NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Last year for National Poetry Month I posted pictures of poems on my instagram, looking for interesting short little pieces of poems that could fit in the square format of the instagram feed.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Eileen Myles, Snowflake

Eduardo C. Corral, Slow Lightning

This year I'm doing the same thing, but different. I'm going to write the poem/lines up myself, maybe with a little illustration, and then post them, where ever I am, in real life. I'll be using Label 228s and they'll be mostly going up in Durango Colorado, but if I happen to be somewhere else, that's where they'll be posted. I'm going to be sourcing most of the poems from the internet, giving links to the original work. I'll also post pictures of the posts to the internet via my tumblr and my instagram.

This is what they will look like in the wild/this is the first post (I know, not an totally an internet poem, but it's so so good and you can hear Abraham Smith read the poem here):

Abraham Smith, Whim Man Mammon

I'm doing these mostly day-to-day, so I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow (probably something from this by Mark Cugini) and if you want a poem to be featured, you can nominate it through my twitter account. Just @ me with a link and I'll check it out.

Rap Game Billy Collins

Right now I'm sorta jazzed, sorta bummed, sorta floating, on life/writing right now. I'm coming out of a bit of a funk but I moved to Durango CO and now I feel like there is so much new shit to do that I'll never get through it all. I mean, I walk to work in a town that has a ski hill in the city limits? It's ridiculous.
*
Workin on a collab project that is just the shit right now. heres a few lines:

Hang on, let me take a picture of this burrito, then

we can talk about how invitations work. The entire

wedding service will be spoken in tongues. I don't

fuck with

OkCupid.

It goes like that for like 5 pages right now. And it's so so so much fun writing this shit too.
*
I'm worried that I'll drink my face-off living here
*
I've got a book review out a while ago. On Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Swamp Isthmus. It's a different review for me. Most of the time I write a review, I create a personal/lyric entrance into the piece. It felt pretty strange to not have that. It didn't even really have a clear: BUY THIS BOOK, IT'S VERY GOOD. So that's what I'm doing now: buy this book, it's very good.
*
Electroshock therapy is swirling around people I know. It sounds scary. It sounds magical.
*

You can call me whatever you want.

The Conceit :: The Concept

The first poem(s) that I'm sharing for my National Poetry Month activities are Jeff Bridges poems by Donora Hillard from Hobart online.

You tell Jeff Bridges you fear
your dying breath will be just like
the whimper you make when trying
to remove glitter polish from your
toenails. He sets his guitar down on
the fur rug. Baby Sister, he says,
live like you’re already dead.

*

You are sitting at my kitchen table
and Jeff Bridges is in California.
It is either very late or very early.

I am sorry for shaking the table,
for shaking so many legged things.

I kiss your ear and your ear is cold.
I hope Jeff Bridges is wide awake
and writing songs about gnats.

What I like about these poems is the humor, the pop-culture references and the way those are used to access emotion. I think using pop-culture references in today's literature is like dropping Shakespeare or the Bible or Homer a hundred years ago. Pop culture is readily accessible to all levels of society and it's just another form of intertextuality; not anymore or less sophisticated, just different.

It seems from the few bits of the project that we see, that the poems use or treat Jeff Bridges as a sort of mediator, an interlocutor, for a relationship, but also a sort of third wheel wrecking the relationship or a ghost haunting the relationship. It's hard to say from a little section of what is obviously a larger project.  Like, what's gonna happen when the poems start channeling Lebowski, or the old guy in that Laser Tag movie? And I guess that's where you run into potential problems with sections of a project vs individual poems: is the conceit bigger/better than the writing?



I'd pay money to find out how Jeff Bridges actually functions in the full project. By that, I mean, I'd purchase a book of poetry titled, Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges would look super sweet on a bookshelf too. I think maybe Jeff Bridges' Greatest Hits would also be a pretty cool title. Jeff Bridges: Unabridged would be pretty cool too, except the pun, but that might be the coolest part of that title.

