Come On All You Ghosts....

This is the name of the book I've been reading this week, by the incredible Matthew Zapruder. Usually when I really love a book I devour it as fast as I can, but this book is so fucking good, so rich, that I find myself reading it slowly, bit by bit, savoring each poem as long as I can, because I never want the book to be over.

today my mouth
is an artificial lake
I'm too tired to swim across

I can't believe it's already September. Besides reading Come On All You Ghosts I've also been writing my ass off, averaging a new poem every other day, constantly revising both these new and old poems, constantly talking to myself in my head. And what's different this semester is that I actually have a working manuscript. With a title. With sections. With a six-page title poem in the middle. In a way I've been writing my first book since I began writing at all, but for the first time I feel like I'm writing my first book. Like, I tell people, yeah, I'm writing my first book! Of course, for it to be a book someone has to want to publish it, but we'll save that talk for 2013...or 14? I have no idea.

In other news, my friend Drew is doing cool things over at Tin House and Poor Claudia; my friend and VCFA roommate Emmalea is preparing the third issue of em:me  magazine; and the other day I got an email that one of my poems is going to be published in the next issue of The Coachella Review.

Oh, and in July I was asked to join the newly established literary magazine, Split Rock Review, as a contributing reader, which so far has been a very cool experience.  Things are happening.

And a really big thing that's happening:: Evelyn started preschool on Tuesday! A super awesome Montessori school with local art on the walls and plants and beautiful things all around. She loves going there, which I love.

My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.
My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.
I am trying to catch a ray of sunlight in my mouth. 

(also Zapruder. Go buy his book.)

aaaaand what i still want!

seriously. who didn't want a library like this? i used to dream about it. and still do.

Source: 9gag.com via Sarah on Pinterest

reading: Insomnia Diary by Bob Hicok

If you haven't heard of the poet Bob Hicok you are lucky because now you get to discover him. I've recently read his collection Insomnia Diary, which I highly recommend to anyone who likes, well, I really just recommend it to anyone. His poems are refreshingly honest, grounded in the everyday of the working life, yet they're also explosive, bursting with love and longing, full of images that are sometimes electric and sometimes so quiet that it hurts. As found on The Poetry Foundation's website, here is the beautiful and haunting poem, "The semantics of flowers on Memorial Day:"

Historians will tell you my uncle

wouldn't have called it World War II

or the Great War plus One or Tombstone

over My Head. All of this language

came later. He and his buddies

knew it as get my ass outta here

or fucking trench foot and of course

sex please now. Petunias are an apology

for ignorance, my confidence

that saying high-density bombing

or chunks of brain in cold coffee

even suggests the athleticism

of his flinch or how casually

he picked the pieces out.

Geraniums symbolize the secrets

life kept from him, the wonder

of variable-speed drill and how

the sky would have changed had he lived

to shout it’s a girl. My hands

enter dirt easily, a premonition.

I sit back on my uncle’s stomach

exactly like I never did, he was

a picture to me, was my father

looking across a field at wheat

laying down to wind. For a while,

Tyrants’ War and War of World Freedom

and Anti-Nazi War skirmished

for linguistic domination. If

my uncle called it anything

but too many holes in too many bodies

no flower can say. I plant marigolds

because they came cheap and who knows

what the earth’s in the mood to eat.

"There is a world..."

"There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world."

from Mary Ruefle's "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

Mary teaches poetry at VCFA, and I'm highly considering working with her for my last semester... she is brilliant.

More quotes from the above piece:

"I am a writer, and the next step is inevitable: I used what had been revealed to me in my own writing."

"We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things."

"Our minds and the universe—what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don't have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can't read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write "The giraffe speaks!" in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?"

And she quotes Kafka:

"'Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far away from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.'—Kafka in a letter, 1904"

reading: poet Kim Addonizio

I read a lot of books and thought I could start sharing more of what I'm reading on a daily basis. Yesterday Kim Addonizio's poetry collection Lucifer at the Starlite arrived in my mailbox. The first poem in the book:

Sign your name

on a scrap of paper,
crumple or tear it up and throw it away:

that's how the world works, friend.
Maybe you can't even get as far

as gripping a pen, maybe your hand
is scrabbling in a few dirty grains

of rice, or you're licking a tin plate
or just your fly-crawled lips. Welcome

and farewell: your stacked or stashed
or set aflame, turning on the spit,

the axis, the long pole that runs
through everyone. If you're here

you're already nearly gone. Write
if you can. If you can, give us a song.


