Wash the Fingers Off His Hands / Glen

It is rather curious when
you consider the fact
that all 3 of
them disappeared on the same
day. They
are slowly being replaced.
This is a fact. Mama
Cass died when she
choked
on a ham sandwich. This
may or may not be
a
fact. Yester-
day a stainless steel
scrubbing device appeared next
to the sink, and
today, when I arrived
home after work, I
discovered that
someone
had left a hand towel on
the faucet.

What, Happening

Can you hear the
14 or 13,
man?
Traffic is often
slow, it moves
slow / has a
slow pulse, exhibits
slow tendencies.
You
could
do something about it or
say, "Fuck it.
Furniture - I'll get
naked too."
The implication is that
certain movements have space allotted
for the unforeseen:
you can't know what will happen to time,
it would ruin the forum.
as "What / what
I say
vs.
what / what
happens or
happens."

What is not important.
The key is the link.

All Kinds of Things

answers
the
phone:
"are you asleep?" Come back
from the other
side
of the world. The last train comes
at 9. What I think it
is is not
important. We should have
all kinds of
things. I'm thinking
earlier. When I get to
where
I'm going I
thought that an attorney
would
know all about it. You
see, I'm here now. I am
on
the bus.

Detroit Face

She said she hadn't
worn it
in a long time
and she was searching
the pockets
for money; instead,
she found a photograph
of a
dead
fish.

When There Was Nothing Else To Eat, It Made A Little More Sense

I.

They truly are
really excellent
sneakers. Even the Pope wears
them. Keep smoking your
cigarette if you don't
believe me.


II.

Every forest stops.
That's where I get off -
it's like you'll be able to
cut through the
summer up there;
it's a different ending,
mung beans were not ____ for this
(a dollar fifty for everybody)
.
It takes forever to get to
all of them except
for 2.

The Core Apple

His brilliant shine it
was terms I could not
explain. It was
the closest thing to
only as people would
as a construct
his writing is
beyond no comparison
ever to
feeling no none it's
his good stuff the juvenile
book 1,000 pages
it's part of the
concept I'm not
going to explain
anymore. To me, I was
it's not
there's hands down
years ago he killed himself
apparently he couldn't
deal with the fact
that he couldn't ever talk
to anybody he does
not have detractors.
None.

The Space Between Real Life & Manipulated Text

One aspect of "Writing Down The Bones" I really appreciated was the emphasis on the importance of writing as a regular practice. As much as I appreciate the feedback and instruction that I receive in writing classes, one of the things I appreciate the most about taking a class is the fact that it forces me to put words on paper. It is difficult, without the parameters of various exercises or the benefit of feedback, to remain motivated, at times, to write. This is a problem I've had with keeping a journal in the past. While, at times, it feels very therapeutic to write and I can appreciate the psychological benefits of the act, there are other times when it is extremely difficult to find inspiration without direction of some sort.

This blog has helped to provide an impetus to write, if mostly in the form of reactions to various reading, and I hope to continue it after the class (although I plan to remove content that is not poetry, short prose, recipes, shopping lists, or essays (i.e. the responses)).

Recently, I had an extra credit assignment for a physics class that consisted of writing a 5-page paper by hand. I chose to write the paper in cursive. While my my penmanship had decayed dramatically from years of neglect, it was interesting to note that I still remembered the shapes of all of the cursive characters. It was like the familiar analogy of riding a bike: once I was on, it felt like I had never stopped writing in cursive. This is a suitable analogy for my relationship with the written word in general. This class has helped to get me back on the bike and reminded me of how fun and rewarding the ride is.

on DON'T LET ME BE LONELY

DON'T LET ME BE LONELY is a record of Claudia Rankine's experiences in a specific geographical location (the United States of America) during a specific point in time (the beginning of the twenty-first century). The book begins with the author reminiscing about a time "when no one I knew well had died." Rankine goes on to examine death, its representation in popular media, and various anecdotes relating to death. In the next section of the book (distinguished by a photograph of a static-covered television), the author begins by remarking, "I leave the television on all the time." She reports a dialogue she has heard on the television concerning death - how a young man (a juvenile offender) responds to an interviewer, when asked if someone (it is never specified whom) is dead, that the person "is dead to me." This exchange results in some confusion for the interviewer as the young man repeatedly states that the person is dead to him (in an emotional context - whether or not the person is physically dead is of little consideration to the young man).

