A defense of the beautiful and broken

Bad roads

2012-01-24T23:55:00.000-05:00

The main things I've learned during grad school and the years of my life that have transpired while I've been in it are that what I want is almost totally irrelevant to how anything happens for me, and that I am the least important person in my own life. Everything I want is always in other people's hands, and I'm never able to persuade them to give it to me, not out of talent, not out of dedication, not even through pity, and believe me, I'd take pity if it would get people to give me a chance on some things.

I have a hard time even conceiving of what I deserve, but at least the emotionally untouchable taskmaster side of me can step back and say, "something better than this." It takes other people to point it out, though. The PhD just about cured me of being able to think that way on my own.

Yes, this is about more than the abysmal job market.
My orchids are in terrible shape because I haven't watered them in months, plural, and at the rate I'm going I'll never finish poetry book #2, let alone do anything more ambitious. A tenure-track job would help that, but so would a few other things, none of which are in place. Right now, the only motivation I have for working is personal satisfaction, and I can get personal satisfaction out of having some ice cream and a nap.

It's beginning to make me believe in luck again just so I can believe in unerringly, relentlessly bad luck. I wrote to the people at Marie Laveau's and asked them to make me a custom mojo bag. At this point, why not.

Ebb

2012-01-11T02:14:00.001-05:00

Doesn't share it.

I knew I had been trying to get someone to take care of me, but weeks later I realized

Sqwerl eating meat:

Laid a white scarf over my mouth while congratulating me, really nice one, off-white more, & I said, I'm working, this is all I do.

I'm going to go talk to her, ( )

Blonde baby girl, as I said, whoever she is, she's either a year old yesterday or 25 months

Quite a big hole left here to fill up with

(bastard/secretary
hand)

(aconite)

& ragged, compare the track

Purposeless, really senseless, purposeless. Why someone thought he had to

!= leaning forward != plenitude/to fill

(Doesn't share it.)

Ode for Ereshkigal

2011-12-27T21:27:00.003-05:00

It's just the dead. The dead, the dead, the dead.

On New Year's Eve at midnight, for one minute all the animals can speak and it's only by the bitter grace of knowing it won't do any good that they don't tell you how badly you've hurt them, or for how long, or what a different world would have meant to them. Instead, they whisper "I love you" to each other and slump together back to sleep.

The dead want you to hold them even in pieces. Whether it's you in pieces or them. As long as it isn't both, we can make this happen. Even.

They walk to the end of the driveway every day to check the mail even though they can't pick up your envelopes for you.

The animals die together and this is what most of us mean by "flock."

Knit a cotton shroud for the spring. This is what most of us mean by "fog."

War makes the dead irritable over all the incursions. They want you to mail them back their damaged skin priority. They want me to speak and say, "I love you," but they want me to say it to the fog and I don't think anyone will hear.

Clouds shredded in pieces and it doesn't matter which height. Look down. Look down.

On New Year's Eve at midnight drums will beat like hearts, but like empty hearts, all skin, no blood, all stage, and try to drown out the drowning.

Don't shoot. Sing the dead back to sleep like a flock of orbiting meteors.

Foiled

2011-12-24T18:33:00.002-05:00

Approaching the holiday with nowhere to go and more dark thoughts than I care to leave myself alone with, I'd made plans to spend it working on my dissertation. Starbucks, the company website said, would be open everywhere, normal hours, to 10 or 11. Lies, it turned out -- I worked at Spot, near me, til they closed at 5, then came home to grab food that wasn't entirely sugar and starch, popped back out to the Starbucks I thought would be my place for the night: closed. Drove downtown & found that one dark as well. I had some momentum earlier and I'm going to try to get it back, but I still have a lot of trouble working at home, so it may not happen.

In years I've felt better, I've put up a Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees. Driven around looking at people's lights. I've even left out cookies, as an adult; I love arbitrary, happy festival things, knowing they're arbitrary and liking them just fine that way. Before grad school, I even used to bake, usually something different for each family member, something for a Christmas party or two, sometimes something for a friend. I've always wanted to go out caroling. Used to decorate my parents' house up sometimes.

And: I've spent 7 out of my last 8 Christmases alone, going for 8 out of 9 this year. I had been trying to decide whether working at Starbucks would count as being alone or not, but now that that's moot, I can say, yes, I will be alone yet again. Nation is full of people who hate holidays, yet get to have them, and I can't make a life such that I get to do any fun gift shopping or decorating or holiday cooking, which I'd actually enjoy. Proof that the universe is neither just nor sensible right here.

I don't even know what I'd ask for, if I made a Christmas list, because the things I want seem so distant as to be unreal. I'd like things to change for the better; afraid to try to specify any more than that because of the almost perfect certainty that I'd be setting myself up for disappointment.

I suppose I can ask to revise another 2, possibly 3 chapters, but that's up to me to do and not Santa -- and sitting here, I already feel far more like lying down than like working. Other than that? Can't even say. Little purpose in doing so & less ability. Just get it over with so I can go find an impersonal setting with wireless and caffeine on Monday.

pew pew pew

2011-12-18T16:59:00.001-05:00

Six or seven years ago, I was involved in this clusterfuck of a documentary project in Baton Rouge -- Andrei Codrescu was teaching a class in documentary filmmaking, which, since this was Andrei, appeared to mean giving MFA students access to video cameras and no oversight. I imagine there were a lot of gross, fairly awkward stories about poets he'd seen drunk; that was a major component of the poetry workshop I took with him, anyway. A couple of the students in that class decided their documentary was going to be a "poetry combine," something Andrei had done in New Orleans, where he'd filmed poets who were friends of his going around and doing New Orleans things, and then they'd written poems about it and done a reading. The students were going to do theirs in Baton Rouge, with local poets, which immediately presented difficulties, since Baton Rouge didn't have nearly the doing-things resources New Orleans did, or local poets to do them -- but our budding auteurs decided to take on the challenge. They asked me to be in on it, and without getting a lot of details, I said, oh, sure.

Unsurprisingly, with inexperienced students basically making things up as they went along, the process was far from hitch-free. Things were supposed to start off with an evening at a blues bar downtown, and no one got ahold of me to tell me when (or if) people were getting there. The next morning, I met everyone at a coffee place, where the directors sprang on us that we were supposed to write collaboratively, which appeared to be news to everyone, not just me, and not news we were thrilled to get, because none of us were experienced with or interested in collaborative writing. A couple visual artists were involved, and they seemed more into the idea, but the poets all kind of went, uh, yikes. To this day, I'm not sure I'd even know how to write collaboratively -- Poetry Band is the only creative project I've ever gotten into, and that works partly because we avoid stepping on each others' toes by working in different media.

The day is recorded in a poem in my book, called "the poetry combine: a collaborative documentary" or something. We stood still in full Louisiana sun and listened very politely while a guy from a second-line jazz band played trombone and talked about jazz, which left me with permanently damaged skin. My whole right shoulder and arm scarred, all these tiny white dead spots, and ever since, if I get tan at all, you can see them. (I almost never get tan, and that's part of why -- it looks gross, so I avoid the sun even more than I would otherwise.) We went to a plantation, stood still in more full Louisiana sun, and listened to an appallingly well-fed white woman who taught folklore at Tulane talk about compair lapin, a character who came over from Africa, where his name, presumably, would not have been in French, and who eventually morphed into Brer Rabbit. She talked about how nice it was that families had these stories to hold them together through difficult times, like, you know, slavery.

I'd wanted to go to a plantation since moving to the area, but because I'm an ignorant Yankee, I thought the plantations today would be run by African Americans and they'd be these probably beautiful but grave points of very ugly American history. No -- in fact, the one we visited, the Laura Plantation, was unusual because they hadn't knocked down the slave cabins, and was considered quite daring and progressive for that. Most plantation tourism is really about how beautiful these houses are and the "elegance" with which Southern gentry lived before the War of Northern Aggression. Blithely, our speaker told us that these cabins had in fact been rented by families up into the 1970s. They were joined together in duplexes, one room per family, each just the size of the cabins I stayed in during Girl Scout camp, although with wood sides instead of canvas ones and a fireplace in the middle between the two of them. Grievous physical labor and abuse, rape, infanticide, grossly dehumanizing verbal abuse, and trying to live as a family in one room half the size of my current (small!) living room, joined next door to another family in equally horrendous circumstances -- but isn't it nice, how they told such clever stories and those eventually became part of "our" culture? That's what these cabins are really about. Right. It was easily one of the most ideologically upsetting situations I've ever been in. Our documentarians were kind of excited to have this woman on tape -- because, remember, we were filming -- saying jaw-droppingly tone-deaf things, too.

We may have done some other things -- not sure -- but our last stop was at The Hole Experience, a piercing and tattoo studio out in the sticks where I was going to get a tattoo. I'd wanted to have iconic-to-me animals put on each foot and the back of each hand, one for each element: turtle for earth, lizard for fire, frog for water, dragonfly for air, and this was a plan I'd had for a while. All creatures from my rural Missourian childhood. For the combine, the directors offered to get me the foot tattoos, which sealed my involvement. Important things this taught me: tattoos should never be free, and they should never be filmed.

The shop where the tattoo artist I'd wanted to do my designs worked turned out not to want us filming inside, which was a shame, but we respected it. Well, we had to. One of the students heading this up found another artist out at the edge of town at a studio with the same name -- presumably, they were owned by the same people, but maybe had different managers, because this one was fine with being on film. The artist was a douche, plain and simple, and although I knew not to get a tattoo designed by a douchebag, I went against my better judgment and told him to go ahead and draw up designs. I told him I wanted them to just be black, no color, and he immediately got out his book of tribal flash. No, not tribal, I want them to look like a turtle and a lizard, not like shitty faux-tribal tattoos. I thought I'd gotten it across to him, but he didn't have designs ready until the day of filming, and -- of course -- when we got out there, tired, sunsick, simultaneously wound up and exhausted, with the pressure that we had to do this whole thing in one day, the designs were stupid beyond stupid. Chunky tribal-style bullshit.

I put on the show, like this was the most fun I'd ever had in my life, and although I never saw the footage, I'm sure it came off that way, but I was so not happy from go. At least I only got the one, but still -- any time you're telling yourself, "maybe it's not so bad," that's not a permanent change you should be willingly making to your body. By the next day I was already sobbing about it, but there it was. I think I emailed the students who were doing the video -- may have left voicemail? -- about how upset I was and how much it was likely to cost me to get rid of it, and one wrote me back what I remember as a very cold-fish, obnoxious response. I've been walking around with this stupid-looking black tribal turtle on one foot ever since. Other people did poems or drawings or whatever their thing was; there was a reading/show for it, which I believe also got filmed, but I wasn't involved. No idea what became of the project, although Andrei no doubt gave them an A.

Yesterday, I went in for a laser tattoo removal treatment. Not that I have nothing better to spend my money on, but this thing has continued to bother and embarrass me for years, and getting a tattoo lasered and, eventually, replaced is more achievable than saving up for the car I probably need. It stings -- I have a high enough pain tolerance that I've had doctors comment on it, and I'll definitely admit that it hurt. Very short-term pain, though, and holy macrophages, Batman, but about 12 hours later, when I took the protective gauze off, I could already see a huge difference. The whole thing got lighter, even that quickly, and patches are already almost completely clear. I thought I'd take a "before" picture last night, but it was already on its way into "after." I'm planning to get it lightened enough to be covered over -- two big, gorgeous Betta splendens, one on each foot, chasing each other like the Pisces symbol, with stars, if we can make it work, in the shape of the Pisces constellation with half on each foot. I have an artist here I want to work with on that, but I have to knock out this mistake of a turtle first. I now imagine that'll be all of one or two more laser sessions.

This, and I bought myself a really nice pen (Pelikan M400 in white/tortoise) and a pretty nice bathrobe (one of those two-layer microfiber & terry spa-type ones), both things I've wanted for a couple years. A bracelet and earrings made out of antique typewriter keys, the latter of which I improved markedly by adding a bunch of beads, because god knows nothing is ever quite busy enough for me. During my exams, I learned that I'm one of these people who shops when she's stressed and I didn't do much of that when I was crunching my hardest on the dissertation, so I guess this is probably blowover from that. Or it could be that it's Christmas time and I'm buying gifts for myself in lieu of having anyone else to buy them for, or anyone else to buy them for me. Plus still no interviews, plus still nothing under me like a job I care about or a plan or a life. Started a crochet project (Interweave's Dahlia shawl; Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino in Spanish Moss). Going through revisions but there's no urgency -- I found, for example, that I had several nearly identical pages in two chapters, because I was trying it out in each place and forgot it, and no one said anything about that. They definitely didn't read it, and it's a fair bet no one ever will. Meaningless project unless it gets me a teaching job or at least gets read (and honestly, not very meaningful if all it ever does is sit on ETD and occasionally get downloaded by some other clueless grad student). So: lots of limbo.

I'm even thinking about paying off parking tickets with my next paycheck -- surely a sign of not enough in front of me to do.

Crows again.

2011-12-14T14:07:00.001-05:00

Another day appears to be creeping by without any requests for interviews at MLA. If I go two years in a row without even getting an interview, I don't know. . . well, I don't know a lot of things. It throws my whole career into question -- the only life I've ever tried to make, for which I've given up a lot of things I would really like to have had. Proceeding out of that question mark, a lot of other serious problems: do I keep trying; if so, do I go back to adjuncting, looking at $24k a year, if I can even get full-time teaching, possibly without benefits, leaving myself very little time or energy for an independent creative or scholarly agenda, with my loans coming into repayment; if I don't keep trying, what do I do; can I handle not trying again; can I handle trying again.

There's time -- a little -- MLA doesn't start til January 5 and a decent number of my applications only had deadlines of Nov 15, 28, 30. A very few had Dec 15 deadlines, and all that group but one were poet positions, so they may be interviewing at AWP at the end of February. I've been told that people get interview requests a matter of days before the conference sometimes, and it at least used to be traditional for Yale to make their calls on Christmas Eve. Not that Yale was hiring, at least not in my field, but the point might bear considering.

All the same: I now have two terminal degrees and a book out. I've successfully applied for international research grants (well, fine, one), have a scholarly article coming out next year, have tons of teaching experience -- and I'm not even getting interviews. I'm not alone, either; the discipline has vastly oversold its seats, and has been doing so for years and years. Someone should tote up the number of new PhDs awarded in English each year for the past, say, ten years, and the number of job postings in the US for English professors. It's got to be on the order of hundreds to one, and every year a new batch of PhDs floods out into a world without jobs for us, pushing everyone that much farther away from our intended careers.

If we think like capitalists, it's not even in higher ed's interest to improve the situation for the deeply indebted, un- and underemployed people it's producing. Colleges and universities get very highly-trained people to teach their shittiest classes, and they get them cheap. We're beat down, we're scrupulously trained to live poor, we're naive about other options and how to make any of them work, and we're really, really dedicated to students and teaching. If you don't have any one of those traits, you won't make it through a PhD anyway. Our being extremely intelligent, creative, and capable of teaching much more advanced, specialized, lively classes is somewhere between a nice lagniappe to irrelevant. In some situations, it may be a liability, because as with any other low-end job, if you look like you might (and might be able to) jump ship, places may not hire you anyway. Because adjunct and instructor positions are all one-semester or, if you're lucky, one-year contracts, though, fortunately our better abilities are rarely a detriment to securing insecure and exhausting employment.

It's even to a school's advantage to overwork its contract work force, because if you can pay us so little that we have to take on 4, 5, 6 classes just to get by -- and I've known people with families and kids who somehow teach 7 and 8 a semester -- we have nothing left to devote to advancement. I remember a friend who was on a fiction-writer search several years ago, going through CVs while I was on the phone, and saying about one, "Wow, this guy hasn't done anything in six months. I wonder if he sent us an outdated CV or something." The person hadn't published a new story or given a reading in all of six months, and that was so deviant that it put the document itself into question, along with, of course, the applicant's candidacy. Readings are not easy to come by, even with the blessing of a major city that happens to have a relatively thriving literary culture. You have to go to a lot of readings, most of which will be awful; you probably ought to organize some and invite other people, to incur favors; you have to walk a very fine self-promotional line between making an ass of yourself and vanishing -- and even with all that, you still have to be right place/right time lucky. Publications are at least as rough. And six months out, you already start to look like someone who doesn't know enough about what s/he's doing for a committee to take you seriously. Once you move beyond the assured poverty of working as a graduate teaching assistant into the uncertain and even worse poverty of adjuncting, keeping your CV up takes herculean dedication and a willingness to do without other interests, including a social life. It's more to ask of oneself than the psyche is built to sustain, and a lot of us fall into that pool and never wade out -- which is only to many institutions' advantage.