(read it on Google Books)

read so hard {b*tches in bookshops}

I just came across this via a friend via the Huffington Post. I don't know how many of my readers are book nerds like me but those of you who are will love this. And those of you who aren't will too, I hope!



By Annabelle Quezada and La Shea Delaney-- click here to visit Annabelle's blog!

bookworm

some kids' parents!

Lately on Fridays Evelyn and I have been attending Toddler Time at a nearby library. This library is decently stocked for being a smaller town, they have a big kids section with little tables and chairs, and Toddler Time is a free half-hour program for toddlers and their parents--it's 20 minutes of stories and songs followed by a little art project.

Evelyn loves it, and of course I love spending this time with her, but today the room was packed (usually it's like 6 or 7 kids, today it was at least double. At least.), with parents who don't care to discipline their very disruptive children! This is story time people, not gymnastics! Tell your obnoxious children to sit on their carpet squares and pay attention to the nice lady with the books (like my little girl, look how nice she's sitting!), and if they continue to not listen then you should probably leave because you're ruining it for others!

Also, it should be noted that this half hour is for children between 18 months and 3 years. They have other classes for children who fall outside of this age range, both younger and older. TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THE APPROPRIATE CLASS.  One mom brought her two children, neither of which were the appropriate age--her daughter who was too young (I even overheard her say "she's too young to even be in this class"-- then wtf did you bring her?!) was crawling all over the place and on the brink of a tantrum, while her son, who had to be almost 4, kept standing right in front, jumping around and doing handstands, and kicked another little girl in the head (I am not exaggerating!)--totally blocking Evelyn's view, by the way, and just being really disruptive and disrespectful to everyone else in the room.

A few times the mom told him to sit down, but he didn't listen. And she told him to sit down. And he didn't listen. And this went on the entire time.

I understand that not all kids are like Evelyn and able to sit calmly through story time, and while it's great to see so many people bringing their kids to the library, if your child is treating story time like it's the playground, and refuses to listen to you, it's probably best to leave.

I don't know, but if that was my kid I would have left. 

Evelyn saw some of the other kids standing up (plenty of others were sitting nice), and so she stood up too but I right away told her that she has to sit down until the story is done so that the kids behind her can see the pictures too. And she sat right down.

On a totally unrelated note, on the way home we stopped at the grocery store in town where we had our first ever experience of a power outage while grocery shopping. Maybe all the heavy snow knocked down a power line or something? And for some reason the generators didn't kick on. Evelyn and I snacked on some donut and cookie samples in the dark. Yum yum!

on freedom and finding your ladder

"What this is all about, Santos, is freedom. The freedom to see something awesome in the sky and gab a nearby ladder and climb it until you can touch that awesome thing and once you have a solid footing on the top step, grab the awesome thing and pull it toward your chest and slowly walk backwards down the ladder until you're back on the sidewalk and it's cool to take the awesome thing to a park or somewhere else that's quiet and just hold it."

--from the short story "Why We Must Write Prison Baby," in Thomas Mundt's collection You Have Until Noon To Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, Goldfish Press, 2011

FIND YOUR AWESOME THING THEN FIND THAT LADDER. IF YOU CAN'T FIND A LADDER I SUGGEST YOU BUILD ONE YOURSELF.

"I Heart Your Fate" (and my new goal) (and a question for you)

This is the title of the poetry collection that came in the mail yesterday. It's by Anthony McCann and I ordered it last week based on this review in H_NGM_N, which excerpted these lines, from the poem "Your Voice":

And the trees opened their shirts and stepped out of their shirts
Out of their pants stepped out of their pants
And the trees started to weep I mean rain it was raining
And stood there all human and naked and shaking

Fucking beautiful.

