.oar.

notes on home

2012-01-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

To reside / to be inside / -side, -side / with nothing sad there / with something sad there / and said / thinned by language / or weighted down? // “There. I said it,” she said / as if it had been a key she’d been hesitant to hand over / but then was made to // has a taint / to it / dirty now / a haze / a haint / one who haunts / halo-less / hollowed lass / hums as lights hum // hum an hum / an hum an / human // home is a hue / huge is a size / abuse is a word / in your huge vocabulary // shy away from chug chug and all that chiding / words make holes in us / their own homes / rabbits, rabbits / birthing throughout me / sailing happy birthday happy birthday / each day / toward some part (sum and part) of me / under my breath // some part of me covered by a tarp of breath / little more / breath-trap / party / —of breath / —of one

[Seitan Piccata from Candle 79 Cookbook over excessively creamed spinach]

*

"An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties." -- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. There are two new Djunas in Tucson, babies both.

2012-01-14T16:23:00.000-08:00

Reading Mallarmé's A Tomb for Anatole (trans. Paul Auster), thinking of houndstooth and Anne Carson's Nox, eating Panko-Crusted Seitan Milanese (recipe from the Candle 79 Cookbook), redistributing desire

In preparation for the Curiosity Symposium on 1/20 at Casa Libre

2012-01-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

[photo: Angel Bull / Holy Pig shaped by Jen Shearer]

Home / bon homme / o man (good one) omen be / omen-beak, snatch away / amen, come in / comb through the burden heap // awe opens me wide / throat self / or jaw a shelf for a bookish tongue / a mannish book / a book of manners that unnerves me / that neuters / neuters us all / suture new terms to the gaps / gab a little / grab a lot // This is my lot / this my rhubarb wasting in the fridge / this my itch wasted by the scratch // The television has been on for days / always on / the wooden armoire / always on / my mind // A hermit in the home of my mind, I fail to leave it / to leaf through its many / ruins / rooms / ruins // I fail to ruin it / to rule it—my mind / I mind

On Re-

2011-12-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

I recently "talked" to Harvey L. Hix about Re-. He posted my response to him on his blog.

2011-12-15T10:48:00.000-08:00

I carry this image: a mouth opens and light comes out instead of sound. The head is basically overtaken by light. The mouth opens and opens as if birthing light. As if the head had been a hood for the light beneath it. The light is not head-shaped or bulb-shaped, which is why I don’t think this image has much relation to the image of light bulb hovering over head signifying “bright idea.” Epiphany. The light’s more like a ladder being pulled down, though in this case, out, from somewhere it had been folded. The light’s more like wet concrete jetting out to pave something. To pave everything, maybe. Where is this image from, you sack of light?

I like this critique of the light-emitting mouth of a panda.

To Have Avoided Being/Feeling Scared

2011-12-04T16:30:00.001-08:00

On translation:

"I stood before the screen of my own language. There was no remedy. Either I stood before the original work in its incredible beauty or I stood before the screen of my own language. Before this screen, I had no recourse. Something had to be altered in my body, to compensate for the screen of my language that stood between me and the poem. I unsocked myself. I unshoed myself.

I was a stalk of grain and light."

From Erin Moure's O Resplandor

Textual Practice is going to publish my essay "From No Body to Some Bodies: Forms of Mourning and Melancholia in Jenny Boully's The Body and [one love affair]*, news I learned on the very day I was preparing to teach footnotes as form in my Poetic Forms class. Felt serendipitous.

liminal

2011-11-19T10:27:00.000-08:00

These lines from Inger Christensen's alphabet (translated by Susanna Nied) stop me every time:

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory's light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future

[Buffalo tempeh, couscous, mixed vegetables tossed with rice vinegar and chili oil]

I'm reading new poems and poems from Re- on Nov. 26 in Tucson at the Casa Libre event at Bohemia on 4th Ave. 5-8 p.m. Selah Saterstrom and Jennifer Denrow will be reading, too.

2011-11-12T17:15:00.000-08:00

M poached tofu steaks in homemade broth, breaded them, and pan-fried them, then M put the broth with pumpkin and turned it into a soup, and M made horseradish Vegenaise dip. Thank you, M. Things get better: class prep today = watching Beckett's Endgame. Did I mention how much my students liked Beckett's Texts for Nothing? Last Thursday's class discussion was invigorating. Wrote three new poems on the desk calendar (in the spirit of Niedecker's "Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous"), too. I need to make a decision not to leave the house on Saturday every Saturday maybe. Until next Saturday, when I must leave the house for what's sure to be a night of amazing readings first by Kyle Schlesinger and Steven Salmoni for POG, then for The Destroyer release party.

2011-11-12T14:12:00.000-08:00

Fingerless gloves that have fallen apart. I'm thinking of all kinds of untethering. I'm thinking of various kinds of bites, of our bodies as meals, but also of figurative bites, bites that nourish us because they say "someone's interested," someone wants to learn more. Are you getting any bites? Are bites getting any of you? Bites that add to the body, bringing swelling on. Bringing creams out. Modes of response are plenty. Dreaming the face is a clothes rack, and hanging out on it, the eye is always wet, the face ineffectual.

2011-10-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

Just made the sestina packet for my Poetic Forms class. Poems by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Evie Shockley, Cathy Park Hong. Halloween's got me thinking about Bishop's "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" -- "please come flying" -- celebration of non-normative women. Witchy witchy, which she isn't witchy after all? My favorite stanza:

"Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying."

[photo: Witch History Museum in Salem]

*

Also, I'm reading poems next Saturday (11/5) in San Diego with the amazing Stephanie Balzer.

2011-09-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

My new book Re- got its first review. I'm expecting to see copies of it this week, right in time for my mini-book tour with Megan Martin. We'll be in Roanoke on Oct. 2, Richmond on Oct. 3, Albany on Oct. 4, Boston on Oct. 5, and Philadelphia on Oct. 6. Come out and see us if you live nearby. Details for the reading are in the sidebar. In other news, POG is taking part in the Allegro Gelato's percentage nights on Friday, Sept. 23. If you live in Tucson, you have an excellent reason to indulge in multiple cups (pints even!) of gelato and/or sorbet. Head over anytime after 6 p.m. to lend your support through your ingestion. Sept. 23 is also the night of the Curiosity Symposium on Water at Casa Libre (7 p.m.) and the Flamenco Festival at Casa Vicente (8 p.m. to midnight). In other news, it's Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore week in my Modern Lit class. Sparkle, spark-culled. Off to prep.

notes

2011-09-12T16:43:00.001-07:00

A Mina. Anima. Anemic. A name is a nemesis or isn’t. A Gertrude. A gratitude. An attitude. An altitude. An altered dude. An altar to. The last reading group of the summer we talked about Thalia Field and Abigail Lang’s A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010). Names and power. Names and cowering behind them. Names and proliferation. A posy of selves. A pose as a self. A name change. A shame game. To sit inside a thought. A patio. A patois. It’s Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein week in my Modern Lit class. It’s a Thursday in my thoughts, where I’m sitting on a Monday. A name and a need. A need named. A knee claimed by a corner of a bed, made red, then blue, but not blown out entirely. In a planning mood. In a plane soon. Off, off. Cough, cough, as a rose coughs, if that rose is the right rose, the coughing rose in The Little Prince. If that woods is the right woods. Spicer: “You cannot lose your innocence, Andy / Nor could Alice. Nor could anyone / Given the right woods.”

2011-08-28T16:23:00.000-07:00

the failure of language or the failures of humans as manifested within language?

2011-08-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm reading men writing on modernism it feels like I'm reading about men, men, men, Moore, and more men. Sometimes when summer ends I'm reading men. Sometimes when summer begins. There are whole years of men. The fall was the fall of man. Faulkner. The other night, M[an] + I watched Dial M for Murder, which is streaming on Netflix. We watched it as part of my research for my paper on Gail Scott's The Obituary. Grace Kelly is the number in the square in the calendar of noir in which Dial M for Murder is one day. I'm excited to be teaching Modern Literature this fall. This fall that begins in summer. This summer that ends in summary. A summer spent with little to spend. A summer of water. Of weights. Of waiting. A summer waded into before fully submerging. Sleepless, though full of the image of sleep.

2011-07-30T14:39:00.001-07:00

"Once, in the supermarket, I bought a little can that had a Japanese woman painted on the side. Later, at home, I opened the can and saw inside it a piece of tuna fish. The woman seemed to have changed into a piece of fish during her long voyage. This surprise came on a Sunday: I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in the cafe, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words." -- from Yoko Tawada's Where Europe Begins (trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden)

*

Scarlet Barley, Masala Baked Tofu, Herb Caulipots
(from Appetite for Reduction cookbook)
+
Sautéed Red Cabbage
(from online Rachael Ray recipe)

Summer Something, for Leslie

2011-07-22T14:51:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to compose a poem each time I swim. Repeating it and adjusting it as I move from one side of the pool to another. Here's Monday's:

SWIM / TEEM

Amidst the beautiful backstroke
exhibited in your lane—
afloat on the frosting
water, the uppermost
one’s whole length dips into
like a finger to cull
its sweetness, that wetness

Witness the body and its propellers
Brown terrycloth yellow terrycloth
Would that your name were Terry
that you yourself tarried
thus my own lingering
made permissible

*

Begin tutoring training today for online tutoring service. Researching Brittlebush, which turns out to be in the sunflower family. Longing to be back on the porch of Barrio Brewery with rain going nuts on the tin roof, which reminds me of lying on hay in my dad's barn, listening to afternoon showers. A shift in breakfast. No more tempeh bacon for now. Instead, Trader Joe's quick-cooking steel cut oats with spoonful of peanut butter, cherry jam, sunflower seeds, and a pinch of brown sugar.

*

Summer Something or some are presumptuous.

