Bauhaus

When I was a teenager, I knew a thing or two. I stayed in my room being skinny and having bangs, listening to Bauhaus and lifting 3 lb. weights. I drew pretty good portraits of my own face. I learned to drive stick, and I would drive farther out into the suburbs to go to the mall and walk around drinking Dr. Pepper and chewing candy and being mildly disgusted with the all the . . . people, who seemed to be sinking of their own accord. All the way there, I’d look for the Eagles on the radio, in order to demonstrate that the Eagles are always on the radio and to further demonstrate that—for good or bad—my vocal range exactly matched that of one Don Henley. On the way back, I would listen to Heart or Fleetwood Mac, which reminded me of my childhood in the ‘70s, a time of honest belting and bad vibes. Boys at school would talk to me in class, and I guess I would just look at them or say something weird about The Sorrows of Young Werther or something, because after a while they’d get nervous and blurt out, “I guess that’s how people dress in Europe.” Then we’d both turn around, and class would start.

Shoe Portrait

The Woman Who Awoke Before Noon

Todd Colby reading our collaborative poem "The Age of Wonders" at the Lungfull Release Party/April 2010

The view from here

May poem

[poem was here]

Saturday

Go For It Program: Morning Advice for the Non-Morning Person

1. What are those people saying? I mean, birds.

2. Do not think about what constitutes a "pleasant environment" in the morning. Look at the light. It's probably pleasant.

3. Where does the sunlight fall on your bookshelf? It might be: Howards End, Gilead, The Morgesons, The Brothers Karamazov. I really might organize all this differently.

4. Cheech and Chong voice in my head goes, "Organize your miiiind, man." OK.

5. If you stop paying attention to good or bad things, they stop happening. Or start happening. I read that in a book.

6. Now there's light on Paradise Lost and Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler.

7. You should try it.

April 30th poem

Last poem of the April draft-a-day challenge! "It's been real," as my mother used to (embarrassingly) say to store clerks.

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While Reluctant to Use the Word Sing, I Am Content to Say Hum

Do starlings argue about whether to put a change
jar in the bedroom? Would a starling sit on the couch
wanting to make poems of birds and light? I can hear
the city grinding itself into the earth, making something
living of itself and airplanes dropping soot from blue
blue sky. Everything is shining and in pain.
(The little girl yesterday at the restaurant looked
at me, then asked her parents, Are the grownups
going to die? Her father-- Don't worry about it.)
It's hard to be loving all the time. Let's try.

April 29th poem

This is me having a life of the mind

Late April and I'm almost back to swimming feeling--
swim swim--under a washed-clean sky and all
those green for real leaves out my office window.
Birds picking their mites and students doing some spring
frolic thing I don't even want to know about on the beach
(lawn) by the admin building. It's all good vibes and secrets.
I'll climb the shallow concrete steps, branches curving
up like scythes. If I learn to build on what came before
there are cool places to hide.

April 28th poem

Jesuit School
[poem found in the back of this semester's teaching notebook]

the way a nun in no habit will bend at the waist
cock her head a little and clasp her hands
smiling a little comic smile of God and understanding
when she sees you at the bathroom sink
(or is that woman a nun at all?)

April 27th poem

Morning and “Opaline” Light after Three Days of Rain

These birds are calling machines, sound spinning on a string,

and then there’s the real machine—something cutting through

the last real rock Manhattan has. Yesterday was dumb

and not in a good way. An artist might be simple and strange,

lovely and dumb. Yesterday was not an artist. (I’m scared

of ugly animals, people with shopping bags and masks who

step in your way to cough in your face on Central Park South

remind me to walk on the other side of the street next time,

the park side where raccoons and lost schizophrenic sons

will watch over me.) I was on the 1 train thinking of you

after reading “Beware of bone-tiredness/ that brings sickness.”

Oh, friend who is my heart. For real. Come see me

someday before we’re dead. We’ll shuffle along together

and swing our arms bent a little, like you like to do.

The light’s a slow kaleidoscope. I can see one stunted

branch and a wall of light on brick through the grate.

