April 6th

Here We Are in Tunnels Again

The sounds of track and glimpses
of blue and white lights are
some shared memory of before.

We could have found a city under here.

April 5th

[poem was here]

April 4th

[poem was here]

April 3rd

Little Edie, Valiant

Fed the several cats their luncheon, spied
the growth through opera glasses-- the best blue
scarf one's ever owned falls through, stays lost--
staunchly climbed the turret to scatter the beasts
their Wonder Bread. One loves animals. But raccoons
and cats, raccoons and cats, trying on the nerves.
And there walks Jerry, mother's friend, beautiful
paint-spattered youth, the Marble Faun. The kind
of people creeping around here now! This is mother's
house. She lets them in or keeps them out.

April 2nd

It is pleasant to stumble

In the Smoky Mountains it is pleasant
to stumble if someone with oversized hands
catches you in his hands like baseball mitts.
This is called dating.

April 1st

Kansas

How a heaviness of my spirit pulled
against the lightness of the air. How
that was my home.

Poetry Month

I am going to write drafts of poems every day this month for Poetry Month. Then I'll go back and work with them later. I kept flip-flopping on whether or not to post these drafts on my blog. I had decided not to. Then, inspired by Ada Limón's blog, I decided to just go ahead and do it. She wrote a pretty awesome first of April poem. I, on the other hand, am getting off to a slower start.

So far, my first two poems are inspired by phrases from James Schuyler poems. And so far, my April poems are only three to four lines long. (Yesterday, April 1st poem was about 14 lines long, but today I just lifted the best lines, and made that be the draft.)

I'll post them . . .

One day . . .

Dr. Seuss, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Ruth Krauss

[photo: http://www.k-state.edu/english/nelp/purple/photographs.html]


Her prose poem "News" (1961) makes me so happy I don't know what to do. It's separated into six short sections. Here is one of the sections:

"This measure," the Attorney-General stated, "This legislation-- which I endorse-- requires some thirty thousand skylarks to register for the first time with my office." And he left the room.

Five for Monday

1. I couldn't remember the phrase "negative capability" when I was teaching. What does that mean?

2. A man came by with a screen for my office window, but I haven't seen the aggressive squirrel in at least a week.

3. Everything stopped, then started again.

4. I'm still getting used to my dedicated walking shoes.

5. The perks of being a Joanna.

The Housemartins!

To Keep My Hands Busy

Nova Scotia, Summer 2009

Sigh . . .

Slight cardiac ache on a peaceful subway

Your heart has a charge and I think the word eons
but mean the word ions. I'm thinking to meditate
on the right particles or valence or molecules.
It's funny the language I don't know about myself.

One time in Philadelphia, they sent me to the machine;
they read the tape and I was fine, except for one of the more
common arrhythmias. A lovely word. "Meet
my daughter, Arrhythmia."

People get on at 42nd, but not so many I have to shift
in my seat and clamp my elbows in. I'm thinking, To breathe,
and certain things I quietly delight in-- a young and lovely
black woman in '20s era dress; the calm and deliberate way

the woman across reads a gossip magazine, the dignity
of her posture; and, earlier, a young man reaching
across a puddle of slush to steady an old woman.
My heart in there sending out waves and eons.

Tangled Up in Blue

Flowers, hey!

Saturday, Early February, 12:14 p.m.

The expected snow never came. You might say I'm only happy when I'm with you or when I see a funny dog or think about kittens or California or the South Seas and Pippi Longstocking. I woke up wondering if your forehead was made of diamonds and if you still hated me for hating "Myth Busters," and I let you make the coffee very strong. Then you stretched up and curled your arms around like a kung fu monk and walked out of the room. I can still hear you in there. You are expanding yourself and taking big breaths.

Initial thinking (for team review only)

1. Build some time in.
2. Cost per use.
3. Some other instrument or medium I can't describe. Something like a loom and a piano, a Mr. Microphone and a harp.
4. Pay attention to the voice-over.
5. Volunteers across all five boroughs.
6. Meaning is a shaky edifice.
7. A festival. Pieces of tin on our outfits; in our hair and teeth, stars.
8. On the subway stairs, vision of (a) cattle car and (b) melting ego.
9. Sliding the tiles around for the proper effect.
10. If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.

