April 16th poem

Settled

"So much khaki and uncombed hair!" is how my mom described the Unitarians that time she was trying out being a joiner.  Another time we got the giggles when the white gospel troupe very solemnly intoned, "For-- I-- shall-- consider-- my-- cat-- Jeoffry---."  Still, the decision is clear:  once I'm settled, I'll join a gym with childcare and whatever denomination has childcare and a tolerance for pantheism. 

April 15th poem

April 15th

It drizzled all day, and by afternoon, overcome with the thought that I had become a bad luck person, I fell deeply asleep when the baby did, each of us entering some kind of deep well of our own. (Think about what a good metaphor "sinking" would be for such a sleep, if it weren't already a commonplace.) I sank on my hard and comforting sleep bier, an effigy of myself, in time to meet R on a train platform somewhere along his journey. My one really tall ex-boyfriend! Well, there are a couple tall ones. I told him all the troubles, holding on, even then, to my newly reborn feeling of self-sufficiency. A kind of leather armor of self-reliance. "Carapace" is the word I'm thinking. My son was strapped to me, as he would be in life. Next we were wrapped up in a fleece cape-like blanket, and R was hugging us to him and swaying us along the platform, walking and swaying, walking and swaying, until the baby and I let go our worries and were completely relaxed, completely at ease. Even now, I feel that was nice of him to do.

April 14th poem

Poem in a Late Style

Today I kept getting turned around in the Village
then I got home and someone on TV asked if I had a turkey neck
Do you have a turkey neck? the caption said
I don't know I don't know
I just don't know anymore

April 13th poem

Kenning

How to cultivate wound-deep knowing
with only these scrawny trees around.
Even on the first really warm day
strangers at the park remain closed-
faced, squared off.  The wrong kind
of wounding.  One girl, though,
blond, Hasidic, alone in middle childhood
surreptitiously follows you around
the playground.  Testing out
knowing.  Going the wrong way down
the slide, twisting into a circle to get
her shoe back on.  Soul pate, is what
you think. Whole-souled human,
kenning what she can.

April 12th poem

Notes from Today
(Or, Poem with Stolen Lines*)

Morning at the cafe there's a woman at the next table dying of consumption. Well, she's coughing and reading Renata Adler.  Coughing and reading, coughing and reading.

I am enraged at the cafe but why?  (Tiredness.)  I am looking at job ads I am looking up words I know the spelling of because reading final final proofs makes me look up words I know the spelling of.  Hello strawberry sweet cheese kolache hello iced Americano.  Everyone get out of my way.

What year was it that I read that Buddhist book that said to pause in doorways and think this moment or think nothing lasts.  (Which was it?  Both/either.)

Everyone is bothering me.  Everyone was once a helpless baby and they all still need so much love I can't take it.  I'm beaming out love and exhaustion.  I want to cry because we were all babies.  My gift is glittery and eternal.

I go to Central Park to see my partner's (?) good friend from high school and her baby who looks like my partner's (?) Aunt Catherine.  She (the baby) is named after a beautiful Buddhist concept.  I think she will be a wise teacher and learner.  I think if she had glasses on a string she would look just like Aunt Catherine.

On the subway, my baby touches a lady's fingernails, gazes at a lady, eats pieces of cereal, squeals, laughs, beats his head on my sternum, shares a joke, needs a nap.  On the subway, my baby.

I am singing us, I guess.  

I am eating dinner.  I am victorious and hurried, dinner-wise.  Listening to the music that fell between rocksteady and reggae and has innocent lyrics.  People just wanted to dance in the underground clubs and the politics were fucked.  Is what I'm told.  Please turn it down I'm tired.

If I had my mouth, I would bite

Once when I was a teenager I was sleeping in the small room upstairs at my grandmother's when my uncle Joe came home from wherever and started cracking pecans with a nutcracker at the kitchen table while I dreamed that he was eating knuckles.  I could see him sitting at the table cracking and eating them.  Then I went downstairs and he was sitting at the same table eating pecans, and I said, "Oh, I thought you were eating knuckles."  That's how I feel when I fall asleep from seven to ten while putting the baby to sleep.  "Oh, I thought you were eating knuckles."  I'm half-asleep, but which half I don't know.

Transformation transformation transformation.  It just never ends, you know?

Doors are tricky.

Good night.


*some of the italicized lines are from Brenda Coultas, Maureen Thorson, Eleni Sikelianos, Gregory Crosby, and Todd Colby. 

