Things Mom has said so far:

1. We’re only watching this to see if she’s a midget.
2. The warmest fur is the underhair of a musk-ox.
3. I’m not going to kill you with a blood pressure cuff!

Back at Mom's

where it's Christmas in August.

Move it

We're in a new apartment with new rooms and a view of trees. And there's this hole in the kitchen wall.

The night we moved, we ate a beige meal-- hummus and cracked wheat crackers and Chimay. It was perfect. We also watched a movie, but not one of these movies. (We watched Silkwood, which I haven't seen in years. It isn't what you'd call a celebratory movie, but watching something so well acted is comforting, at least.)

The next day we were really tired. We went to brunch and then sat on a bench and looked at these geese.

We still have a lot of unpacking to do.

Summer Project

[poem was here]

My chapbook

at the Poets House Showcase.

Today

I journeyed to Brooklyn for the apartment search in the hot hot heat wave. I had an iced coffee; looked at an apartment; walked around Prospect Heights in the hot heat; had a peanut butter-banana smoothie for dinner; came back home.

Weekend in Hudson

(1) Train; (2) wildflowers for my b-day; (3) looking ghostly-blurry at the b&b; (4) the ritual breaking of the Hello Kitty piñata at the wedding; (5) sculpture at Art Omi.

My friend John drew these feet.

Don't be jealous.


(Drawing by John Fleischer)

Last night when I couldn't sleep

I read an excerpt from this book by Aimee Bender.

Then I read an excerpt from this book by John Waters.

Then I looked up some pictures of Johnny Mathis:


Then I looked up Johnnie Ray:

Then I watched some John Waters interviews:


Then I somehow got to this video called "If David Lynch directed Dirty Dancing."

Then I ate some cereal and started watching this documentary on Netflix about Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist:


Shortly after the part in the documentary where they show the clip of Max von Sydow wrestling with a tree, I went back to bed.

Visiting W.

The apartment of one of my oldest friends, who lives in Boston.

Upcoming reading

Hey, New England friends: I will be reading in Keene, NH on Saturday June 12th. Information on the reading is here.

What Muriel Rukeyser said

They flung me into the sea
The sunlight ran all over my face,
The water was blue the water was dark brown
And my severed head swam around that ship
Three times around and it wouldn't go down.


Too much life, my darling, embraces and strong veins,
Every sense speaking in my real voice,
Too many flowers, a too-knowing sun,
Too much life to kill.

[photo from the Academy of American Poets]

Our Biography

I had not re-read Whitman this summer yet when I began thinking
"cultivate and circulate" and making fake ballet arms in the kitchen.
The lady on PBS was telling me to circulate my lady molecules
for the good of all living things and men. For once I didn't feel
resentful. I was thinking "lymph and chi" when I woke up and birds
were calling loud-- between a squawk and chirp. I was reading
about Rukeyser's river and how fear of women and fear of poetry
are the same thing. "Too much life, my darling . . . .
too much life to kill" is what Rukeyser said.
Imagine saying that.

Bauhaus

When I was a teenager, I knew a thing or two. I stayed in my room being skinny and having bangs, listening to Bauhaus and lifting 3 lb. weights. I drew pretty good portraits of my own face. I learned to drive stick, and I would drive farther out into the suburbs to go to the mall and walk around drinking Dr. Pepper and chewing candy and being mildly disgusted with the all the . . . people, who seemed to be sinking of their own accord. All the way there, I’d look for the Eagles on the radio, in order to demonstrate that the Eagles are always on the radio and to further demonstrate that—for good or bad—my vocal range exactly matched that of one Don Henley. On the way back, I would listen to Heart or Fleetwood Mac, which reminded me of my childhood in the ‘70s, a time of honest belting and bad vibes. Boys at school would talk to me in class, and I guess I would just look at them or say something weird about The Sorrows of Young Werther or something, because after a while they’d get nervous and blurt out, “I guess that’s how people dress in Europe.” Then we’d both turn around, and class would start.

Shoe Portrait

The Woman Who Awoke Before Noon

Todd Colby reading our collaborative poem "The Age of Wonders" at the Lungfull Release Party/April 2010

The view from here

May poem

[poem was here]

Saturday

Go For It Program: Morning Advice for the Non-Morning Person

1. What are those people saying? I mean, birds.

2. Do not think about what constitutes a "pleasant environment" in the morning. Look at the light. It's probably pleasant.

