April 8th poem

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April 7th poem

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April 6th poem

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April 5th poem

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April 4th poem

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April 3rd poem

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April 2nd poem

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April 1st 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.   

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.