National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month and there are some festivities to be told about.

1. 30 x Lace, curated by Carrie Murphy and Birds of Lace. I will have a poem in it. It's new, it's fresh, it's about being disappeared, and it's gonna be rad. Today there's a poem by Nichole Steinberg and she writes about a really interesting book of poems, Diana Lucifera. Here's a couple lines from her piece titled, There Is No Romantic:

...We’re all so warm

and pink, it’s obscene. I don’t want any

part of it. It took me years to learn

simple tasks: how to snap my fingers,

tie my shoes. My mother’s early gaze

full of worry that love would escape

me, too.

2. I'm writing poem things on my tumblr everyday. I'm going to write through the major arcana, reblogging images of the cards and attaching notes to them.

3. Here I will be trying to share an excerpt from a poem that's in an online mag along with some thoughts about the poem from time to time.

4. Anyone know of any good things to follow? Good poets that are also doing something? Good magazines/poetry websites/etc?

Love Your People Hard

As I began to write this, it was Frank O'Hara's birthday. If writing by any single person has influenced the way I live my life, it is words written by Frank O'Hara. The way he merges sincerity and intellect and humor and just goddamned beautiful language stops me in my tracks everytime. Somedays I can be obsessed with a single O'Hara poem or line from the moment I wake up till I dream of him and him sitting in front of me reading one of his lesser known gems. In the dreams I always want to lean over and kiss him on his receding hairline, tell him I like his nose, and stare into his vague blues...

I made dinner for my family tonight; a very simple spaghetti with a bacon, ground beef, garlic, and marinara-from-a-jar sauce, and texas toast. My brother and sister-in-law left early. She's a few months pregnant and had some strange pains and started spotting. She came out of the bathroom balling. Saying it didn't feel right...

Today was also the second day of hearings on marriage equality. Something I'm sure Frank would support, but I can also imagine his support as a casual affair. He wouldn't give two fucks what the SCOTUS thought about marriage. He would keep having fabulous love affairs with dancers and artists. As Marjorie Perloff quotes John Ashbery:

O’Hara’s poetry has no project and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Vietnam or in favour of civil rights; it does not paint Gothic vignettes of the post-atomic age; in a word it does not attack the establishment, it merely ignores its right to exist…

In that moment, seeing my sister cry for the first time since I've met her, I felt nothing but grief. In that moment, I was actually so glad that I didn't have anything like this to lose. In that moment, I seriously questioned my desire for love...

I have this tattoo on my arm that's a quote from Meditations in an Emergency:

All I want is boundless love.

And it's true, even after seeing the pain and fear in my sister's eyes, that's still all I want. I want to be so loved that it would destroy the other person to see me gone. And the opposite: I want to have something to lose, something that if lost, would destroy me. That might be the only thing I don't have in my life right now, and I don't think that's a difficult request...

I think that's what gets me about marriage equality. That kind of love isn't unique; that kind of love is universal. Everyone wants to be loved and have love like that...

We all wanna be fucked up by love...

My friend Lisa said something pretty great on facebook in regards to marriage equality: "I don't think anyone should have to make a pathos appeal to support LBTQ marriage... (because) you can bet everything that the US Government doesn't give a fuck about love," and I think that's true. So what if SCOTUS shoots down DOMA and prop 8, that not's going to keep you from loving your people. And that's what you have to do, love your people as hard as you can no matter what, cause your government doesn't give a fuck about your love...

I think the best way to end this post is with a bible verse (yeah, it's gonna fuckin happen):

Galatians 5:22-23; But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

*(UPDATE: my sister and my future nephew/niece are ok:)

What Makes A Good Poem

Forces reader to think
Creates a sense of beauty in the reader
Elicits an emotional response in the reader

I think that's it. Two out of three will make it a competent poem.

A Fun Little Writing Website

I love anything that will help me write/write something for me. Robot Poetry Reading is a fun little site. Angelo Plessas actually wrote a whole book of poems titled, Robot Poetry Reading, using the program, and it's a gorgeous looking book... 

