Muse Magazine

I have eight poems up here. 

Notes from packing my books for the move to Brooklyn

1.  I used to be so careful.  Tiny handwriting.  Blank sheets of paper folded into exact fourths and stuck into books to be found ten or eleven years later.  That trick.

2.  Dear American authors of the nineteenth century.  Dear Whitman.  Dear Poe.  Stop calling people "half-breeds."

3.  "Bolt upright in my bed that night/ I saw my father flying;/ the wind was walking on my neck,/ the windowpanes were crying."  --Stanley Kunitz

4.  You once sent me a large shoe box of poetry books you were finished with.  Most of them were creased and smudged and had receipts stuck in them because you used to carry poetry books everywhere in the large pockets on your shorts.  In one you had written a note to yourself:  "The exalted calm."

5.  Now in my author bio, I can be like all those other people and go, "Joanna Penn Cooper was born in 1980.  She lives in Brooklyn."  Part of it will be accurate.  The Brooklyn part.

To Whom It May Concern

I'm writing to inform you of my qualifications on this sunny day inside
wearing silent headphones, a small white feather stuck to one foot.
I can hear that tree clearing its throat outside my fifth floor walk-up.
I can see all this packing and half unpacking of boxes as a compulsive
metaphor for how we're all of us always moving, always learning
it all the freaking time:  How to lose how to lose how to lose.
How to know the dark leather gloss of July leaves and let them go.
How to wear the crown of love and fresh pita for lunch and let it go.
My life is not a plastic hamster ball.  My life is not that refugee song.
Not any more than anyone else's.  I've cured myself of being
so meta, or else I've embraced it.  Either way I'm wearing
the crown. Either way, we're all wearing the crown.

Happy birthday, Linda Ronstadt

Authors I Am Not (2)

Hemingway never actually ran with the bulls in Pamplona.
But I used to ride my bike along a somewhat busy street in St. Paul
to get to the smoothie place.

Authors I Am Not (1)

[Image source: Poets.org]

If I were H.D., I'd be all
mythic oracular and Woman.
Today I feel more like a worried cat.

Mid-July

Mid-July and here I sit looking up "scrimshaw" to write a not-great metaphor about an 18 year-old Nantucket sailor from the 1830s and this tree next to my window.  Both of them in full sail, wind in hair.  Anything could happen-- fog and white-shrouded figures; tea; scrimshaw.  All this blue. 

Loving Cup

Poem Partly Composed While Half-Watching Wimbledon

[Image source: Reuters]

You are prone to good streaks when you let the racquet do the work,
prone to a landscape of secret suffering in other languages,
followed by bird wit and eucalyptus.  Your youth and stoicism
the best kind of wasted youth, everyone on the edge of their seats
to see if you remember what comes next.  Now it's all, "Have I
made the finals?  Is this really the game?  What is the salary
of the ticket-taker on the commuter train?  Who is she later
at home when she takes off that hat?"  You've glided through
on your metaphorical Raleigh bike, unaware of the forces
surrounding you, keeping you upright.  Getting to the finals
is encouragement enough.  Beginning to feel your dark night
of the soul is a bit silly is encouragement enough.  You can
make up a new game in the middle of their game.  Call it
"art."  You're all jacks and sack cloth.  You're a fighter.
Your'e a doll.

Other Flowers

My short review of James Schuyler's Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems is out in the current issue of Pleiades. 

On or around my birthday

Drove up with my pal Douglas from NYC to Henniker, NH, where we read at New England College as alumni readers for our former MFA program; stayed with friends Mary-Catherine and Adam in Henniker; had zombies and crab rangoon with my poetry mentors Paula McLain and Malena Mörling; took the bus to Boston to see one of my oldest friends, Wendy, who had made a homemade cake for my birthday (her first!-- it was delicious); went for a walk in Brookline, Mass. and bought these books; realized I had a huge welt-like spider bite on my leg [photo redacted].  Hello. 

Solstice Activities So Far

1.  I did a ceremony involving arugula, blue cheese, strawberries, and a Blue Moon beer.  A lunch ceremony.

2.  I read some poems by Elaine Equi.  One of them starts, "The name Equi means horses in Latin."  Then I thought of something I recently learned: "The German word for Cooper is Fassbinder."   

3.  I thought about the idea of renewal.  It came to me like a Joseph Cornell box-- something with a ballerina looking sad but determined.  Maybe some string representing the trajectory of thoughts; an old postcard with new writing across the old image; and a plant from under the ocean that looks like lace made of clay.  Maybe it's a plant, and maybe it's an animal.  The point is, once you've made an art box assemblage, you're free to get on with things.

4.  I'll offer you this service, in the form of a summer incantation:  "Take it easy.  Let it go.  Just go ahead and let it go." 

I Feel Spooky, Tina

(after a line by Peter Davis)

The only person named Tina that I remember knowing was from 4th or 5th grade.  She was small with a cute doll face and fine curling hair.  She looked very fragile with a strawberry birthmark on the side of her face, a sad, unsettled look about the brow.  In truth, my main memory of her is one day when Tina, Tammy, and I were taken down to a basement classroom to begin learning the flute.  Maybe the unsettled look only happened on that day.  Maybe her name wasn't Tina. 

Tammy was one of the middle-aged fifth graders.  There were a few girls who looked like 47 year-olds in shift dresses.  I imagined that they were required to do all the housework and bring their dads beers while their moms worked overtime at crap jobs.  These middle-aged kids had a resigned look about them, and it was both creepy and comforting to be sitting there learning long-division with them wafting preternatural competence and brokenness out into the room.   