Themes regarding life and death are evident throughout this book: we can find them in the author's examination of the life and death of hope, medicine and hospitals, film and television, the work of various writers, and (then-)current events. This is very much a book about figuring out one's place in the world (and trying to make sense of this position). As determining one's position has much to do with determining the position of other entities, the importance of these interactions with said entities is also prevalent in this book. It is interesting that the author often references the medium of television (often seen as a cold, impersonal means of interpersonal communication) throughout the text. The author also discusses loneliness in the context of interacting with others. At one point, she states "loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness."

Near the end of the book, Ranice discusses the act of shaking someone's hand - how it is an act of asserting one's presence as much as it is a submission of one's self to another. According to the author, the transient nature of the balance between the two has "everything to do with being alive."

on TOTAL ECLIPSE

TOTAL ECLIPSE relates the story of a journey to a city in Washington "near Yakima" where the author, Annie Dillard, has traveled (with her husband, Gary Clevidence) to view a solar eclipse. Within the essay, the author speaks of the expectations she has about the eclipse and her experience viewing a partial eclipse in 1970; however, midway through the essay she explains that a partial eclipse "bears almost no relation to a total eclipse." She continues by explaining that witnessing a partial eclipse "bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane." Within the story, the author's anticipation of the event turns to a form of grief (or even shame, perhaps (the images of the spectators "streaming down the hillsides", driving away in their cars, and never looking back hints that such an emotion may be shared)). Indeed, the human spectators (or, at the very least, the author) in this essay are humbled by the experience of the solar eclipse; despite having the advantages of modern technology and ideologies, they are still in awe of the magnificence of this natural occurrence ("From all the hills came screams," the author writes).

One of the difficult things with producing an essay that is a meditation on one's reaction to a specific phenomenon (and its emotional resonance) is keeping readers' attentions throughout the piece (it could be argued that keeping readers' attention is an important consideration when engaging in any type of writing). This seemed to be a problematic issue when we were discussing the essay in class. I would agree that this essay does seem to meander a bit. The author spends a considerable amount of space exploring seemingly mundane details (a painting in her hotel room of a bald clown's head made out of vegetables, the contents of a roadside diner, the hues that she experiences during the eclipse) in her journey to relate this story. In the end, however, this is still a moving piece of writing that reflects the author's struggle to make sense of her (and our) place in the natural world around us.

LISTS

There are a number of the essays we're looking at in our Creative Writing class whose forms share certain characteristics with lists. For example, "Door No. Five" presents what sound like chapters from a book (or, perhaps numerous books): the first paragraph is composed of concepts/objects/places/sentient beings whose names begin with the letter "M". The next paragraph concerns ideas that begin with the letter "N", then "O", and, finally, a section of "P" groupings. The author of "NOTES TOWARD THE MAKING OF A WHOLE HUMAN BEING" also organizes the information within the essay into one long list of actions, events, and places (in the form of a complete sentence). "Things To Do Today" is also literally a list of actions, some of which are more abstract than others. As I mentioned in a previous post, the versatility of the essay is, for me, one of the most attractive qualities of this form: it can take many different shapes, the list being only of them.

One Person's Party is Another's Cannibal Blood Festival

One aspect of the essay that I've always enjoyed is the versatility of the form. Within the essay packet that we're using this semester, one can find several different types of essays - some that read like short stories ("Red: An Invocation", "Mint Snowball") or monologues ("Sunday"), while others ("Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird") have the feeling of a scholarly research paper. These, in and of themselves, are only a sampling of the various elements that span the form. Other types of essays include political manifestos, literary criticisms, and different examples of argumentative writing. An essay may take the form of prose or verse; it is flexible in many respects.

"Red: An Invocation" involves a series of recollections situated around a disparate allusion to Donner Pass, the infamous route through the northern Sierra Nevada mountains which is named after a party of 81 Californian-bound emigrates who, according to some reports, resorted to cannibalism after they were stranded by a snow storm for some months. This is, at times, a playful piece - the narrator is constantly correcting their own choice of vocabulary as they meditate on the cyclic nature of life and death via a scene involving a fox and a hawk.

In "Sunday" the narrator uses the context of food to examine race relations in the United States. The essay itself gives the impression of a monologue; the language is somewhat colloquial and the the lack of indentation or quotation marks when dialogue is used add to this effect. It is a beautifully written piece with lots of sensory details (the descriptions of the food are especially visceral) and descriptive passages that lead amazing to an incredibly poignant and powerful conclusion.