Here is the poem I wrote using the site (note: I added line breaks):

lick a large 
black Man ' or follow 
Who 

another point in time meeting 
this Monday, My girlfriend is 
a Nine Tailed Fox DramaWiki. 

I wish 2011 Subtitles, AKA 
Jodaeiye Nader, 
The USA was started 
&. My dad said I Could sell 

The Poop TUBE 
#tim! 
Bill Gates was Ready 
to Swing. My cat is named 
Toothless Imgur. My favorite food 
is You DJ Icey. 

Baseball was Invented, 
I think,. You might, 
I study? I dream of purple 
sunsets on Europa may have 
Lakes in Chile. I want to lose 
my baconator in a tire fire.

Some Advice About Citizenship In The Writing/Intellectual/Academic World

More writers need to realize that they are not their writing. Just like Steve Jobs is not an iPod and Thomas Edison is not a lightbulb, you are not your writing. As a writer, you are creating a product and if you enjoyed making it and you felt it needed an audience, and it found that audience, then who cares what they think?

I think Kate Zambreno struggles with this and writers that I know who have books struggle with this but they really shouldn't. I don't really know what it's like to get a bad review, but I do know what it's like being rejected and getting negative feedback on writing.

Some people are just going prefer shitty writing and Zunes and whale-fat-powered candle light and nobody should take that personally.

Sometimes you're going to write something that is bad. And that bad writing is not you. That is a separate thing. Yes, you created it, and if it sucks, be honest with yourself and allow other people to pan it. But if someone says you're a narcissistic asshole, or a racist piece of shit, or a closet misogynist to your face, about you, you should be offended.

Unless, of course, you are.

If you're worried about negative reviews or negative thoughts about you because of your writing, why not just put in a livejournal? Why publish it at all? Why not keep it on a hard drive or print everything you write and put it in your sock drawer?

Publishing after you die is a good idea I guess... I'd love to see that book contract...

A lot of people really love the shit out of light bulbs and iPods but Edison and Jobs were kind of assholes. You can only be a good You and a good creator of good stuff, but you can't control what people are going to like. If you make good things and are a good person it shouldn't matter what other people think.

Therapy & Healing

I've been in therapy a few times. Once was couple's therapy. The other times were on my own, trying to get officially diagnosed with ADD (getting diagnosed as an adult is damn near impossible) but really trying to find relief from my feelings of non-productivity. I felt like I wasn't productive; maybe I was, maybe I wasn't, maybe I'm still not (I'm still not). I felt like there was something keeping me from accomplishing the things I saw my peers achieving. I felt like there had to be someone who could do something about that because I was trying as hard as I could and couldn't keep up.

(\)

Or so I felt.

(*)

I have poems in the new issue of Menacing Hedge. I like the poems. They're pretty new. A different style than I usually write and a different style than I usually enjoy. Someone asked about the first one, Eating Is & Should Be A Joyous Occasion. They asked what I was thinking when I was writing it. It's very simple: I was watching No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain was chasing chickens and I was eating cereal. What surfaced were my thoughts about all these people that I have loved, that I've literally chased around the world, that are now gone from my life, and I now have no idea where they are, what they are doing, if they think of me, what they think of me.

(^)

One of my therapists was a grad student who was really into Buddism and meditation. One of my therapists was an Evangelical Christian who was not as big into prayer as one would think. One of my therapists was an older man who was really into psychoanalysis and often talked of our meetings as 'work'.

(:)

In the end, I'm ok with not knowing what my past loves are doing, thinking, being. I'd rather not know. The interesting thing is the presence of absence; the fact that we notice when things are missing from our lives.

(o)

During therapy I often was asked to recall or discuss traumas in my life. I'm not sure how this was supposed to help. It often hurt. Often, it hurt a lot. I'm not sure how therapy is supposed to help anything.

(_)

The loves are not gone, but have turned into an absence.