April 11th poem

Mysteries of Carports and Other Places

"first you're in the womb
or some other insular place"
--Bernadette Mayer

then for years an only child, others' houses unsettling
you, harsh words over dishes and how things are no longer
where you set them down when you go back later

at home, you let the cats claw at your scalp like yarn
you wander out to the carport to burn things with matches
douglas hurst lopes in sideways from down the street
to torment you with his pert little face (which face you
also have but don't think of yourself as having)
neither of you know what to do about the other's face
and there is the exchange of insults like Pip 
and the fine young gentleman, all sharp eyes and longing,
competition to be smartest at school (you are smartest
but he is smartest in math)

you have driven him off
you are alone in the kitchen staring at the empty fridge
seized by an imp of perversity, you take out the cool whip
and hershey's syrup, mix up a big bowl
take a few bites and leave it
the wiz is on hbo again and diana ross
looks so sad in harlem you'd like to go there
and eat dinner with her family and walk outside to sing
with snow in your eyelashes

April News Update

Amid my NaPoWriMo posts I wanted to take a second to share some exciting updates:

Extract(s) recently featured me in a three-question interview about themes, process, and short-format writing. They also shared a few excerpts from last month's release, The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis, which you can learn about about at Brooklyn Arts Press.

Please join me on Thursday, April 24th for a Dual Release Party at Berl's Poetry Shop in D.U.M.B.O., where I'll be reading from Itinerant Girl alongside fellow Brooklyn Arts Press writer Bill Rasmovicz.

In other news, I'm eager to announce that my second (!) book of the year was released April 3rd. Titled Crown, it's now up on the Ravenna Press website as part of the Ravenna Pocket Series.

April 10th poem

(collaborative poem with Todd Colby; revised today)

Track 28, 2:45 pm

The instruction manual was etched in glass,

and made a sound like a mouse or a dreaming
woman making small squeaks in her sleep

when you ran a fingernail over her parent's teeth.

Her parents adored her and it showed 

in their well-faded jeans and moisturized palms.

They all smelled of coconut oil and sandalwood, 

as per the instructions.  As per their understanding,

suffice it to say chemistry textbooks have many

excellent images for making collages, which is

why she failed the class but won at compiling 

spray adhesives.  All the while, this mystical
being was ensconced in a wondrous world called

"what New York had become." Which is why I am

a principal in Atlanta. During recess the dogwoods

did sway in the wind.  They did sway and I did
sway.  Thank you for coming in this afternoon,
Mr. and Mrs.  Buncombe.  I sorely appreciate

your children and your pie. There will be a day

when you forget my name, but I'll be dead by then.

April 9th poem

Compassion poem

Once when I was teaching 10th grade American lit, I came to class just emotionally empty for whatever personal reason or non-reason, wondering how I'd ever beam the appropriate amount of attention and good cheer toward my students that day.  I was scowling maybe and preoccupied as the students filed in, and they just ignored that part or didn't see it and beamed good cheer, attention, and humor out from themselves like we'd all tried to do to the best of our abilities on previous days.  Had I banked some cheer for myself just by trying to be a decent person to my students on those other days?  However it happened, they were giving it back to me and didn't even know they were doing it.  They were just being decent people.  We'd made a space for each other to do that, be decent people even on empty days.  That kind of thing-- small acts of kindness and attention-- bounce around like light bounced off a small mirror this one kid used to flash light in another kid's eyes until I told him to put it away.  Even not being heavy about the mirror continues to bounce around.  This theory of good humor and bouncing energy is important but must be held lightly, the way the boy held the mirror and the way he put it away again. 

April 8th poem

Tuesday April 8 
(after Bernadette Mayer)

an overcast somewhat warm day someone is the city is having
a beautiful time doing i don't know what.  i begin writing this
and the baby intervenes by biting a yellow crayon pointing
at the microwave to deflect attention then grabbing my pen
bobbing his head to the music crayon breath geh-geh-geh
he says and bites my scalp a little where i crouch on the floor.
that sad velvet underground song comes on "ain't got nuthin'
at all." then e bites a big hunk off the green crayon and i stop
to clean it off his teeth. we say bleh at each other and he runs
away come back!  "oh sweet nuthin' ain't got nuthin' at all."
microwave beeps again the last few sips of coffee.  when the baby
sets something down, he does so carefully and takes his hands away
with fingers delicately outstretched but i turn around and the red
and green crayons he just set down aren't there.  what if he waved
his hands and disappeared them?  gosh.  no here they are
on his coat.  sleight of hand. now that "makes no difference"
song.  rick danko is my favorite from the band besides
levon helm.  but this is my morning jacket. e is now
busy in his playpen.  says, "ah."

April 7th poem

(collaborative poem with Todd Colby)

Gaining a Purchase
 

I forwarded you a quality of life list.  Let's brainstorm because sooner or later a bird makes a delightful meal for the workers.   At noon, we'll meet in the circle to work on value-added vision boards, after which the servants will bring in cucumber sandwiches and tea.  They have been instructed to control their gazes. More importantly, the servants are required to maintain an air of objectivity regarding the prudish ineptitude of not only the citizens, but the material desires of all involved. We are spiritual beings having an earthly experience, but not all the members of the team are on board.  Patricia has promised to meditate upon the question.  Robert is going to throw some psychic energy my way to see what sticks. We should adjourn by 12:04, when we'll be treated to ocean vegetables and a fermented red beverage made from firm ground. See you there!

