Publication news

I'm pleased to announce that my second full-length book, What Is a Domicile, will be published by Noctuary Press in spring 2014!  I love the mission of this press, and I'm very excited to be working with them.  (My first full-length book, from Brooklyn Arts Press, will appear in early 2014.)

And in chapbook news my collaborative chapbook with Todd Colby, I'm Glad I Know You, is now up online as the first digital publication from Poetry Crush.  Yay!

Five for Wednesday

1.  This episode of the Waltons.  It scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid.  I wasn't sure it was real.  It's real. 

2.  This Mary Ellen Mark picture of Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, which I continue to find oddly heartening. 

3.  The New York Poetry Festival is this weekend.  Stain of Poetry has some wonderful readers appearing at the festival on Saturday:  Emily Toder, Monica McClure & Gregory Crosby.  Yes!

4.  I'm happy to announce that Todd Colby & I have a collaborative online chapbook forthcoming through Poetry Crush!  Details TBA soon. 

5.  My Florida sojourn is coming to an end.  Goodbye and hello from me & E. from Florida and soon from Brooklyn again.  

Word Balloon

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

Some days you learn a lot about eye shadow or about how
the medication inherent in cosmetics makes the heart grow fonder,
or softer, or more medicated.  If you really believed this was your life
and not an ever-evolving state of emergency, you might blend into
the horizon like a warm knife into butter on a boat in the Indian
Ocean. But I digress. There are programs designed to help you lift
weights while buying fruit or to help you smooth out your fear of death
with a straightening iron.  In my own program, I loom for hours
over the advertisements in the back of The New Yorker, which
is sort of like stabbing myself in the face. Don't forget the world
is full of things like overly tall trees, impudent starlings, toxic puddles,
and, when you really get down to the brass tacks, some rather molten
leftovers from the time of the burnt wafer. I mean I'm all over
the enlightenment tip, pausing in doorways to die and be reborn
108 times a day. It's only fair to tell you how far I've come to tell you
of the odd course at our flanks, jumping from year to year.  In fact,
I've come from the the past to tell you. You are hearing the voice
of someone who no longer exists or never really did. You are filling
your shoes with sand in an attempt to appear more carefree and
useless. My advice: Take off your angst like taking off a coat made
of angst. I'll meet you there or anywhere they still let me in.

April 30th poem

[expired]

Poetry month news

Thanks to the NaPoWriMo site for featuring my blog today!  I can't believe it's almost the end of poem-a-day month. 

Check out the blogs of my friends Lauren Gordon and Annmarie O'Connell, who totally killed it during NaPoWriMo. 

Also, poetry will continue after April.  This Stain of Poetry reading on May 31st featuring Lee Ann Roripaugh, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Kathleen Rooney, and Lynn Melnick stands to be amazing!  It will be my first time back hosting (with co-hosts J. Hope Stein and Jenny Zhang) since the baby was born. 

April 29th poem

[expired]

April 28th poem

[expired]

April 27th poem

[expired]

April 26th poem

[expired]

April 25th poem

[expired]

April 24th poem

[expired]

Cathlamet Prize

I'm pleased to announce that I've won the Cathlamet Prize from Ravenna Press, and my chapbook Crown will be published as part of their Pocket Books series.  I'll keep you posted on when the chapbook will be out.  I'm really happy that this manuscript has found a home with Ravenna Press!  

April 23rd poem

[expired]

April 22nd poem

[expired]

April 21st poem

[expired]

April 20th poem

[expired]

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop House, Great Village, Nova Scotia

The blog of the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary has linked to my April 11th piece about staying at the Bishop House.  What an honor.  Check out the blog for interesting posts about Bishop and Bishop scholarship, like the Wonder Questions, posts exploring the connections between the work of Elizabeth Bishop and other writers, artists, and musicians, including people like Orwell! and Nabokov!

April 19th poem

[expired]

April 18th poem

[expired]

April 17th poem

[expired]

April 16th poem

[expired]

April 15th poem

[expired]

April 14th poem

[expired]

April 13th poem

[expired]

April 12th poem

[expired]

April 11th poem

While the Baby Sleeps

I read an Anne Carson poem about walking before dawn in Iceland.  I'm envious of Anne Carson then.  I want to be in Iceland doing things like that, seeing crows as big as chairs.  Ravens.  Or in another place, Nova Scotia, maybe, where I went once to stay at Elizabeth Bishop's childhood home and write because one of the house's owners told me I should.  Or could.  I did more revision than writing there.  I read a book of prose poems by Anne Carson there that I liked.  I also read the beginning of Anne of Green Gables, a couple of books by Canadian authors I hadn't heard of, some old National Geographics in the sitting room that was lonely to go into, some files of photocopied archival materials about Bishop.  I got my feet stuck in the red-purplish mud of the Bay of Fundy.  I walked down the middle of the road with my friend Douglas at around midnight.  There were so many stars I didn't know what to do.  I thought of Bishop's poem about Robinson Crusoe, and I kept telling Douglas that we should move over to the side of the road in case a Canadian redneck came peeling through the village in a pickup truck in the dark.  Every night we would meet in the kitchen and ask each other if we thought the house was haunted.  Neither of us would stay in the largest bedroom.  I think that's where Bishop's mother screamed that time before she went back to the sanatorium for good.  The house got very sad around dusk and stayed that way for a while, but I loved it. 

