Another collaboration with my brother (Malfeez #2)

Suze Orman Prose Poem

Watching Suze Orman before bed seemed like a recipe for whatever, but I did it anyway.  I was not bringing home $25K per month, like the guy who called in to ask permission to send his four year-old daughter to private grammar school for $36K/year.  (APPROVED.)  In bed I put in my earplugs and took sleepy breaths.  The radiators were off, even though it was still winter outside, even though it was late March.  I thought of horse breaths on a chill day.  Have I ever seen horse breaths on a chill day in real life?  If I had gone to a private grammar school, would I still be here thinking of horse breaths on a chill day?  Oh, Suze.  

[image by Alex Lenhoff; text by JPC.]

Tom Waits

Collaboration with my brother (Malfeez #1)

After the Botanical Garden

My brother and I sit at McDonald's eating soft serve and French fries.  He says, "Let's each say something positive," and for a moment we just sit and stare.  Stumped.  Then we realize we are eating ice cream in the middle of a weekday afternoon.  That we are together.  That we exist on the Earth at the same time.

[image by Alex Lenhoff; text by JPC.]

Joanna's Exercise Manual: Lesson One

You may be just the tiniest bit agoraphobic on certain days, but if you've been sitting for several hours staring at your CV and your unpublished book manuscript, I recommend that you take a shower.  You may then want to sit on the edge of the bed and stare into space for a few minutes before putting on some comfortable corduroys and the running shoes you bought for walking because, you know, "Maybe I'll take up running."  (Probably not.)  When you're ready to leave the house, impulsively pick up five poems and read them out loud in what you're thinking of as your "new reading voice."  When you finally leave the house, realize that it's almost dinner time and decide to go to a restaurant for a salad and a $5 glass of wine when you realize it's happy hour and glasses of wine are only $5.  Whether you want to or not, eavesdrop on the couple opposite you who seem to be on a first date.  Their conversation will be painful to overhear.  He will be doing all the talking, trying to very clearly indicate to her that he finds her attractive.  She will be sitting very still, wearing her coat, and trying to decide how she feels about it all.  Can this possibly end well?  Pay your check, get up, and walk to the park.  Walk briskly around for 30 minutes, pumping your arms a little.  It may be two days after the vernal equinox, with deceptive sunshine, so that when you've gone once around the path, you are a little sweaty under your coat, but your gloveless hands will be red and freezing.  Listen to the sound of aluminum bats hitting baseballs.  Accidentally do a weird little hop without breaking your stride when someone's half-boxer, half-pit bull seems to lunge at you a little.  When you come around to the baseball diamond a second time, it will be getting just the slightest bit dark and the field will be suddenly, uncannily empty.  Everyone will have packed up and left just that quickly. 

News

1. My former MFA classmate Joe Gouveia interviewed me for his radio show, "The Poets' Corner," on Provincetown radio station WOMR. The podcasts of the interview (two fifteen-minute halves) can be found here.

2. I will be participating in a faculty reading at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus on Thurs. 3/24 at 7 PM. The event is free and open to the public, and I'll be reading with some exciting poets, including Elisabeth Frost, Sarah Gambito, and Willie Perdomo. It takes place here: Fordham University-Lincoln Center, 113 W. 60th St. (corner of Columbus/Ninth Ave.), 12th Floor Lounge.

3. Recent poems appear in Lyre Lyre and are forthcoming in the journal Muse.

4. My book review on James Schuyler's Other Flowers will appear in the June issue of Pleiades. Here's Schuyler reading.

5. I'll be presenting a paper on Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely at the MELUS conference in April. The conference is in Boca Raton this year! I am considering presenting in golf pants and white shoes.

Four more

Part of My Trip

My grandmother is telling me there are coyotes all over town and I'm looking at those gourd things she has hanging by the kitchen window. "What are those gourd things, anyway?" "Gourds." She almost doesn't want to go into the backyard anymore. "The chance of encountering a wild animal is great!" There are more deer and raccoons than before. Bobcats. Anything could come out of those woods. There used to be kids and dogs to scare things away. She picks up the yellow-brown glass chicken on the window sill. "Remember this?" "Yes." "Mamaw gave this to me, on the last Christmas she was alive, I think." She's telling me about Mamaw's taste-- she was always picking out glass doodads for the house. "Mamaw had wonderful taste. She was always put together. Wore white gloves and a fox fur to go uptown." We look at the glass chicken and think of Mamaw alive.

Visit home

Lyre Lyre

Three poems of mine have been included in this new online journal. Thanks, Lyres!

Movement

"We use that word movement. I am moved. And yet we know we're standing right there." --Richard Tuttle, from Art21

I've Already Been Pretty Cultural This Year, So Far

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Participating in the New Year's Day Marathon at the Poetry Project. I performed/read with Clif's trio, Secret Orchestra. Here's an article that gives us a special mention as one of the "musical highlights." (!)

2. Visiting my friend Wendy in Boston. We sat around watching a Monty Python documentary and playing Angry Birds. One day we went to Cambridge and ate at the Indian buffet I like. She also gave me a cup of powdered green tea that I was skeptical of, but highly enjoyed. (We are sometimes more "cultural" than this, but we were in the mood for a low-key New Year visit.)