(-)

Sometimes, I feel like we need to talk things out, explain things to ourselves, and I can see how therapy could help with that. The problem is, that problems don't go away when we talk about them. Problems, even if they've been fully reasoned through, are still there; all my traumas still happened, even if I understand how and why they happened.

(.)

The trauma is a new event everytime it's recalled.

(+)

So, how does healing ever occur? I don't think it can from therapy. Even though the word 'therapy' means that it will cure or heal. For myself, I fear that you can't be cured ever. And yet somehow I haven't lost my mind. I think part of the reason that I don't completely lose it, is an affinity for NEW. I try to do and taste and feel and smell and see new things. The brain is finite after all, and if I add new things, eventually old things will get replaced or misplaced and thoroughly mixed in with all the new. So even if I don't lose all the traumas, I can squeeze them, make them smaller, by adding new things... much like the loves who were present and now absent are again present as an absence, the trauma is here, pushing itself into all these wonderful new things. The traumas are part of the new, not made new by recalling them.

Representation: My Blue Square Is A Giant Spider

I rarely post pictures of myself online. This goes back awhile, but I started gaining an aversion for self-representations of myself on the internet a few years ago. I wasn't ok with images of my face, which I selected, standing in for my presence. I valued actual presence over a simulated one. I didn't want someone to be able to gaze at my avatar and feel a sense of intimacy. So to do this I started choosing for my avatar a picture of myself with my face obscured. I had a picture of my face blocked by a sparkler. I wore a horse mask. The light whited out half of my face. I was the color red or the color blue. I was a hand drawn image of myself.
*
recently I started posting pictures of myself, not as my avatar, but just in my various feeds. it's kind of scary. what do people think, what do they want to say, but don't. the response is mostly positive.
**
Someone shared this article on twitter the other day about a recently discovered spider in the Amazon that builds a normal web, but arranges debris in the center of the web that resembles a larger spider.

the actual spider is just the rear end of the whole spider image

Here is one scientist's thoughts, from Wired:

“Considering that spiders can already make really impressive geometric designs with their webs, it’s no surprise that they can take that leap to make an impressive design with debris and other things,” he said."

***
Idk, that doesn't seem like a design, to me. It seems like a representation. Somehow the spider developed the ability to create a representation of itself or of another spider.
****
I'm fine with being tagged in images other people make. that means that i was there, sharing a space with another human and a camera.
*****
My avatars:

facebook

twitter

******
my aversion to self-representation has a lot to do with the fact that I'm aware of myself. I know what I look like and I know what I look like to other people and I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of other people creating an image of me in their mind based on an image i created of myself. Creating an abstraction of myself, i hope, allows others to interact with me in their mind more freely.
*******
i wonder if my little blue square, or red square, or whatever color my square is next, comes to a person's mind when they think of me. that would be lovely
********
The spider is likely unaware of it's own image, or the image of other spiders.

A Published Blogpost In The Style Of And About Selected Unpublished Blogposts of A Mexican Panda Express Employee

i've never met megan boyle and never been her friend on facebook and i've never followed her on twitter except when her and tao lin got married. i think i unfollowed her when i unfollowed bebe zeva. i think she must have an interesting online presence and probably should follow her or something

i just googled bebe zeva and i'm really glad that i unfollowed her when i did. seems like bebe is so mainstream now

i was surprised she never said, 'seems bleak' in the whole book. thought, 'maybe 'seems bleak' was only popular after she wrote it, or 'seems bleak' was edited out because the phrase wasn't 'cool anymore''

i read 'everyone i've had sex with' when it was in thought catalogue. i wanted to do that too, but i have a hard time getting over the shame that occurs when i list them in my head. the people i've had sex with who might read this aren't the ones that would bother me, but the ones that would never read this in a million years

i did make a list of what the people i've had sex with would be if each person was the celebrity they most resembled. at the time i made the list, one of them was a muppet and one of them was channing tatum

there weren't a lot of 'poems' in the book. i felt like i was reading a memoir. there were a few good poems though

there was one part where she says all she wants to do is live somewhere warm and drive trucks and i think she is driving trucks as a job now. she is living her dreams

there were some really sentimental moments in the book which was surprising. i guess i have this assumption about muumuu house that their aesthetic is about extreme detachment. megan boyle seems very attached to the world, even if she doesn't feel connected all the time

i bought the book for my sister for christmas because my sister is around the same age. i ended up reading the whole book before i sent it to her. i took pictures of the parts i liked:

the idea of taking online quizzes in your head is really funny.

