Lambda Literary, etc.

Super excited to have this interview up on Lambda Literary:

"I realized that what conspiracy theories are—if they aren’t true—are our way of seeking order, of making sense of the chaos of these terrible events..."


In other news, I am not going to AWP this year. Something about six hours on a plane. And Boston in winter. Also, I'm responsibly wrapping up this quarter's teaching. I'm not an old pro like some people who can take week 9 of a 10-week quarter off without everything falling apart. I jest!

But I am loving my students this quarter. Last week we talked about revising creative work. Something that I do all the time, of course (and obsessively!), but not something I've ever actually thought about procedure-wise. The process of constructing a lesson plan around teaching non-cw majors how to revise creative writing was really instructive. And actually forced me to reimagine two recent poems to their betterment. Accidentally.

I also learned, for example, that I will panic students who hear me say that rarely does anything of mine see the light of day before it has undergone 20-40 revisions. We talked about 3 being the vital low number of revisions: global, paragraph, sentence. (Or in poetry, of course, global, stanza, line.) And then fourteen strategies for paragraph- and sentence-level considerations.

It seems impossible to believe that things are winding down. One quarter left of grad school, round two. Come June I will have one degree in fiction, and this new-minted poetry degree. I feel like I could do it all over again. I like being in school, and hope that the teaching I hope to do in the future allows me to feel in some ways that I'm in that cycle of endless accretion of knowledge.

All I ever want is books and good conversation. Well, a few other things too.

Safe travels y'all.

Books read in 2012!

About half of these are repeats / books I've read before. Several of these books I also read more than once this year. As Sheri said, yes, I am in grad school. The land of close reading. I'm currently working on finishing up my "critical thesis," focusing on books that have both prose and lineated poetry. My five favorites (if I count only "new" reads; i.e. Crush is still my favorite, and I still want to marry Liz Waldner, and I still want to marry Anne Carson, and Karen Volkman, and Richard Greenfield, etc, etc) were: Letters to Yesenin, Tjanting, My Life, The Vicious Red Relic, and Point and Line. Tjanting changed my life. The Vicious Red Relic was unlike anything I've ever read, and the other three favorites? Well, damn if I don't wish I'd written them myself. The Apocalypse (#3) was also life-changing in that part of it became the epigraph for Waiting Up for the End of the World. Without further ado... the list:

1. Letters to Yesenin – Jim Harrison
2. Dismantling the Silence – Charles Simic
3. The Apocalypse – John of Patmos
4. Dream Songs – John Berryman
5. Trilogy – HD
6. That This – Susan Howe
7. The Home Book – James Schuyler
8. Fjords vol. 1 – Zachary Schomburg
9. Splay Anthem – Nathaniel Mackey
10. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song – Ellen Bryant Voigt
11. High Windows – Philip Larkin
12. Tjanting – Ron Silliman
13. The New Sentence – Ron Silliman
14. My Life – Lyn Hejinian
15. Meditations in an Emergency – Frank O’Hara
16. Eyeshot – Heather McHugh
17. Under Albany – Ron Silliman
18. 3 Poems – John Ashbery
19. The Lost Son – Theodore Roethke
20. 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking – Tan Lin
21. Slow Lightning – Eduardo C. Corral
22. The Latest Winter – Maggie Nelson
23. Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
24. Kora in Hell – William Carlos Williams
25. Out – Ronald Sukenick
26. Close Your Eyes Look at Me – E. Marie Bertram
27. Museum of Accidents – Rachel Zucker
28. Erasures – Donald Revell
29. A Point is That Which Has No Part – Liz Waldner
30. Homing Devices – Liz Waldner
31. Facts for Visitors – Srikanth Reddy
32. Voyager – Srikanth Reddy
33. Point and Line – Thalia Field
34. The New Black – Evie Shockley
35. My Common Heart – Anne Boyer
36. Delivered – Sarah Gambito
37. Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie – Joshua Harmon
38. So We Have Been Given Time Or – Sawako Nakayasu
39. Girls – Nic Kelman
40. Savage Girls and Wild Boys – Michael Newton
41. Anabranch – Andrew Zawacki
42. The Vicious Red Relic, Love – Anna Joy Springer
43. In Media Res – Karen An-hwei Lee
44. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound – Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (ads)
45. Peculiar Motions – Rosmarie Waldrop
46. Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry – Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek (eds)
47. Clamor – Elyse Fenton
48. The American Prose Poem – Michel Delville
49. Deepstep Come Shining – C.D. Wright
50. Heart First into the Forest – Stacy Gnall
51. Dora: A Headcase – Lidia Yuknavitch
52. The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me – Maged Zaher
53. The Balloonists – Eula Biss
54. This is Not a Novel – David Markson
55. Except by Nature – Sandra Alcosser
56. The Guardians – Sarah Manguso
57. The Pharmacist’s Mate – Amy Fusselman
58. Paris Spleen – Charles Baudelaire
59. The Very Thing That Happens – Russell Edson
60. The Elusive Embrace – Daniel Mendelsohn
61. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth
62. Plainwater – Anne Carson
63. Free Verse – Charles O. Hartman
64. The Book of Embraces – Eduardo Galeano
65. Within the Context of No Context – George W.S. Trow
66. Spar – Karen Volkman
67. Sad Little Breathing Machine – Matthea Harvey
68. Crash’s Law – Karen Volkman
69. Speedboat – Renata Adler
70. The World Doesn’t End – Charles Simic
71. Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy – Keith Waldrop
72. Early Poems – Charles Simic
73. Saying the World – Peter Pereira
74. Paterson – William Carlos Williams
75. Goldbeater's Skin – G.C. Waldrep
76. There Are Three – Donald Revell
77. Invisible Bride – Tony Tost
78. Melancholia – Kristina Marie Darling
79. Bin Ramke – Matter
80. A Carnage in the Lovetrees – Richard Greenfield
81. Just Whisper: A Valentine – C.D. Wright
82. The Firestorm – Zach Savich
83. Remote – David Shields
84. Crush – Richard Siken
85. Notes from Irrelevance – Anselm Berrigan