The title of "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird" gives the impression that the piece will be, in some part, didactic. It is, in fact, not, but it is an informative piece, full of information pertaining to hummingbirds. Diane Ackerman writes of their history and various behaviors before exploring an anecdote concerning the novelist Jeanne Mackin. Ackerman goes on to explain some of the relationships between hummingbirds and vanilla bean cultivation, and attempts to perhaps explore larger ideas of the relationships between various entities that co-exist in nature.

While these essays may present information in different ways, each is similar in that it is trying to present information that is intended to make the reader contemplate their relationship to the world around them.

on TRANSLATION & NO THRU STREET

Renee Gladman's collection, Juice, consists of four short stories (or prose poems, depending on who you ask). The two that will be discussed and compared in this blog entry are "Translation" and "No Through Street."

Both stories address leaving a geographical location and returning to it to find said location changed in very remarkable ways - the narrator of Translation returns to their hometown to find it abandoned, the narrator in No Through Street returns to a city they have a close association with to find it transformed by the fame that their sister attracted by painting street signs. While the tale of someone leaving an area, transforming in some way, and returning is one of the oldest archetypal stories we know, these tales have a very unique feel that is largely a result of the author's style of storytelling. There is a very ethereal quality to this type of writing, which leaves the reader (or at least this reader) with the notion that these stories are dealing more with the subconscious level of our existence than the conscious realm. Indeed, there is a surreal quality to these tales that leads me to suspect that they are, indeed, explorations of much larger issues of culture and identity than the simple telling of stories. Perhaps much of this sensation is due to the fact that the narrators of the stories themselves are struggling to make sense of the changes that have occurred in regards to their proximity to the cultures they identify with: the narrator in “Translation” cannot recollect where they went to when everyone disappeared; in “No Through Street” the narrator wakes up outside of a hotel one year after leaving her hometown with “only water where memory should be.”

One of the very remarkable qualities that both of these stories share is that there is no evidence to suggest that any of the action that is described by the respective narrator of each tale has ever actually taken place (in the context of the stories themselves). While this may apply to any narrative that we don't witness ourselves in the physical world, it rings especially true in these stories. In the second paragraph of "Translation" the narrator states that "Most people have not heard of my town; even those with imagination will deny it." On the last page of “No Through Street” the narrator remarks that they have “given up the long-awaited homecoming;” whether the narrator is actually asserting that they never returned to the town or whether they are speaking to the fact that the woman who is alleged to be their sister claims to have never heard of them is unclear.

There is an interesting passage in “No Through Street” where the narrator talks about how a couple who were long-time neighbors of hers moved out after the “consuming crowds” that followed her sister’s fame arrived in town. The narrator states that the couple “left behind them an emptiness that caused panic in those remaining.” This feels somewhat comparable to the emptiness that the narrator from “Translation”, who survives on “sex and leaves,” must deal with. While both of these stories concern characters who have become separated from their families and culture, the narrator from "Translation" is attempting to preserve the aspects of their community that they find agreeable as opposed to the narrator from "No Through Street" who, by the end of the story, has abandoned the town once again (or perhaps never returned at all). They refer to the train as being "smart" for moving with "so many destinations that it essentially has none." There is also a great deal of emphasis placed on movement in the two pieces. After the narrator of “No Through Street” reads about the media frenzy engulfing her hometown, they are unable to move east and west for a number of days. Indeed, they are “unable to board a train in any direction.” In “Translation” the narrator is waiting for the return of their peers, unwilling to move as they are certain of the return of the society to which they belong.

To write only about the conceptual aspects of these pieces would be a huge disservice to the aesthetic qualities of the work. My feeling is that both of these pieces function as well as they do thanks heavily to the striking minimalism and the ethereal tone (mentioned earlier) that the author invokes. The space between ideas or moments in these stories serves them well as the narrators in each piece struggle with the emptiness around them (the abandoned city, the trains where the narrator can only view other people's lives). In my opinion, the form of these stories (or prose poems) are as important as the content.

What;'s your beef with adverbs, Janet?

It is interesting to read the section from Burroway's "Writing Fiction" entitled "Prose Rhthym." Perhaps the most interesting quality of this portion of the text is the author's apparent ambivalence towards rhythm in prose writing.

