Moon over Montclair; what my hair doesn't look like after my haircut; low-key show by Secret Orchestra, including a couple of beautiful new songs-- it's amazing to me that people can do that, play music; I'm telling my fortune in coffee filters. Or I'm just drinking a lot of coffee.
My brother and I have started a blog for our collaborative drawing-poem pieces. The name Malfeez comes from a German board game, Malefiz, an archaic word that means "misdeed." We also had in mind Max and Moritz, pranksterish forerunners to the Katzenjammer Kids. Our "misdeeds" mostly have to do with existential questioning, though . . .
Have you ever teared up at brunch when you were supposed to be deciding what to order?
Was it due to all the uncertainty of life, the way things keep changing? How nothing is fixed?
Did you enjoy your mimosa anyway? The carmelized apples? Were the carmelized apples a blessing, even though the man to your left kept talking about renting a hotel room to learn all the three-letter Scrabble words?
Afterward, did you sit in the park and watch a little girl with straight posture and a braid do a dainty run back and forth to fetch large rocks and hurl them with force upon the flagstones? Like this: run run, hands out at sides, run run, THROW the rock down to see if it breaks?
At one point did she come back with a walk that involved lifting her feet high, as if stepping through fairy dew from a ballet recital? Step. Step. Step. THROW the rock down.
Have you had this line in your head for a while?: to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Is living is like that, also? Luckier and more painful?
Suppose we embrace it? The dream-like rhetorical bent? The rocks and the stepping through dew? What then?
People who write "awe" when they mean "awww." People who say "wary" but mean "weary." People who say "anyways." People in vests. Pigeon-toed people. People with cowlicks. People with an ink smear on one cheek because no one told people all afternoon. I have been one or more of these people. I'll give you some other things to think about: The other middle-aged lady sitting alone who also ordered a small plain frozen yogurt with strawberries. What's her story? She was a kid, right? She had a mom. What was that like? Now think about the different things "middle aged" can mean. Now think of a horse and those pointy-outy hairs around its mouth. Think of its soft nose. Where is your horse? In a field, right? Maybe by a two-lane highway, or something? It's like one of those horses from a James Wright poem, but more wary. Wary or weary. It looks at you out of its side-headed eyes like, "Whatever." Like, "Whatever. Fine. I love you."
1. This list of seven items from a visit my brother made to NYC in April 2009:
Top ten
The light at 8:10 and the way those water towers look
Brother's story of trading a crucifix for a chocolate pie
Stopping at various points in central park to sit on benches
Descrip of the renaissance youth on audio tour.
Portrait of the blacksmith's daughter
"that French woman just touched my hand by accident"
Sheep meadow
2. This poem I wrote in a poetry workshop in Kansas with Luci Tapahonso in the early '90s. Well, my friend Wendy found it and sent me this photo. (Dig the Jane Austen epigraph.) I think I'm better at line breaks and stuff now.
3. I also found a notation in my phone from August 1, 2009: "Deanie Loomis." It was meant to remind myself to get another cat and name her Deanie Loomis. Later that month, though, I would begin dating Clifton, who is allergic to cats. Cliftons are all well and good, but I still want a cat, too.
4. And there's this Levertov poem called "Aware" in which she talks about "the vine leaves/ speaking among themselves in abundant/ whispers." Here's the second stanza:
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
Brooklyn morning, 10 a.m. writing project
a car alarm somewhere on the block behind
a quasi-desperate tiredness
I look at the job ads and think
"If I carry me off to Iowa," I think
Here's the pie chart of my mind:
big slices of I'm sick of your insane demands
of gratitude gratitude shakti shakti
I'll rest my mind upon the vari-colored
terra cotta tiles
brick-red painted house shingles
white trim, green leaves all light
and dapple dapple through the window
opposite
(Since I was a kid, if I let my mind go quiet:
particles moving in the trees)
What is this realm I've come to,
its leaves, its constant jostlings?
