dog-eared-poetry & prose

Imagination Verses Reality

2012-02-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

(Hide Away by Ana Mouyis printed in Annalemma Issue 8: Creation.)

My friend, Kim, came to visit me in December, and she brought with her a copy of Annalemma Magazine. Last minute, before she left, she said she'd loan it to me, and I read it, which felt good because prior to reading it I was mainly reading textbooks, and my student's final papers. God. I coveted that journal. I took it with me on the train, kept it in my purse, pulled it out to read bits in between things. It was like I re-discovered reading literary work.

Blake Butler has an essay in my coveted literary magazine, "I Tried Really Hard to Play." I fell deep in love with the essay and with the accompanying drawings by Anastasia Mouyis. Butler's essay contains a strange kind of depth (nearly cabalistic). This particular issue of Annalemma has a theme of creation, and Butler explores ideas of creation through role playing games.

This semester I am teaching an intermediate level writing class, and after reading Butler's essay I decided to make the classes' focus arguments in the media. I assigned Butler's essay for homework on Wednesday night and bright and early this morning we had a discussion. What we came up with: Butler creates a layer of settings-- the beach, the condo, and the world of his imagination, and in these settings we can find common themes of fear, solitude, a need for discovery. The memories he gives us are much like the drawings he makes as a child: pieces of something incomplete, a way of discovery. Butler approaches big ideas here: it's hard to create when we are still trying to figure out reality. Coming of age is a strange process and it never really goes away.

One of my classes' essay options is to write about role playing games, and how they might affect a society, the world, an individual, and the problem solving skills related to them. I will encourage them to use Butler's essay as a source, and I am already looking forward to their responses.

(I also decided to use Butler's essay as a model for a narrative essay in EN 101 class, and while the focus of the discussion was different, the students had a lot to say about role playing games, solitude, and identity.)

Sooo thank you, Mr. Butler for writing good words. And thank you, Kim, for always putting good words and inspiration in my life!

Poetry and the Body

2012-01-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

Poetry and the body go together. Hand and hand. Brain and brain. Skin to skin.

And poetry is a body of imagined things. A doll. A strange doll. This is what I am pondering on before I hit the hay tonight: poetry is a stamp and a maker of history, as with all writing. The form poetic verse takes is more like that of a body than prose, however, as the lines are often defined and linked together by enjambment (bones or glue).

Best Of...

2012-01-04T10:55:00.001-08:00

2011 was a year of many changes for me-- a rollover from 2010. Everything rolled on and on into a whole year: I worked in four different cities, lived in three different houses, picked things up, put things down, misplaced myself, and found myself again.

Not much stayed the same for me in 2011, and with things so rapidly changing, I didn't dedicate myself to many full length collections of poetry (or to reading full novels for that matter). My attention span fractured into many small pieces, but I did pick up literary goodness here and there, and where and when my brain would allow. However, making a best of list isn't something that I can rightfully do this year.

I feel guilty about that, but on the upside, I have some awesome friends in poetry who run an awesome vlog, and I'd like to share their best of videos here.

Jess was my neighbor in Pittsburgh, and we attended Chatham University's MFA program together. She is an amazing, hilarious woman, and soul sister in verse. I trust her taste in poetry more than I trust my own taste in shoes. I haven't read any of the books on her list, but I plan to, and so should everyone else out there who has a brain.

I also met Carolyne at Chatham. We attended a summer program together, and I will never forget how I immediately wanted to be her friend (she had on pink and leopard print). Her taste and love for Pittsburgh is impeccable, and I cannot wait to read her book! One of the books she mentions, "Border Theory," is also written by a Chatham alum, Stephanie Wielkopolan. I used Stephanie's thesis as a guideline for my own. What I know of her poetry: the words are of place and brash truth. I look forward to reading more of this book.

Thanks Jess and Carolyne for your voices, opinion, and being who you are!

Some Things I Learned as an Adjunct English Professor (in my first semester teaching)

2011-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

(In no particular order)

1. Too much exposure to passive voice can make one delusional.

2. Know your physical peripheries: the desk is in the same place as it is always in, be aware of its placement in relation to your body. You can and will bounce off of it (and it's best to call yourself out on this... somehow).

3. Do not attempt to scale a random bag of potting soil at 8 a.m. Sprained ankles hurt and the focus on teaching is lost when body parts throb.

4. Set three alarms for 8 a.m. classes.

5. Many will fail to tell you when you are teaching with your jacket on inside out/ turn on the light in the morning when getting dressed.

6. ALWAYS check the marker you are writing on the board (it may be permanent and permanent markers do not erase easily-- even with cleaning agents).

7. Just buy a parking permit (the $12 it costs for the semester is MUCH cheaper than the endless quarters fed into the meter/ parking tickets collected).

8. Smart classrooms are at times possessed and not much can be done about it.

9.Do not leave glasses of red wine near ungraded papers.

10. If you are low on parking meter change, but have a few dollar bills, you can stick them in the Coke machine and hit cancel, and get quarters in return.

11. When the sun shines in classroom windows, the shadows on the white board can be really beautiful.

12. Boots without traction are a bad idea when lecturing.

13. Running after the meter maid and waving your arms in the air, shouting, "I'm coming. Don't ticket my car. Please don't ticket my car" can work as a method to avoid getting a ticket.

14. It's nearly impossible to grade with a pug dog on your lap.

15. Red ink is both powerful and intimidating.

16. Grading takes a lot of freaking time, and snacks are a good interruption.

17. The phrase, "Just kidding," has the potential to erase what you've just said.

New Publication!

2011-12-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

My poem, "After 7 am," is published in the most recent issue of dot dot dash, the "Gambit Issue." I haven't received my copy yet, but I'm very excited for when I do, and happy to be a part of an international publication. The idea of themed magazines is a good one, not to pigeon-hole, but to open a discourse and to reinterpret words, meanings, definitions, themes.

Prior to submitting to dot dot dash, I didn't know what a gambit is... a wacky chess move? When one makes a sacrificing move to get ahead. So... interesting. I originally heard of the publication through a colleague at Chatham, Miss Laura Davis, her poem is published in the Feast Issue (#5). I love the design choices of dot dot dash, and decided to think about what the word "gambit" means, and if I had a poem suitable for the word/ idea. Looking through my manuscript, I found a plethora of poems on sacrifice, and I'm happy to have found, "After 7 am" a home. The poem personifies Tuesday, and approaches friendship and love.

I'll do a write-up on Issue 8 (examining other writers' interpretations of gambit) when I receive the magazine in the post.

Thanks dot dot dash! For including my work!

A Handmade/ Secondhand Christmas/ Playing a Good Santa

2011-12-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

This year I have decided to shop only secondhand, handmade, independent, or at local shops for Christmas. Not only does it save (slightly), but it's also so nice to the earth and to the community. I wanted to avoid online shopping, but along the way, I found some great sites that have allowed me to stick to my promise to myself.

I am brought back to the times of my teenage hood, when I saved up my babysitting money, and shopped at thrift stores for gifts. Finding vintage treasures has the same magical feeling as it did then, and each gift given is bound to be unique, truly the chances of repeat gifts are cut back, and the surprise will always be bigger.

With two weeks left until Christmas, I find myself still shopping, and I figure others are doing the same. I've compiled a list for smart shopping/ unique holiday gift ideas I've fallen upon along the way:

1. Mystic Monk Coffee : For the days when it's hard to make it to the coffee shop to write, this stuff is amazing. My parents first brought home a bag from the National Cathedral in DC. I honestly could not believe the alert state my mind took after drinking my first cup. Brewed by the Carmelite Monks in Wyoming, the blends are all remniscent of their name: mystic. This is a fly high drink, and it really will make the coffee drinkers in your life happy. The coffee/ tea also makes a good gift to the self!

2. For the literary lovers in your life: Small Press Distribution is running a 40% off sale for the holidays. SPD is wonderful. I always feel good shopping with them, a hub for small presses, the non-profit company carries an excellent array of publications from the independent literary world... from Alice James Books to Zone 3 Press.

3. Etsy carries just about anything and everything colorful and unique. Among my favorites are the handmade journals.

4. Book-y earrings -- way cool!

5. Vintage books / things made out of vintage books Story-time clocks? Yes!

Happy Smart Shopping and Merry Merry Everything!

Commercials and Poetry: How Levis has been giving me the shivers

2011-11-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

A little while back, I did a blog post on The Beats, it was Jack K's b-day on that day. I included a clip of Tom Waits reading, "The Laughing Heart." G-damn I love that poem.

And then later, I was sitting in the movie theatre, a few months ago, and I literally almost jumped out of my seat when I saw Levi's had done a commercial, "Go Forth..." that featured Bukowski's poem.

But a few moments ago, I was watching a friend's vlog (The Vlog Poet's Channel) and one of the videos talked about poetry in the news... film and media. I was reminded of the commercial again and wanted to share it:

"Be on the watch... the Gods will offer you chances, know them. Take them."

It really is great to see poetry moving into the mainstream, whether viewers realize it or not. Because I do believe, we ought wear poetry the way we wear jeans.