In some ideal world -- in the world where I'd like to live -- college and university administrators understand how important the humanities are; humanities faculty make the importance of their fields clear. There's a culture that encourages and, oh goodness, requires students to take literature, history, languages, philosophy, so classes can fill and departments can justify real hiring lines. There are some schools where that culture still has a good hold, and on one hand they're elite as hell, but on the other, they're they places where I am probably best suited to teach based on my strengths. They're by far the exception, though, and plenty of other equally well-qualified people, plus, probably, plenty of better-qualified people are applying. Here I am, then, with the last 10.5 years of my life over and nothing yet to move on to. I always look forward to the winter solstice, like it's going to mean something, and it never does. It ought to. If the universe were ordered, it would; when the universe appeared to be ordered, it did. Sun coming back to us and all that. Not today.

I wish humanities departments would get themselves out of the job-training trap. What we do does not prepare students for careers, at least not careers doing anything different what we ourselves do, and it's not even ethical at this point to encourage bright young people to go to grad school in literature. As long as we accept job training as a rubric by which to judge the worth of an aspect of education, we're fucked. What we need to be talking about is joblessness training. Resourceful, informed critical thought; the inquisitiveness and optimism that founds positive cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-class interactions; the same inquisitiveness and optimism that helps you adapt to totally unexpected situations like radical career changes, or straight-up unemployment; the knowledge and attitudes you need to enjoy free or nearly-free things like having really intelligent discussions about books. These are the things that, sometimes, make our miserable lives tolerable, and while of course one hopes the world will be kind to one's students, there's not enough kindness to go around. They would make others' miserable lives tolerable, too, if we'd get up the rhetoric to secure the resources to provide the classes in a context of institutional respect, and get students taking them.

State universities will never go for joblessness training. The ivies might, but it'll still be a long while before their student body has to face these pressures. Small private colleges, maybe, depending on their values, and, well, their donors' values. Let me tell you, I would love to get to one of these places and go to town on establishing why these programs that aren't money-makers and that don't produce money-makers deserve serious support. As much as I loathe meetings, those, I'd go to and I think I could do real good advocating for this cause that's deep in my heart.

They'll have to interview me, though. At the very least. Meanwhile, it's just the anxious emptiness and the desperation.

Anatomy

2011-12-08T21:18:00.001-05:00

I think of my prose as muscular and my poetry as all broken bones and blood. There isn't any skin because I don't trust what it does.

Alternatively, the wind blows open the door, the house howls, and I can open my mouth and explode from the inrush of freezing night, or I can sing so hard it pushes the outside back outside. But I can't shut the door. I could never forgive myself.

I've finally made an appointment to get a tattoo lightened so I can cover it over with a much better one.

The Mississippi basin holds the continent's endocrine system.

SPOILER ALERT: she gets the degree

2011-12-02T21:56:00.001-05:00

Defended.

Yes, as of yesterday afternoon. It lasted barely over an hour, and everyone was astonishingly pleasant. Hardly anything was said about the chapters on actual poets, so it's possible, and far from unheard-of, that no one read the thing, but the conversation we did have was still excellent, so I have no particular complaints. I got some major and meaningful compliments on both the book -- that what I'm saying about Eliot, for example, is genuinely new, particularly because of the context of the other poets with whom I'm associating him, which indicates that the work seems to hang together (though that's outlined in chapter one, so, again, no evidence anyone necessarily read beyond that); that my highly unorthodox theory about myth is actually right; that I could teach queer theory, even though I don't even identify as a queer theorist, per se. This last came from my advisor, and since QT is his bailiwick, where his reputation is, that was a surprising and very positive casual comment for him to make. I'm not really capturing it. People said a lot of excellent things, and I'm so uptight about anything positive happening to me that I'm not even comfortable typing them out.

They also asked some very real questions, including starting right off by asking me what I mean by "the irrational" and suggesting that this might not even be the right term for my concerns. I, uh, would have liked to have had someone raise that 4 or 5 years ago, when I first began framing this project in precisely those terms, but I guess bringing it to the defense is better than never addressing it at all. (I guess. Oy.) I got an excellent suggestion from Don Revell, whom I asked to be an outside reader (and who was great -- I don't know him beyond liking his work and having seen him speak at a couple conferences, but that was enough to ask him if he'd read my diss, and he did, and turned out to be an awesome asset). He pointed out first that the concepts to which I hew are -- I used the word myself -- phenomenological, measurable, issues of scale, and that measure has a lot of resonance in poetry. Then he suggested that what I'm after might be something more like the disruptive rather than the irrational; on first blush, I was too busy thinking, oh, shit, this is such a key term for me and I don't know how I can afford to punt it, but he's so right. Plus, key to me or not, I'm using it in a different way than poetics usually does; poetry as irrational usually invites a lot of fruity crazy-person bullshit about intuitive and how you can't analyze poetry because it's about synthesis and I don't even know what all useless non-statements. I have no wish to be confused with those people, so I do want to sharpen my language, and what I'm talking about, those inarticulable experiences of confronting death, desire, the natural world, connections to others (and Otherness), etc., are of interest to me for their disruptive character.

I did not, however, have an immediate answer for how I could rework the manuscript to trade out talking about the irrational for talking about the disruptive. Fortunately, no one on my committee asked me that, but I was already asking myself as the meeting went on. Toward the end, my advisor, who is, well, not a math person, asked me something like, "irrational numbers, isn't that a thing in math?" He's right -- and much righter than he could probably have guessed. Dig:

Irrational numbers are those which cannot be represented by a fraction or ratio. Inapt to proportion, division, reason; they are inarticulable by ordinary numbering systems. (And the articulate is that which is jointed, divided, cut into pieces, and only therefore spoken; the unspoken/inarticulate is silent and also whole. As pain. As I've said before.)
We have to invent ways to represent them -- pi, e. Draw an immediate parallel to catachresis or at least to innovation broadly conceived.
If we do try to represent them numerically, they extend the system beyond its own bounds, nonterminating, nonrepeating.
They progress (nonterminating) but their progress cannot be predicted (nonrepeating).
Compare 22/7, one of the common approximations for pi. Inexact, but functional; doesn't change the reality of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, but lets us bring it into mathematics, albeit in a deformed form.
Compare also the succession of ways we've approximated pi: 25/8 (Babylonian), 3.141666 (Ptolemaic), 3.141864 (ancient Chinese), a sigma equation called the Madhava-Leibniz series (Indian and German independently), various later series, and the familiar 3.14. Each came to be through a different approach; each serves different ends, e.g. accuracy vs. convenience, well. Data points around an attractor.
Compare then death. The statistical likelihood of dying from a given cause or at a given age, biochemical descriptions of the body in decay, psychological descriptions of grief and coping with loss, even religious systematization (rationalization) of death's meaning -- none of these have anything to do with the experience of actually confronting it, as a future for oneself or the manner by which one loses another. They might be called approximations.

To say, irrational numbers are going to clarify how I'm using that term, in a clever and flashy and also legit manner that ties right into my also clever and flashy and unexpectedly legit use of chaos theory, while disruption is going to give me a better term to use where I don't need to push the valences of irrationality that I do need.

A number of other thoughts came up, several more about clarifying or doing more with some of my key terms -- materialism, community, movement (as transfer, now, as metaphor), sense (which hinges between logic and somatic experience). I got some platinum advice about how to position myself within major questions in modernism, which has always been a struggle for me. About all I can come up with is that I trouble the idea of modernity as new, and instead focus on its connections to its history, vexed though they are; as a corollary, I then trouble the whole idea of novelty that's ruled our critical and pedagogical practice for the past century -- which is accurate, but not a thing you really say to people. Coherence and synthesis look old-fashioned & totalitarian when you're invested in novelty and difference, which most 20th-century lit people are. My take is that there's a lot of unexcavated possibility, in Ovid as much as in Eliot, but no one hears that; they just hear that you're skeptical of the new and they discount you for that. I've tended to look at other people writing on the period's poetry & said, ehhhh, I'm not even really arguing with them so much as doing something different from them, & then looked at people writing on myth & I'm really doing something different from them, and given the whole problem a big, dissatisfied shrug.

One of my committee members said that he'd like to see what I'd say if I took up, e.g., the Frankfurt school -- who write about myth tons and take it seriously, but who treat it as ineluctably and perniciously conservative. That's precisely why I'd shrugged them off, but he's absolutely right that I could probably tease out all kinds of interesting and useful complications and divergent illuminations within that body of thought, and, disagree with them over myth or not, I love those people. Or, well, I love the younger, more literary ones. Not so much the more directly political ones, but still. That should be a great tack to follow.

The biggest, though, I've saved for last, and not only because it was the last thing we talked about. Someone, I forget which person, asked me how I position myself vis-a-vis queer theory. There is kind of a lot of deviant sexuality in my dissertation -- I mean, when Tom Eliot is the straightest poet you have on hand, that is a queer batch of people. That wasn't intentional, though; it was just that the poets whose work seemed to be doing the things in which I was interested also had nonnormative gender identity positions. The big reveal is in my Spicer chapter, the last one, where I argue that poetry itself is kind of queer, the paradoxical but actual experience of being both inspired, receptive, yielding control, and of having mastery not only of craft but at the level of ontology, to create this thing that didn't exist before. I argue that it's especially legible in Spicer because of his poetry's content and its context in his life, but that this is a necessary condition for what I ended up calling Orphic poetics. Right. If I'm right that myth and poetry share their project of articulating the disruptive, approximating it aesthetically/verbally, though, and I think I am, then I'm actually saying that mythmaking is queer in these same ways. How crazy is that? I love it! This plus the Frankfurt school on myth, if I can get enough read to write about them well, will give me an awesome afterword, which is one thing I was hurting for.

The committee were fully satisfied with what I have and told me I was done, which also supports my suspicion that they didn't read the whole manuscript, because I know one of the Eliot chapters (I ended up with two) is riddled with typos. The other probably is, too, and since Spicer was rewritten from scratch and Crane only really written for the first time in the last three months before I handed it off, I imagine they may be similarly sloppy. Since I scheduled myself six weeks between defense and the graduate school's deadline, I want not only to fix those things, but to see how much of the rest of this I can get a start on, too. It's not like I'm busy otherwise -- largely because burying myself in what turned out to be a 364-page manuscript fairly well broke all my other bonds, responsibilities, and interests. If it weren't for job applications, I don't think I would even have known what to do with my brain this past month.

We also talked about a possible additional chapter. One problem here is that academic presses apparently want manuscripts around 90k-100k words, which is IMO tiny, if you want to do anything right. This makes my dissertation already about 100 pages long. It's always easier to cut than to add usefully, but cutting 100 pages out, woo -- that'll be a bear. If I write another chapter, it'll be a bigger, angrier, more muscular bear. I do want to, though, because one of my primary goals for Apostate is to demonstrate that mythopoesis is a live activity, right now, with all sorts of salutary aesthetic and sociopolitical potential. I want therefore to bring the book's historical scope forward to the late 20th century, early 21st if I can

I've been thinking for a while that Derek Walcott's Omeros would take that niche, and have been ruminating over a notion of recolonizing the canon, some kind of redirection of the technologies of colonial power back at the empire. Part of this, cynically, is that it would be nice to have someone in my book who isn't white. Such is the scene. However, I recently reread Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and I was flipping through her Sappho a while ago, and, man, stylistically and thematically, she's so much more in line with what I'm doing and so much more exciting a poet for me. There's queer erotics, bodily monstrosity, acting from the margins -- plus she does such interesting things with absence, and that's something I haven't yet dealt with much. There are things to say about her, I think, through notions of privacy and elision and silence, that would end up making some interesting claims about how and whether we engage texts so ancient they aren't only about myth, but partake of myth in their own being. One of my committee members also brought up Nate Mackey, who of course is another poet whose work I just love, and at one point I had thought he'd be the dissertation's final chapter. I'm not currently sure I could say much about him that would be all that distinct from what I say about Eliot, and since I wouldn't be overturning a lot of misreading in order to make those statements, they wouldn't be as interesting made about Mackey as they are about Eliot.

Not that I've sat down and done the least bit of real work on any of these poets, though. What I'd like to do, if I can land a job that will afford me the support to do it, would be to work up articles and/or conference papers on all these people, see how well I like the possibilities for writing deeper treatments of their work, and look at how any of them would reconfigure the manuscript as a whole. Being able to establish my erotic Orphic poetics, via Spicer, will be a much more powerful move if I can then go on to show someone around today who's doing it and doing it spectacularly. It'll also make disregarded/demodernized Crane seem suddenly more relevant, let me show the aesthetics I see H.D. championing in action long after her day, etc. Word count or not, then, chapter the next is something I want to do. Need to find out how.

I'm happy with the dissertation, and with the time to make it one step better. Very happy with the tenor of my defense. In order to stay that way, I have to refrain from thinking about any other aspect of my life, which, unfortunately, is hard to do since the dissertation was the main thing I've been using to keep from having to think about the rest of my life.

I passed, though. Ten and a half years of my life tied themselves up and became the past. Whatever comes next, I'll never go back there; it's not even possible, and that's a loss that's cause for at least modest ecstasy.

Meditation for the Erzulie Clan

2011-11-27T19:59:00.001-05:00

In 2002, while living in Baton Rouge, I dated a guy who lived in New Orleans for a bit. He was good-looking; that was nice. He was interesting. Took me on some good dates -- smart movies, cool restaurants, walks through the Bywater where he lived (on Montague Street, in fact, of "Tangled Up In Blue" fame). The second weekend or so that I went to see him, I came out and my car had had some kind of grey substance painted across the drivers' side window, and over a "Safe Travel" sticker I had in the back window with an iconically spell-like circle on it, weird little characters and a few curving lines going in and out of it. Well, spell-like; it was sold as a spell.

At first, I was kind of excited; I felt like I'd been hazed, like getting voodoo-cursed -- because what else could it be -- meant I really lived there. I didn't know what it had done, and was definitely superstitious enough to think it had to have done something. I was also superstitious enough to be fully leery of trying to undo it myself; voodoo, so I had been told, latches on to people just for thinking about it, and fighting it was definitely a bridge farther than thinking about it. That winter, I'd wreck my car driving home, the last time I went home for a holiday and the last time I'd go home at all until just a couple years ago. Totaled it out. My poor little Honda looked like it had been punched in the jaw, and my cats and I had to wait, first by the side of a road and then in a police station lobby, for hours while my father drove down to get us. Or, I would have totaled it out if I'd had insurance; when I called the next morning, I found out I didn't, that my mother hadn't paid my bill, something she'd voluntarily offered to do when I started graduate school, and my insurance had been dropped quite some time earlier. As it ended up, my parents paid for the repairs and my brother came up to help fix it, but I lost three weeks I hadn't planned on spending there and as a result lost my extra job -- which was a miserable job, but I did need the money at the time. I remember watching a lot of Beavis and Butthead on one of their giant screen TV's, off my brother's laptop, and I remember the smells of paint and bondo. A windshield repairman came out to the house on a Saturday to put in a new one. I remember the crash, too, but that's a different knot in this cord.

I worked out a plan to exorcise the curse I was then certain I had. I had an old glass prism from a chandelier or lamp to put it in, a ribbon to wind around and bind it there that came from somewhere significant though I can't remember where anymore, a lemon to blast it out and a knife -- and so, nearly a decade ago, I was already living in some of Spicer's terms. The lemon and the unwelcome ghost and the problem of control. I never had the bravery to do it, though; driving again, across I-70, I did it in my head, wrapped the glass gem in its ribbon and threw it out the window somewhere in the middle of the state, but the lemon had started to mold and I knew I wasn't doing what needed to be done; I wasn't sure what needed to be done was possible, but I did know I wasn't accomplishing it.

I never know, anymore, how I believe in any of these things. But I wonder if I need to get rid of my car for things to start going well for me again. That fall was probably the last time they did and I'm still driving it. Not that I have any way to afford one right now, but if it could be made to happen, it couldn't hurt.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T17:32:00.001-05:00

Migrating, they beat dirges out of the air with their wings. They keep their mouths shut.

Borrow me a dotted line. Rosin, palms, coconut husks, hurricane soughoff.

Pine needles actually needles, or larger, and that's where I fall. It's night. Someone's hands shape white scars in the air and someone else's hand has a hole in it where a brazed star is supposed to be. I'm bleeding as soon as I move, thank god. I rain over them and they think it's the sky.

Why doesn't it even

2011-11-17T00:19:00.001-05:00

                                                :

           On the page.

                                                         ending

                              silver voices
                                                       is missing

Zeno and I have crossed our finish line.

2011-11-06T20:55:00.001-05:00

The last -- not even weeks, last two or three months of this dissertation had really started to seem endless. The day job thing -- well, I took a couple weeks off, and did need every minute I got, and in addition to permitting me to tear through a ton of research and writing, my sabbatical also gave me good, scientific data on how there's no way I can have a non-academic job and pursue anything resembling independent academic work. Under statistically identical circumstances of stress, exhaustion/energy, financial resources, etc., I do as much in one good day on my own as I do over a week while working at my office. Good to know. Better to know if I can get a tenure-track line at a university that cares about research & writing, but it's good information, regardless.