April 10th poem

[expired]

April 9th poem

[expired]

April 8th poem

[expired]

April 7th poem

[expired]

April 6th poem

[expired]

April 5th poem

[expired]

April 4th poem

[expired]

April 3rd poem

[expired]

April 2nd poem

[expired]

April 1st poem

[expired]

Opening Day

[Tomorrow NaPoWriMo begins!  Here is a prose poem from my 2012 poem-a-day efforts.  See you tomorrow!  Don't forget to say "rabbit, rabbit."] 

OK.  First of all, it's warmer out than I thought, and so I'm overdressed.  Second of all, even with sunglasses on, I'm squinting.  Thirdly, when a bird goes, poo-tee-weet, I direct my next thought toward it, thusly:  "Petulance.  We like the sound of the word petulance, don't we, birdie?"  Then I pass three separate teenagers, still young, still forming, looking elastic in spirit like fourteen year-olds mostly do.  I wish them the best.  I  begin to worry.  They look so full of potential.  As the third one passes, I sigh loudly in his direction, and he politely looks away, ensconced in his own hat like that.  When I get on the subway, all the adults look vacant and spiritually sparse.  At least there's one kid.  At least he's scowling with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket and thinking what look like serious thoughts.  At least he's swinging his little feet.  His socks are black and white striped.  His Adidas are the same ones my 25 year-old brother has.  Welcome to opening day, little boy.  Play ball, I guess.  

April, almost!

OK, so I'm going to write 30 poems in April again for Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo.  I'll post them here.  This is my fourth (!) time doing it.  First time with a newborn.  zomg.  Imagine me singing this part in a high-pitched quavery voice:  "Aaaaah!"

My 2010 and 2011 efforts are still archived on my blog.  I removed the 2012 poems in case I wanted to submit some of them to journals, and I will likely do the same thing this year, once April is over.  Here's one that was published in RealPoetik.  

The 30 poems in 30 days challenge is just that-- a challenge.  It's a good way to feel connected to poeminess and process and one's everyday observations.  It's also a good way to feel a bit crazy and vulnerable.  (Because, you know, I need more of that right now.)  Anyway.  I'm doin' it.   

Stay tuned also for a new drawing-poem collaboration by me and my brother at the Malfeez blog. 

In the meantime, here is a picture of the baby to tide you over.   

Elias is here

After three days of labor, he decided to be born.  We regarded each other.

In the hospital, Clif and Elias tried with mixed results to catch up on lost sleep. 

Once home, he gave me this look.

And this one.

We can't believe our good fortune in having this person in our family.  There is much to learn.  Meanwhile, Elias sends you  his blessings.

On the Delicate and Non-Delicate Movements of Weather and Time

At 2 a.m. the humidifier sounds like crickets and then I know I should move to the country.  

I let my large gray yoga ball sit on my reading chair, even though in times past that would have meant something ominous if I woke up wrong.  But I know I’m undergoing a transformation because, when they do show up, the ghosts in this room keep me company now.  One will hang around all matter of fact and affable, like a wise old dog, before leaving again, and then I’ll just go back to sleep. 

My boyfriend tucks me in for the second time and tries to sneak away to do more work.  “Goodnight,” I say, then hold up my arm and make a beak.  Then I say, “Remember shadow animals on the wall?”  He laughs and turns to go.  He knows I’m always trying to start conversations about shadow animals when people are trying to say goodnight. 

What do you expect?  One lifetime is very short, but it’s hard to realize when it’s happening.  Except sometimes it’s easy to realize.  Sometimes you’re almost a year later in a room in Brooklyn waiting for a blizzard, when just a second ago you were almost a year earlier in a different room in Vermont sitting on a bed with a Vanity Fair, a pregnancy test, and an empty bag of M&Ms you don’t remember eating.  

My friend tells me there’s a word for this made up by a theorist.  She can’t remember the theorist’s name or the word.  My friend is very intelligent, but we like to half-remember things when we talk.  It’s just what we do.    

Physics calls it “everything happens at once and all the edges touch.”  I believe I read that somewhere or heard it on PBS and didn’t just see it in a movie.  

 

I will be the theorist and I will call it effleurage, which actually means “a delicate stroking motion.”  In my theory, it means that and it also means “the mind and body’s flagrant disregard for notions of the consistent forward movement of time.”  A delicate and non-delicate motion. 

The Next Big Thing

The wondrous J. Hope Stein has tagged me in this self-interview series.  As she explains it, "The Next Big Thing is a neat, pass-it-on, chain-letter-ish interview series in which you conduct a brief interview with yourself and post it on your blog & at the end of the interview tag 2- 5 [writers]– thereby passing it on to them . . .  just like influenza! or birdsong!"

I believe these are supposed to come out on Wednesdays, but I'm doing it today!  Here goes.