April 6th poem

Tea Fortune

"This is a sorry culture, babe.  You have to make your own."
--Alice Notley, "A Bitter Treason"

A sorry culture and I must return to the homeland
absorb the vibe-a-rations where the sky is right

I am somewhat comfortable
with the semiology of Brooklyn
(stomach flips sideways writing that)

somewhat more comfortable with how the sky fits
the land in North Carolina or even Kansas
and the roads through the what is the word
want to say roughage, but it is . . .
want to say verbiage
roads fit through the I'll just say trees and grasses

Pick a card
I'm thinking High Priestess
but I dig out the old mass market paperback and turn
to Death When you see this card think of: 
CHANGE, REBIRTH, RENEWAL

Mastering the Tarot: Basic Lessons in an Ancient, Mystic Art
by Eden Gray, pub. 1971
same year I was conceived in North Carolina and born in Kansas
or, wait, I guess I was conceived in 1970

a small burning
a small bun in
or just, Hi, I am here to steal your tarot book later

April 5th poem

Case Studies

"[A]ll those happy hippie plans gone awry."
--Eleni Sikelianos, The Book of Jon

When I was a kid, we were always doing things like going to visit some angry guy with a bushy beard in the woods who couldn't finish his half-tree house mountain retreat dreamscape because his father wouldn't turn over the damn money.  There was always a farm sold out from under someone else and the disappearing funds.   The disappointed older generation with their hairdos and handbags, and the disappointing younger generation with their hippie-dippy anger.  Still, we rode up into the mountains on the border of NC and TN to check in on the simmering, under-realized utopias, the burlap and health food feel of it all.  The world wasn't really that different.  The women were still in the kitchen.  My family had no money and so the anger was more diffuse, or was actually just humor mixed with sadness, a dash of resentment.  Then my mother went back to grad school.  She thought she was turning me into a social scientist by leaving all those case studies of pygmies and schizophrenics around-- I read anything-- but I observed too much to fit between the rails of discipline.  My idea of narrative drifted, listed, became loose and unstructured, tending toward poetry, all of it much too qualitative and speculative to win many government grants.  Oh, well. 

April 4th poem

[expired]

April 3rd poem

Dear Bonnia,  

How do the myths lay down road in a girl eating pound cake in the South
at her grandmother's table?  There's the one about the goddess and her chariot
pulled by cats.  The one about the man who wanders, the family left behind.
And then there's the weaving of the disparate stories into a founding myth.
Years wandering, the horse behind the gates.  The underworld.  What disparate
strands we all of us weave.  Especially Bonnia of the sad and happy eyes.
How and when do we come up from underground?  By which I mean myself.
By which I mean any daughter-wanderer, any hero-mother who stays behind, wondering.

April 2nd poem

Freyja in Brooklyn

I misplaced my chthonic majesty and lost my feathered cloak
in the last move.  All I have left is this reindeer skull diadem
with antlers, all out of context.  People mistake me for mere shaman
or Pratt student.  How to remember one's role in the weather--
bear down and bear down all winter until everyone's breaking
and broken, pale on the subway.  Still, my sorcery's all jacked
up.  I'll move clouds about until it comes back to me, turning
the wind this way and that, like an old-timey radio knob.
If Odin were here, he'd say, "Out-of-sorts goddess.  That's no
way to go through life."  Either way, I'll meet half of you
halfway down your long last road. 

April 1st poem

[expired]

Almost Spring Poem

First you think of buying a colorful flowered shirt as a sign of some sort of symbolic rebirth.

Then you think, "Again, with the symbolic rebirth?  Or still?  Still working on the same one?"

After that, a glimmer of affection for that guy in college who ended anecdotes with "Just imagine!"

Just imagine!  It has been many years since you were in college, but if you let it, time folds like a piece of paper.  When you hear that one New Order song, for instance, or that one Pixies album, you could almost just step across the fold and stand there in front of your James Dean poster with that guy in his checked shirt saying, "Just imagine!," basking in your nascent glimmer of affection.

In one way:  Who cares?  In another way:  The slippery "you" of this poem does.

If you could have any power from a book, what would it be?  (A) Tesseract?  (B) Giving people's minds a little push so they'd acquiesce to your series of small demands?  (C) Letting your mind unhook from caring about any of it, even the flower shirt?  Letting it unhook from it all, like some Siddhartha or some sociopath from an existential novel, but without the murder?

Well, then.  Happy spring to you.  

Drawing #1 to accompany The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis

Drawing by Alex Lenhoff.  The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis is available here.