Have you ever let your house go to where it's super cluttered, and then started cleaning? You know how you can "clean the house" and then, sitting around in the evening, before you even get to feel proud of yourself, you realize that your primary accomplishment has been revealing more mess that you now have to deal with? It's possible to go through at least four or five iterations of this. I certainly have. Revising my chapters worked like that, plus I was still writing the Crane one. It just -- it really wasn't ever going to end. I was going to be eighty years old and still writing pages and fixing sections so they made sense with each other and checking citations.

But I won't, after all. 360 pages, 116,109 words, and it's done. I have yet to email it to my committee because I want to use Dropbox's public folders and the entire internet appears to be too busy to check one of my links to verify that it works -- but it's done. There are things I'd fix, a few more articles I know of that I should track down, at least one book and one essay collection that came out in the past few months, etc., and I may very well deal with those things between now and when I submit it to ETD -- but it's done. My defense will go off on December 1 and although I'm sure we'll have plenty of material for conversation, there's no real chance I won't pass, so this also means that my PhD is done. Less than a month and I can even take the title.

Au revoir, life as a grad student. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Woman of Claims

2011-10-08T19:06:00.000-05:00

MSA this weekend. Millay paper went excellently -- the panel wasn't well-attended, but we were up against I think three other poetry panels, all on more major authors than ours, and it turned out that David Chinitz had been one of my copanelists' undergrad advisors, so he showed up, which means I got to give a really cool paper in front of a youngish heavy hitter in my field. Our panel overall hung together really well, which is not always the case, and all the papers were strong. Audience was into it, too. Actually, probably the most interested, enthusiastic audience I've ever spoken to, even though there were like ten people in it. I need to go get famous so I can have more people being all excited about the things I'm excited about.

The comments I got were primarily along the lines of thanking me for providing such excellent readings of the poems, which is great. What that means is that my paper came across as illuminating facts people hadn't noticed before, rather even than making an argument, when it was not only making an argument but making a fairly extreme one. My stance is essentially that Millay's formally perfect sonnets are as aesthetically innovative as the Poundian free-verse strike against the metronome. I even said that toward the end. And, still, people were like, "oh, yes, I never saw that, thank you for showing it to me," not even like, "wow, that's an interesting idea, thank you for putting it out here to think about" -- which would have been more than satisfactory! Of course I think I'm right, but I think I'm right about all sorts of loony things. Having one of my loony ideas come across as correct at the level of appearing to be a fact to other smart, informed people -- that's pretty swell. With some development of the context and slightly more attention to the (incredibly small) pool of criticism on Millay, I think it'll be a good article. And that is well-timed, it turns out, even though writing the talk represented a big detour during my Last Ever Dissertation Month, because it will give me a project where the thought is already laid out, and where I have a wind of encouragement at my heels, to carry me beyond what still feels like a funereal act.

Last Dissertation Month itself is going all right. Tired. Wow am I tired, and I'm only going to get more so, but I banged out an entirely new, much, much, much better chapter on Spicer and now I'm going through Eliot to see if I can get that down to about 60-65 pages. Needs an intro and conclusion, needs signposting, needs some things trimmed. Spicer will need an intro and conclusion. Crane still needs more substantial work but I was on kind of a "skygack or girder-jack" tear for a while and got lots laid out on him that I should be able to shape and extend well. Plus, Crane, thank goodness, is all about The Bridge for me, without this career-surveying thing I'm doing with both Spicer and Eliot. Remind me not to do this again until I have a job and the accompanying license to write single-author books. Or not to do it at all. I was drowning in Eliot earlier this year, really just drowning. With Spicer, it's more like stretching myself over a great tract of territory, I suppose because he writes about distance and Eliot writes about drowning. The criticism starts to feel like the poetry, too, though. Anyway, Crane is so blessedly much more focused. I want to shape Eliot, do the on-ramp and off-ramp for Spicer, so that everything will be done but the one chapter, and then go to the rest of Crane. It's still a project and I have mere fleeting weeks to get it done, but I think it will be possible.

Barring crisis. Crisis is always a possibility when it's my life, but one does what one can, and at the very least, I can forge on until crisis strikes, if it does, and reschedule my defense if necessary.

Yes, the defense is scheduled -- room reserved, whole bit. December first, which is numerologically fortuitious. H.D. would be pleased. Viz.:

12 / 1 == 1+2+1 = 4, the Moon/motherhood, feminine revelation of mysteries, intuition, fertility, generosity, stability (predicting a fascinating, affirming, supportive discussion, in this context); the Emperor in the Tarot, command and masculine power of law, another kind of stability; also the number to which my birthdate adds, so I consider that my lucky number;

12 / 1 / 2011 == 1+2+1+2+0+1+1 = 8, Uranus/expansion, exploration, the sky (moving; growing; i.e., getting a grown-up job), also the arts, alternative sexualities (which of course are all over my diss); Strength in the Tarot, which is a very gentle, flexible, fertile strength, the strength to give, not that which dominates; it's also a lucky number in many Asian countries, the number of legs Odin's horse has, and the number of white kitty paws in my house. The total number of kitty paws in my house is 12. Either way, I expect Bastet to be at my side, or winding back and forth around everyone's ankles, ensuring that the experience is magical and glamorous and purrworthy.

The prevalence of doubles, 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 suggests harmonious, very positive increase, as does the 8 + 4 = 12 sum; this suggests that the smaller and larger implications of the day support some greater structure together, rather than, say, undermining it or simply having no relation to it. And, yes, you can spin these out in any direction, nearly infinitely. I'm sure I could turn it all into combative 5s and painful, solitary 9s if I wanted, but I'm a pragmatic juggler of systems, and I'm only going to swing them around in ways that support my needs, in this case, to head toward this date feeling like I am going to win the academy, in the way that people are always claiming to win the internet.

I do sometimes wish this were a hundred years ago and I could obtain a doctorate in Occult Studies, but then I'd have to actually be in these things, the way I'm in poetry, and I have too much fun being an intellectual with an incongrously non-disparaging interest in these things. I'd never want to give that up. I guess I'm saying I wish I could get a PhD without having to be serious about it, and that wouldn't really work.

Anyway, Millay went well, and I've liked this conference generally very well -- no surprise, but it's the first time I've done MSA, so it's new, if far from unexpected. Next year, it's in Las Vegas! Gross, but if I went, maybe I could go meet the CSI people. Don't tell me I can't. Suspending the distinction between fiction and reality is the only way I get myself to keep writing and applying to jobs.

Send that statue tumbling.

2011-09-29T19:34:00.000-05:00

Ron Silliman has gone and blogrolled me at his enormous poet/ry blogroll under my real name. Imagine this is an effect of my (still extremely hilarious) being reblogged by the Tea Party and through that highly unlikely mechanism, coming to visibility in the poetry blogosphere, briefly and faintly. Not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I'm kind of awed and titillated by the notion of people reading a poetry blog, and by people who have poetry blogs that get read, and in theory the idea of having a poetry blog that people read ought to appeal to me, but I do a fairly good job of keeping my name Google-dissociated from my scurrilous opinion-having and neurosis, some of which does take a home here. I figure that people who know me, or who somehow happen to search my posts' content, it's fine if you all see me moping about not having a future or ranting about arts scenes or gushing about orchids and fountain pens or whatever other inane thing gets my attention on any given day, but it's not stuff I'd get out at a job interview. So. Silliman's blog and my name. And I know at least one person has clicked through. It's a thinker.

On the other side of ephemeral publicity, MSA put up all our abstracts on the program this year! I have no idea if they've done this previously, since this is my first time doing MSA, but I just discovered it the other day. Look: Epiphany at the Edges of Modernism. Our panel sounds really good, if I do say so myself, and reading through it again was a nice reminder that my ideas are at least potentially interesting, at least a little. Plus if someone's read my job materials enough to have an idea of what I work on, they'll now be able to find that and see evidence of a larger context for my dissertation -- a critical perspective. Imagine! So, thanks, MSA. I'm unconvinced your conference is worth the $130 it cost me just to register (fuck's sake, huh?) but I do like that you put all that online. I'm sure the primary purpose is to give attendees a better way to find out what the panels are about, but it also gives those of us who are presenting a nice little unexpected slice of web real estate.

One of our former (or something; I don't know what his relationship to the program ended up being) poetics PhDs today sent the listserv a notice of a new interview with him, out today, in which he discusses "mobile poetic forms, microseconds, wakefulness, neighborliness, introspection, dialogue, and love," and which also includes a clip of one of his new projects which "features improvisatory sidewalk dialogues." He's not joking; this is what he does, is have banal conversations with people, record them, and type that up, and call the recordings and/or transcriptions poetry. It's sort of a Kenny Goldsmith thing, but not with the ego (thank goodness). I wince. He's not a bad human being, at least what I know of him, but criminy. I also remember him telling me once that he knew he and one of our modernism professors weren't going to get along because they met to talk about an independent study, and our sidewalk-conversating poeticist told the professor he wanted to read some novel, I forget what one, but a novel. For a semester-long graduate class. The professor said, "ok, sure, and what else would you read?" End of that discussion.

And this, for those of you outside English studies, is why literature programs are wary of poets when they're hiring -- that is to say, this is why they're wary of me. That I have the book out and even continue to write and publish poetry suggests I might be like that, and reading one novel for an entire graduate class doesn't testify to an ability to conduct meaningful, publishable research, or to teach high-calibre classes, which is what departments want from job candidates.

Poetry Band Bandmate gave me an issue of some recording magazine he gets today with an interview inside with Brian Eno. Along the way, he reveals that the teachers at his art school thought he was too brainy for art, with one of them having entered the comment somewhere into his record that he was "hampered by intellectual considerations." At least I'm in good company with being a double-ended peg. Apparently his old school had given him an honorary doctorate right before he happened to give the interview. Maybe decades down the road someone will give me an honorary job, since I'm probably going to get the doctorate on my own.

Finish This Syllogism

2011-09-25T10:56:00.000-05:00

Differénce is a dream of plenitude.

At the same time, that something appears illogical doesn't mean it wasn't constructed with care.

Job search, opening sally

2011-09-20T21:52:00.001-05:00

About 30 jobs on the initial release of the job list that describe anything like what I do. Two of those are looking for a poet who can also do literature classes. Let's savor that for a moment: 27 jobs (to be precise) in the entire nation for which my background might qualify me. Two in the entire nation that are really what I do. I'll expect about 2/3 that many more to post during the main season, which will bring me to maybe 50 jobs total, maybe 3 or 4 for which I'm really suited. For those few positions, scores of other people will be as well-suited, plenty of them with stronger pubs and fully-complete PhDs.

I never imagined I was doing some self-destructive, self-indulgent thing in shaping the career path I've tried to shape. I thought poetry meant brains and a distinctly unworldly commitment. Transworldly, maybe. The ivory tower seems to think of it as best characterized by placidity, bordering comfortably on nice-person identity politics and creative nonfiction. It's not even the same arena as the one where I've been waging my battles.

I went through the gossip about who got last year's jobs at jobswiki, and while it's hardly comprehensive, the information that's there was discouraging. Lots of people with 2 books on the market; the names of people who got the poet jobs where I was applying, at least the ones I recognized, are IMO very bland writers. The listings read like that's what departments want, too, and I can see that, now that I have a year of dwelling on them under my belt.

The very few literature jobs in the 20th century so far are downright bleak, for my strengths, without even one that sounds much like me. That side definitely looked better last year at this time, not that it did me any good. I can only hope postings through the fall, and the spring, if necessary, do me better.

Web Job finally actually offered me the real money and real position yesterday, but since I'll be a student through at least mid-December, and possibly until degree conferral in February, I begged off giving a real answer. As I said a while ago, it's not a question of whether I take the position, but of how I feel about it; I spent all night last night and then this morning intermittently crying, so the answer there is, not good. I try to focus on the In This Economy aspect, but it's just not strong enough. Or, I don't care enough about money. As far as personal fulfillment, taking that job as a long-term option would represent a profound failure for me, and going to 40 hours a week will mean the end of my scholarly career. I'd love to see any one of the faculty I deal with, or any of the ones from my department, try to maintain an independent research program while working a desk job 5 days a week. I might still write poetry, but without the innervation from teaching creative writing and having the academic apparatus of tenure and conferences and so forth to prioritize that work, I doubt it will go very far or happen very often. Poetry Band does some for me, but not as much as a teaching job would by a very long stretch.

I'll be looking harder at VAPs, but I really think that my chances may just end up being poor, after all this time. 10+ years of graduate school and I may end up a decently-paid web monkey with a lot of debt and a lot of useless knowledge. I could be giving the liquor store a lot of business under those circumstances. I've barely drunk for years, but if anything was going put me back on it, that would do the trick.

Vodka's good for you, you know. It's made out of potatoes.

Last BlazeVOX Go-Round: That Which Melts into Smoke

2011-09-07T02:49:00.000-05:00

CATS AND KITTENS!

My netlebrity has reached an all-time high. I've had more hits here in the past 48 hours than I usually get in a month. Evidently I should do more griping about the poetry business? Not exactly: my unprecedented notoriety (which is still only a few dozen hits, so, you know, speaking very relatively) is due to the BlazeVOX posts, but specifically because one of mine got reblogged at a Tea Party website. To quote the internet: What is this I don't even.

Oh, wait, no, I do know what it is, it's the funniest, most impossible and perfect confluence of 21st-c. idiot savantism to which I've yet been party. Kent Johnson, who is sometimes an irritant in poetry, but as a rule an irritant whose shenanigans I support, pointed to this back at HTML Giant, and also to an anecdote about Sarah Palin picking on BlazeVOX as anti-American and so forth, suggesting that the latter might have stimulated the former, but it's a stretch. How Johnson happened to know Palin had railed about BlazeVOX, I can't imagine, but this is the world of rhizome informatics, and there they are right there. Anyway, even if we credit some kind of sense to the sequence of Palin > BlazeVOX > Tea Party caring about BlazeVOX, I have got just no idea whatsoever how they happened to pick my blog out of all the ones posting about it. I barely even exist to myself! I go to my day job, I write web pages and marketing/recruitment guides and I go to meetings and show my coworkers the greatest videos on the internet and then I go bury myself in 1.) dissertating or 2.) being too tired to dissertate. That's pretty much my life. My posts here generally get around a dozen hits over the first week they're up, and no more, ever again. And yet, somehow, knowing not one thing about poetry (dare I assume? yes, yes I do), some hilariously horrible right-wing site picked me out of the wilds of the internet to represent. . . well, we don't even know. There's no framing text to suggest why they reblogged the story in the first place -- imagine that; right-wing media regurgitating language without engaging it critically. You're stunned, I'm sure. Knocked all the way back on your heels.

The most personally meaningful aspect of this mess for me has been its reminder that there is, in fact, a "you" for me to address, a "you" that includes working writers and not just the friends I have who are close enough to the arts that they get my frustrations, but who are not, themselves, artists. I've watched Buffalo poetry people and those across the nation with strong connections to this scene spin out impassioned-to-obnoxious screeds in favor of BlazeVOX/Gatza personally, and against the rest the world, and I've watched a lot of people entirely unknown to me come out and say exactly the same things I say. It's been nice! A few bars hummed to the tune that I might, after all, not spend the rest of my life talking about poetry only to my cats and the dead, and that's some reassurance I've been hurting for.

Being reblogged by the Tea Party, though, while not nearly so meaningful, is definitely my pick for most entertaining bit. The TEA PARTY! These people would pull their kids from my classes. Some of them would actually shoot me dead. And yet one of them gave me at least a few seconds out of my allotted fifteen minutes of fame. It may have been because my headline and opening were so inflammatory -- after all, among my many unappealing traits, blandness doesn't often figure. I can only speculate, though; perhaps Jesus whispered my URL in someone's ear.

The press, by the way, has come weepingly, rendingly back to the fold of the living. BlazeVOX will rise again! Frabjous day! Business by crisis, on top of business by bullshit. I'm not impressed, and I continue to be disappointed in the clamor on BlazeVOX's side. There's a lot of straw-manning going on, where instead of responding to the initial and consistently central critique that Gatza had been perpetuating a dishonest money grab, or the next-out point that his math fluctuates literally hour by hour as he reexplains what he's doing, bloggers and tweeters and Facebookers act like the issue comes down to whether poets should help fund the presses that publish us. Viz.:

If we're going to talk about ethics, I think giving a donation to a press that's publishing your book and supporting you as a writer is far more ethical than giving money to presses that likely won't read more than a few pages of your manuscript, that likely won't even forward your manuscript to the final judge(s) for consideration, that really have no interest in you or your work at all.

