Three from this week

April 3rd poem

An I and a You

Woke up thinking of motherhood because I have not done that.  In high school I saved my brother from choking on a Cheerio in his high chair, so maybe he'll take care of me when I'm old, even though he doesn't remember.  I'm pretty sure I turned him upside down and everything, until his face wasn't red anymore, and then he just went on with his day.   

Woke up thinking with affection of my student who takes my same bus, who said in class (gently, firmly), "That flip-flopping.  That's how we learn." 

Cornel West says we can stop worrying about "Wholeness" in the Romantic sense.  Twain knew.  West says we all got here through the "funk of life."  "The love push that got us here," he says.  It's easier to imagine if your mother was a hippie, which mine was sort of, and young.

And what if that funky vessel turns around and buys you flannel pajamas with monkeys for Christmas and noise-reducing headphones and reads all your poems, even though she doesn't like poems?  If I never bring more people here, how do I pay it back?  How does the love push work then?

Voice says, "Be your own funky vessel."  The good-enough funk.

April 2nd poem

List Poem-Essay for A.

1.  Remember when I was Bertha and you were Grace Poole and how we couldn't stop laughing for years, me mad in the attic like that?

2.  Remember us Jane Eyre all that time, our little orphan souls, those dolls?  Those monkeys.

3.  It's been twenty years.  What have we learned?

4.  The look on your face when loud people cornered me in bars in Kansas and told me "smile."  Your look at my look.  Your chortle.

5.  This is my second poem in which you chortle.

6.  In Providence, we put ourselves at the kitchen table with acrylic paints, like kids of ourselves.  I painted a cosmic egg on the back of a cardboard timeline you'd made of nineteenth-century novels and concurrent events for your comprehensive exams.

7.  There's our poem right there.

8.  You sitting in a heap of books outside Schultz's office, wearing tights and a black checked jumper dress.  Your hair was always slightly fuzzy in college, which made you seem worth knowing.   

9.  You once told me it didn't matter if I forgot what I read because I'd already integrated it.  Can I give up knowing things for 40?  I'm tired of "knowing." 

10.  Cosmic egg.

April 1st poem

"Who would ever want to be treated like a woman in a hospital?"
--Bernadette Mayer, "Fixation"


My mother and my grandmother are both still mad
about being treated like women in hospitals.
And that is how we got here! 
I tell my grandmother that my friend Annmarie
recently gave birth.  My grandmother looks at me,
says, "I wouldn't do it for anything." 

NaPoWriMo

Fiiiiine.  I'm going to write a poem draft a day for National Poetry Month again this year.  I was completely on the fence about posting these, but I am going to do it.  I may even throw some drafts of collaborative poems into the mix, if I can enlist my usual collaborators to participate.    

Here's Ada Limon's blog, on which she and Jennifer L. Knox will be posting their poems-a-day.  I enjoyed theirs last year. 

Hopefully by the end of this, the trees will have leaves.  (That isn't a metaphor.) 

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.

Hawk dawg

I dreamed the moon was the hugest it had ever been, which helped explain our behavior. The real things, though, were the hawk on a near tree when we woke yesterday, and, last night, wind like wind from Close Encounters, shaking our front door five flights up. All these shifts in weather and bird, all this feeling of winter being rent-- by which I mean tearing, torn, but I guess there's that other kind of rent, too. (Did you ever read Howards End? "Rent to the ideal.") This is all a workshop I'm paying for. The rent is slush and chill and knowing we will die, which is also part of the workshop. The cost of the class is the subject of the class, a seminar called "Difficult and Wondrous: The Costs and Rewards of Walking on Through." Syllabus forthcoming.

Groundhog Day Ice Storm Occasional Poems

Last night and today, I've been working on two poem drafts inspired by the ice storm. Luckily, I don't have to go back to campus until tomorrow, so I haven't been out in it. From my window, I just watched a guy and his small shoe-wearing dog try to skate-shuffle along. It seemed like slow going.

Here's one of the poems. The other is more lyrical and odd and uses words like "nimbus" and "consolation." It's called "Ice Blink." It isn't finished.


Ice Amounts Explainer

From this position of non-permanent privilege
I'm prepared to say: it's all shadow and act, all
crawling in and out of our personal own holes.
The Home for the Literal-Minded is where you'll end
up for clinging too hard. But then, we all end up at Home,
whether the guiding metaphor is lamb or lion, bionic
man or bird. Today I'm thinking: Groundhog. Thinking: Glissade.
Glissade sounds like a word I'd use in a poem about your hands
and the back of your neck and the way we skate around
on our mutual ice, sometimes doing some near-perfect silver
medal thing and sometimes taking the ice
metaphor in a horrible direction. Happy Groundhog Day.

