With my hands I made a little man-poet.
He hurt me. Three feet high, he sighed like ages.
How was it I fashioned someone old from clay?
I remembered him as if by fingering. An étude.
I indicated him from silt and felt his buddha
belljar swell in hands all gloved with him.
Because he was my poet he was naked. Because
he was muse I was not his. Poets are for me a how-to—
praxis. Together we were family love of god
and man, and I the better poet. I made another.
The first had not been what I had in mind—- he
was all big love but nothing genius. So I
moved on, leaving squat one after one to slap
clayed hands onto clay cock. The last I gave
a vulva. She produced less than others, sometimes
more—she had an ebb to her, and treaded on her
selves not in path- or rut- or lovemaking per
say, but in drunk, perhaps, rapturous or
endemic waltzing. Worried, I anyway settled
on her as vessel—then sent an angel. This is
how it’s done, how I have done it all world
long, but she cared less. And more. The words
she put out like lights were not my own.
My ladypoet, she abandoned me for our child--
Pome, she called him, and meant apple--her tiny
vengeful gala. We have never met.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Unpreserved
Open up the jelly in the sandwich, open
her drawers up, the jelly ones, the upper
drawers. Open up the jelly inside the jelly
drawers, always the multiple layers of jelly
like glass under glass but reddish. Purple
opening makes what is obscene readable. Open
up something red and the open is mere gore.
Purple gore is sexual and the people won't
have that except they will and not tell anyone.
Toe-tap, hotel-hop, dead prostitute or intern.
Open the prostitute, a coroner's job. People
and coroners have many drawers and jobs like
prostitution and many instruments in those
drawers to do the many jobs done in the red open
drawers of the body. Also coroners have scales
to weigh the jellied hearts, to judge them
enlarged, which tells coroners about the manner
of the bodies' closings down, some irregular
thing, vulnerable, overly full of itself as if
certain anatomies or jobs signalled the ability
to love more, to die younger, or to make dying into
a thing, a commodity, curiousity, a purplish bit
we are embarrassed to hold in an open hand
in an open room to call openly my father's
death, my mother's, my mistress's, my child's
death at three, as these are obscenities. Other
deaths are read as more mere, red. In the diner
on white linoleum, newspapers spattered with living
colonies of jelly shudder false and chemically with
no seeds-- as generic as any war- or street-
death--and fail to open us. We are surface on
all sides, we are smooth, hypocrite, resistant
to stain, cool and pale and drawerless. We do
not possess these deaths we leave beside
our tips. Smeared with strawberry-flavored
sucrose, these are somehow not our deaths. It's
as if no summer died to make this taste.
her drawers up, the jelly ones, the upper
drawers. Open up the jelly inside the jelly
drawers, always the multiple layers of jelly
like glass under glass but reddish. Purple
opening makes what is obscene readable. Open
up something red and the open is mere gore.
Purple gore is sexual and the people won't
have that except they will and not tell anyone.
Toe-tap, hotel-hop, dead prostitute or intern.
Open the prostitute, a coroner's job. People
and coroners have many drawers and jobs like
prostitution and many instruments in those
drawers to do the many jobs done in the red open
drawers of the body. Also coroners have scales
to weigh the jellied hearts, to judge them
enlarged, which tells coroners about the manner
of the bodies' closings down, some irregular
thing, vulnerable, overly full of itself as if
certain anatomies or jobs signalled the ability
to love more, to die younger, or to make dying into
a thing, a commodity, curiousity, a purplish bit
we are embarrassed to hold in an open hand
in an open room to call openly my father's
death, my mother's, my mistress's, my child's
death at three, as these are obscenities. Other
deaths are read as more mere, red. In the diner
on white linoleum, newspapers spattered with living
colonies of jelly shudder false and chemically with
no seeds-- as generic as any war- or street-
death--and fail to open us. We are surface on
all sides, we are smooth, hypocrite, resistant
to stain, cool and pale and drawerless. We do
not possess these deaths we leave beside
our tips. Smeared with strawberry-flavored
sucrose, these are somehow not our deaths. It's
as if no summer died to make this taste.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
gurlesque answer to D
Hey D!
