to tell of them to get it all in.