On top of this, Distraction.

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

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

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

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

(image above by Alessandro Pagani)

If you say hide, we'll hide.

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



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

Happy birthday, 'dolf.

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

One More Stop, plus 60 miles

TITANIUM HIP CHECK



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


SHOTGUNS 20% OFF

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




EVERYTHING LIKE OCEAN

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


OSAGE, CAN YOU SEE

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

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

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

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

[Book #95 for 2011]

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

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

from Ariel Dorfman's MASCARA

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

Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

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

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!!

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

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.

*

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

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

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

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

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."