April 26th poem

Fragment

The in-between-- I see it now--
my true home and its ghost

John Prine

April 25th poem

Today Was Cold April Sunday

Walking under the arms of new full leaves in the spitting drizzle,
everybody-- even the kids and dogs-- looked hungover.
It's still drizzling on the subway. A man is taking my picture
with his phone, or watching porn on his phone, or reading
text messages. Later I see him in the potatoes at the store.
A lady there follows me, walking in front of me and stopping
to block my way at the ends of aisles. Back home the sky
glows violet gray in my kitchen. My soup barely turns out.
Every single time I look at the clock today,
it's 52 minutes past the hour.

April 24th poem

Lifted

At a student reading, I hear
the line "I dream that my skin
is new" and take heart.

Fragments from April Notebook (April 23rd "poem")

Tonight for dinner-- crackers (cracked wheat) with aged parmesan, small container of blackberries, dark chocolate, a few pecans, two glasses of good, inexpensive red wine. These foods the result of sunny day mania.

*
Shaker spirit drawings. Their founder was a woman.

*
The hands of someone familiar-- "someone's hands familiar."

*
"Who do you think you are? You're not a star boarder." Something my great-grandmother used to apparently say.

*
Reading Mom's People as a kid, I was puzzled by "Liz Taylor's violent eyes." Such passion! But seemed to judge her for it. Years later: "Oh. 'Violet.' "

Ice in Italian: il gelo.

My security words: "Unbity" and "and pendulum."

*
Small girl on the bus saying "ever ever ever."

*
Jim Carroll and James Schuyler before bed. Life is short. I don't know how to live it.

*
The nice empty feeling when you cull and organize.

*
That guy I dated who'd make a face of mock-disgust when he was glad to see me. It was funny at first.

*
Bench in Central Park. Tourists from eastern Europe (acting their idea of American?). Bird whistle like the disco cop whistle in Donna Summer's "Bad Girl."

Dream: Archive of everything. What it leaves out.

Heads-up

Here are some recent/upcoming/ongoing developments:

1. On Saturday, I will be reading a poem or two at the THE LUNGFULL GALA RELEASE RAUCOUS AUCTION & READING SPECTACULAR. Last year's event was indeed somewhat raucous and spectacular. This year's event promises to be even more so. (An authentic Devo hat will be auctioned off!)

2. My poetry book, How We Were Strangers, was a semi-finalist for the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Even better, two of my friends (Ross Gay and Rebecca Howell) were finalists, too!

3. On Saturday May 1st, I'll be reading in Brooklyn in the CROWD reading series.

4. My new chapbook, Mesmer, will be available in May from Dancing Girl Press.

5. We are nearing the end of National Poetry Month. What have we learned? I've learned that when trying to write a poem a day for National Poetry Month, I tend to write in all sorts of ways-- poemy poems, prosey poems, compressed/lyrical fragments, talky pieces, found poems. I've also learned that while it probably isn't against nature to try to produce a draft per day, it may in fact be against nature to post them on your blog.

6. The image is a jackalope, an animal I first learned about from the KU Natural History Museum. I'm not sure if they still have the jackalope on display, but they still have the horse Comanche.

[Jackalope image found on blogulate.com.]

April 22nd poem

Aubade
("One of these mornings, you're going to rise up singing")

I'm watching some miasmic chemical reaction between the decaf
and the regular coffee in the press and it would be easier to consider
myself awake if more light came in through the windows. (My mother
and I looking at New York apt. ads two years ago-- "Oh, look. Another
ad for light. What a selling point. Haha." Haha.) I go to the bedroom
to write down, "It would be easier to consider myself awake, etc."
and there is some light shining the white gauze curtain bright. I
shimmy a little, then try a tentative grapevine, then slouch and frown
and sit on the bed. The guy in the cranky introvert article said Sartre
might as well have said, "Hell is other people in the morning."
I'm almost my own other person.

April 21st poem

Quarrymen

The friendly guy behind the desk at the storage place is telling you about Beatles Fest when suddenly it's 11 p.m. The belligerent customer who was here when you arrived is now on the other side of the glass with his two sons in gold chains. They're all looking at you like they learned it from each other. What you found in your storage space are only huge stacks of typed material you may have compiled, one disassembled chair, an unsettling misc. box (semi-precious stones, old calendars, a cartoon map), and books written between the years 1722 and 1997. Most of the people who wrote most of the books are dead. The man who is telling you about Beatles Fest is still alive. He once played with the reunion of the Quarrymen. Now he plays when someone offers him enough money. He gives you a free lock. When you go outside again, the sky is strange.