/page/2

& i happen to be reading Matt Hart’s book of poems Wolf Face.

from the title poem:

… and now my hand //

is responsible for many tragedies, and my mouth for confusions /
both numerous and long. At the edge of the forest /
a shadow-me is running you into friends on a picnic, /
soaking up their sunlight and growing up their damage. /

Weird wonder these days how it only gets darker /
and figuratively speaking full of teeth in the glow.

clagil:

WIRE SCULPTURES by POLLY VERITY

Simple things of everyday life is the raw material: Wire and Tissues. Magically. http://www.polyscene.com/indexwir.htm
Hop on the YesYes book-tour bandwagon! I did. Hope to see you this Thursday night in Columbia City.

Hop on the YesYes book-tour bandwagon! I did. Hope to see you this Thursday night in Columbia City.

New events around town!

March has turned into quite a busy month for readings. Plus one for late April.  Check out my events page for all the detes: http://arlenekim.com/events

As always, I would love to see you at any or all of these. (Was joking with my friend Kyung that I should make a loyal reading audience punch-card and give away some stellar prize to anyone who attends all my upcoming readings. I may.)

New poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.
– Donald Hall, “Out the Window: The View in Winter” (The New Yorker) (subscription-only)

(Source: thedependentclause)

my back turned to the sky

Been writing all afternoon, back turned to the sky. When I turn around, I suddenly see the sky’s been sticking out her pink tongue at me for hours.

cheeky sky

It’s a little thing but I’m still silly over being on the radio.
A short poem of mine just aired on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle’s NPR station, and my sister and I (NPR junkies both) had the best time today listening for it morning into afternoon—she in her house working on some new designs, me in my apartment catching up on emails. Hearing my own voice from outside my body still makes me squirm, but hearing it come out of the radio was a thrill!
I grew up in a nowhere, semi-rural, suburban neighborhood in Virginia, in a strangely isolated household where we weren’t allowed to watch much TV. (That’s the house up there in that image from Google maps.) But there were no rules about radio.  So the radio became my secret place.
Mostly I listened to Top 40 stations because I was trying to give myself an education in pop music. I was almost 13 years old before I knew who Michael Jackson was. Before the radio, my Top 40 list was Chopin, Bach, Debussy; my everyday mixtape was Liszt, Schumann, Bartok, Haydn. Before I quit, I sat at the piano practicing an hour or two every day (presumably while other kids were over at each other’s houses singing along to Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Sheena Easton). The idea that the “piano” could somehow be associated with “playing” still seems a bit absurd to me. It was practice; it was work.
You have no idea the number of morose fantasies I entertained in my head while practicing pieces again and again about how my mother would find me fumbling my way up the stairs, gone blind from the nights and nights of reading music in that dim corner of the house. Or she’d find my wan body draped pitifully over the bench, no maybe splayed across the keyboard, cheeks sunken like gulches, fingertips chapped, dead finally from some mysterious virus, some killer disease stemming from so many hours of piano. The gorgeous regret that would bloom on her face! The wanting it all back so she could let me outside instead to play the way other kids played, so she could do it differently.
Sometimes—when I thought she wasn’t paying too much attention from the next room—I’d sneak out a thin booklet of sheet music I’d found in the piano bench. In it were songs from the Disney version of “Pinocchio” along with sketches of the characters: Jiminy Cricket in his bespoke vest and spats, leaning on a cane; Pinocchio before—before he became “real,” before he wasn’t tied to strings, just leaning. I’d play the charming little tunes as softly as I could—“Give A Little Whistle,” “When You Wish Upon A Star”—sometimes I sang along, but I didn’t have much of a voice, so mostly I didn’t. I just listened to myself playing.
Evening was the best time for radio. I could be alone in my room, or there with my sister who was like my twin, and listen to the dedication hours on each station while I halfway did homework. I was in love with the DJ, calling out names, reading messages from someone to their someone, sending this song to that listener, dedicating person to person. I never heard my name.
Now, hearing my voice coming out of the radio, I’m gaga, I’m giddy. It’s magic. It’s as though somehow, via the radio, I am broadcasting myself back in time, speaking to the young me there, in the bedroom of that Burke house, listening on that tiny red-and-black-checked boombox for I’m-still-not-sure-what during all those hours then. I’m saying, “Here you are. Here is your name, here, your dedication.”

It’s a little thing but I’m still silly over being on the radio.

A short poem of mine just aired on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle’s NPR station, and my sister and I (NPR junkies both) had the best time today listening for it morning into afternoon—she in her house working on some new designs, me in my apartment catching up on emails. Hearing my own voice from outside my body still makes me squirm, but hearing it come out of the radio was a thrill!