*

Observation: Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt are eating Tofutti ice cream in the babysitting scene in Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

Essay on Water

2011-07-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

Rereading The Beauty of the Husband, I think about the first time I read The Beauty of the Husband, after I purchased it at a bookstore near the campus of the University of Manchester in England, where I was studying my junior year. The copy I am rereading is not the copy I first read, which is still on the bookshelf, a shelf above the shelf where the copy I am currently reading was before I pulled it out to read. Pulled it out for my mother to read while she was here and kept it out for myself to read after she left, after I had first put it back on the shelf and then taken it off again. Art Smith first introduced me to Anne Carson’s poetry when I visited his office hours during sophomore year, searching for more contemporary poetry to read. He suggested Autobiography of Red. Suggested Men in the Off Hours. The library had both and so I had both. There were ashtrays bolted to tables in several of the library’s enclosed reading rooms. I read William Carlos Williams in one of the rooms with the bolted ashtrays. Poem with signage. Poem with steps. Poem with kinds of breaking. I used to think about getting a tattoo of the line “Tongue is the smell of October to me” from The Beauty of the Husband but I ended up reading the line over and over to students instead. Not over and over to the same students. I am rereading The Beauty of the Husband by lamplight, to honor the shining that matters to it. That opens it, at least. I shine as I read it, heat-slicked as I am.

Tucson Goings-on

2011-07-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

July 13 (Wed.), Sonora Review Reading at Plush featuring Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Jamison Crabtree, and Daisy Pitkin, 9 p.m.

July 15 (Fri.), Forks Over Knives at the Loft, hosted by Whole Foods

July 16 (Sat.), POG Rent Party -- we're trying to raise $716 on 7/16 to help fund the new season (email me for details if you need them)

July 20 (Wed.), Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre, featuring Tony Luebbermann, Lisa O'Neill, & Ann Seiferle-Valencia

July 21 (Thurs.), Fiction Reading at the Poetry Center, featuring Frankie Rollins and Mary Jones

July 22 (Fri.), Curiosity Symposium at Casa Libre, 7 p.m. -- this month's topic is water

Happy July!

2011-07-04T12:14:00.001-07:00

Ma swoons for monsoons / or will do so soon / A visit / a vis-à-vis with // Wither / weather / brave the strum / fingers drawing sound / well of you / as in / I thought well of you when I / too took / from the well of you // I thought well / another thinking / merely so-so // comme ci / comme ca / come sigh // a brush with / hair / resting in it // a brush with / dearth // the hair lifted / a nest deposited in the trash // thrash deposited near / an unmanaged anger // an anchor lifted / as if it occurred to a museum / I need you / Anchor // concurring strops the claim to a truth // It’s so / ipso facto

[photo: salad w/ buffalo tempeh from Appetite for Reduction]

2011-07-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

The pool at the Edith Ball Recreation Center. A birthday and a hinged beast named Birthday, having been assembled to mark one. Most days are birthdays, presumably, so most things are assembled on birthdays, but the birthday being mine, I tracked the day's assembling. A whale bellying up to words, an inch-long boat of ink. Public Oblique. Theatre Thereafter. Weekly acupuncture at Tucson Community Acupuncture, with its sliding scale for payments. Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius. &Now Conference panel acceptance. Poems, constraint-based. The History of Card Games and a mini-donut pan. A freezer full of waffles, newly made. Govinda's (mostly) vegan Indian buffet on India night. The casting of Alice in Midnight in Paris so that when she opens the door, one thinks, "There's Alice."

2011-06-22T21:39:00.001-07:00

Our Mutual Friend, wherein appears the working title for The Waste Land, “He do the Police in different voices,” said of Sloppy and his fine newspaper-reading. First trip to Tucson Community Acupuncture and first time punctured by such needles. Seeded ears. Poetry and Skype. Raspberry Oatmeal Bars to use up the raspberry-strawberry jam I made and Galaxy vegan spread with dill on homemade bagels. This line from Ashley VanDoorn: “This is not a magic moment where everything changes.” Cool tiles in an otherwise warm hallway. Insomnia, still. A faucet that mists. A cat who mimes meows. A video that brings counting and sweat out of me. Pool dreams. Fire more and more contained.

Super Easy, Relatively Fast, and Always Delicious Enchilada Casserole

2011-06-19T18:21:00.001-07:00

I've been craving vegetables. Had a loaded salad for lunch, then decided on an old favorite for dinner. Well, a modified version of an old favorite. The pan we used to use for enchiladas rusted, so we got rid of it, and the casserole dish we have is a little small to fit four tortillas heaping with fillings, so M + I switched our old enchilada recipe to an enchilada casserole recipe, to accommodate our dish. As it turns out, we like the enchilada casserole even better because it allows us to go overboard with the filling.

Enchilada Casserole

1 Poblano pepper, seeds removed, chopped
1 Jalapeño or Serrano pepper, seeds removed, chopped
1 white chili pepper, seeds removed, chopped
1 yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
½ cup of mushrooms (we use cremini mushrooms), chopped
1 zucchini, diced
1 tomato, chopped
A handful of cilantro
½ cup to 1 cup of prepared pinto beans
1 small can (8 oz.) of whole corn kernels
15 oz. can of green enchilada sauce
4 tortillas
Olive oil
½ tablespoon Herbes de Provence (more to taste)
Frank’s Hot Sauce
Salt + pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 325°F. On stovetop, cook peppers, onion, garlic, mushrooms, zucchini over medium-high heat in olive oil until onions near transparency; while cooking, stir in salt, pepper, Herbes de Provence. Stir in beans and corn; add a few dashes of Frank’s Hot Sauce, stir, then cook for three more minutes. Pour half of the mixture into casserole dish; top with 1/3 of the enchilada sauce. Cover with two tortillas, then repeat layers (half vegetable mixture followed by 1/3 of the enchilada sauce). Top with half of the chopped tomato and all of the cilantro. Cover with the final two tortillas. Spread final 1/3 of enchilada sauce onto tortillas, covering completely. Scatter remaining tomatoes on top. Bake for 18-20 minutes. Eat, eat, eat! Leftovers are excellent cold.

2011-06-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Inquiries into the invention of orthodontic braces, arguments for the transparent door on Laundromat dryers, American buffets. Creamy tomato barley risotto from the VeganYumYum cookbook w/ caramelized onions, mushrooms, and red pepper sauce. Imagined interview with the sugar children from Sweet Movie. Forty minutes of a film adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Sixty-nine cent per pound heirloom tomatoes. A lunch date and refill after refill of water in a Mason jar. A bike pedal and a scrape. Four nights of insomnia. Cactus flower tea, sun-developed. Eight-pound weights. A note noting “extinction of the face” to wash off my arm tomorrow. Necessary encouragement.

Summery / Summary

2011-06-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

For the reading group gathering today, M + I made vegan "pigs" (or, as an alternative imagined up during the book discussion, soy beams) in a blanket. We split the soy beams and, in place of cheese, used caramelized onions. These were delicious. This week, I also happened upon my new favorite breakfast: 1/3 cup red quinoa seasoned with fresh dill, 1/3 homemade hummus, plus 1/4 cup couscous tabbouleh stirred together. This is the way I will incorporate quinoa into my daily life; this is the way I have been incorporating it into my life for the past four days. We have been doing more than cooking + eating. We have. We've been reading about space races and arcades and jewelry made out of the hair of deceased loved ones.

I found written in a margin a note in my own hand but a detail I had forgotten about the Brontë sisters wearing bracelets made of hair. We went to see the new X-Men. M's been working on lyric essays, and I have been working on more poems with words and line counts generated from the card game Royalty. However, the past seven days have been hard, concentration-wise, because of our apartment being stuccoed and the house sounding more like its being torn apart than given a new layer from 6 a.m. to 1, 2, or 5 p.m. So eating has been of the more feasible things to do in the interior of the house these days--and to eat, we cook, mostly. M made the broccoli almond sweet + sour tofu from the VeganYumYum cookbook for dinner. I have been wanting this without knowing it was this I wanted. The recipe is on the VeganYumYum website if you want it, too.

Things We've Been Making

2011-06-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

Or, perhaps, things being made in a shared space. While M + I did in fact both make the chapbooks, M made the loaf himself, with St. Pauli Girl lager in it, though I made the photo of the loaf, so there's some collaboration. I've been thinking about lists and containers and my affinity for foods that spread. Friends who formerly lived in Tucson visited us in Tucson and introduced us to Food City's roasted green chiles, which do not necessarily spread, though can be made to, added to salsa or chorizo for a breakfast burrito. I've been reading about the ethics of satisfaction and the lyric poem in the new issue of PMLA and "The Irony Bribe and Reality Television: Investment and Detachment in The Bachelor" (research for a contemporary sonnet series fondling my thoughts) and returning to Lynn Xu's poems in issue four of Poor Claudia:

Downward angel
Downward spring
Child I wake singing in the shrubbery
Child who wakes peeing and peeing

rabbit rabbit rabbit

2011-06-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

Last night, thinking about tiled showers, I remembered drawing floor plans with my dad's tools when I stayed with him. Every window had a window seat. Yesterday, to end May, M and I finished a small chapbook project, and I got to scratch something off my summer do-list. Summer dew. Not here in the desert. Things on my list: turn conference paper on Morgan Schuldt's work into an article * write poems, good poems (down, boy) * learn German for translation project * visit caves * make something with rhubarb. The mini-reading tour I'm taking with Megan Martin to read from our new books in October is coming together. We have readings lined up thus far in Richmond, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Notes

2011-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Nearly every day, I have a tempeh bacon, lettuce, tomato, and basil sandwich, sometimes on pita and other times on loaf bread. On days I do not have one, my stomach gives me the silent treatment. Not just my stomach, the whole ingestion/digestion mechanism. Lately, we've been using a recipe from Vegetarian Times to make the tempeh bacon. What do you eat? I hope you eat every day. I dreamed of hair after reading Celan aloud in bed last night (Michael Hamburger's translations). "Landscape with urn creatures./Conversations/from smoke mouth to smoke mouth.//They eat:/those madhouse truffles, a chunk/of unburied poetry,/found a tongue and a tooth.//A tear rolls back into its eye."