in 2009 i made a list of new year's resolutions. first on the list was 'don't die'

second on the list was 'don't fall in love'

Graduate School

A couple years ago I applied to creative writing PhDs a few years ago and didn't get accepted. I wasn't really surprised: I bombed the GRE, had no recommenders who could speak to my teaching ability/very little teaching experience, and I have an under-par undergrad GPA. It was really just to see what the process was like, if I could go through it, and how I would cope with complete failure.
*
I'm on the edge of applying again, this time for Literature. It seems like a lit phd is a lot less pressure to walk a line between tradition and innovation, which I felt was a pressure from the CW phd. Talking with the specific professor I want to work with, she was immediately interested in my ideas and really encouraging me to apply.
*
I was wondering if I should get an MA in Lit first. I'm so far behind on Theory and Criticism and a little behind on older traditions of poetry and literature. I've never read Greek or Roman epics or philosophy. Never read any long fiction from the 19th century (maybe Dickinson and a Balzac novel or two). The professor and Graduate Director both suggested I mention this and offer to take more course work as a solution. I guess it's a pretty normal thing. They both said I should just apply to the PhD.
*
I have felt recently that I should quit dabbling with academia. That I shouldn't have one foot in it and a finger in art and a hand in childhood education and always having my eyes on writing for money. I should just do one thing.
*
The only problem I have right now: my teaching ability recommenders more or less backed out in the last six weeks. My mentor and my boss both weren't able to do observations. I guess that's more on me than them. They didn't know that it was important to me. They were doing their jobs.
*
I watched that Bo Jackson documentary last night. There were three things that were impressed upon me: some people are just born with abilities (the people in the doc used the phrase 'god given' about a million times), you CAN do everything, and everything spectacular can come to an end in a banal instant.

The Middle West

Until this week, I'd never spent any significant time in the Midwest. I went to an AWP in Chicago a couple years ago and it was in February and it was cold and it sucked. No one should live in Chicago in February.

Iowa City is Beautiful.

I'm in Chicago now, hanging out with a friend, going to meet up with other good friends later in the week. I guess I didn't have anything better to do with my Thanksgiving week, but I'm really enjoying the food and culture and street art. I don't feel like Chicago is as effortlessly artistic as Seattle, but it's still has a lot of art stuffs happening.

Well, I guess I had other reasons to come to the Midwest: I read in Omaha on Friday with the lovely Kathleen Rooney and the charming Trey Moody at the Strange-Machine reading series. It was really fun. I feel like I did a good job. It's been a long time since I've read so I was pretty nervous. I think everyone thought I was funny, so that's good. I wrote and produced a zine for the event called "Omaha God". I have extras if anyone wants one. Hopefully there will be some at zine libraries in Chicago and Portland soon.

The Demon Poets

Kathleen read from her book, Robinson Alone. I really like the book so far. I immediately felt a rhythm to the poems, which very few books of poetry have the ability to impart on a reader. You can hear it in the book trailer (the above link).

This is sort of a dumb post with no point but to say, "I'm not in my normal place, I'm seeing the world."

I'm drinking coffee, reading Ariel by Plath, and life is good.

What should I do in Chicago?

Break-ups and Make-ups

Saturday I felt like poetry was breaking up with me. I was pretty sure that I just wanted to get a job on an oil rig, or in a pipe yard, or something that I could just do and not care about. I feel like I sold my soul to poetry in grad school and on Saturday I felt like poetry was giving me my soul back, which is incredibly sad, but sounds incredibly nice.