As far as the D&G, I don't have it in front of me-- but if you are talking the becoming- chapter... it is the chapter where they posit to become ANYTHING first you must become woman (The ultimate becoming is imperceptible/minoritarian/essence I believe). In other words, the first magical transformation is always into the female from which all other creation (to animal, child, etc) is possible. One could read this I guess as an acknowledgement of feminine power, but my read is that it places the male energy solar-ly, and woman as the first mask or emanation. Nothing new there.
Claiming victimhood vs. playing with the subject position: I don't want to play anymore. I don't feel like a girl anymore and most of girl-trappings do feel placed (on me as consumer by external capitalist deciders). I guess if I was mightily attracted to any of it--I'd keep it and flaunt it. I wear heels, after all--but never pointy toed shoes. Here's my difference, again... I don't see my "womanly" retention of 4 inch heels as doing much damage (though in my dreams they can). I can imagine a poem where those shoes do work--oh yes I can--like Addonzio's red dress. But in the poems I think of as gurlesque I don't always see that work. I don't see the subverted gaze you speak of or the implication of the reader. I see tons of coy and pout and hairflip... but I *think* what is being gurlesque wants to claim the skewering, and dammit I DON'T SEE ENOUGH SKEWERING. I would just please like to see more skewering. I'm sure Johannes and Lara wd back me up on this desire. That's all.
And you ask, what do you get with womanhood? A little invisibility (the kind you have a right to, not the kind you must liberate yourself from--that comes back with old age). That is what D&G say all transformation aims for... imperceptibility, and only then revolution. To become, for once, the unwitnessed gazer. And to achieve something like it after 30 years of feeling all eyes critiquing is something I can admit to enjoying when it happens (thus the draw of the urban landscape where I do not have to turn into a soccermom to disappear). Glitter for chardonnay (but isn't this Sex and the City and aren't they exceedingly gurlesque?)--not so hot. Glitter for the presidency, a prime ministership, an endowed chair--I'll take.
Where I do agree with Arielle is that when I was young I thought I'd be able to do anything. But I do not think my way to standing by that child is to affect her--it is to grit my teeth, bear down, and push my way through any means necessary to the anythings I want to do-- the poems I want to write, the novels I want to publish, the professor I want to be. The trappings have always been something beside the point in my world--the things (as I said in my earlier post) that I had to do without to get the ballet training I loved... so military in its regulations, so sexist and hierarchical in so many of its modes, and yet so damn USEFUL, as it got to the heart of training and *learning to train* my body to do anything else it wanted to (modern dance, yoga, aikido).
My take on my own poetic project is similar... the content is mere exampling of the deeper structures. Any aesthetic in which the content is a central/defining feature will undoubtedly raise my poetic hackles... I believe the personal is political because we are examples. We are examples. It is enough.
As far as the D&G, I don't have it in front of me-- but if you are talking the becoming- chapter... it is the chapter where they posit to become ANYTHING first you must become woman (The ultimate becoming is imperceptible/minoritarian/essence I believe). In other words, the first magical transformation is always into the female from which all other creation (to animal, child, etc) is possible. One could read this I guess as an acknowledgement of feminine power, but my read is that it places the male energy solar-ly, and woman as the first mask or emanation. Nothing new there.
Claiming victimhood vs. playing with the subject position: I don't want to play anymore. I don't feel like a girl anymore and most of girl-trappings do feel placed (on me as consumer by external capitalist deciders). I guess if I was mightily attracted to any of it--I'd keep it and flaunt it. I wear heels, after all--but never pointy toed shoes. Here's my difference, again... I don't see my "womanly" retention of 4 inch heels as doing much damage (though in my dreams they can). I can imagine a poem where those shoes do work--oh yes I can--like Addonzio's red dress. But in the poems I think of as gurlesque I don't always see that work. I don't see the subverted gaze you speak of or the implication of the reader. I see tons of coy and pout and hairflip... but I *think* what is being gurlesque wants to claim the skewering, and dammit I DON'T SEE ENOUGH SKEWERING. I would just please like to see more skewering. I'm sure Johannes and Lara wd back me up on this desire. That's all.