Things I'm looking forward to in the next few weeks in Tucson:
*Curiosity Symposium: Superstition(s) at Casa Libre, June 10, 7 p.m.
*First summer reading group brunch gathering at our place, June 12, 11 a.m. to discuss Andrea Rexilius's To Be Human is To Be a Conversation (contact me for more information)

2011-05-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

Computer problems frustrate me -- and they frustrate me even more when I'm in the middle of a major revision with a deadline. Little food splurges have the opposite effect -- they soothe me. So after yet another trip to the Apple Genius Bar (and, I should note, after the problem was quickly and happily taken care of), I stopped into Whole Foods, which I've been avoiding to save money. To thank M for tolerating my computer-mood, I picked up a new product, Soy Bleu (see vegcuisine.net). M's been making many vegan cheeses using The Uncheese Cookbook and some recipes from an old issue of Vegetarian Times, but he, to his dismay, hasn't been able to find a recipe for vegan blue cheese. We haven't liked any store-bought vegan cheeses (thus making them at home) -- or, I should say, we hadn't liked any until the Soy Bleu. It has great texture and spot-on flavor and goes particularly well on a cracker with curried tempeh salad (the apple in the salad accounts for much of this good match, we're convinced). We're excited to mix it with vegan mayo (as the package suggests) and put it on a black bean and smoked tempeh burger. Now back to Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy.

Summery / Summary

2011-05-07T11:51:00.000-07:00

I had stopped in to Lovin’ Spoonfuls, a vegan restaurant in Tucson, two times before stopping in again yesterday. The first time to satisfy a milkshake craving after dropping off some trousers for mending, and the second, for dinner before a movie M and I didn’t end up seeing (The Town, I think). We enjoyed the dinner for its novelty rather than its taste. The soy-heavy menu relies on nostalgia for one’s former omnivore days more so than presents innovative vegan food (the fake-meat names are usually an indicator of this, I’ve found—just call tempeh tempeh). I had the country fried “chicken” platter, and M had the bacon cheeseburger.
Besides the “chicken” being a bit overdone and chewy, the meal was fine. Fine. No entry into the index of our cravings. Yesterday, seven months after our fall visit, bogged down calculating grades, we decided to pick up lunch.
Lovin’ Spoonfuls emerged as an option (read: nut loaf craving) and narrowly beat out Char’s Thai (an always dependable option). The nut loaf isn’t offered for lunch, so I opted for the “chicken” salad sandwich with coleslaw, and M ordered the club with potato salad. Happily, we would eat this lunch again—we will likely even crave it.

In addition to reading Sarah Dillon’s The Palimpsest for an article I’m revising, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is still on my nightstand for evening reading. Last night, in the chapter “Handmade,” which covers the craft and innovation brought to the A7L spacesuit by the seamstresses on the assembly floor, along with the tailoring of each suit to each astronaut, I read this gem: “While each glove finger, anklet, or undergarment was assigned a tracking serial number, it was also given a range of sizes—from small and medium to large—within which its astronaut-specific dimensions could be designated. Once agreed upon, the only problem came with sizing the most intimate part of the suit assembly, the urinary collection device (UCD) that slid over the astronaut’s penis [there were no astronaut vagina’s yet, which the book discusses in earlier chapters]. After an ‘incident’ with the first astronaut fitted for the device, the UCD’s designations were changed from ‘Small, Medium, Large’ to ‘Large,’ ‘Extra Large,’ and ‘Extra-Extra Large’” (De Monchaux 223).

With Mother’s Day nearing, I’ve been thinking about “My Mother’s Nipples” and "Male Nipples,” companion poems written by Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman, introduced to me by Dr. Marilyn Kallet in an undergraduate poetry class years ago. The way I remember the story, Hillman challenged Hass to write a poem about his mother’s nipples to move him away from the cerebral toward the corporeal. We had to write our own companion poem to their set. To their fine set. Last week, I worked on lipograms for the Curiosity Symposium on recipes, which a headache eventually kept me from attending. I went the beautiful in-law route, using only letters in the following two phrases for a set of companion poems: “Recipe for Success” and “Recipe for Disaster.” Since I did not get to share them yesterday, I will share them now. Notice the violence, frustration, and issues of inequity that surfaced.

ASK AND YE SHALL HAVE ASKED

[recipe for success]

I peep: succor us. I pipe up.
Force-fur us. Crisis-fur.
Peers score Reese’s Pieces,
spices, rice. Our roof seeps.
Peer, peer. Cue cures.
Peer?—sir?—, piss
for free? for free?—fee?
Fie! I see, sir, seer-I.
I spies feces—er, or, fuss
of crepes, pies, cress,
success! Our roof errs,
i.e., pees—so us cuss—
crier, I seep, I seep, ripe for
ire. Ice-fur, pipe-ice.
For us, species is if.

YE SHALL HAVE BEEN SAID TO BE WANTING;
YE SHALL HAVE BEEN SAID TO BE ASKING

[recipe for disaster]

Referee, steer a pest
past pester. Rid it as DEET
rids. A door treated a face
to a draft. A pest rides a draft
to repast: tripe, tea, deer
ripped red—taste. Dapper sister,
a receipt states treats
as steep. Recap what I reaped
for so steep. Striped paste
for face-pride. Teet-tape.
A roster of tears. Id stirs sass.
It casts rapes, drafts sisters for.
I aped priss. I tried. I tired. Foster
a fist its trite state—pass out.
Red tape post-i.d. distresses,
deters arrest. Deters a rest.
Out to pastor. Door to door.
A tear rides a face. A raft. Rift.
Feaster, resist a feast.

"Inspired by Real Events"

2011-04-30T21:22:00.001-07:00

harasser / eraser / violence / violins gather lint-like in an ear lent out to sound / here are the pinkest blossoms / here is the sum of your blah-blah / the pinkest / the pain-kissed / the pancreas increased / swell / you bunch yourself / you are bunched / the day a vase you wilt inside / I prefer your body / a line / period / stand up straight / stand up / for yourself / harassee / heresy / he will see / cede

[pic: Vancouver in bloom]

*

Reading: Gail Scott's The Obituary, Evie Shockley's The New Black, and Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Eating: Aloo Matar leftovers [made twice in the last eight days; recipe source: Vegan Yum Yum]

Preparing pieces for Friday's Curiosity Symposium at Casa Libre [topic: recipes]

2011-04-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

Ate at Gorilla Food in Vancouver during the American Comparative Literature Association Conference. Took a photo of the Moroccan Rawkin Pizza and a book one of the Composing Poems through Generative Engines participants let me borrow.

E-vents / Evince

2011-03-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

African stew / I freakin' stew / what else can I do?/ Did you bring the candlesticks? Can dull stick? / yes, yes, and veil every crow -- an eye darkening to obey a mood / schmuck, schmuck, goose / schmuck, schmuck, guess who // in the muck of it / the much of it / Mush! as in get on / over it // A tushy is too she / too chic? / shake, shake / disorient me by the shoulders // bypass / biped / "bye, pet," said a dearer friend / and quiche all around / or something that resembles a memory of another thing / enough / to displace it // Enough / already / enough

*

Also, everyone should order TC Tolbert's Territories of Folding, just released from Kore Press.

I refuse to shear you.

2011-03-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

Don't cross me
out--make an ex
of me. A series
of glowing letters
we recognize as
a leaving sign.
Alleviation--
to shun or show in?
Show, I'll watch.
Shows I watch.

2011-02-25T15:35:00.000-08:00

Been loving Farid Matuk's This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) * Been dreaming of spiders -- orange and black ones -- and cars scraping the sides of other cars * Oversalted the batch of hummus I made last night / overestimated my eye-balling abilities / eye-brawling now * My first book-making project is in the works, along with my second: Press On will hopefully put out its first chapbooks this summer * Wishing students wouldn't text in class so students wouldn't have to get mad at me for calling them out on texting in class

Good things

2011-02-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

Chocolate cupcakes using the recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking and the vegan chocolate spread we found at 17th Street Market near the Nutella * lipograms and my generative engines class's generous approach to the challenges I prepare for them -- here's a little six line/four words per line lipogram I wrote using only the letters we selected from the old Millie's Pancake Haus business card I brought in:

Queen pelt, pun me --
tense sleep, tu tempt
muscle-unmelt. Cuss sleet: Melt!
else stunt p.m. Nut-cut
plum -- museum pen spells
MUTT. Queues net men.

* green tea with a former student to ease poem-interpreting anxiety * Zukofsky * only one set of composition essays left to grade * M's homemade salsa * a plane ticket booked to Vancouver for under $300 * thinking about a possible paper looking at disability in either SyFy's Sanctuary or How To Train Your Dragon for next year's PCA/ACA Conference * newly established Skype poetry dates with AV * playing hairband-fetch with the little black cat the primary dragon in the aforementioned dragon movie could have been based on * watching sun-tea sun

Things I'm Looking Forward to in Tucson in the Upcoming Weeks

2011-02-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

The rest of the meetings for my Composing Poems through Generative Engines class at the Poetry Center. What interesting people signed up!

Feb. 15, 7 p.m.: A Fire in My Belly film screening at Casa Libre. Free and open to the public. "Casa Libre is thrilled to present David Wojnarowicz' A Fire in My Belly in response to the Smithsonian's removal of this important work from their exhibition 'Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture' at the National Portrait Gallery. This film explores the relationships between violence and beauty, oppression and the body, silence and complicity."

Feb. 24, 8 p.m.: Next Word in Poetry: A Reading by Kazim Ali and Ana Božičević at the Poetry Center.

Feb. 27: My first bookmaking class at the Drawing Studio.

March 5: Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Talk at 2 p.m. and reading at 8 p.m.

March 8, 7 p.m.: Norman Finkelstein and Michael Rerick reading at Casa Libre.