WAITING UP FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is available!!!

The new book can be found here... deeply discounted for the moment! I highly recommend the color; I have been carrying around a copy myself and fondling the pages nonstop since I got my copy! (Though I am a little biased...)

Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), the newest collection of poetry from Elizabeth J. Colen examines 20th / 21st century conspiracy theories from a poetic standpoint. Taking road trips around the globe from New York City, Dallas, Atlanta, Georgia, and Gakona, Alaska to Area 51, Lockerbie, Scotland, London, Paris, and Indonesia, Colen visits the sites of alleged secret plans and alliances and their sometimes cataclysmic outcomes, investigating through verse such topics as black helicopters, chemtrails, the North American Union, the fluoride conspiracy, and the JFK assassination, and exploring possible links between government and corporate corruption and the on-the-ground results of continued global overconsumption.

http://jadedibisproductions.com/PREORDER.html


Hope y'all are staying safe out there in the east, my friends.

September 19

Happy birthday, brother. I hope you're well and happy in all things wherever you are.

Distance makes the heart grow

From Yoko Tawada's "The Art of Being Nonsynchronous":

Before digital technologies became a part of everyday life, the letter was considered one of the most important instruments for the transport of words. Even the telephone was unable to destroy the culture of letter writing. People who before had frequently written letters continued to do so to communicate things they preferred not to say on the telephone. The letter has developed its own for of distance that allows people to express things it might be difficult to say in person. This has less to do with inhibitions or politeness than with style. Writing a letter, you can borrow this or that turn of phrase from literary tradition to apply to your own life much more easily than on the phone. It wasn't until the advent of electronic communication that the culture of letter writing began to lose some of its dominance. There are many differences between an email and a letter on paper, but one in particular stands out, namely, the consciousness on the part of both sender and recipient of the distance between them. Even in the case of an overseas email, people tend to expect a response in the next few hours, as if the recipient's desk were in the same room. Mentioning the time difference or weather in an international email can already be interpreted as a personal, even romantic gesture. A handwritten letter, however, almost automatically announces the writer's absence to its recipient. 

Spork

A few days ago, this went live: http://sporkpress.com/fiction/?p=951 - a few more prose poems from What Weaponry.

Almost everything I have ever read at Spork Press I have loved; today I read this: http://sporkpress.com/fiction/?p=794 - Knots by Sam Ramos. It is beautiful. This is from that:

It is the longing for a moment free from time and its cold meter. It is the pained desire for a place with no loss.

The Slim Beauty Knot ties down all things wanted and loved so they will never be missed.

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.