Perfect Bird

(a kind-of ghazal)

[poem was here]

Bonnie "Prince" Billy sings Bill Withers

Odetta

Portrait

(an older piece)

He started out 5'8", but by the time their romance was over, he was 4'3", and she didn't know what to do with him. Sometimes he would sneak into her pocket when she was on her way out to the library and wait until she was in the middle of trying to remember something important before popping out under her armpit and humming love songs toward her ear. His hum was the hum of a forgetful mime. Overall, his personality was that of a juggler irritated by a parking ticket. Sometimes, though, he reminded her of a man with sad eyes, given to slicking down his hair with something that smelled like her grandfather, making her like him terribly. "Bright Eyes," her friends called him behind his back. And it was true: He was as impudent as Charlton Heston. Bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked.

He had taken up smoking to get back at his parents for giving him an alliterative name, but then one day he told her, "You don't know what sad is until you've seen the mattress your parents slept on your whole life thrown into a garbage truck." By then he had given up smoking, and she was about to move to Canada for reasons of her own, having to do with a movie she had once seen.

When she got there, she realized that he probably missed her but that he was probably the kind of person who would give himself one day to be sad before distracting himself with ukelele lessons. She occupied herself with arranging her spices and cheering up the dog, and then on the 17th day after she moved, she got very sad while measuring the coffee.

Morning Poem

11:15 on the couch with an English muffin and really good jam.
Pomegranate strawberry (almost wrote "poem-agranate"). A plate
inherited somehow from my little (half-)brother's grandmother--

white with green garlandy leaves and yellow, orange, and blue
flowers. Halfway through the first month of the second decade
of the 2000s. I could not have imagined this when I was younger.

I'm not sure what I thought I'd be. But I love,
somehow, this plate, this jam, this sitting here. Still,
a city might fall down on itself in a place you have never been.

Port-au-Prince has fallen down on itself. What does this mean
about how we care for each other? About a sunny day in
upper Manhattan, in the year 2010? Everything and nothing.

Pray for us.

The Kind of Thing I Find Weirdly Comforting

"Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

8 1/2: "Asa nisi masa"

Birthday 1978, Revolver

"Lying with the Wolf"

The truth is there is no prescribed version of what artists are supposed to be interested in. They are just drawn to certain activities and they pay attention to this.

--Kiki Smith

[more images can be found here]

Max Ernst Thursday

Today

Only Child Syndrome

I was imagining something crystalline and made of city
dirt and not-knowing. So I stayed inside all day.
I would like to say some true things, the way a song
can be true, or a dance. Using my words, I can say, “I sat
all day on my couch, looking up things online. This was research.”
I can say, “I’m left to my own devices again.” Whatever
that means. I have a generalized, sisterly sort of ache,
all of us trying so hard. Think of the gaze of something
dear to you. Imagine you could stay there always.


1/3/2010
Inwood, NYC

Rituals

[poem was here]

Kim Novak

Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen

Calm Down, Blanche

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

[poem was here]

Joanna Newsom

Pema Chödrön

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, non-aggressive, open-ended state of affairs."

--Pema Chödrön, Buddhist nun

Hang

If I can make myself grade all these finals, I get to go hang out with my family for a while.   

Mid-December

Some Friendly Advice

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

[poem was here]

Thinking of going off sugar (again)

Hypos

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off-- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Seu Jorge

Bushwick Reading Series

I'm reading at the Bushwick Public Library on Saturday with some great writers. You can find more information here. And I've recommended two books on their blog.

Five Questions for Todd Colby

Todd Colby has published four books of poetry: Ripsnort (1994), Cush (1995), Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings (2000), and Tremble & Shine (2004), all published by Soft Skull Press. Todd has performed his poetry on PBS and MTV, and his collaborative books and paintings with artist David Lantow can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art special collections libraries. Todd serves on the Board of Directors for The Poetry Project, where he has also taught several poetry workshops, and he posts new work on gleefarm.blogspot.com.

Hi, Todd! Thanks for being my inaugural interview. Tell me, what is the last thing you ate?

I just at a perfectly ripened banana that I purchased from Trader Joe's when it was still rather green earlier in the week.

Todd, what's a poet? I sometimes think that if I were better at some other kind of art, I wouldn't have to mess around with words. It's a funny thing to do, isn't it?

A poet is someone who receives a visceral energy from words. Words to a poet are units of energy that can be combined in various ways so as to create a sensation in those people with properly tuned receiving mechanisms. H.D. examined this in Notes on Thought and Vision. She thought that just two or three people with that power could change the world. I also think messing around with words just makes good economic sense. Having lived with a painter in the past, I know how expensive and messy it can be. So the fact that I can sit and write without a dime in my pocket while wearing a delicate writing jacket and not worry about getting it stained makes me very happy.