$250 to support a really good press that's going to support you as a writer (if we're going to be all capitalist about it, a press that is going to be give you ALOT more value than $250) or entering 10 contests where your manuscript many never once be seriously considered. If we're going to use terms like "scam" -- what's the scam here? What's not transparent? A publisher wants to publish your work, he asks for a donation--you have the choice to say yes or no.

Before I get into the argumentative fallacies, don't do this. Now I have in my imagination a stubborn, googly-eyed Alot made out of shiny diamonds and gold and crisp, newly-printed bills. He has a nametag reading "MOAR VALUE!" and also, punched through his ear, a price tag for ">$250." He will be in my head the rest the week and I'll keep wanting to hug and pet him, because the Alot is, in all forms, irresistably cute in his ugly way, but even in my imagination he'll be no fun to pet, because value isn't cuddly, however I try to imagine it. I'm trying to make myself an Alot of Squishables to take his place, but the Alot More Value is more compelling precisely in his difficulty being appealingly concretized. He's one of those stupid puzzles made out of bent nails, only the person who made this one fucked it up, so as much as I twist them around, I'll never pull them apart, and yet, I won't be able to put it back down on the bar and go back to my table.

To the topic at hand, though: no. No, no, no, no, no. Every time someone praises Gatza for "publishing your book and supporting you as a writer" in this context, they're accepting and propagating a myth, that BlazeVOX does some bang-up job on promotions. They have had a reputation for selecting good avant-garde writing, but as Mike Meginnis points out, Gatza himself/the press itself does very little to promote its authors. I see them at AWP every year, but it's turned out that at least some authors even have to pay their own SPD registration. They can buy copies cheaply, but they do the vast majority of their own legwork on reviews, paying the postage and spending the time to solicit reviews and get copies to potential magazines/reviewers. Meginnis is devastating on this point:

If I take $250 dollars from you for the privilege of uploading a PDF to CreateSpace and not refusing the money of anyone who happens to actively pursue your book, having done no work at all to promote said book, what exactly would you say I've done for you or your poetry? I've gotten the prestige associated with being a publisher, I've got your money, I've got the money from your book's sale, and you have -- at best -- the ability to tell people I published your book. A fact that will become significantly less interesting to most people when it comes out that you paid me for the privilege.

His post is very worth reading; I'd quibble with his go-get-em attitude about the possibilities of marketing poetry very widely, but only in degree, not in nature. He does a phenomenal job at picking apart a lot of the weird ideas that drive small press publishing and marketing, anyway, using the BlazeVOX blowup as an entry point and taking the scale bigger.

Four Way does a great job promoting its authors; Salt does in the UK, although my impression is that they don't do as much over here (understandable, if unfortunate for their US authors -- their Twitter stream has suggested they're strengthening their presence over here, though). They set up readings for their authors, they secure reviews, they do publicity for their authors' readings, they cross-promote via mailers and email and giveaways. Moreover, they have their act together financially and logistically so they can pay their authors, on top of doing all this work!

BlazeVOX doesn't do any of these decidedly supportive things, and in fact, another piece of the narrative promulgated by Gatza's defenders explains why not: they remind us, again and again, that he's just one guy, doing this out of sheer love of Art, and we big pantyhose-wearing bitchez shouldn't expect any more from him than his going-it-alone resources permit, and that, further, we ought to support him precisely in his failings, because that testifies to just how DIY he is. You cannot be both an outsider DIY one-man operation, struggling valiantly to hold up your press's beautiful world like Atlas himself, letting things slip as a matter of course, and also be a reliable, highly capable publishing outfit that supports its writers so much that on their starving wages they should send you $250 checks for the privilege of having you take on their books.

The supposedly-favorable comparison to the university press contest model? No! People are doing this all over the place but the logic just isn't there. The contest model isn't ideal, as I've said here and elsewhere, and at some -- not all -- such presses, a lot of work, indeed, doesn't get read. At others, everything does get read, and seriously. In either case, it is absolutely less abusive to ask $20-$40, spread evenly over your whole base of interested parties, without tying that contribution to their chances at getting a book on your imprint, than to stir up hopes in people whose books you wouldn't publish on their merits alone, and immediately, in that vulnerable moment, to ask them to pay you $250 to get published. Presented in that way, the "choice" is far from free of compulsion, and the model really is vanity publishing. Moreover, in this instance, Gatza appears to have been funding an upper tier, the authors for whom he didn't raise up the $250 paywall, with this lower tier. These people are cash cows.

As for what's not transparent: not being transparent. Carrying on this unequally-applied pay-for-publish scheme for years without once mentioning it on the press's site, other than through the hidden "donate" page to which Gatza's form-letter email directed his prospective author-cash cows. Maintaining submission guidelines throughout this period that explicitly stated there was no fee to be considered, which does imply there's also no fee to be published, the published being, logically, a subset of the considered. Only revealing this option in the emotionally-heightened moment of quasi-accepting a writer's book. Playing on manufactured sympathies by claiming to be forced to pursue this policy under pressure from a vague, unspecified financial crisis. Being somewhere on a spectrum from unwilling to unable to give people who suddenly got interested in what was going on clear, consistent numbers that would justify your unusual and publicly undisclosed funding practice. It's not like these points are particularly arguable; Gatza's supporters, in fact, for the most part aren't arguing that any of these practices are ok; they're just asserting so, quickly and passionately, without laying out reasons why. All claim, no data. (Which brings us back to the Tea Party! Sadly, they don't have a patent on bullshit discursive strategies, though.) This is the real crux of this ugly revelation, and dismissing it through a rhetorical question, as the post referenced above does, fails to address the extremely serious blowback for which BlazeVOX has put its authors at risk.

Meginnis begins where I want to end (and I believe this will be an end, because as agitated as this situation has gotten me, with its precise activation of everything that irritates me about poets and especially the poets I know here, I should get back to my largely undocumented dissertating): the exposure of this affair will mean terrible, terrible things for BlazeVOX's current catalog. Whether an author was asked to "donate" the $250 or not, his or her book will be tainted by the possibility that it was done on this pay-to-publish model, especially anything published in the past couple years. You'd have some acrobatics to go through to put anyone's mind entirely at rest. If you can't, at best -- at best! -- you look clueless. At worst, you look like a scam artist, yourself. Imagine the person going up for tenure this year who finally got her first book out a few months ago on BlazeVOX; now imagine her tenure review committee is reasonably clued in to contemporary literature, and they find out about this. Imagine someone going out on the brutally competitive job market this year with her one book, and it's on BlazeVOX. You can bet your eyeteeth the people on poetry hiring committees will know about this when they read CVs this fall, or at least the poets, those committees' opinion leaders, will, and everyone, looking at those hundreds of application packets, has a sharp eye for any reason to trim down their pile.

This isn't doing generous work for poetry. It's hanging crucial pieces of people's careers -- poet's careers -- on airy nothing, and we're all in precarious enough positions even with the solidest support imaginable from a publisher. The whole thing looks, as Meginnis points out, like it's profiting from poetry on little work, a lot of secrecy, and manipulative communicative tactics. And then it's relying for support on a community that's hotter for solidarity than for critical inquiry.

Worse BlazeVOX News: Taking His Ball and Going Home

2011-09-05T11:37:00.000-05:00

Good my LORD. This BlazeVOX thing has burst out of all scale

A few hours after the initial post at The Bark, Gatza announced he'd be discontinuing the pay-to-publish practice. A couple hours after that, he announced that he's closing the press at the end of the year.

What.

People immediately started jumping all over Brett Ortler, the poet who made that first post (and for the record, I don't know this guy from nobody on the street, had never run across his name til yesterday, have no idea whether I'd even like his work or not). I watched my Facebook feed play out the taking of sides, with people suddenly friending each other in two distinct groups, and the ones on the clearly pro-BlazeVOX side posting really angry stuff, at The Bark, on Facebook, on their own blogs, and probably many other places. Accusing Ortler of "closing" BlazeVOX, calling him and anyone else who'd chimed in that this seemed hinky & troubling a moron, a bitter egomaniac, etc. -- the usual online ad hominems. And then screaming choroi of high-energy panegyrizing: Gatza has the ethics of Amiri Baraka, BlazeVOX is one of the few DIY presses in the nation (factually untrue; we have a couple others just right here in Buffalo!); he/the press has done more for avant-garde poetry than whoever else, he's being pilloried, he's a nice guy who's given his soul and life to poetry and you're now ruining him, etc.

I should really emphasize, by the way, how measured and nonaggressive the criticisms of BlazeVOX have been, at least the portions I've seen on The Bark and HTML Giant. If there's been corresponding vitriol there, it's been in other venues. Almost no one has even said they're opposed to pay-to-publish -- I'm in the decided minority there, with the stringency of my opinions -- and again and again, the push has been for honesty, not a change in the press's funding/business model. People have consistently said that, whether or not this model is for them, they respect people's ways of trying to make poetry publishing work In Today's Economy; they just think authors ought to know what they're looking at when they consider submitting to a press.

Several of the more vocal defending BlazeVOX/attacking Ortler are people I know locally, in whom I'm disappointed. One got into it with me in a lively but (I think, at least) entirely friendly way a while ago about presses who charge reading/entry fees and the whole contest racket. I'm not naming him because I like him and his work and have no wish to make him googlable in relation to a spat -- but back then, not quite a year ago, he came out swinging against entry/reading fees, saying the practice preyed on desperate, young writers, suggesting their work was worth more than it might actually be. I consider this an unfortunate but tolerable compromise with the reality that nobody buys poetry books, not even other poets; since you usually get a copy of the winning book, assuming you send to presses whose catalogs you like, this isn't so bad. You're supporting poetry (beyond your own) after all; maybe you even read said winning book. Now this other poet is defending Gatza and BlazeVOX -- who were charging far more per "entrant," being thoroughly dodgy, giving inconsistent half-answers when someone asked him to explain what was up, etc. Inconsistent even to the level of the numbers he put out. Said local poet just published on BlazeVOX, so he's got a vested interest, but -- you can't accuse university and established independent presses of abusive business practices because they charge a clearly-disclosed reading/entry fee, and then defend a smaller independent press who's baiting vulnerable people into paying to publish their books without even letting anyone know that's on the table til they get there. Or, you can, but if you're someone I respect, it'll hurt my heart and push me away from you for doing so.

There are a lot of useful, clear-eyed comments on the various Bark posts. A couple selections:

The fact that these “donations” were probably only going to add up to a few grand shows me that BlazeVOX wasn’t really looking for or didn’t know how to really raise funds. I’ve seen small, start-up journals raise over a grand through kickstarter campaigns. I’ve seen local musicians raise similar amounts to allow them to release VINYL RECORDS! As far as I can tell, BV has a larger base of loyal supporters, has influences more people’s lives, and is more relevant than other institutions I’ve seen run incredibly successful kickstarter campaigns.

Someone else pointed out that as far as they can tell, BlazeVOX isn't a registered charity, which is just dumb, after 10 years in poetry publishing, if that's really the case. NY state is more generous with its arts funding than just about any state in the nation, but you can't take advantage of that unless you make your operation a charity. Gatza also declined Ortler's offer to set up a Kickstarter campaign just for the one book, which suggests that he's got some reason to keep from treating the press like a charity, and that makes zero sense. The only thing a for-loss arts outfit gets out of refraining from taking charity status is privacy, because once you file as a charity, your financials become public record -- but publishing poetry doesn't require, I don't know, corporate junkets to the Bahamas or shady currency trading schemes.

Using the numbers blazevox claims, If they sent 30 of these “donation”-based acceptances and all 30 accepted, then they get $7500, and spend $52,500. If 12 accept the deal, the publisher makes $3,000 and spends $21,000. That is why this looks like a scam–you’re saying you aren’t making money, so instead of focusing on a smaller set of books you’re most excited about (those accepted without the requested “donation”), you create a scenario where you could potentially make $7500 only to spend $52,500 more. From there, it becomes clear that the numbers Geoff is using are not accurate/made up, which only furthers the ill-will and suspicion about the scheme in the first place.

There's the math of it. Additionally, as of 7:30 last night, Gatza had posted on the press's blog that

I did send this letter to a 30 folk with the hopes of getting 15 people. No scams at all. It is done in the spirit of co-operation and in the 3 days since we asked folks for this, we raised $3,000. There is no requirement, I offered to publish their book next year for no donation or make an ebook / Kindle title out of this instead. There were many offered options but one poet was more than a bit upset. So this wind storm.

As Ortler notes, these few (ungainly) sentences copy-and-paste from his form letter, not awesome as far as showing regard for your interlocutors, and they incorporate multiple lies, notably that he's only been doing this for three days and that "donating" wasn't a requirement for publication. That aside, though, just a couple hours later on his Facebook wall, he posted,

Many have found our arrangement to co-operative in spirit and a bold and decisive measure in these tough financial times, thus why I chose to do this. There have only $200 donated through out the year to help the press in printing and the total was less than $1000. It is very hard to run this press and this method gathered up only a very small amount to help our production costs.

This also appears on the BlazeVOX blog, and if you load the main page, you can see the conflicting numbers right above one another.

So first it's a great, workable business plan that raised $3k in three days -- let me in on that, huh? -- and everyone should be on his side. A couple hours later, it's gotten him either $200 or $1000 -- the syntax isn't clear, but either way, much less -- over the entire year; this was never a big deal, no one should be mean to him, and so on. I think the $1000 is the number referring to "this," the pay-to-publish scheme. Which, no, I'm not calling a co-op. If you made your authors "owners," involving them in the press's workings, the way Alice James does (and Alice James pays its authors, it doesn't charge them to publish), and if you told people that was the deal coming in, that would be a co-op, but there's nothing cooperative about putting up a surprise $250 paywall between a frantic, un- or underpublished poet and his/her book. Given chance after chance to clarify what he and his press want/need, what their financial situation is, what kind of relationship they want to have with their writers, and what their business model is, Gatza only obfuscates further, contradicting himself.

And he shuts his whole operation down! Or at least threatens to do so, although after this display of shitpants nuttery, I think he'll have a hard time coming back. If, heaven send, I get young writers to mentor any time soon, I would use this story as a great big warning about how well you have to know a press's workings to trust them with your book. I probably will; it'll just vary in tenor depending on whether BlazeVOX exists or not. But here's the thing -- reasonable questions about what you're up to from your own community should not trigger a collapse of your ten-years-going publishing endeavor. For fuck's sake, you're in writing! The career is fraught throughout with other people tearing apart everything you do. You have to, have to have your ducks in the straightest row you can manage; you have to have excellent answers for why you make the choices you do, whether that's my avoidance of capital letters, which will get me misaligned with e. e. cummings as long as I maintain it, or an editor's decision to pursue some innovative funding model. You have to balance a necessary hubris with an equally-necessary humility.

Or rather, you have to do that if you participate in a community where debate and criticism happen. It does at the national scale. I faced a lot of very real questions when I went up for this great job, for example, from strangers with a strong interest in how I do poetry. Ideally, magazines and presses ought to put submissions to tough questions, too, in deciding whether to publish them or not, although of course we don't exactly knock that one out of the park. Students and teachers ought to do it to each other, colleagues at and among universities and those who aren't even on campuses (which, right now, after all, is me). That's how we get better. It's not always fun, but it's necessary and you have to be ready for it.

It doesn't happen within the scene here, though. The in-group's culture is strong enough that it can protect itself from difference, which feels great and glowy when you're in it, but leaves you without resources to handle criticism productively. In this case, Gatza could be royally fucking his whole catalog. These are people whose careers hang in part on his press's stability and its image. If he really does shut down, their books might very well be lost. Something similar on a smaller scale happened with Zoo Press a few years ago, and I'm still not sure what the people who'd published with them ever did. I heard that one author got his about-to-be-released book picked up by another press, but that has to be the exception. Most the dozens and dozens of BlazeVOX authors could honestly be looking at, "wow, I effectively no longer have that book." Appalling irresponsibility.

People have come up in arms about how many books BlazeVOX has put out and how this makes them an admirable entity in contemporary publishing -- on one hand, yes. But if they've been doing that on an unsustainable funding model, and hiding those ongoing instabilities, which really does look to be the case, they moved a bunch of people into a shiny new housing development built over a massive sinkhole. Eventually it was going to collapse, without any contingency plan in place for where these poets and their careers could live.

For my part, I'll post all this over here, but I feel so unwelcome in the local scene that I'm not even getting into anything on live discussions. They've got 40+ people liking Facebook posts about how great BlazeVOX is and how awful its critics are; I don't think I even have 40 people in my very loosely-defined "friends" list who post regularly. Most of those don't give a rat's ass about poetry. Or, probably, about me, which says nothing about me or about them and plenty about digital-age "friends." I'll go as far on something like this as to make a public record of my own thoughts, but getting into it with the people right around me -- I don't even go to their events and they don't go to mine; we might as well live in different countries, and there's no bond there on which I could rely to expect people to be any more respectful of what I have to say than they have been of what this Brett Ortler person has had to say. It'd be feeding myself to this many-headed monster, which at the moment is out for a lot of blood and not a lot of self-reflection. Dissertating has me a bit anemic and vitreous in many ways; they'd tear me apart. I wish Brett sterner strength than I'm feeling, and lots of support on- and offline. Fortunately, I think he has both.