Burroway states, in reference to prose writing, that "on the whole the rhythm is all right if it isn't clearly wrong." She states that rhythm can be wrong if the "cadence contradicts the meaning" - she provides an example of a piece where the rhythm doesn't work, a piece depicting a lazy day on a river. The selection contains several short sentences, which feel rather abrupt. She goes on to rearrange the piece, using longer sentences to extend the cadence and give the work a more leisurely rhythm (which works better with the content of the selection), but then goes on to add that there is "nothing very striking about the rhythm of this version." My problem with her "if it's not broke, don't fix it" attitude is that, for many people, rhythm is something that is not inherent. Like many other elements of writing, it is an aspect which must be practiced. Burroway comments at the beginnging of this section that novelists and short-story writers do not need to concern themselves with the relationship between sense and sound in the same way that poets do. While, I would agree that rhythm is one of the most primary elements in poetry, I would argue that its importance in effective prose writing is not something that should be disregarded. Certainly, the idea that rhythm is something that only poets need to concern themselves with seems highly problematic. There are several prose writers I can think of who would appear to be extremely concerned with rhythm. Their awareness of rhythm informs their literary works in very noticeable and striking ways and is a large component of their personal style of writing.

on ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS A MERCEDES-BENZ

I've often enjoyed the brevity that Natalie Goldman exercises in the book "Writing Down the Bones." This shouldn't be taken the wrong way. What I mean to express is that her chapters are short and, most often, to the point. This is a quality I find admirable. There is nothing there that doesn't need to be there. Never is this more true than in the chapter entitled "One Plus One Equals a Mercedes-Benz."

Registering at less than a page, this chapter deals with the idea of melting into one's surroundings and opening up oneself to any and all prospects. The author implores the reader to "turn off your logical brain that says 1 + 1 = 2. Open up your mind to the possibility that 1 + 1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse." As in previous chapters, she encourages us not to tell our stories with facts, but with details and figurative language. She asks us to allow that which we observe to consume us in a sense ("burn all of yourself with it"), to consider how it feels to describe oneself not as an outside force acting upon an object, but as the object itself. To become the thing about which you're writing. She states that we have only a short time to experience such "ecstasy" before our egos will send us crashing back to Earth again, leaving only the writing itself with "the great vision." The purpose being that we return - again and again - to these writings to remind ourselves of the nature of the human condition and the necessity for compassion and kindness in the world we share.

What this reading series has to do with a building for bathing

Stephanie Rowden is a professor from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design who works primarily with sound installations and recordings. Her contribution to the Bathhouse Reading Series event this past Tuesday was in the form of a lecture which included a presentation of selections from her body of work.

Early in her lecture, she implored the audience to go on a "sound walk" with her, whereby she guided the audience through different audio landscapes such as a meadow and a 24-hour diner using field recordings that she triggered with a laptop computer. She stated that sound is a "nimble medium," one which is capable of "transporting" a listener by invoking images that "stick to the brain."

Before her presentation began, a group of her students (and one ex-student) performed Is That Wool Hat My Hat? by Jackson Mac Low. This is an interesting poem consisting of various intonations and permutations of the five different words which are found in the title of the piece. Experiencing the poem being performed live reminded me of seeing David Ives' play Phillip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread. One of the most obvious similarities between the two (and, I suspect, the reason why it came to mind) is the use of rhythm in both pieces. The deliberate and regulated repetition of words and sounds is at the heart of both compositions. Interestingly enough, rhythm is something that I don't recall ever being specifically mentioned during Stephanie Rowden's presentation. Her work is rooted in field recordings and, in several of her examples that we witnessed, the manipulation and installation of said recordings. At one point during the question-and-answer portion of the event, she referenced the fact that she does not, in fact, consider herself a "performer" per sae.

It was an interesting juxtaposition to Stephen Benson, whose work is heavily informed by improvisational performance and composition. Benson is a poet from New Jersey, who moved to San Francisco in 1976 and is credited with being instrumental in the then-burgeoning language poetry movement. His presented a live performance at the Bathhouse event, which consisted of the author somewhat randomly choosing selections from his work and presenting them as a larger unified piece.