McCann's poems are addicting, even though I don't necessarily understand them upon first or second read. Some of them I might never understand fully, but the language is so beautiful, so musical, and the images he conjures up for me are magic, and so I'm okay with not fully understanding. His poetry is a sensory experience.

One of my new goals, so to speak, is to not get on the computer first thing every morning, but to sit with a book of poems and my journal. Some mornings I do this anyway, but other times, especially when I've just done a photo shoot, I get on the computer first thing. The big desktop computer in my office. But I don't want to do that. I want every morning to be spent quietly with words, and having my laptop out is okay for some of it, to either write up a quick blog post or begin my own poem, since I do most of my actual writing on the laptop now (the journal is for thoughts and ideas, the seeds of poems).

This morning I've been reading more of McCann's collection, published by Wave Books, and one stanza is just sticking with me, it's so beautiful. From the poem "Werther":

Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
Can't live a day in a world without birds!
I drag myself toward you using only my face
To see each little flower, forever, at once

...................................................................................................wow.

QUESTION: If these were your words, who is your "you"? i.e. who in your life do these lines make you think of? Who would you drag yourself toward using only your face.....?

Answer in the comments if you like. Next time I'll tell you my answer.

bookstore loot

 

Evelyn and I went on a bookstore adventure yesterday and came home with this nice stack (minus the one on top, which came in the mail yesterday). None of these books are on my official reading list of the semester, but I guess they are now. I'm becoming increasingly interested in visual art and in the American culture of the 1950's and 60's (hence the Ginsberg and the Pop) - mostly the writing and the art, but also the culture as a whole, since that's out of which writing and art inevitably come from.....It's also interesting to note that quite a few poets were also painters, such as cummings, who is my favorite dead poet....

"The Art of Recklessness"

Another great thing I came home with from Vermont is a list of reading suggestions, both prose and poetry, and one of these books just came in the mail: The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young (I posted a poem by him the other day), recommended to me by Matthew Dickman. Matthew said that this book strongly influenced him and made him feel incredibly free. Matthew says that when we're making art, when we're writing a poem, it's the only time in our lives that we're truly free. He quotes Larry Levis, a poet who once said of poetry, "Out here I can say anything." I agree with this notion, yet I don't feel totally free yet, not in the way Matthew speaks of, and one of my goals this semester is to secure that creative freedom, to create beyond any limits, beyond potential. I've only just begun reading The Art of Recklessness and already I can tell I will gain much from it. Young opens with this:

Let us suppose that everyone in the world wakes up today and tries to write a poem. It is impossible to know what will happen next but certainly we may be assured that the world will not be made worse. I believe in the divinity of profligacy*. The creation of art, okay, just the attempt at the creation of art, as well as the appreciation of it, is both an enlarging and an expanding of the consciousness. To write a poem is to explore the unknown capacities of the mind and the heart; it is emotive, empathetic exercise and, like being struck by lightning, it will probably leave you stunned, singed, but also a bit brighter, and too your odds of being struck again then go much higher.

*I admit I had to look up the definition for profligacy, and here's what I found:

1. shameless dissoluteness*; 2. reckless extravagance; 3. great abundance

I then had to look up the definition of dissoluteness:

1. lacking moral restraint; indulging in sensual pleasures or vices.

Hmmmmm......I think I can buy into the divinity of profligacy. Sounds damn refreshing. And free.

Cheers!

No, I'm not playing Jenga with my books. I'm finishing up my last packet of my first semester of grad school, and I have to include an annotated bibliography, which means I had to go through each of the books I'd read this semester and find the publishing information. So I thought I'd take a picture for good memories. Honestly, the stack looks smaller than I imagined it would. Cheers to a first semester basically complete!