I grew up in a nowhere, semi-rural, suburban neighborhood in Virginia, in a strangely isolated household where we weren’t allowed to watch much TV. (That’s the house up there in that image from Google maps.) But there were no rules about radio.  So the radio became my secret place.

Mostly I listened to Top 40 stations because I was trying to give myself an education in pop music. I was almost 13 years old before I knew who Michael Jackson was. Before the radio, my Top 40 list was Chopin, Bach, Debussy; my everyday mixtape was Liszt, Schumann, Bartok, Haydn. Before I quit, I sat at the piano practicing an hour or two every day (presumably while other kids were over at each other’s houses singing along to Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Sheena Easton). The idea that the “piano” could somehow be associated with “playing” still seems a bit absurd to me. It was practice; it was work.

You have no idea the number of morose fantasies I entertained in my head while practicing pieces again and again about how my mother would find me fumbling my way up the stairs, gone blind from the nights and nights of reading music in that dim corner of the house. Or she’d find my wan body draped pitifully over the bench, no maybe splayed across the keyboard, cheeks sunken like gulches, fingertips chapped, dead finally from some mysterious virus, some killer disease stemming from so many hours of piano. The gorgeous regret that would bloom on her face! The wanting it all back so she could let me outside instead to play the way other kids played, so she could do it differently.

Sometimes—when I thought she wasn’t paying too much attention from the next room—I’d sneak out a thin booklet of sheet music I’d found in the piano bench. In it were songs from the Disney version of “Pinocchio” along with sketches of the characters: Jiminy Cricket in his bespoke vest and spats, leaning on a cane; Pinocchio before—before he became “real,” before he wasn’t tied to strings, just leaning. I’d play the charming little tunes as softly as I could—“Give A Little Whistle,” “When You Wish Upon A Star”—sometimes I sang along, but I didn’t have much of a voice, so mostly I didn’t. I just listened to myself playing.

Evening was the best time for radio. I could be alone in my room, or there with my sister who was like my twin, and listen to the dedication hours on each station while I halfway did homework. I was in love with the DJ, calling out names, reading messages from someone to their someone, sending this song to that listener, dedicating person to person. I never heard my name.

Now, hearing my voice coming out of the radio, I’m gaga, I’m giddy. It’s magic. It’s as though somehow, via the radio, I am broadcasting myself back in time, speaking to the young me there, in the bedroom of that Burke house, listening on that tiny red-and-black-checked boombox for I’m-still-not-sure-what during all those hours then. I’m saying, “Here you are. Here is your name, here, your dedication.”

Wonderful piece on Echoes by Gently Read Literature. Thank you, GRL and reviewer Kelly Lydick!
It’s still strange—in a good but also unsettling way—when I read someone’s review of my book and see that they can see all the way inside me in places. Strange/good because yes I wrote those poems to show those things, but strange/unsettling because I never thought anyone would be able to see that much of me, to xray what’s in my head, to call it all out nakedly on paper, without pants. Poems give me pants, I guess.

Wonderful piece on Echoes by Gently Read Literature. Thank you, GRL and reviewer Kelly Lydick!

It’s still strange—in a good but also unsettling way—when I read someone’s review of my book and see that they can see all the way inside me in places. Strange/good because yes I wrote those poems to show those things, but strange/unsettling because I never thought anyone would be able to see that much of me, to xray what’s in my head, to call it all out nakedly on paper, without pants. Poems give me pants, I guess.


Poetry & Manhood

My friend Nate got a rad write-up in the Huffy Post! His poetry book, Panic Attack, USA, is terrific terrific. You need it. Immediately.

nateslawson:

PANIC ATTACK, USA “coalesces into a wrenching, convincing, and instructive portrayal of American manhood in the early twenty-first century.” Or, according to Muddy Waters, “I’m a man.”

Poetry & Manhood

My friend Nate got a rad write-up in the Huffy Post! His poetry book, Panic Attack, USA, is terrific terrific. You need it. Immediately.

nateslawson:

PANIC ATTACK, USA “coalesces into a wrenching, convincing, and instructive portrayal of American manhood in the early twenty-first century.” Or, according to Muddy Waters, “I’m a man.”

Time to lose time in the "Catalogue of Curiosities"...

Among the Poets & Writers curios:

portraits of women

“a twig-wigged tree”

“things full of errors … new born & perfect”

Phoenicopterus ruber (my what a big flamingo you have)

the idea of the cave, mapless

“a little more volume”

a train in reverse, skyward

Hollywood 1943

“degrees of black”

“sinks & outcrops … fields & shanties”

“a crepuscular melange of all the cities … not ordered by the engineer”

(& yes, that is me there, too!)

