December 2009
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A short list of things that happened to me in the...
I wore graduation robes twice. I poured tea for Harold Bloom and took his phone calls at 6 a.m. I did a full circumnavigation of the globe and saw Jackie Chan in a Hong Kong nightclub. I had guns drawn on me at the CIA headquarters. I read a lot of things that changed me. I forced 11th grade kids to love Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan. I fought with the irrational parts of my mind every day. And...
Dallas = Poor Digestion
"Double," by Rae Armantrout
So these are the hills of home. Hazy tiers nearly subliminal. To see them is to see double, hear bad puns delivered with a wink. An untoward familiarity. Rising from my sleep, the road is more and less the road. Around that bend are pale houses, pairs of junipers. Then to look reveals no more.
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Dear whoever was charging things to my credit card from Russia: I hope you try to buy a coat but you can’t because I shut down my account this morning and you freeze to death
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Interiors (Rilke) →
Via The Paris Review, sixteen of twenty numbered sections from a piece composed by Rilke in 1898 (when he was 22) and never published in his lifetime.
That’s how it always is. People would sooner weave their dreams deep into the linens than let them grow up next to them into a life without enough sun for them to ripen. When you near your end, you leave your dreams behind in small and seemingly...
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Letters To Santa Written By Shakespeare Characters
jpjs28:
Santa!
I had this crazy dream that I ate your reindeer. But then this morning your face appeared in a puddle of maple syrup. So I licked you up.
— Falstaff
oh, mcsweeney’s.
“I said, why don’tcha KISS her instead of TALKING her to death?”
– man on porch in “It’s A Wonderful Life”
Christmas Week: White Christmas (1954)
My take on the perfect Christmas musical.
filmosophy:
WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED
by Elizabeth Wilcox
As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce, and Al Pacino is in the rain,...
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Jeanette Winterson on the Patricia Highsmith... →
I think I want to read this book. Also, I like the description of obsession being “focused but not linear.” That rings pretty true.
(and who says it’s “not attractive” to be “manipulative, self-destructive, secretive and obsessive”?)
“The women poets I know are beginning to understand feminism as a sly term that...”
– Eileen Myles, via the Poetry Foundation
I love this description of feminism - Myles describes it not as a rigid set of rules but as a “moving abstract”, a constantly evolving way of looking at and interacting with the world.
(via thebronzemedal)
(via poetbabble)
Eileen Myles is awesome. And yes,...
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“For me, poetry has no point in existing if it’s not to be a prompt or aid to...”
– John Kinsella
Poems can stop bulldozers.
“The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who...”
– James Meek (via)
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Times I am NOT dreaming of a white Christmas:
when it’s about to happen in my hometown & is threatening to fuck up my travel plans.
A Conversation Between a Soldier and a Poet →
Carol Muske-Dukes (Poet Laureate of California, and an awesome teacher) begins an exchange with Lt. Colonel Edward Ledford about poetry, war, cynicism, Hamlet, and courage.
“In Hamlet’s view, the conscience with which he is dealing threatens to make him a coward, not a hero — he turns away from the unknown. So, given Hamlet’s words as a backdrop, you ask, “Where do...
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Now there is a door and whoever very beautiful and very very strange. Near you a table. Laughing. Singing. Calling to one another, the crack of whips. Cloud to cloud in ricochet. Music of hooves and wheels. The heavenly Jerusalem from shards of Babylon destroyed. Now a door. Where thinking ends, house and temple echo, possible objects of admiration. Will you go?
_________
From Transcendental...
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poetbabble:
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
"Everything," by A.R. Ammons
found on the back of an envelope from Helen Vendler, 1.28.1981
You came one day and as usual in such matters significance filled everything— your eyes, the things you knew, the way you turned, leaned, stood, or sat, this way or that: when you left, the area around here rose a tilted tide, and everything that offers desolation drained away.
________
Published in the Paris Review, Issue 165, 2003
Found Poetry
From the end of an email written by Chris’s mom (original formatting):
See you soon Santa’s been here and left lots of goodies
Christa
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chriscantwell:
Los Angeles tap water ranks 83rd among water supply of the 100 most populous U.S. cities, containing chemical levels well over EPA standards.
Okay, so, things people have told me today: I can’t eat fish, because the mercury will kill me. I can’t drink tap water, because the chemicals will kill me. Soy milk will fuck up my estrogen or something, and concerned...
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Five Excerpts From Poetry Books I Read in 2009...
1. From Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson (1998) He had dreamed of thorns. A forest of huge blackish-brown thorn trees where creatures that looked like young dinosaurs (yet they were strangely lovely) went crashing through underbrush and tore their hides which fell behind them in long red strips. He would call the photograph “Human Valentines.”
2. From The World Doesn’t End,...
Patience and Doubt (more travelogue by Jessica... →
Friend/colleague Jess Piazza guest blogging over at Best American Poetry!
“For us, waiting for poetry will always be better than forward motion toward anything else.”
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Why is it that I mostly only feel inspired to write when I’m already 1/2 a bottle of wine in & I know whatever I turn out tonight will need heavy revising?
Letters of Note →
poetbabble:
Letters of Note is a terrific site that, in its own words, is “an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.”
(i.e., the wormhole I will be in should you need me…)
Yes.
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A pulse asset with glorious visions, the green river flown out of the cave, an enormous hammer making from pulp some distinct love (as say, the Swiss for their snow). A great discretion. When the tenure committee said au revoir I was, understandably, miffed. Now with you here and your little dog I can lecture all night long, and then scrape my teeth on your thigh. A candle burned down my...
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Frank O’Hara reads “Poem (Lana Turner...
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