What is the working title of the book?
How We Were Strangers.  I've gone through a series of other titles-- including A Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis-- before returning to this original title.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
The book didn't emerge from one specific "idea" so much as it represents a few years of writing poems, prose poems, and short prose vignettes and watching a voice and themes emerge.  One memory comes to mind, though, when I think about having an idea that I could write a book like this.  When I was getting my Ph.D. (in American literature) at Temple University, I was "secretly" continuing my life as a creative writer, which included writing brief prose vignettes that fell somewhere between prose poem and short short story.  Anyway, I showed some of these to my friend Ross Gay, and he commented that he "could read a whole book of these."  I tucked that away in the back of my mind to return to later.     

What genre does your book fall under?
 I'm glad I asked myself that.  I actually submitted the manuscript to publishers as a book of poems and prose poems, and the editor who showed interest, Joe Pan at Brooklyn Arts Press, explained that he would like to work with me in publishing a book of the prose pieces.  So, after some reorganizing of the manuscript in which I reworked some of the pieces and swapped out others, the book is now all prose vignettes.  I believe we're publishing them as "lyrical shorts."

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Hm.  Interesting question.  The book is more about voice, mood, and thematic threads than it is about plot or characters, but I suppose there are some recurring characters.  I guess the speaker would have to be played by a few different actors, like in that I'm Not There movie about Bob Dylan.  One would be a Blue-era Juliette Binoche.  One would be Winona Ryder from Beetlejuice.  And one would be this kid:

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

I wrote this in a job letter:  "The pieces in the book explore the liminal spaces between the lyrical and the surreal, and also between genres of the prose poem, micro-essay, and short fiction, ultimately seeking to depict the fine shadings of individual consciousness as a way to honor that which we share as human beings—mystery, wonder, existential struggle, and a desire for understanding and love."  An even simpler way to say it would be:  How We Were Strangers explores the speaker's longing for solitude and simultaneous longing for connection.

 
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I did an MFA after the PhD, and some of the pieces in the book appear in the 2009 thesis version of the manuscript.  The book has really evolved since then, though, and I've included many pieces that I've written in the last three years or so.  
 
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
 I'm inspired by writers who have an appreciation for the rhythms of speech and the way that odd or piquant observations intersect with individual consciousness.  For me, this includes writers as different as James Schuyler, Eudora Welty, and James Thurber.  Some of my appreciation for colloquial speech and strange/delightful observation also comes from listening to my mother and grandmother speak.  They're like walking found poems.

I've also been thinking a lot about works that exist at that intersection of genres.  I'd love to teach a class in prose poems, short short stories, and micro-essays, just to explore the blurry boundaries between those genres.  We could read prose poems by Charles Simic and James Tate; fiction by Lydia Davis and Amy Hempel; Abigail Thomas's memoir in vignettes, Safekeeping.  Also, there seem to be many women who identify as poets and write in a form that's somewhere between poetry and essay-- Brenda Coultas, Bernadette Mayer, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, for example.  I'd like to explore that more.  That could even be its own class.
 
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Below is only one of the three pieces I've written that mention Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  (Well, ok, it's the only one in the current version of the book.)

Everyone’s a Winner

Take me out to the dream stadium, the contest of great minds where players beam down from on high-- all men-- but I find myself in the mix, learning to leap and float above the green green turf. We all contribute something, me, Einstein, the Gandhi-Nehru guy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and the poet-athlete from my early years. Our mascot tells us things with his eyes, listens for me during the medal ceremony, as I squat there, falling into a trance to the sound of a weed whacker, picking up small animals, setting them down again.

 

Is your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It will be published by Brooklyn Arts Press in late 2013/early 2014.

My tagged writers for next week are below.  They may or may not have time to complete the self-interview, but I urge you to check out their work!
Todd Colby.  Karen Dietrich.  Annmarie O'Connell. Lee Ann Roripaugh. Shanna Compton (who's already been tagged five times, but who says she'll do it soon!).

Delirious Hem

My piece on the movie Bell Book and Candle is today's featured essay in the Chick Flix series over at Delirious Hem. 

You can see an overview of all the essays posted so far on Becca Klaver's blog.  I'm happy to be in such fascinating company! 

You May Be Approaching a Developmental Milestone

Today is late January and you'd sooner fling your dinner
than eat it.  You are pale and careworn around the eyes
and hair.  It's been a day.  And all day of it you've needed
a nap.  Instead you lay there whimpering, somewhere
in the recesses of your delicate skull knowing it won't be long
before you hold up your head, sit up of your own volition,
and grasp what's right in front of you. 

Recently and Soon

1.  I went to the MoMA recently and stood in front of this Jasper Johns piece.  It was the last day of the Quay Brothers exhibit.  The most striking part to me were the portraits of their mother at the beginning of the exhibit which showed that they looked almost exactly like her.  (Somehow I didn't realize the Quay Brothers were twins.)  I was also struck by my response to the set from their film of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  "Poor Gregor Samsa," I thought.  And I meant it.  Then I had to leave because there were too many people in the Quay Brothers exhibit.

2.  The all-prose version of my book, How We Were Strangers, has been officially accepted at Brooklyn Arts Press, with publication in late 2013.  If you have ever wanted to read a book of "lyrical shorts" by me, it will soon be possible!  