And you ask, what do you get with womanhood? A little invisibility (the kind you have a right to, not the kind you must liberate yourself from--that comes back with old age). That is what D&G say all transformation aims for... imperceptibility, and only then revolution. To become, for once, the unwitnessed gazer. And to achieve something like it after 30 years of feeling all eyes critiquing is something I can admit to enjoying when it happens (thus the draw of the urban landscape where I do not have to turn into a soccermom to disappear). Glitter for chardonnay (but isn't this Sex and the City and aren't they exceedingly gurlesque?)--not so hot. Glitter for the presidency, a prime ministership, an endowed chair--I'll take.
Where I do agree with Arielle is that when I was young I thought I'd be able to do anything. But I do not think my way to standing by that child is to affect her--it is to grit my teeth, bear down, and push my way through any means necessary to the anythings I want to do-- the poems I want to write, the novels I want to publish, the professor I want to be. The trappings have always been something beside the point in my world--the things (as I said in my earlier post) that I had to do without to get the ballet training I loved... so military in its regulations, so sexist and hierarchical in so many of its modes, and yet so damn USEFUL, as it got to the heart of training and *learning to train* my body to do anything else it wanted to (modern dance, yoga, aikido).
My take on my own poetic project is similar... the content is mere exampling of the deeper structures. Any aesthetic in which the content is a central/defining feature will undoubtedly raise my poetic hackles... I believe the personal is political because we are examples. We are examples. It is enough.
Monday, July 14, 2008
gurlesque
When Arielle Greenberg (whom I was in school with during my MFA) recognized the elements she construed as the gurlesque aesthetic, to be honest, I didn’t feel my work qualified. I’m still not certain that it does, although—as with inclusions in movements (or whateveryoumaycallthem) that exhibit themselves across a spectrum—you could make the argument. I was raised in the 70’s, with Free-To-Be and unicorns, but I did not revel in the girly trappings of that era—mostly due to an intense ballet schedule (20-30 hours a week from 11-18) that eschewed glitter nail-polish, ribbon barrettes, friendship pins, then jelly bracelets, funky eyeshadow, and ankle-tights. (Our flesh-pink ones had to cover our feet.) With hair pulled back and a penchant for black, I was mildly, mildly gothic—or perhaps just prematurely lit major. With a difference. The dance thing plus the fe-male, fie-male, fo-mentation plus the sexual revolution none of us escaped made me always always writing from the body—even before I was. Sexuality is part of my aesthetic, but not I think in the way that AG uses the term.
What I mean to say is that when I read Sexton in high school, her metaphors were a revelation, and at Yale, when Bishop was offered as one of the only recent female poets (this was the early 90s!) worth looking at in depth, I saw her restraint only as the calcification holding back what I thought must be seething underneath. Very Freudian. My reading of contemporary poets was non-existent until my MFA, the exception being poets in translation, strangely enough. I knew confessional and beat poetry and Frank O’Hara, but the freedom to combine the ubiquitous body with a mythic Now! was not a freedom I ever felt. In my work, the body is everpresent and thus unselfconsciously indicated: but Now is something I’ve never gotten my teeth around.
I am elliptical though. Certain that association was the way to write good poetry, I came to that knowledge from reading Paz and Transtromer (these in translation) and Simic, not Stein (who came much later for me). Surreality was what I loved, and science fiction. My poetry rarely talks fabric or fashion, and indeed, in a room full of gurlesque female poets, I’m the one with the eight dollar haircut or no hair at all. It is particularly the freedom to include pop culture and daily happenings that I am fairly unable to do. But why haven’t I ever taken this freedom as my own (since the lack of those references in my work is I think the most notable difference between myself and the other poets noted by AG as gurlesque)?
Certainly, the poets mentioned by Arielle and Danielle are wonderful company, but it would be disingenuous for me to claim much sense of an aesthetic fellowship with the poets named there. I do feel fellowship with the women poets I’ve known and spent time with because of that time. The ones I’ve been in class with have influenced my work, assuredly—but in a way that promotes kitsch and cutesiness and a gutsy insistence on the details of a specific brand of girlhood? Not so much.