Thank you, Levi's.

And another favorite:

Jeans and poetry. Love and Sex. And strange love... God how that idea grips me... because writing is some strange love, after all.

Return to (a post on self-help for myself...a vent really)

2011-11-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

I love it. I love poetry. So why haven't I been letting it permeate my life? Why haven't I been dedicating myself to it? I want to give myself reasons, thus making my problem "public" "bloglic.. public..." (I have a cold and my thoughts are blending together.)

1. I feel broken record-ish.

2. I just want to watch T.V.

3. Grading. I ought to be grading.

4. Does my work feel boring somehow? Or am I just missing a semblance of a writing community?

5. I need a good, independent coffee shop to go to.

6. Job hunting for full time work or supplemental part time work. It takes time.

I need to change something. Maybe write long hand instead of on the computer. Maybe re-focus myself.

I need to, we all need to:

1. Trust my body of revised work and send it out for publications.

2. Revise.

3. Seek advise from writing friends.

4. Re-visit my manuscript and re-shop the market.

5. Let go of timelines. Then create timelines.

6. Become capable of turning negative feelings into positive feelings.

(Lists should always come in 6's.)

Three pieces of Insight for the Day

2011-10-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

I write in red ink these days, it spreads across the papers I collect. The words passive voice; word choice, spelling error spill out of my hand, but I never forget: a soul lives in every word written. Every word spoken.

Disfunction. Misinterpretations. Repetitions. Wacky equations. Good is always on the horizon.

Sometimes it's easier to neglect making art; to neglect visual and verbal expression; to stare off into space. Because life doesn't always reveal the importance of reflection; of replication/ interpretation. Because who can tell how big an audience, if ever an audience, what for? These words echo the reminder: the reasons to make art are just as significant as making love: for history, for the better of the body, for the better of the earth, to spread energy, the earth is incomplete and boring without it.

Inspiration for a Sunday

2011-10-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

(Thanks, Kim Brown, for sharing!)

Small Press Festival in Frostburg, MD

2011-10-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Good People,

This coming Saturday, October 15th, is Frostburg State University's Center for Creative Writing Small Press Festival, and that's exciting to me for the following reasons:

1. Shady Side Review will be serving on the panel: Online Journals: From Paper to Published.
2. Athena Pappas, my dear friend/ poetry co-editor/ poetic partner in crime, and I will be selling chapbooks we published.
3. I will be selling my own chapbook.
4. Frostburg is beautiful in the fall.
5. The line-up is great:

10:30 am - Registration; Meet and Greet the Editors and Publishers; and Light Breakfast

11 am- Book Fair Opens

11:30 am - 12:15 pm
Publishing Basics
YA/ Children's Writing: A Round Table
Reading and Writing Online
Freelance Writing

12:30 pm - 1:15 pm
Sci-Fi and Fantasy Horror: A Round Table
Self Promotion
Writing Spirituality
Blogging, New Media, and Journalism

Break

2:00 pm - 2: 45 pm
DIY and Self Publishing
Poetry: A Round Table
The Novel: A Round Table

3:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Writing Local
Scriptwriting: A Round Table
Online Journals: From Paper to Published
Publishing Basics

4:00 pm- 4:30 pm
Book Fair
Light Refreshments

If you're in the area: BE THERE!

More Info: http://www.frostburg.edu/cwcenter/smallpressfair.htm

Quote of the Day

2011-09-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

You should just live your life. You should write your name on the Earth in gasoline and just light that shit on fire." - Casey, Party Down

New Publication!

2011-09-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

Two of my poems are published in the new issue of Radioactive Moat, and they can be read here.

The poems in this issue are a part of my manuscript, "Let the Balloons Go on the Highway." I am currently seeking a home for the manuscript, and hoping it finds its place in the small press world.

The poems in this issue: "Gemini" and "Machinery at Play" are poems that reflect upon my childhood. The mini-me lives inside each of them. Writing poetry like this makes me feel as if I can re-kindle with the girl I once was-- I'd like to meet that girl. I think we could all benefit from meeting our childhood self, not to give advice or warn against heartache, but simply to give a hug-- to show love to the youth that brought us to where we are.

Shady Side Review Fall 2011 Issue Released!

2011-09-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

(Cover Art: Sleeping Giant by: Steven Knezovich)

It's been a year since our last issue, but I like to think this one was worth the wait. Our editors have gone through some wild changes (completing grad school, moving places in Europe, moving across the states, and the like) since the last issue. The journal itself has gone through some wild changes as well: with a new format and focus in style, Shady Side Review has released it's Fall 2011 issue.

We stuck to our Pittsburgh roots and featured cover art by Stephen Knezovich, an artist living in the Steel City. For me, it's a matter of the way Stephen melds definitions and images together that keeps my eyes drawn and my brain going, "Wow." I love the vintage effect in his collages: nostalgic and grainy and dreamy and surreal and all other good things that come out of thrift stores and antique shops. It's a recycled art of sorts, and featured here: http://thenewgravycake.wordpress.com/

Stephen is equally as interesting as his art-work; one of my fellow editors and I had the pleasure of meeting him at AWP in Denver. He's got great things on his mind.

Continuing on the Pittsburgh roots note, we've got a few other Steel City artists in this issue, Robert Isenberg (fiction) and Siobhan Casey (poetry). And hey! We're not bias, it just happened that way, but to be honest, I think the editors all miss the city we met in, at least a little.

The full list of Fall 2011 contributors includes poetry by: Shirley Brewer, Siobhan Casey, Milton P. Erlich, Kurt Z. Geisler, and Ann Neuser Lederer. Fiction by: Joe Baumann and Robert Isenberg. Non-fiction by: Rachel Carbonell, James Claffey, and Lynn Harper. And cover art by: Stephen Knezovich.

The writers in this issue give us: Persephone, romance on highways, parrots reading tarot cards, arguments about words like babushka,naked lovers in the rain, a man with a tin leg, and a way to dismantle routine.

Shady Side Review is moving forward. To go along with our new look, we're working on a new mission, our focus in the work we publish is shifting, and talks of themed issues have come up. The fall is always a good time for transition. We embrace it.

Check us out: http://issuu.com/shadysidereview/docs/ssr2011

Birds, Hunger, Self Promotion

2011-08-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

Years ago I kept parakeets. My first was named Uncle Elmo. He was a sky colored bird and had cotton candy blue markings on his beak, which was how I learned he was a male. I loved that bird. He talked, better yet he cussed, he made strange noises, and he really seemed as if he was from outer space. I always felt as if Uncle Elmo was a bigger part of me, something of my spirit. He lived until I was about twelve. My second bird was named Delilah; she was sunshine colored with green specks of grass in her feathers, and she was kind of a bitch. She wouldn't sit on anyone's finger, she bit skin for the salt, and she would only talk at night when there was a cover on her cage, but I loved her because my friend's bought her for me for my nineteenth birthday as a surprise. And it became apparent to me, it was if she was the bad that lived inside of me: the rebellious, and she too was a part of my spirit.

I wrote a poem a few years ago, in which I imagined myself as Anne Sexton. I imagined her hunger and put a parakeet in her mouth. I, myself, may have had some similar fantasy, not because of literal hunger, but because sometimes it feels as if something bigger is missing. I titled the poem, "The Truth the Hungry Know (After Anne Sexton)," as she wrote a poem, "The Truth the Dead Know." My poem was accepted and is now part of Cave Moon Presses' fine publication/ anthology, "Broken Circles." Not only is it exciting to be part of a book, but it's even more exciting to be part of a book that reaches for a greater cause: to fight hunger and poverty.

Buy it here:

https://www.createspace.com/3668679

It's for a wonderful cause! I can't wait to receive my copy!

Found Art

2011-08-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hooray for random metaphor in grocery stores! Because flowers = poetry. Because poetry should be consumed. Because life is romantic (if we let it be that way). I like that this is in the Safeway in Wheaton, MD. It strikes me by surprise every time I see it. I would love to see a whole store filled with poetry signs like this. In the bakery: Poetry in the making. In the meat department: Raw Poetry or Poetry and Beef. In the greeting card section: Poetry for all occasions. Yes!

Linked and Built Together

2011-07-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've just begun to read Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank," a novel about the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. It's beautiful, but haunting and tragic, and with every page I further draw a personal connection. Today, I was reading on the metro ride home, and the line that stopped me most was, "Truth against the world." I read it over and over and said it out loud and made it my facebook status. I want to know what it means to me, I'm curious. In the context of the story line, it meant we must believe in our individual truths when the outside world embellishes our lives.

In a lot of ways, the story line in "Loving Frank" reminds me of Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying:" running away to a foreign country with a lover in order to discover oneself, and the discoveries one makes because of love affairs. Being deep within a woman's psyche we learn the sacrifices humans make to move forward, to reach discovery, but within those sacrifices, the deep hurt that is found and the blackness to the discoveries made.

