Trains, Strange, and Branches

In two weeks the travel starts. Me on a train. Me at my aunt's wedding in Monmouth, then me on a train for a day and a half, a two-hour layover in LA's Union Station, then another two days on the train, this time with lie-down and feed-me accommodations (as in, I got a room). I get a room when I go to Kansas because the train ride ends for me at 3am. Then I get to hope my rental car is waiting there in the station dark, parked someplace I can find, key handed to me by the disinterested party of the station attendant (after all his other chores of off-loading and loading passengers is done). The last time I waited 25 minutes in the blue station light, watching the child's-fist-sized flying midwestern bugs beat themselves senseless against the overlarge lights on the platform outside. 

I get the keys and I drive for an hour and a half. I hope my grandfather has left the door unlocked. Otherwise I look for the key, if I remember he keeps one hidden outside. I will get to his house at 5am. If I can't get in I go to the all night Walmart and try on sunglasses and drink chocolate milk and sit under a light in the parking lot where fist-sized bugs beat themselves 20 feet above me. I read a book or I nap. I hope the right people travel through the parking lot, if any travel through at all. I am afraid of small towns in the middle of the night. I am right to do so. I grew up in a small town. I grew up gay in a small town. I am right to be nervous. 

But nothing has ever happened to me there. My grandfather's town feels good to me. I get to his house a few hours later when I know he is up and drinking decaf and reading the morning paper if the morning paper has found its way inside to him. Now he is less mobile though, and no longer takes the paper; he told me last week. What I will do without the crossword and sudoku and jumble, I do not know. What I will do without the local news to educate me on their ways. I will eye the big bottle of bourbon too early. I will talk about the ice road truckers. I will show pictures of my dog. I will listen to him breathe, and listen to his oxygen machine breathe. I will wish things had been different, and that I had known him for more than just these past several years. He's a good guy. Interesting and smart. And so am I. We get along. Laugh at the same things, vote the same way. We think the same women are beautiful usually.

My parents separated when I was five. And it was ugly. And then none of us lived in Kansas anymore. And everyone hated everyone. And I saw my grandparents when I was ten and then never again. Until I made it happen when I was 27. My grandmother died a month later. Now I go back every year.

This isn't what I meant to talk about.

I meant to say what I was reading. Partly in preparation for the journey. 

I just finished reading Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys and am typing up notes. (An odd relation: I get off the train in Newton, KS.) I am reading Andrew Zawacki's Anabranch. Slowly, the way I read things that are good. Things that stun me. 

From the page I am on, this...

14

Nor were we immune to such evolve and overwhelm. A diminishing match the frontier of unbreaking, we vexed oscura to spark, hearing it inhabit a new constellation: neither the sisters who cluster for beauty nor Sirius in a bid for omnipotence, but wax flower and ironbark, plainchant of a diesel engine coruscating rock at the edge of across. Where--razorwire spiraled to prevel the dead from defecting, or ghosts from insinuating when least required--a flood lamp broiled the salt flats torn from a page too charred to read, as we wagered who the photographer was, cutting our hearts on the hours until sunrise, on anything not expired. The soul opting out through its second-hand lens: the eye that eroded from lexis to shadow, azure by estrange, or the eye beset by a looking-glass inlet, a mile ago dark but now dazzling.

Odd how well that random grab fits with this post. It's such a good book.

And this, I read today by Anna Journey: http://atlengthmag.com/prose/strange-merchants/

In either scenario, a stranger flees in mortal fear through an exit. 

and

In the classic anthropological text, The Stranger (1908), German sociologist Georg Simmel articulates his concept of a unique sociological form. A “peculiar tension” arises, Simmel suggests, from “the stranger,” who manages to be both close to and remote from us at once. The value of such figures in society, then, stems from the strangers’ “objectivity.” Because they aren’t intimately connected with our lives, we feel freer to confess to them our secrets. In pre-modern societies, Simmel writes, most strangers within a group made their living as traders or tradesman, those “‘strange’ merchants” who move closely among us in a crowd, performing necessary tasks, even as they remain enigmatic.