You’re in my Hall of Fame room holding a ginger seal pup with a fabulous mullet. You have the mullet, not the seal pup. I’m in your Hall of Fame room going all post-apocalyptic child star, killing and roasting my own venison while wearing glorious deerskin gaiters. If I had news about my plasma, you’d be the person I’d write to, to take my mind off the news about my plasma. If you needed someone to hold the sides of your head to keep your mind ok, I’d totally write you a poem that metaphorically held the sides of your head. In our previous friendship, back in time, we were some of those proto-human toddlers who took painting lessons in a cave ritual about painting lessons. As a middle-aged man of fifteen, you invented dung sculpture, blowing everyone’s mind. I had my own project, blowing on fiery twigs to create shapes like those little brass angels that fly by the heat of candle flame at Christmas. But nothing like that at all.

News about The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis

I was very happy to hear that my book from Brooklyn Arts Press sold well at the AWP conference in Seattle.  Thank you to BAP editors and staffers!

The book is available from the BAP website, as well as SPD and Amazon (in paperback or on Kindle). 

My brother, Alex Lenhoff, and I have begun a project in which we are choosing pieces from the book to illustrate.  We previously did a drawing and poem collaboration here.  Alex is a talented artist and I'm delighted to talk about my work and images with him and see what he comes up with.  The first drawing will be posted shortly, with five more to follow in the coming months.  

Next Steps

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

"We Bought a Zoo" is a kid's movie. Please enjoy the awkward

nature of being alive in this century at all. Enjoy it the same way
 you enjoy being helped across the street by a manic fellow
with a gold grille on Valentine's Day. You will take what you can
from the thousands of dogs making their yellow urine canyons
while we breathe in our rattles of phlegm because that is called being grateful.
Your better angels are standing at your shoulder in Burberry coats
making notations on what you think, feel, and see. "3:00 Bedford Avenue,
gangly 12 year-old boy in sweatpants lifts arms like a dancer and steps
over his dog's leash with a Fosse-like hop." Your angels approaching
job burnout just want you to quit your yammering. Wow... I would like
to to get acquainted with you. If you don't press against
certainly? I hope we are similar? Tell, if it is not difficult, what's your real name?
and by the way what are you doing now? Forgive me I have forgot to tell you
my last name. My surname Lyudmila. Mainly
I am search my soulmate here, I want to have genuine relations. You agree
with me? If you have thoughts for the same it will be Perfectly!
I expect to hearing from you soon..
Your answer, is important for me. Lyudmila.

Paul Auster on winter

from The Invention of Solitude:

There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding.  Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned.  It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness.  The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind.  He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself-- not really here, but not anywhere else either.  A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls.  He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought:  a darkness in the bones; make a note of this.

Make Your Own Luck

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby
 

Signs abound and puddles of slush, so you leave the house

like some latter-day Candide exclaiming "Nice hat!" to Orthodox ladies

but really we're all just skulls beneath the moisturizer, making the calcium
function as a shell over all that electric gooey mess. One time
I told a class that desire speaks of mortality.  Cradling the body
of the beloved is like to trying to stave off death by owning lots of shoes.
And that cute thing of lying with your face close to the other's face
and sharing breath immediately becomes the memory of lying there sharing
breath.  Therefore sex is death, everyone.  Let’s start an improv group called
Memento Mori Everywhere. The class just looked at me.  When you’re twenty
sex is just sex. February, on the other hand, but I digress. Let me introduce
you to the second law of thermodynamics: if you light a match
and extinguish it by pressing it against your forehead, it will not only hurt,
but you'll get burnt. The resulting mark is called the Mark of Cain and it helps
distinguish the well-intentioned from those who live above the law, to wit,
artists.  Or am I thinking of Ash Wednesday?  Death and resurrection
are constant themes.  Small talk and pleasantries until one day
you just throw in the towel & float to some ascension magnified not by doubt
but the realization that we are all so fucking alone.  Throwing in the towel

is what we're here to learn how to do.  Using that same towel to pin to a pole
and wave around like a flag is a form of personalism so broad & crisp
it makes my teeth hurt.  Groucho Marx said that.

(More of our collaborations can be found here.) 

Open Letters Monthly

My poem "Crown" appears in a great new issue of Open Letters Monthly.  Thank you to the editor, Maureen Thorson!

Book!

I'm pleased to announce that my first full-length book, The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis, is now available for pre-order on the Brooklyn Arts Press website, with a publication date of February 25th.

Balancing outward and inward looking, playfulness and vulnerability, strange intimacy and gauzy disconnection, Joanna Penn Cooper’s The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis builds a moody and tender ladder. These lyric shorts recall the New York School with their arrays of noticings and exultancies and knobbly, vivid particulars, yet they also feel wholly fresh and surprising, and of Cooper’s own nimble and provocative making. This is a wonderful collection.

 --Paula McLain (author of The Paris Wife; Stumble, Gorgeous; Like Family)

 

There will be a book party/reading this spring.  More details forthcoming.