QUESTION. Are poets allowed poetic license to do practically anything with punctuation? I ask this in view of a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to use the em dash in bewildering and inscrutable ways.

ANSWER. Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In my experience, they are sometimes even offended by editing, believing that their misspellings and inconsistencies are inspired, if not intentional. Of course, if poetry is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying, nobody will want to buy it, so there’s some motivation for restraint in the first place.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online

I repeat: “Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please.” Chickaboom.

Video clip: A bit of Art Spiegelman’s response when asked about the terms “comics” vs “graphic novel.” (Sorry the audio is so hard to hear—phone videos might be convenient but they don’t make for the best quality.)

Awhile ago, comics artist & writer Art Spiegelman came to Seattle to promote his new book MetaMaus, which details the experience/process of creating his most well-known work, MAUS. (By the way, here’s a good article in The Millions about both works, and a link to the podcast of Spiegelman’s talk with librarian Nancy Pearl at the Seattle Public Library.)

MAUS was the first comic book I had ever read. It essentially taught me how to read comics. Sure I’d read the Sunday comics or the tiny strips in Bazooka bubble gum, but I’d never read a full-on comic book—and it was surprisingly tough to do. I had to figure out how to get into my own flow of looking at the words + the pictures, and also do that without forgetting the larger composition of the page. I had to figure out which direction to read in—whether for rapid-fire speech balloons across panels or for pages where the panels departed from the usual orderly left-to-right blocks and leaked all over the page in disturbingly non-standard shapes and directions. Who am I kidding—forget avant-garde, irregular polygons—even a slightly larger square in a panel or a tall, skinny rectangle threw me into a panic. I was comics illiterate before MAUS, not to mention also clueless about the possibilities of the comics form.

About this “comics” vs “graphic novel” question, I’ve also wondered if there’s a difference between the two (being still relatively new to it all, I’m never quite sure if I’m using the terminology correctly). Don’t know that I agree (or disagree) with Spiegelman about the respectability of graphic novels over the irreverence of comics, but it did give me a new starting point into the maze of thinking about how forms/containers affect writing; how (if) our intent plays into it; the definitions and expectations of the words comic / comics / graphic / graphics / novel; the ways we prepare ourselves (subconsciously or otherwise) to receive what we perceive to be different types of texts (including, and especially, poetry), and how (if) I should be thinking about that/using it when mucking around with so-called cross-genre pieces; and the value of trying to come up with answers to questions like this based on our own philosophies of writing.

 

On a separate but related note, what feels like a parade of new technology marched into my house recently: a new laptop (to replace my old one, HAL, who got motherboard cancer and is in computer hospice now), a Kindle Fire, and a Kindle Touch. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what each is for and how they’re different from my Droid phone and my other (now old—already) Kindle and my iPods and the still many lots of books on my shelves.

slide from Art Spiegelman talk (Seattle, WA 2011)

 

Maybe they’re just other types of forms/containers—for both consuming and creating.

Still not sure what that does to me in the maze.


P.S.

What is the effect of flattening out our reading material, I wonder? Is there an effect? I mean, does not having the dimensionality of a thick/thin book also somehow change the way we receive/perceive a text? Or create it? Or what about the fact that all texts (books, magazines, videos, music, web sites, poems, email, photos, etc) seem to take on/represent themselves as the same shape (that is, the shape of the technological container)? Does it create a sort of textual-tactile democracy that seeps into our attitude toward all texts? Or do the ways we read a text carry over subtly to other texts without our knowing it (so that if I went from reading a comic book to a news article maybe for a bit I’m reading the news article the way I did the comic—paying attention to and gleaning meaning from whatever images appear from the text and the larger composition of the page as a whole including its ads)? Or maybe there’s more “intertextuality” going on in our heads than ever because we bounce around from a wider variety of texts now, and maybe all that textual rubbing in our brains affects how/what sort of text we create? Does it make our brains expand/grow in spatial smarts ways because we still perceive dimensionality but only virtually/mentally? If questions were nickels, I’d be the 1%!

"Dear Rilke, I am not young and I am not a poet...

…I slink around the city, disaster-footed, sure for danger, face unknown, I pull my hoodie up. I snick around, I slink around the city’s back. Short for danger. My motherless face bagged…”
 
 I have new poems up on the lovely, lovely diode!
 