Source of Inspiration: Adrienne Rich

You may have noticed that Facebook has this new thing where you can list the people who inspire you. While I know this is just a way for Facebook to get its users to link to more pages and thus expand its already enormous and thoroughly permeating presence on the Web, I don't care (I've given up my fight with Facebook). I think it's cool to have people who inspire you, and so I'm going to write about those who inspire me here. The first is Adrienne Rich - an American poet, feminist, mother, activist, and all around amazing woman. I am reading her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which was originally published in the mid 1970's, and the edition I have is a reissue she released in 1986. I'm about 100 pages in and fully absorbed. I don't have time to mention everything I would like to here (Jason surprised me by renting Fight Club so we're going to go watch that!), but I want to at least share one passage about what feminism is:

Like patriarchy itself, the extent and influence of the antipatriarchal women's movement is difficult to grasp. It is not defined by specific organizations, groupings, or factions, though these exist in abundance. It exists in many stages of development throughout the world, at the most local, pragmatic levels, as a network of formal and informal communications, as a growing body of analysis and theory, and as a profound moral, psychic, and philosophic revaluation of what it means to be "human."

I am going to amend my "Feminism Matters" page to include this definition, which is one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate definitions, of feminism I have ever come across. There's much more to share from this wonderful, truly inspiring book (especially inspiring for women, most inspiring for mothers, but inspiring also for everyone), and this book is already changing my life, or at least the way I think about my life (which is the foundation for change anyway), but I'll have to wait until a later time to share.

Happy Night (imagine me holding up my glass of red wine in a toast to you).

Saturday's Quote: Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a brilliant author. I devour her books. Her quote:

“I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.”

Dawkins Passage I've Been Obsessing About

So I've started reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (I've read excerpts before/heard him read parts, but the full experience is way better), and I came across this eloquent passage I cannot fully stop thinking about.

"An atheist . . . is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful." (my emphasis)

Feel free to discuss. If you're a regular reader who's never commented, I encourage you to share your thoughts. :)

New Books!

Little One is in bed already, Papa is still at work, and I still have the applications to continue working on, but I want to share the three new books I bought for myself today. I usually don't buy brand new books because I can find them online for a lot cheaper, but I somehow found myself in a Borders bookstore today, and it's pretty much a crime for me to leave any bookstore without at least one book (but who am I kidding, it's never just one book). My new books:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Oh, and I guess I bought four books, because I also bought The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, but it's for a friend (I already have a used copy). I don't know when I'll have time to read these, but I do know that I will somehow find the time (I actually just read the preface to The God Delusion, ha!) Maybe soon I'll share some lines from my new reads :)

Stop hoping; start doing.

That's my new motto: stop hoping; start doing. And it's inspired partly by my own musing thoughts, and partly by an essay from this new book I am reading, The Future of Nature . I bought it at the Green Living Expo, and it is "required reading for those interested in a livable future . . . a crucial guidebook for the 21st century activist." My motto comes from Derrick Jensen's "Beyond Hope."

Jensen frankly admits that he does not have much hope for the environment. He says, "No matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We're losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the plant, and most people don't care."

Kinda depressing, huh? BUT, he goes on to say that he sees his lack of hope as a good thing because

Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth . . . To start, there is false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness . . . False hopes blind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

Jensen so clearly accurately depicts what most of us say or think:

If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they're getting worse. Rapidly.

If only, if only, if only . . . Jensen is right. We need to stop saying "If only," and start doing something.

He goes on to say that "Hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line," because to hope for something, is to assume that something is out of your hands. In Jensen's words, "Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless." He explains this even further:

I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've assumed the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

In other words, stop hoping, and start doing. And this can be applied to any number of situations. I wish I could delve into some of them as examples, but I hear the little one waking up, so I can only leave you with a few more of Jensen's great words:

I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction . . . The use of any excuse to justify inaction reveals nothing more or less than an incapacity to love.

People sometimes ask me, "I things are so bad, why don't you just kill yourself?" The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good.

Let's use this in our lives today (and all the other days) and see what we can do.

Ah, Rilke

Summer reading has begun! First up: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. I've read some of this before, but I didn't have much head space to fully absorb it then. It's not a long book, but it takes time to read because one must take it in slowly.... here are some excerpts from the early 20th century German poet:

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

How lovely it is to read these words on a rainy morning with a cup of tea while my dear Evelyn sleeps in the next room.

Once upon a time...

I recently read what I believe will always be my favorite book of all time (which is somewhat disappointing, since I am only 22).

Somehow, I managed to read this book in two days. It's as funny as it is sad. As another reviewer said, "Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is a hauntingly beautiful novel about two characters whose lives are woven together in such complex ways...."

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering..."