What does it mean to be included under a rubric of any kind? I don’t know, this being the first moment I have had that pleasure. I do know, that in an era that seems insistent on the fact that individuals are free to present themselves as women any way they choose and that such freedom should be celebrated, I dissent. I would not limit anyone’s self-portrayal, but neither do I glory in each and every. I am not at all Whitmanesque. I am much stodgier. I do not see performed sexuality as power or proof that “we’ve arrived” in the way many women of my generation and younger do; instead, I see the way this era promotes such sexual expression as power to be the duping of an entire generation, a telling of only half the story. Sex is power until it is not—until it no longer offers you a way of achieving money or a man. (Yes, a man. My college freshpeople still speak of an MRS degree. Color me agog.)
And as for “girls”—no one really likes this term without the double r or the -friend, do they?—have they gained “freedom” in sexual performance and expressivity? I can't read this movement as grotesque no matter how hard I try. Wanting glitter to be important doesn't make it so. I get the implied violence to the cute... but don't masochists already own their fetishes? Why is claiming victimization as an identity any better than passively being victimized? Isn't it in fact worse to be willing and complicit in the violence? This isn't power, in my estimation, it's throwing in the towel. If girls have gained a sense of center-ness in the past 20 years, and maybe they have, it seems to me concurrently our boys (as a mother of three of them) have lost some ground. Can they (I'm talking cultural acceptance here) wear pink? dresses? braid their hair? any more than they could twenty years ago? I cannot believe that any gains in girl-land not echoed in the other gender-space (or god-forbid even crossing over into it!) could be real gains.
I do not believe that today’s girls experience their more blatant sexuality in a wholly empowering way. And I think that crafting a nostalgia-laden, pre-hung up idea of what my body was to me at eight would be false. I had shame at eight. And six, and five. Shame was as ubiquitous in my early life as unicorns. In fact, I knew since I first began idolizing the white phallus-beasts, that they only came to virgins, and since my mother was enlightened enough to answer such questions honestly, I knew at six exactly what a virgin was. And by fourteen I knew I’d done enough to ensure I’d never see a unicorn (confession lives!).
In other words, sex may be power, but power once-removed and intricately linked to shame and usable for only ten to twenty-five years of a life. Danielle sees this as a substantial chunk, me--not so much. Like a career in ballet, the advantages of treading this road to influence rarely survive into the next stage of a woman’s life—whether she procreate or not. I find it difficult to embrace as my own any term that lives inside this youth-centered illusion without consideration of what is beyond its borders. I can no longer in good conscience carry a Hello Kitty lunchbox. It infantilizes me, and as I will not shave myself to pre-pubescent levels I will not lurch toward any previous incarnation of my self. I want to be woman. I want to revel in the Now I cannot include in my poems. I am a box of hypocrisy in that way. Forgive.
I cannot see this poetic clinging to pre-adolescence (not just as content but as marker of difference) as substantially removed from the popular idea that the majority of prostitution acts or strip clubs or the cultural imitation of strippers (Brazilianed, tanned orange, capable with a pole, having less than 15% body fat but size C+ breasts) empowers women. Using what you've got for a short period of time for less than it is worth is NOT real power unless you have a REAL choice about it (privileged few). It also echoes the tendency to cosmetic surgery (done for the woman's self-worth of course, not for her value on the open market or to prolong youth... the most recent incarnation is the "Mommy Job" [a combo of breast-lift, liposuction, and botox to reclaim the pre-pregnancy shape]). Ever see Brazil? Have you looked at Mickey Rourke lately? Clearly, cosmetic surgery disasters do not limit themselves to women. Or idiots. I think the overeducated and the artistic feel the same cultural pressures as everyone else. To help us cope with our choices, we develop theory around them.
