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.