Visiting hours are open at all times. Even right now.

photo caption: Carcasses lay on the ground at the Muskingum County Animal Farm on  Wednesday in Zanesville, Ohio. Sheriff’s deputies shot 48 animals,  including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions, after Terry Thompson,  owner of the private Muskingum County Animal Farm threw their cages open  Tuesday and then committed suicide.
[i liked it better when the story ended with a monkey & a wolf, still  on the loose, hitching it out of zanesville. i’ll just keep that ending  in my head.]


Wolf, monkey believed still loose near Zanesville

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20111019/NEWS01/111019002/Sheriff-48-animals-killed?odyssey=nav%7Chead


“We’re convinced that we do not have any animals running at large.  [The monkey] was in an area where one of the cats actually killed one of  the monkeys and we feel he could have been eaten by one of the cats,”  [Sheriff Lutz] said …

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44970708/ns/today-today_news/t/ohio-owner-exotic-animals-was-deep-debt/#.TqB8zXL6NnA


One monkey remained unaccounted for Wednesday night …
Overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday, sheriff’s deputies searched  the eastern Ohio woods around the city of Zanesville with night-vision  gear and patrolled in pickups, armed with shotguns. Flashing signs on  the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: “Caution.  Exotic animals.” Schools were closed, and some frightened residents said  they were keeping to their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted the  lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears.
“Yeah, there’s a lion on Mount Perry Road. … I just drove by and it  walked out in front of me and was standing there under the street  light,” one caller to 911 told deputies.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/us/ohio-animals-on-loose/index.html?iref=allsearch


Like Noah’s ark wrecking

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-18/exotic-animals-loose-ohio/50821092/1

photo caption: Carcasses lay on the ground at the Muskingum County Animal Farm on Wednesday in Zanesville, Ohio. Sheriff’s deputies shot 48 animals, including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions, after Terry Thompson, owner of the private Muskingum County Animal Farm threw their cages open Tuesday and then committed suicide.

[i liked it better when the story ended with a monkey & a wolf, still on the loose, hitching it out of zanesville. i’ll just keep that ending in my head.]



Wolf, monkey believed still loose near Zanesville

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20111019/NEWS01/111019002/Sheriff-48-animals-killed?odyssey=nav%7Chead



“We’re convinced that we do not have any animals running at large. [The monkey] was in an area where one of the cats actually killed one of the monkeys and we feel he could have been eaten by one of the cats,” [Sheriff Lutz] said …

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44970708/ns/today-today_news/t/ohio-owner-exotic-animals-was-deep-debt/#.TqB8zXL6NnA



One monkey remained unaccounted for Wednesday night …

Overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday, sheriff’s deputies searched the eastern Ohio woods around the city of Zanesville with night-vision gear and patrolled in pickups, armed with shotguns. Flashing signs on the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: “Caution. Exotic animals.” Schools were closed, and some frightened residents said they were keeping to their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted the lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears.

“Yeah, there’s a lion on Mount Perry Road. … I just drove by and it walked out in front of me and was standing there under the street light,” one caller to 911 told deputies.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/us/ohio-animals-on-loose/index.html?iref=allsearch



Like Noah’s ark wrecking

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-18/exotic-animals-loose-ohio/50821092/1

The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.

I am the person I see least of over the course of my life, and even what I see is not accurate.


(repeat)


The way you get to know yourself
is by the expressions on other
people’s faces, because
that’s the only thing that
you can see, unless you
carry a mirror about.
But if you keep saying ‘I’
and they’re saying ‘I,’
you don’t get much out
of it. They’re not
really in-
to you, or we, or
they; they’re
into I. That makes
con-
versation
s l o w. //

I am
the person
I see least
of over
the course of my
life, and
even what I see is
not ac-
curate.

Gil Scott-Heron, from a New Yorker profile of him, “New York Is Killing Me: The unlikely survival of Gil Scott-Heron,” by Alec Wilkinson (August 9, 2010)


(loitering about the house solo, in the owl hours, half-listening to an old Slate podcast on GSH, suddenly rushed by these words of his)

(& all the awkward ways we are only I, I only, on these slow streams, how that-is-how/is-that-how we know ourselves, slow ourselves, selve so low)

(unlikely survival. gills. caught. here. no. no. )

& i happen to be reading Matt Hart’s book of poems Wolf Face.

from the title poem:

… and now my hand //

is responsible for many tragedies, and my mouth for confusions /
both numerous and long. At the edge of the forest /
a shadow-me is running you into friends on a picnic, /
soaking up their sunlight and growing up their damage. /

Weird wonder these days how it only gets darker /
and figuratively speaking full of teeth in the glow.

clagil:

WIRE SCULPTURES by POLLY VERITY

Simple things of everyday life is the raw material: Wire and Tissues. Magically. http://www.polyscene.com/indexwir.htm
Hop on the YesYes book-tour bandwagon! I did. Hope to see you this Thursday night in Columbia City.

