joshua rivkin

Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

2011-07-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

In the background of my years in Houston is this painting. A painting like a soundtrack. A score. Like a song stuck in my head, turning and turning, that passage from white to color, those fragments of words and text, that beautiful room that could, even when I thought I knew what I'd see, surprise me and take my breath away.

Betweenness

2011-06-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

Writing an essay on T.S. Eliot I came across this anecdote by the poet Donald Hall. Just arrived in England, Hall went to interview the older, now very famous writer:

Then Eliot appeared to search for the right phrase with which to send me off. He looked me in the eyes, and set off into a slow, meandering sentence. “Let me see, said T. S. Eliot, “forty years ago I went from Harvard to Oxford. Now you are going from Harvard to Oxford. What advice can I give you? He paused delicately, shrewdly, while I waited with greed for the words which I would repeat for the rest of my life, the advice from elder to younger, setting me on the road of emulation. When he had ticked off the comedian’s exact milliseconds of pause, he said, “Have you any long underwear?” I told him that I had not, and paused to buy some on my dazzled walk back to the hotel. I suppose it was six months before I woke up enough to laugh.

It’s a terrific moment of deadpan from a writer who had by then been turned from life into myth. Famous, distant, calcified, he was well on his way to being the T.S. Eliot described by early critics. As Hugh Kenner writes of Eliot’s early critical fate, and the way he’s often taught to high school students, “He has not been credited with noticing anything at all unless in a book.” But this little moment – long underwear! – is a reminder of the surprise and wit that mark his early poems.

I’ve been thinking about the kind of stubbornness, flexibility, resilience and just plain foolishness it takes to keep going as a writer. A couple of years ago I met a well-known older poet at a party in Austin. We were talking about how hard the “between” time can be, that time between just starting out, writing your first poems or stories or essays, just beginning to see the shape of your calling and the habits of your mind finding their forms, and that later (and this is purely speculative, and to be honest I’m not sure this is even really possible in the restlessness of artistic making) time when you’re settled into more fixed, established and less uncertain place. The between time is in some ways a powerful place to be – possibility stretches before us. But it’s also incredibly painful in the sense that waiting or uncertainty is always painful. We lack control. Or vision. I’d like to think this is true not just for artists but for anyone who wants something larger than themselves. I might say, I’m waiting for my manuscript to get taken, but what I really mean is that I’m waiting to claim that I’m no longer young in a certain way or I’m no longer a student or that I’ve made some contribution to the world.

I go back to often to that conversation, the writer and I drinking together in the mostly unfurnished dining room of my friend’s house, when I’m feeling discouraged about a stupid rejection of one kind or another, not for anything specific that he said but the comfort I found at that time in his acknowledgement of how challenging this between time can be. How much we want to be heard by those we admire and look up to that our fears are not unfounded, that our hopes are not impossible. How much we want to know. But how little older writers have to teach us Eliot seems to say. They can tell us to get dressed, to bundle up, to prepare but in the end we’re on our own. Our way might, as in Hall’s trajectory from Harvard to Oxford, resemble Eliot’s own, but his path as a writer and man diverges, as it must. What reader who picks up Hall’s Without thinks of the High Modernists? More than anything, it’s an anecdote that speaks to me about that beginning stage of a writer’s life, when he or she is looking, asking, hoping for a way, any way, to be set down the right road. As if there is a right. As if there is a road.

The Jetliner of Poetry

2011-02-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

I've got new work in a couple of places. Only the poem in Anti- is available online.

Anti- (full text)
The Southern Review
Harvard Review

Other fun things I've been reading / listening to recently:

1. I heard Mike Scalise read the first part of this great nonfiction essay a couple of weeks ago, Exactly Where You Want to Be. He knows things. He loves The Roots.

2. Glenn Shaheen reading from his forthcoming book Predatory. Damn.

3. I have a huge crush on Adele's voice. I too have tiny desk concerts, but they're off-key and poorly attended affairs.

4. And it's not too early to order Marc McKee's Fuse. Imagine if your moral compass watched every Joss Whedon show ever made, twice. Imagine if you could save the fire from the burning building. Or, if you prefer the words of famous Polish poets: The jetliner of poetry triumphs over local trains of everyday existence.—Adam Zagajewski

And now a lie -- I'll try to be better about updating this.

Conversation @ Memorious

2010-11-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

Here's the start, read the rest here

Contributor Conversations: Sarah Barber and Joshua Rivkin

In this twist on the contributor interview, we’ve invited contributors to enter into conversation with one another. In this first edition, Sarah Barber, author of the newly released The Kissing Party, interviews Joshua Rivkin, whose blog offers more links to his work.

SB: I want to start off by asking you about “The Fingerprint Clerk.” There’s something so lulling about the opening and end of the poem and yet your choice to include Li Po and Bobby Fischer in the poem really pulls us back to earth in a delightful way. So I’m going to ask you to explain despite your “Don’t ask me to explain.” How did this poem germinate for you?

JR: The pleasure in writing a kind of persona poem is that the writer can step back and say, with perhaps a slight smile, oh that’s not me. So unlike the speaker, I’m happy to explain. Though I sort of imagine him as the kind of man who wants to be asked, if only to refuse. This poem started with an actual experience, which I then wanted to transform. I had to have a background check for a teaching job and while I was being fingerprinted (it’s all electronic now) I thought about how few rarely we’re touched by strangers. There was something at once strange and ordinary about this act. With a doctor for example, it’s often an ongoing relationship, and one in which one expects physical contact. But this experience had a kind of resonance: an act both coldly formal and highly intimate at once. What does it mean to touch a stranger? How does a fingerprint offer some kind of proof of one’s self? How do fingerprints mark at once both something individual and communal? As I started writing the character formed around these questions. I knew from the start that I wanted to write this from the point of view of the clerk; it seemed an occasion to move outside of myself, and within that voice, clipped and impersonal, a way to capture and collapse the distance between the intimacy of the action and the reserve he claims. I like how you say those quotes pulled you back to earth, I hoped those would be markers of personality and locate a sensibility for the speaker, a reticence to speak, to interfere, and yet perhaps revealing a kind of knowing and longing within the gestures.

SB: You’re right, of course, how rarely we’re touched by strangers—maybe even how rarely we’re touched by those we know as we spend more and more of our waking lives hooked up to all this equipment—but what really strikes me is the way your response highlights one of the things that drew me to your work in this issue, the combination of the strange and ordinary, as you put it. The domestic—touch, friends, objects—seems blended with the uncanny in your other poem from this issue, “Housewarming,” and I wonder if that’s something you consciously aim for in your work and whether you see it as a significant direction for contemporary poets?

JR: I don’t think I’ve considered it exactly in those terms before, but I’m really taken with your description of how the strange and the ordinary come together in my work, and I think perhaps more generally. Tony Hoagland has a terrific essay about Larry Levis in which he describes the poet’s metaphor making as an act of moving both away and towards at the same time. Even as a metaphor pushes away from what’s there, it returns and illuminates the thing the thing being described. Is the same true of seeing the strange within the everyday? Perhaps I hope that’s the case. That by moving away, either in imagination or metaphor or expectation, somehow the domestic, or really the relationships within that sphere between lovers, friends, family, will be understood in a new way.

Maybe there are two ways of considering it; one is seeing how ordinary the uncanny can be, and the other is to find the strangeness within the everyday. I guess I’m perhaps more interested in the later, and while I don’t think it’s something I aim for intentionally, I think it come from a kind of restlessness. Samuel Johnson said something to the effect of, “The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it.” The desire in my work seems to be one of transformation: to take the given world and see it, and beyond it. I think about poets and poems that I love—that opening of “Birches” where the speaker wants to imagine the boy swinging, or the embodied trees in Levis’s “Two Trees” mocking the man, or that turn towards that dream space in Mark Doty’s “Tiara.” They are all poems and poets who transform the landscapes they’ve been given, turning the mundane (ice storm, tree, funeral) into something extraordinary through acts of intense attention and imagination.

And while I’m not sure I could make a generalization about if this is a direction for contemporary poets, it’s maybe something ingrained in the act of writing. The turning of the world into language seems to be itself an act both strange and ordinary. The poem uses the material of the everyday to say what isn’t, or can’t be said, within the everyday. I feel like I’ve drifted far from your really insightful point, but I think finally I’m interested too in moments of shift or change, when expectations alter and surprise—that move to hang the bottles in “Housewarming” or that kind of faith at the end of “Fingerprint Clerk.” These seem like openings, occasions to be considered, and small windows into the mechanics and mystery of experience. Or at least that’s the hope.

... http://memoriousmag.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/contributor-conversations-sarah-barber-and-joshua-rivkin/

How We Know

2010-08-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

Amy Hempel
“The Man in Bogota”

“The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge – though not, she threatens, for long.

“I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

“I tell the woman about a man in Bogota. He wasa a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

“Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

“When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then – that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

“Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.”

Off the Mountain

2010-08-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

To take an amazing, intense week and reduce into a bit size, easy to say in conversation – great – and then keep going doesn’t really fully explain the strange and magic intersection of summer camp / serious conversations about writing, life and art / fraternity party / hard work and tiredness / professional shimmying / inside jokes / extraordinary people that come together in something that stands far outside of everyday life and experience, and like all spells is cast and then, thankfully, broken. Though I’m happy to return to my life, my own schedule and the possibility of getting back to a writing life, today feels off, quieter and gray, literally and figuratively. Time moved differently on the mountain; each day stretched into the mental space of a whole week or month, drawn and lengthened so that I would catch myself describing a lecture or workshop or breakfast shift as something that had happened several days before when in fact it was only hours ago. Everything compressed and pressurized in ways that are at once lovely and disorienting. And yet by the end I felt like I’d just arrived. It’s hard not to be a little sentimental but the truth is that to live that closely with others, apart from ordinary life and with writers who share your passions and understand your hopes and fears is a rare gift, a gift I think that happens with less frequency the older one gets. I met so many wonderful and talented people, some who I’ll look forward to seeing in the world or reading more of their work and others who I think will become lifelong friends. Back in the world, I’ll have to be content to say great and by that mean everything unexplained and unexplainable.

Que Tal

2010-08-02T16:22:00.000-07:00

I have a new running route. Up and over Church Street, down into Dolores Park, up to Duboce and then over the hill that divides Noe Valley and the Castro. In some ways it seems right to have found this route so late in my time living in SF, one that is longer and more challenging than my usual route, a loop that's both familiar and unfamiliar at once.

As I ran last week, a late night run, the air unseasonably warm and kitchen lights illuminating that urban vision of men and women in their kitchens, I thought to myself, against the anxiety about moving, change, leaving -- lucky life. Not for the dumb fortune of having been born in a first world country, but the luck of loving and being loved, of living each day in this body; the luck of being alive and so fully present in that moment. It’s how Andre Dubus describes in the short essay “Legs” that he was never more still than when running. In the middle of motion, I felt a sudden still and calm, something hard to describe but a feeling that’s physical and overwhelming – lucky life.

There’s a moment in a movie I recently watched where the main character described these kinds of moments, those rare coins of experience where we think we’ve escaped time. Even as we try to hold them they disappear. It’s the sensation I was trying to describe to my online students while we were discussing O’Hara’s elegy to Billy Holiday “The Day Lady Died.” Several students didn’t like the poem for its self-centered, urban speaker or for the casualness of the language. It’s a poem I’ve always loved, and it shook me the first time I read it. I spent a while writing a long defense of the poem, not to convince them but to clarify for myself, years later why it still mattered to me.

For me it’s a poem that offers me the experience of being part of the realization of the singer’s death. Here is this moment when we’re going along in our life, thinking we have control unaware that everything has changed. The poem is not about the experience, but is the experience. We’re with O’Hara in that “I do this, I do that” framework, a kind of style that lets everything around him become poetry and when he sees the paper announcing her death he’s transported back to that moment in the Five Spot “when everyone and I stopped breathing.” He’s suddenly outside of time and in the memory of the moment, and the moment itself.

Last week I met my friend John at Que Tal, a brightly painted coffee shop in the Mission: large windows, tropical birds and blue skies etched on the ceiling, and tables of others working / not working over their Macs. Halfway between our houses, coming here to write and talk had become one of the rituals that defined my life last year. He’s since moved and I’m about to and so it was a kind of last lap – a visit to the life and habit that’s ending.

I first came to Que Tal four years ago. I didn’t live in San Francisco yet. I was visiting my friend and since she worked, I spent the day wandering around the city and stumbled upon the place by accident. When I moved here the next year I returned, and would sit all day, hoping to still be writing in the early evening when the light coppers and shifts and the place was almost empty.

I’m back again today, my last full day in San Francisco. Almost all of my possessions are now in storage. My landlord asked where to send my deposit and I told him I’d be in touch. This place, its large windows looking out to a barber shop and a Laundromat, is a marker of my SF life, the one that is ending. One of the blessings of the last couple of weeks is that I’ve been so busy teaching that I haven’t had time to fully come to terms with how different my life will be next year. When it feels overwhelming, this change, I try to remind myself, as best I can, lucky life.

When I think back to my time in this city, I know that what I’ll remember are the smallest moments, some private and particular, and others more connected to a physical landscape of hills, parks, streets. I’ll try to hold to what I can, but there’s a lovely mystery to what lasts of a place for us. It’s how when I think the time I lived in New York, I remember mostly the slight details and moments – the night we went to a dive bar on the Lower East Side, watching a movie projected onto an abandoned building, the fire escape in my first apartment, a snowstorm, the F train as it trundled from below to above, elevated above city streets as I neared home.