3.  In the past several months, I was also a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and a finalist during the open reading period at Trio House Press.

4.  Oh, and . . .  my due date is two and a half weeks away!!!  Yes, we have chosen a name.  We'll tell you later.
 

Found poem

[Mom's comment on a photo posted to Facebook.]

A group of us went out to a Hibachi restaurant and it happened to be our 20th anniversary. So I was forced to wear a Japanese cook's hat. Bill was not forced. He loved it. The cake is two cupcakes for us with cherries on each so they looked like boobs. Of course Bill had to compare them to his lovely wife.

November dispatch #3

One day will I be described as an "unlikely impresario"? 

Will I curate a freak show of loose metaphors of my ever-shifting delight and discontent at the small contemporary art museum of a medium-small town?

From that time forward, will the residents of the town decide to live as their own metaphorical embodiments of discontent and/or delight, as in some contemporary novel along those lines?

I guess we'd have to free the animals from the zoo, and a quasi-orphan boy wearing a pirate's hat and a union suit would be seen riding a zebra down Main Street at dusk and dawn.

An eleven year-old girl would transform the elementary school into the headquarters of her psychic hotline business.

Meanwhile some of the adults of the town would go back to school, but they would do it in the form of unschooling, spending a lot of time reading up on alchemy and learning to oil paint.

Would I eventually be the old woman in a house on the hill, wearing a strand of large cloudy beads that tell your future if you peer into them long enough as I play with them over a candlelit conversation?  

Certainly I'd learn some esoteric gardening practices and cultivate a delighted bird-like scowl when a man in Napoleon britches came to play the violin on the third-floor turret balcony of my house every day from four to five.

It could happen.  

November dispatch #2

My favorite part of the day may have been when the optometrist projected a very large E onto the wall and said, Don't pay attention to me and my light.  Just pay attention to the E.  Then she shone her light at each of my eyes while bouncing a little, then swaying a little.  I paid attention to the E, but while I did it, I thought about how the large projected E in a dark room and her bouncing and swaying in front of me might make a good moment in a movie.

Later, I was hoping that the man in line in front of me at the co-op was the actor Bob Balaban, but it was not.  So I pretended that the man in front of him was Philip Glass.  I watched an older woman drop a pre-made pizza crust on the floor and then pick it up again.  (I couldn't get to her to offer help from where I was in line, and, anyway, she seemed fine.)  Then I made my purchases-- four tangerines, Chem-Free Fair Trade decaf, pecans from the bulk section, chocolate-covered raisins from the bulk section, and some trail mix called Cranberry Jubilee, also from the bulk section.  Jubilee!  But not.    

I leave to sit at a table at the local library branch and write my dispatch.  Two middle school aged girls walk by my table.  One is drinking  something from a Dunkin' Donuts cup.  The other is saying, "You don't know how to act like a lady."  They both look straight ahead, trying to have dead eyes.  In front of me, a small boy checks out a large stack of picture books.  Then I'm thinking about Gandhi, a movie I saw when I was in elementary school and watched again on Netflix last night.  I think about how we can start out one place and end up in another, and how this might involve reading a large stack of books.  When Gandhi was a small boy, he had a very serious gaze.  This boy in front of me has flames on his sneakers and a green puffy down coat.  He wrinkles his nose a little to push his glasses up, maybe looking at me in his peripheral vision.  (Don't pay attention to me and my light.)  Then he zooms away on his emblazoned feet. 

November dispatch #1

Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.

--Robert Hass, "After Goethe"


Often in a play, a scene will open on a stage lit in such way as to remind you of individual consciousness spreading out into a shared domestic space.  A lamp, a rug, a plant.  The indication of a hearth.  A comforting sight and one with a slight frisson of dread.  

*

I'm studying the felt-ish skirt and colorful tights of a woman on the subway (one a leafy-loden green, one a subdued poppy), when I'm back in a dim fourth grade classroom watching a film about the Lapps.  All that year I was lost, except that afternoon in the dark room among the Laplanders and reindeer.

*

My friend left her humanities professorship to become a nurse.  The work is demanding, and she is often exhausted, often sore.  She reports that one man in his 90s wanted to watch a cowboy movie, so she found one for him, but when it flooded in the movie, it flooded in his room, and he called and called that they needed to move everyone to higher ground.  Sitting on the floor next to the bed and finding ways to calm him were a respite from the procedures and charts.  Being a presence for the dying may be her favorite part.  

*

In the dream, theories of home and of structure are something I can learn.  The seminar is called "What Is a Domicile?"  I will absorb the history of the dwelling place and develop the ability to infuse place with ritual significance.  A structure in which to reside.  An atmosphere both fluid and contained, which grounds and fades the ghosts.  We all live there together.

November dispatches

I had an idea to post some small "dispatch"-- a description of a moment or a short poem-- several times a week in November.  The storm and some deadlines have thrown me slightly off course, but stay tuned.  Meanwhile, we are fine here in our part of Brooklyn.  Our power only went out once for a couple hours.  The biggest inconvenience for us was that the subways near us were down for about a week, but the most troubling part was watching the news and wondering how those in hard hit areas nearby were faring.  And continuing to wonder.