Bawds of Euphony: Shady Shit at BlazeVOX

2011-09-04T18:07:00.000-05:00

Dark publishing gossip: BlazeVOX has apparently been pulling a shitty, shady, abusive pay-to-publish scam for at least the last couple years.

I'm not a huge fan of the press; they throw a lot of parties -- they're local to Buffalo -- but they publish a number of books by people I think are terrible poets and worse human beings, so I haven't paid much attention to their catalog. I have, however, generally heard that Geoff Gatza, who heads it up, is a nice guy. I can't speak to that personally as I've lived here six years and never met him, which shows you just what a misanthropic, antisocial curmudgeon I am, but that is what I hear. I think he Facebooked me at some point and I think I hid him at some later point, although I can't now recall if there was a reason beyond seeming boring. Such is the never-ending global cocktail party of 21st c. poetry. However, today this post at The Bark by Brett Ortler came across my radar, and suddenly BlazeVOX gets some of my attention.

Ortler reproduces correspondence with Gatza where the latter offers to publish his book, but only if he pays $250. Ortler presses him to find out how common this practice is, whether it's hitting all his potential authors or if he's only asking some to pay, and what exactly the numbers are. Gatza's responses are appallingly unprofessional, in part obvious copy-and-paste and the rest slapdash, full of typos and syntax/homophone errors ("as opposed to having authors pay have the cover prince"; "I did send this letter to a 30 folk"; tons of run-ons and fragments) -- and he never answers Ortler's questions directly. He whines about a major donor having supposedly fallen through due to an unelaborated "scandal"; he chirps about pay-for-publishing, which is what it is, being "in the spirit of a co-op"; he hews to "this crisis," again not specified, and phrased as though it were some very temporary situation, in which case the prudent, respectful thing to do would be to pull in one's operations until the "crisis" were mitigated. He sounds hurried and spastic throughout, and when Ortler pins him to the question of whether he'd consider publishing the book sans $250 forcible donation, finally does say, "No, of course not." Of course not. Why would you think a silly thing like that?

I have just shy of zero sympathy with the rhetoric of crisis when it comes to the arts and humanities. There's never been money. NEVER. Time was, we had some Rockefellers and Carnegies, and before that King Jameses and Queen Elizabeths, and before that de Medicis. . . but none of these folks were funding "the arts" at large; they paid artists to shore up their empires. It's not as though a 16th century peasant could crawl out of her plague-ridden hut in the northern peat bogs, hike down to London and make it big at court as an outsider artist painting portraits on birch bark of angry sheep with tirades against the aristocracy scrawled across their comic/frightening ovine faces. The patronage writers and visual artists enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century was unprecedented, and even that was still a guarded system to which the vast majority of people had no access. In America even more than in the rest the Anglophone world, the arts and humanities have been in an unending state of "crisis" since before the Industrial Revolution, which is to say, at least as long as we've had people with enough money to potentially fund the arts. It's not a crisis when it goes on that long; it just sucks. And no one will argue that the position of poetry in this culture is about as marginalized as any human activity could be, but it's been that way. No poet here ever had the popular adoration Pushkin still enjoys in Russia (and that's attenuated dramatically, from what I understand, compared to what it was a century ago). We did have some known personalities in Millay and Pound who got attention beyond the circles of poetry itself; some of the Beats, in some parts of the country; Maya Angelou, who's a miserable excuse for a writer. How many people do you suppose wrote books of poetry in the past century and never published them? How many published books and got no notoriety, no money, no very meaningful interest from anyone beyond their own friends and students? Tens of thousands; hundreds of thousands; I couldn't guess beyond "a lot." But: a lot. Poetry has always been a highly specialized cultural mode, and I'll argue, vociferously, that that's crucial to its value as art -- it can explore, innovate, precisely to the degree that it's marginalized. I'd like it better if we could be somewhat more cared-about and still get to play, but forced into the choice I'll pick protective obscurity. So do not moan at me about crisis. If you want America to take care of you, get out of the arts.

However -- Gatza turns out to have been sending these same form letters to poets for at least the past two years. A situation that persists for two years is very definitely not a crisis. People stopped calling the problems in Darfur a crisis long before two years had elapsed. It became a civil conflict, a war, a tragedy; it ceased to be a crisis. Even if you don't buy my defense of poetry's marginalization, whatever you think the financial climate is like or ought to be like for the arts, you can't claim that you're dealing with a "crisis" and that you'll "be back up and together in the future," as Gatza does, for two solid years. At best, you're conducting business in a way that perpetuates inadequate funding for years running; at worst, you're lying and using the rhetoric of crisis to try to shill money out of poets. Poets. Especially young, first- and second-book poets who are desperate to publish, who may not quite realize how shady the setup is, who themselves are living on adjunct wages and cramming poetry time in at either end of grading 80-odd freshman comp essays at a go. In at least two years, he hasn't managed to get his funding and production lined up well enough that he can help these people and their art without squeezing them for sizable chunks of cash.

To make it nastier, apparently, Gatza's publishing some books in a perfectly ordinary way, without asking for a "donation" from their authors. Then there's a tier of second-class books, whose authors get publication dangled in front of them, pending this $250 fee. So he's got books he believes in, and others he doesn't even think will do well, and he's publishing the latter only if their authors will send over a pound of flesh. As some of the post's commenters point out, the figure he quotes repeatedly of $2000/book doesn't hold; BlaxeVOX does print-on-demand, so his up-front costs to publish ought to be light. Moreover, if he's got $1750/book on hand, to make up the rest of that amount, he ought to publish fewer books, so he could carry on within the means to which he has access. The $2000 figure sounds like he pulled it out of the air to make the $250 sound small by comparison: classic door-in-the-face sales tactics, leveled only at those he thinks won't be in a position to resist.

For Ortler, the sticking point is the lack of transparency. If BlazeVOX made it clear on their site that they're following a pay-to-publish scheme, that they've become a publishing co-op, that would be one thing; presenting themselves as publishing work based on quality alone, but then hitting prospective authors with this $250 fee is starkly dishonest. Doing so only to part of their prospective catalog is flat-out skeezy. (My very pejorative phrasing, not his.) I agree that if they're going to do this, they ought to be even-handed and up-front about the practice, but I don't think that would legitimize it, and in fact, it'd almost certainly sign the death warrant on the press's reputation. It's hard to convince poetry that you take quality seriously when you've brought pay-to-publish into the picture, even if it's only paying part of the costs of publication. We're already a nepotistic, aesthetically-inbred bunch; we know how arbitrary publishing is, even at its best. If you make it public that you're only publishing people's books if they write you a fat check, you're done for -- which, I'm sure, is why the website makes no mention of the policy and why the "donation/offer of publication" page where you can accept this devil's deal isn't linked anywhere from their pages.

Worse for me, though, is the potential damage this kind of arrangement could do for someone who accepted it. One author commented on Ortler's post that she'd taken the $250 deal and was happy with the production and promotion she'd gotten -- and if so, that's good for what it is, but if BlazeVOX starts to look like a vanity press -- and if this blows up, it very well may -- she's fucked. Publishing is changing and all the old rules are up for question, sure, but to hiring committees, granting agencies, and so on, a vanity-press book is worse than no book at all. It makes you look shady, yourself, casts doubt on your work's quality, and suggests very strongly that you don't know what you're doing professionally. This had to come out eventually, and I think now that it is, the press's reputation is going to dive. People who got the better deal, book publication without paying the entry fee, will suffer by association, too. (And they just had a book launch here, with books by three poets I know, one of whom I really like, so that's depressing even for my incredibly small circle.) I have my dissatisfactions with TSUP, but I can definitely count on the integrity of their reputation til I die and afterward, and that was precisely why I took their offer instead of dicking around with Tupelo, whose editor, Jeffrey Levine, got smacked for a similar fee-for-service scam right around the time mmcn got picked up. BlazeVOX has been around long enough to have made a name for itself, and to have attracted poets who care about that reputation. Those are the people who'll get the worst, least fair blowback from Gatza's decisions. He may yet be a really nice guy; again, I can't speak to it personally. But this practice itself is incredibly stupid at best and abusive at worst. Poets don't need more abuse. We do that to ourselves and to each other perfectly well without publishers getting in on it, too.

It sounds like the Foetry folks may get on this, and I'd like to see that. They did go after a couple institutions that I think were putting out good poetry, albeit in less-than-optimal ways, but for the most part I think they're a major force for good. Precisely because our resources are terribly limited, I think presses have to be very damn above-board to hold a place in the landscape. I don't read nearly as much new poetry per year as I'd like to, and even if I had nothing to do but buy poetry books and magazines, I wouldn't get to all of it, and out of that mass, I'm happier spending my money -- and my time and attention -- on books and presses whose values, ethical as well as aesthetic, line up with mine. I hurt for anyone whose career may suffer from this, but, without lessening that sympathy and anger on their behalf, I'd rather see the business of poetry kept honest.

Back into the underworld.

2011-08-30T16:46:00.004-05:00

I did start writing again, and finalized my intro and one chapter. Pieces coming together.

Then I got into my Spicer chapter. I knew it was going to need vigorous revision because I took sizable pieces out and used them with some other things in the intro, to set up the whole project instead of that one chapter. I did not, however, know before rereading it more carefully this week that half of the first 30 pages doesn't really apply to the poetry it's about and the rest is fairly well not organized at all. The ideas are great, and I know that, and I still found myself bored by my own chapter -- the presentation is that desultory, the sections that hazily shaped, the readings that buried under nearly directionless bullshit. On the good side, Spicer criticism is virtually nonexistent, so it's not like I have to slog through pages of other people's terrible writing before I can fix my own, but I do have a job with this chapter. I'm having trouble even envisioning what the chapter is going to end up doing! I have to start out by somehow recapping the intro's theory of mythopoetic inspiration (to be precise, its theory of what the poet's position is within that experience) without just reiterating it. I need then to develop the parts of this theory that are uniquely expressed in Spicer's work, and then. . . well, there are a lot of things I want to cover, and I'm just hoping if I ski out to the end of those pages, doing so will make the next pieces clearer.

I think I'm going to end up talking about the other two books within Homage more than I have, which is great. I also think I'm going to end up with a series of sections each of which treat an image trope that plays out the theme I argue is at the core of Spicer's poetics, a queer relationship of identity between poet and the source of poetry. I think a piece I wrote about cars that didn't fit very well on the first draft will do a lot more on the second one as part of an exploration of travel and distance, which will resonate with Spicer's life, differently with the queer poetics I say he develops, and, as a great lagniappe, with themes from my Crane chapter. It's very, very unclear to me quite how all this will fall into place at the moment, though.

This chapter is much less together than my Eliot one is, in fact. Would have been nice if my advisor had pointed any of this out more than a year ago when I showed it to him and he blandly, blithely said that perhaps the theory went on a bit long, but it was good.

When I have a PhD, I wonder if I'll have to sneer at myself for having gotten one.

Calling All the King's Horses; the Men, I Expect Not to Be Around

2011-08-21T15:26:00.008-05:00

What dissertation?

The last few weeks, this has been looking like a valid question around Chez Poetrix. I finished my Eliot chapter (or finished drafting it; we'll return to that distinction shortly), took a few days off, wrote my intro up, took a few days off, started plowing through books and articles to rewrite my Crane chapter. . . and then I met with my advisor, and I've barely done a single scholarly thing since.

Some of the slowdown can no doubt be attributed to my having hit a perfectly ordinary crash point -- I wrote 120-some new pages in the space of about 8 weeks, and thoroughly reworked about 30-40 more, and the brain is entitled to some recuperation after that, whether it fits one's defense schedule or not. Some probably comes from a nasty combination of high heat and having my car stolen, then in the shop for two weeks. Yes, my car got stolen; yes, again. Twice in about four years. Same car. I moved from my former borderline-nice, borderline-less-nice street to a much better one, where I live directly across from a fancy Catholic high school and around the corner from sushi, an all-organic cafe, and a deli ("deli") where you can get artisan potato chips to go with your prime-rib-apple-and-brie sandwich -- and my car got stolen right off my street, again. Next time they tow me for tickets I'll be very damn tempted to go to city hall & claim I'm not going to pay because I'm obviously not getting any police protection for my no-driveway tax. Anyway, I was on foot at what turned out to be the height of our summer (July was a roaster; August's been unseasonably cool and rainy), and that would have kept me too beat to do much after work or even on weekends, with or without any other factors.

But it's been a month now, maybe more, even, and: not a single new word written. Couple articles read. I did take my intro and reshape about half of it for an article, and I sent that off to a journal that, supposedly, wants to publish it. But I had planned to finish rewriting the Crane chapter, which is in scant and shabby shape, by the end of August, now ten days away. I could quit my job at this point and be nowhere near finished by then. At the same time, everywhere I go lately, people ask if I'm all right and comment on how tired I look -- and I really do. Zombie eyes. Losing weight again. The day job makes my sleep schedule a serious problem, but I didn't look (or feel) this run-down a couple months ago when I was working almost daily and really well.

When I sit down to write, I have this dread and kind of wimpy, helpless panic, and this deep, keening sadness, and I recognize it well. It's what hides beneath the flittery inability to work at home, which keeps me at (expensive) coffee places if I want to accomplish anything, but I had gotten to where it didn't bother me if I was out. It plagued me, heavily, during the very bad years I had during this degree, and the only times I got any relief (and could therefore get anything done quickly) were when I worked around someone else. I graded papers at a friend's house a few times, and that went fine. I showed up in St. Louis for the Eliot conference one year, paper barely started after weeks of frantically accomplishing nothing; stayed with a friend, and after we got me settled, he went in the next room to do email and suddenly, magically, I sat down and transformed into my capable self and wrote a really good paper in a matter of a few hours. It's an extreme, paralyzing anxiety, a deep lack of confidence in my abilities that, for whatever reason, is linked to loneliness.

So, last month, I met with my advisor to talk about my Eliot chapter. It was messy, and I'd told him so up front, and I'd asked for help, which he'd agreed to provide. Writing it, I kept feeling like it was going to topple over, way too many big pieces balanced on too small and fragile a base. I told him that there were sections where I wasn't even sure whether they belonged to the chapter and I hadn't quite articulated the connections, or whether they needed to be lifted out and turned into separate things, of whatever form. (Crumpled-up wads of paper currently come to mind.) I was too deep in the minutiae of Eliot and Eliot criticism to figure any of that out on my own, at least not without serious time away from the project, and I told him that, too; forest for the trees, he said, he could do.

I sent it to one of my other committee members, too, who works in modernism, and by the time my advisor and I met, he'd written me a thoughtful, attentive, useful and very positive email. I reread the chapter two or three days before I got this email, and with the break of a couple weeks, it felt like it held together much better than I feared; my other committee member agreed, which was great confirmation all over the place. He had some great and extremely specific recommendations for a few more texts I might bring to bear on the piece, pointed out several statements that were buried down in paragraphs that would make great signposting/thesis material if I relocated them, and, wonderfully, told me that he wasn't an expert on late Eliot and he felt like he was learning a lot reading my chapter. Not an expert on late Eliot, but he's very well-versed and well-published in the period.

Thank goodness for that email, it turned out, because boy did my advisor respond differently. He turned all my requests for help around to berate me. It's messy. It doesn't have clear signposting. There might be pieces that don't fit and he couldn't even tell whether they did or not. Oh, and it needed page numbers. Yes. Page numbers. I need a senior scholar in my field to tell me that finished essays should have page numbers on them, but I don't need one to help me navigate very complex bodies of work like Eliot's or very complex bodies of criticism like Eliot studies or very difficult, dodgy theory like Jean-Luc Nancy's. I don't do formatting things until I have a piece well in line, and he and I had even gone around about that before, but he was really irritated with me about it this time. I went along and was pretty nice -- "yeah, exactly, that's what I was seeing, that's what I was hoping you'd be able to help me with" -- until he told me that he was on sabbatical and as such he wasn't really expected to have to deal with student work. I got a little testy then and asked what students were supposed to do if their advisors went on sabbatical; are we supposed to wait a year to graduate while you're on vacation? "Students have to be able to work around these things," he said. "That's even in that book."