The set for his presentation consisted of a couch at stage left and a desk and chair at upper stage right. The only other props were a mobile white board, some dry erase markers, several pieces of paper, a plastic bag of books (most of which were his own), and a bottle of water. With these devices in tow, the author proceded to walk, crawl, and run about the stage, grabbing scraps of paper from the desk, reading them or discarding them for later, then moving to the couch or the floor to read from other pieces of paper or books or, at times, material from both almost simultaneously.

It was difficult, at times, to tell if his movements had been blocked ahead of time and likewise, if he was actually reading from the books and the pieces of paper or if he was reciting his work. Afterwards, during the question-and-answer period, he addressed those questions by stating that he had, indeed, been reading from the texts and implying that his movements were not blocked ahead of time.

Stephen Benson stated that frequently during his performances there are times when he feels like he is connecting with his audience and times where he feels their attention waning. I certainly observed this to some degree during his performance both from my own perspective and by observing the reactions of other spectators. Interestingly, the lines that oftentimes garnered the biggest response were (intentionally or coincidentally) self-referential. For instance, much of the crowd reacted quite verbally (in the form of laughter) when he read a line of text that questioned why the reading series is entitled "Bathhouse." During his performance, there were some serious problems with the engineering of the audio system. At one point, two of the event's organizers left the main seating area and were standing behind a wall which seperates the entrance to the room from the seating area. They were discussing the situation concerning the audio system loudly enough that at least a portion of the audience could hear them speaking. This situation happened to coincide with a line that the author was reading which referenced two people talking in the next room. A student from the audience brought this occurrance up during the question-and-answer session and asked if the line had been an intentional response to the situation that was unfolding at the time. The author hadn't realized that the situation was even occurring - he had no idea that there was a problem with the sound or that there were two people talking in the next room when he delivered the line (much less that it was a moment that resonated with at least one, if not more, spectators).

An interesting aspect of this event was how different both the content and the form of each of the presentations were. While Stephanie Rowden's video & slide presentationd dealt primarily with capturing and manipulating sounds and the relation of sound to memory and the human experience, Stephen Benson's very physical performance was more of an exploration of the process by which language occurs and exists. Both dealt with an aspect of sound and communication, but in very different and fascinating ways.

Leftovers

The following are some poems that I composed during this semester. It seemed appropriate to include them in this blog if only for the sake of having a place to put them (as they are currently on random pieces of paper floating through various notebooks). All but one were written while I was working on assignments for class and one was actually written "erroneously" in reference to an assignment.


LOOSE ATOMS

So, the guy who found the suit
The guy is yeast
it turns out he's a botanist
"I care about supplemental forms,
I'm a scientist."
As a child
He was chased around
the train yard
by hobos.


DISPLACEMENT

When a human being consumes anjing it is said to have a warming effect on the body similar to that one may experience after consuming alcoholic beverages. Ingesting dog flesh also reportedly decreases the occurrence of premature ejaculation in males who may be prone to such behavior. Muslims have strict guidelines relating to certain aspects of their diet - that is to say that while some food has been deemed acceptable by Allah for human consumption (i.e. those that are halal), other foods are prohibited. Dog meat, along with pork, alcohol, and fish without fins or scales, is considered to be among the latter.

Thomas Edison sought to answer great questions by making a practice of falling asleep in a chair while holding a rock in his hand. Beneath his hand (and the rock contained therein) was a metal bucket. As he drifted asleep and the muscles in his hand relaxed, he would release the rock and it would fall into the bucket (causing the sound one would expect a rock falling into a metal bucket to make), thereby waking him in the process. This was how he sought to retain consciousness while sleeping. Such a procedure may be responsible for the invention of useful items ranging from the kinetoscope to the incandescent light bulb.


THE INVENTION OF THE DEATH RAY

The same guy we found failing with legs

in the park one

Sunday morning was the one on the

plastic seat with the jacket that

meowed.

There was no real problem;

the driver kept his leather

on the wheel

and what I assume were his nostrils

on an amorous breeze

that blew feline intonations, and headphones,

heavy sighs,

and advertisements

out the tops

of windows.

I was thinking about what,

a Styrofoam cup that was attached

to a clear lid

breaking beneath the weight

of my left

foot.

Who knows? A mitten, a newspaper,

the smell

of

wet shoelaces and partially-smoked

cigarettes.

What else, how to find it,

something I was looking

for that morning.

Perhaps it was a brown lighter.

I was shattered, I keep doing that

all the time. Switching between one thing

and

another, always wanting everything to

work out.