I have been following the blog of Bhanu Kapil. She says things like this on her blog:
Teaching has a lot of shakti. Writing has shakti. September is for balance, the mediation of all this voltage, and the pleasures of the color gold. I invert myself, with others, above the river in early Fall, or the first day of Fall, then go home. Last night, I dreamed of a tree that was filled with eight or nine mountain lions; they were three-quarters mountain lion and one-quarter hawk.
I thought I might have a dream like that last night, but I only remember dreaming that I told some man that I needed to lose 10 pounds and he said, "No, you need to gain 10 pounds." So, there's that.
One image that came up when I Googled "Poet Headstand."
[http://tantricpirate.com/wordpress/]
But there's also this: I woke and thought, "A book called Spells." Like, "Here are some magic spells," but also like, "Joanna's having one of her spells again." The thought pleased me.
At brunch, C. and I talked about serving the poetry/art/music, instead of using the poetry/art/music to serve your ego. Tapping into a water table of poetry, etc. We kept extending the metaphor until it became pleasantly absurd, and C. ended up telling me not to make poetry smoothies that would poison people. (I won't. Hopefully.)
I'm feeling the need to invert myself. I will work up to that again.
Last night as I came back out of Penn Station after teaching poetry in New Jersey, I saw Jesse Eisenberg ride by on a bike. Where were you going, Jesse Eisenberg?
[Under the High Line is where I ate lunch with some of my family; my brother met up with a "couple friends," and I walked them through Prospect Park; David Byrne put this globe here; my brother made a plum cake, and I made a cake with the leftover plums, which sunk into the cake, but were still good.]
My friend J. Hope Stein, a wonderful poet, has a blog here. Be sure to read About her and to watch the excerpts from her short film, "The Inventor's Last Breath." It is all very wondrous.
Yesterday I took a cab to a 9/11 memorial poetry reading (because the two subways I needed to get there weren't running), and everything just seemed so quiet in Brooklyn. Very quiet. The reading had entrancing moments. My former teacher Malena Mörling read her poems in English in her Swedish accent. I've heard her read several times now, and in my mind the voice of her poems is so tied to the lilt of her accent, the way the English runs over it so that it's plucked at in a lovely way. Nicole Peyrafitte started her performance piece by saying something like, "Remember. Reflect. Mark." And then she rubbed a bunch of charcoal across a huge sheet of paper. It went on from there. There was chalk dust on her head and French lilting singing and marking on her body and more singing. And, of course, given her presence and her voice, we marked and reflected. It's amazing to me when people can do that kind of thing and pull it off. And Dorianne Laux held us all. Rapt.
What else? Clif and I ate Tibetan food on Saturday.
On Sunday, we sat in our offices for most of the day, and still I have more to do on my syllabus for tomorrow's class. Well, I've been mulling it over and making notes on possibilities for about three days. Yesterday I read some poems and thought about them, the kind of poems that lull you and knit you into them. The lulling and knitting distracted me from finishing culling down the list and fitting the poems into categories and boxes of time on the syllabus.
We also finally got my tall bookshelves upstairs. They wouldn't fit up the stairs when we moved, and we (well, mostly he) had to take them apart and put them back together. Now I have a tiny library room attached to my office, in addition to the built-in bookcases downstairs. Yay. But, you know, I still need to arrange the books. Here is the Collected Frank O'Hara looking lonely.
Clif says our upstairs reminds him of the Millennium Falcon, and that he likes how we can both lean back in our office chairs and look at each other down the curved hallway. That hulking black case there is a double bass.
1. Ten years ago, it was a beautiful day in Philadelphia.
2. The tv in the English Department hallway at Temple. Lyn Tribble saying, "This is bad." Knowing DC and New York had been hit. Thinking at first Philadelphia would be next. After teaching, a skittish drive through Philly with my friend and former student Walter, on our way out of town to be with other friends. Feeling waves of grief and shock up and down the eastern seaboard.