*

A while ago I talked about how I was working on a proposal for an ecopoetics conference. My paper didn't get accepted. On Saturday I got a form rejection. Which sucks for all the reasons that form rejections suck.

*

Red Lightbulbs had a reading for their last issue. I didn't get accepted. I really wanted to be in their last issue because I was in their first. Last Wednesday, Russ basically apologized for not taking the poem. It made me feel good, but it's still a bummer you know?

*

Last year for Thanksgiving I was in Portland and my sister came to town. It wasn't sunny a single day. It was a bummer, but we went out a bunch. We went to North Portland for Transgiving, which was amazing.

me+my sister (I don't feel like I'm a pretty girl)

This year I'm going to be in Chicago. I don't think there will be drag involved.

*

On the way to Chicago, I'm reading in Omaha. On Saturday I was thinking of cancelling (you know, so I could start my oilfield career). I changed my mind Saturday night. On Saturday night I hung out with some of my favorite people. We ate delicious food. We talked about poetry. We talked about writing. We drank delicious beer. We chat rouletted.

*

I hung out at Lily Hoang's house with Richard Greenfield and Evan Lavender-Smith and Carmen Giménez-Smith and Krystal Languell and Dylan Retzinger. My first thoughts when seeing Lily's house was that it was "cool". I'd been there before when the house was another faculty members house and it wasn't cool, but classy. Lily made an amazing stir fry at midnight while chat roulette was happening. Before that Evan and Richard nearly fought each other over a Rae Armantrout poem (Richard was right, FYI). I had two really great conversations with Evan about writing. We talked about Avatar and about why anyone does anything at all, especially write, and we talked about what I should read next and what he's excited about now. Later Lily would mention her relationship in passing and I wanted to say something about how Las Cruces is a great place to get over a relationship; there's nothing to do but write and stare at the sky. I didn't say anything though.

*

I normally wouldn't name all the names of the people I hung out with. This is to say thanks. I almost quit writing Saturday.

I'm Digging a Pit, Just to See it Empty

Today I wore brown on black. It does not feel like me. I love wearing color. I think my favorite thing to wear right now is a pair of blue and white striped pants and a pair of blue japanese tennis shoes and a blue shirt (I also love wearing a pair of yellow shorts). So somedays I wear three shades of blue (and only think of fifty shades of grey).

Today I taught composition to college freshman at a community college. I am teaching them how to write a personal essay. I had them read Eula Biss' Relations. Most of them didn't read. One student who did read it said it was garbage and discombobulated.

I want to wear red. I want to wear red all of the time. I want to wear red pants with a red and blue or red and cream striped shirt. Maybe a red sweater too. I want to wear red, but I can't because I don't own red. I own a single red sweater, but summer time. I own so much blue that I wear all blue somedays. I want to buy a red  pair of shoes but I can't justify the purchase right now. Maybe I'll buy a pair of red laces for my boots. Maybe a red pocket square. Someday I'll have a pair of red shoes though.

I had a hard time justifying her writing. I had a hard time telling the whole class, "this is art. this is the reason you should want to write. what she's doing here is magic with words. she isn't doing anything but writing and she is making you feel things."

There is this whole genre of youtube videos about teenage boys digging holes and tunnels and forts. There is really no reason for them to do it. It's just something for them to do.



In the comments, the boys are often made fun of. There are a lot of virginity jokes (you can put your virginity in there). Jokes about computer games. Jokes about scifi movies. Obviously minecraft.

When I was an undergrad, I had a poetry workshop with Carmen Gimenez Smith. In the class, we read a poem by Jorie Graham. Some of them weren't having it. They thought it was boring and meaningless. She said something that made a ton of sense: Jorie Graham doesn't have to prove herself a good poet to you. She's a good poet. This is a good poem... You don't get it, and that's you're fault.

In the comments, the boys are often asked what they're going to do once they're finished. One boy said he was just going to fill it back in.