When looking up, "Truth against the world," I fell upon this Frank Lloyd Wright quote, and it made me feel as if I am meant to be studying the man further as if I will continue to discover through his words and work (especially appropriate as I have been temping as a receptionist at an architect firm lately).

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating...

I have scaled these city walls

2011-07-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

At the end of the work day today someone was whistling this song in the office. I couldn't see who it was, but the moment stayed with me as I walked to the metro. The whistling reverberated in my thoughts the same as it had sounded as it traveled through the cubicles. I imagined it to be the cleaning man who earlier in the afternoon waved to me in the elevator video camera or one of the architects thinking of the end of the day--in a dreamy mode, pressing their lips together.

On the walk to the way to Dupont Circle, over and over I sang to myself, "These city walls. These city walls." As a writer or artist, don't we all live for these moments? When symbolism is created unknowingly. When real life becomes like a scene from a movie or novel. For me, this is the reason to re-create real life moments: to put down in words what I imagine or experience for others.

Working in the city and living in the suburbs, I have a limited understanding of the "city walls" of Washington D.C. But with each passing moment, I take in the people surrounding, passersby as inspiration.

I love being in a place that feels brand new to me. A place where my observational levels are heightened. A place that inspires me to capture each moment I experience and turn it into poetry, even if the poetry is only in my mind. Even if it hasn't formed itself into stanzas, line breaks, rhythm. And to be reminded that art is made by art. That living and small moments that turn into ideas are the meaning behind art. To know that we all are searching for the perfect line and to be okay with admitting, "but I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

Today's Focus: Energy: The Ability to Do

2011-06-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

Energy: The ability to do.

Poetry Cartoons! Yes!

2011-05-30T20:11:00.001-07:00

All I need is somewhere I can feel the grass beneath my feet

2011-05-26T08:25:00.001-07:00

Belle & Sebastian are my go-to for inspiration. Their lyrics never fail to take me into a lovely world, one with daydreams and reality that meld together, cloud-like.

The following two songs are by far my favorite and are on the endless playlist in my head especially as of late as we move into the summer season.

Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John
(From Write about Love)

What a waste I could have been your lover
What a waste I could have been your friend
Perfect love is like the blossom that fades so quick
When it’s blowing up a storm in may

Travel south until your skin gets warmer
Travel south until your skin turns brown
Put a language in your head and live on a train
And then come back to the one you love

Yeah, you’re great, you’re just part
Of this lifetime of dreaming
That extends to the heart
Of this long summer feeling

Quiet night you see the tvs glowing
Quiet night you hear the walls are awake
Me and you are getting out of the party crowd
Can I see what’s underneath your bed?

Can I stay until the milkman’s working
Can I stay until the café awakes
Do you hate me in the light, did you get a fright
When you looked across from where you lay?

Yeah you’re great, you’re just part
Of this lifetime of dreaming
That extends to the heart
Of this long summer feeling
All the history of boys
I invent in my head

Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John

What a waste I could have been your lover
What a waste I could have been your friend

Asleep on a Sunbeam
(From Dear Catastrophe Waitress)

When the half light makes for a clearer view
Sleep a little more if you want to
But restlessness has seized me now, it’s true
I could watch the dreams flicker in your eyes
Lying here asleep on a sunbeam
I wonder if you realise you fascinate me so

Think about a new destination
If you think you need inspiration
Roll out the map and mark it with a pin
I will follow every direction
Just lace up your shoes while I’m fetching a sleeping bag, a tent...
Another summer’s passing by
All I need is somewhere I feel the grass beneath my feet
A walk on sand, a fire I can warm my hands
My joy will be complete

I thought about a new destination
I’m never short of new inspiration
Roll out the map and mark it with a gin
Made my plans to conquer the country
I’m waiting for you to get out of your situation
With your job and with your life

All I need is somewhere I feel the grass beneath my feet
A walk on sand
A fire, I can warm my hands
My joy will be complete.

(What a cute little character at the beginning of this video! She, within herself, is inspiring!)

Advice and Insight

2011-05-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went for a walk in the sunshine with my cousin Marc. We talked about horror movies while we meandered down the sidewalk, and as we were nearing home, I took notice to a sign in the neighbor's front yard. I stopped and took a picture of the "End These Wars" sign, and he asked if I'd noticed the others in the yards we'd passed. Somehow I hadn't observed them. After taking the picture, I stood in front of the sign and thought of the words as advice and not as a demand.

As a writer, as a human, I am always looking for advice, but knowing what to do with it doesn't come easy. I collect in the way of stacking magazine clippings, I file away what others give me. "You should do this, you should read this, you should check this out." Suggestions are therapeutic, they take the stress off discovering on your own, directing yourself. Being co-dependent in certain elements of life can be beautiful, for me unavoidable. I know I cannot live alone with my creativity. I know I cannot be alone in my beliefs.

Recently, a beautiful friend of mine suggested an article to me. After reading it I felt, powered, charged, and as if I wanted more: The Urgent Matter of Books reminds one it's okay to sit on your ass and read as long as you stand up and share afterwards. Lidia Yuknavitch's article made me think about the whole process of reading and writing, how there must be a balance between the solitude of both processes and the community found through each.

What would we do without the advice and insight literature gives us?

Recently, I have been thinking of my favorite Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. As I neared the end of my grad program, I realized how much of an influence she has in both my writing and how after I read and studied her, I gained a new way of looking at the world. This perception is one that lies in an incredibly internal place. Some words from her:

"Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence." (The Passion According to GH)

"For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes." (The Hour of the Star)

"The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices." (The Passion According to GH)

5 Literary Things I am Thankful For (as of late)

2011-04-03T14:36:00.001-07:00

1.) Finding my Hummingway (Hemingway) t-shirt that was packed away in my spring/ summer clothing. This shirt is a Konglish favorite. I bought it while I lived in South Korea. It was the only one in the store front in this tiny clothing boutique that was on the back streets of Suwon. (Is it an intentional mistake? Or just a perfect gem of a sincere mistake?)

2.) Yesterday I went to a writer's workshop put on by Frostburg Center for Creative Writing. The workshop was led by Detroit poet, Joy Gaines-Friedler; she focused on using art as a muse. Her energy and encouragement left me feeling creatively charged. We worked on writing exercises and the entire workshop shared what they had written.

Here is a segment of something I wrote:

Life is a dream for her. She falls asleep in any space: on lilies, busted cobwebs, against a fence. The wood must feel good on her face, and her balance is beautiful. She does not miss her grown-up sister who used to sit on the white plastic teeter-tauter with her. Her arms are dangling towards the ground, one moment in broken stasis.

I want to call her Reba. She lives in the mid-west--life will always be slow for her, might she keep her eyes closed. Her bangs tickle her own face, then her father's face when he lifts her and takes her inside to the sofa. The television is on.

(This came from a picture of a little girl with blonde hair. She was leaning on a board that rested against a fence. In the background, white playground equipment sat rusting.)

3.) Last week I introduced my writing mentor's book of poetry at his book release party. It felt good to introduce Gerry LaFemina to a familar crowd at Main Street Books. His new book, Vanishing Horizon, is his best yet, and I will be writing a review for it in the near future.

4.) The book I am reading right now, "The Year of the Hare" by Arto Paasilinna and my dear friend, Amanda Bena, who reviewed it, suggested it to me, and who has recently reminded me of the magic of going to the library.

5.) Austin Kleon's "How to Steal Like an Artist and Nine Other Things Nobody Told Me." (Thanks Kim Brown, for sharing.) Of my favorite among these: "Be nice. The world is a small town." It's important to think about methods of self-help when creating art-work, and Austin Kleon reminds us not to be alone in our methods of self-help. I like that.

An Homage for Jack Kerouac on his Birthday

2011-03-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

DJ Bahler's "Everything is going to the beat intro" is pretty fabulous.
http://soundcloud.com/dj-bahler/sets/mashin-pit

“Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

He was a good one. I'm glad he existed.

The Laughing Heart

2011-03-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

(For a little bit of assurance, and a lot a bit of love for Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski and because I've been thinking about The Beats lately.)

Listening to Waits read this poem made me realize just how powerful human expression is. It should never be withheld, always embraced, and shared with the world. If ever I'm not okay with being myself, I will think of Bukowski's words, because we ought to remind ourselves we are marvelous, we are to be delighted in.

The Laughing Heart
By Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Reading is Sexy

2011-03-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

A certain kind of intimacy comes from watching others deep in a book/ magazine/newspaper, whether it's glancing at a complete stranger in a coffee shop, library, park, the beach, or if it comes from admiring your significant other/ crush being carried off into a completely different land created by words.

For the creeper/admirer in all of you, and to promote the appreciation of a sexy body and mind, I've put together a small compilation of websites featuring readers:

http://lu-yi.blogspot.com-- Each of the photos on this post are story-worthy. Oh, the stories within the stories.

http://hotguysreadingbooks.tumblr.com--Because those who don't like a good looking man with a book in his hand, well, they are just sad folk.

http://peoplereading.blogspot.com/--A blog with a very cool goal:

The goal: A hundred readers every hundred miles, everywhere the globe is populated. The arctic, not exempt—any scientific communities looking for a new project? The oceans, not exempt—forward to your friends who work on outrigger canoes, fishing vessels, oil rigs, cruise ships. The upper reaches of Siberia—not exempt!— reindeer herders read, too. A map filled up with readers would be a beautiful display of diversity, and unity. I invite you start your own sister (or brother) blog, wherever you may be.

http://typewritergirls.net/--Fun girls who create literary shenanigans in the Pittsburgh area and beyond.