To Remind

2010-07-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit -- to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff and develop. and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mind, makes me not a good writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

-David Foster Wallace from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Flying, Falling, Flying

2010-07-07T17:40:00.000-07:00

Earning the Air

2010-07-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

There's an interview in a recent Missouri Review where Robert Wrigley describes a conversation with Brigit Pegeen Kelly, who when asked what she's working on said, "Sentences." I too am working on sentences. And since I'm mostly writing prose, trying to finish a piece before the end of July, I don't have energy to write much here. I gave a friend a hard time recently for not posting anything recently on her blog to which she said, "I'm finishing a book."

We have limited focus and time -- the world too much with us -- and I'd rather write a great essay than a good blog post, though at the moment I have neither. I am excited about this piece and the kind of uncertainty of knowing if I can finish it, and if I do, will it be something meaningful. A late teacher of mine said about his morning writing routine, a routine of getting up early and writing in the converted barn, "I don't feel that I've earned the air I'll breathe every day or the right to walk on the ground I walk upon, unless I've made good language: words that are useful to someone other than me."

And since I'm trying to put my own words to use, I'll just quote a passage from a book I'm reading, Writing into the World by Terrence Des Pres. Its from a short essay of personal reflection mostly about fishing that stands in contrast to much of his writing. But it's about fishing the way "Big Two-Hearted River" is about fishing, which is to say it is, and it isn't:

The boy, of course, is myself, a self more vital, compact, pure, like wood within the inmost ring of a tree whose life has reach to many rings. Once, out for firewood, another boy and I crosscut a trunk of walnut that had lain barkless and rotting for maybe fifty years. When the yard-thick halves rolled clean we found the ooze of sap still live at its heart. Time remakes the meaning of such moments. They grow in memory and come finally to speak for the whole of one’s life. Amid the damage of living I find purchase in that uncluttered coming to selfhood of a boy whose serious solitude began on clear water streams, the Maries and Little Maries, the Osage, St. Francis, Castor, Huzzah, Black, Blue Tavern, Jack Fork. Most of them were small enough to flashflood after a night's downpour. They fell to almost a trickle in late summer, and you could hear a boat coming miles off as it bumped and scraped through the shallows.

Last Passage

2010-06-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

I came across this passage in Solnit’s book, which I’m delaying to finish; I want to carry it around a little longer, rereading the passages I’ve marked and keep going back to its clear eyed gracefulness and effortless prose and wisdom. In an essay about a relationships and forms of wilderness she writes, “A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only this hadn’t. The stories don’t fit back together, and it’s the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses.” The stories don’t fit, and I’m not interested in trying to make them by retelling those stories here; I’ll let go any other versions, even if I think they’re missing or incomplete or half-true. For action, even if it's in the form of silence, is perhaps the truest, adult proof of love and respect.

Three Passages

2010-06-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, or how to fall to in love with book of essays

“That passage from To the Lighthouse echoed something of Woolf’s I already knew, her essay about walking, “The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room….Into each of these live on could penetrate a little way, far enough to give on the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastnesses, but Woolf, with her acute perception of the nuances of consciousness, could find it in a stroll down the street, a moment’s solitude in an armchair. Woolf was not a romantic, not a celebrant of that getting lost that is erotic love, in which the beloved becomes an invitation to become who you secretly, dormantly, like a locust underground waiting for the seventeen-year call, already are in hiding, that love for the other that is also a desire to reside in your own mystery in the mystery of others. Her getting lost was solitary, like Thoreau.” (17)

“The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily. But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. I missed a lot of adventure that way early on, but I know that there were many paths I could have taken, and madness and misery lay down just some of them, just as death was down one of Marine’s, closing off the others her talents and passions might have taken her down.” (109)

[writing about country music]

"There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness because even when love doesn't fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful? There are songs of insurgent power; they are essentially what rock and roll, an outgrowth of one strain of the blues, does best, these songs of being young and at the beginning of the world, full of a sense of your own potential. Country, at least the old stuff, has mostly been devoted instead to aftermath, to the hard work it takes to keep going or the awareness that comes after it is no longer possible to go on. If it is deeper than rock it is because failure is deeper than success. Failure is what we learn from, mostly." (119)

contrasts

2010-05-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

It's been an intense and strange week. Clearing out a person's life of possessions -- separating the things we'll keep: a chair, a painting that's always been hanging, in this house and the last, my great-grandfather's citizenship papers and passport, the wartime letters to "my little mouse," the transistor radio bought as a birthday present, the lithograph by a famous artist found in the attic, the B&W photos of a young family at Coney Island, a case of scotch that's been bottled for more than forty years, and on and on and on -- from everything else. Everything else: closets full of unworn clothes, dishes for two lifetimes, pillowcases and envelopes and office supplies and glass and porcelain tchotchkes for three. What doesn't get sold at the estate sale gets given away. What can't be donated gets brought to the dump. The house gets sold. Rushes of sadness and nostalgia undone by the scale of the work to clear out the valuable or needed from the items which no one wants. What place for grief here? There are lines from a Joe Bolton poem "Adult Situations" I've been thinking about all week, turning them over as I filled garbage bags full of unused yarn or boxed up plates -- "What's left of us / Lasts in what is / Least us: in cars, / in the twilight Of white cities, // In our houses, / In our closets – / Clothes we put on / In the hope of / Taking them off."

And then today. I'm with my brother on the CSA farm where he's working for the summer. I spent the afternoon, barefoot in a field helping to plant potatoes. Red Golds. All Blues. Keuka Golds. He and I, following behind the tractor creeping along the furrowed ditches dropped the half sprouted starters evenly into the spaces. A day where it was supposed to rain but instead a warm, bright afternoon, my brother and I wearing cheap black sunglasses we'd found separately in the house but both took with us, working in a sunlit field, planting, barefoot, talking, laughing, hands covered in dirt.

someone else is always older

2010-05-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

Self-Portrait
by Adam Zagajewski

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers--but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife's face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don't know.
I'm truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that--so far--
belongs to me.

Inside the Noise

2010-04-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

A friend today described her reluctance to spend time on the Internet because for her it is a windowless room lit by florescent lights, an equivalent to the unreal lighting inside a big box store, a place that induces disorientation and overwhelming anxiety. Sometimes I don't disagree with that feeling, but on those shelves, inside the noise -- because or despite of it -- there's so much to see and hear and share, some of it full of insight and some of it a way to avoid working.

About the National's new album (listen online for 2 days)

Lannan Podcasts (I'd recommend the Tony Hoagland and Adam Zagajewski readings)

NYC CWP reading series (Olena Kalytiak Davis reading / talk / adventure is fantastic.)

Eric's blog about the Peace Corps

Jill's blog about teaching in prisons

John's poems in Hayden's Ferry Review

Filed under sports, the absurdity of Ariel Bowfishing. (Fish on.)

An "interview" with Paul Muldoon about Ke$ha's "Tik Tok"

And...

a couple of links to new poems online

"Door" in The Antioch Review

"Housewarming" and "The Fingerprint Clerk" in Memorious

"Pastoral 1, 2, 3" in The Kenyon Review

Late Spring

2010-04-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

I was working with a student last week and we were reading Robert Hass’ Human Wishes together; the book is a lodestar work for me in its ambition, generosity, and wondrous image and idea making. A book of a mind at work, and yet still part of the live, physical, meaning making world. We were reading the poem “Late Spring” in which the speaker, walking into his son’s room, mistakes the boy’s figure in the bed:

Leif does not move a muscle as he lies there; no, wait;

it is Luke who lies there in his eight-year-old body,

Leif is taller than you are and he isn't home.”

Time is confused for a moment in the speaker’s mind and then corrected on the page.

The same gesture, in a slightly different and more direct way, happens in Hass’ new poem “August Notebook: A Death.” The poem, my favorite of his in years, begins in quick succession with mistake, accounting and correction:

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body.
That q That was my first bit of early morning typing
So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right.

I woke up thinking about my brother’s body.

The poem ends with a similar gesture:

Well, I am through with those arguments,
Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit—
I thought this poem would end downstream downstream—
of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.

The poem starts and finishes self-consciously calling attention to the acts of its making, and then correction; Hass pulls back the curtain to the artist at work, struggling, wrestling, and revising. Correction is part of his process; it’s a reminder in the first stanzas to pay attention. To show respect for his brother’s death: "So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right." The considered end of the poem, “I thought this poem would end downstream, downstream” is the poet wanting an ending of unity (those lines about downstream come earlier in the poem) and one of completeness. But Hass can’t end the poem there, even though he thought, or claims to have thought, that’s where it was going when he started. At the end of the poem revision becomes part of the process of grief. He has to reject a snap-shut end and instead continue, an ongoing-ness and continuity of memory and time even after loss. It’s an activity -- correction – that I understand and appreciate as both writer and reader. It feels true to the art. And life. Expectations change and we adjust: awkward, reckless, and graceless as hatched birds. We think we know how the poem is going to end. We think we know where we’re headed. We create expectations, if only to change them, or see them changed. And then we keep going.

Freshness

2010-03-03T21:48:00.000-08:00

In a shot essay titled "Round Time," W.S. DiPiero writes about a mysterious sensation in a work of art, what he calls freshness; a quality that “reawakens us to the intensities of existence.” More felt than understood – and I think often too an experience individual and idiosyncratic, threaded as much into the story of our own life as into the art itself – freshness, he claims, is not shaped or willed into a song or a story or a painting, but an unstable elemnent, a mystery looping in time, calling us back. I have my own touchstones of ‘freshness’: the burst of yellow above the black circles in Twombly's "Say Goodbye Catullus..." or the end of Levis’ “Two Trees” where the Daphne / Apollo myth and the speaker’s life merge or the tremor of Billie Jo Shaver’s voice in “Live Forever” when he arrives at the word ‘wanna.’ As DiPiero says in the passage below, one of my favorites from the essay, it’s easier to exemplify than explain:

Freshness is an aura or perfume: it’s a condition, a state where we’re unaware preservation is or has been even taking place. And it can only be possessed by things we’ve experienced, frequently, for a long time. Something provokes astonishment the first time we know it, then ten months or ten years later it does the same, and we don’t even remember the first astonishment. Freshness is a faint narcissism that the work itself possesses. It’s easier to exemplify than explain. I catch my breath every time I arrive at the famous simile in Iliad 5: Homer transports us from Troy’s killing fields to a farm harvest when chaff threshed from winnowed grain falls to the ground in small white piles…and that’s how white the Achaeans are as they kick up dust in battle. They’re nearer the order of disposable chaff than to restorative grain.

The reason through I’ve been so excited by the piece, beyond the ideas or the clarity of his prose and his ability to dexterously control and change tones, is that the essay does a rare thing, becoming, capturing the quality it describes. It too has that strange perfume.

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/dipiero_w10.html

Our List

2010-02-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

from The Guardian's Ten Rules for Writing Fiction...
8 Think big and stay particular

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

9 No going to London.

6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

3 Read Keats's letters.

3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless.

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.

9 Get lucky

10 Stay Lucky

10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment

4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

3 Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.

4 It is the gestation time which counts.

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

10. Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

1 Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/10-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-two

Elegy

2010-02-06T16:27:00.000-08:00

The first time I ever really saw my grandmother was the night we spent at my aunt and uncle's house a year ago November, a couple of days after Thanksgiving. I remember the exact date, November 28,because the TV was on CNN, showing live clips of the hotel terrorist attacks in Mumbai. We were all together in the living room, watching the news, drinking wine and talking. I remember the sharp contrast between the warmth and lightness of the house and the violence on the other side of the world, and I remember too how I thought to myself how funny and warm-hearted my grandmother was. I’d never doubted her love or pride in her family, but there are certain blindness within families sometimes, or at least a kind of narrative that’s created about personalities. Narratives that are often true -- there are no absence of anecdotes about my grandmother’s stubbornness or independence, it was part of who she was, and passed generously down the family line – but acknowledging them means missing other aspects of a person’s personality. At one point, sitting close together, we, my younger cousin, her boyfriend, my grandmother and I, listened to a few of my his band’s new tracks, my headphone earbuds in her ear and we all watched the humorous sight of her head bopping up and down to the beat of the music before she rightfully raved about his music. I think in that moment I was seeing her through my younger cousin’s eyes, full of generous affection and warmth and respect. Sitting on the couch, a mug of tea she didn’t mind having, she clearly enjoyed her place in the orbit of the conversation: wise woman with advice, generations of experience, knowledge of how the world worked, a sharp sense of herself, and a deep pride in her family. I thought, yes, that’s who she is. It wasn’t that she wasn’t always a smart and funny and caring woman before, but that I don’t think I ever understood or could see them as clearly as I did that night. An elegy is ultimately about the living. When talking or writing about absence, we’re speaking to ourselves and each other, the people who continue and so I'm sharing this here in part as a reflection about my grandmother, though in some ways it's as much an admiration of my cousin and her whole family and how well they loved her.

Hot Opener

2010-02-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

There are endless jokes to be made of the Potomac Review's decision to call their featured story a "hot opener" and though I'm not mature enough not to think of them, I'll refrain myself and instead just share the story by the talented Giuseppe Taurino. He is, and I'd say this even if we weren't friends, the real deal. Here's the opening of the story. The rest can be found here.