Here's the tree I can see out the window of my office at home.  The broken part has since been removed.

There have been other, happier events these past few weeks.  Obama was re-elected.  (Phew!)  My friend Amanda visited, and we went about doing cultural outings.  Clif and I visited Philadelphia, where we saw my friend Catherine and I met her baby, Gabey.

Me and Amanda.  Here we are on an outing to the High Line.

Another outing: Storm King Art Center

Me and Gabey, my "Poet Baby," at Rittenhouse Square.

There are other signs of good things to come, signs that things are on the right track.  Much encouragement and good cheer surround me, if I choose to see it.  Also, being six months pregnant is pretty bizarre and amazing.  I think there's actually a person growing in there.  So far, I know that he likes dancing and chocolate chip oatmeal muffins, and that he might be born in the Year of the Water Dragon.  Much else remains a mystery.

Here's some more good news:

• My friend Todd has been posting some amazing poems lately on his blog.
• As has my friend Annmarie. 
• This poetry reading I'm hosting next week, along with J. Hope Stein and Jenny Zhang . . . come if you can.  It will blow your freaking mind.   

Dispatches from Here

1.  The sky is very clear today, and there are calls across the air-- a nesting bird, a leaf blower, incidental traffic sound.

2.  The two year-old downstairs is wailing mournfully in long cries that end with little yelps and howls.  Perhaps he is remembering and grieving his time with the wolves.  Perhaps he got a flu shot.

3.  In Philadelphia, I could live in luxury for what I'm paying here.  Well, I could live in large apartment in a Frank Lloyd Wright building in a sculpture park.  Private terrace.  Washer and dryer.

4.  Before long, I will have very important visitors, viz.: A friend I met in college, who I first admired for her over-sized sweaters, fuzzy hair, and steel-trap mind; the brother who was born when I was 15 and who has only recently stopped insisting that he knows I'm secretly his mom [I'm not]; a mysterious traveler who will come in his own time, once he's done absorbing material from the collective unconscious, or whatever he's doing in there. 

5.  Writing that last phrase was punctuated by a stretchy jab from inside, as if to say "my agenda remains my own for now" and "hello."

Today

[with thanks to Todd Colby]

Opportunities abound.  But I had rolled oats with pecans and cherries for breakfast, so I feel that I have done my part.  And the air-- I should say something about how the air today both holds me in place and pushes me toward winter.  I'll sit here in red flannel pajama bottoms and a charming scowl.  I'll listen to the roofers next door and their quieter hammering.  The cloud cover makes it quieter.  But really, they've just moved to the farther side of the roof.  When you get here, we'll drink hot chocolate and misremember novels together.  Somewhere from a room upstairs, we'll hear a low stringed instrument being played.  We'll think about music and its relation to walking.  We'll take naps.  I had something else to tell you.  But this will have to suffice. 

October Monday

1.  I made soup.

2.  I defaced a William Carlos Williams poem.  (See below.)  I started out following this assignment by Nada Gordon to "baroqueify" (which I saw by way of Shanna Compton).  But my poem isn't baroque at all!  It's more like me trying to be Roethke trying to riff on Williams.  [shrug]

3.  Clif shaved and cut his hair.

That's about it.

A Sort of October Song

(after Williams)

Let the snake of the mind wait under weeds, damp leaves,
radiator hiss.
Learn plant words. 
Or better, learn the sound of plant growth slowing. 
Forget the sleeplessness and slow wit of summer. 
Reconcile the people and the stones.
Be the stones.
Be the somnolent waiting smell of old houses in the damp.
Compost.
Under covers, learn one to three books.  But slowly.
Learn wet asphalt.  Low sky.  All of it. 

For Chris Toll

Today I learned from the life of a poet who has died.  He once accepted a poem of mine and wrote to tell me, saying, "I have a ghost girl living in my mind."  (The poem has a ghost girl.)  We exchanged maybe eight emails, and in one he asked how I'd fared in Hurricane Irene and we talked about downed trees.  I like a person who can ask how you fared in Hurricane Irene and who can tell you he has a ghost girl living in his mind.  It means, "I am not afraid to be a human being." 

Another thing he wrote me was, "In Art, I like to go fast." 

Reading about him and re-reading our emails, what came into my mind was, "I'm just going to have to embrace my weirdness.  It's the only way." 

The night before he died, he wrote this in an email to R.M. O'Brien:

i know i’m nobody – i’m a snowflake and i’m drifting toward a bonfire – i know this well – i’m getting hot.
BUT
everything we do at every moment is critically important – every deed at every moment in every day should be a living prayer – if we pray hard enough, we will have a New World – and we will have it sooner rather than later.

Thank you, Chris.  And good journey. 

Slow Crescendo

In the crime shows I’ve been watching, things culminate into worst case scenarios and long drawn-out scenes of broken pool cues and smeared mascara.  A Rottweiler lies down in the snow to die with the prostitute he swore to protect.  Around here, all that happens is I wait until four to nap and then have to listen to the family below get home and clomp around like a drunk fourteen year-old in a tube top and clogs.  A whole family made up of multiple copies of the same drunk girl and her sad feathered hair. 

