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.