I have more to say, but no time to say it. The dog deserves a walk. 

the in-betweens

I recently read Srikanth Reddy's Facts for Visitors, and also Voyager. Which I really enjoyed. And read another book I didn't really care for, that I won't bother to name, although it too was interesting to look at in order to further understand what it is poets are doing when they cross the border between lineated and prose poems, why they make the decisions they make to break or not to break. I have a stack of books and I'm working through them. Because, really, there's not much else going on. And because I want to get as far on my critical thesis as possible before fall. Before late summer travel really. 


Today I read the first of two Barbara Jane Reyes books I will read. Poeta en San Francisco. In it I found the sounds to be a mixed bag of stunning and lackluster. Sounds to be the first stick by which I measure any writing, of course. Leaving that aside, the project of the book and the execution of it is incredibly powerful. A look at war. And war culture. About that I am still thinking / not yet in a position to comment on. 


From the book I will share an excerpt of a poem, which I am rudely taking out of context, but which (out of context) moved me today. Because it's where I am. The second I will include whole-cloth.




--




(from one of the epistolary prose poetry parts... p 92)



there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match.




-




[agimat kinabukasan]


one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires’ edicts; its walls will hold with blood and spittle, brackish water and sun-dried grasses. within these walls she will inscribe her own terms of worship, upon every pillar and column, glyphs resembling earth and ocean. once she had no sharpened stone, no reason for stone, for once the wind bore her words upon its entire wingspan. carved into bamboo, banana leaf, her river poems, her birdsong.


you came then, with your devices, and you will come again, believing yourself to be some cipher, some illuminati, plunder-hungry in secrecy. she will not appease you, but with the fire you once took to her flesh, she will melt down your weapons, forge her own gods, and adorn her own body.


it is for no glory, no father, no doctrine. as it was in the beginning, so shall it be again. in plumes of ash blanketing sky, the land expels that with which she was poisoned. 

Talk About SOMETHING

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.

A poem is not an abstraction.

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.

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

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

on running away

*


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.

Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory, coming to a city near you!

If you're in Bellingham, or have the means and the will to get here the evening of Saturday, February 7, please join me in celebrating the recent release of Kathleen Rooney's memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object and Kyle Minor's short story collection In the Devil's Territory, both excellent reads. Kyle and Kathleen have graciously asked me to appear on the ticket for their Bellingham reading at Village Books. Prior to being asked to read with them, I knew nothing about Kyle's work and tout de suite took advantage of the holiday sale over at Dzanc Books to grab myself a copy of his collection (as well as the latest Yannick Murphy book, In a Bear's Eye). Dzanc Books is a new press and if Kyle's book is any indication of the quality of the rest of their output, I think we're in for a long and excellent ride with them. As I do with any book of great merit, I have been taking my time getting through In the Devil's Territory (though I plan to have it finished before they roll into town). The (long) short story "A Day Meant to Do Less" is a complicated masterpiece that beautifully navigates multiple time shifts and perspective, including what has proven for me the best written illustration of dementia I have ever read in which the character exists on several planes of time and experience at once. I really can't emphasize enough how worth your time this book is.

Kathleen Rooney, thus far better known to me as a poet (mostly for her moving and at times appropriately jarring and disconcerting look at the art and oddness of wedding in 2007's winner of Switchback Books's Gatewood Prize, Oneiromance), has outdone herself with Live Nude Girl. Kathleen's memoir primarily addresses her experience as a nude art model and the strange perspectives that go along with that. At times she's balancing on several different levels, deftly melding art history, theory, and popular culture with sometimes wonderfully almost clinical narrative of the mechanics of modeling, as well as excerpts from childhood memory when supposing what may have allowed her this direction. As someone comfortable with my body, yet not willing to disrobe for strangers and having never examined this for myself, I read this book with almost voyeuristic pleasure. Check out this and other books by K. Rooney here: www.kathleenrooney.com. Oh! And she's also one of the founding editors of one of the best small presses in recent years to rocket onto the scene, Rose Metal Press (www.rosemetalpress.com).