I should put more beautiful words to this.  I should say, the near October light through blinds.  Or just, I have a proto-human growing in my abdomen.  He weighs a little more than a can of Coke. 

Yesterday was cracked and somber, and I made my way uptown, seeking out any odd moment to be weird and gentle after a bummer of a rough morning.  Then I lay in a darkened room while a Caribbean lady jabbed a sonogram wand at me to get Peanut to pose right.  He acted pretty put out.  I wanted to cry.  The screen on the wall showed the bones and snow.  The beautiful part is that everything’s fine. 

I’ve been off coffee, and much of my life is a slow movie on an art gallery wall.  You climb into a room with pillows on the floor and watch it all swim around.  You are in love with someone you just met, who’s lying there, too.  You barely touch, but you’re also the same person.  Part of the movie is a tiny spine, tiny kidneys.  A four-chambered heart.  Look at all the wonder. 

Quote from Mom

When you were a fetus I read everything about teaching little kids so I could be sure to teach you myself even if the school didn’t or instead of the school. I loved John Holt then. The educator, not the reggae singer.

[FYI:  My mom was 18 when I was a fetus.]

Three or four things

1.  I received my copy of the new issue of Ping Pong.  I have a poem in it, as part of the folio "Poetic Responses to Jean Arp's Poem in Translation 'What Is It?'."  I'm in excellent company in the journal.  My poem lives alongside work by Elaine Equi, J. Hope Stein, James Harms, and many other cool poets.  Nice!

2.  Two chapbooks I worked on this summer were finalists at a press I really admire, Bloof Books.  Huzzah!  And onward!

3.  I'm sitting at my desk in my office at home.  Now that it's not 100 gazillion degrees, I can actually sit up here in the attic and think deep thoughts with only the ghosts for company, as I am wont to do.  Someone next door left a box of books on the sidewalk, and I can see pedestrians stopping to examine the books, then walking on with or without a book.  I like catching people in the act of being interested. 

4.  If you tell someone you like sock monkeys, your life will become total sock monkeys.  But at least you are loved. 

Something about ghosts in the fall

I am smarter in the early- to mid-fall, so I'm waiting for that to fully kick in.  I read that scientists have found that if you want to be happy, have cool air blown up your nose.  Happy.  Warm air up your nose:  Less happy.

Also, I'm writing a new book, and I won't mention ghosts in it once, even though I already did (oops).

My mom says, "What is it with you and ghosts?"  And I say, "I don't know."  Then I say something about the early twentieth century and free-floating anxiety.  She seems to understand, or at least to understand that that's how my mind works.  We are standing in a room in a Hampton Inn in North Carolina when this conversation happens.  That's where the ghost might have been.

Later I agree to go with her to Hardee's so she can eat a biscuit and gravy and I can eat a biscuit with jam and an orange juice.  I tell her that at my previous job, I kept doing things like filling in for tenure-track faculty who would go on mysterious medical leave without telling their independent study honors students what to do.  I'm not sure anyone noticed the extra work I did, besides the students.

One time I put in a request with the department secretary to get a screen put on my office window.  I told her that a squirrel kept looking at me from the ledge and threatening to steal the lunch out of my hands.  The secretary laughed then in a way that made me feel both foolish and appreciated.  That job came with a time limit, but I miss the students, many of them.

This all seems to have to do with whether I'm secretly appreciated or haunted or not.  That's how I feel in the fall when cool air circulates through my nostrils and lungs and around my body.  Secretly appreciated.  Affably haunted. 

Some of what my grandmother told me

You become like those with whom you associate.

Back in the old days, they called children by nicknames to keep the devil from knowing where they lived.

Mountain people won't tell you anything and they resent you asking.  [About some of our family.]

Fools are found in high places.  Beware.

I have a funny mind.  I'm watching it all, the passing parade. 

Mom and grandmother

I think my grandmother said that the jeans my mother's wearing were called "devil dogs."  (Is that right?)  Also, they are in the telephone alcove at my great-grandmother's house.  People had little nooks for their telephones back then.

Some thoughts while traveling by subway

1.  Some days the East River sparkles like any other body of water in almost fall in the late afternoon. 

2.  My grandmother says that when my mother was a young woman, she once jumped in a van with some other young people and drove all the way from North Carolina to New York.  She called on a pay phone from Times Square to say, "Mom, I'm in Times Square!"  Then she drove back.  This story was reported with a mixture of incredulity and admiration.

3.  It's the year of the water dragon.  The last year of the water dragon was the year my mom was born.

4.  The phrase "delicate condition."  I was born in a delicate condition.

5.  Frau Lyrakis saying "puzhalsta" to get our attention in Russian class.  It means please, and you're welcome, and here you go.  Puzhalsta.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Admit One

Some Notes on Footnotes

1.  Last night I was re-reading Maggie Nelson's Bluets, and I realized that part of the reason I like it is that it reads like footnotes to a larger text-- one that is just out of view, that we can't have access to.  