Learning to Wait

2011-02-21T20:04:00.000-08:00

(Image from amir kha's flicker)

Lately I have to keep reminding myself to have patience. My life has rapidly changed in the past year and a half, and due to all of the fast going changes I've had, my natural want is to continue to progress. To work towards what I need in life (whether that is selfish or selfless), and to feel like I am continually moving forward has become a natural state for me. Over and over I have been told to slow down, it will come to you, take life one step at a time, baby steps, things don't happen over night. These are all good pieces of advice, but I haven't been listening.

Today I began to recognize my obsession with goals: publication goals, career goals, personal goals, and how the months have passed by so quickly since I've moved home. Inevitably panic struck. I started to think about the people in my life who are patient, who take one step at a time, and how I want to and need to embrace that way of life. But how? The answer came from googling and stopping at thinkexist.com.

The following are quotes on patience that struck me (some in good fun, some as sincere meditations):

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

-- Rainer Marie Rilke

Never run after a bus or a man. There will always be another one.

--Irish Proverb

Patience is passion tamed.

--Lyman Abbott

Patience is the art of hoping.

-- Marquis de Vauvenargues

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.

--Buddhist Proverb

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.

--St. Francis De Sales

Post to a post and home for a home

2011-02-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

Last week (ish) I went to a phenomenal poetry reading hosted by Frostburg State's Center for Creative Writing. Before the reading, I did a little promotional blog for the CW Center's site. Can be found here: http://fsucenterforcreativewriting.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/crystal-williams-profile/

The reading itself was full of good vibes. For me, it was the first time I'd been in the Lyric Theatre as a theatre space, a theatre/ building that has caught fire twice. Once in its early days and more recently when it was home to Gandalf's Restaurant and Bar in 2004. To hear poetry here made me think of how the space itself thrives to be a public gathering point.

Crystal Williams was entrancing to watch. Her reading brought one to realize, poetry is an oral art. It should never be only on the page.

As I continue to think about her work, I realize just how much place informs our creative outlook. For the moment, I am happy to be home and to recognize the importance of environment as it relates to identity. More on that in my work. Most recently in my poems I've been exploring the first house I grew up in in Brimfield, Ohio, re-visiting memories and interconnecting the now with those memories. This first came about from reflecting on Williams' work, and later teaching a writing workshop at the Frostburg Senior Center, then finally into fruition when I told a love of mine I want to see Frida Kahlo's blue house. He said, "You are a blue house," jokingly, and coincidentally, my first childhood home was a blue ranch, and now I am working on a series of poems called just that, "You are a blue house." A good challenge.

Quote of the Day

2010-11-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently had this uncomfortable relationship with happiness.

Not with being happy, but with its metrics. Everywhere, everything, everyone seems to be measuring happiness. Valuating happiness. Making metrics of happy. As if it were something to be measured and planned for and designed. “Are you happy?” people ask when we meet. What are they asking, I wonder. Could their definition be the same as mine, and really, wouldn’t it be more interesting to talk about compliments, or pancakes, or the detail in a particular line, or the view, or that we got a really good cross breeze going in the right way? Small moments. Happiness in motion. And then the conversation could begin.

Frank Chimero:

[H]appiness is not crafted. Happiness emerges.

(From Bobulate.com)

Through the Roof and Underground

2010-11-07T22:26:00.000-08:00

I just watched the film "Wristcutters" and fell into love with the dreary backdrop, the desperate characters, Tom Waits (once again), and the soundtrack, particularly Gogol Bordello's, "Through the Roof and Underground." I can't stop listening to it, really. It's one of those songs where the lyrics are so intense they read like a novella. While the song is paired well with the movie, for cultural and deep psychological reference, it also stands beautifully on it's own and I can't stop thinking about it or the lyrics.

Somehow the lyrics fit how I feel about my surroundings and how I am always looking for escape in both poetry and mind:

When there's a trap set up for you
In every corner of this town
And so you learn the only way to go is underground
When there's a trap set up for you
In every corner of your room
And so you learn the only way to go is through the roof

Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground

And as we're crossing border after border
We realize that difference is none
It's underdogs who, and if you want it
You always have to make your own fun

And as the upperdog leisurely sighing
The local cultures are dying and dying
The programmed robots are buying and buying
And all secluded freaks they are still trying trying

Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof, and underground

And as the boy scouts learn to read between the lines
The silver rabbits hop between their fathers' lies
And boy scouts ask "Where? Where do they go?"
They go to the country that they only know

Just like their meanings they lay between the lines
Between the borders their real countries hide
The strategigo's saw their advertise
Their strategy of being is one of in-your-face disguise

Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground!

And when their own walls they will a-crumble,
And all the systems will be discumbumbled,
Around the stump of bigotry, our own
Serebryanye zayazhy vodyat horovod! [Russian]

Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof, and underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof, underground
Ooohoohoooh through the roof! Underground!

Serebryanye zayazy vodyat horovod! [Russian]

Through the roof! And underground!
Through the roof! Underground!

Quote of the Day

2010-10-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

people always say how you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing. Like a toaster or something. well if that’s how it is than fuck that. my toaster changes colors.--http://velvetcigarette.com/

Literary Spotlight #2

2010-10-27T14:31:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I was reading the latest JMWW when I fell upon Nicelle Davis's poem, "The Wings Inside Our Stomachs." Let me just say, I have not fallen deep in love with a poem this way in a long time. For me this poem was one of those, "damn I wish I wrote that" pieces. But then thinking about it for just a minute or two it became the "damn I'm glad that poem was written" piece. It starts, "I'm not a monster, you say. The little girl in me agrees— / sits next to your boy-self on the curbside / of our childhoods." I love that I truly believe the poet can travel back to the edge of a childhood sidewalk and goes on to explore the memory of place in childhood. I also love the liberties the poet takes with the line break in this piece, kind of prosey, but smart and risky and the prose style is coupled with one to two word stanzas. Breathy.

Of course after this poem, I googled her work to see if her other poems blew me away with the same force. My other two favorites are published in http://www.escapeintolife.com, "As Songs Travel Past Their Singers (the reprise)" and "Dolly." In these two poems there's play with form and an element of surprise. I like that, when I read a poem and think, "there's nothing like that in which I've read before." When the imagery and syntax and element of the story just take the reader away into that magical place where one forgets they are reading and they are allowed to float in the world the writer created.

I eagerly await Nicelle Davis's first book and feel lucky for electronic publications because otherwise I might not have found her on my own.

shady side review fall 2010 issue

2010-10-22T07:07:00.001-07:00

We did it! We released our fifth installment, the fall 2010 issue, with stunning cover art by Juliette Crane: http://www.juliettecrane.com/index.shtml. Her work makes me want to be a child again, discovering new colors and whimsy. More of her work can be seen here.

The fall 2010 issue includes prose by: Cate Stevens-Davis, Pin-Yi Ko, Nathan Leslie, Craig Medvecky, and Carolyne Whelan. And poetry by: Joanna Eleftheriou, Jessica Lakritz, Patrick McGinty, Marc Pietrzykowski, Ravi Shankar Rajan, and Janine Surmick.

It's a real stunner, this one. As always, I'm really excited to be a part of this project. Each issue makes me more and more proud, mostly because of the work of our submitters, but also because of the support and enthusiasm from my fellow editors, Sarah Grubb, Amy Holwerda, and Athena Pappas.

Discover literary goodness here: http://shadysidereview.com/fall2010/

Wearing Literature/ Poetry and Apparel

2010-10-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

(Image from SVA Magazine)

Lately I want to wear my poetry. To dress myself in my words, to be a walking statement of something other than black and white, my cut off shorts, or the mustard velvet dress I just purchased. I want to be looked at for my verse, recognized for art. Not to say dressing isn't an art, it is in many cases, but that does not stop me from wanting to drape myself in my creations.

I feel more connected to my work than the fabric that lays heavy on my skin. The heat has not allowed me to switch over to my fall wardrobe and I'm foolishly tired of wearing flip flops and shorts (I know, woe is me). I also want to be recognized for more than the expression that comes through in my clothing. I'm sure a good part of this has to do with feeling lonely in this new town. I miss the comfort of being surrounded by other writers and being able to discuss literature face to face, coffee cup to coffee cup. I haven't been as proactive as I should be in finding a writing community in Tyler.

With a lot of free time on my hands, and the tendency to reorganize my closet a lot, I have started to think about my clothes as my memories-- in the way the poetry I write serves as a memory retrieval. In this light, I was curious to consider the ways literature and fashion go together. This idea is not a new one, I found as I internet perused.

