Florida again

Today

I got a few things done in my new office.  Here it looks like that shrinking hallway from Willy Wonka.

And I bought this minimalist bouquet (freesias) because I was told that fresh flowers would make the house spirits happy.  I got this vase as a going away present the year I taught 10th grade English in St. Paul.  I like the vase, but I may put the flowers in something else. 

My little brother was featured in this German newspaper article.  The article is about his biculturalism-- he was raised in Germany and the U.S.-- and it was written by his best friend since kindergarten, Anika.  I'll have to post this funny picture I have of them on the first day of kindergarten when I can find it.  They have those huge square backpacks German kids carry and the traditional huge cone of candy.  Now she's writing newspaper articles and he just started a graduate program in urban planning.

Also, Clifton is back from his trip up north.  Here he is doing the ritual pantomime re-enactment of his travel.  (And don't worry-- I'll hang some stuff on the walls at some point.  Maybe in September.)  

Top ten things that freak me out about ghosts

(for Todd Colby)

1.  Todd Colby goes, "I read an article in the New York Times that there are more ghosts reported in Brooklyn than anywhere on the planet!"
2.  Great.  Haha.  I didn't say anything about GHOSTS.  I just said I couldn't SLEEP because Clif's in BUFFALO.
3.  But now I'm thinking about the ghosts again.
4.  The first night we slept here, I had a dream about the people who had lived here before.  I discovered all their old clothes from the '40s.  The woman, especially, was happy that I knew who they were.
5.  But the attic still felt sad and unsettled.
6.  Until we unpacked our stuff and vacuumed.  Then it felt ok again.
7.  Until Clif went to BUFFALO.  And left me here with the GHOSTS. 
8.  Sometimes it's just trapped sadness, like the feeling of Elizabeth Bishop's mother that wells up at dusk in her childhood home.
9.  My other friend goes, "Poor Joanna.  Every place you live turns out to be haunted.  Must be hard." 
10.  Anyway.  Ghosts don't like to be talked about.

I Hear You Sometimes from a Veil

I have since childhood been sleepy and loved
and trying to work it out

A friend calls
and I report on my eye circles
He says, I thought I could count on you 
to take care of yourself
But we have a project
A proposed collaborative project
something about crossing dimensions
something about a veil

I will leave the attic door open
listen for you in a dream 
if I can sleep tonight
I'll call to let you know
what you said

Watching the Basquiat documentary again

Radiant child.

Semi-arranged

The new place is starting to get arranged.

If you ignore those two end tables that don't go there.  And the lampshade with no base.  And the empty basket that doesn't go there.  And the fact that my tall bookcases are still in the entryway because they wouldn't fit up the stairs.  Etc.

I wasn't sure how I felt about the two small attic rooms in our duplex after we moved in.  They seemed haunted and/or overly womb-like.  Now I like them again.  Here is my office/garret/guest room.  My friend Wendy and her brother made that small painted table in high school.  That Marimekko pillow was my gift to myself when I first moved to New York three years ago.  I thought, "A pillow of jaunty mystery.  Just the thing."

I just noticed that this closet has a glass doorknob.  You can't see it very well, but this painting is by my friend John. It's called "Setting Out."  I'm always setting out. 

Recent news

1.  I have been accepted for a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center for May 2012.  Hopefully I will have a good start on my second poetry manuscript by then. 

2.  Nic Sebastian has read one of my poems in that wonderful voice of hers for her website Whale Sound. 

3.  My friend Wendy, who I've known since we were 17, is visiting.  Usually I visit her in Boston.  But this time she is visiting me in my new digs in Brooklyn.  And she brought her talismanic travel object, a smirking Canadian doll.  It's Bonhomme, the mascot of the Quebec Winter Carnival, and he only scares me a little.  Middle Ellie seems fine with him. 

Today I Discovered

A button painted onto the windowsill.

A bunch of old photos of old friends, looking ten to twenty years younger.

Why there are so many books and movies about old houses that hold secrets.

The necessity of slowing down, in order not to walk away without your money or hit your head so hard it leaves a dent. 

There has been a turn toward autumn, and breeze, open windows, and cicadas remind me of Kansas, even though I am in Brooklyn.

I am in Brooklyn.