Halfway into the Blue
A short story by
Giuseppe Taurino

This was the year we moved back to Queens.
One night in April, during spring break, Uncle Vinny called and said, “Be ready by seven. Tomorrow, you have a man’s day ahead of you.”
Uncle Vinny is Mamma’s oldest brother. He’d taken to speaking to me that way, with directives, ever since my family and I returned from Italy. While we were away his Pork Store had expanded into a miniature supermarket. Without asking for the job, I’d become his assistant.

My New Hero

2010-01-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

The book Outdoorman’s FIX-IT Book by Monte Burch (pictured) published by Harper & Row in 1971 and bought for 25 cents at The Beaches Lending Library & Book Exchange in Eastport, Newfoundland contains the sage words that with a coil of baling wire and a pair of pliers, “Almost anything could be repaired with this pair, from split tire rims to splints for broken bones.” I think that carrying both, you know, just in case, might become my new trademark in the city, which I’ll be returning to next week sometime, and the amount of pleasure I derive from reading about fixing snowmobiles and taking care of hunting knives, is perhaps a sign I should stay and open a repair shop. I'll post his Introduction on the wall of my shop just below a framed photo of Mr. Burch himself looking over the horizon thoughtfully, approvingly. Or perhaps it's proof that it is indeed time to return:

A few generations ago, taking to the woods meant carrying a blanket roll, frying pan, a sack of flour, salt and a slab of cured pork side. Not so today; the sophisticated outdoorsman including auto campers, hunters, fishermen, and even bird watchers, takes to the filed with an array of equipment that would astound even an old time traveling tinkerer. Naturally the more equipment, the more time and money it requires to keep it working properly. And keeping equipment in good working condition is a necessity, not only for your own personal comfort and safety, but for the safety of the very fragile environment you’re visiting. It is every outdoorsman’s responsibility to see that his outboard motor, chain saw, or whatever is working properly and not spewing out avoidable cloud of oil and smoke.

Unfortunately we have become a throw away world. If something doesn’t work, we merely pitch it onto the garbage heap with millions of other items just like. This was no the case with the great and rugged people who founded and developed our country; our fathers and grandfathers who were strongly tied to the outdoor life. The most important items on a farm or ranch years ago were a coil of baling wire and a pair of pliers. Almost anything could be repaired with this pair, from split tire rims to splints for broken bones. We need to preserve this rugged outdoor reliance. If a sleeping bag is torn, or a tent becomes a little ragged, fix it up, patch it, put on a good coat of waterproofing. Don’t throw it away just because the guy in the next campsite has a newer, more brilliantly colored tent.

Shot Me for Quoting Thoreau While Living in a Cabin on the Water

2010-01-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

My friend Darin once said to me, reporting what another parent had told him, that with kids the days are endless but the years fly by. I think that could be said too for how time feels here, though perhaps it’s that the hours are endless and the days fly by. Not endless, that’s too strong, but I feel the length of each day, the steady but sure routine which takes hold, and how time slows and stretches so that by noon, night feels like a far away island. At the same time I’m surprised how quickly almost two weeks have passed. The days are without much news. A broken coffee pot, two loaves of rye, sweet potato and carrot soup, a long distance phone call, another, loving a new piece of writing, a revision, hating a new piece of writing, next chapter, a fire in the woodstove burnt out by morning, crows in the yard, hauling wood, cutting wood, another soup.

Thoreau wrote in his journals, “The poet is the man who lives at last by watching his moods.” It’s a bit dramatic, and I’m slightly embarrassed at the cliché of it, but I’m aware, I think, in the absence of other goings on, to the slight changes in the weather, both external and internal. I’m a weatherman of one, with lousy benefits, except for the hope that in such attention to the worlds I can hold to something meaningful or true long enough to understand or describe it. I could have no better guide or company than Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory.

Enchantment is perhaps the best word I know to describe it so far. I’m not done and I’ll perhaps write more about the book when I finish, but it feels like I’m watching a conjuror cast spells in how he’s able to create a vividly physical world of the smallest and largest events. Reading it is like that moment in the Tony Hoagland poem “Honda Pavoritti’ when the speaker describes the opera playing in his car as “this thing made out of experience / but to which experience will never measure up.” Even as it moves to examine the intimate it feels expansive and vast. For example, this rapturous passage which comes at the end describing his French governess / tutor who lived unhappily with his family for years:

She had spent all her life feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from fiction? Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more than her chins or her ways or even her French---something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her, to the radiant deceit she had used in order to have me depart pleased with my own kindness, or that swan whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a drooping dancer's pale arms; something, in short, that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had loved in the security of my childhood, had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart.

Beyond the sheer kinetic energy of each sentence, and the powerful foreshadowing at the end of his father’s fate, it’s his profound assertion about the the incompleteness of knowing: a person, a place, a time, that moves me as a reader so deeply. Even that this follows what feels like a generous and full and very funny description of Mademoiselle, it's not enough. A moral obligation – Have I really salvaged her from fiction? – guides his making of memory in time. And how that time (now I question what I wrote above), despite what is understood in the moment, can only be shaped into story, into thematic design, after.

Three Photos

2010-01-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

the window in front of my desk
the next cove
the house, second from the left

Windchill -26 C

2010-01-17T07:36:00.000-08:00

Happy Adventure, Day 2. The sky is a light blue, clear of clouds, and from the window it's a beautiful winter day. From the window. Outside the wind quickly turns skin bright red, though, to be fair after a few minutes of cutting wood it doesn't feel so bad. Inside the wood stove keeps the house warm. I'm on my own now at the cabin and feel like today is a day to settle in, embrace the quiet of the house, except for the blowing wind, and get ready to work. I have a rye bread rising and will start a soup when it gets dark, I'm finally going to finish the Cormac McCarthy novel I've been reading for what seems like months, and I'll write this evening. It's a gift, this time, offered by my family to let me stay here, and offered too by the people I've left behind. I'm not sure how often I'll write here -- disappointing the very few who long for more information about the wood stove (top loading Carmor) or about bread baking (variation on James Beard's rye, spiked with whole wheat), or poetry (snow, ice, wind, repeat) -- but I will try to post more frequently, even if it's only a photo or a temperature update: right now 16 C inside the house, -12 outside.

Canada is still cold

2010-01-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

In case you were wondering, Canada is still cold. Or, to be more precise, Newfoundland is still cold, though it’s not snowing and the sidewalks are almost clear of slush and ice. It’s practically tropical and the coffee shop on Water Street where I’m working this afternoon is filled with St. John’s hipsters. There’s some irony – though I’m not sure that’s the word I’m looking for – to go 4,000 miles from home to sit in a place as similar as I could find to San Francisco. I leave for the cabin on Saturday and am looking forward to getting down to the work, whatever that may be. A thoughtful friend let me borrow Donald Revell’s The Art of Attention, part of the Graywolf series that also includes Sven Birket’s really excellent The Art of Time in Memoir, for the trip. Revell’s book is more difficult than Birket’s in that I resist, strongly resist, some of what he claims about the subject of poetry and certain kinds of poems. His is a moral universe, an ordered one at that, and this sense of command and faith dictates the kinds of writing and writers he offers as models.

But though I resist some of his ideas, particularly his views against personality, interiority and irony, it was the right book for me to read at this moment. (A side theory: Books find us when we need them. This summer I “needed” to read Gilead. The first year I was in graduate school, Russel let me borrow Larry Levis’ Winter Stars. Freshman year of college it was Lowell’s Life Studies. In high school it was Nine Stories. I might have read thess books at other points in my life, but perhaps they wouldn’t have spoke to me in the direct and immediate way they did at those moments.)

“I hear no deception in the sound of a thrush. I wrote my poems to be at home with words and not, as it turns out, to master or to undermine them. I wrote to reach my being here,” he writes near the book’s end. He claims revelation in witnessing the world as the world. And what I needed on that plane ride and in these first couple of days of transition before heading up to Happy Adventure to write was that reminder to pay attention. Not the attention of daily life, distracted and half-blind, but something deeper and more open. To be aware of the physical, material world with clear eyes (full heart, can’t lose). To that end, a passage Revell quotes from Charles Olson’s beautiful Song 3:

In the midst of plenty, walk

as close to

bare

In the face of sweetness,

piss

In the time of goodness,

go side, go

smashing, beat them, go as

(near as you can

tear

In the land of plenty, have

nothing to do with it

take the way of

the lowest

including

your legs, go

contrary, go

sing

Marfa, Texas

2009-12-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

I'll add to Jess's recent and excellent blog posts about our travels that for me at least, Marfa is an inspiring place for my writing. Light, landscape, art, new and old friends, joblessness, I'm not sure the reason but I've started a couple of new pieces since arriving. Unfinished and raw for sure but it's an exhilarating feeling to be writing again, and more than that, to be excited about the new work. I'm moving here. Or at least dreaming of it.

Day 4

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/we-heart-marfa-endless-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Day 5

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/photo-diary-and-poetry-as-monument-all-sorts-of-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Van Horn, Texas

2009-12-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

I'm on the road, driving with my friend Jess (and her special dog Special) from California to Texas. We're at a Days Inn in lovely Van Horn, Texas and will be going to Marfa early tomorrow. Jess is guest blogging about our trip for the Best American Poetry blog-- part travelogue, part meditations on poetry and art. Here are her posts to date which do a much better job than I could of capturing our trip.

Day 1

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/we-be-trippin-a-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html

Day 2

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/patience-and-doubt-more-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html

Day 3

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/all-the-funs-in-how-you-say-a-thing-even-more-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Poem

2009-12-03T12:44:00.001-08:00

A poem of mine, Tikkun, is now up on the Boston College Magazine website, reprinted from the journal Post Road.

http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/fall_2009/endnotes/tikkun.html

what happens by accident

2009-11-26T19:37:00.000-08:00

There is of course the pleasure of return, the trusted patterns, the stories I've heard and told, the way in which it's easy to fall back into the roles we've made, been given, and accepted -- all of the small pleasures of being with the ones who, if they don't always know us best, understand who we are in time and love us without reservation.

I went to my aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner. This is our fifteenth or sixteenth year of being there. Despite the art everywhere -- at one point in the night my brother and I walked through the hallways admiring the de Kooning and Johns and Miro prints deciding which we'd like for ourselves -- my aunt and uncle are unconcerned about the rambunctious kids or the exaggerated arm swings that come precariously close to expensive and fragile glass sculptures. It's another reminder of their natural grace and kindness, a warmth they both have that's hard to describe yet seems to inhabit their actions and interactions.

What doesn't change from year to year: the jokes about who drinks too much, who talks too much about politics, who's missing, the production of a group picture, the small children wound like tops, and the checking in of the where and how and when of each others lives. Ritual, we love and complain about, knowing I think this how we find comfort in what changes in small and significant ways from year to year. Ritual, the force that allows us to mark time not as continuous but divided: here and after and before. Ritual, as the way we can tell and retell stories of how we've arrived here, together, again.

But this is not my family. Or to be more precise, they are not my, my sister, my brother or my mother's blood relations. My aunt and uncle are not my aunt and uncle. The ones I call my cousins are not my cousins by blood. My connection to them is through my stepfather. We are what happens by accident. (There's a longer, more complex piece to be written here, about how children whose parents divorce and remarry see themselves within a family. There is for us, a certain point where, aware of the world to varying degrees, we start to understand family not as something we're born into but as thing that can be made and remade. Family is not static but shifting, an unstable element.)

But they are, my aunt and uncle, my cousins, even the people there who I don't know, are without question, my family. I feel closer to them than I do to some of those to who I am actually related. Perhaps it's because of time, the sheer accumulation of familiar habits and traditions we've been a part of over the years. Perhaps it's just an acceptance of the way things are. Or perhaps, and I think this what I'd like to believe, it's a more purposeful decision, a distinction between the family we're born into and the family we choose.

Sick

2009-11-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

In the 12 days (and counting) I’ve been sick, I’ve lost ten pounds, watched countless hours of terrible, mind destroying television, written nothing, read nothing, and have generally been miserable. I’m on the slow train back to better, with only a hacking cough and tiredness still lingering. Being sick is not fun, and while this isn’t exactly news, I haven’t been this sick in years and had forgotten the black cloud that comes with the feeling that your body is abandoning you. It’s a terrible feeling to feel that your body is the enemy and you’re powerless to do anything but be sick. The days and nights I spent in bed, I tried to will the time, the time I wanted to only go faster, to speed up, into something productive. This is time to think. To be still. To meditate. But it’s not. The time when the body is in pain is lost time. This sickness though is temporary; I’m lucky, I’ll get better in time and my life will continue and this will become a story about the time I was really sick for two weeks.

While I was sick C. recorded a couple of short essays for me to listen to. One of the excerpts she read was from Mark Doty’s memoir Heaven’s Coast, which begins with him explaining that he no longer thinks of illness as a solvent. He beautifully, of course, goes on to describe how illness can be instead a kind illumination: “demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are.”

I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about that passage and though I trust him and the hard wisdom of what he writes of, I can’t help right now but think of illness as that solvent, not breaking down just the body, but relationships. I don’t mean to compare the flu with a terminal disease but only to suggest that if illness is indeed a solvent, it’s taking apart the self’s connection to the world. When I’m sick I don’t want to be, or talk to, anyone. Illness means retreat back into the bear cave of the self. To hibernate. To be alone. I’ve felt for the last two weeks pretty far from the normal workings of my life and the lives of my loved ones. Stripped of my own sense of self and the desire to be part of the world, I’m exhausted by my own lack of attachment. I know it’s a temporary state and one that feels somehow necessary, a kind of biological imperative to be alone, away from the world of health and happiness, the world that seems a forbidden and distant kingdom. I’m incredibly glad that feeling is coming to an end. I’m tired of being the sum of my body’s pains and aches. I’m looking forward to being back in the body I recognize. And besides feeling lucky to be getting better, to have a body that can heal, I am also very thankful to have friends and family who have persistently called and wrote even when I didn’t want to talk. Thank you.