How Dressing and Verse Come Together

http://amyuhrich.com/2010/10/08/what-do-women-want/
Amy is a friend of mine from graduate school. Her interest in fashion and literature are much more developed than my own. I am always amazed to see what she is wearing and writing. She is also part of what inspired this blog entry.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19780
Poets.org offers a whole listing of poems and fashion (Kim A's "What do Women Want" included). I'm a huge fan of Honor Moore's "Red Shoes."

http://www.trendhunter.com/photos/12514#1
I love the idea of "book bags" as the style reminds me of my high school days when tin purses were popular. (My best friend, Kristin had a Reese Peanut Butter Cup tin purse.)

http://www.contrariwise.org/
Literary tattoos? Yes!

http://www.amazon.com/Shoes-Autobiography-Alice-B-Shoe/dp/0821223194
Andy Warhol's "Shoes" read like little poems. My Aunt MJ gave this book to me as a gift when I was a teenager and I treasure it.

Paper Darts, an online and print magazine has a fashion component: http://www.paperdarts.org/fashion/

Model and writer: http://velvetcigarette.com/ "She can read. She's bad." Love the tagline!

I've included a poem I wrote (still in its rough stages) in reflection of clothing as identity and working in a beauty salon. As I commonly find myself working in customer service, I also find myself comparing my work identity with my writer's identity.

What Happened to the Orange

These heels complete this outfit,
tight purple dress with black leggings—
and this eye shadow, this eye shadow
is perfect: purple on the lids, gold on the brow.
Catch a glimpse in the mirror, and I find myself in:
I play the role,
I am a receptionist, I check people
in, I make appointments, I call the upper class
to tell them about their upcoming color and cut.
When nothing is going on, I stare out
the door, into the square, where a police sheriff
leads a prisoner in stripes,
and they both get into his truck,
my boss tells me they drive them to the jail that way,
and I watch as they make a left onto the brick road,
say, “I thought jail uniforms weren’t made like that anymore
I thought they were only orange."

On Ideas and Looking for Inspiration

2010-10-13T19:11:00.001-07:00

Coal Hill Review Publication

2010-09-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have a new poem published in Vol. 7 of Coal Hill Review. This one is about internal conversation in a work place, titled, "If my co-worker asked, I'd answer." I'm pleased as a pickle to be published by Mike Simms, Editor in Chief of Autumn House Press in Pittsburgh. Autumn House has published some of my favorite books of poetry including "Lucky Wreck" by Ada Limon and "A Theory of Everything" by Mary Crockett Hill. This press does a really beautiful job. I'm a fan of their online journal too (that picked up my piece). Yes. Yes. I am so very happy to be published along side of some of my favorite people I met while in Pittsburgh. Volume 7 volume includes poems by: Athena Pappas, Siobhan Casey, Sarah Ansani, Kelly Beahm, Laura E. Davis, Dalenna Moser, and John Venturella, among others.

Go on then. Read.

Punk Rock Lit.

2010-08-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

Gerry LaFemina's first collection of short stories, "Wish List," grabbed my fast beating heart. I picked up LaFemina's book in the local bookshop sometime in February when I was visiting my hometown, Frostburg, MD. I like to visit Main Street Books even if I'm just in for the day. And when I'm visiting I like to buy local writers' work, if I can. So I did just that.

After I bought the book and returned to Pittsburgh, school got in the way, thesis writing ate my time, and "Wish List" sat on my bookshelf, but I never forgot about it. Mostly the cover would draw my eye, the front of this book is like a poster for the way my husband's bachelor pad looked when we first started dating: amp, guitar, and a mess of music on the floor.

I feel connected to this book on many levels. Gerry was my undergrad mentor. I worked for him as an intern at Frostburg State University's Center for Creative Writing where he directs. I not only love Gerry's poetry, but love what he has done for my hometown and my alma mater as well. It was very exciting for me when his fiction collection came out. I've been terribly homesick since I've moved to East Texas in June, and so I started to read the book in late July, and I've been thinking about it since then. I am not bias when I say these stories kick ass.

The characters love what they love: punk music, vinyl, small clubs, and one another, but in a heartbreaking and ever so human way. Gerry creates a raw world in his stories, a world that can be as fast as a D beat, but slow as trying to find the place we're meant to be in life.

I want to say my favorite of this collection is the title story,"Wish List," a story where love saves the fucked-up-ness of an ex-junkie and his girlfriend. But I was equally moved by "Proofeading America" in which a man obsesses over the grammatically incorrect signage of fast food joints, street signs, and weekly local papers in small town Michigan. (When I read "Proofreading America" I related, and I thought of the obnoxiousness of misspelled teetotaler signs. If you believe in something, get it right.) But this story digs deeper than linguistics. It spills hard truths (you'll have to read it if you wand to know what they are).

Reginald McKnight's blurb on the back of "Wish List" claims, "This is Punk in short story form..." and I couldn't agree more. These stories are everything I wish I could have read when I was fourteen and wearing ripped jeans and listening to local Western MD punker groups like Undercover Nuns. But I'm glad I read the book now because I get a lot of what I wouldn't have gotten then: love fades, we have to reshape it. Life is as long as a good Buzzcocks song (could be infinite if played over and over as Steve does with his favorite records in "Wish List"), but really, there is grit out there, and it's unavoidable and LaFemina gives it to us.

Damn, this is a good book. Thank you, Gerry, for writing it. Thank you Marick Press for publishing it.

If you're done reading this, go out there and read "Wish List."

Wicked Self Promotion

2010-08-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

(Wicked Alice Fall 2010 Issue) Artwork by: Cassia Beck

I'm really excited to be included in the latest issue of Wicked Alice. I'm always intrigued by the work, editor, Kristy Bowen publishes: dreamy, sometimes horrifying, sometimes sweet, and always textual and imagery ridden poems. My favorites in this issue are Leigh Phillip's "The Ethical Slut on Your Nightstand" and Laura Dixon's "Poem for the Friend Who Packed My Husband's Closet." I'm also a fan of the experimentation of Khadijah Queen's "from Cuniculus." What it means to be a woman, for better or worse, that's what all of the poems in this issue have in common.

In other publication news, I recently received my copy of Weave Magazine's issue 4 in which my poem, "Tracing" is published. The fiction in this issue is phenomenal. Kirsty Logan's "Anchor of the Suburbs" won my fast beating heart as did Salvatore Pane's "America's Lover." The premise in "America's Lover" is so damn cool and contemporary in which the protagonist, a regular Joe (who happens to be a liar and cheat) made famous by a reality television show, goes to visit his dying father. If you buy a copy of this beauty, you won't be sad, but warning: you might fall in love with some of the work in here, in love, love (and if you don't, which would be weird, at least you'll have a pretty, pretty cover to look at).

Go here to read my poem in Wicked Alice: http://www.sundresspublications.com/wickedalice/contents30.html

Go here to buy your copy of Weave Magazine and read my poem in there too: http://www.weavemagazine.net/p/purchase.html

shady side review summer 2010 issue

2010-07-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Today is the Day -- Ben Kehoe

We've just released our summer 2010 issue at shady side review -- with cover art by Pittsburgher, Ben Kehoe. I love Ben's work. It's dark and surreal and playful. A nice combination. He paints creatures that beg to be touched, but look dangerous to touch, that look as if they would talk to you, but speak in another language.

I'm very excited about the literary work we've published for this issue. The fiction and non-fiction editors featured one author each. Our featured fiction writer is Amber Larson, whose work has a sharp voice and a way of drawing breath in a multitude of ways. Our featured non-fiction writer is Joshua Foster. Foster writes of rural landscape. His work makes you want to meet both him and the people in his life.

For poetry, my co-editor, Athena, and I chose a variety of writers, including: Peter Kline, Kristin Ravel, Besty Snider, Kiki Vera Johnson, JS Walter, and Joseph Reich. I'd like to think we chose work that both shocks and delights. The poems here are about boners, shoes, egotism, and strange love.

That being said, my advice is chose your drink/ cigar / lawn chair / shady place of choice and read: www.shadysidereview.com

Online Literary Magazines as Clubhouses & Spotlighting

2010-07-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

What I like about the online venue is the freedom to go from one poet's/ writer's spot to the next. Each online literary journal is like a writer's clubhouse/ fort (this can go for print journals too, but one has to pay their "entry fee" as in subscription to get into print land-- something I am willing to do when I have a steady income or if I fall hard in love with a publication).

I've been looking at reading as play lately. Mostly because when I'm on the internet, I think of it as play, and this past month I've been reading a lot of online literary journals.

And even though, as a reader, it's really easy to get into the online literary clubhouse, it's still fun to be inside. I'd like to start spot-lighting some of the writers I've fallen upon through online journals.

First Spotlight

Whilst internetting this past week, one of my favorite emerging writers I've fallen upon is Melissa Broder. Her book, When You Say One Thing, but Mean Your Mother was released by Ampersand Books in Feb. 2010. The work I've read of hers on On Earth As it Is must be shared: I fell in love with lines like: "I believe god knows these things about me/ so I needn't say them with heart." (From Pennsylvania Prayer). And "She’s been/a bad babysitter. Deliver us/from Burger King with In Touch magazine" (From Prayer of Teenager Waifs).