Hop on the YesYes book-tour bandwagon! I did. Hope to see you this Thursday night in Columbia City.

My, what a big spoon you have.

My, what a big spoon you have.

New events around town!

March has turned into quite a busy month for readings. Plus one for late April.  Check out my events page for all the detes: http://arlenekim.com/events

As always, I would love to see you at any or all of these. (Was joking with my friend Kyung that I should make a loyal reading audience punch-card and give away some stellar prize to anyone who attends all my upcoming readings. I may.)

New poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.
– Donald Hall, “Out the Window: The View in Winter” (The New Yorker) (subscription-only)

(Source: thedependentclause)

my back turned to the sky

Been writing all afternoon, back turned to the sky. When I turn around, I suddenly see the sky’s been sticking out her pink tongue at me for hours.

cheeky sky

It’s a little thing but I’m still silly over being on the radio.
A short poem of mine just aired on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle’s NPR station, and my sister and I (NPR junkies both) had the best time today listening for it morning into afternoon—she in her house working on some new designs, me in my apartment catching up on emails. Hearing my own voice from outside my body still makes me squirm, but hearing it come out of the radio was a thrill!
I grew up in a nowhere, semi-rural, suburban neighborhood in Virginia, in a strangely isolated household where we weren’t allowed to watch much TV. (That’s the house up there in that image from Google maps.) But there were no rules about radio.  So the radio became my secret place.
Mostly I listened to Top 40 stations because I was trying to give myself an education in pop music. I was almost 13 years old before I knew who Michael Jackson was. Before the radio, my Top 40 list was Chopin, Bach, Debussy; my everyday mixtape was Liszt, Schumann, Bartok, Haydn. Before I quit, I sat at the piano practicing an hour or two every day (presumably while other kids were over at each other’s houses singing along to Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Sheena Easton). The idea that the “piano” could somehow be associated with “playing” still seems a bit absurd to me. It was practice; it was work.
You have no idea the number of morose fantasies I entertained in my head while practicing pieces again and again about how my mother would find me fumbling my way up the stairs, gone blind from the nights and nights of reading music in that dim corner of the house. Or she’d find my wan body draped pitifully over the bench, no maybe splayed across the keyboard, cheeks sunken like gulches, fingertips chapped, dead finally from some mysterious virus, some killer disease stemming from so many hours of piano. The gorgeous regret that would bloom on her face! The wanting it all back so she could let me outside instead to play the way other kids played, so she could do it differently.
Sometimes—when I thought she wasn’t paying too much attention from the next room—I’d sneak out a thin booklet of sheet music I’d found in the piano bench. In it were songs from the Disney version of “Pinocchio” along with sketches of the characters: Jiminy Cricket in his bespoke vest and spats, leaning on a cane; Pinocchio before—before he became “real,” before he wasn’t tied to strings, just leaning. I’d play the charming little tunes as softly as I could—“Give A Little Whistle,” “When You Wish Upon A Star”—sometimes I sang along, but I didn’t have much of a voice, so mostly I didn’t. I just listened to myself playing.
Evening was the best time for radio. I could be alone in my room, or there with my sister who was like my twin, and listen to the dedication hours on each station while I halfway did homework. I was in love with the DJ, calling out names, reading messages from someone to their someone, sending this song to that listener, dedicating person to person. I never heard my name.
Now, hearing my voice coming out of the radio, I’m gaga, I’m giddy. It’s magic. It’s as though somehow, via the radio, I am broadcasting myself back in time, speaking to the young me there, in the bedroom of that Burke house, listening on that tiny red-and-black-checked boombox for I’m-still-not-sure-what during all those hours then. I’m saying, “Here you are. Here is your name, here, your dedication.”

It’s a little thing but I’m still silly over being on the radio.

A short poem of mine just aired on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle’s NPR station, and my sister and I (NPR junkies both) had the best time today listening for it morning into afternoon—she in her house working on some new designs, me in my apartment catching up on emails. Hearing my own voice from outside my body still makes me squirm, but hearing it come out of the radio was a thrill!

I grew up in a nowhere, semi-rural, suburban neighborhood in Virginia, in a strangely isolated household where we weren’t allowed to watch much TV. (That’s the house up there in that image from Google maps.) But there were no rules about radio.  So the radio became my secret place.