"That book" is Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which is pretty excellent. My advisor gave me a copy during my third year here and I recommend it very highly. She does talk about things that can happen to derail your progress, and she mentions the specific possibility of your advisor going on sabbatical and being so unreachable as to have essentially abandoned you, but it's presented as one of these uncontrollable crisis-level tragedies that you may have to deal with. It's not like she (or any reasonable person) thinks it's ok for a professor to delay a student's career by an extra year because s/he isn't "expected" to deal with student work. The only reason professors aren't expected to deal with student work, under any circumstances, is that we expect them not particularly to care about their students. In no other professional field would a parallel situation be considered normal or even permissible. For that matter, in other professional fields, you don't get sabbaticals. You don't get research leave, either, or every summer and winter and spring break off. You also aren't expected to be kind of working all the time, even on vacation, but let's not lose track of the level of privilege tenured university professors enjoy.

He said he felt like I was asking him to do my work; he suggested that I might not be ready to defend when we ("we"; he was the one who scheduled me for October in the first place!) had agreed I would; he said he probably ought to approve the dissertation before we go ahead with the defense. To the last point, fine on its own, but in the context, it was demeaning and dismissive. And he was flat-out unpleasant all along, without a word for the good material that I know is in there. I'm saying things about Eliot that no one's said, that are innovative and perceptive, based on incisive readings of some hitherto-unilluminated points in his work -- I actually am -- and this warranted not a syllable of commentary, let alone praise. He's been my one ally through all this, the person I relied on to read my work and act like it was smart and like I was smart. Gone. Only one meeting -- but it was a hard burn.

Everybody has these horror stories about their advisors leaving them trembling, useless shells of themselves, and I never had, but I do now. He's always been better at talking about interviewing, conference strategies, the job market -- professionalization -- than about my writing; usually all I really get back is a handful of books I ought to read, most of which don't turn out to be deeply relevant, though they're always interesting, and "well, keep working on it." This was the first time I gave him something where I needed his help, both with the time pressure and the piece itself, and, wow, have I learned just how bad an idea that is. I think some of his nastiness may be that he doesn't actually know how to work with someone else on revisions, and instead of dealing with that inadequacy, he struck out at the thing that was trying to make him confront it, i.e., my dissertation, and by only a short extension, me. He used to be famous for his dedication to and availability for graduate students, and over the last couple years that's been waning distinctly, so our meeting may be a symptom of that larger shift, too. I can tell myself these things, and they seem reasonable, and they've helped mitigate some of the worst of it -- but even blunted, this was a blow. I tried to go across the street right afterward to work (car was still in the shop), and ended up sitting in the bathroom, crying, so I went home. Have barely done a thing since.

Barely a scholarly thing, anyway. Most of two crochet projects down and my orchids are in great shape. Wrote a couple poems. Did Poetry Band performances. Started doing yoga again a couple weeks ago after more than a year out. For the most part, though, I've been shell-shocked and angry and hurt and accordingly unproductive. I wrote an email to my advisor, the department chair, and the secretary who'd have to do the paperwork in which I withdrew from the program; didn't send it. Sat on it for a couple days, but didn't send it. After the time I've had at this university, with its associated people, trying to get this degree, I'm ready to be done with it and a lot of me wants to say, fine, I'm done. No one's going to read this thing. I'm not going to get a job on it. I don't have enough respect for institutions that having an official stamp on me claiming I'm smart/accomplished will mean very much to me. Like: guess what I don't care about? Graduating. Guess what else I don't care about? Kind of everything. Fuck you, indicating the widest, most generic, expansive "you" possible.

I don't think this is an unusual state for a graduate student to enter, but here's where people who have involved, reliable families, partners, and/or friends have a huge edge: they can take care of you. Even if they have no connection to the academy, they'll listen to your freaking-out, they'll sympathize and take your side, they'll let you hang out at their houses and work, they'll distract you from your pain long enough for you to start doing things again and get some confidence built back up. They'll listen to your ideas even if they don't have the background to say much back, and they'll be interested and that interest reflects back to build your confidence that your degree is worth the effort it takes. I don't have any of that. It's me taking care of me, here, or at least me and the internet and a few nice conversations with coworkers -- which I appreciate, but it's not the same as sitting down next to someone who knows me pretty well, respects and likes me, and who'll give me enough time around him/her to calm down and get to where I can work.

So here I am, only finally feeling together enough even to talk to the internet, a month later. Kind of a desperate effort, because I've emailed a couple people about it already and talked about it a bit with people at work & Poetry Band bandmate, to no resolution yet. Joan Bolker advises writing about why you can't write, and says that often, before you know it you'll end up doing the writing you just said you couldn't. I've had that work (seriously, her book is great), where I'd start out talking about not being able to figure something out or even about interpersonal things like this, and then I figure the thing out in writing about it, or I see a parallel between my life and the ideas I'm handling, and I'm off. A couple hours on this post, and it has yet to happen, but I do feel slightly clearer and better put-together.

A week or two ago, I decided to go through revising the other pieces before I started the more muscular work on Crane; it all needs to be done, after all, and that might give me momentum, on the project specifically and also on myself, remembering that I'm actually good at this stuff. So I'm here at Coffee Place with my printouts of three versions of my H.D. chapter, and maybe, maybe once I call this long-winded post finished I'll get back on drawing the first two of them together.

By the time you read this, I hope I have.

Having come well through Decadence, we're now Decayed.

2011-07-19T23:56:00.005-05:00

May have seen today what poetry book #3 will look like. The definite import of this is that it means poetry book #2 is under enough of its own steam that I no longer have to work on figuring out what it will look like; years ago -- years and years, now -- I had an initial idea of what poetry book #2 would be and it's come to be in a completely different and much better form. So it might change, and in fact the logistics aren't all worked out, so it will have to change, at least to go from a notion with a lot of blank space in it to a fully-realized object. But it's there.

A while ago I wrote an entry here that dipped into an alter ego as Iscariot "Tokyo" Davies (I took her other s back away), a Gibsonian dystopic near-future fortuneteller/poet. She got a poem the other weekend, in which all my wimpy, nervous, not-especially-helpful parts went to her for a reading, and got all sorts of bizarre stories & advice they couldn't even interpret, let alone use. Tokyo, it turns out, is a brusque and prickly, if still garrolous fortuneteller.

I sent the poem to my advisor and he wrote back saying that he liked it, but also obviously at a loss as to what to do with it; said he thought he'd be able to access it better if he had the context -- and I replied that there really isn't any. Parts of it came via making fun of an Etsy seller, referencing a conversation I had with my poetry band bandmate about our name, referencing "Love for Sale" which also (in my head) came out of that conversation, lifting a phrase from the Meador translation of Enheduanna, lifting others from blog posts here about how poetry works, referencing a blog post (not mine) about children's names in the 1800s, using up some words and phrases I'd gathered in my search to generate a name for Poetry Magazine, using up a bunch of other stuff about winter I had saved up. . . and so on. I've written lately by declining to look for what the things I put into a poem mean, and trusting that my subconscious/the poem/the muse will do fine without me hauling on the reins. It works, too -- a couple weeks ago I realized that I'd put the same image, described differently but the same image, in two poems written a couple years apart, and the two have very different tones and perspectives, but in those moments they're both about surviving erasure.

The image, incidentally, is of wings/a wing without. . . wingness. One is insect wings without membrane; the other is bird or angel wings, but instead, they're enormous antlers on a person's back. In both cases the subject "flies" and I think it may be "flight" as in fleeing, not as in flying upward through the air, and the argument therefore may be that running is a way of soaring, in certain difficult circumstances.

In the new fortunetelling poem, the person goes to the dystopic psychic/prophet to ask about her love life, and instead gets all this gobbledygook about work and fragile things and vaguely dire somethings and urbanity and I really don't even know what. My advisor implying that he didn't know what it was about made me curious, and on just a very short look, I saw one place that's obviously about becoming a poet -- inside/via the weird imagery from all the ridiculous places. Other people may or may not get it, but I know exactly what that is. (Yes, I'm being entirely literal when I describe my writing now as a process run by intuition. It's normal for me to finish a poem and not know what it's about, and to have to come back and learn what it's about by interpreting it, just as if I were reading some other person's work. If the muse is a metaphor, she's a thoroughly accurate one. Plato was right to regard us as untrustworthy citizens; we're all secret, even to ourselves.) So the message is, as in Spicer's Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud, that if you ask about love, I'm going to tell you your fate is to be a poet, and that may or may not be an answer in the affirmative, depending on whether you think poetry is being in love, or being alone. For the record, I am intensely and definitely ambivalent on that question.

Last weekend, I got my own cards out for the first time in a very long while and asked about. . . my love life. It's pretty annoying, reading tarot for other people, because all anyone ever wants to know about is love life and money. They never even ask about career aspirations or non-career ambitions; based on what they ask tarot readers, most people may very well not have those. They don't ask about religious or theological issues. They only very, very, very rarely ask things like how a trip they're about to take will go. Love life and money. And me, well, most my questions, over the now twenty years since I started teaching myself to read, have been about my love life, or, most the time, my lack of such. I have asked a few times whether I ought to be doing tarot for money, and always get the answer in the affirmative but then don't do it. I've also asked about social circle issues, time management, career goals, likelihood of publication. . . I don't know what all. Not much about money, I think because I assume I'll never have much of it and don't feel a need to question that. But love life, that one, I do.

I was afraid to go for it, actually, and did two readings, one asking about the immediate future/next couple months (til I defend/submit my dissertation), and the next in a very cowardly, dodgy frame of mind where I said I didn't even know what to ask, what time frame or who or what I should even be asking, just to tell me what they would about my love life future. Closest I could bring myself. And then both readings, as far as I can tell, and I do have some years doing this, were all about career stuff, frustrated, thwarted, unsteady career stuff to boot. Wands and swords everywhere (not everyone's career, but definitely mine), lots of reversed cards, a couple pentacles in important places. The best news I had was getting the Fool signifying myself in the second spread, and most the time, the Fool is not a card I like pulling for myself! Things were that pain-in-the-ass, though. At least I still get to be ridiculous and intuitive-impetuous. By, say, giving my highly intellectual, career-driven self a tarot reading about my sopping and silent swamp of a love life.

This is just what happened in my poem for Tokyo. The cards/I told me exactly what she/I told fictional-wimpy-querent/me.

I don't care how it works; I'm as happy thinking the subconscious is that good as I am thinking Mystical Forces Are At Play or -- truly -- thinking things like this are nothing but willed delusion stilted up on fear and being histrionic. I regard experiences like this the way users do computer programs, in that it doesn't matter what language you build it in; what matters is the interface with which we interact. Or, if you want to insist that the language does matter, say that it doesn't matter whether you write a particular routine using regular expressions or not. The level at which the architecture of your code makes a program more or less efficient, gives it a slightly different feel, etc., is so fine that no one will ever notice. The person at his or her keyboard will do his or her taxes, or shoot polygonal zombies, or whatever, and get an equivalent experience without knowing or being able to know the nature of the apparatus that provides said experience. Tarot do their best work in helping you think about things in different ways -- one way those readings did so for me was to get me to think about some interesting equivalencies and reflections between situations in my own life and surprisingly similar (similar in a geometric sense, even) situations in a friend's. Whatever the avenue to get to that new perspective, it's good to reach it. A decent reader will get you there, whether or not she or he tries to give you a date to expect your raise or a hair color for your next amour.

This evening I was reading some Crane criticism because I'm reworking that chapter (and, gawd, Brian Reed -- by turns so intriguing and then so slavishly LangPo-worshippingly disingenuous), and I kept thinking about how very uncanny it was to write a poem and then unwittingly to do what it described to myself. For that matter, without the intention to write the poem that way in the first place, or awareness of what it was doing until after I'd both written the poem and done its story to myself. I have no idea how I'll eventually work out the significance, but in thinking about poetry and tarot, I got the idea to do a series of poems -- poemlets, even, just very elliptical, quirky scraps of language -- one for each card. I have no idea why I never thought of this, unless it's that as the PhD has made me a better poet, it's also made me a much less consistent tarot reader. You only have so many hours in a day, and I spend more of mine doing pointless bullshit online than doing interesting bullshit offline. Eh.

I thought first of printing them on small cards, maybe 3x the size of a business card. Then I thought of (oh, no one's done this) working with a visual artist to do maybe abstract impressions/expressions of/responses to the cards/my poems, but I don't know any visual artists who'd be interested in that. Then I thought, oh ha, Tokyo should get to talk in this; she should get little wry commentaries inserted in, like Cooperman's "tissue" poems in his Still project and also like the "Explanatory Notes" in Homage to Creeley. At about that point it morphed from something I could write as a very large part of Magpie to, this would be long enough to make a whole book.

I picture designing the card pages as though they were tarot cards, with the Roman numerals at the top and name of the card at the bottom, maybe (maybe?) some lines to suggest the card shape. Not sure what language for the titles, probably English. I love my Latin and French would be appropriate, but I think English will be best for the personality. In the space where you'd have an image, instead I'll have spare, cryptic poems, and interspersed throughout, other poems (maybe untitled? maybe some but not all having titles?) that comment on the cards, on fortunetelling, that lampoon or ironize the language & methods of instructional books on divination, etc. This would really be one persona all the way through, or at most two, Tokyo and the cards, which would be an interesting/challenging project. The physical constraint will probably be VERY different for me, and anxiety-inducing, but I think it would also take advantage of things I haven't been able to do, and free me much more from having to make characters and places and fully-realized emotions, as I still usually do, even if my characters, places, and emotions are uninterpretably bizarre.

I run into poetry that uses tarot imagery off and on, but other than my dead pals Eliot, Spicer and H.D., none of it's ever very good. People may have written books I haven't seen that basically consist of a series of poems about tarot cards, but I doubt very much anyone's brought an idiom quite like mine to that table. . . since people capable of trapeezing and tunnelling in an idiom like mine generally go pop-eyed and grimacey behind fixed, polite attempts to smile when they run into the idea of taking anything like tarot seriously enough to write good poems from/for it.

In high school, and I think even for a while after, probably still while I was working for my alma mater's art department, I had ideas off and on to make a tarot deck, but I've never been the visual artist, and truthfully, I don't think I care enough about being some Llewellyn/Lo Scarabeo celebrity to put in the effort, even if I had the talent. But I do care about poetry, and I love navigating complex discursive fields, and I remain irrepressibly amused by and ethically invested in posing before the world a person who's a real intellectual and a real mystic, in whatever incomplete and partially-tutored ways I can perform both those roles. I think this book will be a great ride to write, and that it'll be a distressingly good read -- conditions to which all poetry ought to aspire.

Fields of Asphodel

2011-07-11T23:02:00.004-05:00

The first myth that grabbed me was Persephone.

I can remember about age five or six, reading a hardback, cheap-paper edition of some collection of classical myth, maybe an Edith Hamilton version? It included, as many such do, "The Rape of Persephone." I had no idea how sex worked at the time, but I knew rape was extremely bad, something you didn't even talk about -- this was rural Missouri in the early 80s, in my upbringing's defense. The title freaked me out, but I read it, I think several times just trying to figure out what was rape-like in it (or what rape even was that was so inarticulably horrible). Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary for myths, or stories generally. I'm not sure when I found out that "rape" could mean "capture," something like "kidnapping," but it wasn't for quite a while after I encountered the word used that way, in that story. In the meantime I got very familiar with the picture of the girl swept up with the big, muscular arm around her waist and the god with the dark helmet in the darker chariot, plunging into a chasm in the ground, and with the story that started beneath it.

It was about a very pretty girl who went off by herself, and that was a way I wanted to think of myself. Moreover, she was off alone picking especially beautiful flowers, ones her friends didn't notice or didn't dare to go after. This terrifying god of hell/death bursts up and carries her away to the underworld, and although she resists, tries to starve herself, eventually he persuades her to eat -- and it's fruit, which I've always been big on, and an exotic fruit, the pomegranate. Meanwhile her mother has sent the entire earth into mourning and refused to let crops grow or trees have leaves, instituting the first winter, over her missing daughter, and that, I have to say, always appealed to me. Not the idea of being responsible for global starvation, but the idea of being that important to one's mother. The girl finally becomes the goddess of spring, signifier/cause of all things lovely and renewing, the happiest side of natural cycles of plenty and poverty, and also the queen of the dead.

I turned my dissertation's intro over to my chair and my most anthropologically-oriented committee member this week. It's full of these stories -- not Persephone herself, but the birth of Aphrodite, Psyche and Cupid, Orpheus. Orpheus has ended up being my primary figure for poesis, and I was thinking about him and Philomela today, and then about him and Persephone -- both figures who return from the underworld, with very peculiar, fraught love relationships. And then about Persephone and me.

As an undergrad, I turned over and over the question of why spring would end up wedded to death. It seemed so very unbalanced a union -- Love and War make sense; so do Love and Art, for different reasons, and Love and Soul; so does Song/the Sun and all his various nymphs (one needs an audience, when one is that big and bright, not a partner); so does bratty masculine law and equally bratty feminine law; etc. Of all the couples in classical myth, though, Persephone and Hades were the only one I could find who seem to stay monogamous, and they also at the time seemed one of the unlikeliest couples. Now I can look at it and see: the virginal maiden-goddess' youth has an inherent fragility that speaks already to death and decay; the goddess of spring's robustness echoes Hades' role as ruler of earthly wealth ("Pluto," as in the plutocracy); she's what the earth needs in order to feel whole, a latent power that suits the queen of the dead. The pairing goes beyond this for me, though, to something inexpressible and definitely strange, something the rightness of which will never cease either to compel or to surprise me.