Wild Things

2009-10-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Where The Wild Things Are captures perhaps better than any other movie I’ve seen in a long time the danger and mystery and confusion and secret life of a certain age in childhood. It’s always been my favorite children's books – get me drunk and I’ll quote the whole thing – but the movie and the filling in of Max’s backstory offers something else, and though it slides close to sentimentality at moments and the Wild Things are a bit too talky, it also strikes in those opening scenes in particular to something near to the heart of how it is to live in a world that feels random and uncertain and where adult decisions, all decisions, feel both arbitrary and personal.

Max’s misunderstood fear of a dying sun, for example, is beautifully shot with Max sitting in the classroom and then the voice, the words of the teacher, following him as he rode the bus home. It reminded me of being a kid and listening to the radio and hearing for the first time about Russian ICBMs aimed in my direction. The thought of a missile capable of wiping out Washington DC, and our home 90 miles away, felt real and possible. I looked on maps of first strike cities and traced the outer edges of circles of immediate death and possible death by radiation poisoning. I imagined nuclear winters. The reports on the radio were another sign in a world of signs that said, not yours. No control.

The game of finding parallels between one’s life and any work of art is both an act of authentication but also a dangerous limiting of both the complexity of the life and the work. But as I watched the movie I couldn’t help but remember what it was like to see a parent begin to date again, seeing a sister's more popular world, strange and wonderful dreaming and play, or the rage and fear of emotions that can't be accounted for in adult terms. A couple of years ago my mother and I were going through a box of old letters, report cards, etc. and found a report written about my behavior in kindergarten. It said something to the effect that Josh can become easily frustrated if unsuccessful on his first try and sometimes has trouble controlling his temper. We both laughed, in part of how I’ve changed, but mostly because the personality described then could have been recycled and reprinted on every progress report, evaluation throughout my childhood. And while I think I’ve matured slightly since age 6, there was something surreal about seeing a younger version of myself, and a shadow of that description in my current self, written with such accuracy.

Eggers and Jonze, in giving Max a single mother just beginning to date again and worried about money, an older sister, an absent father, have set up clear domestic causes for his wildness. But even while they’ve set up possibilities they’ve also left it uncertain. The scene of the all the kids playing in the school yard, the science teacher describing the sun as a star that will one day die, and the quiet moments of Max playing alone, building of a room of forts, the igloo, etc. – all of these build to shape not the cause of Max’s behavior but the world in which he inhabits. If Max’s acting out were the result of a single cause then I think it’d feel manipulated, and I understand that compliant about the movie, but in my movie watching experience I could believe that Max’s confusion, anger, and uncertainty respond to the fact that the world, his world, is changing. Arbitrary and personal. At the end of a Mark Strand poem in Dark Harbor the speaker writes “Tell me I have not lived in vain, that the stars / Will not die, that things will stay as they are, / That what I have seen will last, that I was not born / Into change, that what I have said has not been said for me.” As we get older we find ways to deal with these contingencies – our own islands of imagination, wild rumpuses –it doesn’t change the truth that we’re born into a world of change.

The movie also conjures with intimate, often handheld shots, the strange and private wonder of play that too is part of childhood. Individual imagination, quiet revealing, games of one and wild stories: these become Max's way not just to entertain himself but understand his place with the world. Being a kid is a lonely business. I think one of the reasons that when adults describe this as ‘not a kid’s movie’ they are calling attention to the themes that make them uncomfortable. It’s what most ‘kid’s movies’ avoid, and for some good reasons -- loneliness is a hard thing to show in an interesting way and it makes people in our age of good feeling uncomfortable. There’s a moment where one of the Wild Things, “Carol” says something to the effect that Max as the new King of the Wild Things will keep the loneliness out. It’s a moment I think Eggers and Jonze perhaps show their cards a little too much. If it is a movie in part about loneliness, it's also about the counter to that: story.

“I could use a story,” Max’s mother says, and for me it’s also a movie about the kinds of stories we tell each other. And the stories we tell ourselves. The story Max creates of the Wild Things, the need to travel to that world in order to understand the one he left behind, gives him meaning and definition. By pretending to be King, he’s able to see who he is as both an individual, but also his part of his family’s community. There’s a letter Don Dellio wrote to Jonathan Franzen and quoted in Franzen’s book of essays How to Be Alone, I’ve been thinking about recently and seems connected to this idea of the stories we tell. Dellio says, “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Max is like and unlike Dellio’s vision of the novelist as engaged in an act of survival; as a boy he wants, though can’t articulate, his desire to be both an individual and part of a community. It's what I admire about the end of the movie -- I don't think I'm ruining anything here -- is that even when Max returns, we know that life is in some ways unchanged. There's no false statements by either his mother or him about never hurting the other again. It's a happy ending to be sure but one that doesn't refuse the truths. Living in a community and staying an individual is hard. Being part of family isn't always easy. Life will continue. There’s no end to loneliness, just small islands of safety and danger, and some rooms where dinner is waiting for us, still warm.

Damn

2009-10-05T14:41:00.001-07:00

One of the best poems I've read in a while.

In a Beautiful Country

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

KEVIN PRUFER
Poetry
October 2009

Last Words

2009-09-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Last Words in New York Times, By Claire Cameron, September 19, 2009

I haven't written much in a while, but this made me want to write or at least post this article. These statements, last words, said by Texas death row inmates before they were executed are compelling, surprising, a few are darkly humorous, but taken together they are devastatingly sad. On one side of these words is an act of terrible and shattering violence they most likely committed. And on the other side of the words is silence. Many of them apologize or ask for forgiveness, and in doing so we see the incompleteness of apology and the finality of their deaths. Most likely -- and as was described in a recent New Yorker article, it seems that at least one innocent person was executed -- being important here, and shadowing all of these words with doubt. And while I know they've been gathered and arraigned by the author to create an effect, this is an editorial after all, it doesn't diminish their power for me. Its not an overtly polemical statement against the death penalty, though it certainly serves that purpose, but rather a reminder that a person is speaking, was speaking.

Nocturne, Phnom Penh

2009-09-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

A short prose piece from being in Cambodia this summer, part of a very cool site of collaborative writing projects called The Owls:

http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/stamps-rivkin/

Why so quiet Josh

2009-08-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

When writing poems, the blog feels like an escape, or at least a counterweight to a certain kind of intensity or focus or obsession with precision, but when i'm working on prose, in this case an essay, or right now pieces of an essay, writing here feels like a distraction or taking away somehow from the prose. I'm also really busy getting ready to teach. So instead of reflections on the state of the soul or the purpose of poetry (Milosz: "The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person/ for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors), here are a couple of things I'm looking forward to in the next couple months.

Poetry! New books from a couple of writer's i really like...

Robin Ekiss' The Mansion of Happiness

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780820334080-0

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780892553532-0

Max! The night max wore his wolf suit he made mischief of one kind and another...

Where the Wild Things Are Movie

http://wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com/

Wisconsin Music! The state that brought you fried cheese curd brings the noise...

Volcano Choir (with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver)

http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG156

boarding all rows

2009-08-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

It sort of makes sense to write this last post of my summer travels from an airport. (and in a hurry) I'm in St. John's Newfoundland and two flights away from being home, or as close to a home as I have. When I arrive in SF I'll be going to the apartment where all of my stuff has been living for two months but where I have yet to sleep or cook or live. My fellowship is over, I'm teaching new classes, my girlfriend lives in a different time zone, In other words I'm returning to a life that in some ways feels unfamiliar or at least very different from the one I had before I left. I've been thinking again this morning about the Cavafy poem "The City." Just as there are songs or albums which become placeholders for a time or season -- for me this last year Bon Iver's album "For Emma Forever Ago" -- there are also lines of poems for me that rattle around, graffiti the walls, echo and call, and I keep thinking of the lines, "You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:/ there's no ship for you, there's no road." But this morning, it doesn't feel like this at all. In the last days of travel the pleasures and small comforts of home grow large -- cooking with friends, my red bike, running up the hill on Church Street and descending into Dolores Park, writing with John at Que Tal. At the same time the realities and questions of the future become real. A friend recently wrote something to the effect that at a certain point ones' course of life becomes set. Sitting here, waiting to return, these next couple of months already have the feeling and weight of big (and small) decisions that will set my life's course for a while. It's a feeling that by turns is exhilarating and overwhelming, probably one of the reasons I haven't slept the last couple of nights. But it's morning, the sunlight is bright on the tarmac, departing planes diagonal the huge glass windows, and they're calling my flight. This morning I'm hoping for good things.

I'm Home (Sort Of)

2009-08-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

though I'm still thinking about Phomn Pehn, and will be for some time I think. It's a city unlike any other and one that feels at the edges of law and reason, complex and unknowable, wild and alive. The neat lawns and ordered rows of traffic of my sister's suburban neighborhood, not to mention the complete absence of moto drivers leaning or sleeping on their bikes, food stalls and street venders, women pulling carts of vaulable debris, seem eerily quiet, as if there is something missing. Which isn't to say I'm not thrilled to be back and have drinkable tap water, working plumbing, cleaner air, regular hot water, wide sidewalks, and most of all to be with family and friends, but even the hum of traffic in my sister's neighborhoods sounds subdued. Life in Phomn Pehn happens so much on the streets and in the outside spaces and I'm thinking about the evenings in the squares beside Independence Monument. To blasting music hundreds of women in rows do group aerobics – lean and push and pull in almost unison. With the exception of the person at the front, almost no one is wearing workout clothing. There are even competing groups, some doing a faster, athletic version while in others the music is slower and more melodic. It's a sight that's lovely and odd.. I can't help but smile. At another end of the square boys kick small rattan balls, double the size of a grapefruit, playing either soccer or juggling the ball between them – a cross between hackey sack and volleyball – a game called sepak takraw. Some play without shoes and I have a hard time in the quick speed of the soccer games figuring out who plays for what team. Yells and hollers in Khmer rise up when a team scores. At the edges of these games and workouts, people sit on the small patches of grass and laugh and gossip. Families stroll and vendors hawk and teenagers flirt and tourists watch and as evening becomes night the crowds become smaller and the air quieter.

snapshot of walter (siem reap, cambodia)

2009-07-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

For example, he tells me, the time he was a Tuk Tuk driver on Pub Street, working all night driving drunk tourists to their guest houses. One dollar a ride. The woman he met, not his future wife who was then working at the lizard shop in the Old Market, but the one who served beer at the restaurant he invited back to the room he rented with his brother for 30 dollars a month, shared bathroom with the other rooms. Five or six times, he says, she went back with him before he found out she was already married. Then he goes to her house. Waits outside. Stands in the dark on the street until her husband comes home. Her husband is a police officer, big car with lights, and that's the end of that. Never wants to see her again. The big trouble, you know. Don't want. Then he meets her, his wife, who according to her father is worth $2000 dollars. What's the word for this arraignment, he asks, when the man pays for a wife. A thousand of it he saves himself, five hundred he borrows from his sister and another five hundred from his brother in law, all going to the family for this girl. This is the woman, opening his wallet to show me her picture, a professional portrait done with a hospital blue background and she's not quite smiling. Pretty, he says. I agree. Together they have a one month old. Still owes the brother-in-law. Or to be precise one month and eleven days. And he asks, where do you go tomorrow. He wants to give me a good price.

snapshot

2009-07-25T03:27:00.000-07:00

yesterday we rode bikes through the ruins of Angkor Wat. it was our second day there and so we'd already seen the 'big sights' -- the jungle tree limbs and roots breaking through the stone, the huge Buddha faces carved into the ancient stone -- and so we cycled in the blazing heat on our single speed bikes down an elephant path to what was marked in very tiny print on the map we had as "the gate of the dead." no signs. no tuk tuks. no tour groups or kids offering bracelets and cold drinks. ahead of us monkeys crisscrossed the path. we arrived at the massive entrance way, the same as the Eastern and Western gates with the towering faces, several stories tall, half crumbling, and breathtaking. here it was silent. we were the only ones there . for about an hour we stayed there before biking back to see more of the sights and then later, we rode the several kilometers back into town to catch a bus for sihanoukville, the beach.

course correction

2009-07-21T00:31:00.000-07:00

to cambodia. i'm at the airport and I'm on my way to phenom pehn. (I'm actually already here but ran out of internet time at the bangkok airport so i'm posting this now) . it's a last minute change in plans but feels like the right choice. some of my favorite people love the city and the country and if that's not a good reason, I don't know what is. and wats. lots of wats. and it'll hopefully be less trafficked than thailand, or at least the parts i visited. chaing mai, where i've been the last couple of days is a beautiful place, the people are friendly and the food amazing, but there's the feeling that the experience of being there already has already been carefully packaged. for the loads of families, first time travellers, and all the other tourists who wonder through the markets. but beyond that, it was a place without history. not that the area isn't rich with culture but that the attractions are about a different kind of pleasure. it's the pleasure of touching a (drugged) tiger or bungee jumping or visiting a tribe in the hills (that knows you're coming and has knickknacks to sell you). i don't mean to be too cynical it's just that it felt like a place without consequence or past, or that the history there was second to the desires of travellers for 'experience.' too much of aiming toward what a foreigner visiting thailand wants, or expects to see. there's an adam gopnik quote i recently remembered and discussed with my brother, it's a passage from Paris to the Moon: "There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more." i make no claims about which one i am, though i know which i aim to be. and to my mom, don't worry, i'll be safe.