Mostly I listened to Top 40 stations because I was trying to give myself an education in pop music. I was almost 13 years old before I knew who Michael Jackson was. Before the radio, my Top 40 list was Chopin, Bach, Debussy; my everyday mixtape was Liszt, Schumann, Bartok, Haydn. Before I quit, I sat at the piano practicing an hour or two every day (presumably while other kids were over at each other’s houses singing along to Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Sheena Easton). The idea that the “piano” could somehow be associated with “playing” still seems a bit absurd to me. It was practice; it was work.

You have no idea the number of morose fantasies I entertained in my head while practicing pieces again and again about how my mother would find me fumbling my way up the stairs, gone blind from the nights and nights of reading music in that dim corner of the house. Or she’d find my wan body draped pitifully over the bench, no maybe splayed across the keyboard, cheeks sunken like gulches, fingertips chapped, dead finally from some mysterious virus, some killer disease stemming from so many hours of piano. The gorgeous regret that would bloom on her face! The wanting it all back so she could let me outside instead to play the way other kids played, so she could do it differently.

Sometimes—when I thought she wasn’t paying too much attention from the next room—I’d sneak out a thin booklet of sheet music I’d found in the piano bench. In it were songs from the Disney version of “Pinocchio” along with sketches of the characters: Jiminy Cricket in his bespoke vest and spats, leaning on a cane; Pinocchio before—before he became “real,” before he wasn’t tied to strings, just leaning. I’d play the charming little tunes as softly as I could—“Give A Little Whistle,” “When You Wish Upon A Star”—sometimes I sang along, but I didn’t have much of a voice, so mostly I didn’t. I just listened to myself playing.

Evening was the best time for radio. I could be alone in my room, or there with my sister who was like my twin, and listen to the dedication hours on each station while I halfway did homework. I was in love with the DJ, calling out names, reading messages from someone to their someone, sending this song to that listener, dedicating person to person. I never heard my name.

Now, hearing my voice coming out of the radio, I’m gaga, I’m giddy. It’s magic. It’s as though somehow, via the radio, I am broadcasting myself back in time, speaking to the young me there, in the bedroom of that Burke house, listening on that tiny red-and-black-checked boombox for I’m-still-not-sure-what during all those hours then. I’m saying, “Here you are. Here is your name, here, your dedication.”

Wonderful piece on Echoes by Gently Read Literature. Thank you, GRL and reviewer Kelly Lydick!
It’s still strange—in a good but also unsettling way—when I read someone’s review of my book and see that they can see all the way inside me in places. Strange/good because yes I wrote those poems to show those things, but strange/unsettling because I never thought anyone would be able to see that much of me, to xray what’s in my head, to call it all out nakedly on paper, without pants. Poems give me pants, I guess.

Wonderful piece on Echoes by Gently Read Literature. Thank you, GRL and reviewer Kelly Lydick!

It’s still strange—in a good but also unsettling way—when I read someone’s review of my book and see that they can see all the way inside me in places. Strange/good because yes I wrote those poems to show those things, but strange/unsettling because I never thought anyone would be able to see that much of me, to xray what’s in my head, to call it all out nakedly on paper, without pants. Poems give me pants, I guess.


Poetry & Manhood

My friend Nate got a rad write-up in the Huffy Post! His poetry book, Panic Attack, USA, is terrific terrific. You need it. Immediately.

nateslawson:

PANIC ATTACK, USA “coalesces into a wrenching, convincing, and instructive portrayal of American manhood in the early twenty-first century.” Or, according to Muddy Waters, “I’m a man.”

Poetry & Manhood

My friend Nate got a rad write-up in the Huffy Post! His poetry book, Panic Attack, USA, is terrific terrific. You need it. Immediately.

nateslawson:

PANIC ATTACK, USA “coalesces into a wrenching, convincing, and instructive portrayal of American manhood in the early twenty-first century.” Or, according to Muddy Waters, “I’m a man.”

Time to lose time in the "Catalogue of Curiosities"...

Among the Poets & Writers curios:

portraits of women

“a twig-wigged tree”

“things full of errors … new born & perfect”

Phoenicopterus ruber (my what a big flamingo you have)

the idea of the cave, mapless

“a little more volume”

a train in reverse, skyward

Hollywood 1943

“degrees of black”

“sinks & outcrops … fields & shanties”

“a crepuscular melange of all the cities … not ordered by the engineer”

(& yes, that is me there, too!)

QUESTION. Are poets allowed poetic license to do practically anything with punctuation? I ask this in view of a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to use the em dash in bewildering and inscrutable ways.

ANSWER. Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In my experience, they are sometimes even offended by editing, believing that their misspellings and inconsistencies are inspired, if not intentional. Of course, if poetry is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying, nobody will want to buy it, so there’s some motivation for restraint in the first place.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online

I repeat: “Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please.” Chickaboom.