March 12-13: Tucson Festival of Books.

April 13, 7 p.m.: Poetics and Politics: Gerald Vizenor reading at the Poetry Center. I will be taking my copy of Bearheart, the Heirship Chronicles to have signed, air-kissed, handled.

2011-01-20T16:03:00.001-08:00

"I shall like any name you select for me; I am in my family, a weasel, a coach-dog, a water-rat, a basilisk and an alligator and could be an armadillo, a bull-frog or anything that seems suitable to you." (Marianne Moore to Bryher, Dec. 13, 1920)

When I read Marianne Moore's letters, I tend to hear them in the voice of Emma Thompson in Sense & Sensibility. This perhaps reflects the number of times I've seen that adaptation of Sense & Sensibility more than anything else -- or Moore's description of herself to Pound. Of herself to pound, to be beat upon.

2011-01-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

Sorry, flaws / a little floss will do to remove / is due for it // We fail one another with too much frequency // To fail one another less // A papaya gets nearer to rotting on the counter / snuggles up to it / Today will be its day // tomorrow can be yours

Over break, M made some pepper-crusted cashew "goat cheese" using this recipe. The lemon gave it the tanginess of goat cheese. It worked especially well scattered throughout angel hair pasta. Though I tend not to like vegan cheese substitutes (even Daiya), I could eat logs and logs of this stuff -- my body could be a mill for it. Twin Peaks comes to mind again.

2011-01-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

In this photo, Aloo Matar from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook. I injured the area around my eye fixing this one, but it was worth it. I found some old A & D ointment in a drawer. Popping cardamom pods. We ate at Maynard's last night for New Year's and were sad the vegan substitutes for the set menu lacked imagination and were not worth the price of the meal--won't return. Today, will rectify by cooking delicious things: black bean soup, apple strudel, and linguine with maple syrup/soy sauce glaze, torn spinach, and sunflower seeds. The year started off with two cats heaving at different times. The new decade will continue with Jena Osman's The Network and writing; I've been writing one 10- to 18-lined poem every day of break. Today's will be #27. Will decide which to keep/pursue after break ends. I'm enjoying the exercise. Row's enjoying the sun-path leading away from the sliding door.

2010-12-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

M and I are cooking our way through the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook. The first thing we made was the Smoky Miso Tofu, which M served with wild rice instead of bread. The thin slicing of the tofu allows the flavor to penetrate. Bonus: I packed some for dinner on an airplane.

The last two books of our Octopus subscription arrived -- Cindy King's People Are Tiny In Paintings Of China and Claire Becker's Where We Think It Should Go. I've been reading a lot of Celan -- and I read Ara Shirinyan's Your Country Is Great! (Futurepoem, 2008) on the plane ride back to Tucson. Chus Pato's m-Tala (trans. Erin Moure) should arrive this week, along with Suzanne Buffam's The Irrationalist. After the big novel phase I went through in the fall (Bleak House, Absalom, Absalom!), I'm ready for more poetry. What are you reading?

2010-12-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to see some of my pieces from PLAN/K's mid-section in the winter issue of Dear Navigator. More of them will come out in New American Writing, Issue 29.

2010-12-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

Writing, writing -- poems and a paper on textual bodies in Morgan Schuldt's poems. Reading things for the writing of said paper and for January's reading group, The Peep Diaries. Will hear James Belflower read tonight for the Trickhouse series at Casa Libre -- will you? There's also a pie crust making demonstration. Dear friends arrive to Tucson --
and Tucson's acting testy about it. Dropping to highs of low 60s for them. Like that Don Mee Choi's The Morning News is Exciting! starts with a homophonic translation, which seems to wonderfully set up the notion of epistemic violence that runs through the book.

From Face to Fact

2010-12-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

self-presentation / -preservation / disclosure / disclose her / diss clothes her / she despairs / disappears // diss apes peers / an app for downloading / for throwdown // satires / sass tires / très I / tray for serving myself / serving self up / face down / fess up / the fee sees me flushed / right out / of money // from money / from my knee comes my forwardness // moved me / I'm moved

In response to David Shields' Reality Hunger

2010-12-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

I have a narrative in my head that is my life.
I have a narrative in "my" head that is "my" life.
I have a narrative in my head that is my "life."
"I" have a narrative in my head that is my life.
I "have" a narrative in my head that "is" my life.
I have "a" narrative in my head that is my life.
"I" "have" "a" narrative in "my" head that "is" "my" "life."

*

To cheer myself up after a hard drive crash, I ordered Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking[AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Wesleyan, 2010) and the three latest Action Books (special bundle price): Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting!, Abraham Smith's Hank, and Raúl Zurita's Songs For His Disappeared Love. I've been thinking about loss after the crash, too. And, after last night, talking with people after the Joshua Marie Wilkinson/Kate Bernheimer reading, translation as erasure. The cheekbone drawn out from the ghostly face. Machete. Ma cherie.

2010-11-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

In the next few weeks, I will be writing away on Morgan Lucas Schuldt's Verge, LuNGUAGE, and Otherhow in preparation for the ACLA conference in Vancouver; finishing Dickens' Bleak House; welcoming the Pihakises to Tucson; cooking and eating chili; buying a ticket to Hawai'i to finally meet M's botanist grandma; finalizing the activities for my Poetry Center workshop, which starts in February; grading eighty essays; meeting with a group of fantastic people to discuss David Shield's Reality Hunger; fixing the blown inner tube in my bike tire; writing a review of Jennifer Martenson's Unsound. And you?

"Inspired by Real Events"

2010-11-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

M dashes -- M dashes -- / with Mrs. Dash, M sashays from chopping block to stovetop / over the top / so over the top / M stands / stares down / stairs leading down to nowhere / stars leaking down from night-wear / pajamas / pomelo jam and we / put it all away

"Inspired by Real Events"

2010-11-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

a blintz enters / splinters a face at the mouth / defaced / de- / ssert / a Cert inserted after / goes in there / juts out // just out / a new release / re: least / un-A-list / unenlisted / bent on blitzing / bite it / hit it / on the head // list / -lessly, she lips the lip of a glass of she / -ep's milk // of her ilk, the stuff in the glass a staff steered to it / steer, ami / Tiramisu / tear I sue my face custody for / (tear that soothes) / custodian face / fleece! fleece! / (stop!) police! // ice lobbies for melting and gets it / in for it, it gets it / jet set / jet pack / jelly packed / and from the hole, jelly deboards / straight into a gourd / a noggin / egg noggin' / acknow- / legend / the janitear who / flicks the tear off / toward elsewhere / bug no longer to bug

2010-11-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

Spending today with Peter Otto's Blake's Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas, Tristanne J. Connolly's William Blake and the Body, and a team of quilts. Go, team! Go teem. Trim the goatee from the face of consciousness. From this phase of consciousness.

More Bid / More Biding

2010-11-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

body in relation / body in elation / late body laid down / grounded / bulked up blood cup / choked up / you lugging eulogy around / berobed / robbed / rubbed the wrong way by fake gold / so greened / co-vert / all the greens together / either ether or gas what / yes / guess / body in shun-mode / outmoded / husk / tsk, tsk / a tasket / attack it / we all fall do[w]n't we

Them Birds There

2010-10-23T12:21:00.001-07:00

“Help, my mom is a Krueger” / a Freddy / no Betty? / Re-belle, mama, Re-belle / coo, grr / coo, grr / a coup girl / achoo girl / less you more me[ek] / Marmie / marmalady / ladle / lay dolls at her feet / dole at her feet an orange foraged / for a rage / an exchange / Floor aging with anti- / oxidants / accidents [an ax’ll dent] / the accident of a face / about face / a pout / a powdered / pow-dared / how a punch is worn / spilled on a dress / spill / spill it / spell it out / abracadab / a dab will do / wilt won’t / will it? / will it / away

flu flying away talk

2010-10-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Recovering from stomach flu -- not enough flour in the house -- still thinking about the review of Thalia Field's Bird Lover, Backyard I want to write, tentatively called ENVIRON/MENTAL E/LAMENTS -- influenced by last year's obsession with Donna Haraway's When Species Meet -- grading grading grading -- M got the flour tonight -- for cornbread casserole -- happy to have friends who like to talk about books of poetry -- next month, talking about Elizabeth Robinson's House Made of Silver -- read along -- when I get the flour, I'm making waffles -- to freeze -- then unfreeze

10/10/10 - "Inspired by Real Events"

2010-10-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

a visit and a series of walks / a shift / a shawl brought out / an air offed / no heirs offed / a y’all offered up in conversation / a verse stationed in a church / hymns lining a board as a coat is lined / for warming / the hall where vocal cords card each sound / desiring entry to the room / a groom of sound bridles up / makes braiding its grooming / style / stalled in a hair / my fingers / horse fingers / hoarse, it figures

Week of Oct. 4

2010-10-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Good week: writing date -- with fresh lemonade and loose pages weighted down by our hands and by various things with hefts heftier than paper / returned students' first essays with feedback and grades / caught up with an old friend over dinner / went to Casa Vicente with M and my sister, who's here for a visit -- saw student flamenco dancers there -- joyful dancing, fruitful conversation, fruit-full sangria carafe / saw The Social Network / will hear Erin Moure and Brent Hendricks read tonight for POG: Poetry in Action / after a walk up to the Center of Creative Photography / Vegan YumYum's mac 'n "cheese" again / tofu scramble, tempeh bacon, hashbrowns, and toast [thanks be to M] / chili-oil-infused soba noodles / chocolate cupcakes, again / and tonight pesto and braised fig pizza / H.D.'s Tribute to Freud arrived in mail, now bed-side / a late monsoon / the covering for the porch now half up and half not / more like a photo backdrop for a high school dance than anything / "than anything"

2010-10-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

Misread "waiting" as "writing" -- or was it "writing" as "waiting" -- yesterday, which made me think about writing as listening again. Being responsive to relationships between words, a lesson that reading, then teaching Harryette Mullen perhaps clarified most for me. Reading Marianne DeKoven's Rich & Strange: Gender, History, and Modernism -- happily, reading the section on "The Yellow Wallpaper" doubles as class prep for the upcoming contextual analysis unit for my composition class at The University of Arizona. Need to stop by the Arizona Quarterly office to see if there's a back copy of the issue in which the Veeder article "Who is Jane?" first appeared. Happy food week in the house: bean + vegetable enchiladas, vegan chocolate cupcakes, eggless egg salad, chili-oil-infused soba noodles, spicy tofu + avocado sushi. Also, finally moving forward a bit on the re-watching of Twin Peaks: finished disk two of season two -- too much Bob in that last episode -- Bob as the haircut my anxiety wears in watching it. Today, starting Thalia Field's Bird Lovers, Backyard for an inaugural reading group meeting, but grading first. Ding, ding. Shoulders squared. Elbows in.