I am not denying that girlhood happens and it IS important. It just isn't all-important to me, or necessary to represent artificially in conjunction with my current being. Girlhood is my previous existence, a rite of passage, a source, the well from which the woman Kirsten sprung. Note the past-tense. And then, but then, there are other (equally important) parts to a life. It doesn't seem to me that girlhood needs anymore validation or extension, especially anything that casts Lolita as emblem. That's been done by men for women for a longtime. The sexually precocious nymph. The supermodel. And no, I don't think Valley-speak is an act of resistance. Sorry. I admit, this railing I'm doing is all from a perspective a bit removed from the heart of girlhood. I once may have been attracted to donning the Catholic school uniform poetically--but if and when I did, I don't think it creeped anyone out--titillated them maybe. Maybe it's the same. I don't think so. Poets who incorporate childhood into their poems (god knows I do) are legion. I think what I don't understand is the defense of this tactic as a strategy of power. I don't want my childhood to be my armor. Maybe I still am (although there is no I in Xnnovative poet, is there?) partly my childhood and its trappings, but I can think of other non-linear aspects of my poetic "self" better suited to skewering the patriarchy. Like my mind.
As far as wanting people on the street to want to have sex with me—I did want that once. I am happy to not want it now. And as far as my cunt getting loose or smelling… I’d have to say that I hope I can learn to love aging. Admitting to loving youth—that is nothing. Saying I will accept my aging—easy. But loving the aging, really loving it, that I see as difficult and immensely worth my poetic while, and decidedly avant-garde.
What I mean to say is that when I read Sexton in high school, her metaphors were a revelation, and at Yale, when Bishop was offered as one of the only recent female poets (this was the early 90s!) worth looking at in depth, I saw her restraint only as the calcification holding back what I thought must be seething underneath. Very Freudian. My reading of contemporary poets was non-existent until my MFA, the exception being poets in translation, strangely enough. I knew confessional and beat poetry and Frank O’Hara, but the freedom to combine the ubiquitous body with a mythic Now! was not a freedom I ever felt. In my work, the body is everpresent and thus unselfconsciously indicated: but Now is something I’ve never gotten my teeth around.
I am elliptical though. Certain that association was the way to write good poetry, I came to that knowledge from reading Paz and Transtromer (these in translation) and Simic, not Stein (who came much later for me). Surreality was what I loved, and science fiction. My poetry rarely talks fabric or fashion, and indeed, in a room full of gurlesque female poets, I’m the one with the eight dollar haircut or no hair at all. It is particularly the freedom to include pop culture and daily happenings that I am fairly unable to do. But why haven’t I ever taken this freedom as my own (since the lack of those references in my work is I think the most notable difference between myself and the other poets noted by AG as gurlesque)?
Certainly, the poets mentioned by Arielle and Danielle are wonderful company, but it would be disingenuous for me to claim much sense of an aesthetic fellowship with the poets named there. I do feel fellowship with the women poets I’ve known and spent time with because of that time. The ones I’ve been in class with have influenced my work, assuredly—but in a way that promotes kitsch and cutesiness and a gutsy insistence on the details of a specific brand of girlhood? Not so much.
What does it mean to be included under a rubric of any kind? I don’t know, this being the first moment I have had that pleasure. I do know, that in an era that seems insistent on the fact that individuals are free to present themselves as women any way they choose and that such freedom should be celebrated, I dissent. I would not limit anyone’s self-portrayal, but neither do I glory in each and every. I am not at all Whitmanesque. I am much stodgier. I do not see performed sexuality as power or proof that “we’ve arrived” in the way many women of my generation and younger do; instead, I see the way this era promotes such sexual expression as power to be the duping of an entire generation, a telling of only half the story. Sex is power until it is not—until it no longer offers you a way of achieving money or a man. (Yes, a man. My college freshpeople still speak of an MRS degree. Color me agog.)
And as for “girls”—no one really likes this term without the double r or the -friend, do they?—have they gained “freedom” in sexual performance and expressivity? I can't read this movement as grotesque no matter how hard I try. Wanting glitter to be important doesn't make it so. I get the implied violence to the cute... but don't masochists already own their fetishes? Why is claiming victimization as an identity any better than passively being victimized? Isn't it in fact worse to be willing and complicit in the violence? This isn't power, in my estimation, it's throwing in the towel. If girls have gained a sense of center-ness in the past 20 years, and maybe they have, it seems to me concurrently our boys (as a mother of three of them) have lost some ground. Can they (I'm talking cultural acceptance here) wear pink? dresses? braid their hair? any more than they could twenty years ago? I cannot believe that any gains in girl-land not echoed in the other gender-space (or god-forbid even crossing over into it!) could be real gains.