If you were going to prescribe a ritual to jump start my creativity and/or joie de vivre, what would it be? Would it involve speaking in funny voices?

I can only speak for myself here, but coffee is my jump starter. In fact, I'm writing this under the influence of that marvelous drug right now. I also think it is important to think about a person you'd like to address with the poem you're working on. It makes it more intimate and personal and you wind up saying things in the poem that you otherwise might not have if you were just looping around in your own head all day. Epistolary poetry in particular makes me very happy for some reason. Those fake letters of Dylan's in Tarantula or Alice Notley's many forays into that mode have all made life a little more bearable for me, which is the best thing you can say about poetry, or pretty much anything for that matter.

Yeah, I love how that happens-- how discovering that someone else's sensibilities overlap with yours does, in fact, make life more bearable somehow. Humor can be a big part of that for me. Can you talk about humor as a practice or technique for you? Do you ever think, "OK, I have to be funny enough to find my way into a complex area, but not so funny that I keep everything else at a distance?"

Humor in a poem makes it very personal for me. The tone, that is. But it has to be laced with something slightly acidic and even frightening to make it really work, at least for me. That said, I think Ron Padgett's poems have the perfect amount of levity and erudition. Joe Brainard also encapsulates that aesthetic for me quite well. I think humor in this context helps me not take myself too seriously, though I do, it's just that the self has to be laughed at or with now and again or else everything just feels like it totally sucks after awhile, and let's be truthful, it does. Humor is a good masking agent!

When is your next book coming out? How do you think it will it be different from your previous books?

I'm not sure. I need to talk to a couple more publishers who have expressed interest. The new book has a slightly different tone than any that came before. But it's a tone of craft and expertise that strikes me as my most seasoned writing ever. I can come back to the poems I've written over the last 3 years or so again and again and they just unfold in so many ways each time I revisit them. It's almost like someone else wrote them! Anyway, hopefully a new book will be out sooner than later.

Archibald MacLeish, We Love You!

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

Or maybe it's D. W. Winnicott we love.
Kindly squints and black ties make us strangely happy,
if we ever have been happy, which probably we were in childhood
when we learned to tells lies and walk around with our faces.

"Big whoop" was all we could muster. Our muscles bent
over thick bones. We were all forecast and goldenrod, mobile as dice,
really nothing more than fungal, but feisty and robust and always
nipping at the bus standing on the bridge fat and skinny

This was life. This was being alive, a cloud of knowing
not-knowing. A cloud of counting the barks of a chained
dog for messages. Bark twice if you hear me speaking
to you in my head. Bark! Bark! Moderate swing tempo.

Water is good for the lungs. If you hear me singing it could be
someone asking you to come home or twist into a new shape.
The circumstances are clear though the results are not always available.
I am steady as a gutter. I am lifted and profane. I lack only lack.

By "someone" I mean all the poets everywhere, I mean friends
on screened-in porches, sparklers in their faces, caught
in complex thinking of their own. I'm steady at my swinging table.
I'll draw it for you. Listen.

By "lifting" my head I can see what people are doing to me. There are
windswept fields with dried matter blowing everywhere. You are there.

Suddenly it's early December

Wings of Desire

From Dana Levin's poem "Working Methods"

LISTENING

I was falling asleep, wondering how to describe a poet’s studio, when a voice said, “You have to be your own absence, with fifty percent deity.”

woke up with: I false—into arrangement; am out of it—deranged—

woke up with: hurry up is flamboyant and resolutional—

woke up with: as the ask progresses to a tiny new yes—

My friend Dan says: Listen—Record—Orchestrate.

Wednesday Top Ten

1. Little dog stretching his middle for easy grasping.
2. Gazebo and brown leaves.
3. Preternatural toddlers.
4. Diagonal geese.
5. Some kids running and yelling in a field, forming different patterns as they moved about.
6. Red chard, sweet potatoes, and etc.
7. Duende.
8. Discussions: Small prose and the realistic surreal; Walpole and canes.
9. How branches organize the mind.
10. Anticipatory breathing.

