.oar.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

Tuesday's Class

2009-10-11T12:59:00.001-07:00

We're reading:

Christine Hume's Musca Domestica
Ashley VanDoorn's "With What Eyes" (from issue four of The Canary), alongside Hume's "True and Obscure Definitions of Fly, Domestic and Otherwise" in particular
an excerpt from Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson

I'm presenting a paper on several poems from Musca Domestica at the Third Biennial Conference of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network, so I'm particularly excited to hear what my students have to say about this week's material.

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Last week's "voyage poems" discussion went well. Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Hart Crane's "Voyages," and Wallace Steven's "The Comedian as the Letter C."

An Essay in Words and Images

2009-10-06T12:06:00.001-07:00

What We Did on Our Almost-Summer Vacation in Brooklyn

During our layover in D.C. on Friday, M and I experienced remarkably happy flyers, due largely to the spinning wheel of prizes set up by United Airlines. We won two game books and worked their crosswords in an airport brewery. People took pictures of their flying companions spinning the wheel. O the power of a wheel.

Saturday, we went to Brett’s (and Evan’s and Jane’s, etc.) new apartment for (what turned into a twelve-hour) brunch and a reading-chain of James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem. Much laughing (much needed).

Before heading over to Unnameable Books for the reading on Sunday, Sommer, M, and I went to Le Barricou for brunch. I wanted to eat the table. I wanted to eat the breakfast nook. I took a picture that will hopefully impart this wanting to you. What I ate instead: eggs Florentine. There’s no pictures of what M and Sommer ate, but they ate a Spanish omelet and steak + eggs, respectively.
We heard several people read for the EOAGH Launch (including Thomas Cook, Pattie McCarthy, and James Belflower), then I read, then Sommer performed, then we took a reading break and went to Beast for drinks with new and old poet friends, where an even older poet friend met us. Then back to the reading. I liked the length and casualness of the reading; it seemed like every reader had a different audience. Much leaving and claiming (and reclaiming) of chairs. After the sun went down, M read. I found a new Donna Haraway book I want but didn’t get. After M read, we got sandwiches from Hana’s Deli near Sommer’s. At the deli, I had my second encounter of the weekend with Thriller. The first encounter was when Cindy played us a YouTube video of the Lego homage to “Thriller.” The second encounter came in the form of a vegetarian club sandwich (named the Thriller)—tofurky slices, veggie bacon, pesto mayonnaise, jalapenos, Colby jack cheese, tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, pickles, and seven-grain bread, triple-stacked. I told Sommer I could eat three sandwiches a day, one a meal, and I meant it. M got a tofu Rueben that was good but not as good as my Thriller so we traded one of our halves. I had half of my half for breakfast.

At the airport, we saw Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio, which seemed like a good person for us to see to round the trip off. We came home to a basket of kittens. We came home and basked in our cats.

Recently Mine (to soon mind)

2009-09-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Young's Picture Palace (ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni, 2008)

Stephanie gave a reading/performance at Dana Ward's last night, part of which all will be able to experience after Michael Hennessey puts the reading bit of it up on PennSound.

Andrew Zawacki's Petals of Zero / Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009)

Sandra Simonds's Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and Used White Woman (Grey Book Press, 2009)

Aryanil Mukherjee's late night correspondence: a collection of transcreated poems (Cinnamon Teal, 2008)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo, 2009)

Norman Finkelstein's Scribe (Dos Madres, 2009)

2009-09-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

Replicas of the Nina and the Pinta docking in Covington. We prepare for gawking in Covington.

Also in Covington, Farmer's Fair.

I came back from a visit to Tennessee with a recipe for cornbread focaccia and a sore throat.

My advanced poetry class begins on Thursday. We'll be reading Harryette Mullen's Recyclopedia, Morgan Lucas Schuldt's Verge, Christine Hume's Musca Domestica, Sawako Nakayasu's Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, G.E. Patterson's To and From, and Eric Baus's Tuned Droves, plus many many poems outside of books.

2009-09-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

I just got the following announcement from Octopus Books, which I imagine Cincinnati folk will be particularly thrilled about:

"April Open Reading Period Results

After spending quality time with 350 manuscripts, we have chosen to publish the following two titles in the fall of 2010:

Where We Think it Should Go by Claire Becker

People are Tiny in Paintings of China by Cynthia Arrieu-King" [aka UC's own Cindy King!]

2009-09-08T18:20:00.000-07:00

In this photo: something from Santa Fe, something from Ashley, something from a suite soiree in Tucson, something from writing a paper in a psychoanalytic theory class, something from the fourth of July celebration in Northside in the park where a vendor's purse was stolen from her booth, something for my birthday, something from Russia, summed things.

2009-09-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Heather Trahan reviews Hush Sessions. Thanks, Heather!

Summery / Summary

2009-08-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

We bought sushi rice at Findlay Market on Sunday, then came home and made something with it. This is our first roll attempt. Or, rather, this is our first roll success. Avocado, cucumber, flavored tofu. Also at Findlay, a plain waffle at Taste of Belgium. Because of a memory it evoked, taste of Prague. Gloved hands and whitewashed booths. It's the final week of the summer term. My students did particularly brilliant thinking with the Anne Carson "The Life of Towns" and Rebecca Solnit "Noncomforming Uses" pairing.