2.  I was also thinking about Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and how the footnotes in that book form a parallel narrative, an exploration through apparent ephemera of personal and national experience at the turn of the twentieth century.  The footnotes become their own story, which is in part a story about how the story needs to be told through accretion and indirection.

3.  See also the work of the poet Kristina Marie Darling, who I met at the Vermont Studio Center.  She is drawn again and again to the form of a poem in footnotes, and, like Nelson and Rankine, the work becomes a circling around some other version of the story.  Darling's work is, in part, about the female poet's debt to and obsession with the pre-existing narratives, but it is also a sly wresting of control.

4.  I have long been interested in footnotes.  For years I considered it my job to read novels and books of criticism very closely (and to make incisive and slightly peevish marginal comments).  This is because I was in a doctoral program in literature.  I grew to enjoy my own incisive peevishness.  It even extended to arguing with or becoming overly fascinated with footnotes. 

5.  I have some ideas about how footnotes are a good form through which to think about Emily Dickinson.  This is in part because I really enjoyed the footnotes in Alfred Habegger's biography of Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, when I read it a few years ago.  I would like to go back and read those footnotes.  There is also Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, which, like Nelson's Bluets, reads like a book of footnotes.  Collage-like.  I actually need to read that book more closely.  I've been circling around it for years.

6.  Perhaps footnotes are a good way for thinking about Dickinson because her poems share certain qualities with footnotes.  They are fragmentary and authoritative at the same time.  Contained power. 

7.  Since earning my doctorate, I have learned that there are many ways of reading closely in life, and only some of them involve books. 

8.  At the same time, embracing non-academic ways of knowing and perceiving does not have to mean forgoing an enjoyment of one's own incisive peevishness (as I am now thinking of my critical faculties).  I am beginning to feel that the footnotes are a way back in, a way of wedding my critical and creative interests. 

9.  These thoughts have to do with the following:  Something about accretion; something about the building of scaffolding; something about the indirect revealing of argument and voice; a satisfying skeletal architecture that points to something else beyond the page, a more complex narrative than we can express in words; leaving space.

More quotes from Mom

It's ridiculous.  It's like building a transistor radio. 

You're the only person I know who uses Twitter, and I never understand your tweets.

[On why she hates Facebook:]  I don't want to see your kitten.  I don't want to hear about Jesus or how you think Obama is a communist.  Or a big picture of the American flag-- "the most beautiful colors in the world."  Half the nations in the world have the same colors in their flag! 

I'm trying to gather my strength so I can be normal tomorrow. 

Modern Times: An Occasional Poem

(Photo: Tina Holmes)

(for Andi) 

This week my little brother went to a '90s party dressed in a pink shirt and faded jeans, as if that happened in the '90s, which it did because they were his father's old clothes.  My brother is the one who will drive me to the airport-- even though he has computer simulations to work on and I still call him "the baby"-- and he's the one who will keep turning the air conditioner down one notch for every two that I turn it up.  Mostly he understands me.  On the airplane home, I read in the literature that "everyone deserves a working TV on a flight," so I begin flipping through the channels to exercise my right.  I will watch anything that doesn't turn my stomach sideways.  One man on the television asks, "If the spirits can produce enough energy to move someone's hair, what else can they do?"  I worry about these things, too, and about what happened to the child-faced 25 year-old I was in the '90s.  But mostly I think we should honor our dead and tell them it's ok to feel peaceful around us.  If they ever move your hair, they're probably just telling you it's ok to be present right here and to live your life in the 2010s-- or whatever decade you find yourself in-- with as much joy as if you always wore a Blossom hat from the '90s, one that made you laugh and that only you and they could see.

"Kiss my ass. This is a holy site."

Between the Worlds of the Tiny and the Big

There's a boy in a branch library in an o.k. part of Brooklyn
being tutored in math by an exasperated woman.  I pass his table
 on my way to biography, and he looks up into the middle distance
to make a wry face.  This is me witnessing his one and only life.
This is him witnessing mine out of his peripheral vision.
This library is closed on Sundays due to budget cuts.  This library
has two shelves of poetry.  One day in the fall, a teenage girl
will come here after school because she needs the quiet
ruckus of a good book.  Her parents have accents.  She's wearing
the wrong jeans.  She'll sit at a table with a view of the children's
section and read Plath for the first time, and her hair will swim
on her scalp.  Kiss my ass.  This is a holy site. 

Quotes from Mom

You can't get a precision grip with salad tongs, especially mine, which are from Halloween and shaped like skeleton hands.  [About using salad tongs to get a small snake out of the pool.]

Does anybody remember the movie with the guy with a big nose and something about tea in the title?  [Darjeeling Limited]

Ethel's the name of the bunny rabbit I talk to when I ride my bike around the lake.  She's one of two I always see, except there are probably 100 different ones.

Ferns are magic, especially if they grow directly out of your house.  I just made that up.

Stain of Poetry

Come out on Friday 6/29 for what promises to be a stellar reading from poets Loren Erdrich + Rebecca Howell + Monica Hand + Aubrie Marrin.