Anyway, my lunch menu is tuna salad and Lost, and it's really calling me. Check Kathleen Rooney, Kyle Minor and I out Saturday, February 7 at Village Books, 7PM. To round out a triple-genre threat, I'll likely read a few poems to start things off. For other dates and locations, check the poster above or see the tour blog here.

Go hear!

TONIGHT!
Village Books! 7PM!

Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in Tinderbox Lawn illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess' poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when "the small mad heart at the center of things stall mid-tick." Carol Guess is the author of two novels, Seeing Dell and Switch; a memoir, Gaslight, and a collection of poetry, Femme's Dictionary. She is an associate professor of English at Western Washington University.

Poet Joseph Massey has this to say about TINDERBOX LAWN:
The sharply cut lines of Tinderbox Lawn veer from the stark and crystalline―”think hard enough about broken glass and it becomes rain”―to the blur of memory and dreams: ”silver with raindrops―no, barbed wire.” And between those conditions the possibility and impossibility of love lingers throughout, amidst vivid details of urban spectacle. Carol Guess, through brilliantly wrought blocks of prose, has made the kind of poetry you'll want to keep on your night-stand; poetry that won't leave the back of your head―the pulse and insistent whisper of it―a “bridge between faith and decay.”

Go hear.

October 23, 2008 at Richard Hugo House ~ 7PM

The Filter Release Party is a night of readings and music celebrating the release of the second volume of Filter, a limited edition hand bound hardback literary journal that features poetry, prose, erasures, and art.


ABOUT FILTER:

Jennifer Borges Foster, editor and creator of Filter, seeks to revive the craft and artistry of book making and book binding that has been nearly driven extinct. Each copy of Filter is made by hand, sewn together using various colors of waxed Irish Linen thread and an exposed spine binding with a modified button-hole binding technique. End papers are hand torn and come from various sources, including Japanese Washi paper, pages from Apgar’s Plant Analysis Adapted to All Botanies (1892) (some of which include the notes, illustrations and actual flower pressings of a Mr. D.A. Powell made in the Spring of 1904), and color plates from Travelling With The Birds (1933). Books feature an accordion-fold erasure booklet made from hand torn Rives Heavyweight paper, each hand printed using 10 separate ink screens and slipped into hand made envelopes created from pages of old books about magic and maps featuring nations that no longer exist. All of the color artwork is tipped in by hand. There are two different cover designs (Aardvark & Aardwolf) by Amy Jean Porter (Jubilat, McSweeny’s). The covers are each screen printed by hand, using 3-4 screens and 7 colors.

All of this means that each copy of Filter is unique. And although the books are worth hundreds of dollars each in materials and labor, this is not a money-making endeavor. We want people who appreciate artistry and literature to buy this book, regardless of their income. The books are sold on a sliding scale, with the median price of $35.
There are only 200 copies (each signed and numbered) of Filter vol. II. (The first edition sold out entirely.)

In addition to being a beautiful work of art, Filter features an astounding array of talent, with 41 contributors, including:
• Poetry from Mary Jo Bang, John Olson, Kary Wayson, Elizabeth J. Colen, Carol Guess, and Erin Malone
• An essay on cancer, music, and polar shifts by Tricia Ready
• Erasures by Rebecca Brown, Matthea Harvey & Amy Jean Porter, Jennifer Borges Foster, and Brangien Davis
• Fiction from Matt Briggs, Corrina Wycoff, Claudia Smith, and Norman Lock
• And many others!


ABOUT THE RELEASE PARTY:

Have a drink and help celebrate release of this beautiful book. 18 short readings, 2 musical interludes. Admission is free.
Richard Hugo House -- Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 -- 7pm - 9pm
1634 11th Avenue -- Seattle, WA 98122
206-322-7030

Readers: John Olson, Trisha Ready, John Osebold, Kary Wayson, Deborah Woodard, Corrina Wycoff, Brangien Davis, Erin Malone, Elizabeth Colen, Carol Guess, Brian McGuigan, David Mitsuo Nixon, Kate Lebo, Emily Kendal Frey, Adriana Grant, Tatyana Mishel, Roberta Olson, Bob Redmond

Music: David Mitsuo Nixon, Jose Bold (John Osebold and Kirk Anderson)

Original Erasures on display by: Rebecca Brown, Brangien Davis, Ariana Kelly, Jennifer Borges Foster.