So his envelope, his folder, it

meowed again and everyone in the back heard

it and wanted to know

what was going

on

even though they all knew

what was going

on.

And the driver, in his infinite

wisdom and patience,

kept his gloves on the

wheel and his eyes in

outer space.

on MYSTERY STORIES

I'm a big fan of mystery. I don't need to know all of the inside angles all the time. I like to explore, to guess, to figure things out and accept that there are some questions I'll never know the answer to. In this sense, I prefer to remain in the dark as to an author's intentions behind a piece of writing when I'm looking at it for the first time. That is to say, I prefer to view it with a blank slate to see how, unaided, the text resonates with me.

As I was reading through the first fiction packet in anticipation of this week's class, there were several pieces that I enjoyed. Jamaica Kincaid and Sherman Alexie's pieces were both exceptional, and James Tate's "The List of Famous Hats" was a lot of fun, but one piece that really struck me was Sharon Krinsky's "Mystery Stories". The thing I enjoy about this selection is that it elicits a sense of wonder, wherein one recognizes that, as the reader, we will only ever be able to see a portion of the total picture; in this sense, then, it is our duty to finish the narrative ourselves.

At times, this selection reads like a recollection of dreams. I believe this effect is achieved, in part, from the omission of certain details, and, in another part, due to the fact that it is written in the present tense. In the section entitled "The Japanese Man", the author references both dreaming and waking life:

"I dream that I am this Japanese man. I wake up crying in the dream but not in real life."

Because the author draws this distinction between dreaming and waking life, we must assume, then, that these stories are not summations of dreams, but some other type of stories. Yet, there is something in the writing itself that makes these stories feel too ethereal to have taken place in our world. Perhaps it is the omission of certain details that I alluded to earlier; indeed, there is something in her writing that allows even the most commonplace of occurrences to take on an otherworldly feel. Take, for example, the section entitled "The Record Store":

"A rock 'n' roller all dressed in black comes up behind me while I
am flipping through the albums in a record store. He kisses the top of
my head. Later, he comes to visit a waiter at the restaurant where
I am the manager or hostess."

There are many questions that are posed by this section: Why does the unnamed 'rock 'n' roller' kiss the top of her head? Do they know each other? And why does she state that she is the manager or the hostess of the restaurant? Why doesn't she know which one she is? Is she both? What is the rock 'n' roller's relationship with the waiter? There are many items left unanswered. And that, in my humble opinion, is the beauty in this piece. It brings to mind a quote by the inimitable Pablo Picasso:
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
What would our lives be without questions to stoke our curiosities?

on SYNTAX

The chapter in "Writing Down the Bones" entitled Syntax is a very interesting one, in which the author implores the reader to take a selection from their most boring pieces of writing and rearrange the words without concern for syntax or order. Afterward, the reader/writer is encouraged to add random punctuation marks to the piece, then to read the selection adding intonation and inflection.

Goldman states that "we think in sentences, and they way we think is the way we see." She opines that if one can "crack" what we have learned to be the traditional sentence structure, we can, likewise, crack our perception of the world around us and examine it in fresh new ways. One of the most interesting examples of creating a work that is outside of our normal ideas of syntax were a group of poems that the author included from an anthology of poetry written at a residence for mentally retarded women. I thoroughly enjoyed many of the pieces included in this chapter; some (most notably "Give Me a White" by Marion Pinski) reminded me of the work of Gertrude Stein. Goldman states that one reason she finds the women's poetry remarkable (or "fresh") is due to the nature of surprise that is evident in their work. I didn't necessarily find that same sense of surprise in these pieces. There is a considerable amount of attention to detail, and the common imagery of cabbage (which is found in both "The Stone and I" by Beverly Opse and "Everybody" by Shirley Nielson) is something I find interesting, but what really grabs me is the fact that, despite the unconventional syntax (or lack thereof), one is still able to glean meaning from these poems. That is, there are easily recognizable images, conflicts, and themes within them. Such ideas are so universal that they exist outside of the laws and principles of grammar. I like to imagine that they are too large, too obvious to humans, to be able to be contained, or imprisoned, in something that we've created.