Extremes

2009-07-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've been working on this post on and off for more than a week and can't seem to finish it, or at least feel satisfied about any of the claims about place or travel. The other reason I haven't finished it, aside from the fact that most of my intellectual stimulation comes from conversations with 8 and 9 year olds about point of view and syllables is that my little brother made a last minute visit to Bangkok. He was on his way to Urumqi in Western China when the riots and violence started so he wisely changed his plans and found a cheap flight here. We spent the evenings together in the city doing what we do best as travelers: walking and eating. On Saturday, I didn't have to teach and so we walked around the city visiting a Wat (Buddhist temple), stumbling upon an electronics market (that was really a cover for all the guys selling homemade Thai porn) before finding a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a place, from the strange but friendly stares and giggles, not often visited by tourists. Everywhere there were thousands of pounds of garlic cloves and elephant sacks of chilies, as well as huge pallets of bananas, dragon fruits, mangoes, watermelon, papayas, rose apples, families in their little stalls together shucked peas or separating chillies by size and quality. Walking and eating. The food here, especially the street food, is plentiful, cheap, delicious. From the roasted duck to the noodles to the curries, we wandered together through the streets and alleys like hungry dogs.

Which brings me back to my first night in Bangkok. and the feeling of extremes that I feel in being here. After arriving and being treated by my host to a very nice dinner we walked to a neighborhood night market. There were variations of typical boardwalk amusement games, baseballs thrown at stacked cans, rings over coke bottles etc. but there were also ruckus calls and cheers of people gambling. Some people sat on improvised stools but most stood and threw down money on painted boards betting on the numbers from what looked like for all you Price is Right fans a Plinko game. Further in the night market children tried to catch goldfish in a baby swimming pool. Others ate at the rows of stalls on the street, grilling meat and seafood, large vats steaming with broths and soups, and even baskets of various kinds of fried insects. It was clearly a neighborhood night market, not very large but very active with something for each person in the family. Noisy, chaotic, fast and completely alive with activity. But, in comparison to the rough and tumble speed of city life ( perhaps true of any city, but this one in particular) I'm lucky to be treated very well by the people running the program. I've been taken out fancy dinners in private dining clubs that overlook the city, treated to a Thai massage, and I'm staying in a pretty swanky (at least for me) hotel room. Fresh towels replace the ones I use in the morning, the guards at the door smile and say hello as they push the up button in the lobby elevator, and my room, with it's crisp white sheets on the bed and beautiful hardwood floors – not to mention the kitchenette with the washer/dryer – offers a kind of calm and order in the middle of a busy urban city. It's not so much the quality of the room or an attempt to brag about my digs, but rather one part of being here.

Going back and forth between walking around and coming back inside is a little disorienting, and after the long (and challenging) day of teaching my sweet if not very advanced group of 7, 8, 9, and 10 year olds, part of me craves the comfort of the hotel room and the other part of me wants the pressure and speed of the city. What these extremes mean, I'm not so sure yet. If anything I think it has made me more aware of the my outsiderness here; not that one doesn't always feel the basic truth of that to some degree as a foreigner, living on the other side of language and history and custom, but I think the extremes here offer a heightened sense of separation. But there's also a kind of pleasure in the extremes, and perhaps the possibility for understanding; a fiction teacher I once had said that a good story was about moving characters to their furthest poles of themselves. By doing so, she argued, the truth of their character would emerge.

Being in a new place, especially one that's far from ones own experience has at first the temptation of seeing into what can't be seen from within. I'm thinking about Robert Frank's America photo series for example and the way in which being an outsider allows one a different kind of access. I make no such claim for being here, I'm only trying to think about what it means to not just be here, but to seek it out. I wanted this. And this seems to be the real question I'm asking myself. Why go? I think there's a tempting if imagined possibility for travelers: if only I just... then I'll never be sad again. But it ain't true. We know it. Yet I don't think I want to side with the speaker in Cavafy's poem beautiful and terrifyingly “The City” who claims in response to a you going to another country, “You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.../ You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:/ there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.” The only city we ever truly visit is the one we carry with ourselves, he seems to claim – and while I'm with him to a point about the origins we carry within us – the problem with the request of the you isn't his or her desire to “find another city better than this one,” but that somehow the past and the self will disappear. Instead the other city, the one sought, might become not a replacement but a compliment, a city within a city. I think of the last line of Tony Hoagland's grail poem, Why We Went and What We Found: "And we'll never sad again! Or never sad in the same way."

Musafa

2009-06-27T07:25:00.000-07:00

To the things I love about Singapore – the food (hand pulled noodles, laksa, sweet tea, mee goreng, etc.), always being able to watch a soccer game or table tennis/badminton on local TV, staying in a hotel with a sauna and a pool, the sounds and smells of being in a place that's far from home, teaching (most days), or at least being back in a classroom, my very bright and charming students – I can now add Mustafa to the list. Mustafa is a store, though that word feels inadequate, in the Little India neighborhood, open 24 hours a day, that sells everything from designer sunglasses to spices to washing machines to knock-off Nikes. Yesterday, after dinner at a vegetarian place with the most amazing chutney and homemade yogurt two of the other teachers and I walked down the main street of Little India, past the Hindu temple, the stores selling cheap bangles and T-shirts, the bell and beat of Bollywood soundtracks, the gold dealers offering 'Just Good' rates, and the curry-fragrant restaurants with older men outside pushing menus, to Mustafa.

The ceilings are low, aisles small, and the people range from the frantic mothers dragging small children to the older Indian women in bright saris resting on the stairs between the levels to the clearly (see Josh) lost. I spent most of my time looking rows of adapters, running shoes, razors, spices, and, cue angelic music the Nikon D5000. What I loved there wasn't the quality or price, but the sheer quantity of each thing offered – endless varieties of cumin and rows of different kinds of tennis racket – and the number of people weaving through the aisles, most clearly on a mission. They knew better than to walk in and browse. It's a surreal sort of place, and after getting lost several times and rejoining my friends, I was ready to return to the street. And it's loud. From the ubiquitous pop music playing everywhere here to the discussions of what to buy and where to find it. After thirty minutes I couldn't see straight, half dazed by the brightness of the lights, drugged into awe and confusion by the endless rows of cleaning products, gold jewelery and on and on and on. Enough. But maybe that's what I like about it too – it's not a place for the casual or the timid. It's impossible to take it all in at once. Walking in is a tacit agreement to be included in the chaos and to be overwhelmed.

But in the interest of balance I should also give some time to the things about being here that are difficult or challenging: the three shirt a day heat, staying in a hotel without a real desk, books, kitchen, etc., the malls of high-end stores (though someone recently pointed out that the reason for the mall, and the great benefit of them is they blast their A/C so offer a place to hide from the weather), and most of all the time difference between here and there. Or, maybe it's just not being around my friends. The week before last, while in Kansas City, I started making a joke about wanting to be a pastor, perhaps because I'm so taken with the narrator's voice in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and his description of his work as a pastor of being able to see, understand (and not understand) people, or maybe because I like the idea of an audience I can see and hear and respond to: a flock. The more I think about it, the more I realize when I say I want to be a pastor, what I'm really asking for, somewhere below the joke, in the way that beneath most jokes is the spark of truth or feeling, is the continuity of community.

My friend Marc first coined the idea of Friend City: a place where all the people one loves could be together. Not quite a commune, but close. In someways the desire alone shows some kind of paradigm shift from years ago when extended families lived, if not in the same house, but on the same street, same neighborhood, same city. I have memories of my grandparent's house, my father's childhood home, in Brighton Beach and the small upstairs apartment where my great-grandmother lived. There was, for better and worse, an overlap of generations, and beyond that, an extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. nearby. A few of my close friends live near family, but most are far from home, and even their homes are far from other relatives. We're spread out across state and country, without the safe certainty of a place fixed in time. We become each others families. Being here has been particular hard – harder than I thought it would be – to be away from the people I care about and am accustomed to seeing, talking to, and being part of each others lives. In part ,it's just getting used to the routine of getting up before six, the return to having a 'real' job, and the time difference. But I also know there's a deeper feeling about the kinds of trade-offs that one continually makes as an adult: choices, that even as they offer freedoms, also define limits. Is it possible I wonder to be both part of a community, connected to others, and still have a kind of independence? Or asked another way, if it's impossible to live without certain trade-offs, how does one see these choices not as trade-offs where one thing is lost and another gained, but as different possibilities?

layover

2009-06-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the Tokyo airport waiting for my flight to Singapore: paging announcements in the quick and singsong lilt of Japanese, small children shrieking and running carefree, many weary looking travelers in the ungenerous florescent light of the international departures area. (I'll be out of the country for the next month and a half teaching, traveling, and hopefully writing.) There's a line from a Levis (?) poem about the 'easy loneliness of travelers', and while that seems true in the days of long bus rides, crowded markets, and unfamiliar cities, there's something about being in an airport at the start of a trip that invites both that nostalgia for what's left behind, and a sense of possibility. There's a quiet lifting of weight when the start of a journey actually begins. A breath. A pause. A moment amid the noisy comings and goings, to think and consider the trip that's actually happening. In some ways getting ready to leave has been a blessing; I haven't had time to fully consider the amount of transition. The semi-frantic errands of the last week or so, in addition to moving, have diffused the feeling of being untethered. The last two years have allowed me the illusion of safety – external validation and definition. It was the easy, if sometimes awkward or strange, answer to 'so what do you do.' But now. But now . Being untethered too, I want to believe, can be a kind of blessing too. My friend describes needing physical markers for the spiritual or emotional ones. I think I'm the same in that way and this trip, part work and part pleasure, feels like the end and beginning. Until I landed here, it almost didn't feel real. It was an answer to a question, an abstract vision of a place, a distant possibility, an idea. And now that it's happening, I'm pretty damn excited.

Postscript: I'm safe and sound in Singapore. It's hot. No, that's not exactly it. It's dog mouth, all consuming humidity, clothes stuck to the body kind of hot.. But from my hotel window, I can see a bright blue pool (and in the distance construction cranes, a gas station, and the low clouds of maybe some torrential rain).

where i want to stand

2009-06-03T11:05:00.001-07:00

from an interview with Thom Gunn

"When he [Robert Duncan] and Elizabeth Bishop met, they got on terrifically well. They would talk and gossip together and laugh. I asked each of them separately what they thought of the other’s poetry, and each of them said the same thing: “Oh, I can’t read it. It means nothing to me at all.” Their poetry is immensely different—much more different than mine is from either of [theirs]. Once I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the sixties at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop, and one was a protégé of Michael McClure called Free Wheeling Frank, literally a Hell’s Angel, who had written poetry dedicated to Beelzebub and so on. At one stage, Free Wheeling Frank handed me a lighted joint. I puffed on it, handed it to Elizabeth Bishop, and I thought: that’s where I stand, midway between Free Wheeling Frank and Elizabeth Bishop."

http://www.memorious.org/?id=119

remind me

2009-06-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

I think it’s one of those weeks (months, years) when the words of others say better and clearer what I can’t quite put into words. There’s something strangely comforting about the process of moving – and unsettlingly too, very unsettling – that feeling of making an account of who you are, and who you’ve been, as the physical collections of your life are contained, sealed, and for a time disappear. My roommate described on his blog recently the process of finding mementos, photos, letters, etc., that have no ‘value,’ but can’t be thrown away. While the details of the objects are particular, that feeling of moving from amused pleasure to searing memory and finally a kind of reminder of past selves, feels true. It reminds me in some ways of Stanley Kunitz’s poem Touch Me. What both capture is that feeling of having different lives and different selves that, at moments, come back to us. It’s the gift of memory and forgetting that these selves, like photos of South American mountains, museum entry tickets at the bottom of a shoebox or high school love letters wrapped with rubberbands, stay far from our daily life, making it possible to imagine we can live in the present. But it’s the gift too that they come back, with age and time, to say, here is who you were. It's not just that it happens, but that we want to be reminded, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, all of it. It's perhaps why the Kunitz poem doesn't end in a realization of the past tense, but the present. No, it's not just who you were that these object tell us, if we're looking and lucky, we can can see who we've become. Who we are.

_____________________________________

“There are a couple issues. The first is that it takes too long -- I start going through the first box, as I did just an hour or so ago, and suddenly I'm looking at ticket stubs for concerts I went to on dates as a teenager, letters and birthday cards from people I don't talk to anymore, train tickets from Italy and Russia, sports photos of girls I knew in high school, talismans of my mother.

At first, looking at these things makes me chuckle. Then my stomach starts to feel hollow. It ends with me spending an hour touching and reading every scrap of paper in a shoebox, and wanting, again, to throw it all away. I think that's why I keep it, so that every time I move, at least every year or two, I'll have to spend some time remembering who I used to be.”

from http://blog.justinstgermain.com/

_____________________________________

Touch Me

Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171845

love for sale

2009-06-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

apologies to my three loyal readers but packing and writing are, apparently, mutually exclusive. but fortunately copying and sharing is still well within my grasp. this is one of many wonderfully written, thought and observed moments from Simone's new book City Dog.