3. Where does the sunlight fall on your bookshelf? It might be: Howards End, Gilead, The Morgesons, The Brothers Karamazov. I really might organize all this differently.

4. Cheech and Chong voice in my head goes, "Organize your miiiind, man." OK.

5. If you stop paying attention to good or bad things, they stop happening. Or start happening. I read that in a book.

6. Now there's light on Paradise Lost and Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler.

7. You should try it.

April 30th poem

Last poem of the April draft-a-day challenge! "It's been real," as my mother used to (embarrassingly) say to store clerks.

-------------------------------------------------

While Reluctant to Use the Word Sing, I Am Content to Say Hum

Do starlings argue about whether to put a change
jar in the bedroom? Would a starling sit on the couch
wanting to make poems of birds and light? I can hear
the city grinding itself into the earth, making something
living of itself and airplanes dropping soot from blue
blue sky. Everything is shining and in pain.
(The little girl yesterday at the restaurant looked
at me, then asked her parents, Are the grownups
going to die? Her father-- Don't worry about it.)
It's hard to be loving all the time. Let's try.

April 29th poem

This is me having a life of the mind

Late April and I'm almost back to swimming feeling--
swim swim--under a washed-clean sky and all
those green for real leaves out my office window.
Birds picking their mites and students doing some spring
frolic thing I don't even want to know about on the beach
(lawn) by the admin building. It's all good vibes and secrets.
I'll climb the shallow concrete steps, branches curving
up like scythes. If I learn to build on what came before
there are cool places to hide.

April 28th poem

Jesuit School
[poem found in the back of this semester's teaching notebook]

the way a nun in no habit will bend at the waist
cock her head a little and clasp her hands
smiling a little comic smile of God and understanding
when she sees you at the bathroom sink
(or is that woman a nun at all?)

April 27th poem

Morning and “Opaline” Light after Three Days of Rain

These birds are calling machines, sound spinning on a string,

and then there’s the real machine—something cutting through

the last real rock Manhattan has. Yesterday was dumb

and not in a good way. An artist might be simple and strange,

lovely and dumb. Yesterday was not an artist. (I’m scared

of ugly animals, people with shopping bags and masks who

step in your way to cough in your face on Central Park South

remind me to walk on the other side of the street next time,

the park side where raccoons and lost schizophrenic sons

will watch over me.) I was on the 1 train thinking of you

after reading “Beware of bone-tiredness/ that brings sickness.”

Oh, friend who is my heart. For real. Come see me

someday before we’re dead. We’ll shuffle along together

and swing our arms bent a little, like you like to do.

The light’s a slow kaleidoscope. I can see one stunted

branch and a wall of light on brick through the grate.

April 26th poem

Fragment

The in-between-- I see it now--
my true home and its ghost

John Prine

April 25th poem

Today Was Cold April Sunday

Walking under the arms of new full leaves in the spitting drizzle,
everybody-- even the kids and dogs-- looked hungover.
It's still drizzling on the subway. A man is taking my picture
with his phone, or watching porn on his phone, or reading
text messages. Later I see him in the potatoes at the store.
A lady there follows me, walking in front of me and stopping
to block my way at the ends of aisles. Back home the sky
glows violet gray in my kitchen. My soup barely turns out.
Every single time I look at the clock today,
it's 52 minutes past the hour.

April 24th poem

Lifted

At a student reading, I hear
the line "I dream that my skin
is new" and take heart.

Fragments from April Notebook (April 23rd "poem")

Tonight for dinner-- crackers (cracked wheat) with aged parmesan, small container of blackberries, dark chocolate, a few pecans, two glasses of good, inexpensive red wine. These foods the result of sunny day mania.

*
Shaker spirit drawings. Their founder was a woman.

*
The hands of someone familiar-- "someone's hands familiar."

*
"Who do you think you are? You're not a star boarder." Something my great-grandmother used to apparently say.

*
Reading Mom's People as a kid, I was puzzled by "Liz Taylor's violent eyes." Such passion! But seemed to judge her for it. Years later: "Oh. 'Violet.' "

Ice in Italian: il gelo.

My security words: "Unbity" and "and pendulum."

*
Small girl on the bus saying "ever ever ever."

*
Jim Carroll and James Schuyler before bed. Life is short. I don't know how to live it.

*
The nice empty feeling when you cull and organize.

*
That guy I dated who'd make a face of mock-disgust when he was glad to see me. It was funny at first.