 

November 26th

Today we went to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 

I saw this Italian Futurist dog.

I ate a cup of vegetable bisque, half a brie panini, and some chocolate lava cake in the cafe. 

The baby fretted for a bit, and then he fell asleep in his carrier and I draped a napkin over the carrier while I ate my food.  Then he woke up and we went to look at the Anselm Kiefer exhibit.  He liked it pretty well.  A couple of the large pieces we bent over and looked at upside down, which he seemed to especially like. 

November 25th

1.  Sometimes a person may say they are doing a blog post for each day in November, but what they are really doing is a blog post for many of the days in November.

2.  The synchronicity thing:  My mom and I often reported to each other from my childhood on that we had read and heard a word at the same time.  Or wrote and heard.  We each do this separately and fairly often.  These synchronicities come in clumps for me.  Mid-November contained a clump of synchronicities.  I used to write the words down in a notebook [with brackets around them] but I have since ceased this practice.

3.  Did I ever tell you that I sometimes explain things to Ben Franklin in my head?  The other day, I was telling him what sushi was.

4.  The Indian buffet I had for lunch was ok/pretty good, but the dessert was especially good.  The baby tried some small bites of my samosa and then he got antsy and we had to go look at the statue of Ganesh while Clif finished eating.  Then we switched off, and I had some awesome rice pudding and chai.  I mean, it was sustaining. 

5.  "If your toothbrush is giving you vertigo, you may have bigger fish to fry," is what I thought to myself when my new toothbrush gave me vertigo.  It has, like, rubber whitening cups that threw me off balance.

6.  There's nothing wrong with taking your own life and work seriously and also finding joy in it.  Your own life and work can stand on their own four feet in front of a berry bush on an old wooden sign and delight everyone for miles. 

7.  Someone who used to sell suits for a living may enjoy putting on your coat at the end of the evening and then patting you on the shoulders.  This will be cheering, with a touch of pathos.

8.  "Life is short.  People die.  It's not cool."  I am trying to know this and just be here.  Be grateful.

9.  A flock of starlings doing their geometric swooping thing, but very close to the ground and as they are landing in a field near the highway-- it's a wondrous and terrible sight.

10.  When I was a child, I thought as a child, and when people drove me around town, I read signs out loud in a sing-songy voice.  When I became a (wo)man, I put away childish things.  Now I just do it in my head.  ("Suburban Veterinary Hospital . . .  Ideal Image Store . . .  Ideal . . . Image . . . Store.")

11.  Wait, there's a snowstorm coming?

12.  Welcome to Buffalo.

November 22nd

Well, I skipped another day.

Today I went to Cobble Hill to go to BookCourt. 

On the way, I saw these solid gold shoes. 

After the bookstore, it was suddenly dark.

And I saw this sad rabbit.

So I bought these brownies.

They were pretty good. 

On the way home I talked to a woman with five kids who told my baby that all her problems began when she spilled tuna in her backpack.  And I asked another woman where she had gotten her shoes (tan oxfords).  Shoegasm, she said.  I hadn't even eaten a brownie yet, but somehow I was talking to all these (two) people.

November 20th

Occasional Poem for Wednesday

I wake up to someone in mid-conversation with me
about the conspiracy theories surrounding The Shining,
how Jack Torrance is the Minotaur and Kubrick reversed 
the carpet in some scenes and what about the moon landing?
If I had a nickel for every time someone close to me doubted
the moon landing, I'd have at least ten cents, and I'd put it
in the wobbly-looking handmade bowl on the kitchen counter
that I bought in Asheville.  "Wabi-sabi" is a term for that wobbly
kind of beauty or "I never know what to buy at craft fairs,
so I'll buy this."  I like the bowl, though, with its cream-colored
glaze, the slight jade-green tint.  And what if someone gave
you a green stone necklace in the shape of a heart when you
were, say, eight years old that you promptly lost because
you lost most jewelry given to you up until the age of
thirty-five?  Would you sometimes think of it and think
of the vibrations it emitted on your small little sternum,
which at the time was the only version of your sternum
you had ever known?  Would you wonder if it was buried
under a tree in your old apartment complex or buried in
the back of some strange person's drawer, and whether
it emits those vibes without you or needs your body
to activate them?  Would you then wonder why you're
thinking of "vibes" and "energies" and "emanations"
so much lately, wonder what kind of hippie you were
becoming?  There's too much wabi-sabi in any one
person's invented mythology, all wobbly and beautiful,
slipping on impermanence like ice, grasping at stars. 

November 19th

Today was cold and sunny, and Elias was in a good mood, except when he got his flu shot.  I'm thinking about how much of our discourse now is made up of little jokes and a sort of call and response.  I'll have to think more about how to describe the quality of that.  After the shots, we (well, mostly I) went for banh mi and bubble tea, and I had a long conversation with the pregnant woman sitting next to me, who said she's a singer and actress and sometimes a writer.  I didn't recognize her, but I think I've seen her husband before.  Or maybe not.  He's either this one actor or he isn't.  The woman, Adelaide, and I were given free chocolates by the guy behind the counter because "Happy Tuesday."