"It happens to the best (and worst) of us. Love at first sight. Or passing infatuation that in the maturity of time turns to a love so complete and enthralling that it shapes our feeling for reality. Or young love, puppy love, hapless crushes, the loss of all sense to an object that gives nothing back. Or studious love: Tell me more about yourself, I’m patient as the summer day is long, and don’t you think such-and-such is interesting? Cole Porter gave words to how we make ourselves available: “Love for sale. Who will buy? / who would like to sample my supply? / Who’s prepared to pay the price / For a trip to Paradise?” We don’t, can’t really, love pictures the way we love others. Flesh is both object and medium of love. It has its unpredictable mutability and felt pulse. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, a favorite of American intellectuals half a century ago but now seldom read, in his little 1957 book, On Love, says that desire, once fulfilled, disappears, but that love is forever unsatisfied. It’s essentially an act of impassioned attention, and when we fall hard, we’re madly attentive. Shakespeare’s lunatic and lover are of imagination all compact because they possess an aberrant, abnormal attention span. Like most experience that begins with a calamitous rush of feeling, love evens out in time and becomes normalized, sometimes (if we don’t pay attention) dulled or killed by habit and familiarity…Being in love is a condition, but love itself is all process. Ortega calls it “a psychic radiation which proceeds from the lover to the beloved, not as a single discharge, but a current.”

“Love for Sale” W.S. DiPero City Dog (2009)

a little mirror of the library

2009-05-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

Iskandariya

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but
maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought
I said not “some sort of fish,” but a “scorpion fish,” a
request he would surely have granted, being a goodly
God, but then he forgot the “fish” attached to the
“scorpion” (because God, too, forgets, everything
forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish,
sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the
striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and
followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish;
instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar
prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part
bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a
disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or
even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly
does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in
mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling
backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail
doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a
venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of
Cleopatra’s asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite
the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men.
In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight
eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and
is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and
feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison
barb when backed against a wall — a thing like me,
but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or
design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the
curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step
softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many
years, have I been stung, both times because,
unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes
now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he
is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal
Book because of his strange organs of breath. His
lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And
inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged
like the pages of a book — imagine that! And when the
holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood
that circles through them touches the air, and by this
bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of
books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library
at Alexandria, which burned.

I've Got the Spirit

2009-05-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

It’s taken me a while to get this together because like my life at the moment, it is going in several directions at once. At first this was a rumination about the purpose of rejection (no, thanks), and the necessity for external validation (yes, please), but ultimately I’m more interested in thinking here about what I’m reading, writing, listening to etc. For a while I thought about posting a poem, but couldn’t find one that I wanted to post. So apologies to the three readers of this blog for the delay in deciding what, if anything I’d say. Here goes a short piece that if I ever tried to turn into a real piece of writing I’d call something like “I’ve Got the Spirit.”

In the essay “Gots is What You Got” in W.S. DiPiero’s new book of essays City Dogs – a piece about his beginnings as a writer growing up in Italian immigrant community of Philadelphia in the 1950s – he writes, "Whatever is authentic in my work is due to the crass commingling of that abstract sense of formal beauty with the given language textures and soul-conditions of my culture, though when I was struggling for post-adolescent and cultural independence, I of course believed I had to refine out the "crudities" of my culture. And yet I never did shed my tribal legacy of my contrariness, the festive abrasiveness and chafing hilarity that even now I still at once love and cringe at. It too me some time to realize that abrasiveness, mineral grit, could be the kind of pumice stone that polishes a surface and gives shapely forms a chased gleam.” The friction of these two forces – internal and external, given and chosen – allows a voice that belongs wholly to neither: something surprisingly new and individually idiosyncratic. No other voice but this. It’s a recognizable narrative about the merging of the colloquial sounds of the street and the high tones of literature, bringing together the given and the made, the raw and the cooked – yet, even as it’s a familiar trope, it’s one that still has tremendous power. It’s essentially the story too of the modern, polyglot English we speak and write, of the high Latinate words, soft and rolling and melodic, and the guttural edges of the Anglo-Saxon words. Sometimes like clouds, passing into each other seamlessly or other times colliding like boxcar trains crossing the same intersection at the same time, the effect is one of reminder (our language is a made thing / the world is a complex/ conflicting) and creation (here is something new from different parts). I think my interest in using different tones in a poem comes from a similar place – moments of small or great tonal shifts within a single poem offer a kinship between things that otherwise would remain disparate, a joining of worlds, and isn’t this one purpose of art: to cleave differences into a temporarily stable whole. For some readers, it can be a digression or a breaking of the contract the poem sets up with the reader. Perhaps they’re right, but I think the play between lines of tonal dissonance, as in Berryman’s Dream Songs, allows lines like, “Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika, she glanced at me / twice” and later in the same poem “'You are the hottest one for years of night / Henry's dazed eyes / have enjoyed, Brilliance.'..” to push and pull the reader towards a new language, familiar and unfamiliar at once. Which leads me, inevitably, obviously, of course, to Joy Division. Well sort of anyway. I recently got from a friend the albums Unknown Pleasures (1979) Closer (1980). (You might ask how I’ve never really heard anything by them beyond “She’s Lost Control” and I hang my head and admit I too have never read War and Peace or anything by Pynchon – the world, as Wordsworth said, is too much with us. It’s also not lost on me that I’ve been listening to a band whose lead singer died young under tragic circumstances.) In the 1981 review of Closer in Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore writes, “Yet none of that really says much about how obsessing Joy Division's music can be, how it can draw you into its desolate, chiaroscuro atmosphere and fearful, irretrievable circuits. Draw you in and threaten to leave you there.” I like that phrase “chiaroscuro atmosphere” and how it describes in visual terms the auditory effect of the music, but more then these two descriptions, at its best it feels new, even thirty years later – without complete allegiance to its earlier influences, but aware of them all the same. In the same RS review, Gilmore goes on to write, “But it was also music that could rush and jump and push, and a composition like "Disorder" – or better still, the later single "Transmission," with its driving tempo and roiling guitars – seemed almost spirited enough to dispel the gloom it so doggedly invoked.” “Disorder,” one of my favorites, the anxious rawness of the vocals is heightened by the slanted, quick drums and bass and rather than sinking into a melancholy, the song seems to rise. Ellen Bryant Voigt in the new Missouri Review describes, as she does elsewhere in her book of essays The Flexible Lyric, the double power in the language of poetry – one of syntax and one of music. According to Voigt, what prose gives up is this attention to the music, and the ability to make song. I’m not sure I completely agree with her, what I find so powerful in Joy Division’s music, and the play between the light and dark, is a tension between what it says and how it says it. There is, in many of the songs, a coolness or austerity that pushes against the clearly punk influenced sound. And while much of what I’ve been writing about is tension – between voices, tones, sounds – what connects the elements of this post for me is an interest in beginnings and the question of how we find/make/create a voice that’s our own. How do we know when we’ve found it? Will it be appreciated/ recognized? How, once we find a style/voice that’s our own, do we keep challenging and pushing ourselves? In one account the producer of the Unknown Pleasures, in order to create a certain mood – this sparseness perhaps – would turn down the heat so low the band members could see their breath. I love that image of the band playing and Curtis singing, a small cloud of cold air surrounding the microphone, repeating three times: Until the spirit, new sensation takes hold, then you know.

out of sheer rage

2009-05-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

I have poems in the new issue of Blackbird and I'm pretty excited by both having poems out in the world and being in an issue with the amazingly talented Nicky Beer and Rita Mae Reese, as well as other writers who I admire. What's strange though is that though I'm happy about being published, I feel pretty far from the poems in the magazine. Both poems were started about five years ago and though I've continued to revise them, they feel as though it was written by a different kind of writer. The process of revision, sending out, acceptance, etc. takes time, and it's been a period, I hope of some shifts and progress and growth in my work. I think some of the things I strive for in more recent poems – an openness and directness in particular -- doesn't feel as present in those poems, which of course makes me wonder if it'll always be like this, when I look back on my work, seeing the rough seams, the limits, the whole range of time: writer I was, the one I am and the one I want to be? I think though to have it any other way would mean a kind of artistic stasis; perhaps this is the right kind of ambition, to make work that pushes and strives towards something better, brighter, shiner, faster. Or maybe it’s a wrongheaded wish for a kind of impossible perfection. I’m almost done reading the amazing Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s meditation on not writing an academic book about D.H. Lawrence. My friend who gave me the book to read said it best, it’s like being included in a conversation (or conversations) you’re already having about freedom / stability / art / restlessness / peace / desire. I’ll have more to say about it in another post, or maybe not at all, but the conversation of the book is also for me one about risk. The recent loss of my friend Craig has been on my mind, consciously and unconsciously, these last two weeks. It’s entering my writing and how I think about myself in the world. I’m not sure I’m even ready to describe the loss, one that I know is so profound to many people I love, and one that doesn’t feel totally real yet. Yes, we were friends, or maybe more like friendly, but his presence in my life was more important than I could’ve described before his absence. I remember reading Shells when I was an undergrad just beginning to think about myself as a writer. It was one of the first books of poems I’d ever read, certainly the first book by a contemporary writer. Up until that point it was only anthologies, handouts, etc. The idea of the book of poems was something I didn’t even really know existed. Craig’s book made it possible to see the single poem as being part of a larger conversation, and that certain themes like friendship and desire became available in ways they hadn’t been before. His work was permission at a moment I needed it. But then later, when I got to know him and became friends, I understood something else -- there’s was a kind of openness he had about him: he wanted to talk, loved it, being the center of things, generous and willing, always moving and going. There’s something surreal that happens when someone you know first through their words becomes a real, living person, a kind of doubling where you always know two of them, and both the words and person are rewritten with a new vision. His restless seeking, and sense of inclusion, part of his writing and part of himself, was important to my own sense of being an artist. In a way he was the first real connection to an idea and promise that for so long was just imagined. I can’t quite articulate it. It’s something irrational and hard to name, but by example and presence, he made things possible. In art and life. Dyer describes Lawrence writing to his friend Rolf Gariner about being in Celyon surrounded by others studying Buddhism, “I am essentially a fighter – to wish me peace is bad luck – except the fighter’s peace.” At another point Lawrence writes, “But always remember I prefer my strife infinitely, to other people’s peace, haven, and heavens.” The fighter’s peace as I imagine it is not a desire to eradicate the self but to accept the contradictions and thrashing that comes from being alive in a world of competing desires. It is a moving towards the world and not away from it. I can’t speak for Craig, but I recognize in this something true – not necessary a preference for strife, but a willingness and understanding of how struggle makes for a richer, if more complicated life. My friend sent me one of her favorite passages from the book, and it’s also one of mine: "there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free [ vs. "some grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture of relinquishment, or of standing up for a certain principle"]. To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness. There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.” We go, we push against the limits of what’s easy or safe, what’s expected not for the sake of making art but because there’s no other choice and anything else would be contrived and unsatisfying. This is something I truly feel, but know that it risks romanticizing Craig’s life, or death, or the version of a certain kind of artist. Terrence Des Pres, an essayist who I deeply admire and who also died under tragic circumstances, has an essay on the death of John Garnder called “The Accident and Its Scene” which describes this sense that the writer’s death begins to shadow the life and we’re left to construct narratives from limited facts. I don’t want that to happen, though it’s perhaps inevitable. Instead, I want to remember Craig for his life, and how he matters still. I know though that all of this, all that I have and will write about him is small consolation, a insufficient and incomplete way of saying that I will miss him, deeply.

in rotation (or good songs for uncertain times)

2009-05-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

between this and the black key's 'the lengths' i'm stretching the limits of how many times one or two songs can be listened to on repeat. but some days, some weeks ask for a certain soundtrack and all i can do is listen until the songs, like a drug in the bloodstream, run their course.

Hard Life - Bonnie prince Billy

making it look easy

2009-05-05T22:29:00.001-07:00

In an recent essay in the NY Times, Tom Bissel writes about David Foster Wallace who “was often accused, even by his admirers, of having a weakness for what Nabokov once referred to as “the doubtful splendors of virtuosity.”” I’m pretty taken with that idea about the ‘doubtful splenders of virtuosity.’ There is something to be said about the quality of virtuosity in any art – that kind of bravura of an artist showing off their chops, sometimes for the sake of the work and sometimes for the sheer pleasure of saying to the world, I’m that fucking good. But if there’s doubt there, it seems that it can become an end itself, showing off at best, or worse a kind solipsism without end. But what’s really hard, and this is what defines many great artists, is making the work look easy. Of the memoirs and non-fiction I’ve read recently, Tobias Wolff’s memoir about Vietnam In Pharaoh’s Army is perhaps the best example of how a writer can make the writing and its effects feel effortless. There’s a kind of ease and lightness that inhabits the work; his ability to create moving scenes, his precise (and often self-indicating) reflection and his tone that oscillates between conversational and intimate, humorous and terrifying, all help create a feeling of inclusion and immediacy. The point is not that one is better than the other. I don’t want a world where I have to choose between the pyrotechnic syntax and imagination of someone like Wallace and the clear-eyed clarity of someone like Wolff, it’s about recognizing the joys and limits of each, and being able to take pleasure in the virtuosity of both. The chapter Close Calls is perhaps my favorite and I’ll probably use one day to teach a certain kind of storytelling structure, but it’s the scene at the very end of the book that I keep going back to, for obvious reasons these last couple of days. These are the three final paragraphs of the book, and in it he describes his closest friend from jump school Hugh Pierce who died in Vietnam:

…He will not know what it is to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on, a labor of years. Watch the decline of his parents, and attend their dissolution. Lose faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.