I do not believe that today’s girls experience their more blatant sexuality in a wholly empowering way. And I think that crafting a nostalgia-laden, pre-hung up idea of what my body was to me at eight would be false. I had shame at eight. And six, and five. Shame was as ubiquitous in my early life as unicorns. In fact, I knew since I first began idolizing the white phallus-beasts, that they only came to virgins, and since my mother was enlightened enough to answer such questions honestly, I knew at six exactly what a virgin was. And by fourteen I knew I’d done enough to ensure I’d never see a unicorn (confession lives!).
In other words, sex may be power, but power once-removed and intricately linked to shame and usable for only ten to twenty-five years of a life. Danielle sees this as a substantial chunk, me--not so much. Like a career in ballet, the advantages of treading this road to influence rarely survive into the next stage of a woman’s life—whether she procreate or not. I find it difficult to embrace as my own any term that lives inside this youth-centered illusion without consideration of what is beyond its borders. I can no longer in good conscience carry a Hello Kitty lunchbox. It infantilizes me, and as I will not shave myself to pre-pubescent levels I will not lurch toward any previous incarnation of my self. I want to be woman. I want to revel in the Now I cannot include in my poems. I am a box of hypocrisy in that way. Forgive.
I cannot see this poetic clinging to pre-adolescence (not just as content but as marker of difference) as substantially removed from the popular idea that the majority of prostitution acts or strip clubs or the cultural imitation of strippers (Brazilianed, tanned orange, capable with a pole, having less than 15% body fat but size C+ breasts) empowers women. Using what you've got for a short period of time for less than it is worth is NOT real power unless you have a REAL choice about it (privileged few). It also echoes the tendency to cosmetic surgery (done for the woman's self-worth of course, not for her value on the open market or to prolong youth... the most recent incarnation is the "Mommy Job" [a combo of breast-lift, liposuction, and botox to reclaim the pre-pregnancy shape]). Ever see Brazil? Have you looked at Mickey Rourke lately? Clearly, cosmetic surgery disasters do not limit themselves to women. Or idiots. I think the overeducated and the artistic feel the same cultural pressures as everyone else. To help us cope with our choices, we develop theory around them.
I am not denying that girlhood happens and it IS important. It just isn't all-important to me, or necessary to represent artificially in conjunction with my current being. Girlhood is my previous existence, a rite of passage, a source, the well from which the woman Kirsten sprung. Note the past-tense. And then, but then, there are other (equally important) parts to a life. It doesn't seem to me that girlhood needs anymore validation or extension, especially anything that casts Lolita as emblem. That's been done by men for women for a longtime. The sexually precocious nymph. The supermodel. And no, I don't think Valley-speak is an act of resistance. Sorry. I admit, this railing I'm doing is all from a perspective a bit removed from the heart of girlhood. I once may have been attracted to donning the Catholic school uniform poetically--but if and when I did, I don't think it creeped anyone out--titillated them maybe. Maybe it's the same. I don't think so. Poets who incorporate childhood into their poems (god knows I do) are legion. I think what I don't understand is the defense of this tactic as a strategy of power. I don't want my childhood to be my armor. Maybe I still am (although there is no I in Xnnovative poet, is there?) partly my childhood and its trappings, but I can think of other non-linear aspects of my poetic "self" better suited to skewering the patriarchy. Like my mind.
As far as wanting people on the street to want to have sex with me—I did want that once. I am happy to not want it now. And as far as my cunt getting loose or smelling… I’d have to say that I hope I can learn to love aging. Admitting to loving youth—that is nothing. Saying I will accept my aging—easy. But loving the aging, really loving it, that I see as difficult and immensely worth my poetic while, and decidedly avant-garde.