*
Bench in Central Park. Tourists from eastern Europe (acting their idea of American?). Bird whistle like the disco cop whistle in Donna Summer's "Bad Girl."

Dream: Archive of everything. What it leaves out.

Heads-up

Here are some recent/upcoming/ongoing developments:

1. On Saturday, I will be reading a poem or two at the THE LUNGFULL GALA RELEASE RAUCOUS AUCTION & READING SPECTACULAR. Last year's event was indeed somewhat raucous and spectacular. This year's event promises to be even more so. (An authentic Devo hat will be auctioned off!)

2. My poetry book, How We Were Strangers, was a semi-finalist for the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Even better, two of my friends (Ross Gay and Rebecca Howell) were finalists, too!

3. On Saturday May 1st, I'll be reading in Brooklyn in the CROWD reading series.

4. My new chapbook, Mesmer, will be available in May from Dancing Girl Press.

5. We are nearing the end of National Poetry Month. What have we learned? I've learned that when trying to write a poem a day for National Poetry Month, I tend to write in all sorts of ways-- poemy poems, prosey poems, compressed/lyrical fragments, talky pieces, found poems. I've also learned that while it probably isn't against nature to try to produce a draft per day, it may in fact be against nature to post them on your blog.

6. The image is a jackalope, an animal I first learned about from the KU Natural History Museum. I'm not sure if they still have the jackalope on display, but they still have the horse Comanche.

[Jackalope image found on blogulate.com.]

April 22nd poem

Aubade
("One of these mornings, you're going to rise up singing")

I'm watching some miasmic chemical reaction between the decaf
and the regular coffee in the press and it would be easier to consider
myself awake if more light came in through the windows. (My mother
and I looking at New York apt. ads two years ago-- "Oh, look. Another
ad for light. What a selling point. Haha." Haha.) I go to the bedroom
to write down, "It would be easier to consider myself awake, etc."
and there is some light shining the white gauze curtain bright. I
shimmy a little, then try a tentative grapevine, then slouch and frown
and sit on the bed. The guy in the cranky introvert article said Sartre
might as well have said, "Hell is other people in the morning."
I'm almost my own other person.

April 21st poem

Quarrymen

The friendly guy behind the desk at the storage place is telling you about Beatles Fest when suddenly it's 11 p.m. The belligerent customer who was here when you arrived is now on the other side of the glass with his two sons in gold chains. They're all looking at you like they learned it from each other. What you found in your storage space are only huge stacks of typed material you may have compiled, one disassembled chair, an unsettling misc. box (semi-precious stones, old calendars, a cartoon map), and books written between the years 1722 and 1997. Most of the people who wrote most of the books are dead. The man who is telling you about Beatles Fest is still alive. He once played with the reunion of the Quarrymen. Now he plays when someone offers him enough money. He gives you a free lock. When you go outside again, the sky is strange.

April 20th poem (A day behind . . .)

Observations, Inwood Hill Park
4/20/10

1. Very small child with denim skirt, striped orange tights, and preternaturally long hair: "It's like a land of birds over here."

2. Light green trees across the top of a black cliff out beyond the bridge. The cliff's fancy hairdo.

3. Duck couple.

4. Bronx-Manhattan car bridge noise, on the Not George Washington Bridge.

5. Man speaking Dutch to his bulldog. Bulldog speaking back with snorting noises.

6. River's full today and doing that shimmer-shimmer-this-is-your-consciousness thing.

7. Tiny round-headed person, a baby, trying to imitate a jogger, then lurching in another direction, toddling over like a drunk politician to greet a lady on a bench.

April 19th poem

This Must Be the Place

Days you get up and-- something in me has given
way-- everything feels swimming. In the mirror
an openness of aspect, a falling away and smooth-
faced forgetting. Happens maybe several times
a year. You and the air are swimming.

April 18th poem

Looking for Myself in the Mirror of Karma at the Rubin Museum

The mirror of karma is small and dark and perfectly round
and barely lustrous and comes from some earlier century.
I'm not studying the wish-fulfilling jewel at the top.
I'm swaying in my tennis shoes a bit-- sway, sway. sway,
sway-- to see a shapeless bobbing on the surface. Something swims
around in there, and I'm looking for a "me." Here I am swaying
trying to locate my coat and my haircut. Still and again.

Flash fictiony

A piece of my short short prose appears in the latest issue of Pindeldyboz.