3. I guess I moved to Minneapolis after that? In part because of that? To be near family? I was in Minneapolis when the U.S. declared war on Iraq. The war is ongoing. The grief of the Bush years. The numbness. Eric saying something like, "That is how they want you to respond. Don't succumb to the numbness."
4. A Facebook friend posts, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace." Yes, do that.
5. Another thing: I am remembering the atmosphere in Nova Scotia, where I got to go for a week two years ago. Where I was, the air had a lightness, but the atmosphere was also heavy enough to hold you. That is what I remember or what I was feeling at the time, lightness and weight, the air and a holding. May I be grateful.
6. This morning's email from my mom: "If u were little I would buy u these PJs and talk u into wearing the hat w them." For the fact that someone sees me this way, may I be truly grateful.
7. And: grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love.
Today I wroteroad rode the bus to Montclair, NJ to fill out my HR paperwork. I am teaching one class there this fall. (American Poetry after 1945.)
Today I was very sleepy all day, and I ate dumb foods, like a croissant for lunch.
Today it rained and rained a lot at night just now, which is tonight.
Today I ordered Indian food from the place I like now, near me in Brooklyn now. Gandhi Fine Indian Cuisine of Flatbush. I have lived in my new place for a month and ten days, and I have ordered food from there four times, I think. (Once for a visiting friend.) The man who brings it said to me the second time, "I have been here before. Do you remember me?" and he gave me a very sweet smile. Yes. Yes, I remember you. Today we smiled sweetly at each other again, and I thought, "Please be careful on your way back." Maybe he heard me think it. It wasn't raining at that point. Maybe a little miss. mist. Careful.
The rice pudding has a little tapioca in it, which I guess that sounds a little weird. But so good.
This is how I sound at night after I was sleepy all day and it rained, and a croissant for lunch and a bus that sat there in the Lincoln Tunnel for a very long time (a short time, but an hour ride instead of twenty minutes, part of it in the tunnel).
This is what I look like when I'm tired like this. (You don't want to see.)
But there was seafood korma and a salad we made at home, which someone cut up the vegetables for me for. A few bites of rice pudding and the rest for tomorrow.
All of which sounds better if you think it over while you listen to this:
2. Another piece is forthcoming (next week!) in Everyday Genius.
3. I realized that Bernadette Mayer and Donald Revell will be the Visiting Writers during my four-week writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center next May. Hey!
4. I've picked up some poetry teaching for fall, in addition to the research work I'm doing. (I'm doing some paid research work for another writer, as well as some research of my own into late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century spiritualism.)
5. Keep me in mind if you need someone to do paid research, editing, or writing work. I'm hoping to get a simple website up this fall about the services I can offer along these lines. Meanwhile, you can find my resume here and academic cv here.
6. Some of my research/celebration of the season change involved going to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp with my little brother last week when I was visiting Florida. It was the site of a community of turn-of-the-century spiritualists, and now it's an isolated small town filled with psychics. It is also, apparently, filled with spirit orbs that show up in photographs! My brother and I tried unsuccessfully to photograph a spirit orb (see above).
7. Oh, dear. Summer is ending. But oh, my-- how I love fall.
Me: Look at that person. That ibis. That egret thing.
Mom: That's a sandhill crane.
Me: I feel like my recall hasn't been the same since I hit my head.
Brother: I just haven't been the same since that roller coaster car jumped the tracks . . .
Me: [reading People magazine] Why is Shiloh Pitt-Jolie such a little cross-dresser?*
Brother: I don't know, Joanna. Some of your questions are beyond the scope of my knowledge.
*FYI, I actually think little kids should be cross-dressers. It shows character.
"Another one of Bill's weird birds. Bill likes birds. [shrug]"
"I'm glad you're getting old. Otherwise you'd be dead."
"Why didn't you bring me spirit orb candy? I didn't want to eat it. I just wanted to set it on my desk and look at it."
"Here's the quote from Groucho Marx at the beginning of part 2 of my book: 'I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.' "
"I know I'm charming. You don't have to state the obvious."
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.)
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 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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