2010-09-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

M made Tempeh Cutlets Provencal; I photographed and ate, graciously. September is the season kick-off of poetry readings and roller derby. October will be the month I find a pool for swimming; the Day of the Dead parade; a sister's visit; the collecting of 75 narrative essays incorporating description and illustration; a purchase of vegan kimchi; a CocoRosie show at the Rialto; a reading group and a book, Thalia Field's Bird Lovers, Backyard. Thank you for the packages, you who send packages.

Reading Hermione

2010-09-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Her / my own knee
Her / my own need
Her / my o! 'neath a gesture
the linguistic jester
an l with a bell
dangling off itself
an exclamation
claymation
might capture it so:

[insert an illustration]

an exclamation point punted
toppled over
is a little i

a little i goes a long way
a little eye spies a litter more

2010-09-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

Mei-Mei listens to me read Gertrude Stein's murder mystery Blood on the Dining-Room Floor and attempts to murder a conference sign-up sheet.

"How confused are you all but I, I am not confused.
It really is not confusing.
How many houses and families do you know about now.
One two three four five.
And how many crimes.
One two three.
And how many possible crimes.
Six."

I agree with Judy Grahn about reading Stein out loud. As does my cat.

Eye dew. Eye-dew.
Adieu.
There's no crying here.
Though there is an aching my head is taken by.

"Inspired by Real Events"

2010-09-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

Panang curry curries favor / flavor / with me // Attends my mouth / is a ten there / on a scale of / one to tend / to wait on / for // One too tender in the mouth / might’n’t say the thing / I want to say / might vanquish the chili / from the heated thought // quiche / sheesh / shish kebab / versus / Twin Peak’s Bob / sticking out beside the couch / or bedside / staking out a dream / taking the dreamer out of it / takeout / doggie bag / doggie bad / down, dog / downward dog / I’ll talk you through it / ill-talk / ill-thought / padding the least suspicion / against which a thud is thumped // sumptuous / swish / swish / the Mouth is Clean / but for the dirty head // headed there / now / “now, now, slow down” / bow wow wow / kung pao next / with a bit / bite / of thyme nicked for it / nick of thyme

Chores / A card game / Southwestern landscape / Play

2010-09-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Laundry / the yawn-dreary and yonder / yonder there where to one must walk / I fold a hand / -some pant / Some pant / parent / Some raise you / three blue chips / in a favorite mug / sludge and mud / general wear / the why to / clean / the Y near / the wash / the dried / out bed / you bet / kvetch / fetch them clothes / domes- / tickled / Tided / tidy / to bed / in bed / too petty? / "I'm with stupid" / across a tee / crass / cracked / up / a crossed t / a doted-upon I / ire / iron / I wronged it / wrung it / a run in some delicate thing

Specimen

2010-08-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

One may wrap most things in a tortilla and rapaciously devour it. One May wrapped most things in moistness and nestled up to June. You may sit on my porch and read to me about the body. You may find your name in a poem and may delight in the fine thing the finding is. Yuma is near me. You, ma, aren't near me. Or are. Aura. Uh-uh.

*

The first week of school on both campuses where I'm teaching (University of Arizona and Pima Community College-East) went well. Getting up at 5:15 for my Monday/Wednesday class meant seeing the sun get up, too. Meant wearing my winter robe because the sun hadn't warmed things up yet. Meant a night light on in the kitchen. A glowing Mary. Next week, we're going to practice close reading with a Loren Goodman poem. From Famous Americans. The one with bottles and jars -- Einstein and Napoleon, non-American and becoming-American. Famust. Fame mussed the hair of them. Messed with them how.

2010-08-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

Adjusting / au jus we dip ourselves in / Adjuncting [now thinking of L. Robertson's "juicy mouth" from The Men]

Orientation meeting tomorrow at Pima CC - East Campus. Driving there, I pass by the airplane graveyard (as featured in Can't Buy Me Love. Said bye-bye to my syllabi -- sending them off for the chair's approval. Reading Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark in preparation for a poem-essay I want to write. Hope to post a blog entry on Jennifer Martenson's Unsound soon. Growing my second jar of sprouts -- this time radish, last time alfalfa. We've been making a lot of deliciousness (thanks, 17th St. Market!), and mosquitos have been making us out as a bunch of deliciousness. Making the check of us out to their own blood-sucking. I itch, I itch. But a private backyard to be bitten in.

Tucson / To Seen

2010-08-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

I could slow up on time / could brunch / do / the brunt of it guts him / her / the sack of her good feelings rifled / sad sack / flooded / flaunting / a building called tin / tin spelled out in tin / “it shits color” / shifts it / two bicycles besiding each other / not besmirching / besmooching / be smooching wheel to wheel / I’m wearing my wellness / out / like the shirt covering his stardom / sternum / still numb I pull the fur of this conversation / upend it / append it with / a little body / that suits it / that it suits / sweet coat / sweat coats / I pool the wool in the would / pool the wood in the well / inventing buckets inviting water / in-fighting amongst drops equals slosh / envious mouths / vying / eyeing the other's / river mouth / human mouth / hue-mended moth / a typical muchness / atypical muchness

Poems

2010-08-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

Failbetter posted some of my poems from my newest manuscript, PLAN/K.

Day Three

2010-08-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

Weatherford, OK, to Albuquerque, NM. New Mexico is gorgeous, as usual. The Super 8 we're staying in is 1.4 miles from a Whole Foods, which meant delicious deli dinner -- curried vegan "chicken" salad, quinoa wheatberry salad, vegan meatloaf, sweet and sour grilled tofu, and kung pao tofu, plus New Belgium Mothership Organic Wit wheat beer. Happiness.

Day Two

2010-08-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

St. Clair, MO, to Weatherford, OK. We did not go into the Precious Moments Cathedral.

Day One

2010-08-07T07:50:00.000-07:00

Cincinnati, OH to St. Claire, MO. Do you think the namers of Santa Claus, IN, named it so so they could say, with a clear conscience, Santa Claus exists?

July Specimens / specks

2010-07-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Tristram Shandy. Earthquake in San Diego / being on a submarine in San Diego when the earth quaked there. Current favorite recipe. Northside parade. Micmacs. A bus in the zoo and a plane in the sky. Four planes in the sky. Contract to teach a class at the Poetry Center in Spring signed. An application for a new apartment filled out. Cinnamon coffeecake. A series of words: Maritime / Marry Time / To My Merit, I’m / Nary a Merriness But Nearing To Be.

2010-07-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

A paragraph from the paper I presented -- "Regenerative Poetics in Christine Hume's Musca Domestica -- at the Contemporary Women Writers' Network Conference:

Christine Hume’s Musca Domestica operates under the sign of the fly. First of all [or offal, which seems appropriate here], the title is the scientific name for the common housefly. It also aurally recalls “musk,” that which secretes or seeps out, threatening the body’s solidity by reminding of its fluidity; musk either attracts or repulses. “Musca,” we learn in the introduction, is also a constellation, which, over the centuries, one learns upon further investigation, has morphed from bee to fly. The poems in the book begin and end with flies. The first poem, “True and Obscure Definitions of Fly, Domestic and Otherwise,” tropes on the etymological mobility of “fly,” with a cascade of literal, figurative, and idiomatic references to the term “fly.” I’ll quote the first seven of its 37 lines to give a sense of the poem’s movement:

Do what we can, summer will have its flies
a paper fly cage dangles from the ceiling
a fly on the coach wheel
sent her away with a fly in her ear
That fly setteth her upon corrupt things
--in the ointment, --in the soup, --on the wall, --off the handle
He grasps the wand that causes sleep to fly (3)

The grammatical dispersal of “fly” reminds us of the dispersal in which flies participate. The poem ends, “I will fly you a line” (4), which links the fly explicitly to language and exchange, while “line,” within the context of a book of poetry, also recalls the poetic line, which does in fact take a kind of flight in the middle of the book, a point to which I'll return in a moment. The last poem ends, “Even flies come to the eyeball for food” (70); the seat of visual observation—of image-making and –taking-in—is feeding ground. The “Notes,” positioned as an afterword, are subtitled “Fly Paper Palimpsest,” and suggest an identification between poet and fly; setting up an entryway to fragments of source materials her own writing feeds off, she writes, “The following ge(r)ms [both gems and germs] have been carried and collected here” (73). The visual presentation of “ge(r)ms,” with the “r” of “germs” enclosed in parentheses between the “g-e” and “m-s” of “gems,” demands we read both gems and germs, suggesting part precious and part contaminating, potentially generative as well as degenerative. The germ/gem is abject or object of desire.

Summery / Summary

2010-06-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

June: boon or a bust? A plus or pulse-stopper. Stupor. A purr stews in me. A new purse: lips held that way. The lips of a purse snapped open. Wallet. Wallow. "Well, hello" said with some sincerity. I went to the beach with my mom, sisters, cousins, aunt and read a day of The Weather every day. In the ocean, I saw a shark. In the oceanarium, I saw a dolphin. From a kayak, I saw two dolphins. I sawed into nothing. I found no doll with fins nor sought one. A salt one: the waters. Battering waves assault one. A batter of waves. Seacake. Sea biscuit. Cede the cake to that mouth, then stake the else elsewhere. That time of a month: a birthday. A patio padded by friends. No one's pad, but a patio. A trio of beers. A beard of light costuming the trees. A beard of light consuming the street. A treat of light handed over. A light snack.