November 18th

Three from Monday.

It was unseasonably warm on Monday, and we went to the playground and went on the swings.  The sky was beautiful, and I took pictures of trees coming and going.  (The middle picture is not at the playground, obviously.  This guy is serious about his kitchen implements.)

November 17th

Today I met with two friends and did writing exercises, which was fun.  I get some good material for poems that way.  And some human contact, which is a good thing.  Today was cloudy and a little drizzly and oddly warm, but I didn't go out, even though Clif took the baby on two walks.  I ate cookies and drank tea.  I met with my friends.  Later I made some beans and rice and played with the baby and put him to bed. 

The exercise for the piece below was that we read a poem out loud and then had to incorporate some of the words into our own piece.  (For this one, the poem was from Notley's The Descent of Alette.) Here it is:

Attempted Dispatch 

I wish I had more to report, a dispatch back from my journey,
but I'm in it now and now hovering and now living it
but also an image of myself projected onto myself
by a movie camera, something from a Charlie Kaufman movie--
marionettes, tunnels, rebirths, dioramas, a warehouse containing
my life and all the paths I walk in Brooklyn with the baby
in the stroller or the baby in the Ergo carrier.  When I found out
I was pregnant, my mother remarked that we had embarked
on an alternate reality and we had.  We had all boarded a ship
or walked down into a narrow trench, or I had, walking willingly
and with interest and then with trepidation, and then it opened
out into a colossal cavern, and that was the night he was born,
when I floated there alone even though I wasn't alone,
eating pellets of ice and watching the window for some kind of sign
of attendant angels or of a soul cohering.  Really I was listening
to a comedian I don't know being interviewed on a podcast
I kind of like until they had to break my water and it was dirty
and they had to increase the pitocin to get him out, until I was vaguely
 threatened with a caesarean, until I began to complain of all
the pressure breaking through the epidural, until it was time to push. 

November 16th

Clay

Often I find myself longing to be another sort of artist, so that my thinking would happen while drawing or moving clay about with my fingers.  The other night I dreamed that I was helping excavate a trench that was had been dug into some clay ground.  Buried in the side of the trench, I found the perfect book.  But I don't remember what made this book perfect, just that suddenly there I was, holding this perfect book I had pulled out of this wall of clay while sitting in this hole in the ground.  It's all very Jungian, right?  (I'm sure we could make something Freudian out of the clay.  But whatever.)  Also, I read the James Joyce story "Clay" in ninth grade and didn't really get it, but then later I read that the clay was about mortality and that's why it was so cruel to play a trick on the aging woman involving clay.  Or what?  I need to read that again.  Clay is what we are and what we'll return to.  It's the muck and it's also what grounds us and proves we're both of the earth and humble.  There's this passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God: 

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over.  Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed.  So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song.  So they covered each one over with mud.  And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb.  Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine.     

Well, it isn't always easy to show one's shine.  But that's all we have, right?  There's something to the mud itself, though.  The mud is also home.   

This is what I was thinking when I was putting the baby down for a nap just now and trying to "sleep while the baby sleeps." 

November 15th

Oh, oh!  My blog-post-a-day project is getting away from me. 

Well, ok.  Here's Friday night:

November 13th

Oh!  I missed a day.  OK, this falling darkness in the afternoon isn't so cute anymore.  A friend wrote me this email:  "This darkness is unworkable."  My thought yesterday was, "I need a butler and a fireplace to get through this."  But instead I made my own cambric-- half Lady Grey tea, half almond milk, a few drops of vanilla extract.  That revived me somewhat, as in a Victorian novel when one finds oneself wandering the moor all night before seeing a lit window in a lone house and being taken in by one's long-lost cousins.  One is welcomed in and given a warm cup of tea, only to realize that tea assuages 60% of one's angst.  Maybe 70%.

(I should write tea blurbs for the J. Peterman catalog.)

And here is some art inspired by Jane Eyre by the artist Paula Rego.

November 12th

Tuning into Your Day in Almost Mid-November

What do you do with a wintry mix and a tiny human
who won't keep his socks on is a question your PhD
might help you with.  Gothic moments in American realism
is what your dissertation was on and also what happens when
you lean in at 4:30 a.m. to check on the baby and he's there
staring back at you with wide-open eyes.  Redeployment of Freud's
concept of the unheimlich is helpful in literary study and also
in thinking about how the baby looks when he's suddenly sitting
up looking around at the air above his head, when seconds before
he was deeply asleep.  Are families uncanny?  Only when
you can't fall back to sleep and start thinking about Salem witches
and spirit orbs and the job market. Whether you ever grew a small
human in your body or cared for one or regarded one with interest,
think about the strands of the Marvelous and the Real.  Think about
the cloud cover; the interplay of consciousness; the slowing down
which precedes a quickening of the imagination; a onesie made of stars.