I know it’s wrong to think of Hugh as an absence, a thwarted shadow. It’s my awareness of his absence that I’m describing and maybe something else, some embarrassment, kept hidden even from myself, that I went on without him. To think of Hugh like this is to make selfish use of him. So, of course, is making him a character in a book. Let me at least remember him as he was.

He loved to jump. He was the one who started the “My Girl” business, singing and doing the Stroll to the door of the plane. I always take the position behind him, hand on his back, according to the drill we’ve been taught. I do not love to jump, to tell the truth, but I feel better about it when I’m connected to Hugh. Men are disappearing out the door ahead of us, the sound of the engine is getting louder. Hugh is singing in falsetto, doing a goofy routine with his hands. Just before he reaches the door he looks back and says something to me. I can’t hear him for the wind. What? I say. He yells, Are we having fun? He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, jumps, and is gone.

What’s remarkable, aside from the razor prose and his uncanny ability to access the contours of the self’s struggles and joys, is that even as he describes the limits of the form – making use of Hugh as a character – he tries to give him back life. There’s an amazing shift in that last paragraph where the past tense of the first couple sentences becomes the present tense. The speaker no longer describes the memory of this moment before the jump, but inhabits it in the language, trying to give Hugh back both a voice and a body, if only for a brief moment. There’s little calling attention to it, just a subtle shift, a small thing, a slip, a kind of grace for the missing.

2009-04-30T16:58:00.001-07:00

Dream Song 29 by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

begins in delight

2009-04-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

My roommate and I are in an unofficial competition to see who can use more plates, pans, pots, etc. to make a single meal. I think his ‘every dish fish’ was in the lead until this past week when I made Eggplant Lasagna with a Parsley Pesto and Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Herbs for my classmates. (pictures tk) For the lasagna, which involved roasting the eggplants, making a pesto for the ricotta cheese mixture and making a roux, I think I used almost every pot in the kitchen and inch of counter space. Professional cooking shows have a slick quality that makes the sometimes tedious process of cutting, simmering, slip away with quick edit or already prepared dish on the back burner. The preparation too is seamless – no dropped knives, no forgotten eggs, no slightly burned vegetables, no unrisen dough – the chef moves from one element to the next, and the food looks, if not perfect, pretty close. Which brings me to my newest crush: Jill Santopietro. She’s a food writer/tester/blogger at the New York Times and her newest project is a short video of her making one of the Times recipes in her very small New York City apartment – as if there’s another kind of apartment there. When I lived in Brooklyn years ago my studio’s kitchen was more closet than anything else, more practical joke than practical. Literally a one-person kitchen, its sole benefit was being able to touch everything in the kitchen by only circling around. Once I had eight people over and I made a kind of disastrous green curry with scallops. I think of myself now as a pretty good cook – I have a good sense of what flavor profiles will work together and I know how to make a recipe my own, but I know just beyond any skill and organization there’s a little bit of chaos. The roux is ready to burn, the chicken can be over or undercooked, and a small error can turn hard work to ruin. What makes Jill Santopietro’s cooking so refreshing, and reminds me of watching someone like Julia Child, is there’s something a little uncertain in the making: what won’t go as planned, what will have to be changed/adapted, will it turn out okay? There’s no suspense usually in cooking shows and though I’m not sure I want to watch someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing at all, there’s something comforting about watching someone cook like an actual person. I know a lot of writers who both cook well and/or write about food. In writing as in cooking there’s an element of unpredictability and controlled disorder in the making. And while alchemy and control and surprise both define the acts of preparation, the start (and perhaps end) of both is pleasure. In the 1948 essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost writes, “[a poem] begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." I’m not sure I’m totally with Frost on the last part of his statement but I believe that the entrance for the reader and the writer is often one of delight – in language, image, idea, or even questioning and struggle – and the course to the end is made through luck (and time, and accident, and work). There is too something wonderful about how different cooking is from writing – the immediate gratification of a well-made meal, the pleasure of working with my hands in an act that’s completely physical, and how the preparation can be a communal activity. But there’s something else, when cooking, there’s a playfulness and willingness to fail that’s often easy to forget in the ‘serious business of writing.’ Cooking becomes for me, not a way to get away from writing, but a way to restore what I love about it in the first place.

why visit

2009-04-20T01:23:00.001-07:00

When we lived in Santiago my friend decided to make a documentary about two famous Chilean artists, a husband and wife, who were exiled under Pinochet and had since returned to the country and continued making art. Somehow she was able to contact them and they agreed to be interviewed for the movie. One afternoon we took the bus to their house in the Nunoa neighborhood, where they graciously had prepared lunch for us, before she interviewed them in their studio. I can’t recall much of the interview – I was the camera operator – but their shared studio, a huge space at the back of their house is still vivid: jars of colored pigments, brushes, buckets and containers, half rolled oil tubes, paint splashed chairs and tables, the skylight that gave the canvasses, some finished and others in stages of being made, a luminous glow. Yesterday I went to the Headlands Center for the Arts open house with a couple of friends, one of whom had a residency there and still has a studio space. Aside from her wonderful reading, the highlight was walking through the artist’s studios – photographers, sculptures, painters, video, performance artists – and seeing their work in its stages of making and unmaking. Almost all the artists were there, some standing around and touching the edges of things nervously while others introduced themselves and couldn’t wait to explain and describe their work. Most were in the middle of projects and it’s that sense of being able to see and hear and watch a piece change and develop that I envy. In writing (I’d exclude this blog of half thought out ideas) I have a group of friends who I trust as first readers, but even then, I almost never show anyone anything – phrase, line, stanza – from something that’s not done or very close to being done. I can’t imagine someone seeing the fragments and incomplete thoughts of things in their early draft stage. My love of an artist’s working space goes beyond voyeurism at the often messy (or in some cases boring) process of creation but is instead a respect for the truly remarkable view of the mind at work, to see an idea being worked and carried out, and the sense that a space becomes embodied with an artist’s DNA. From the clear artifacts of making, brushes, etc., there are the smaller human details of books being read, coffee mugs, quotes, books, prints, etc. that mean, this is my space alone. The space changes with their presence and there’s – forgive me – an energy that can’t be quantified but is present. But beyond the sense of recognition, being in an artist’s working space is also a kind of inclusion in a community. When we went to the artist’s house, we started our visit with lunch, all sitting around a circular dining room table, their own artwork all around the room, and the house and spoke about art and their life. I remember thinking I had to remember this moment and this feeling that I was both a ‘real writer’ and part of something larger than myself. I left the Headlands feeling inspired to work. As far as I know the movie was never finished.

why wait

2009-04-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

“Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.”
“Paitence,” Kay Ryan

Asked about what she’s working on Kay Ryan says she envies the fiction writer who, as if working on a large knitting project, every day picks up the thread and keeps going. The poet on the other hand drowns, constantly leaves one island of safety to swim through open water to the next, hopeful island. The hardest part too she says is “You can never build an island the way you built it last time. That’s a particularly cruel rule.” This feels like a pretty accurate description of how it feels to sit down every day and say, okay, now what, where do I go from here. As a side note it might explain in part the proliferation of the book length project (ie. an entire book about an obscure 15th century monk in the hills of Umbria studying cheese making) as opposed to the book that is essentially a miscellany. Elizabeth Bishop’s letters often describe her sending a stack of poems to her editors, wondering if there are enough poems to make a book. The book was a number of pages, not necessarily a narrative or lyric progression. But what I’m interested in mostly is not that stable ground where the poem happens, but that place between poems – open water, drowning, which is to say, waiting. Can waiting be, as Ryan describes it, “a place with / its own harvests?”

There are two quotes / ideas I go back to often when thinking about waiting and writing. The first is Adam Zagajewki’s idea of the silence radio; he describes it as a French naval expression for when the radio is off. Sound waves are still being sent, and the mechanics of the radio still work but there is no sound that can be heard. It’s a metaphor for a kind of inner silence, one where the body and the mind are absorbing but unable to produce any song. The other is Louis Gluck who writes in her poem October, “I am / at work, though I am silent.” Both can be read as optimistic and hopeful versions of the silence of waiting, essentially productive periods where something is happening below the surface. The longer I write, the better (hopefully) I am at letting those silences feel productive, but the harvest, to use Kay Ryan’s metaphor, is temporary. As soon as one period of waiting, there’s another and another.

The bigger problem is in present. After time (day, week, month) of not writing, or not writing well, that waiting becomes more and more pressurized. I can intellectually say, ‘yes, I know that this is an important part of being an artist, fallow periods of creativity,’ while at the same time, emotionally feel as though I’m cooked. So what’s a boy to do? Read a book. Take a walk. Drink. I know the possibilities and a few of the tricks, but the point is that waiting, and the mystery of what causes it, leaves you without agency.

But the other kind of waiting that takes up so much of my life isn’t so much about the process or act of writing but everything else connected: waiting for editors to reply, waiting for publication, waiting to hear about jobs/fellowships/etc. There’s so much that I send out in the world without knowing if, or when, I’ll hear back. This isn’t complaint, but the fact of things. I think the best description of this kind of waiting is Mavis Gallant’s story “When We Were Nearly Young.” (There's a great version of Antonya Nelson reading the story as part of the New Yorker fiction podcasts) It’s the first person story, mostly autobiographical, of a young woman who moves to Madrid and her time with the group of Spaniards she meets there. Despite a few dated moments in the story her description of waiting – for money from New York (presumably from a magazine editor), for her life to start or change, for the experiences that will define her – show the tension of waiting. She’s aware enough to know that “The fact of waiting became more valid then the thing I was waiting for. I knew I’d feel let down when the waiting was over.” But at the same time she wants the waiting to end and feels the frustration of it, saying near the end of the story, “I wish there was something to kick over, or to fight.” Though not exactly about an artistic process, the experience she describes, feel true to being a young writer. But there's this too: the result of waiting for her is this story, written years after the fact. The fact of the story is, in a way, proof of the purpose of waiting, and a kind of unpredictability. This for me is perhaps the strongest argument for a productive waiting – not restoration of what’s come before, but the possibility of something new. But there's another possibility in the value of waiting, and it's seductive in its own way -- to wait, to be left without control, is to be humbled, and to see what we do as a gift.

uncontrollable song

2009-04-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

Here's an audio interview with James Allen Hall and Jacob White on The Front Row, an NPR program in Houston:

http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/thefrontrow/2006/04/060420Gulf_64k.mp3

The whole thing is good, but the best part is close to the end when James reads "Portrait of My Lover Singing in Traffic." It's the last poem in his fantastic first book Now You're the Enemy. Beautiful and heartbreaking, his language is sharp and lyric, precise and haunting -- and the device of naming the "counterweight songs" (on the page they are in caps, ie "I Ain't Got No Body," "The Derailed Train is My Shepherd") creates a space for these songs not just to be sung but embodied.

mended without a seam

2009-04-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Larry Levis’ late poems, so lush and expansive, willing to follow the imagination as it turns and shift, coursing through time and place, story and anecdote, romantic and ecstatic, seem to be willing to risk failure for inclusion, willing to risk emotion and intuition for logic and reason – and I was for a time a true believer. I was under his spell. I wanted my poems to have that same kind of expansiveness, a romantic rapture that can claim with gesture and length a wisdom and understanding of the world. There’s a quote from Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that seems to describe the attraction, and kind of deep magic that Levis’ poems can capture: "The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place." What I loved, and still do, in Levis’ long “Elegy” poems is also what can make those same digressions feel indulgent and unfocused. It’s in a way like W.C. William’s criticism of Whitman, that he lacked structure. Yes, there’s a wildness of imagination but a sense of completion can be missing and I’m sometimes left able to admire the writing and the intellect but not the shapeliness of the poem. “There’s a difference between good writing and a good poem,” said a teacher of mine when reading one of my poems. Yes, I thought. I agree. And yet. And yet. I’ve been wrestling recently with how to keep the rawness and excitement of early drafts with the polish of a later version. One might argue that the natural tendency of a revision is usually towards limit – paring back, economy. “Start here,” or “cut this” is often the advice I’ll give when reading a friends work. I think I’ve come to trust my process of writing a lot and then gradually focusing and pulling back. I tend to think in the writing itself and revision is often about angling and focusing and figuring out what I’m really after. (I might say that most of the fiction workshops I’ve been in are usually about adding – needing to know more about a character / motivation). I have too many poems right now that have been revised almost into a blank page in an attempt for something better. I’m struggling with how to let the final shape contain the light and energy that brought the poem into being.

All of it seems to come back to a questions of ambition. What I love as a reader and writer is that sense of risk and restlessness that comes from a wider aperture, an imagination that pushes against the limit of form, that layers and reverses, and revises itself. But I’m old enough and have read enough not to confuse length with ambition. I recognize how the worlds of thought and expanse can be sheltered within the harbor of a small piece. In her essay, “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence”, Louise Glück writes, “What I share with my friends is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.” What connects these different kinds of ambition (though I might argue they are not really so different in their desire to give up a wholeness, letting the mind fill the absence left in silence or breath) is perhaps a kind of internal restlessness. There’s a wonderful poem in Bridget Pegeen Kelly’s Song, “Dead Doe,” that uses negation as a way to create tension and have the poem describe a literal revision of imagination. No, the speaker says, contradicting what’s just been described, forcing the reader to see both possibilities -- what's there and what's imagined there. Maybe that’s what I feel can be lost in revision – that turning of good writing into a good poem –that sense of poem as activity, thinking and questioning, moving and deciding, turning and refusing stability.