Ingrid

Andy Goldsworthy

Bon Iver weather

Postcard to a Better Place

(for Christian)

Even though my grandfather said, Don't talk about doing something, just do the thing, I will tell you that I was excited to come home and put on socks. I came home and put on socks after I spoke at length to an honors student. I talked and talked. I talked about "the Other." I talked about the difference between the word affect and the word effect. I told her, Affect can also be a noun. She had a very flat affect, and I tried to make my face look blank. The student looked at me. Then I talked some more. Before I came home and put on socks, I stopped for wine. I stopped for yogurt. I got to my apartment and washed my hands, then checked Facebook. I followed a link that led me to a slideshow of 15 ugly celebrity men who date out of their league. Jack White I understand. Kid Rock I do not. Several others I wasn't familiar with. Once, years ago, I had a dream in which I stood in front of a screen onto which images were being projected, and I performed a monologue that brought all the pieces together but that also let them keep sliding around like ice floes. I am thinking now that it may actually be possible to pray without ceasing. All of life is a meditation, the man said. What are you meditating on? I am meditating on my iPhone and the messages it might bring me. I'd like some good news. In the meantime, there is this photo of the mother of one of my brother's high school friends. The woman is pictured on her birthday. I have never met her. Whatever has brought her to this point, in this photo, at least, she looks happy.

Strasbourg

I only know its outsized bow was treacherous upon the mind.

Little boots of leather. Bootie things with bitten toes.

All that gathered taffeta and ribbon.

Who would buy a twelve year-old such a thing knowing

she desires it. Clay faced pallor and deadpan eyes

the power of such a bow, such a girl and little boots.

Another Side of Bob Dylan

(Thanks, Annmarie.)

Trinh Minh-Ha

It is probably difficult for a "normal," probing mind to recognize that to seek is to lose, for seeking presupposes a separation between the seeker and the sought, the continuing me and the changes it undergoes. --Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other

Doug as Joseph B.

(for Doug Steward)

I guess you're in your airplane now, having chosen a ritual leather helmet and a bearskin rug for ceremonial reverb. You crash you in the steppes and your hooded tribespeople rush out in fur days later to retrieve you. Sometimes it is minutes and sometimes it is days. I don't want to rush you, but I blow gently from far away, a near stranger's pursed lips, and all your friends blowing red candles into flame in imaginary chapels everywhere. We float you and you heal you. It's all you. Your voice telling me things in my kitchen, conversational, before I remember. You've wandered out beyond us, your brother's rib a thread tied to your rib. We'll see you when you're back. No one is alone.

Weekend Top Ten

1. Twelve-hour "nap." (Is it morning or night?)
2. Japanese food.
3. Robert Thurman talk.
4. Staying in the gaze.
5. Kind words from friends about poems.
6. A friend who can respond to his name! and talk! A friend who can walk up stairs!
7. Brooklyn walk. Skeletons and stuff.
8. When my brother thinks something's really funny, his laugh sounds just like it did when he was five.
9. Getting reading done on the subway.
10. Shark week. Costumes optional.

Babylon

Some days I wake up blessed but go to sleep
far from grace. Other days, the opposite.

The crazy guy in the courtyard doing his crazy
laugh. What’s that about? Babylon.

There’s so much I don’t know.
I don’t sit on my fire escape. I like a nice bench

now and again. A view of the water. Where
is my life. By the rivers of Babylon

the US military lay down camp Alpha
rolling over everything.

What have I learned or forgotten?
Doing what I can for the people.

If I knew the words for music,
I would make some.

Nancy Spero

("The Bomb." Image from artcritical.com)

This is from her NY Times obituary:

Kiki Smith, one of the many younger artists influenced by Ms. Spero, once said in an interview: “When I first saw Nancy Spero’s work, I thought, ‘You are going to get killed making things like that; it’s too vulnerable. You’ll just be dismissed immediately.’ ”

---

Good journey, Nancy.

Oh, Robert. Oh, Duncan.

He's all like, "My Mother Would Be a Falconress."

("Poems about Birds.")

Wise Up

Always good advice.

Pank

Check out Karen Dietrich's poems. Also, I like the way this guy says the word "smoke."

Wednesday at the Met

Fall poem

[poem was here]

Do You Smell Smoke?

Apply this soothing gel made from roots and branches
to your forearms when you wake up warrior style
and run fist-first to the kitchen in your sleep.
I'll buy you almond croissants and hum
to you in my pretty good pitch. You are falling asleep
and chuckling sweetly when you think of me
I'm taking pictures of you sleeping and posting
them on Facebook. I know you don't mind
so I break into your house while you're out
and teach myself the bass.
Don't worry about that smoke smell
it's just my gentleness you're loving.