November 11th

I'm looking at this European toy website and talking to Clif like I'm Rain Man.  "I like the Color Tower Stacking Game.  You can make a wish list.  I'm making a wish list.  You can even share it.  I put the Color Tower Stacking Game on the wish list." 

November 10th

Is it too soon to start playing holiday music?  This morning, I put on Pandora and realized I have an "indie holiday" station (which-- ha, but I kind of wanted to put it on).  What I played was Bach and then some jazz and then the Smiths and Duran Duran, in case any of that helped the baby organize his mind.  He hopped in his jumper along to "Girlfriend in a Coma."  Oh, gosh.  When he was a fetus, I played him Talking Heads and Erik Satie, and I played him some Satie again yesterday to see if he remembered it, which maybe he did.  I have this feeling he remembers me eating tomato sauce when he was a fetus.  I love spaghetti sauce and so does he.  When I give him tastes of it, he shouts for more and twirls one hand about in the air for emphasis.

Today I stayed inside mostly and ate different foods, like French toast, honey crisp apples, Bloomsday cheese from the farmer's market (which I guess is actually named after James Joyce).  Then I took a nap with the baby, and when I woke up, it was getting dark.  Now I'm at a cafe alone and darkness has fallen just like that.  I like the idea of darkness "falling."  How interesting to think about the original metaphorical impetus behind cliches, and to think about how the over-used language of one time and place might be novel to people in another time and place.  For example, near the poles, darkness does not suddenly "fall."  (I've been reading a book that mentions this, but I will have to go home and look at the author and title.  They are utterly escaping me.  "Escaping me.")

The older I get, the more interested in seasons I am?  (I just put a question mark there without thinking about it.  Because-- really?  Maybe.)  I will just come out and use the word "energies"-- I like watching and feeling the shift of seasonal energies.  This is the time of year when I like to think about and write drafts of poems about going underground.  In yoga yesterday, one thought that floated up was the time a massage therapist in Asheville told me that New York City was a vortex of weird energies.  This is for metaphysical reasons that again "escape me" . . .  I think it had something to do with the city being built on rock and with water running underground?  (Question mark.)  And how weird, she may have remarked, that people pack into subways and ride around under there, right where the strange energy is congregating.  Then, back in yoga, I started thinking about The Descent of Alette and how I would like to read it again.  Perhaps I think too much during yoga.  Or perhaps I pay too much attention to the thoughts.

Last night, we watched The Conjuring, which didn't scare me as much as it scared Liz!  This morning I was thinking that it was because I am tired of people blaming Salem witches and their sisters for everything.  It was scary, though.  I like how families are always moving into large old creepy houses in horror movies set in and/or made in the '70s.  And how either the father or the mother or the teenage daughter begins soaking up the bad vibes and showing the cracks in the shared dream of the Family Romance.  Perhaps soon I will listen to indie holiday music and write an essay called "Are Families Uncanny?"  But first I'll go home and make soup.   

November 9th

Two things from today:

1.  This morning I was having a dream that I found the perfect shoes.  They were like old-fashioned black leather men's shoes with laces and leather soles, and they fit me perfectly.  They completed my outfit.  They completed me.

2.  At Restorative Yoga class this afternoon, I was instructed to let go of any thoughts or emotions that arose as we did the poses.  What arose then was the sentence, "This aggression will not stand, man."  So, my inner yogi is the Dude from the Big Lebowski? 

November 8th

A walk at dusk.

A book I found on the sidewalk a couple weeks ago.

Something that was in the book.

Shadow puppets.

November 7th

Today was drizzly and chilly in Brooklyn.  We walked to the grocery store before afternoon naptime, where a woman looked at my baby and said, "So serious."  I thought she was going to say he was cute, so first I said, "Thanks."  Then I said, "Oh, serious.  Are you serious, baby?  Are you ready for a nap?"  The baby had no comment.  (Later we played, and he laughed and showed me his new teeth, so it wasn't all seriousness.  He is also talking now.  He punctuates our conversations with assertions like, "Ba!" and "Da!"  "Ba" seems to mean any object that he's intensely focused on.  "Da!" means "yeah!" or sometimes, I think, "Daddy."  Once he said it when he saw Barack Obama on TV.)  At the cafe, they were out of chai, so I had Earl Grey tea with steamed milk and vanilla, which they were calling cambric.  It sort of reminded me of a grooming product you'd buy at Crabtree and Evelyn, but I liked it. 

Here are the pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip walnut cookies I made today.

Here is a Name Game I made for you. (Wait. Who is EF?  I suppose I knew at one time.) 