Video clip: A bit of Art Spiegelman’s response when asked about the terms “comics” vs “graphic novel.” (Sorry the audio is so hard to hear—phone videos might be convenient but they don’t make for the best quality.)

Awhile ago, comics artist & writer Art Spiegelman came to Seattle to promote his new book MetaMaus, which details the experience/process of creating his most well-known work, MAUS. (By the way, here’s a good article in The Millions about both works, and a link to the podcast of Spiegelman’s talk with librarian Nancy Pearl at the Seattle Public Library.)

MAUS was the first comic book I had ever read. It essentially taught me how to read comics. Sure I’d read the Sunday comics or the tiny strips in Bazooka bubble gum, but I’d never read a full-on comic book—and it was surprisingly tough to do. I had to figure out how to get into my own flow of looking at the words + the pictures, and also do that without forgetting the larger composition of the page. I had to figure out which direction to read in—whether for rapid-fire speech balloons across panels or for pages where the panels departed from the usual orderly left-to-right blocks and leaked all over the page in disturbingly non-standard shapes and directions. Who am I kidding—forget avant-garde, irregular polygons—even a slightly larger square in a panel or a tall, skinny rectangle threw me into a panic. I was comics illiterate before MAUS, not to mention also clueless about the possibilities of the comics form.

About this “comics” vs “graphic novel” question, I’ve also wondered if there’s a difference between the two (being still relatively new to it all, I’m never quite sure if I’m using the terminology correctly). Don’t know that I agree (or disagree) with Spiegelman about the respectability of graphic novels over the irreverence of comics, but it did give me a new starting point into the maze of thinking about how forms/containers affect writing; how (if) our intent plays into it; the definitions and expectations of the words comic / comics / graphic / graphics / novel; the ways we prepare ourselves (subconsciously or otherwise) to receive what we perceive to be different types of texts (including, and especially, poetry), and how (if) I should be thinking about that/using it when mucking around with so-called cross-genre pieces; and the value of trying to come up with answers to questions like this based on our own philosophies of writing.

 

On a separate but related note, what feels like a parade of new technology marched into my house recently: a new laptop (to replace my old one, HAL, who got motherboard cancer and is in computer hospice now), a Kindle Fire, and a Kindle Touch. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what each is for and how they’re different from my Droid phone and my other (now old—already) Kindle and my iPods and the still many lots of books on my shelves.

slide from Art Spiegelman talk (Seattle, WA 2011)

 

Maybe they’re just other types of forms/containers—for both consuming and creating.

Still not sure what that does to me in the maze.


P.S.

What is the effect of flattening out our reading material, I wonder? Is there an effect? I mean, does not having the dimensionality of a thick/thin book also somehow change the way we receive/perceive a text? Or create it? Or what about the fact that all texts (books, magazines, videos, music, web sites, poems, email, photos, etc) seem to take on/represent themselves as the same shape (that is, the shape of the technological container)? Does it create a sort of textual-tactile democracy that seeps into our attitude toward all texts? Or do the ways we read a text carry over subtly to other texts without our knowing it (so that if I went from reading a comic book to a news article maybe for a bit I’m reading the news article the way I did the comic—paying attention to and gleaning meaning from whatever images appear from the text and the larger composition of the page as a whole including its ads)? Or maybe there’s more “intertextuality” going on in our heads than ever because we bounce around from a wider variety of texts now, and maybe all that textual rubbing in our brains affects how/what sort of text we create? Does it make our brains expand/grow in spatial smarts ways because we still perceive dimensionality but only virtually/mentally? If questions were nickels, I’d be the 1%!

"Dear Rilke, I am not young and I am not a poet...

…I slink around the city, disaster-footed, sure for danger, face unknown, I pull my hoodie up. I snick around, I slink around the city’s back. Short for danger. My motherless face bagged…”
 
 I have new poems up on the lovely, lovely diode!
 
Visiting hours are open at all times. Even right now.

photo caption: Carcasses lay on the ground at the Muskingum County Animal Farm on  Wednesday in Zanesville, Ohio. Sheriff’s deputies shot 48 animals,  including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions, after Terry Thompson,  owner of the private Muskingum County Animal Farm threw their cages open  Tuesday and then committed suicide.
[i liked it better when the story ended with a monkey & a wolf, still  on the loose, hitching it out of zanesville. i’ll just keep that ending  in my head.]