As that same undergrad, I wrote a short story for one of my first creative writing classes that was a retelling of the Persephone/Hades story. In my version, she half-tricks him, pretending to be more vulnerable than she is because she's actually a mopey, misfit teenaged goddess-girl who (like any teenager) has no taste for the grown-up gossip and endless plenty of the Olympians' more or less adult world. She immediately spots Hades as a sucker for girlish charms and a quick road to adventure, so she deploys the former effusively in order to secure the latter. Hades takes her below, where she becomes enchanted with the underworld's strange plants (always plants with me; these I lifted from Swinburne) and gets to like the notion of ruling alongside Hades. Hades, it turns out, is grave (no pun intended) and not chatty or ordinarily social, but a really solid, thoughtful, devoted husband. (This, I imagined, had to be the reason they stay together -- Hades just got a bad rap from the mythographers.)

I adopted the same background for a very bitter poem in my book that's out about Persephone, and about me going home, and staged the "rescue" scene of Demeter coming after her daughter as Persephone running from her, tearing up the unearthly flowers in her own garden as she crashed through them in her flight, grabbing a pomegranate and eating its seeds as a desperate attempt to stay below in this world where she had so much going for her. It only works halfway, though, and she still has to spend half the year up here making the world fertile for us. It's terrible for her, having to leave her husband, every year, to do this duty with her mother and make the world fertile for people she doesn't even know. Connections to Orpheus and Philomela, the way they produce song out of grief but get no consolation -- draw them at will. I certainly am.

My mother is nothing like Demeter. At one point I even had a note to that poem saying that if my mother had been more like Demeter, we would have gotten along better. The trip home in there is entirely fictionalized, too; I took the air travel imagery from a trip I made to I think Atlanta for a conference, or maybe to visit a then-boyfriend, and the Missouri-local imagery from a memory of the field at the edge of my high school's turnaround. That was what put this poem together, though.

When I wrote the story, I thought and talked about it as the story of two sides of myself getting together. It may have been, and it may still be. This Orpheus business I just wrote about is all about the bifurcated state of being a person who lives and acts relatively functionally out in the daytime world, and a poet who operates in a vertiginous, presubjective space, beneath Kristeva's thetic, etc., and coming up with a way to explain how we do that. Orpheus and Eurydice; Orpheus below and Orpheus above; Persephone and Hades, Persephone below and Persephone above. If Persephone were associated with song/art, I could have done all that about her. So my circling around this story for so long may have been and may still be about a loosely Jungian dynamic of self-integration (I can feel my psychoanalyst dissertation chair wincing at that even though he doesn't read this). I think it's also a love story, though, one I've not lived but would like to.

Hades. Actually Hades. Someone who loves me as the admittedly quirky, flighty, flower-gathering girl, off in the woods by herself, and who can meet me there but who's also serious and dark but stable, who will put me in charge of things. And, with my now very well damn developed theory of poetry and being dead, probably someone who will have a life with me that sets me up as in charge of poetry things in this serious regard. Someone who understands the underworld, but unlike me isn't perpetually flipping back and forth in and out of it; someone at home with the caves and the rich rocks and the mystery, in a totally pragmatic, unrufflable way. Notably among classical deities, Hades is terrifically calm -- implacable is often the word. As befits, you know, death, because it's not like you can argue with it. Someone non-creepy; Hades is shy, in my imagination, but actually extremely cool when you get to know him. Independent and capable, as, again death kind of has to be, because nobody's going to help him do his thing. Outside all the ambrosia and boisterous bullshit on the mountain that's rejected him, and is even sort of afraid of him although he can't hurt it. Someone who's had a rough deal (he drew the short straw, which gave him the underworld in the first place, vs. Zeus' sky and Poseidon's sea) but made it work for him, in ways that people may not even recognize. Hades. This whole time, I've been trying to find Death to get him to fall in love with me.

No wonder I have trouble meeting guys?

Pin my puns to my back.

2011-07-02T18:08:00.006-05:00

My equanimity and hope about graduation lasted about as long as it took to write the previous awkward blog post. Not gone entirely -- certainly I'm in better shape than I was -- but it's very hard to see that arc of thought continuing without a tenure-track teaching/research position within which to continue it. I'll do the job market again next year, but since I truly never believed I'd lose out my first time through, all bets are off now.

I think I've mentioned, I have an office job right now. I do web development for the medical school -- mostly I write pages promoting the various programs of study & facilities we have. Some IA, though we have an information architect, some low-level coding, lots of marketing and practical language thinking. It's fine, and I'm reasonably good at it, and the people I work with are great; certainly I don't get along nearly as well with the same proportion of people in any English department with which I've ever been associated as I do with the people in my office now. And speaking of offices, I have a huge one. No windows, but it's bigger than what almost any of our tenured professors in Clemens Hall get, with a kitchen right nearby where people leave baked goods and leftovers from receptions on a regular basis.

They'd like to make me a full-time offer, for apparently kind of a lot of money, and to put me in charge of some things. We're about to become a much bigger deal, doing web ops for all five of the university's health sciences schools, which will immediately necessitate about 15 new positions, and I guess the associate dean who heads us up thinks enough of me that she'd like me to be an upper-ish-level person in that. Upper-ish by my standards, anyway, based on my hazy sense that they'd have me doing more talking to faculty & making decisions & less cut-and-dried office stuff.

I don't want it.

I hate to sound like some stupid, tunnel-visioned brat, but -- I don't want it. I like the ivory tower, as insane and unappealing a person as that probably makes me. I believe in literature and students and the humanities -- it's much more accurate to say that poetry is my religion than to say that paganism is. I will never be able to care about the medical school's website or the millions and millions of dollars it kicks around the way I care about explaining poetry to some young, interested person. I want to be mentoring students on research and dissertations, ideally; I want to be bringing in poets to do readings (for whomever this hypothetical department/school might eventually be), and organizing symposia on aesthetics, and having, yes, fussy, and yes, rarified, and yes, cloistered conversations with other people who do these things. And I want to be teaching classes, mid- to upper-level classes, in this stuff that I love. It's not great politics, at least not great populist politics, but you have to have a serious breadth and depth of knowledge to get hold of all the shorthands that let you, say, make jokes about Kristeva's notion of the chora, or talk about reading The Waste Land as a destroyed but persistent five-act dramatic structure and how that shows a deep structural continuity between early Eliot and late. And. . . again, it makes me an unappealing person, just as a person out in the world, because who cares about any of this stuff? Almost no one. It's where I start to feel alive, though.

I was talking to my immediate boss about the job possibility, and saying that I want to be doing these things, and he suggested that he knows people who have full-time jobs who still organize conferences. First, I think he was envisioning something more real and normal and less ivory-tower than what I actually want to do, and second -- those people are happier and more stable than I am. I've never had anything that even looked like a healthy romantic relationship. I might be finally developing some new local friendships after my salted-earth/Ragnaroked years here, but I've thought that a couple times already and it hasn't taken. I can do an awesome job and be really alone, like I am, or I can handle a shitty job (office or comp slavery, either one) if I had a good partner and some kind of social support, but I can't have a life where there's nothing in it I care about. There may be people who can do that. Personally, I think that's unlikely; I think very few adults live as long as I am without any relationships they can engage in meaningfully, without looking just obviously batshit insane. Most the people I've ever seen be batshit insane have, in fact, had more people in their lives than I do.

While I continue to try to overcome this problem, it's not like I'm fixing it this week, or like I see any reliable way to fix it in the medium term. I'm not easy to get along with; I'm very bitter toward a lot of people I do know and not very positive about meeting new ones. I'm difficult to understand, emotional and stubborn, not all that reliable, perpetually broke (that, I guess, would be relieved, and it would make a difference), uninterested in a lot of normal things, interested in things that bore other people, a bad drunk if I drink. . . . Not that I don't have plenty of good qualities. I do. There are some definite obstacles in the way of me bonding at all with anyone, ever, though, and it's not smart to pretend those aren't there. Given that, the thought of trading off my useful hours from poetry and thought to helping the medical school recruit medical school people -- it doesn't appeal.

In ten years of grad school, I've made myself very good at poetry and very bad at most the other things I'd need to be happy. Even if I got a great position, I'd wonder whether it was a good trade, or just a sacrifice, Bataille-style, into the great unorganized circulation of general economy. Without that. . . I really feel like this situation is telling me I should never have raised my eyes above the horizon of my home town or home culture. I could have done what I'm doing now straight out of undergrad, never gotten as crazy or as angry as I have as a grad student, never broken myself into the pieces into which you have to break yourself to do the things I've done, have married some guy who might be fine or might be some asshole who'd yell at me, but who'd at least be around. People who yell at you will keep you around to yell at you, after all. My life would only be ordinarily miserable instead of extraordinarily miserable. Kind of saying that wryly, but actually meaning it too -- not the level of intensity of misery, but the type of problems. They just aren't ones the human psyche is quite built to have.

I may not have a choice, of course; this isn't about, do I want to take this job if it's offered to me, because if I don't get a teaching job, I guess I have to, and I probably have to in the meantime anyway. It's about how I feel about that future, seeing it immediately ahead.

I wonder, too, whether it's smart for me to take the web job to that level instead of, say, looking at visiting positions & shittier teaching jobs than I had been. This might seem a no-brainer, $24k teaching freshman comp and 1-2 other classes per year vs. some very livable wage doing web stuff -- but a PhD has a kind of freshness date, and if you're not in the academy within a couple years, it gets really hard to get back in. So there are some potential long-term consequences even of treating my current job as a short-term solution, which, psychologically speaking, is the best I can do for myself.

Today's lesson, as mine seems to be in a general sense, is that you should not try for things. You should make what you can of the postage-stamp of earth you get and be very glad that at least it's a place to stand. Step off that and it all goes to hell.

The boss battle on this one isn't even that hard.

2011-05-27T18:09:00.006-05:00

Oh, dusty blog. Hello. Well -- I did say I was busy. I have a day job, 5 days a week, regular schedule, the whole incomprehensible thing, and it's only 30 hours a week instead of 40, but any late-stage PhD student will tell you, you can't have a normal job and write a serious dissertation. I'm trying, and what's happening as a result is that most the rest of my life has fallen to the side. I already hadn't really cooked in years, hadn't even done anything more complex than adding fresh vegetables to a boxed stir-fry kit, and now I'm even short of that. I manage to fry or scramble some eggs about once a month these days; otherwise it's coffee house snacks, cereal, yogurt, and microwavable convenience foods. Don't ask about laundry or dishes. Especially don't ask about laundry, if you have any decency in your soul at all.

I did get out on my porch to fill up my flowerpots (that was several mornings and several afternoons; I have a lot of pots) and my orchids are doing really well, but I haven't knitted a stitch in weeks. I continue to keep up with CSI in bursts; I wrote a few new poems this spring; I'm in a poetry band now, where a friend and I are doing these electronic-music treatments of recordings of me reading, and that's extremely cool; mostly, though, it's the dissertation and me every night and every weekend day and every weekend night.

It's going to be very hard when it's over with -- honestly. I turned in another chapter not quite a week ago, and told some people, and of course they want to congratulate me and want me to be accordingly celebratory, but my feeling was, as with any major project I've ever declared done and handed off, one of grief and loss. I love the writing; it's hard, it's tiring, but I do love it. The research and thinking and long chattery days of talking to myself that go into the writing, too. The last several years of my life have been genuinely dreadful, overall, beginning from about August 06, maybe earlier that summer, with no respite longer than my London trip last spring, but the hours I've spent researching, imagining, and creating this thing have been some of the best of my entire life.

I keep having the image of the stepping-stone puzzle from whichever Indiana Jones movie it is. The one with all the puzzles in the caves. (Oh, right, that one.) The floor has these tiles in it, and he has to step on the right ones or pieces of the floor just fall away beneath him. If I remember, he has to spell "Jesus" in Greek, which comes out "IESU" and not "JESU," and, inexplicably, the world-traveled, highly-accomplished archaeologist forgets his Greek alphabet and fucks that up on the first step, sending a bunch of tightly-fitted stone pillars crashing out from under him. It's like that: every step forward is a dangerous guess, and with every step, more of the floor falls away -- only there are no right or wrong tiles, it's just that every time I move ahead, I'm doing away with huge chunks of the ground beneath me, and eventually I'm going to hit that last tile and then I'll just be in free fall in the ancient pitch dark. That's how finishing my dissertation feels to me. You can't tell me you'd be able unequivocally to cheer yourself going through that.

Incidentally, I think my deepest psyche figures death as being in free-fall and life as flight. Lots of irony there, given the full set of meanings to "flight." Anyway. That's a poem or ten.

I told a friend about this, and about how uncomfortable it is to be congratulated on something that feels so much more like a loss than an achievement. Not that there's no enjoyment at all, but what I love is still what's in the chapter, not the fact that it's done. If people wanted to sit around and talk about what I've written, and I'd get to get star-eyed about how I'm making these points that count as major critical interventions in the field, and supporting them in all these excellent ways, that'd be marvelous. But the interest isn't in the insides of the thing, where I'm happy, but in its departure. The friend to whom I was lamenting all this (oh, boo hoo, I finished an enormous piece of writing, boo hoo, I'm so alone -- like that makes any sense -- sensible or not, though, it's how I feel) pointed out that he doesn't know many graduate students who have as positive a relationship to their work as I do. For most people, by the time they get something like this ready to hand off for review, it's laden with misery. It's been cut to ribbons by someone else or several someones; it's patched together in what they know is a thoroughly unfinished fashion but they don't know how to do it any better; the work was hard without being rewarding all along because they weren't rapturously into it like I am with my stuff. So on. When someone in that situation hands over a piece, it is in fact a tremendous relief, and they're hugely happy to get back to their life; quite the opposite for me, because the dissertation is the best part of my life, and the more of it I finish, the less of it I have here with me.

He's very right, and I think this is one of the biggest reasons I have so much trouble making friends in my field -- I can't have the neurotic conversations grad students have about how they can't work, which is a primary bonding activity for the vast majority of us. I can work. I can't do anything else most the time, but I can work. When I defend (October; date set to within a couple weeks), I'll no longer have the one thing I can do, hence grief. Honestly, there's nothing else in my life that's stable and positive. I have almost no relationship with my family. My finances are a ruin. I didn't land a professor job this past year, and while my office job is fine, and the people I work with are really cool, it's not a reason to keep going when I feel like I can't. There's poetry, the writing-it side, but that's so hard for me to give myself permission to do without any other (external) encouragement, and sans teaching/academic job, there's not much of that. I don't even really have friends; there's no one within hundreds of miles I can ask to coffee like that's a normal thing, and other than the guy doing the poetry band with me (who is also extremely cool, but very busy), there's no one I talk to at all outside work. I have these old-maidish hobbies, and people on the internet. I have heaps and heaps of thoughts no one cares about. Even more heaps of words no one has any reason to read. And I have my unhappiness, which does seem to be rather a constant for me, but it's one I prefer to keep at bay by putting other things between myself and it. That's it, though. So I lose the dissertation, I drop from purpose and structure and enjoyment into radically solitary, lightless free-fall.

The friend in this conversation with me gets all this, and fortunately he skips over the part I stop at, where you say, "uh, doesn't all this just mean you're extremely lame?" It does. A good poetry critic, maybe, but a very damn lame human being. He asked me if there were ways I could carry on the work after the defense, so the dissertation is a stage and not (really) a finished thing I have to leave behind. YES. Yes! If I do get a tenure-track position, publishing a book will be mandatory to get tenure, and generally people publish some worked-over version of their dissertations. If they get tenure-track positions. We hope I do. That's been the plan all along; I just hadn't been keeping it before me. Sections of the thing are circulating as articles and more will be within the next several months -- so it already continues to live, in some ways.

Even that is a little short, though. First, I learned in quite a cold-water sense this year that I am by no means guaranteed a tenure-track job, not even with an award-winning book of poems on a major university press, very good creative publications, and stellar recommendations. No one thought I'd come out without a job, but I have, and the consensus of all the grayer heads than mine whom I've consulted is that the market is just actually that tough. Frightening. So publication isn't my best hope for, well, hope, because scholarly publication is primarily meaningful via my academic CV. But there is this -- just a couple months ago, I discovered a strong throughline connecting all (all, really all) my work, the short version of which is that I want to turn from teleological approaches to literature to an ontological approach. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc., come in with fundamental ideas about the purposes works of literature serve and then discover (or, necessarily, perhaps without acknowledging it, construct) the ways particular texts meet those purposes or don't. Perhaps because I'm a poet, perhaps because I'm perpetually running into problems because people expect me to be things I'm not and manhandle me as a result, I want instead to look at what gives rise to something like a poem, what its nature is, coming from that origin, and what its capabilities are then. I don't want to give texts purposes or presume they have them, although I still see them as having effects -- subtly, but importantly different. I want to look from what they are before articulating them into any systems. Apostate starts that project. It's the first bright section of the arc, the light that's describing this track. The whole thing is broader and deeper than poetry, much more than my career, which may in fact no longer exist in academia after my defense. Even without having to be a book, then, worst case scenario, the project doesn't have to die. It won't.