I am also a fan of her piece on The Del Sol Review in which she again riffs on teenage magazines. I like Broder's work for this reason: it embraces pop culture, and (unlike a lot of the pieces I've been reading lately) she uses narrative while playing with inventive language. She's not trying to be avant garde in the wrong way and she knows how to depict angst as a bittersweet thing.

On the Book Purchase List

2010-07-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited about Sara Ries' new book, "Come In, We're Open," and here are the reasons why:

1.) Sara's poetry = very human. Her poems are like those security mirrors in pharmacies, constantly scanning people passing by or checking themselves out to see if everything is alright. And I like that.
2.) I haven't read the book in its entirety, but I read the manuscript as she worked on it at Chatham University. I like to know a little bit of what's behind the cover in also knowing I will be surprised by revisions and what I haven't read.
3.) I'm a huge fan of Sara's work. I can proudly say I was a part in publishing her in shady side review's issue 2, which can be read here: http://shadysidereview.com/i-want-my-city-to-find-me/

I really really can't wait to order my own copy, and when I do I will go here to do it: www.sararies.com
And you should too.

The Applicant

2010-07-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

In my recent move to Tyler, Texas I have found myself thinking about my past a lot. My poems have all been reflective pieces that look back.

The air conditioning in my car isn't working, which limits me to my feet, and my feet are mostly swollen. There also aren't many places to walk in the vicinity. My present is at stand still. And I've been experiencing what feels like ennui.

So, I've been applying to jobs. Any job. Recently I applied to The Bank of America for a bank teller position and I failed the personality section of the application. I drank a Rum & Coke to quell my rejected state. I wanted to smile politely and tell people to "have a nice life." (Some of my favorite Ben Folds lyrics.) I want a sense of placement.

In response to my complaint to the world, via facebook, my MFA mentor, Sheryl St. Germain, reminded me of Sylvia Plath's poem, "The Applicant." Listening to Plath's repetition of "will you marry it?" reminds me what it's like to be in customer service. In this search for a job and for placement I've forgotten how important it is to look at the present moment for poems. Rejection can be a good reminder of many things. (Thanks Sheryl. Thanks Sylvia.)

Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems

2009-11-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems evoke nostalgia: a nostalgia that strikes a vivid figure in time and place, Baca does not let in the grey haze that often times falls over memory. The reflection and environment illustrated are personal and informed by a distinct voice, but this does not alienate the reader, instead Baca reflects in an invitational manner.

Black Mesa Poems delves into and grazes across landscape, both internal and external, and as New Critical metaphors suggest, looking at each poem as a container, the reader finds the words as a crate that carries a large array of emotion and environment. The emotion seeps into the environment, the environment causes the emotion, reminding us we cannot separate what we feel from where we are, even when we are dreaming of escape. A dreamy tone sometimes seeps into these poems; an example of this is Main Character:

Red wine streaked
Blue sky and take-off smoke, /
Sizzled cowboys’ campfires, /
Dripped down barbwire, /
slogged the brave, daring scouts /
who galloped of to mesa buttes /
to speak peace with Apaches, /
and made the prairie /
lush with wine streams. /
When the movie /
was over, /
I squinted at the bright /
sunny street outside, /
looking for the main character. (35-36)

The blending of imagery here creates a sense of mental retreat, which works as a theme that appears and reappears throughout this collection. The leave the poet takes is often traditional as he escapes in nature, in poetry, through muses. Baca’s work has a traditional air to it; one might call him a Chicano Whitman. Baca utilizes crosshatched English, Spanish sentences to illustrate the people of his place. Similar to Whitman also in that he calls to mind the everyday lives of people joining and interconnecting. Both poets are not directly political, yet in focusing on community the message is clear: a beautiful world exists in the same place as ugly injustice. Celebration of individual comes out in all of this as well.

Baca’s El Sapo demonstrates the profound impact of losing a loved one—the reaction in this poem is to reminisce, to celebrate the life before death. The poem takes on the nostalgic tone mentioned earlier. Baca reflects on the life of a loved one in a romantic tone, yet one that tells the truth of El Sapo’s beauty and destruction.

He was robust, /
extravagant and extraordinary. /
Bred from tractor smoke and rows of tobacco, /
his laughter rustled deeply, /
corn leaves in windy afternoon, /
his exuberance for life /
flower-topped alfalfa opening to sun /
and harvesting blades. To him, good /
with bad. If you couldn’t take one, /
then don’t expect the other. /
He drank white liquor, /
left a jar on the porch a year. /
Spoke words full of fire, clean white fire from the heart, /
Made space glow with human radiance. (90)

El Sapo also serves as a good example of Baca’s confident use of familiar metaphor and devices. The poet risks the use of flowery language, yet the “heart” in his poetry always beats for the unexpected; “loneliness and love/ on the darkness” have their place as the poet combines the emotions with a “chalky pumice” of a man’s heart.

Without Black Mesa Poems, what do we know about America in the Southwest, but what we’ve experienced or imagined? Baca illustrates the dusty and raw reality of New Mexico in this collection, he takes us with him, gives us voz de la gente, gives us his preference for red chile over eggs; Baca presents poetry con duende, but never bombastically, only with manner.

Ai: Vice

2009-11-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

Being a human is scary: the memories that swell inside, the lives (other than our own) we carry within ourselves, the pulse of want, the pulse of power, fear, the want, the want, the want. Not only the want, but what happens because of it: a new invention of self-- a self that is just like any other, a self with flaws, a self that leaks need in all of its inky mess.

Ai's Vice poems delve deep into the throat of dark desire. These poems are secrets turned confession. The confessions are not the poet's alone, but instead the persona she invents or imagines, yet each voice plays as an extension of self, somehow. This extension of self happens in channeling a plethora of voices. A good bit of the voices in Ai's poems are unusually lurid, so sinister the reader wants to ask why.

Why a murderer? Why an evil priest? Why a child beater? I asked as I read, as my stomach turned, as I wanted to peer further into the poems, as it no longer mattered who wrote the poems as the voices within the verse began to echo, agonizing echoes. In the echoes, the voices bounced off of me, and I got why. It's in us. These monsters are part of every single person. We are the news we listen to, we are the stories we've heard. This is how self becomes everything surrounding.

Ai's use of voice creates setting; the persona in each piece illustrates not only character, but environment, and culture the same-- a good example of this is in The Hitchhiker:

We stop, and as she moves closer to me, my hands ache,/

but somehow, I get the blade in her chest./

I think a song: "Everybody needs somebody,/

everybody needs somebody to love,/

as the black numerals 35 roll out of her right eye/

inside one small tear." (14)

This poem has vivid enough language to play across a television screen. The voice of the perpetrator, the tear of the victim, the music he sings (why do I hear it crackly and on the radio?) takes us straight to the place, straight to the time; we can feel the car seat against our legs and remnants of the dry Arizona heat mixing in with the cool desert night.

Ai writes brave poetry: poetry with fear that doesn't fear, and she gets it right, but this collection isn't only about the boldness to say what hasn't been said. The collection works as a time travel machine too, a way for the poet to change history, to re-imagine history.

In Blue Suede Shoes (A Fiction) Ai tells her own Joe McCarthy story. And if ever a favorite baseball poem this one could be it for me-- because we are not at the game, but instead in the life after the game. And it hurts here: on this stoop where social class does its divide, and it hurts here where 1923 is no longer, and Joe just wants to be in the time when he was a golden boy. Damn, it stings in the yesterday, damn it stings:

Yesterday Bill comes by the hotel /

and he sits on the bed, but he can't relax. /

Uncle, he says, and points to my feet, /

All I ever wanted was this pair of blue suede shoes. (56)

And it just keeps stinging:

Remember Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road? /

There's no pot of gold at the end, /

but we keep walking that road, /

red-white-and blue ears of corn /

steaming out of our minds: America, /

the only thing between us /

and the Red Tide. (56)

In the same way that it's scary to be a human, it's scary to be an American. Ai's poetry examines this, this anomaly of being, existing in collective memory, invented memory, media memory, memory that is instilled in us. Her poetry demonstrates that we are everything that happens in history; when we read about a murder we become a murder; when we think about being a mother we are first woman, woman that is "born with Eve's sin between her legs, / and inside her." (67) Vice is about identity, examining oneself and pulling out the parts of others, and living with those others within us.

lucille clifton: good woman

2009-10-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

Humans be-- If I were only allowed to use two words to describe Lucille Clifton's poems those would be the two words: humans be, and maybe I would repeat them again, but not without some time and space between the first two times.

Clifton's poems make the reader simplify thought-- this isn't to say that her poetry is simple because it's not. However, the poet reveals that the world can be told with minimalistic language. Clifton's verse makes all other literature appear verbose, yet she possesses story-telling qualities as much as she does poetic, and she tells stories that can be dived into and swam around in. Her sparse verse illustrates that we can't let what appears to be shallow water fool us; we must know that we can't always see when water gets deeper-- sometimes it just drops off.

