Storm King

Two years ago, not long after Clif and I started dating, we went to Storm King Art Center.

And Clif disappeared into this portal.

This past weekend, at the appointed time, I journeyed back to Storm King and greeted him as he re-emerged from the portal. 

When he is ready, he will tell the world his story.

Chicago School of Poetics

I'll be teaching online community poetry workshops through the Chicago School of Poetics starting in January 2012.  The two courses I'll be teaching this winter are Poetics: Level II and Documentary Poetics.

Here's my faculty page.

Right Mind

I ran off to Boston this weekend.  (Well, "ran off" after missing the Bolt bus due to subway construction and waiting for the next bus in midtown for two hours while thousands of people occupied Times Square several blocks away and a bunch of people dressed as comic book characters walked by to/from the Javits Center, where Comic Con was going on.  One really good Edward Scissorhands walked by, but I wasn't fast enough to get a picture.)

I have many October thoughts on my mind, including but not limited to:
1.  How I'd like to write something that is a comfort to someone somewhere.
2.  How there is all this constant "becoming."
3.  The time I talked to Emma Goldman on the Ouija board (TM, Parker Bros.).   She said, "The revolution failed.  Even I failed."  Then she said some things about free love.  Then she said, "Jesus is love," and I had to wonder.
4.  "Right livelihood."  
5.  How it's good to have a friend I've known since we were 17 who knows when to encourage me to ride bikes by the Charles and when to encourage me to get in bed with a book because I might be getting sick.  At one point, W. came into the room as I was bundling myself up in her Hudson blanket and fashioning a recovery turban out of a scarf.  She took in the scene, then laughed at me and walked back out again.  And that was just what I needed.

Lately

 

Lately:

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.

New blog

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 . . .

Here's a peek:

A Set of Questions

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?

Some Things That Have Been on My Mind

[source: lulublick.com]

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." 

Found

Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Yay!

I have an appreciation of him up on poetrycrush. 

Things I Found

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.

Love Is All Around

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?

Spells

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.   

New York Penn Cooper

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? 

Weekend

[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.]

A. R. Ammons

I tried to read Ammons years ago, and didn't get it.  But just today, I get him, like him.

This is just a place.

J. Hope Stein

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.   

Quiet weekend

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.  

I have seven things to tell you

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.

Everyday Genius

I am pleased to have a piece of writing up over here.  Thanks, Everyday Genius people!

Perhaps

Perhaps this drawing parodying pre-Raphaelitism will have a cheering effect. 

(Punch Magazine, 1866)

Today

Today I wrote road 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:

News and recent endeavors

1.  I'm excited to have a poem in the recent issue of South Dakota Review.

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. 

More exchanges

source: http://ibc.lynxeds.com

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.

Quotes from Mom

"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." 

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.