Dream Amelia

If there's a word for Listen
meaning taken aloft and calm

A sinuous mechanical straightness
All the close-set statuary below

Help

Freight Train, Elizabeth Cotten

Buffy Sainte-Marie on Sesame Street

Good night, Inwood

Good night remembering to bless my toast and jam.

Good night trees out there in upper Manhattan where Jim Carroll used to be. Good night one tree in Isham Park that spreads its branches out benevolent like that, so that I greeted it the day after he died and said, "And goodbye, Jim. I feel you there."

Good night lit-up dark in my bedroom.

Good night noise under my sink. Whatever you are, you'd better git.

Good night perfect pitch.

Good night imagined photographs.

Good night "poems or prose poems or prose?"

Good night ringing ear.

Good night traffic noise.

Good night Kronos Quartet.

Good night boy I saw being bullied on his way to the library. (Going to the lie-bary again? You're always going to the lie-bary.) Good night library boy. Good night.

Postdoc, lunch

(Or, I spent my lunch half-hour trying to get a good quasi-religious
iconic baby carrot photo of myself in my new temporary office.)

Ruth Stone!

Ruth Stone

Autumn now

My body its own
sleep
*

First the well
of me-not me
coming full and then
bare tree
of goodness
rising
*

Found us here
swapping slow light
breath like very
small children
their soft bones
and looking

Skater

The Female Gaze

This exhibition is excellent.

Joanna Newsom

elimae

A very short poem of mine has just been published in the recent issue of elimae. Also check out poems by my friends Douglas Piccinnini and Mary-Catherine Jones in the same issue!

From the High Line

Clif's like, "Stereolab."

I would like to offer myself a free reading

1. Whether or not to take the white fox pup to the beach will be unclear. But squat down and look unassuming and the creature comes right to you.

2. You will wake to the sounds of cars and 1 train moving inexorably forward. You will think, "It sounds like the ocean. But not as good as the ocean."

3. You will be rated on enthusiasm, clarity, and appropriate difficulty. Those doing the rating will have work of their own to do. Alchemical shifts all around.

4. Where's your savoir faire now, ma chère?

5. Strap on your aging black Pumas and go.

Two from today

Creep

Well, don't let it bring you down, ok?

In Which I Try Again to Write Straight Lyric

Am I a lamb of God?
I forget

But there is this:
A woman--
her face appears
washed in spirit

Dead Man's Bones

Ryan Gosling's band! Thanks, Mr. Gosling.

And I’ll be happy here and happy there

Combing Brooklyn for cheese and noticings,
stooping down to let others roll over my back,
in that move where others roll over your back. All
the light! A heaven of built-in bookcases and souvenir
textiles. Friends' unsettling art unhinged us
in a soothing way, a tonic way. I guess I discovered
stacked heels that year. Maneuverings of the body
clicking things new. Someone’s hand reaching out
to turn the coffee on for me.

Today is Bad Poetry Day!

[Inspired both by Bad Poetry Day and by DP's instruction to "write the worst poem." It sort of took a bad/interesting turn . . .]

Evening

Tonight the soft cow's nose of evening creeps in like small children in velvet slippers with loving but strange intentions.

A sudden burst of gladness at the shore, the sea kissing the mud, the black dog with his eyebrows and white muzzle kissing the sea.

Twilight and the ghosts are waking up.

Muzzle of chill, scarf of chill, mantle of damp.

Canada evening. How unlikely.

Green, flaking

(Great Village, Nova Scotia)

Damned if you don't see
a small wooden entrance
happening to the sky
draws the heart
gut up like
Kentucky once

A gentle, auditory, slow hallucination

In this dream, Douglas plays organ, pumping pedals to bring air up like feet proceeding up the stairs, so that from the kitchen I hear both a walker up stairs and a player of organ. Stops the mind. He is playing slow Eno music, learning to play softer, then veering into inspiration, calling out a plea to sinners then. It's the dream where I'm walking the moonlit macadam, and where's the moon? It's only stars and dark road, and is that really the Milky Way? Why didn't I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy?