I still want to go to Coney Island.   Lawrence, Kansas and Coney Island. 

Wise Up

Talent

1.  I am re-reading that book of letters between James Wright and Leslie Marmon Silko, even though (because?) it makes me cry every single time.

2.  I read in the Boog Festival today.  It was a day of much changing weather.  A highlight for me were the poems of my pal J. Hope Stein.  A low point was having to leave after five hours due to poetry over-satiation, not getting a chance to see some of the poets who followed me, and leaving my red folder of poems somewhere!

3.  Oh, also I went to brunch with my pal and her friend Ambrose after her reading and before mine, and we talked about how the world is apparently ending, or how New York is like The Plague or Death in Venice this summer, or how Gary Shteyngart wrote a novel last year that predicted some of our present state.  (I'm teaching the Shteyngart novel, so I contributed that part.  The best thing I ever learned from Gary Shteyngart was when I asked him a question after a reading of his, and he made some comment about how his iPhone makes him feel less human, and how we shouldn't cross streets in New York and look at our iPhones at the same time, or something.  It is true.  I almost got run over while crossing the street and looking at my iPhone at the same time.  I am not cut out to be a cyborg.)

4.  What's a poem again?  What's the difference between a poem and a story and a memory of something that happened to you when you were a kid and an email you write to a friend and a blog post?  Emily Dickinson is looking at me from my Kindle screensaver with this look on her face like, "What?"  (I'm reading the Shteyngart on Kindle but the Silko and Wright in actual book form.)    

5.  Go team.

Here Comes the Sun

Almost everything

Almost everything is still in bags and boxes, and I’m constantly walking around thinking things like, “Where’s my green cup [the one I didn’t break]?” and “Where’s my Oil of Olay?”  This morning I woke up thinking, “Where is my last bike that got stolen?  I want it.  Where are the Tretorn tennis shoes I wore in ninth grade?  Where is the slim gold watch my mom bought me that year?”  That was the year my mom had finished her degree and had a good-paying job, and I could pretend to be solidly middle class in public.  Or, well, maybe I could pretend before that.  When I was in fifth grade and she was still in graduate school, she worked as the assistant director of an outpatient rehabilitation center, and she somehow bought me the good kind of stylish Levi’s, two pairs of Nikes, and two or three of the Izod polo shirts I had been coveting.  But my style still vacillated back then, and I also had barrettes with long leather strings with feathers attached.  I remember visiting the rehabilitation center and going on the swings with an autistic boy who was suddenly in love with me, my leather stringed feathers trailing out behind me as I swung.  Sometimes I would wear two different Nikes to the mall because I thought it was funny.  I had a button that said “Why be normal?,” and I wore it for Halloween, along with a few different shirts layered weirdly on top of each other and a cardboard toilet paper roll covered in glitter as a ponytail holder.  I went trick-or-treating with Angela Lowery among the nice houses between my apartment complex and the pool.  I’m not sure anyone understood my costume.  It was 1980, and I was in Knoxville, and all the other “Why be normal” people had gone to the Lower East Side of New York,  but I was only ten and I didn’t know about that.  And, anyway, I was with Angela Lowery, who never had to try to be weird.  Everyone knew about Angela.  She was kind and remote and really sort of otherwordly.  She lived with her mother and grandparents on Flenniken Road, and her face and her mother’s face and her grandmother Polly’s face were all the same Cherokee face.  She was one of those complete-unto-herself people.  She knew how to clog dance.  She was lovely and inviolable and, at times, a little unsettling.  One time the teacher asked her for her homework, and she said, “Homework cramps my style.”  Where is Angela?  Last I heard, she died young in a car accident.  I want her back.  

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]

Poem for my birthday month

Recently and Soon

Twice this week the feeling of someone sneaking up on me.  The feeling a ghost  got in.

Conversations with friends about whether we are more used to “penis” as a reference or “vagina.”  Or, rather, who is punished more for having sexual feelings and parts and talking about them?  Whose feelings and parts are co-opted more?

What if I were to introduce “vaginal slickness” into a poem about lawn furniture or clowns?

A feeling like a joke buzzer, but not in my hand.  Somewhere else. 

I can’t stand how beautiful things are.   So I neglect to dust or throw out old papers.  This helps a little.