Friday 6/29 will be my first official Stain of Poetry reading as co-host/curator with J. Hope Stein.  Jenny Zhang is the third new host joining us later this summer.  I'm excited to be working on this series with these lovely people, and I'm excited for Friday's reading!

Stain was founded in 2006 by Ana Bozicevic and Amy King, and the the series was taken over in 2010 by Christie Ann Reynolds, Steven Karl, and Erika Moya.  More information about past and current hosts can be found here.    

Lauper

It's Cyndi Lauper's birthday!    

Some News

[drawing by Bronwynne Cornish, from "Where the Bear Went" exhibit, Vermont Studio Center, May 2012]

1.  I'm honored to have a poem in RealPoetik today.

2.  I'll be reading with some poetry luminaries at the Popsickle Festival in Brooklyn on Saturday June 23rd.  Along with the brilliant David King, I'm representing the journal Lyre Lyre.  (Thanks, Lyres!)

3.  On July 21st, I'll also be reading in the Second Annual New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island, representing the journal Ping Pong.

4.  The Stain of Poetry reading series will also be represented at Popsickle and the NYC Poetry Festival, and starting this summer, I am one of the curators of Stain.
 
Runner-up for L Magazine‘s “2011 Best Reading Series” in Brooklyn, Stain of Poetry showcases a mix of ”weirdo and beautiful poets,” (BlackBook magazine).  Readings are held on the last Friday of every month (7 – 9 p.m.) at the beloved Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn.   The series is curated by poets Erika Moya, Joanna Penn Cooper, Jenny Zhang, and  J. Hope Stein.

Former hosts include founders Amy King and Ana Bozicevic, as well as Christie Ann Reynolds and Steven Karl.

Upcoming events (lots more in the works)

Popsickle Festival – June 23

Hosts:  Erika Moya, Joanna Penn Cooper
Readers:  Jenny Zhang, Mike Lala, Dan Magers

NYC Poetry Festival - July 21–  2:40 on The Algonquin

Hosts:  Joanna Penn Cooper, J. Hope Stein
Readers:  Melissa Broder, Todd Colby, Claire Donato

5.  I had a wonderful time at the Vermont Studio Center.  I'm still processing the experience and revisiting the work I did there.  I will post more photos at some point.  I have some good art, people, and river pictures. 

6.  More exciting developments are underway, including a collaborative chapbook with Todd Colby.  Also, I'm going to see Prometheus today, as my requisite summer blockbuster.  I'll keep you posted.

7.  There's a small gray bird with a long, flat tail that keeps landing on the tree outside my window.  What kind of bird might that be?

Today

1.  Reading nest.
2.  I will need new sneakers to face these challenges.
3.  Decaf skim latte weather.
4.  Visible river-bottom rocks as koan.
5.  Generative possibilities.
6.  Driver 8, take a break.  We can reach our destination. 
     But it's still a ways away. 
7.  Be as visionary as you like in your spare time.  

Life Drawing

Reported to my brother that I went to life drawing this morning.  His response:  "Stop living the life of a Victorian ill person and get back to writing."  Fiine.  But I'm going back to life drawing at least once.  And I will be sunning myself in an Adirondack chair and taking in a slide lecture later, in addition to writing. 

Jenny Schade

Here is a slightly blurry photo of a painting-in-progress by one of the amazing artists here at Vermont Studio Center this month, Jenny Schade.  The red square signifies solidarity with the students in Montreal.

[Side note:  Jenny also has some amazing karaoke skills.  Her rendition of Nena's "99 Luftballons," the German version, translated from the English version on the fly . . . was pretty inspiring.]

Byrne

Five from today

1.  Heavy thunderstorm.  Atmosphere suddenly electrical and ship-like in the studio building.
2.  After the thunderstorm, reading Tranströmer.
3.  After Tranströmer, a nap on the studio floor.
4.  Attending a reading in an old white clapboard structure.  White plank ceilings, balcony area.  Podium in front of a stage hung with a theatrical backdrop of a turn-of-the-century street scene.
5.  Coming back to studio to listen to Talking Heads on headphones and think.

Four from Thursday evening

Notes on the Movie "Contempt"

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

I let myself into your house and wrapped your family portraits in muslin. There wasn't a lot I could do with images of fetid life.  I don't really want to hear about your nostalgia for summer telephone poles sweating creosote on dirt roads, either. Or the movie lot with the dust bunnies or some palace on a peninsula. I'm done with glitz, for the time being.  Please meet me in the creek where my project begins, something about mud, something about, oh here I go again about mud.  You know that feeling where you've been thinking a lot about the appeal of French New Wave cinema, and you don't even really like French New Wave cinema?  I mean, I did spend a year of my life pretending I was Jean-Paul Belmondo and/or Jean Seberg, but that's between me and my shrink. Did I say "shrink?" I meant I'll be back in just a second.

[Note:  Ideas from a slide talk I saw by the painter Hanneline Rogeberg-- such as family portraits being wrapped in muslin-- have been finding their way into my poems, but they are, of course, out of context and get further pulled in strange directions when collaborating.  But Rogeberg's work, and how she talks about her work, are my new art crush.  Also, the image above is from the movie Breathless.]