November 6th

Today we took a long walk to Unnameable Books, where I bought the following books. 

Then, suddenly, it was getting dark.

November 5th

On the fifth, we played with a hand me down riding bee from my friend Catherine. He's not quite old enough to ride it yet, but he quite likes using it as a drum.

November 4th

On the fourth, I posted about my admiration for Winnicott.  (See below.)  On that day, after exchanging a series of messages about education with two old friends, I also found this piece I wrote a few years ago.

On Forming Questions

When I was in the third grade my mother and/or the school system decided I was “Talented and Gifted.”  This meant that a special teacher would come to my school and sit with me in a very small room—what looked like a converted broom closet—and have me fill out mimeographed worksheets.  The worksheets asked me to make lists and to draw pictures based on instructions.  I found some of these sheets in my mother’s garage recently, and the tasks I was asked to perform seem meaningless and potentially baffling for an eight year old.  “List foods you would cook on the stove.  List foods you would cook in the oven.  Which foods would you keep in the refrigerator?”  Perhaps there had been a mix-up.  Maybe they thought I was a cooking savant.  I wasn’t.  My mother was a graduate student.  We ate a lot of spaghetti, as far as I can remember.  The special teacher once asked me to draw a picture of anything.  Anything!  I drew a cow that had a town of small people living in its stomach.  She told me that I should have drawn something that made sense, something that could really exist.  I told her I felt a little sick, like I was going to throw up.  She wrinkled her nose at me and told me that it wasn’t polite to use the word “throw up.”  What word was I supposed to use, I asked.  She seemed exasperated by my question.  (I wasn’t used to this.  My mother was good at answering questions.)  “Oh, I don’t know!” the special teacher said.  “Vomit.  Upchuck.”  That made me want to throw up even more.   

Does this answer the question?

November 3rd

On the third I watched the marathon go by a block from my house.  I took the baby out to see the marathoners, and as they came by, I thought about how they each had a particular story of training and possibly of traveling to New York, or at least preparing to be at the appropriate place on the morning of the marathon, and, then, of running.  Some people had their first names or the names of their countries of origin written on their shirts.  A woman near me shouted out encouragement to the runners with names on their shirts, which I guess was the point.  "Come on, Gary!  Way to go, Gary, whooooo."  That made me tear up again.  I pointed out the different nationalities to the baby, "Look, bubby, France!  Denmark!  Look, a whole group of Italians."  The baby looked, scowled, then reached up and pulled off his hat.

November 2nd

On the second, I went out by myself (!) to Berl's Poetry Shop's grand opening, where I saw various poets read.  They each read one poem of their own and one by someone else.  Bianca Stone read a short prose piece by Elizabeth Bishop that I love.  It's about a fire at a neighbor's house when she was a very small child.  It made me tear up for some reason.  In it, Bishop describes being in her crib and seeing the flames reflected on the bars of her crib as her mother stood on the lawn handing out refreshments to the firefighters.  Bishop recalls being suddenly very thirsty and writes that her thirst persisted throughout her life.  (I have this somewhere.  It doesn't look like it's in the Collected Prose. I need to find it.) 

November 1st

Oh, shoot!  I thought of doing a blog post a day in November, but am already behind.  Now I found out from my friend Liz's blog that this is an actual thing.  (OK, I've never actually met Liz, but we are internet friends, m'kay?) 

Here's my first make-up post.  On the first, I . . .  what did I do?  I don't remember.  Oh, I went to my pal Jen's house, where she watched the baby for an hour so I could finish a job application.  Jen and Elias played the guitar and harmonica, and then Elias fell over backward taking off his sock and started laughing.  That's a good way to start a month.

Here is a picture of E. playing a drum from India.  I think that was the same day.

 

I Heart Winnicott

I'm going through some writing I did in the past couple years, and I ran across this:  "Winnicott (1971) describes an area of experience that belongs neither to internal reality or to external reality. It encompasses all forms of play and cultural experience, and extends to the magic of love and intimacy, and to dreaming. Winnicott describes it as the place we are in when we are listening to a symphony, looking at art, reading in bed, playing, enjoying ourselves. At the negative extreme it extends to fetishism, lying and stealing, the talisman of obsessional rituals, and may even become the hallmark of madness."
                    --“The ‘Intimate Edge’ and the ‘Third Area’” Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 12 (1976): 489-95, Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg, Ph.D.

Mothertruckin' essay

I am pleased to have an essay on motherhood featured over at Rattle & Pen.  Many thanks to the editor.  I am in some great company over there! 

Text from Mom: "Never defy a witch."

(It wasn't directed at me.  She was referring to using her mind powers to get a flight canceled when she didn't want to travel.  Once when she was younger she said, "I'm going to make that streetlight go out," then pointed at it, and it went dark.  So.  You know.) 

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

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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

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April 24th poem

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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

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April 20th poem

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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

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April 12th poem

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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

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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.