All morning the mind drifts, gentles, then turns and does a dizz-wax thing before gentling again.  Yard work, irises, the sadness of Vincent van Gogh, cash prizes, the physical beauty of others as something to be withstood like, you know, the ocean.  Cash prizes (again).  Inner beauty like a winding spool in the sternum.  Then a far-off feeling like a  joke buzzer, but in another area.

I have to say it:  The blessing of having had friends with whom to discuss organs.  Breath.  Shapeshifting.  Note modulation.  The buzzing in my ear. 
   
So much drifting of the mind and body.  I’ll be 40 soon.  I’ll be over here reading Thomas Merton and doing leg lifts to get in shape in time. 

The sun swinging back and forth on its string all month every month like a slowly turning crystal in some hippie’s window, until later we’re not even the ones here anymore and it’s all people not even born yet.

Goodbye, Gil Scott-Heron

I hope you're new, wherever you are.

The Reader

So, when did my everyday face start looking like Kate Winslet's tortured face in The Reader?

There's my poem right there. 

I just received an email about how I'm supposed to be doing this:

Fine. 

John the Revelator

The Devil is beating his wife

A couple years ago, I found out that people don't say that "devil's beating his wife" thing outside the South.   That's ok.  It's kind of creepy, anyway.    

I Made the Wigleaf Longlist

According to Wigleaf, my short short prose piece Andy was one of the top 100 pieces of very short fiction in 2010.  I'm in good company with writers like Nin Andrews and Kate Lorenz.

Thanks, Wigleaf!  And thank you to Opium for publishing it. 

I Bet You Didn't Know I Had This Superpower

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

You are probably more special than even they remember, too,

letting me breathe on your elbow for luck on my way out to fight

time you can't figure out time, so you might as well join it,

but this is all I have,  the heading out, the mechanism of doubt

like Leave it to Beaver, waiting for Ward to come home, facing

the abyss, and so putting on pearls and a corsage

to vacuum the house.  I will never have you all to my own,

he says through crumpled leaves the lemon sun receding 

the smell of lilacs assaulting our faces like tiny elfin
slackers. I will build you something sweet and rapturous

like a pillow full of soft dice and peanut butter. I love

the look of surprise you get when I build you things like
that, then eat the whole thing with Nutella before you

get home from work.  Watch the nut butters, hon,

your heart is faint, will break were the last words ever,

or at least the last words I heard before the Rapture.

Two events

I'll be participating in two events this week with some brilliant musicians and poets.  Come out and see us, if you're interested!


Monday May 9, 2011
8pm

Secret Orchestra
with special guest poet Joanna Penn Cooper
Yuko Fujiyama - piano
Clif Jackson - bass
David Gould - drums/percussion

University of the Streets
Muhammad Salahuddeen Memorial Jazz Theatre
130 E. 7th St.
2nd Floor
NY, NY 10009

$10 admission
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic refreshments available

http://www.universityofthestreets.org/
http://maps.google.com/?q=loc%3A130+E+7th+Street+New+York+NY+10009




Friday May 13, 2011
7 p.m. sharp


Stain of Poetry Reading series

MEGA WOMEN'S READING

@Goodbye Blue Monday – Bushwick, Brooklyn

with

Joanna Penn Cooper ~ Claire Donato ~ Farrah Field ~ Molly Gaudry ~ Hailey Higdon ~ Anne Cecilia Holmes ~ Brenda Iijima ~ Julia Story

For bios and photos, please visit the website:


http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/ 
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=171817919538834

Ram fountain

Goodbye, ram fountain. 

Five for Thursday

1.  Last day of classes at Fordham.
2.  A Handmade Museum by Brenda Coultas
3.  Meetings with students.  They always look different up close. 
4.  There's always one student on a laptop in the Poetry Room at the Fordham library, and she's always wearing really strong perfume, and always frowns and looks puzzled when you come in to look at the poetry books.

5.  Rehearsal with Secret Orchestra.  At their next performance, I am reading a poem by S. Tanigawa as part of a composition by the trio's piano player, Yuko Fujiyama.  At one point, Yuko was like, "Here you can just improvise some sounds."  And I was like, "Improvise? Sounds??"

Today

Three from this weekend