Lucille Clifton's collected works, good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980, contains unshakeable re-envisions of religious, mythological, and social texts. The poetry here is small enough in size to have been made from magnetic poetry, and if we can imagine Clifton using magnetic poetry for the entire book, the refrigerator would only have to be about 100 feet high. This is how her poems ask to be read: side by side and on one plane. The pieces interact with each other in extremely complicated ways, and flipping from one page makes less sense than would a refrigerator on the ceiling; Clifton's poems might be stared up at and and read one at at time. This Clifton poetry magnet-ing is all very logical as the poems are a cover for what stores nourishment.

Let's start with a song of mary:

somewhere it being yesterday.

i, a maiden in my mother's house.

the animals silent outside.

is morning.

princes sitting on thrones in the east

studying the incomprehensible heavens.

joseph carving a table somewhere

in another place.

i watching my mother.

i smiling an ordinary smile. (201)

Reading Clifton's persona poems happens seamlessly, no stopping to think about how the poet channelled Mary's voice, no wondering if this is Mary speaking. The broken language provides an archaic mood, and the small details a setting as vivid as a plastic manger scene (but without the mass produced feel). mary's song explores a religious figure's reflections. The speaker, Mary, remembers a yesterday before stars and light and visions from God became her life. She distances herself from the symbol of the animals, religious philosophers, and even her husband in order to travel back into her past where she is "watching her mother," and enjoying an ordinary moment. The poet explores the act of happiness or contentment as occurring in the most banal of moments.

Clifton's "Mary poems" delve deep into the psychology of the figure, illustrating the way that stars and prophecy begin to haunt her, the way that light becomes her, the way "light beyond sun and words of a name and a blessing" (198) permeate even her dreams.

Whereas in the "Kali poems," Clifton keeps a distance by moving in and out of third person, and in this way the poems are less of a meditation and more of a series of investigations. The theme of fear creates commonality between the "Kali poems" and "Mary poems." In the "Mary poems" the poet explores fear as it pierces the thoughts of Mary, whereas in the "Kali poems" the poet demonstrates fear of the goddess: a fear seeped in Kali's all-knowingness-- this is demonstrated in the coming of Kali.

it is the black God, Kali,

a woman God and terrible

with her skulls and breasts.

i am one side of your skin,

she sings, softness is the other,

you know you know me well, she sings,

you know you know me well.

running Kali off is hard.

she is persistent with her

black terrible self. she

knows laces in my bones

i never sings about but

she knows i know them well,

she knows.

she knows. (135)

A person could run amok with explication on this poem as it makes commentary on race, the body, identity-- all this in 15 lines, all this and a foreboding sense of the fate of being known by God. Being known, by a higher force, means being known as a figure in time. The poem approaches the inescapable reality that while humans are familiar with the forces of change and time, yet when we question our existence, we have a lost sense of control. We cannot control what is within, the "laces in our bones," the internal reality becomes a part of the ultimate reality that is Kali. Clifton's use of repetition in this piece haunts the page until knowledge transforms to a ghost.

The sensation of being haunted holds prevalence in good woman. The characters linger. The lingering effect stems from constant use of sensory detail. Sensory sticks on the skin in this poet's work. As in miss rosie who is "wrapped up like garbage/ sitting , surrounded by the smell/ of too old potato peels." (19) or the implied sound of a television in willie b (2) "today is mama's birthday/ and i'm gone get her that tv/ out of old steinhart's store. (41)

Voice and the channelling of voices makes good woman. Clifton teaches culture in her poetry-- she reminds us that we are not only ourselves, but we are made up of of culture, ourself is our culture. Ourself is religion or knowledge of it, ourself is the history that makes itself difficult to embrace, but we must delve into such knowledge in order to understand ourselves. Her poetry reminds us "to be," but not to forget what we are being.

Olga Broumas: Beginning With O

2009-09-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

"O"-pression is no longer Over me, Oh
(Alix Dobkin-- Amazon ABC)

To begin with "O" we must rearrange the alphabet and change the convention of language that we are used to. To surpass "A" and all that follows means to take a different route, one that is unfamiliar, one that starts in the middle of something. This "middle of something" in Olga Broumas' first collection of poetry is a series of walking in on "O" and her lover in bed. Luckily we are readers and not a mother or sister or better an awkward stranger getting assigned to the wrong hotel room. Stapled as a "Sapphic" collection we can expect that personal matters are going on in the pages ( but really all poetry does this-- it leads us into a door that was left unlocked; we come to expect it).

Broumas' Beginning with O swells with personal affairs made universal. The poet presents a collection that starts at a central location: at the Greek sea. Readers are led into her heritage by traveling into her past from the get-go with the opening/ epilogue poem Sometimes, as a child, "when the Greek sea/ was unexceptionally calm/ the sun not so much a pinnacle." (I) The street that leads into Greek history starts here (funny enough, the word "street" comes from the Latin, "getting laid." Funny because Broumas is constantly exploring with the notion of language and its roots in this collection, and the poet certainly visits "getting laid" in these poems, but it goes further than that).

The poet chain links female fairytale characters and Greek goddesses to deconstruction. We are told to reconsider the man-made architecture of language. Broumas first pushes the idea of freedom of language as a vehicle for freedom of sexuality in Demeter. "Dependence... the male/ poet said, that touchstone/ of happiness." (21) She mocks, just a little. But the poem gets heavier when the shutters, drawers, and cupboard doors remind her of open graves. These domestic images are both gateways and ways of surrendering to death. Sexton, Plath, Woolf, and Rich are also referred to in this poem as having the "tears of a mother grieving/ a mortal child." (21) An agonizing theme that propels this collection is the call for motherhood and the inability to pro-create as a lesbian; birth and re-birth (of all things) are constant going-on in this collection.

The following exert of Artemis asks readers to think of giving birth to a new sense of language: as social and political voice.

I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me. I keep the goat.

for more than pastoral reasons. I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat

an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whose significance stirs in me
like a curviform alphabet
that defies

decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with O, the O-
mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound. (23)

What Broumas tells me to consider: language does not have to be a patriarchal trap. Language can be converted into a portal for whatever world asks to be imagined or had. For this collection language is passion and "we must find words/ or burn." (24) Meaning that if women do not use a revision of a male-centered construction, we may as well go down with the institution.

Beginning with O is a collection that doesn't allow readers to go down with anything: Broumas' use of fluid and ethereal language and landscape keeps us floating. The danger in floating for too long, however, is losing track of the space between the ground and your feet.

Reviewer, Sue Russell, makes a good point in her critique of the collection "A Yale Younger, Now Older," she writes, "As with any artist with such a propensity for experiment, there is a risk that readers may not always appreciate the more esoteric elements, that the poems may not be as much fun for us to read as they were for the poet to create with her friends."

The poet does risk using "bedroom gossip," and the reader can feel left behind in certain ways, elements of the story can appear muffled at times. Especially in Beauty and the Beast during which I couldn't stop wondering if the reference to the fairytale was simply used as a platform for what the poet really wanted to say: a platform that read literary reference, but did not attest to the same passion of the original story. I was left with an unsettled feeling from this one, unlike the other fairy tale poems which made me feel like, "hey, this is an interesting new version that questions more than I would have ever thought to question."

Beginning with O asks readers to maneuver around streets to reach bedposts; to open doors that have moaning behind them; to think desire; to shift in time. This collection, so appropriately titled, makes readers sigh, "Oh" over and over, sometimes in reaction to passion, sometimes from repetitive imagery. Whatever the "O" it comes from the mouth (or, well... you know where).

Ed Ochester: Unreconstructed

2009-09-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I was visiting my family in California. One morning I was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee; the television was on low, stationed at CNN. My cousin, Marc, came into the room and we both stared in a half-daze at the television. The talking heads (politicos) were saying their thing, and we were falling into the drone of their voices. Marc suddenly shouted, "AMERICA, AMERICA, AMERICA," in a strange southern drawl. We both proceeded to laugh. The moment was perfectly fitting and perfectly absurd.

I thought of my cousin's words after reading Ed Ochester's "Unreconstucted," and I laughed once more. The humor in my cousin's response to CNN was the same kind of humor in Ochester's poetry. The kind I love: unexpected and a little poke-fun (at the state of things). The poet asks his reader to consider what America is. For a cheat-sheet see Alicia Ostriker's blurb on the back of the book that reads: "Ed Ochester has his thumb on the American pulse and his ear tuned to the American voice-- in all its urban-suburban-backyard-backwoods-rust belt-ad-agency and Hollywood inspired dreaming and folly."