Wolf, monkey believed still loose near Zanesville

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20111019/NEWS01/111019002/Sheriff-48-animals-killed?odyssey=nav%7Chead


“We’re convinced that we do not have any animals running at large.  [The monkey] was in an area where one of the cats actually killed one of  the monkeys and we feel he could have been eaten by one of the cats,”  [Sheriff Lutz] said …

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44970708/ns/today-today_news/t/ohio-owner-exotic-animals-was-deep-debt/#.TqB8zXL6NnA


One monkey remained unaccounted for Wednesday night …
Overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday, sheriff’s deputies searched  the eastern Ohio woods around the city of Zanesville with night-vision  gear and patrolled in pickups, armed with shotguns. Flashing signs on  the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: “Caution.  Exotic animals.” Schools were closed, and some frightened residents said  they were keeping to their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted the  lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears.
“Yeah, there’s a lion on Mount Perry Road. … I just drove by and it  walked out in front of me and was standing there under the street  light,” one caller to 911 told deputies.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/us/ohio-animals-on-loose/index.html?iref=allsearch


Like Noah’s ark wrecking

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-18/exotic-animals-loose-ohio/50821092/1

photo caption: Carcasses lay on the ground at the Muskingum County Animal Farm on Wednesday in Zanesville, Ohio. Sheriff’s deputies shot 48 animals, including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions, after Terry Thompson, owner of the private Muskingum County Animal Farm threw their cages open Tuesday and then committed suicide.

[i liked it better when the story ended with a monkey & a wolf, still on the loose, hitching it out of zanesville. i’ll just keep that ending in my head.]



Wolf, monkey believed still loose near Zanesville

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20111019/NEWS01/111019002/Sheriff-48-animals-killed?odyssey=nav%7Chead



“We’re convinced that we do not have any animals running at large. [The monkey] was in an area where one of the cats actually killed one of the monkeys and we feel he could have been eaten by one of the cats,” [Sheriff Lutz] said …

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44970708/ns/today-today_news/t/ohio-owner-exotic-animals-was-deep-debt/#.TqB8zXL6NnA



One monkey remained unaccounted for Wednesday night …

Overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday, sheriff’s deputies searched the eastern Ohio woods around the city of Zanesville with night-vision gear and patrolled in pickups, armed with shotguns. Flashing signs on the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: “Caution. Exotic animals.” Schools were closed, and some frightened residents said they were keeping to their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted the lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears.

“Yeah, there’s a lion on Mount Perry Road. … I just drove by and it walked out in front of me and was standing there under the street light,” one caller to 911 told deputies.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/us/ohio-animals-on-loose/index.html?iref=allsearch



Like Noah’s ark wrecking

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-18/exotic-animals-loose-ohio/50821092/1

The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.

I am the person I see least of over the course of my life, and even what I see is not accurate.


(repeat)


The way you get to know yourself
is by the expressions on other
people’s faces, because
that’s the only thing that
you can see, unless you
carry a mirror about.
But if you keep saying ‘I’
and they’re saying ‘I,’
you don’t get much out
of it. They’re not
really in-
to you, or we, or
they; they’re
into I. That makes
con-
versation
s l o w. //

I am
the person
I see least
of over
the course of my
life, and
even what I see is
not ac-
curate.

Gil Scott-Heron, from a New Yorker profile of him, “New York Is Killing Me: The unlikely survival of Gil Scott-Heron,” by Alec Wilkinson (August 9, 2010)


(loitering about the house solo, in the owl hours, half-listening to an old Slate podcast on GSH, suddenly rushed by these words of his)

(& all the awkward ways we are only I, I only, on these slow streams, how that-is-how/is-that-how we know ourselves, slow ourselves, selve so low)

(unlikely survival. gills. caught. here. no. no. )

"New poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do."
my back turned to the sky
"

QUESTION. Are poets allowed poetic license to do practically anything with punctuation? I ask this in view of a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to use the em dash in bewildering and inscrutable ways.

ANSWER. Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In my experience, they are sometimes even offended by editing, believing that their misspellings and inconsistencies are inspired, if not intentional. Of course, if poetry is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying, nobody will want to buy it, so there’s some motivation for restraint in the first place.

"
"

The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.

I am the person I see least of over the course of my life, and even what I see is not accurate.


(repeat)


The way you get to know yourself
is by the expressions on other
people’s faces, because
that’s the only thing that
you can see, unless you
carry a mirror about.
But if you keep saying ‘I’
and they’re saying ‘I,’
you don’t get much out
of it. They’re not
really in-
to you, or we, or
they; they’re
into I. That makes
con-
versation
s l o w. //

I am
the person
I see least
of over
the course of my
life, and
even what I see is
not ac-
curate.

"

About:

(fruit-headed thoughts of varying volume. thanks & hello.)