Movie Night

2009-08-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

M and I went to see Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds last night. What Tarantino is doing with reversals and the logic of reversals allowed, in my mind, the question of complicity to come more to the fore. With the characters of Shosanna Dreyfus and Fredrick Zoller, we see the trope of the “burden of representation”—the guarantee of stable representation met in the “projection” booth (both in the splicing—a kind of twinning—and shoot-out) rather than the screen (within the screen), the space of representation (as we see when smoke replaces the screen, the representation endures, i.e. it is harder to dismantle; a laugh takes up the mantle of a face). The “Nation’s Pride” and “the face of Jewish Vengeance.” In at least two scenes, a German soldier (Zoller, specifically) refers to himself as a “pest,” who pesters (without his knowledge, a Jewish woman, Shosanna), utilizing (and redirecting) the rhetoric of contagion directed toward Jewish peoples via Nazi propaganda. There is the marking, the desire to mark the “other” (and the situational that notions of “otherness” rely on) [think: Lt. Aldo Raine’s knife-work], the crystallization of identification through a bodily sign. And the Bas-Terds, a play on abjection [I heard "turds," which the misspelling more easily allows]. It’s interesting to me that this film so closely follows (in terms of release date) Takashi Miike’s latest, Django (a film Tarantino makes a cameo in and a film interested in, at the very least, cultural imperialism). I’d like to see Basterds again, but these are my initial impressions.

office chair series

2009-08-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

Summery / Summary

2009-08-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

I’m enjoying having a more erratic reading schedule this summer. Tonight, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yesterday, Meaghan Morris’s The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. Wednesday, Sawako Nakayasu’s Hurry Home Honey.

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All ill shall call hills billed as balls.

Lost hosts cost most when a boat on a moat of oats overturns.

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Those of you who were at Thursday’s Bon Mot/ley Reading, thank you! The packed room packed us with happiness. We’re packed. Yaks of happiness! The term “yak” always makes me think of Frank O’Hara’s “Easter,” which in turn makes me think of Tenney Nathanson’s postmodern poetics course.

I've been:

2009-08-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

reading books with some people this summer. Last night’s book was Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters. Dogeaters also exists as a play, which I have not read or seen. A play I will see is The Lion in Winter when the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company performs it in their 2009-2010 season.

eating the cupboard bare. M and I are trying to finish everything off before we go grocery shopping again. Loaf bread is gone; tortillas are plentiful. The avocado has maybe two slices left. I’ve started eating tofurkey, cheese, and tortilla rolls. Heating tortillas is easier with gas ovens; no more microwave!

checking OneStop much too frequently to see if my summer class has finally filled up enough not to get cancelled. Enjoy the Arts vouchers are especially convenient in the summer when money is scarce in our household.

working on cover letters for job applications with feedback from people I’m very fortunate to have for feedback. For people I will feed when I’m back to getting paid.

wanting to eat brunch at Melt.

intending to write posts about poetry. Aiming to do so when I finish ULULU. Enrolled in a Spanish class after I read Jen Hofer's translations (in Lip Wolf) of Laura Solorzano's poems.

overheard:

2009-08-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

"What if there were a way to implant the idea of mint in your mouth?"

2009-07-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Luscious, luscious. Lush is, lush is Maggie O'Sullivan's Palace of Reptiles. M and I finally put the last of the boxes (and a box fan) into storage. Creepy creepy storage. Here is my writing space. The little green Apica notebook I'm writing parts of my project in is not in the picture, though it is now on my desk. I first ran across Apica notebooks in a shop called Poem. In Santa Fe. With Ashley. Where there were hollowed crows with feet made for gripping. For posing.

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Here is M's writing space. Where there is hollowed medical equipment.
Raffle-won. The pepper plant has not peppered this season. There were finger-length ones last year. Good in enchiladas. In scrambled eggs.

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Here is Row as a draft guard. The bird sounds are better at the door than at the one screened window.

Thus her body buttressing the door.

Summery / Summary: July 18 - 22

2009-07-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

My mother visited M and me. Her visit goes like this: lasagna, walk, walk, bread, royalty, wine, royalty, sleep, wake, burrito, musical, thai, a/c, green tea, thai, walk, mount storm, scoop, scoop, scoop, and cones, royalty, bed, [pause, pause], aquarium, otters & nectar, the rubbing of sharks, one's shark-weight: nursing, a bridge and a storm, leftovers, royalty, royalty, royalty, sleep, wake, lounge, pond, cherries, cardboard and a hard slide, cilantro pesto, presto, gordon ramsey, sleep, sleep, wake, tires, fabric, steamed buns. M and I like my mother's visits; they are like commercial breaks worth dissecting.

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In poetry news, I'm very happy to have poems alongside the poems in the new Octopus. I'm especially liking Lynn's poems, Cathy Park Hong's poems (esp. "Year of the Pig"), and Heather Christle's poems. You can potentially like poems, too, by visiting the issue.