Ochester not only asks us to question what America(n) is, instead he tells us what he thinks it is, his poetry talks to his readers about his perception of his country; he is a poet whose verse has conversational quality, not chit-chatty-over-the-fence conversation, but rather a sit-down-on- a- couch-bar stool- bench- your choice of rear-end- rest-conversation. And his verse tells us to be ready to be seated because there's a lot to listen to, yet the whole time that we are with him in conversation we are reminded of solitude. We are really sitting alone somewhere and falling into his solitude. The first poem in the collected works tells us this is going to happen, in The Origin of Myth, we get:

One reads

and perhaps believes almost anything
when one has lived alone for a while. (3)

Ochester tells us right away: this is my solitude, these words, and I'm giving them to you, but what I say may be distorted because being alone can alter reality; and what we read essentially permeates us (for a short while). We believe what we read when we are alone because it is our only way to be with the external world. This piece sets up the reader for the entire collection, it says: look, here I am telling you about myself, and how much of myself is made up of all that surrounds.

News media, music, film, literature, political history, the people we know and love = what it means to be an American. In Ochester's selection of New Poems, this is particularly true. The poet does not skim these topics, but rather peruses, and rides with the big belly reality that we are what we eat. And do I love the lines in Rewinding the Cassette of Fear City that read, "Times Square as/ electric Eden festooned with neon jellybeans,/anything is possible." (6) Ochester takes the neon and makes it candy, revealing that we are always trying to sweeten things, which is how he prepares us that "we're ready to begin again/ the essential American story."(6)

Poem by poem the poet reveals that the essential American story is also the essential everything story: reflections on war, religion, language, and how all of these components shape our present-day reality. Ochester's poetry too illustrates that Americans are not only made up of what we read and what we see, but also what beats within: somehow escaping a societal dream, and creating our own dream/ vision.

Unreconstructed made me want to try an experiment. Because I read it through a literary lens I was accepting of the writer's allusions, and mostly amused by the name drops (ie: Dylan Thomas, David Lehman, O'Hara) however, I would like to see how a casual reader (not so used to modernist tendencies) would read Ochester's work. I wonder if the weight of these allusions is taken away by the reference to pop-culture and the everyday experience of driving passed a Burger King. I would like to have a conversation on this book with an un-booky person, mostly because I was in love with Ochester's bold and humorous exploration of writer's identity, and I wonder if I was distracted by that love.

One piece in particular that had my heart going was On A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing:

Christ, while we thought each thud of our typewriters
was tough enough to puncture hearts
you heard America snapping its gum (34).

Here the poet says: this is what it's like to have someone try to make you disillusioned, don't believe it. We are what we are: what we listen to just as much as what we don't hear or digest. Yet, the poetry is not always so big, it also gives small ideas to think on, why do we give into the convenience of going to Roy Rogers and taking a few extra tomato slices in a napkin as in Packing Lunch. This is my favorite piece of the collection as it moves from the fantasy of eating fancy foods to the French and Indian wars, to Proust, to the poet making his father sick by riding on a roller coaster too many times. This poem truly reveals what identity is: a collection of memory, knowledge, family, and making all of the above mean something in a larger context.

Unreconstructed uncovers a lot; this collection of poetry pulls back the sheets that cover the horror of America. Yet the poet makes sure that the reader finds funny little things (like "two pillows in pants") in the place of dark images, which is Ochester's way of playing funny. His poetry reveals that when we are faced with terror, the best thing to do is laugh.

Anne Sexton: Transformations

2009-09-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

Anne's Sexton's Transformations gave me the idea that every poem is a little toy: a plaything for its readers. I wanted to be a bad reader and put the toys in my mouth, careful not to swallow the words, but to let them roll on my tongue and against my cheeks; I wanted Sexton's language to bump around my teeth the way that small plastic bits of a Lego castle would if I shoved them between my lips.

It's no wonder I felt this way as the mouth is the most important of all body parts in fairy tales, and Sexton proves this in her revisionary poems as she retells the kiss, the themes of consumption, the imagery of food as both pleasureful and painful, the poisons that put the lovelies of these stories to sleep.

This collection is both disturbing and delicious; the poetry didn't leave me with one specific type of hunger, but it did have me thinking about ingestion, not only because of the food imagery that often appears in the tales that the poet re-tells, but also because in a lot of ways Anne Sexton must have taken each original story in: bite by bite in order to digest and then creatively regurgitate them.

The fairy tales that Sexton turns into poems in Transformations mostly stay true to the Grimm version, but what the poet brings in the re-telling of the tales are similes and metaphors that any writer would want to steal, IE: "They are tender as bog moss" from Rapunzel or the stanza from Iron Hans that I wish I could put in my pocket and claim as my own:

***

Take a boy on a bridge.

One hundred feet up. About to jump,

thinking: This is my last ball game.

This time it's a home run.

Wanting the good crack of the bat.

Wanting to throw his body away

like a corn cob.

And you'll move off.

***

Sexton reminds us that fairy tales are dark business, and that play-things are sometimes demented ways of re-creating life. The fear in these fairy tales comes from events that lead up to looming deaths, murder, loneliness, or great big want. The poet fools around with these themes in a way that almost becomes something like poking fun. This poking fun is most vividly demonstrated in Sexton's version of Cinderella, when she uses the repetitive end line of "that story." Every story is the same, isn't it? Sexton asks, but what tone does she use? Is it a sarcastic tone? Or does she ask a sincere question? I'd say a little of both.

When I was talking to my poet-friend about the book he posed a question along the same lines as the one posed above. He asked if Sexton is following the fairy tales so closely to their original context, how do the poems re-invent the fairy tales? "They don't," I told him, "At least I don't think they do." But what they do is to reiterate that storytelling is an ageless tradition; in this tradition we find that the elements are all based in similar foundations and emulsified by similar components: hopes, dreams, love, revenge, power. Each component represents some kind of rubber another a kind of glue. I told my friend that what I think Sexton does is to prove that language is the larger component that brings everything together: that the same old story is a different story when given a different body and a different voice.

Sexton uses the body of a poem for these tales in order to reveal that an attention to language makes a fresh version. Transformations is an experimentation with narrative in this way. The same old stories are embedded in every writer's creative process, but what makes each writers' version new or different is attention to voice and tone.

Sexton's voice tells her readers of "long, long ago" tales in a way that blends time together while also calling to mind that the poems were published in the 70's. Her Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs begins: "No matter what life you lead/ the virgin is always a lovely number." She uses such little premeditations to the verse to add flavor and give something of her own perspective to the old story. This method makes the poems all the more like playthings. My favorite of Sexton's premeditation belongs to Rumpelstiltskin which begins, "Inside many of us/ is a small old man/ who wants to get out." In both poems the poet plays with the topic of sexuality, which lassoed me in at the first lines.

Sexton does the opposite of what Disney did: she paid no mind to the idea of G-rating for her version of the fairy tales, but that's not to say that she is always straight forwardly lewd, no instead, she mostly slips the perversity in the way that one might add more sugar to tea that is not sweet enough: somewhat subtly dropping in the cubes, one by one. A good example of this is in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs when she writes, "The dwarfs, those little hot dogs, walked three times around Snow White, the sleeping virgin." In some cases Sexton does tell a down-right "steamy" version, as in The Little Peasant: "Touch me, my pancake, and make me young." Or in The Maiden Without Hands, "He wanted to lap her up like strawberry preserve."

Transformations is a collection that embraces the dark side that breaths inside the same old story; it embraces the dark side and laughs with it, deep heavy laughs-- laughs that stem from what? The absurdity of a make-believe life. Yes, these poems are little toys that keep us both entertained, and just a little scared of what past lives we might find in them.

If I could talk to Medusa: a reaction to the discussion from Tuesday's poetry class

2009-09-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

I'd tell her that I know that she didn't look this this. That caricatures are always off. Then I'd get a little serious: I'd say that I'm sorry that they drained her body of one side of its blood. It's embarrassing that anyone would demonize anyone else for sexiness. I'd tell her that it's okay to cause a boner-- no shame in that. I'd stop myself and ask her: is that what they meant about you turning men to stone? I'd hope that we'd laugh together.

I wouldn't ask her if she was wearing a short skirt when she was raped or if she knew that the sickest of people would say that she might have deserved it. But I'd want to know the answer, and to stop myself from asking, I'd put a book in my mouth. And I'd keep it there until she told me to take it out.

I'd ask her if she knows what Freud said about her representing all that is taboo. I'd say, "Are you really the mature female genitals?" and "Were those snakes your missing female penis?" I'd hope that we'd laughed together over this too.

I would thank her for serving as a symbol of creative and artistic vision. I'd ask her if the story was true: that when she looked at the grass in the sea, did she turn to coral? Does she believe that we can kill things into art? I'd ask her if she thought that art is a small death--la petite mort? I'd say do you think that art is like an orgasm-- a place where the world stops?

I'd tell her that people say her story is the story of what happened to women's voices for so many years: her story is a symbol for silence, stillness. I'd tell her, I'm sure she knows this. I'd ask her if she knew how many poems she was the cause of. Then I'd read her my favorite parts of Sylvia Plath's "Medusa."

***

In any case, you are always there,

Tremulous breath at the end of my line,

Curve of water upleaping,

To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,

Touching and sucking.

***

I'd ask her what it's like to be part of so many women, but not without being nervous about looking her in the eye.