April 17th poem

Ars Poetica Dream (2)

you're at the family home
and there's no one

fire goes on by itself
curtains on a timer
*



view of the ocean all around
you can see where it pours in
comes rushing in
*

April 16th poem

Ars Poetica Dream

you are the half-sister
of a famous artist
there is a large archive
electronic and material
the biography of you
strangely inaccurate

April 15th poem

I'm Always Misreading the Bus Schedule

I was in dream circles, from Boston to Canada back to Boston again, looking for my long-lost friend with her vintage bike basket. We were supposed to meet for tacos. I found her, and we were wearing our same skirts, but those people were following me, not to apprehend me, but just to appear at inopportune times and make me feel impatient and smothered. I never got my tacos. When I woke up, boyfriend had his sweet sleepface on and the covers up around his neck like a monk. I curled toward him and almost touched foreheads, and then he rested his fingertips lightly on one of my kneecaps. People with their beatific smiles and their "Do you have regular coffee or just decaf?"

Poetry Month, Midpoint Check-In

I have a need of silence and of stars.
Too much is said too loudly. I am dazed.

from "Home" by William Alexander Percy
(quoted in Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings)

April 14th

A Partial Account of My Foibles

(after Ed Hirsch)

I ride the subway from 59th St. to 175th, thinking,
"I'm a fraud I'm a fraud I'm a fraud. Buy yogurt."

April 13th

Upper Manhattan, 4/13/10
(for Wendy)

On one side of the bridge, ghetto Target.
(Trying on sundresses, approach the dressing room
attendant: "Is that four? I think that's four."
"I don't know. I'm outta here. Count the hangers." What.)
Fat mental-patient-looking man with originally sweet face
and oddleering stare as I walk back, above the water,
under the tracks of the 1 train. On the other side, Inwood Hill
Park, view of beautiful other bridge spanning some colors
of sky, duck mud, beige and brown people with little
kids, sound of aluminum bats (thwock!). The cliff
Columbia U. colonized with a huge light blue "C"
painted on the old old rock. If you stay long enough, the sun
and everyone go away. The bridge and the Bronx high-rise
across the river, a sparkly ship.

April 12th

Excerpts from a talk with A., who I've known for 20 years

"You always reminded me of an anchorite. Just in graduate school."

"I saw a man who looked like Mark Twain this weekend. Is that good luck?"

"I have to go think about salmonella now."

April 11th

April Afternoon, I Want to Sleep
(with apologies to Jorge Guillen and James Wright)


chains their slow descending

the walk there and back

animal layers give way, each layer

the click-shush of turntable arms

sounds hold on

carriage behind gauze

April 10th

That Bluet Breaks Me Up
(for J.S.)

"The day gets slowly started." --James Schuyler

I guess April's pretty cruel. No one can quite wake up
it's sun and sun and blue, except in the shade, where it's
clammy death. Last week was jury duty-- didn't get picked--
and summer warm in early spring, and I walked the Hudson
thinking lines: "In spring, I give a damn!" Where were you
when you wrote about the day getting slowly started?
(Where are the you that was you? Gone.) Listen--
I keep doing this thing lately where I say, "Listen--"
and then I have nothing to say.

April 9th

Birth Announcement

"do you,/ a girl from kansas/ imagine the invisible changes/ in front of you?"
--Jim Carroll


I'm not sure where I was before,
but I dusted my bookshelf today,
and checked myself out up close, new
and alien with my fists up like that--
someone cared enough to take that
photograph, someone else to send it home,
someone else to place it in a small
red wooden frame, to hang it up, and, yes,
years later, to hand the picture over to me,
then embrace me like I was leaving
before I left for the north. Can you imagine--
at 18-- looking into the sleepy knowing
eyes of a newly-here human and giving her
the name of a fictional Quaker ancestress?
Could any of us have imagined any of this?
It's Upper Manhattan. Punk was born and
died. I'm eating Greek yogurt with
honey. I remember you I remember
you I remember you. Whoever
you are.

April 8th

Found Poem: Mom's Facebook Status Update

Karol Ross just broke the paper weight thingy that served to stand papers up so you can see them when you are working on the computer. It had a little fish in it swimming in the ocean. Who knew that the fish was actually swimming in an oily substance that is now all over my shirt and probably giving me some weird chemicals.

April 7th

NYC

Barreling down the sidewalk
with a swagger
and a limp

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