3. Finally going to the Moth storytelling event. The one I went to was hosted by Mike Birbiglia, and storytellers included Christian McBride, Rachel Dratch, Walter Mosley, Todd Bush, and Tina McElroy Ansa. (This one was at Cooper Union, where Sojourner Truth and Lincoln and Frederick Douglass spoke, as well as the striking shirtwaist factory workers, shortly before the Triangle Factory fire, as I just learned on PBS.)

4. The Met, again. The Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand exhibit is still up.

5. Watching Clif play at a benefit for "class war prisoners." Leonard Peltier and etc. A man who spoke there predicted that the revolution in Egypt was about to occur.

6. Going to get my hair cut and studying the old Creem magazine covers in the bathroom of Mudhoney on Sullivan. Joan Jett, David Johansen, Mick Jagger. Lots of shag hairdos.

7. Seeing my former student, Devin Alberda, dance for the New York City Ballet. We saw four short works. "Glass Pieces" (set to music by Philip Glass) and "Plainspoken" (which was choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, Natalie Portman's baby daddy) were my favorites.

8. Visiting Beacon: Dia, huge contemporary art museum in Beacon, New York. My favorites were, I think, the enormous metal sculptures you can walk into by Richard Serra, the paintings by Agnes Martin, and the interactive exhibit by Franz Erhard Walther that Clif and I "activated." (We chose one of the pieces called "Koerpergewichte (Body Weights)" and then stood in the middle of a large carpet and unfolded a large loop of cloth, which we then put around our waists. We stood there balancing and looking at each other while people watched us. Then we folded it back up.)

9. Looking out the window at all the Weather.

10. Going to the launch reading for my friend Ross Gay's second book of poems, Bringing the Shovel Down. The book includes kundimans, love poems to the nation: "Love, you got me standing at attention. Clutching my heart. Polishing guns." [RG quote and photo courtesy of Jessica Cullen, my new pal I went to the reading with.]

More weather

A Weather

Today

Jeanette Winterson

[Painting by Gustave Moreau depicting Saint George slaying the dragon
from Wikipedia.]

I'm teaching Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit again. It's hard to believe that Winterson wrote this when she was 23.

This is from the chapter called "Deuteronomy: The last book of the law":

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious. How is it that no one will believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, when every day Jonah is swallowing the whale? I can see them now, stuffing down the fishiest of fish tales, and why? Because it is history. Knowing what to believe has its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet . . . .

*

There is an order and a balance to be found in stories.

History is St George.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished.

Happy V. Day, Everyone

Clif went out and secretly bought me a gift. Here's the gift, and here's Clif looking sneaky.

Saturday night downtown

Pages from a childhood scrapbook

that I apparently put together sometime around 1979, and that I only have the vaguest recollection of.

Ready as a Lever

[for Todd Colby]

I’m building a sled from popsicle sticks

I’m wearing the jacket of the lamb, sliding

into a town near you to do the dance of glory, the Get-

Ready Man as my witness, for now, more than ever,

we all need a witness. In former times, we all of

us gathered in paddocks to witness the power

and the glory of the jive of the dance of perseverance

and rocking out. These days, it’s just me across town

watching you across town in videos online, rocking out.

I’m setting out to leave out of here on the “departure”

portion of my journey. Get ready, man. Stay tuned

in. I may need you as a witness. Pretty soon—

popsicle sticks everywhere.

Things I Wonder About

1. You'll catch more flies with honey. Sure. But who wants to catch flies?

2. Will my homemade therapies work? (A round of made-up 19th century breaths and small movements meant to teach my back its place, meant to encourage healthful vigor and elasticity.)

3. I don't want to be one, but I like the sound of the word. Weakling.

4. My mother's wish to become a diamond.

5. These sentences from the Morrison novel I'm teaching: "Those twelve years in Montour County, where she had been treated gently by a father and a brother, and where she herself was in a position to help farm animals under her care, had taught her a preferable kind of behavior. Preferable to that of the men who called her mermaid and the women who swept up her footprints or put mirrors on her door." Not everyone, apparently, learns "a preferable kind of behavior."

6. Some recent email subject lines: doppelganger; tick.; flying africans; This one?; You Should Come; Valentine Failure Massage.

7. Up here in my tower without curtains, I see all the weather. Even so, it sneaks up on me. The fact and idea of "overcast" taking hold of me like an uncanny event.

8. "A person can find a calm spot in hell/ between all the snow and spitting." Indeed.

9. Last night my dreams were on a whole continuum. On one end was a dream of washing dishes. I could wash dishes with amazing speed. On the other end was a dream of one of my oldest friends ("You Should Come") having died. I had to go down to the railroad station and turn in her coat, but at the last minute I refused. When I woke, I had just been wearing her coat, clutching it to me, and weeping weeping. No, you cannot have her coat! I am keeping the coat! (Ironically, she did once lend me a coat that I have yet to return. Also a bag and a key chain and a small table.)

10. Spring approaches. Or lurks. It feels more like lurking.