Kick Some Ass

(For TC)

I may have certain failings, sitting on the couch
in my pink striped at-home monkey shorts, having slept
half the day, having been kept awake by mini-
tasks and imaginings the entire goddamned night. The mind,
I have read, is an imp of perversity. On less nervous days,
someone could say that to me and I would smile my cute wondering
smile with only one small cute furrow in my brow. Someone
mostly very kind, who has been a fan for years, could say, “Whose
mind? You know? I mean . . . whose . . . mind?”
and it wouldn’t make me sob in annoyance. I want
you to know that whatever my failings, you’ve made it
into my choreography when I’m standing on the subway platform
and a jaunty song comes up on shuffle. My friends and I are doing
a synchronized dance we would do in our musical
or the musical we would pretend to be in. Two or three of us
start with micro-movements, jazzy and movie-bohemian. Then
we break into larger Sharks-and-Jets-type gestures. It’s beautiful
how we bend at the knees at the same time and twirl like that
and raise our arms at different times, with emphatic dance hands.
Toward the end you are the one, most recently, who grabbed me
around the waist, your head pointing downward, so that we did a two-
person cartwheel, my feet on the ground, then your
feet on the ground, then my feet on the ground. We made it look
so effortless. And FUN! Sometimes when I look like I’m frowning
at you, I’m thinking about how few people make it into
my choreography and how impossible it would be to tell you
what it means to me to add one more. So, I’ll try to kick some ass.
I trust you on this.

The Awful Truth

Knoxville

I remember that some people had pictures of Jesus in their houses or talked about Jesus a lot or about whether things were sins. Maybe they were Baptists. We never talked about Jesus. We were Lutherans, except really we were nothing because we never went to church. I was only Lutheran when I stayed with my grandmother. Even then, she and I would go to Lutheran church one weekend and Catholic church the next because she was thinking things over.

One Baptist lady, some kid's mother, asked me on the stairs if I was a woman yet. I said, "Uh, no. I'm only ten." Then the kid whispered, "She means did you get your period yet." And I said, "I'm only ten." The woman gave me a smug smile and told me that her daughter-- a strangely polite girl with short curly brown hair-- was already a woman. I felt bad for the girl for that and for having that mother. I felt bad for Jesus, looking out over our heads as we stood there on the stairs in a duplex down the road from my apartment building.

Splendor in the Grass

In high school, I watched this movie on video so many times that I once dreamed the whole thing. (Written by William Inge; directed by Elia Kazan.)

Ten from Friday

1. Had a dream I bought Newman-O's for my writing group, so I bought Newman-O's for my writing group.

2. Lovely people writing about (a) a white leather jacket; (b) a horse falling asleep with its head in your hand; (c) the strange ubiquity of the king of Sweden.

3. My friend Manders on the phone. The strangest things make us laugh.

4. "Orbit the earth watching tv" until it all blows over.

5. If I had stayed on the F train, I would have gotten to Roosevelt Island. What's it like there, anyway?

6. Brick oven pizza, a glass of red wine, arugula salad with shaved parmesan. The way the sky looked in that back garden in Brooklyn.

7. "Puff the Magic Dragon" in sudden hushed, professional-sounding harmony from the next table. Sung by four adults to one small girl so bashfully pleased she couldn't move even her eyes.

8. Working with negativity, Pema-style.

9. Poet-brothers. Brother-brother.

10. If I don't oversleep on Monday, I'll be on my way to Nova! Scotia!

Reading

In conjunction with a writing residency in Great Village, Nova Scotia, I'll give a poetry reading with my friend Douglas Piccinnini next week. The reading is sponsored in part by the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. If you are in Nova Scotia next week, we'd love to see you there!

I Am Moving Inexorably toward My Goal

I am using an extremely powerful and whisper quiet system of pumps
and pulleys and reverb. I am doing what I can for the people seven days
a month. I am wearing the sneakers and general store overalls of my
youth imaginary pigtails and a mystical look of utter calm and delight
that very few have seen. My Genius floats above my head in bubbles
of confusion and jauntiness. By Genius, I mean homunculus, I mean
the distinct possibility that I will either walk straight out the door
and take the subway to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone alone in a sort
of wedding ceremony between me and my Higher Self, or that
I will eat ice cream and cherries for dinner, then lie on my side
and whimper for a while for the people, all of them.
These words mean very little. To my biggest fans
and enemies, they may mean slightly more.

Arcade Fire

Bishop

"I've never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I've never felt particularly at home. I guess that's a pretty good description of a poet's sense of home. [S]he carries it with [her]."

--Elizabeth Bishop