Monday, July 07, 2008
7.7.8
Long weekend. I began The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Why, in fiction of this type (hip and best-selling magical realism) is it required that the male protagonist start out so passive? A blank slate to hallucinate on? Is that really necessary? That we can imagine (at least in the beginning) that someone simply slipped a tab of acid into his spaghetti sauce? I'll tell you, it's an immediate turn-off though I am dutifully continuing. Saw There Will Be Blood last night. Daniel Day Lewis scares me.
So I was working on a cosmogeny poem. It's a little 2-dimensional as yet, but so is my computer screen.
In the beginning
a mirror was the onliest carnage. Its oval
begged at its edges (a waterhole will
obscure predation). Its oval begged
and begged and the birds
came first and then
the wildebeests. Finally, man
augured at mirror as mud. What it was
was most truculent silver-white, but
these did not know New England snow
nor would they. What they also
did not know was they existed
not until the mirror begged them
to and be reflected. When the birds flew
over it congregations, fish schooled it beneath.
When beasts leaned in
to drink, huge jaws split the surface to feast
en face. When men walked across, as still
they could then at the beginning
of the world, their soles echoed in women’s
soles—women upside-down, women lengthening
their hair with gravity, braiding it with
movements of fish, tethers of seaweed and rivergrass.
One man reaching down to cup
mirror, brought it mouthward in a kind
of alcohol. This was the first kiss, the woman
plucked and inverted. She sucked air, for her first
time, but found hard releasing what was
insubstantial. The hole left beneath her by her
swallowed men. Several, falling under, shot up
women, until some of each were in each
atmosphere and some halfway. Here
among the air, women move
gracefully, used to thicker stuff, and can hold
their breath for lifetimes.
But this, this has all been told
from the top down. Underneath—
the story goes—crocs were always
waiting, fish doing their arithmetics, and it was
women invented the mirror, on purpose making
those who believe their own thirst
brings into being water.
So I was working on a cosmogeny poem. It's a little 2-dimensional as yet, but so is my computer screen.
In the beginning
a mirror was the onliest carnage. Its oval
begged at its edges (a waterhole will
obscure predation). Its oval begged
and begged and the birds
came first and then
the wildebeests. Finally, man
augured at mirror as mud. What it was
was most truculent silver-white, but
these did not know New England snow
nor would they. What they also
did not know was they existed
not until the mirror begged them
to and be reflected. When the birds flew
over it congregations, fish schooled it beneath.
When beasts leaned in
to drink, huge jaws split the surface to feast
en face. When men walked across, as still
they could then at the beginning
of the world, their soles echoed in women’s
soles—women upside-down, women lengthening
their hair with gravity, braiding it with
movements of fish, tethers of seaweed and rivergrass.
One man reaching down to cup
mirror, brought it mouthward in a kind
of alcohol. This was the first kiss, the woman
plucked and inverted. She sucked air, for her first
time, but found hard releasing what was
insubstantial. The hole left beneath her by her
swallowed men. Several, falling under, shot up
women, until some of each were in each
atmosphere and some halfway. Here
among the air, women move
gracefully, used to thicker stuff, and can hold
their breath for lifetimes.
But this, this has all been told
from the top down. Underneath—
the story goes—crocs were always
waiting, fish doing their arithmetics, and it was
women invented the mirror, on purpose making
those who believe their own thirst
brings into being water.
Friday, July 04, 2008
4.7.8
Maybe it should be independance. Then we could all dance in our pens.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
2.7.8
I am trying to find an agent. How does one accomplish such an insane task if prior to the novel, there have been only poems? I assume it is unlikely. My eyes hurt. Yet, I am not prepared to buckle Sleight into a suitcase to fester under my bed. To much festering is ungood for the spleen. I should never have coffee so late. Today my 5 year old whipped this little nugget out during dinner: "People die by themselves." And when we asked him to clarify, he said: "They die in their own way." Nah, he's not my son.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
1.7.8
It is just July. I am a fly on the wallpaper. The wallpaper is a confusing shade of green. Today I have decided to speak here more fully, not just drafts of poems, but other things. Thoughts about poems and the postage stamp that is my backyard and smells of fermented white mulberries, thankfully not mulberry-colored mulberries, or I'd have wine-stained birdshit on my upper deck.