2010-06-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

2010-06-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Reading Nelson Hilton's Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words and imagining a class that would use it to supplement primary texts. Writing as Listening: Responsive Poetics. Writers include William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Jack Spicer, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris. Working on Christine Hume paper, I've been thinking about textual bodies. Esp. in the poems of D.A. Powell and Morgan Lucas Schuldt. Considering using some lines from Lisa Robertson's R's Boat [ars, Robertson's, Rousseau's, ours / theirs / heirs, Robertson inherits Rousseau's boat / bout] as an epigraph for PLAN/K: "Was I a plunderer then?/ I am interested in whatever mobilizes and rescues the body." Tomorrow, M + I are making tempeh bacon. Enjoying transition to veganism. Missing eggs less than I expected [no egg play, Kristi, not there]. Likely because of eggless egg salad recipe from The Vegan Table.

2010-06-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

Dissertation defended. Thinking about the cultural relevance of play. Of irreverence. Thinking about a class, Writing "Otherhow," I'd like to teach. Thinking about something I wrote on Elizabeth Bishop during the time I was working on my exams:

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” elaborates the crisis of being “placed” in an identity and of recognition of one’s inscription. While Bishop’s poem has been frequently analyzed, a majority of critics (Chiasson 2007; Howard 1980; Kalstone 1977; Vendler 1980), with the exception of Alice Ostriker, have elided the question of gender as an important element of the poem. Ostriker notes that the poem differs from Bishop’s “long tradition of feminine effacement and disguise” and names “In the Waiting Room” as one of Bishop’s poems that “ventur[es] to the tidal edge of self-exploration” (70). In the poem, the poet stages the crisis of identity and identifications. The insistence on one’s groundedness plays against the disorientation that happens as the speaker recognizes and resists gendered identifications. The insistence is iterated through the encapsulating structure of the poem that both begins and ends by firmly positioning the speaker in one place, namely Worcester, Massachusetts. There is a rewriting of subjectivity in the poem, but not an uncritically celebratory rewriting, nor one that results in any finalization. “In the Waiting Room” is set in the stereotypically undesirable space of the dentist’s waiting room, a space notorious for people’s not wanting to be in it, where the speaker of the poem waits for her Aunt Consuelo’s appointment to end. The name “Consuelo” in Spanish means “consolation,” which is ironic, given the aunt is figured as anything but consoling.

As the speaker waits for her aunt, she looks at a National Geographic magazine. Ostriker notes the feminine (read: vaginal) imagery of the volcano that sets off the string of images (72). The image the speaker reserves judgment for is the “black, naked women” whose “breasts were horrifying” (159). Here, the poem seems to rely on discourses of race and primitivity that have historically marked black women (and black sexuality in general) as hypersexual. That the myth of ravenous black female sexuality underlies the uncomfortable recognition of being marked female, and eventually “woman,” helps us understand better the prudery the image occasions in the speaker. Rather than lingering over any of the images, the speaker “was too shy to stop” (159). Her shyness begs the questions of what she would have stopped on (presumably the horrifying breasts since they are the point of fixation) and what occasions her shyness (again, presumably the breasts whose visibility results from being naked). In the lines that follow the closing of the magazine, an act that effectively keeps the source of anxiety contained, inside, or unexposed, we learn, “Suddenly, from inside,/ came an oh! of pain/—Aunt Conseulo’s voice—/ not very loud or long” (160). This “inside” is both the speaker’s “inside” where the voice of Aunt Consuelo is identified with, importantly as a woman, doubly gendered by the designation “Aunt” and the feminine name, and internalized; and “inside” initially also reads as referring to the room in which the dental work is being performed (the poem’s conceit), keeping the “oh” of pain at bay. In the first reading, the identification is painful, but muted (“not very loud”) and ephemeral (“not very…long”). Next, the speaker defensively casts judgment on Aunt Consuelo for what implicitly reads as a judgment of feminine weakness. Yet the judgment, we’re told, isn’t accompanied by embarrassment (despite the very real possibility of embarrassment: “I might have been embarrassed”).

In the next lines, the identification between Aunt Consuelo (between the “oh! of pain” woman voices) and the speaker is made explicit: “it [Aunt Consuelo’s voice, her crying out] was me” (160). The identity of “woman” occasions a descent (“I—we—were falling, falling”); the hopelessness ascribed to the descent can be read via the doubled “falling.” While the speaker tries to console herself with her upcoming birthday, with age as an identification unmarked by gender, a big (literally capitalized) “But” enters in. “But I felt: you are an I,/ you are an Elizabeth,/ you are one of them.” Recognition with the figure of “woman,” occasioned by the naked woman’s breasts and solidified by the merging of the aunt’s cry of pain with the speaker’s own, shifts the speaker’s position or, rather, specifies it. The speaker is not only anxiously distanced from her various identities by the “you”-construction (the speaker is fortressed in a feeling [“I felt”], while the second-person “you” serves as a stand-in in the declarative assertions of being: “you are…”), the speaker is increasingly distanced from the universal (ungendered) shifter “I,” a subject position, to a gendered object position “one of them [women]” (160). The anxiety is reiterated by the attempt to deny recognition by denying confrontation (here, via seeing). But, eyes averted (neither full-on or fully away), the speaker does look, but censors her looking. She will “not look any higher” than the covered parts below torsos that conceal markers of gendered anatomy; she desperately attempts to conserve the universal (what constituted her before her traumatic recognition).
The second reference to the breasts of the woman (the representation of woman, with the representation doubly enforced by being both photographic image and linguistic sign) denotes them as “those awful hanging breasts,” linking “breasts,” here metonymic for being gendered female, with a kind of death (a “hanging”). The speaker asks, but does not satisfactorily answer, whether gender (and other specific identifications, i.e. “similarities”) potentially creates solidarity or serves to reduce the person marked by gender. Neither possibility seems ideal for the speaker. The former points to an arbitrary alliance (“Why should I be…anyone” based on an identification enforced from without), and the latter points to the tendency of similarities to erase difference and fix one into a stable identity. The word that answers her question also sets itself in interesting opposition to the anxiety-inducing “similarities” that occasion the doubtful answer: how “unlikely” similarities lay any claim to who one is, how unlikely the speaker should be any one of the many linked by a similarity. Not impossible, but unlikely.

The clipped answer “unlikely” also increases the speaker’s defensive removal from the “either/or” options her question offers. The trailing-off of the ellipses serves as a moving away from the question, from the identification itself. While the speaker recognizes some safety in the fact that the “cry of pain […] could have/ got[ten] loud and worse but hadn’t” (suggesting the cry is not ultimately overwhelming, but something the speaker might eventually move past or repress), she still questions the arrival (“How had I come to be here[?]”) at a gendered identification. Implicit in the question seems to be the question of inevitability: is it inevitable we should arrive at a gendered identity based on anatomy, or can one (here, a potential future “woman”) subvert a gendered identity? This question takes on even more weight when one considers the poet Elizabeth Bishop (separate from, if connected to the speaker of her poem) who refused to be in anthologies of women writers, suggesting the anxiety of gendered identifications occupied the poet, too. At the end of the poem, the speaker arguably becomes the waiting room, the space of waiting (here, for signification). “The waiting room was bright/ and too hot. It was sliding/ beneath a big black wave,/ another, and another” (161). The sliding can be read as it relates to the slide (or chain) of signifiers through which meaning is indefinitely deferred. For that sliding to stop is for that “big black wave” to smother utterly, for there to be no “another, and another” to cover the speaker (momentarily) over. Signification, then, is engulfing, but ultimately one something can actively struggle against rather than give into in the form of a limiting, limited fixed identity. The poet finds her way out of the smothering waves: “Then I was back in it.” This return is seemingly facilitated by a shift from self to world (the reminder that “The War was on” suggests the social serves as an anchor from being consumed by our individual concerns). However, “The War was on” also serves to note the initiation the poem stages; the psychic struggle (the internal “War”) against the impossibility of femininity doesn’t end. The poem ends on a date; the date marks the initiation. Opening and closing the poem in a fixed location also speaks to the possibility of any number of identities fixing the speaker, but that a date is attached to the place in the last instance suggests a temporality to any such fixing.

Compare this with the celebration of mobility and friendship between women in “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (82), which suggests the relationships take some of the pressure off the focus on oneself. Here the speaker and her companion’s mobility is bound to the figure of a witch (“with pointed toe of each black shoe…with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots…[with] the broad black brim of [a] hat”), a transgressive figure gendered female. The “unnatural” or supernatural figure of the witch enables a sense of normalcy as the speaker urges her friend to “[mount] the sky with natural heroism.” The inanimate (“the grim museums,” the stone lions “on the steps of the Public Library”) becomes animated through the witch’s brew one imagines fixed up with those aforementioned “butterfly wings and bon-mots” (specimens and/of language); language -- signification -- becomes a conducive substance rather than a source of threat.

2010-05-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

"Writer? A position to activate elements of language to join so that its activities enjoin the reader, you (to hear a sound to know a space that 'never' was before)." -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar. Thinking about Scalapino -- Day Ocean State of Stars' Night on the night stand; thinking about the paper I'm writing on poems in Christine Hume's Musca Domestica -- what it means to have a poetics that operates under the Sign of the Fly -- a regenerative poetics -- excited to be on a panel with Vanessa Place and Christine Wertheim at the Conference on Contemporary Women’s Writing: New Texts, Approaches, and Technologies in San Diego, where I'm presenting the paper; needing this cold to quit my body. To quit it now.