There’s a really wonderful essay by Carl Philllips in the most recent New England Review about Restlessness. He goes on to think about the relationship of artistic restlessness and ambition:

"Another way to think of restlessness: as a form of ambition. Unsatisfied with the given—the usual explanations, the usual goals for and trappings of a life—there are those who push past the given, are willing to enter into uncertainty—to take a risk—in order to get to something presumably superior and/or preferable to “the old life.” I don’t have in mind here the kinds of worldly ambitions that can lead to an increase of money and power and material possessions—I mean the quest for meaning, for heightened feeling, for expanded vision, even if that should mean that we arrive at what disturbs us deeply, leaving us more unsettled, less at rest than we had been. This, I would argue, is a defining piece of the artist’s sensibility. And I’ll point out that it’s not a perverse desire to be disturbed; it is instead both a recognition that heightened vision can’t occur without disturbance and a realistic understanding of the world as a place where pleasure and its opposite forever coexist. The artist refuses to ignore this entanglement of opposites, or perhaps more accurately the artist is incapable of ignoring it, because of a commitment to a knowledge that is absolute, entire, but always at the last elusive. That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t regret the knowledge that we do come into. One is human, after all."

As he suggests there’s a price too for this restlessness or ambition. For him it’s that you’re often left more unsettled. But I also think that it’s that periods of transition are not usually times of pleasure or comfort. There’s a way too that uncertainty begets uncertainty and what seems like a question about a particular aspect of writing or form becomes a question of process and intent as a whole. Or maybe that’s where all artistic restlessness leads, to the largest philosophical questions, the Socratic ‘who are you.’ Early in the essay he makes the claim that even as we might prefer consciously stability to instability, we know, at least unconsciously that vulnerability in uncertainty is “a zone of possible illumination.” That is of course the hope: moments of questioning are also moments of possibility, and that what seems like uncertainty is promise.

2009-04-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Joe Bolton poems from The Last Nostalgia

Adult Situations

These moves we make
To do and un-
Do each other
Must be lovely
From a distance.

Such a music,
Such a twilight,
A surfacing,
A sense of style.
No end to it.

The white hotels
We check into
Keep standing. They
Survive each blond
Who comes and goes.

Cities go on.
The lights go on
In cities. Cars
Go to the sea.
The sea goes on.

What's left of us
Lasts in what is
Least us: in cars,
in the twilight
Of white cities,

In our houses,
In our closets –
Clothes we put on
In the hope of
Taking them off

friday night lights

2009-04-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

In last week’s Friday Night Light’s, the second to last of the season, Tyra and Landry driving to the State finals discuss her college essay, the first draft of which he calls a ‘five page needle point pillow.”

Landry: "You obviously don’t believe any of what you’re saying."
Tyra: "Fine, Landry, why don’t you tell me what to write."
L: "This is your essay."
T: "Should I write about my trashy family? About the fact that my sister’s a stripper? Or my mom is a high school dropout who drinks boxes of wine like it’s water? Or about the fact that I lost my virginity when I was 13? Or the fact that my papa wasn’t around? How about that? Oooo! I know what I should write about: The fact that up until two years ago I had enough hate in my heart to start a freaking car."
L: ... [silence] "What changed?"
T: "What?"
L: "What changed from two years ago. Why did you stop having enough hate in your heart to start a freaking car?"
T: ... [silence] "Jason Street got paralyzed. He was this great guy, this hero, and it happened to him... It made me realize that life isn’t fair for anybody. Not just me."

She’s able to articulate what’s lead her to this moment, a belief in a life outside of Dillon, and a future beyond what she could’ve imagined for herself 2 years – or for us 2 seasons ago. It’s a moment in Friday Night Lights that swerves towards sentimentality (perhaps hitting the guardrail for some viewers) but for me is an incredibly moving moment, earned through seeing these characters grow and develop over time. What I love about this show, and what sets it apart from a show like The Wire is that there’s an underlying optimism that people can, and do change. The Wire, beyond brilliant and for my money the best show ever made, makes its core idea that we’re born into patterns, either ones we make for ourselves or inherit. The King stay the King, says D’Angelo in the first season, and it’s a sentiment that courses through the show. Despite desire, despite effort, we are who we are. The conflict of the show is often seeing characters who strive to be different or change their fate, as with Stringer Bell and his biz classes or Jimmy and his relationship with Beedie; ultimately they are unable to escape who they are. By the fifth season larger cycles that are made, either within characters themselves, or within the types – see Michael as the new Omar, Dukie as the new Bubbles – repeat. The exception to this might be Bubbles, but as a whole, it’s the flipside of FNL where work plus ambition plus luck plus time equal change, or at least hope of it – Clear eyes, strong heart, can’t lose.

What I too love about the show is that it reminds me of growing up in Cambridge, a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The football games on Friday Nights were a really big deal, a night when it seemed like everyone in the town was there, all the kids from school and their families. It was as much a social event as a football game. It’s a stick to the ribs kind of memory – being under those white lights at CSDHS, watching the Vikings in their black (or were they blue?) uniforms, couples making out under the bleachers, the concession stands, the gold and blue footballs the cheerleaders tossed in to the crowds after a touchdown, being dropped off and picked up by my friend’s parents, the echo of the cheers, the heat of September. I was 13 when we moved to Baltimore. What’s strange is that all week I’ve been thinking about that move and I can’t remember the day we left. Not the moving trucks. Not even packing my clothes and books into boxes. There’s this gap of time that seems like it should be there – but I can’t seem to find it. As an adult I’ve moved a lot. A lot. I can picture myself walking though those old apartments and houses, making an inventory of what I want to remember and what I want to forget, my hands along the walls, and my eyes tracing the physical edges: you should remember this. Last quarter I heard Mark Doty give a lecture about C.P. Cavafy, looking at how the physical objects in the poems, especially in vacant rooms, become the spaces of memory. In one of my favorites, The Afternoon Sun, Cavafy writes of the catalog of things in the room where he and his lover would spend the afternoon together, the mirrored dresser, the couch, etc.; “these old things they must be around here somewhere.”

I often imagine my life if we stayed. Not that Cambridge is Dillion (based on Odessa, TX), but it’s closer in size and community than the Baltimore where I went to high school. Counterhistory is a game of imagination that always ends with you as you are, unchanged. But what’s true, I think, is that there are profound moments of pivot in adolescence, not the ones you choose but where decisions, actions, happen to you. Good or bad or neutral, you are altered. I recently read a friend’s essay which ends with these haunting and profound lines: “Thank God—any God—we do not know when we are young that the body is an archive. That after years of amnesia, the body, without warning, will remember and repeat its earliest prayers, and that those fledgling prayers do not change much over time, but only reach higher and higher toward heaven from their stubborn roots.” I like how it describes the submerged nature of memory making and that it comes back to us later. Though I might argue that if our bodies are archives, I’m not sure they can be read completely, or accurately. Those lost prayers often come back as mystery, half-understood, but present and singing -- like a radio station at the edge of its signal range, slipping in and out of clarity, as you drive out of town.

2009-04-06T14:48:00.001-07:00

an amazing poem from D.A. Powell's new book Chronic

corydon & alexis, redux

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes

--D.A. Powell

You see I am here after all

2009-04-05T16:03:00.001-07:00

There's an interesting piece in Slate about the postcard collections of Walker Evans and Zoe Leonard. In a slide lecture Evans gave in '64 about his collection he described his own collection as a 'lyric documentary' and described Leonardo Da Vinci as the father of the lyric documentary in his drawings: "that line and that mental approach, that scientific curiosity and that cleanliness, and that detachment of his seemed to me documentary. And, of course, his line is lyric."

I've been thinking a lot about non-fiction recently (and in a larger way, with all art that engages the 'real' world) I've been working on an 'essay' and am putting together a proposal to teach a creative non-fiction class in the fall. I’m in the middle of H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and just finished reading the first part of a friend’s absurdly good and heartbreaking memoir. I like that idea of a 'lyric documentary' and how it calls attention to the act of careful observation, the search for beauty, and the necessary artifice that’s part of the process. There’s a great Walker Evans description of his protégé Robert Frank's technique. He says, "If that were a hammer in his hand he would drive the nail in one or two hard fast perfect strokes. … But not usually careful. There wd be a hammer mark in the wood and the boards wd be joined forever. In some ways that image of the hammer mark in the wood is a kind of artistic acknowledgment that these photos are made objects, heightened from life. Not fact but true and particular. But it says something too about Frank, and how his voice is part of the experience for the viewer. For me that’s part of what the lyric implies in the ‘lyric documentary’ – that the experience of seeing, living, understanding, capturing a vision of people, place or time comes from an angle that’s individual and singular. Its perhaps what separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls – that understanding of how those two elements play with and against each other, and the ability to offer a narrative, a photo, a painting, a poem, an essay that feels as though it could only have been made with one eye seeing the world, one voice naming it. But it’s not enough to just name it – there has to be truth there too. Lowell ends his last great poem “Eplilogue” with this sentiment, and they’re lines I go back to often:

Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

2009-04-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

Since I mentioned Donald Justice in the last post, I went back to his Collected Poems last night. What I admire in his work is a kind of radiant coolness. Below his masterful control, the best poems have an incredible energy and heat. Perhaps my two favorites are elegies, one is “Psalm and Lament” -- a poem Ellen Bryant Voight uses often to show kinds of syntax and structure – and “Invitation to a Ghost” an elegy for Henri Coulette. The later poem ends with the stunning lines “Come back now and help with these verses / Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.” The great subject of his poems is memory – in all its forms of looking back, particularly on childhood, on what's gone or missing or changed. "Time and the weather wear away,” he writes, “the houses that our fathers built." I think part of the attraction to reading someone like Justice for me is that while there’s overlap in subject, we’re quite different in style and form. But it’s the formal nature of his work, so different from my own, that I find attractive as a reader. This active seeking of writers or artists who defy and challenge us seems to be a kind of common trait among writers I know. Kevin Young in an interview I read a while back describes this as having a ‘demon poet.’ His idea (which I might be getting wrong) was that we have poets we admire but resist at the same time. There’s a desire to find voices that go against what is your natural or decided way of making. Ideally, it’s not to validate your own work or aesthetic but as a way to put a kind of pressure on your choices. I think this desire for conflict becomes a counterpoint to a restlessness with a way of making that can, with time, become too familiar. The pleasure of resistance is that it more immediately asks the question of what’s real art and what’s just habit. It’s a question I didn’t ask myself this morning in the farmer’s market at the Ferry Building. Among the stalls of stacked asian pears, artisan cheeses and boxes of fresh greens, all the people strolling with their canvas bags and lattes, I didn’t want resistance or to push against what’s familiar. Pleasure – a day bright and warm, a breeze off the water, strangers laughing and talking and eating – seemed to inhabit the place. I was with a friend who knew all the people working. We’d stop and chat, sample a bit, maybe buy something and then keep walking. It was the habit of things that seemed so wonderful at the moment. There’s a question I’ve been thinking about recently, though I’m not sure I can articulate it clearly yet – why do I want one thing in art and another thing in life? Is it possible to reconcile the wrestling and restlessness I want in my writing with the kind of stability and peace I want in my life? I keep going back to this Pinter quote I heard a writer describe last year in a lecture on happiness, something to the effect of I haven’t written happy plays but I’ve had a happy life.

#2

2009-04-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I feel like the kid who comes late to the party, having missed those first moments of arrival when everyone is suddenly together, full of exuberance and excitement. But, that doesn’t stop me from bringing it up. A lot. Last fall when I was first reading Donald Justice’s Collected Poems, I think I mentioned it in three consecutive classes. I want to think it comes from a place of genuine excitement with discovery. A discovery of course that’s been there for a while. Late comer. Party crasher. A feeling that there’s a new voice that’s been missing, and yet somehow it has always been present, just waiting to be uncovered. Which, in the case of Housekeeping makes sense as so much of the book, implicitly and explicitly, is about a kind of recovery of what’s missing. There’s a kind of paradox though in my wanting to talk about Housekeeping with others. It is in many ways such an intimate book, almost to the point of being private. At points I feel dangerously close to the bone of the things, which is breathtaking and uncomfortable at once. There is a conversation between reader and narrator, which by some strange alchemy makes the reader feel as though his or her experience of reading is individual and particular. The passage I keep going back to happens near the end of Chapter 5. The narrator describes a net reaching down to the bottom of the lake, gathering all that’s been lost:

"Add to them swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of falling buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone and the world became comprehensible and whole….For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?"

The writing is beautiful, both inspiring, and in a way, hard to read. What will I write that has the kind of assurance, insight and grace of Housekeeping? A friend was recently saying that it gets harder and harder to fall in love with a new poet / writer. I’m reminded of a passage in Tony Hoagland’s book of essays Real Sofistikation that says something to the effect of that a poetic education (or perhaps any education) is about a giving up of innocence. What’s gained is knowledge to the inner working and mechanisms, a control and perhaps some kind of mastery, but what’s lost is that thrill my friend was describing. Which brings me back to Housekeeping. It's been a long time since a book has really possessed me, inspired me, and reminded me what a powerful work of art can do.

#1

2009-04-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

my brother claims i'm a lazy blogger. and he's right. short attention span, forced use of sentences, punctuation, etc. and there's a kind of envy I have of other blog writers -- a kind of openness that's thrilling to read, but i'm not sure it's what I can, or would want to be doing, at least in this format. well no more. this is my maginot line. all future entries will be timely, openhearted, and full of charm and wit. or they'll be about food. my brother also said i should mention that i'm tall.