An Exercise

SYNTAX

Writing a poem is a piece of chocolate cake:

inside of each atom is a tiny stanza

waiting to greet us the way lemon juice caresses freshly brushed

teeth,

the way the scent of bread burning in the kitchen toggles one's nostrils,

the way waking up to find a bloody 5 dollar bill in the front

pocket of your pants tickles one's curiosity;

Travis and I spent the better

part of an hour staring at seals who

barked from the bottom of the Puget Sound -

but there were no seals in the water

that day and, if there had been,

they would not have been barking;

GILD MY LILY

writing a poem will never be anything

like eating cake,

there are 3 sides to every apartment

in all new Americas

and a specific meter for any and all

neutrons.

on BAKING A CAKE

In the chapter of Natalie Goldman's book Writing Down the Bones entitled "Baking a Cake" the author begins by discussing the process by which one goes about baking a cake. She states that if one takes the ingredients for a cake and mixes them together, all one will have is "goop." It requires heat (energy) for a cake to take form. The point of this metaphor is that simply writing down the details from one's life experiences will not make for an intriguing read - one must add energy, which, in this case, refers to "the heat and energy of your heart" rather than that of an oven. What she seems to be saying is that passion is the glue that transforms the details of one's experiences into cake, or, in this case, purposeful writing. Simply relating to someone the details of an experience without adding one's feelings about those experiences will render the telling dull and ineffectual. Goldman implores the reader to "caress the details," to give them life. She also discusses how some writers use only heat (i.e. energy) to try and bake their literary cakes. Such dishes, she states, leave the reader with "nothing to bite into." That is to say that they lack the details, the spice, the emotional reaction to one's experiences that shape a good piece of writing.

Interestingly enough, Goldman does not, an any point in this chapter, attempt to explain the delicious nature of no-bake cookies.

"Figuratively descriptive" or "descriptively figurative"?

HYPOTHETICAL INTELLIGENCE

You can teach a hen to answer the

telephone, but you can't fake an egg

or catch a pocket on your tongue and

wait until it rains to wash your hair.

I would still go to sleep if I

shrank to the size of a pea: that's

what screwdrivers do. I mean, who wants to eat

spaghetti off an ax or carry foxes

in quart baskets until their arms melt into unfamiliar mushrooms?

Irony is breathing miasma to tolerate balloons. Go back to

dragging your snowflakes like a tail across my teeth. This

exercise has answered that very same question.

on TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT

Late last night, I found myself at a friend's apartment watching Spalding Gray performing Swimming to Cambodia in the film of the same name (directed by Jonathan Demme). The original stage production of Swimming to Cambodia (for which Gray won an Obie award) was four hours long and was performed over two nights. If you're not familiar with the piece, Gray talks about his experiences in Cambodia during the filming of The Killing Fields (incidentally, Sam Waterson and Ira Wheeler are listed as co-stars, although their only involvement in the film is the inclusion of a short clip from The Killing Fields).

Spalding Gray eventually jumped off the Staten Island Ferry after watching Tim Burton's film, Big Fish. He was 62 years old and had been suffering from clinical depression, which had worsened after an automobile accident in Ireland 3 years prior, for quite some time.

He never, to my knowledge, published any poetry, but he came to mind this morning when I was reading TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT by Bhanu Kapil Rider (although I might be hard pressed to explain why he came to mind - perhaps the dynamics between Eastern and Western societies that are a theme in both works caused me to find an affinity between the two). Kapil's poem is a whopper, in which she states that she "would never do anything so English as write about art. I said I'd write, instead, the book of blood." She refers to two chapters in the aforementioned book - the first chapter is a description of naked Hindu women being tied to eucalyptus trees by Muslim Indians in 1948 with their "wombs hanging out of their stomachs." This imagery is driven home by Chapter Two as "there is no Chapter Two." Next the voice of the author is reading the Denver Post - presumably in the early 1990's as inside of the newspaper is an article about Serbs raping Croatian women, cutting out their wombs, and hanging them on poles (it should be noted that the author breaks to sip tea before she finishes reading the first sentence of this account). As she transitions into the final stanza of the poem, a meditation on the many different types of rain that fall (possibly an analogy for different cultures and geographical locations as well as ideas of transience / permanence), she tells of a "Punjabi monsoon" and states that the rain reminds her that she is "always facing East; the direction of water: its rapidly dissolving salt." I found myself returning to the first line of the poem at this point, wherein Rider states that "When it rains, the grass is filled with blood." This poem is full of images of rain and blood, just like the name of the book contained within.