Mahmoud Darwish, 13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008

"He is terrified of becoming an orphan again. He is afraid we will forget him in the rush of these endings."
- Mamoud Darwish, _Memory for Forgetfulness_ (133)

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in al-Birwa, a small village in Western Galilee. He published eight books of prose and more than thirty books of poetry. He spoke several languages fluently, wrote in Arabic. Most of his work has not been translated into English.

Though I feel certain I had heard the name before, I did not come across one of his books until earlier this year when I picked up

_Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982_, which chronicles "Hiroshima Day" of the Lebanese Civil War and opens with a wish for five minutes of respite from bombing so the narrator (Darwish) can make a cup of coffee. From the second page:

"Three o'clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into this narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can't direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time."

I learned today that Darwish died August 9 three days after undergoing heart surgery. He was 67. Well-respected worldwide, he received the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001, and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. Well worth looking up for the beauty of his work and for a different/literary way in to the study of Middle Eastern history and politics, a recent article about his life/death and influence can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/why-you-should-read-mahmo_b_120470.html


***


"In other cities, memory can resort to a piece of paper. You may sit waiting for something, in a white void, and a passing idea may descend on you. You catch it, lest it escape, and as days roll and you come upon it again, you recognize its source and thank the city that gave you this present. But in Beirut you flow away and scatter. The only container is water itself. Memory assumes the shape of a city's chaos and takes up a speech that makes you forget the words that went before." (Memory for Forgetfulness 91)

"I didn't say 'I love you' because I didn't know if I loved you so long as I kept hiding my blood under your skin and shedding the honey of bees gone crazy in the capillaries of the holy sacrament--the sacrament that so absorbed me that my body was in a moment of continuous birth." (Memory for Forgetfulness 120)

The Face of the Earth is here:

I've been focusing, ahem, trying to focus on writing, etc lately, along with the usual cram of useful/not-so-useful get-togethers that summer seems to inspire. There's something about summer that makes me feel the time is extra, a catch-up. As in, can I get everything I didn't do last year into this year via summer? Can I get far enough ahead in what I want to do this year so I can relax in Autumn? The box of years is a mostly useless distinction, but yet I still keep lists of books read, films seen, books I want to read and films I want to see, odd budgets (this I won't explain), home improvements, dog training, wardrobe adjustments, fitness programs. All of this is acknowledged by me yearly. Perhaps it's crap for me to say I don't "do" new years' resolutions. I don't do them, I have it all figured out well in advance of that holiday what I want and don't want from my year.

What I'm doing this week: re-ordering Money for Sunsets, which in some forums has developed a new title. What I've found particularly useful: the use of a three-ring binder (though darling has given me one that will fit 240 pages, the flipping through and movement sans computer has been a healthy adjustment to having fourteen electronic versions that haunt me (did I save the right version and where?), as I'm mostly a disorganized writer choosing to focus on the process of writing rather than the storage of it, the submitting of it, all of which leads to regular trouble finding the "it" I'm looking for), a newfound honesty with what doesn't work, several new poems that do, and this article from Tupelo Press editor, Jeffrey Levine:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript:
Some Ideas on Creation and Order
by Jeffrey Levine, Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press

From the January 2007 issue of AWP Job List. © 2007 The Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

Some considerations, a bakers dozen, are offered here by one who reads 3- to- 4,000 manuscripts a year. Admittedly, a good deal of what I say is concrete, generic, and in some cases, "merely" stylistic. Since style is, as ever, informed by matters of taste, you must take into account that these thoughts reflect my own prejudices and preferences, and that I've made no attempt to gather a consensus from other editors. Beyond style, however, other advice here concerns more abstract matters: what makes a book a book? How is the artistic process applied to making a poetry manuscript cohere? What are some useful approaches to the art of transforming individual poems into a transcendent whole?

The rest can be found here:
http://www.awpwriter.org/careers/jlevine01.htm

Full of obvious tips on submitting that trip many writers up to real truth on how to get dirty and get things arranged, this is one of the better guides I've found on this subject.