2010-05-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

I was sad -- very sad -- to read on PennSound today about Leslie Scalapino's death. Now, listening to her read. I remember reading way for the first time during Tenney Nathanson's Postmodern Poetry and Poetics class at the University of Arizona years ago and how it changed the way I think about poetry. Thank you, Leslie Scalapino.

Bon Mot/ley Reading in June

2010-05-23T17:10:00.001-07:00

Please join us Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m. for the Bon Mot/ley Reading Series, featuring Farrah Field, Jared White, and Cynthia Arrieu-King. We will head over to Fries Café after the reading and invite all to join us.

Farrah Field’s poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Typo, Harp & Altar, La Petite Zine, and Ploughshares and are forthcoming in Mantis and Cannibal. Rising, her first book of poems, won Four Way Books’ 2007 Levis Prize. She lives in Brooklyn where she co-hosts a reading series called Yardmeter Editions. She blogs at http://adultish.blogspot.com.

http://sixthfinch.com/field1.html

http://www.lapetitezine.org/Farrah.Field.htm

Jared White’s poems and essays have appeared or will appear in journals such as Action Yes, Barrow Street, Cannibal, Coconut, Fulcrum, Harp & Altar, Laurel Review and Open Letters. A chapbook, YELLOWCAKE, was part of the hand-sewn anthology, NARWHAL, from Cannibal Books. He lives in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where he co-hosts poetry readings at Yardmeter Editions.

http://www.foame.org/Issue5/poems/white.html

http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/white_jared.html

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her book People are Tiny in Paintings of China is forthcoming from Octopus Books. Her poems and other work will come out this year in Boston Review, Witness, Jacket, Harp and Altar, and Forklift Ohio. Marilyn Chin sent her to Kundiman when she visited the University of Cincinnati in 2006.

http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2010/05/untitled-cynthia-arrieu-king.html

http://www.typomag.com/issue13/arrieu-king.html

The Bon Mot/ley Reading Series takes place in the Clifton Cultural Arts Center on the second Thursday of each month. The CCAC is located at 3711 Clifton Ave., and you can learn more about the center here: www.cliftonculturalarts.org. Readings are free and open to the public.

Audio files of previous readings are also available on our reading series blog: www.bonmotley.blogspot.com.

2010-05-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

"[T]he term poetry has come to be understood less as the lyric genre than as a distinctive way of organizing language--which is to say, the language art. Poetic language is language made strange, made somehow extraordinary by the use of verbal and sound repetition, visual configuration, and syntactic deformation. Or again, it is language perhaps quite ordinary but placed in a new and unexpected context, as in Kenneth Goldsmith's found text The Weather or Yoko Tawada's 'second-language' poem-essays in Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. 'Do not forget,' cautioned Wittgenstein, ' that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.'" -- Marjorie Perloff, "Introduction," The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (eds. Perloff and Craig Dworkin, 2009)

2010-05-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

Big thanks to Lesley Jenike for her insightful reading of Hush Sessions.

*

Reading: selections from Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets in preparation for Monday's class. My students are reading poems by Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Anne Carson, Anne Simpson, and Lydia Kwa. I'm sad I missed Moure at the post_moot convocation at Miami University last week. April wore down the Brillo pad of me.

Exercise in Response

2010-04-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday / sad-turned day / tilled by sadness til prepped / sad-turned-day / a transformation / cherub[r]ic / sight interned in an eye / was interred there / was a muzzle fit to a maw / was a Ma in fits over a Pa / a paw eases its way in / weigh in on that claim / weigh ten pounds less by pounding none back for a number of weeks / weak if you can’t / incant / a Bic picks a fight with the scruff of a face / a scuff / a cut / a cat gagging on its own care / what its licks pick up and plug it with / hair plugs / bald / bawling / a rawness guttered in the lane of her / in the lame of her

Spring Poetry Events in Cincinnati

2010-04-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

April 22-25 – post_moot conference at Miami University (Oxford, OH) – many, many poetry readings and panels on poetry; student registration is $25: http://www.units.muohio.edu/creativewriting/postmoot/

April 25 (Sun.) - TransAtlantic+TransPacific Perspectives—International Reading: Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson, Lisa Samuels, Lawrence Upton, Steve Willey read at InkTank (in downtown Cincinnati) at 7 p.m.

April 27 (Tues.) – Dana Ward, Pat Clifford, Aryanil Mukherjee, Lisa Howe, Kristi Maxwell, + Mike Hennessey read at the Public Library (Downtown) at 7 p.m.

April 28 (Wed.) – GET LIT! poetry reading event w/ local journals (Forklift, Ohio; Memorious; and more), Readers include Chad Sweeney, Matt McBride, Tyrone Williams, at the Northside Tavern (backroom) at 7 p.m.

May 7 (Fri.) - UC Poets' Homecoming (reading + panel): Lesley Jenike, Amy Lemmon, Jim Murphy and Kristin Naca read in the Elliston Poetry Room in the UC Library at 2 p.m. *You are invited to come and meet the readers and local writers at the Northside Tavern after the reading.

May 13 (Thurs.) - Ana Božičević, Amy King, + Rob Schlegel read for the Bon Mot/ley Poetry Series at Clifton Cultural Arts Center (in the Gaslight District) at 7 p.m. *You are invited to come and meet the readers and other local writers at Fries Café after the reading.

May 14 (Fri.) - Li Young Lee reads at 4 p.m. in the Taft House (on campus)

May 19 (Wed.) – Alice Fulton reads in the Elliston Poetry Room in the UC Library at 8 p.m.

June 4 (Fri.) - Last Word Reading, featuring graduating UC's PhDs and MAs, time/location/readers TBA

June 10 (Thurs.) - Cynthia Arrieu-King, Jared White, and Farrah Field read for the Bon Mot/ley Poetry Series at Clifton Cultural Arts Center at 7 p.m.

2010-04-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

April / a thrill / April / a plus / A+ / nonplussed / a fuss of hair Prell takes over / poo poo the sham / shame the grifter / ham it up on the ape-reel / film / feel / a feel / frilly month / filled-in mouth, a tooth's fling with a filling / fling flung long / mouth plugged up with talk / ugh / tug the annoyance forth / froth some ahoy with the high sea / high c / C+

2010-04-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

AWP makes up for me missing my high school reunion. I like the idea of reunions, and AWP promotes the type of reunion I can stand behind. In my absence, my students will complete one of my favorite generative activities: the Verbo-visual Translation. Usually, the text they translate into a poem is Carnivale, Season One, Episode One, but, since it's no longer available for free on YouTube, I gave a second option: an episode of Twin Peaks. Been reading two excellent books: J. Mae Barizo's The Marble Palace and Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path. If you're going to AWP, I want to see you! Here are some places I'll definitely be:

Wednesday at 7 p.m. -- Ahsahta Press + Omnidawn Reading at the Magnolia Hotel Ballroom

Thursday at 7 p.m. -- The Girls of Saturnalia Books and Painted Bride Quarterly at 1040 Cherokee Street (about a 15-minute walk from the conference hotel) -- I'm reading poems from Hush Sessions alongside Sabrina Orah Mark, Sarah Vap, Catherine Pierce, and several other fine poets

Friday at 9 a.m. -- University of Arizona Alumni Reading Panel -- I'll be reading poems from PLAN/K (for the first time!) alongside Richard Siken and other alums

Friday at 12 p.m. -- I'll be signing books at Saturnalia Books table in the book fair

Saturday from 10 to 12 p.m. -- I'll be helping out at Ahsahta's table

2010-03-29T13:17:00.001-07:00

I compiled a list of spring poetry events for my students, but I thought it might be helpful to post it here also. There's a lot going on in (and near) Cincinnati this spring:

April 2 – Joanie Mackowski reads in the Elliston Poetry Room in the UC Library at 4 p.m.
*You are invited to come and meet the reader and other local writers at Northside Tavern after the reading.

April 6 - Don Bogen and Jerry Judge read in the Public Library (Downtown) at 7 p.m.

April 15 (Event 1) – Cathy Wagner + Bill Howe read at Xavier University – more information forthcoming

April 15 (Event 2) – Zach Schomburg + Mike Hennessey read at the Comet – 9 p.m.

April 20 - Norman Finkelstein and Steve Kissing read in the Public Library (Downtown) at 7 p.m.

April 22-25 – post_moot conference at Miami University (Oxford, OH) – many, many poetry readings and panels on poetry; student registration is $25: http://www.units.muohio.edu/creativewriting/postmoot/

April 27 – Dana Ward, Pat Clifford, Aryanil Mukherjee, Lisa Howe, Kristi Maxwell, + Mike Hennessey read at the Public Library (Downtown) at 7 p.m.

April 28 – GET LIT! poetry reading event w/ local journals (Forklift, Ohio; Memorious; and more), Readers TBA, at the Northside Tavern (backroom) at 7 p.m.

May 7 - UC Poets' Homecoming (reading + panel): Lesley Jenike, Amy Lemmon, Jim Murphy and Kristin Naca read in the Elliston Poetry Room in the UC Library at 2 p.m. *You are invited to come and meet the readers and local writers at the Northside Tavern after the reading.

May 13 - Ana Božičević, Amy King, + Rob Schlegel read for the Bon Mot/ley Poetry Series at Clifton Cultural Arts Center (in the Gaslight District) at 7 p.m.
*You are invited to come and meet the readers and other local writers at Fries Café after the reading.

May 19 – Alice Fulton reads in the Elliston Poetry Room in the UC Library at 8 p.m.

Spring-uh / Bring it on

2010-03-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Been reading poetry submissions and also submitting some poems. Cooking with The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook. Or, perhaps, more accurately, documenting cooking and lending a hand here and there. Risotto Balls. A vegetarian substitute for a crab cake. I will try one with tartar sauce today. Going up to Miami University on Thursday to hear Judith Goldman and John Beer. Finishing up paper on Jenny Boully. Excited about the introduction to poetry course I'm teaching spring quarter. Have dreamed up some exciting exercises, including one in which students go through the stacks in the library, searching for fourteen iambic pentameter lines from various texts on various subjects [the only books that are off limits are poetry books], then combine those fourteen lines to create a contemporary blank verse sonnet, changing minimal words in the process. I'm hoping the activity will stress reading for texture. Reading as a writer.