I hope that Tammy hasn't worked too hard in her life.  I hope that she is now a teacher of the flute.  And, Tina, if that is her name . . .  I hope she owns a condo and drives a Cadillac.  Maybe a vintage MG. 

We all lived at the base of some mountains.  This meant different things to each of us.  That was the year I was a complete latch-key kid unto myself and I skipped a month of school to stay home and watch I Dream of Jeannie.  One day I missed a field trip to the bread factory, and someone kind who I didn't know very well-- Tammy?-- brought me my free sample of bread, a miniature loaf, all perfect and small in its cellophane.  For the rest of the time I lived in that town, whenever that baking bread smell from the factory wafted my way, I felt an unaccountable longing.

Granola

How worried are you about a continuous notion of “I”
and whether the you who did whatever thing ten years ago is
the same you today, and what this has to do with character building
or absolution or how people in different geographical locations imagine
you when you come to mind for them, if you do, given what you may
have done ten years ago?  Do you think about this often?  Sometimes?
Rarely or never?  Do you think things when you’re pouring granola
onto your yogurt like, “What if it’s all a lucid dream, and if it is, what do
I choose next?  Why did I choose the granola with the vanilla if that
wasn’t the granola I wanted?  Why didn’t I lucid dream someone 
coming to restock the kind of granola I did want?”  The granola, then, 
proves it isn’t exactly that kind of lucid dream.  It’s a different kind, 
where you might end up trying a different kind of granola or moving 
back  to the Midwest or adopting a tiny animal that comes out from 
under a car  at the laundromat and naming it Andy Garcia, and having 
it narrow its green  and crazy eyes at you in love and partial devotion 
for the next fourteen years  before it leaves this body, changes form, 
becomes some next  thing you don’t even know about, 
that you can’t and don’t even want to control.

Good News from Sunday

1.  Sitting in a window eating sushi and udon noodles.
2.  Two ten year-old boys eating at a table by themselves, a serious look about them.
3.  On a bench in the evening eating plain frozen yogurt with blueberries. (That good, slightly sour kind of frozen yogurt.)
4.  The Upper West Side couple who walked by with their toddler perched in that high kind of stroller (the kind for running?).  The toddler's face lit up by the iphone he was looking at. 
5.  The Argentinian cab driver who asked me where I'm from and then asked if Myrtle Beach is in North Carolina or South Carolina.
6.  A "small-boned woman dressed as a jackal" on a movie set in my friend's apartment.
7.  Getting in bed with Carrie Fisher's memoir.  She had famous parents like me, except mine aren't famous.  

Malena Mörling reads Tomas Tranströmer

Thoughts at the NYPL

I should have been a librarian.  I've always liked the smell, even though the summer when I worked at the college library taking ancient bound journals off the shelves to be re-bound, the ancient decaying dust (and mites?) got into the skin of my hands and made me feel like a drug addict with itchy hands.  Mostly, though, the decaying smell is a comfort to me.  Is intellectual home.  The smell of decaying books, I mean, not decaying flesh.  But I learned this recently:  There's some chemical that our bodies need, that we're basically made of, that is found in meat that is just starting to rot.  Scientists and French people have found that the food that appeals to all palates is food that mimics this just starting to rot taste.  Like Parmesan cheese.  I'm not being fanciful.  This is a nonfiction musing.  I learned this from a student of mine who is a ballet dancer.  Some people drilled a hole in her bones to repair the fracture she'd been dancing on all those months.  One thing I've learned:  I like knowing a person in one context, and then going to see them in their work context and realizing, "My God, that person can leap about!"  I have also learned that most people have a compelling story if you stop complaining about your haircut long enough to notice.  For example, since I moved to New York, I've met the guy from the radio who convinced himself he had a British accent when he was a teenager.  I've met a woman from Kentucky who flew over Kansas in a prop plane, surveying it all.  Also, my physical therapist has family in Argentina and co-owns a house on Fire Island.  He likes the quiet out there and sometimes finds it hard to get up on Monday morning and take the train back to Manhattan and press on people's backs on the 12th floor of a building near Macy's.  I've learned all that and more.

New York Public Library

Yesterday I went to the library.  The NYPL was built during the Progressive Era to "establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York."  Public spaces like this make me feel ok about life.  Optimistic even.  Currently the library is facing a budget cut that would close many branches, cut community programs, and could cause the library to be open only four days a week.  Speak out.

Twilight

"I have talked to them about this and that, I have explained the twilight, admittedly.  But is it enough, that's what tortures me, is it enough?"  --Waiting for Godot

Morning list essay

1.  I don't think consciousness lives only in the mind.  All your cells know it.  Or-- how do we say it?  Mind is everywhere?

2.  I should spend the summer re-reading Emerson.

3.  Reading Reznikoff, Niedecker.  Who else?  Poetry isn't just in the poets.  [And do I even mean "poetry"?]

4.  I love Americans and their solitary hunkering down into ideas.  Esp. Americans of the 19c who wrote wild and tortured books.  Dickinson.  E. Stoddard.  Thoreau.  Even Poe.  In the 20c, Jean Toomer does it in Cane, this hunkering, letting the material get almost out of hand.  There's a slipshod gracey genius running amok.

5.   Eudora Welty had it.  Found it funny.  Dressed it in gloves and set it on the steps for us to see before it tore off its coat and bonnet and ran away, out of frame.

6.  An extra-social social act.

7.  What's that thing at your shoulder, just out of frame?  Feel it?

[photo: Elizabeth Stoddard]