When I was living in Surakarta, there was a time during the wet season when much of the city flooded. The irony was the storm damaged a large water pump that supplied our neighborhood (and several others) with running water. Until we found a well in our neighborhood that we could use, my roommates and I relied upon the rainwater to wash our dishes with and bathe in (I still recall taking off my shirt and soaping down in the street). A week or two later we were still without water, and so the water company started sending a truck of water to our neighborhood each day. When the truck came, people would shout and grab any variety of empty containers and run to the truck to have them filled. The atmosphere felt like a party: everyone looked so happy to see the water truck. When the running water was finally restored, I felt a little sad; I missed the water truck and the jubilant environment that it encouraged.

To summarize, I choose to invoke the words of the 16th president of the United States of America:

"Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes."

3 Love Poems

I.

We wrapped our shoes and laces like leopard spots

On the torso of the sign explaining

Where and when someone comes to fill the pots

In the kitchen with noodles, proclaiming,

"Green air, black clouds: it's still the same two skies."

And it is, regardless of who's around -

As even when atoms arrive on time

TORNADOES and who could just put that down?

We've been blown around like bus stops before;

Who hasn't been to Love's? Eaten at Hardee's?

Every grain of sand, each apple core

Has spilled to stay and watch something recede

As some have climbed like cordage for their toes

When glass is dogs running bare in the road.

II.

Bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells -

What a waste of time, even birds agree;

Beaks have gone barking, "Jesus, what the Hell?

Go make eyes in Lansing, this is our tree."

I live to climb, watch it in my elbows;

They make a splash, a sandwich in fractions.

There's no pavement left for them to behold,

Them that's so burning like fresh as fashion,

Together as: Notebooks = that won't happen.

Arms aren't made of twine and paper fiber,

Digits aren't scraps of felt to be fastened

Like brittle cucumbers, cold as tigers.

Why lurk like rooms with eyes in small onions?

To ring like sleeves in sweaters with function!

III.

"Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;

And yet methinks I have astronomy"

- William Shakespeare, XIV

If it was a pumpkin, not an apple,

That William Tell arrowed from his son's head,

Then this is the squash with which we must grapple,

The seeds inside of the bowl by the bed,

The gas mask, the hot tub, all that beeswax:

Skinhead ex-boyfriends shoplifting vodka,

Burnt toast and popcorn and suicide pacts,

Straight Edge girlfriends who use Oxford commas,

Pillows who sang like blankets from the floor,
"Let's trace small lines through the strings in our lungs,

Let's smoke our way through the lock on the door,

And bleed bad breath for the soup that we've sung."

So our curse is always chirping something,

Crickets long gone in search of free parking.

3 Poems Including 15 Words or More

A HOBO IS JUST A TRAMP WHO'S TOO PROUD TO BEG

There are kata kata you can

dig like

lemons & there are images I

may taste like holes.

Drop one in the garbage like

a pastry wrapper. Spit

one up on

the sidewalk after pudding. Wrap it

in a blanket and sail

it down the

river. I'll

be your R.S. on a ladder. All unpacific

spindrift and stairstepped

representability. In the lunchroom with

striated

palisades and trilobites. Breathing inter-

mittent epochs and

Carboniferous crinoids: your

basic

carbonaceous what-have-you ... Sessile,

Cambrian, Silurian. It

should be stated that, on the

ground, I'm

nothing like him. I'm

a shark, wet

behind the ears. Happy Sargasso.

LET THE LOG ROLL DOWN THE LADDER / SKIN THE CAT UPSIDE-DOWN

A page in a book:

Representability.

Barren veins:

Trilobites.

Thesauri:

Whatever you want them to be

(Crinoids, epochs, etc.).

A pillar of salt:

Palisades.

The opposite end of violence:

Unpacific.

Intermittent spindrift:

Silurian.

Almost everything:

Carbonaceous.

Bodies of knowledge:

Stairstepped.

A cipher or maze of sorts:

Carboniferous.

Sessile remnants:

Striated.

Cambrian:

trilobites.

COMPLETE SEAFOOD

Complete seafood: Silurian, tropical. I like

that. It's a Cambrian thing. So intermittent.

Palisades? Yep, everything. The spindrift

is carbonaceous. They do this Sessile thing

with the crinoids. And the epochs are

striated with trilobites. It's very unpacific.

We usually go in around noon or

twelve-thirty. Last Friday we stairstepped

yoga and went straight there. The representability is

Carboniferous. You couldn't ask for more.