2010-03-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

While in D.C., I got a chance to watch Phoebe Greenberg's "Next Floor" at the Hirshhorn Museum, where I also saw a room full of de Koonings that made me think the best way to see de Kooning is by the roomful. "Next Floor" is a fascinating rendering [the fact that meat and performance meet in "rendering" works well in this context] of bourgeois consumption and who's implicated. We wondered about the possibility of guerilla screenings outside of certain dining establishments, on cruise ships, etc. Does the small plate phenomenon in fine dining exculpate some such establishments? * While in D.C., I operated, briefly, under the code name Greta Schmidt. I was a German astronomer. I crawled. * The train ride proved to be a good place to get some work and reading done. I reread Susan Howe's Singularities and read for the first time Frances Presley's Paravane. I wrote some lines for [lies for] PLAN/K.

2010-02-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

Egg helps bind meatballs. Snow helps bind me to my desk. February has been a good dissertation-writing month. I will give my committee all my materials after spring break. PLAN/K is still, thankfully, a joy to write. I've enrolled in Alice Fulton's Elliston workshop for the spring so that someone(s) other than my dissertation committee, my partner in crime and poetry, and my poet-neighbor Ellen Elder will see it before I start sending it out into the world [a piece of it has detached and spun out, already, and will soon surface in CUE]. Last week, I had a cooking breakthrough; I mastered two sauces: spicy peanut and tahini. I also made a dessert other than cookies: mini blueberry and cream cheese turnovers. Now, back to reading Sarah O'Brien's Catch Light.

2010-02-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the review, Arbutus Reviews. Thanks for the whole wheat loaf, bread maker. Thanks for the excellent Bon Mot/ley reading, Lesley, Jaswinder, and Josh.

21 c [see!]

2010-02-10T19:53:00.000-08:00

January was a very productive paper-writing month. I finished a draft of something I've been thinking about writing since my second quarter at the University of Cincinnati. I kept sending partial drafts to my email account as back-up files, and I was struck by the abbreviation I used in my subject line: "pap" -- which, for me, has certain feminine connotations. I like this in contrast to the abbreviation I use in the subject line when I'm saving manuscript back-up files: "man." I imagine Pap-Man as a mongrel Pac-Man.

2010-01-23T07:52:00.001-08:00

Dancing Girl Press is having a great deal for readers right now. Five chapbooks for $20. My chapbook, Elsewhere & Wise, is available. These poems mean a lot to me -- and they don't appear in any other of my manuscripts or books. I wrote them during the month I spent in Russia in the summer of 2007 -- the summer after my first year at UC, working toward my PhD. A summer that fluctuated between feelings of alienation and connectedness. A month in a summer that consisted of several bread boats of cheese, captained by an egg. Katchapuri. (I found a picture of it here.) A Beckett play in a dungeon. In what had been a dungeon.

Also: Happy Household, Batman! I received my contributor's copy of The Concher yesterday, complete with wonderfully compact orange box of truffles. I'm very happy to be a part of issue two; I carried the journal around yesterday -- showing it off. You can tell how much work and love went into making it -- thanks, Katie & Ryan! So far, I've only tried the pistachio and the smoked orange truffles.

2010-01-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

Beets irising an eye-shaped plate...

Last night at Chalk, a restaurant in Covington, I had beet salad, which was served on -- as the line above notes -- a plate shaped like an eye -- like the drawing of a one-dimensional eye. I then wondered if the person plating the food was being clever. Beets, after all, contain a high level of "eye nutrients." I blinded that plate of beets. I put a bet those beets were put on that plate on purpose. For purposes: cleverness and eating.

"I used to walk a mile to school in the snow..."

2010-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

What a great gift (set of gifts) I got this week! The four latest titles from Futurepoem Books:
Delinquent, Mina Pam Dick (which I'm reading first)
Poems of the Black Object, Ronaldo Wilson
Traffic and Weather, Marcella Durand
Your Country is Great, Ara Shirinyan

The new Sixth Finch is up, and I have a poem in it. Happy to be in an issue with a poet I met in St. Petersburg a few years ago, J. Mae Barizo.

Last night, M carved a pineapple, then we covered the slices with cinnamon sugar, broiled them, plopped cinnamon gelato on top, and ate between comments of how good they were. They were. I need a new pineapple so that "were" can be reverted to "are."

Also, Krystal Languell engages and reviews Hush Sessions!

Lasts Last and Firsts Propel

2010-01-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

First poetry book read (by me) in 2010: Julie Carr's 100 Notes on Violence
Last movie seen (by me) in 2009: Sherlock Holmes
First play seen (by me) in 2010: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company's The Taming of the Shrew (or, as the ticket notes it: The Taming of the)
Last poetry book read (by me) in 2009: Matvei Yankelevich's Boris by the Sea
First dinner eaten (by me) in 2010: Kale with mushrooms, zucchini, onion, and garlic; black-eyed peas; cornbread muffins; Morningstar veggie riblets
Last game played (by me) in 2009: Royalty

*

I wonder if the prevalence of hobbits in the last decade accounts for a rise in the misspelling of habits: habbits. Or do I notice the misspelling more because of the prevalence of hobbits?

Two Breakfasts, An Article, and the Comments Section

2009-12-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

Between unpacking and repacking, I've been reading an article by Jenny Boully on poetry and blue jeans. I purchased many more poetry books than jeans this year; I did not purchase any jeans this year in fact. I remember learning the story of how denim got the name denim once when I was in Nimes, France. I have not purchased jeans since I replaced the pair of jeans I left (presumably) in my hotel room at the AWP Conference several years ago. I do not own more than one pair of jeans at a time. I bought fewer poetry books this year than I did last year and the year before because so many generous poets traded poetry books with me. While I bought my first poetry book in high school, it was not until my time as an undergraduate that I purchased my first book of contemporary poetry. I'm fairly certain that that first book was written by Anne Carson and recommended to me by my poetry teacher Arthur Smith.

2009-12-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

I wonder if you've used either American Poets in the 21st Century (ed. Lisa Sewell and Claudia Rankine) or Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (ed. Sina Queyras) in an introductory workshop before. I'm considering them for the course I'm teaching in the spring. I like the CD that comes with the first one; students can practice listening and reading.

2009-12-06T09:51:00.001-08:00

I like this time of the quarter. My poetry students are sharing their chapbooks with each other at a reading party we've set up for Wednesday. In class, students hear their poems read by someone else, so I'm quite excited to hear them read their own (revised!) work.

*

The Atlanta reading was fun. Atlanta has some great poets living in it -- we saw Ashley VanDoorn, Bruce Covey, Dawn Pendergast, Jimmy Lo [and we read Dawn's Off Flaw and Jimmy's Surprise! on the car ride home], and we met Heather Christle and Christopher DeWeese [I hope to read Heather's new book in or out of a car in the near future; I suspect my Octopus subscription should be coming to me any day now...come on, eight little legs and many more lines, come on]. The reading space has a wall-less door. Set up behind the microphone.

*

The books on my night stand, accumulated (and accumulating) since the July move [from bottom up]: Aaron McCullough's Little Ease, Elizabeth Robinson's The Orphan & Its Relations, Brenda Hillman's Practical Water, Piratepedia, Stephanie Young's Picture Palace, Apollinaire's Calligrammes (trans. Greet), Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (about which there's a review in the new How2), Mina Loy's The Last Lunar Baedeker, Frank Montesonti's A Civic Pageant, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Catherine Wagner's My New Job, The Bataille Reader, and Rachel Zolf's Human Resources. I need to do some reshelving.

*

Recently watched: The Brothers Bloom (from the writer/director of the neo-noir film Brick)

Crime Scene / Rind Scene

2009-11-29T20:16:00.000-08:00

**

If you live near Atlanta, consider this: coming out. To a reading. I'll be reading at Emory with Gina Myers and Michael Rerick at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 3. The reading's in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. We can go out for a poetry roundtable afterward.

2009-11-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

The first dessert I ever learned to make is snow creme. I watched my dad make it. Then, when I moved to Ohio and was around snow again, I made it. Today, I'm making pumpkin pie. There is not snow yet.

This Week at No Tell Motel

2009-11-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

is Mister Tony Mancus.

Check out his poems.

things making my week a good one

2009-11-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

green tea, my students' reactions to Harryette Mullen's Recyclopedia, spinach + soy chorizo lasagna with friends, books in the mail (Karyna McGlynn's I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems and On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, edited by Jonathan Culler), a black cat's new lap habit, annotating Treasure Island for my project, a swept floor, Thursday, rewatching the first episode of Carnivale

2009-10-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

Been reading Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008) and Lee Ann Roripaugh's On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois UP, 2009) -- thanks, Lee Ann! Shaughnessy's book has some shared investments with the poems I've lately seen identified with the Gurlesque. I wonder if she's in the anthology coming out from Saturnalia Books in 2010. Her poems also have affinities, for me, with Ruth Williams' poems (see her poem the new H-NGM-N -- issue 9 -- later this week). The pictures here document dinner in Columbus when we visited the Jenike-Butts household yesterday. Josh showed us how to make dough without a mixer. Which we needed to know. (Which someone kneaded at some point.) Toppings 1: red sauce, caramelized onions, roasted garlic, mozzarella, pecorino. Toppings 2: olive oil, pepperoncini, pecorino, fresh pepper. Toppings 3: olive oil, pepperoncini, olives, caramelized onions, pecorino. Toppings 4: cherries, chopped cashews, apple, bourbon-butter sauce, pecorino.

2009-10-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a photo-facsimile version of an 18th c. text. The "s" is very "f"-like and so two words are often seen: sail'd/fail'd, otherwise/other[-]wife.