Mid-Winter

Saturday poem

I Am Always

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

I love how all your friends are shy. You befriend them in order
to put them at ease, make them nervous, and put them
at ease again. I'll light a candle and think of a place I've been
to with you. And then I'll stop because the wind will be howling
and the cold snap will be unbearable, mostly, without you.
Like this red down coat my mother had in the '70s.
It made her look like the Michelin Man, even with her
long hair and bird bones, and I ripped the pocket
grabbing onto her in parking lots, waist high
and desperate. That coat is gone. I drew a skull and crossbones
across the back of it with a giant Sharpie and hung it above the garage,
and then it just blew away the very first day it was up there.
The view from here is Christmas lights and gravel, and maybe
a whiff of cinnamon and cigarettes. I don't want to go home.

[1/9/10]

I Have Seven Things to Tell You

1. I think I'm going to start putting something on my blog every Wednesday. This is the year in which I tell some version of the truth. And as Hunter S. Thompson said, "[A]nybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor." I do not emulate HST in other ways, but in this way (the commitment to a psychic anchor), I will. But don't worry. I'm not as jangled as all that.

2. This is the view out the window of my home office. The dirt on the window is not my fault-- it's between two panes of glass-- but it makes for an interesting photo.

3. Today I will finish preparing for tomorrow, which is my first day of spring semester teaching. I will be talking about "Coming of Age Narratives" and "American Literature, 1890-1929." There are so many things those categories could mean. I will narrow it down and narrow down until each topic fits within three pieces of papers; six novels; and a series of 75 minute discussions.

4. An opera singer moved in next door. He is doing scales right now. Maybe I should do some kind of vocalizing every morning. Or maybe some kind of ritualized movement. I could be like Allen Ginsberg in his kitchen doing tai chi.

5. I would like to take this class. I've been mulling over ideas for a poetry workshop I'd like to teach in which students put themselves in trances. I recently found out that Eleni Sikelianos hypnotized her poetry students herself! You are allowed to do such things in Colorado.

6. The night before last, I dreamed that I was on vacation with my little brother and a friend of his from junior high named William. Somehow, I was concerned that William had not brought the right clothing. When I woke up, it was strange to realize that I was no longer on vacation with the two of them and that they are no longer the age I dreamed them to be (which was maybe 16 years old). However, I quickly accepted it and was no longer in that reality by the time I finished brushing my teeth.

7. Next year at this time, I will likely be somewhere else (in a new apartment, if not a new city). This is due to neighbors who stomp and to the academic job market, which is also inconsiderate. (The opera singer doesn't bother me.) I am trying to figure out where I've lived the longest. It may be Lawrence, Kansas, where I lived for about seven years in my late teens and early twenties, with one year away. Can that be right?

Happy Wednesday!

Things I Still Have

Our New Year

I’ve cleaned off a space on my desk big enough to riff

on you twenty times. By which I mean I’m on the bus

back from Boston, thinking of your eyes and mouth and hands.

This poem, you may have noticed, has an I and a you. This poem

is the daughter we don’t have. She’s a curly-headed implicated

implicator. She’s American. She’ll be oddly happy up through

the age of ten, then suffer seven years of anger. Blame her mother;

blame her father. Emerge from flame knowing the different

music. American. This is our new year of learning urgency

and a kind of loose-headed, courageous heart. Some people think you

shouldn’t use “courageous” in a poem. But consider this:

Near the end of Ingrid Bergman’s life, she and her friend

Liv Ullman went to the movies. Fifteen minutes in, Ingrid leans

over and says, “I don’t have time for this,” then gets up and leaves.

This is all just to say, there’s a wild low singing under all these naps,

and from now on I’m telling the truth. From now on, I’m telling

some version of the truth.

Movies I've Watched in 2011 So Far

image from Flixster.com

Exit Through the Gift Shop [First movie of 2011. Interesting-ish; hoax-ish]
Shutter Island [better than I thought it would be]
Alice in Wonderland [eh]
Precious [eek!]
Audrey Rose [1970s supernatural thriller with a very creepy Anthony Hopkins]
Moon [Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell.]
Stephen Fry in America [BBC series. I love the way he talks.]
Patti Smith: Dream of Life [I liked watching her paint and seeing her talk to her parents.]
Monty Python: Almost the Truth [delightful documentary watched with my delightful friend in Boston]

I also just watched American Masters: Jeff Bridges. I see some Starman in my future. Maybe American Heart. The Fisher King? [And: How much do I love The Last Picture Show? A lot.]

Three from today

Pema Chodron

The New Year

New Year's Eve: Chimay and cheese and heirloom tomatoes. Twilight Zone. New Year's Day: Sushi. Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Finalist

My book of poems (the more prose poem-y version of it) was a finalist for the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. Congratulations to the winners and all the finalists and semi-finalists!

Here I Am

Merry Christmas, all you elves out in internet land.

I'm at my mom's. I might go see True Grit later.