I love my deck and do not use it enough. I have a ficus, an umbrella, and a plum tree out there, and all of them are still alive. If you know me, you will know that is a victory. This week, I am reading Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist from Omnidawn, and like My Life and A Border Comedy, I intensely enjoy the reading but find the process slippery.
I cannot hold the water in my soil.
I may or may not attempt to analyze this sensation at some further date. Suffice it to say that it is not purely the associative act that makes her work read for me like a subtraction. There is something effacing about the directions in which the associations and arguments flow. They are not jarring, not contrary, the visuals are often caught in lists that do not correlate to form a snapshot, and the you and the I end up more universal than confessional because their relation dwells mostly in the realms of abstraction and hypothetical for instances, not memories they *claim* as seminal, or defining, or even apocryphal. Some moments aren't claimed at all (the floral carpetbag running through the baggage terminal over and over and over). But let me mull.
The poem as airport (page 34):"A poem/full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying." But here I also think sneeze, and contagion. Can a poem exist as an example purely of poetic thought, as an elucidation of one of a poem's properties? A manual of poetic process, but written in the language of the product.
What I *can* recall from my reading is that when I first plucked the book out of *my* carpetbag I was sitting for the first time in years on a yellow schoolbus on a field trip to 'Jungle World' in Limerick, PA (notable for the smokestacks in evidence at its nuclear facility) with my 5- and my 3- year old and multiple other runny-nosed funny shriekers. After a few pages, I felt a desperate desire to record the schoolbus and the concept of the *field trip* as a general category and this one in all its specific oddity.
This, then, is the type of writing that is for me permissive. For that reason alone, I must claim it as a good. On page 35 Hejinian writes, "The guy/grabbed the egg. But is it just simple contact that we want?" I wonder about the prosaic, semi-redundant "just simple" And I wonder how anyone can grab the egg without sending the slime through the fingers like semen (not simple at all, messy), or the hardboiled ova rubberballing down the hall towards the toddler's room where number 17 on his classical mix CD each night gets too loud and threatens to wake him, disturbing our magic hour which I am at this moment wasting.
You must excuse me.
I love my deck and do not use it enough. I have a ficus, an umbrella, and a plum tree out there, and all of them are still alive. If you know me, you will know that is a victory. This week, I am reading Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist from Omnidawn, and like My Life and A Border Comedy, I intensely enjoy the reading but find the process slippery.
I cannot hold the water in my soil.
I may or may not attempt to analyze this sensation at some further date. Suffice it to say that it is not purely the associative act that makes her work read for me like a subtraction. There is something effacing about the directions in which the associations and arguments flow. They are not jarring, not contrary, the visuals are often caught in lists that do not correlate to form a snapshot, and the you and the I end up more universal than confessional because their relation dwells mostly in the realms of abstraction and hypothetical for instances, not memories they *claim* as seminal, or defining, or even apocryphal. Some moments aren't claimed at all (the floral carpetbag running through the baggage terminal over and over and over). But let me mull.
The poem as airport (page 34):"A poem/full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying." But here I also think sneeze, and contagion. Can a poem exist as an example purely of poetic thought, as an elucidation of one of a poem's properties? A manual of poetic process, but written in the language of the product.
What I *can* recall from my reading is that when I first plucked the book out of *my* carpetbag I was sitting for the first time in years on a yellow schoolbus on a field trip to 'Jungle World' in Limerick, PA (notable for the smokestacks in evidence at its nuclear facility) with my 5- and my 3- year old and multiple other runny-nosed funny shriekers. After a few pages, I felt a desperate desire to record the schoolbus and the concept of the *field trip* as a general category and this one in all its specific oddity.
This, then, is the type of writing that is for me permissive. For that reason alone, I must claim it as a good. On page 35 Hejinian writes, "The guy/grabbed the egg. But is it just simple contact that we want?" I wonder about the prosaic, semi-redundant "just simple" And I wonder how anyone can grab the egg without sending the slime through the fingers like semen (not simple at all, messy), or the hardboiled ova rubberballing down the hall towards the toddler's room where number 17 on his classical mix CD each night gets too loud and threatens to wake him, disturbing our magic hour which I am at this moment wasting.
You must excuse me.
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