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:)

I Am Not Amused (But I Want To Be)

Lorca called the muse a dark song, Duende. He describes duende as an angel that drags rusted wings on the inside of his skin, trying to burst out.

Elizebeth Gilbert gave a TED talk about waiting for the muse. She talks about making time for writing, and if the muse doesn't show up, it's the muse's fault, not hers. If the muse shows up when she isn't ready, the muse should know better; she doesn't listen.

Sometimes we have people in our lives that spur our creativity. We find ourselves in these crazy productive and successful places purely because of the presence of another. Sometimes it may not be one individual, but a community, and everyone finds themselves caught up in this wild storm of art and beauty. I think this is the muse.

The communal aspect of the muse can be seen in a lot of art history. Paris and modernism. The New York School. The Beats and the road and each other. LA and NYC in the late 80's and early 90's and gangster rap. These tightly knit communities that catalyze the present creativity and talent.

The twin muse is there too. Keats and Wordsworth. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Chris Farley and David Spade (don't tell me that Beverly Hills Ninja or Dickie Roberts is even half as good as Tommy Boy [but maybe Joe Dirt is close]). Sure, they're perfectly capable, or even great, on their own, but the sum of the two together is somehow better than the individuals alone.

I mean, LOOK at them

I'd say that I've had exposure to these two forms of the muse. In grad school and, to a lesser extant, in Portland, I had these amazing communities around me that both inspired me, and, I hope, I contributed a small part to the collective.

I also think of my good friend and amazing poet, Carrie Murphy, as my twin muse. I can't really speak for her, but I can't imagine my poems going out into the world without her reading them first. I can't imagine writing something without eventually asking for her input. Would I still write if Carrie weren't around? Surely I would, but I don't know what kind of poet I would be, what kind of poems would come out.

Then there is the muse that is just the muse. The person that somehow gives inspiration without getting anything in return. Eddie Sedgwik to Andy Warhol. Gala to Salvador Dalí. Kevin Federline to Britney Spears. Prince to Prince (yes, he is his own muse, and why the fuck not? he's beautiful). This is something I know nothing about. I've never had a person in my life that just gave me creativity, made me productive, or was pure inspiration. 

My inspiration typically comes from a vacuum left by people who left. That's a different blog post entirely...

Spring: To Move Suddenly Upward Or Forward

I've felt very behind lately. I'm a week late in my grading, which translates to 100+ papers. My department recently had a norming session and I realized how far behind I am in my class. Not just the grading, but I haven't covered enough by this point in the semester.

I don't know when I finished reading a book last. Right now I'm reading Songbook by Nick Hornby. It's such a great book. I'm flying though it. I hope I finish it tomorrow. I'm proposing a class on writing about music and want to use it as a text book.

I feel very dormant in my life. I haven't bolted in over a month. I feel complacent. I haven't ventured, so I guess I haven't gained. Which to me, feels like failure.

I think my feelings are wrong. Even if I haven't gone on any grand adventures, I haven't had anything spectacular happen, things feel the same, that doesn't mean they are. They aren't.

They're just very slow. Slow change is not how I operate usually. Usually, I just move across the country in a train. Usually, I just end relationships and start over with someone new. Usually, I just change who I am and what I'm doing and become a new person. But this change now, this is very slow, and I am having a really really hard time feeling it. But there is change.

I recently applied to Teach for America and I'm getting a phone interview next week. I started working out again regularly since the new year and have lost 15 pounds. I'm shaving my head as part of a St. Baldrick's Foundation event in Las Cruces on the 16th of March (please consider donating or sharing this; all funds go to childhood cancer research). Aside from a date in Texas, me and some friends are set for doing a reading tour of the Southwest in May. We'll start in Tucson and end in New Orleans (if you live somewhere in between, please come hangout!).

I bought my mother tulips last year for mother's day. After the potted plant died, I planted them in her side yard. They have started to poke out of the ground.