Frances and I sat in the park.

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

"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.

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.

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:

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)

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

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.