My friend said I ought to think of myself not as finishing the dissertation so much as potty-training it. This is stellar, first because I delight so in the ridiculous, and a dissertation in need of potty training is wonderfully ridiculous, second because it's accurate as a metaphor (they do kind of piss and shit all over themselves and scream for your attention at all hours til you're done with them), third because it's a metaphor at all, and finally because it gives me a way to recognize and even -- oh, look at that -- celebrate finishing things without having to put weight on their being gone. So. I'm potty-training my diss. We get to get her into big-girl panties in the fall, and believe me, we're all looking forward to that. See? That, I can get on board with.

As soon as we were having this conversation, the cave sequence in my head got a different ending: now, when I step off that last tile in the dark, I spring forward onto a new one, small, spotlighted, with just the slightest dark hint of more ground in front of it. It's a leap, but according to the video I make it, basically like Samus Aran or any other hero of your favorite platformer. (Don't tell me you don't have a favorite platformer. I can't even talk to you anymore if you don't. Mine was actually Faxanadu, but no one recognizes that one, and they do recognize Metroid, and Samus Aran is unbeatable as excellent gaming characters go. So there she is in my story.) Now -- my hand to god, this is the truth -- the feeling is that I'm going to run this out, tile to tile, taking little short jumps when I need to just as they fall away beneath my feet, and I'm gathering the speed to make the last adrenaline-charged jump across the chasm flawlessly. Classic move. No game should be without one.

I am going to beat this stage without even using an extra life. I know you're jealous -- I'm sorry. Skills, man. You got them or you don't and I have the carpal tunnel to prove I earned mine.

(PS, if any Prince of Persia game was your favorite platformer, I also can't talk to you anymore. Fucking horrible. You aren't even allowed to read my infrequently-updated blog if you like those games. Go back to Uwe Boll movies or oven-roasting catshit or whatever other unholy things you fill your days with.)

Ontological

2011-04-01T19:36:00.002-05:00

In honor of National Poetry Month this year, I will. . . be a poet. Writing a lot & rewriting a lot on the dissertation, finagling a halfway-grownup-non-teaching job, & not a lot of time left for much else. Textual gladhanding on Sappho's behalf will have to wait till next year.

For Rain

2011-03-26T01:21:00.006-05:00

Churning magazine titles over; must have gone through 100+ by now. Lesson: I'm useless at titles unless I'm dreaming. Other lesson: the study of cloud physics is called nephology.

Some dissertation work.

Really ought to update my website, because that project has changed astonishing amounts in the last 7 months or whatever it's been. Unlikely any time soon due to various things but most of those vanish into mood.

Orchids keep starting to grow and then blasting, which is heartbreak material. Spring pretends to show up but doesn't. (And won't. We will have winter, only green and warmer, and then winter, only hot, and then winter, only colorful, and then winter. Lake effect.)

I got into this on the bet that it would be worth the pain, and so far that outcome is a very hard read. Density is fine with me, but obscurity isn't, and this is obscurity. Obscurity & me grappling with it alone, adding another form of constriction. Did you know alone can be an apparatus? It can. It ratchets down. Brass. The whole trend.

So everything is straining to see in the dark, which is exhausting in the medium term and deadly over longer periods. Or I guess there's the option to close one's eyes and lie down, but I tried that. Then there is the miracle of light, but I'm not in charge of miracles as everyone can see.

My instinct is for obscurity of a different kind, and there all this goes silent as though it were buried in deep black static. Because it is. Contained light & black static, indeterminate, sealed as we are in the one shape of an egg.

My angels. . . I'm trying, but I don't feel talkative.

Vision

2011-03-17T20:53:00.000-05:00

World of Poetcraft.

OH GOD YES.

Horses

2011-02-19T07:43:00.004-05:00

The ongoing consequences of being unable quite to put to ruin (in the sense of a ruined village and of a ruined woman) one's desire.

Affection remains basically an idiotic cataclysm that goes off every once in a while in my skull. Get it out. Get it out. But what could be brought out is only what immediately ceases to be, anyway, like ozone way up at the blue.

Or you could put me underneath the hooves.

Chick Stuff

2011-02-13T10:45:00.002-05:00

You know what's super obnoxious? Being a feminist and doing anti-feminist things and not even realizing it. Shoot me. Just in the leg or something, but really.

If what I want poetry to do leans toward traditionally feminine work -- beauty, foremost, and all the baggage that brings, the unlocatability, the indulgence, the avoidance of purpose, the excess, the uselessness, the enjoyment & joy -- then it's horseshit to try to come up with a magazine name that avoids feminine connotations. Socially pernicious horseshit. (And heaven knows we have enough of that.)

In fact, the whole aim might/ought to be to take one of these "feminine" labels and do a magazine that both fits its name and is an unimpeachably excellent organ of poetry.

I mean. HELLO. I know better. I don't know what was wrong with me.

I'm thinking about spiders now.

Nomenclature and the Hole in the Universe

2011-02-08T17:06:00.006-05:00

So, AWP.

We meet again.

The melodrama factor in my internal monologue is really so high that when I strapped my badge around my neck and turned to face the bookfair last Friday, those words actually came to mind, and not even ironically. It was as mad(dened) as it is, and as tiring, and as clique-heavy. Since I don't have a clique, there was as much dead time as there usually is, during which I strolled or sat and maintained that wearying, pleasant smile. It wasn't bad, though. Saw one genuinely stupendous thing -- a newish online-gone-print project called Sidebrow essentially staged a Brechtian event during a panel on innovative collaboration. I am an instant and huge fan of Sidebrow, and if I can squeeze in time, I'm going to go through their anthology & whatever's new on their website and see whether I can write something new of my own to hook into their projects. So there was that, and I saw a few decent readings, and found out about a couple more new and new-to-me magazines. The TSUP reading went very well, contrary to my irritable expectations, and I got to meet the new winner, B. K. Fischer, who seemed immediately cool, lively & super smart & generally checked into the kinds of energy I dig. And the couple times I went by the TSUP table, someone was buying my book. HA! As ambivalent as I feel about being published, I did enjoy that bit of fuck-you to certain individuals who treat me with inadequate cordiality.

I also ran into someone from my MFA whom I hadn't seen or heard from in years, and it was even someone I completely like. She's not really in writing anymore, although it sounds like she kind of wants to get more deeply into it again, but she lives about two hours from DC, where this year's convention was, so she'd come up to it. We hung out quite a bit, and I was not only thrilled to run into her for her, but also to have someone to alleviate the sense of being a reprehensible isolate when everyone else I knew was off having dinner and drinks with each other. I asked her to send me her thesis; hopefully she will, and I'll see what we might do with it as far as a book. She's not a hugely prolific writer and never had much to do with revision, so my bet is that it's not a book as is, but she's also very talented and an extremely clever, thoughtful, playful writer. She ought to be able to make a book, on that. I'll be very happy if I can help her there.

The coolest thing, though, even cooler than running into Gilgamesh Rhapsode (she's very into Gilgamesh) was a bookmark. Not the kind in your browser, no, a real, paper bookmark. I need to take a photo of it and send it around, and hopefully if I do I'll also remember to post it here: my name is on this bookmark. The Allegheny Review, a journal for undergraduate creative writing that published me years ago, made up promotional bookmarks with a list of their previous authors on it, and they included me. Not only this! There are two lists, one big list in bright white print (navy background), and another below it in smaller, yellow print, and I'm on the better one. I'm on there with contemporary luminaries like Victoria Chang, a poet with excellent pubs and even excellent poems, and the very cool fiction-writer Ben Marcus. At the top of this list with all these swell people on it is David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace. Of course, I'd be happier about it had his life not made him want to shuffle off his mortal coil, but given those limits, I am thoroughly delighted to appear on a list of writers with D.F.W. Even if by chance, even in terms of undergrad publications, that I got lifted out of the masses and set up with him is writer-cool of an alpine order.

Feel a bit like I should pour one out for Wallace after that, but I'm at a coffee place and I think they might revoke my unlimited-refills privileges if I dumped my coffee out on their floor. Perhaps the thought can count.

On the way back (by bus; airfare ended up being unattainable by the time I got part of my loans situation figured out), I started the first poem I will ever have written as a male persona. It's a ghost who first showed up in my head when I was about 19. I had the name Israel for him, but that never seemed quite right, and then I had the initials R.A.F. Recently I read that Edgar Allen Poe used Israfel as a pen name, and then there I was going through his city on the way to DC and back, so this has come together into a poem where this ghost talks to the person he's haunting. I don't think the person is aware of the poem. (Can't call it speech, because it's from a ghost; can't call it communication if the other person isn't involved -- but nor is it a letter or quite a monologue or anything else I can think to call it just now.) Brought my Victoria-Regina tarot deck for reference imagery and am going to see what I can do with that tonight. Possibly also work up a scrap of a poem I wrote just almost a year ago, for which pieces of this ghost poem seem to be better-intended. Yes, you can write in a coffee place, even write the way I write. You can write anywhere your resources are at hand. Frequently this isn't the case even in your own apartment, and as frequently it comes to be somewhere totally else. They have crepes here. Important.

The conference affirmed for me the place a still-to-be-named poetry magazine run by me (and a friend I've asked to come on board as co-editor) could have. The writing world is just full of people like me, who are fireworks & nymphly acrobatics compared to the hordes of narrative poems about tractors and pregnancy, but who have long ceased to be impressed by Language poetry's manic jockeying for its own hip edge. We all kind of wince tiredly at the former and look over our shoulders and roll our eyes at the latter -- but nobody's standing up and making any claim for the kinds of poetry we do as having distinct character, a center of gravity, a recognizable set of aims. Everyone coasts along and lets the discourse more or less remain silent on what we do. Crucially, this means it's silent on how what we do is actually already a critique of quite a lot of what's out there, already an alternative. We tend not to be soapboxers; most of us just say what we write is poetry, and don't get into the mud trying to argue about what ours does.

Well, I'm the person who gets into that mud. I end up there when I don't mean to, because I go and believe things and act on those beliefs and they don't turn out to be what the arbiters of whatever arena want. If there's a need for an entity to voice this work as a coherent aesthetic position, and there is, I can do that.

It's therefore increasingly incumbent on me to figure out a damn name. I'm determined to have a name that's a statement, as I wrote here when I was initially working through some of these ideas. The vast majority of titleable things have nouns as their names, from "The Metamorphosis" to The Egoist to The Godfather. You might get a noun with an interesting descriptor, like Tin House or Six Characters in Search of an Author or my maiden cowboy names. Names: Ulysses, Margie. There are some indeterminate titles that are a little more active, where words that are mostly verbs get substantiated into nouns -- Blast or Radical Scatters -- and gerund phrases that lean active: Being a Green Mother, Smashing Pumpkins. And there are the nonsense or unidentifiable-case titles, which can be interesting, like LIT, Swink, Versal, and Jubliat. Titles that are full-on noun/verb/direct object statements, though, are very rare. They stand out, though. The Walls Do Not Fall -- even though the verb's negated and intransitive, that's a title that instantly establishes a world. Passion Leaves a Trace. "Rimbaud Decides to Put Away Childish Things." Years after running across it in a clearance sale, I remember a yarn -- I think from Alchemy Yarns -- called She Threw a Brick. Two books of poems that I haven't found all that interesting as books with absolute top-shelf titles, both from Alice James: Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Shahid Reads His Own Palm. The way two points call a line into existence, three points a plane, four our own spatial dimensions, these phrases instantiate realities. There are agents and actions and (in all but the H.D. book) recipients of those actions. They're instantly relational statements. I'm so set on finding one for this magazine. Also one for the Magpie book, for that matter.

This morning I started thinking of titles in terms of (popularly imagined) Native American names, though, too. Walks Delicately with Deer. Stirs the Fire. Stirs the Fire Steadily. Stirs the Fire at Dawn. Chief Rainy Mountain, Squaw Sights Her Bow Twice. (My made-up Indians are gender-equitable. Of course. I'm a guilty white person; don't expect me to deviate from that.) Lightning Down to the Rapids. Spotted Trout, Burning Pine, Mare's Hoof, Big Shine Around the Moon. I like that vibe, too, though if I use it to make a journal name, hopefully I'll be a little less heavy-handed.

Everything I'm thinking of so far with the mix of beauty, potential danger, and alien quirkiness is too girly, though -- dragonflies, naiads/oreads/dryads. Fountain pens don't have components with quite the right combination of sound and form. Daggers, too high-fantasy; any birds I'm thinking of, too approachable; plants. . . I do so much with plants. It would feel like a default setting. There are a lot of poisonous and thorned and sticky and vining plants that get the mood I want, but surely I can go bigger than that. Broken glass, too inanimate. Lava, too masculine (Pele notwithstanding). Tapestry and needlework occurs to me, but too feminine for the most part and too European. Usually these kinds of negations turn me around to see what I need, or at least they do in poetry when I have some noumenon I want to get at (yes; pretentious white person as well as guilty white person). Not happening yet, though. The next question then would be whether I can name the difficulty naming the thing, and use that. Maybe. Then it becomes naming a threatening, amorphous darkness in these terms, and I could perhaps come up with that if I stew with it a while.

Multiple spiral fractures are virtually always taken to be signs of abuse.

2011-01-30T01:00:00.009-05:00

Articulation, in terms of the skeleton, refers to the manner in which two bones are fitted to and move against one another to form a joint. Inarticulate therefore means unjoined, or perhaps isolated.

I think the shift from mmcn to this second book has been a shift from phenomenology to a poetics that's at least trying to get to ontology. Is that even a meaningful thing to say? It has to do with getting away from narrative and sensory vividness (not that I was terribly narrative to begin with, compared to some people, but still more so than others), and going deeper into the forests of making words do things they aren't used to doing, in my poems' case, making them not only describe but instantiate, convey by embodiment, states of being. Some of this is still psychological or relational but some of it is another level removed & concomitantly harder to describe.

Pain cannot be articulated because it cannot be divided.

What you speak about can't be pain, then, but is at most its divided, imaged, languaged impression.

In which case, we're relieved of the burden of trying to convey our pain, just as we're relieved of the burden of trying to convey anything else. It's not conveyance at all, but a maximization of language's capabilities to interact with itself, its subject an accident in the way that a saint's body is an accident. And for me, that doesn't mean abandoning syntax or the appearance of narrative, even, but it does mean that syntax, producing description and eventually narrative, becomes a manipulable feature of the medium rather than its structuring ground.

Think of building a skeletal model of an animal that doesn't exist. This, of course, is a hallowed carnival tradition and a perfectly legitimate form of trickery that's earned a place in plenty of museums.

Caviar, Four Star Daydream

2011-01-20T17:27:00.005-05:00

I kind of hate to do these neurotic posts about financial problems, but. . . sometimes, they're all I have to talk about. Plus, they're certainly a shaping feature in my academic and creative careers, so uninteresting to anyone but me or not, they belong here.

That uninspiring introduction made, on with it.

In the fall, I applied for graduate PLUS loans. This is a newish program for grad students who've exceeded their federal aggregate amounts for Stafford loans -- and let's not forget, that limit hasn't been raised since 1992, so I am hardly the only person coming up against it. I know several people in my program who have, in fact. The government approved me for $13k and since I was hoping to go the year without working, I went in to talk to our financial aid people to see if I could get that raised at all, or whether I should look at private loans, or what. The woman I spoke to asked me my rent, usual bills, and so forth and said, "Let's see if we can get you a bigger budget." I didn't hear from her again, but called our automated phone system a couple days later and found that I had been approved for a surprising $10k per semester, in Stafford loans. More than fine! You don't want to take out more debt than you have to, no -- but at this point, not having to worry about money, and being able to focus on doing the job market and then writing was ideal.

A couple weeks ago, I thought my spring loans should have posted and called to find out why they hadn't. I was told they were about to disburse, waited to find that out, then waited a few more days to see whether they were floating through the system or something. Went in to the financial aid office last Friday.

The guy I spoke to didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure that woman wasn't ever supposed to have changed my budget in the first place. At some point, someone saw my big loan amounts in my friendlier loan category and fixed it, restoring my limit to $13k for the year via PLUS, and rescinding the Stafford loans I'd already had disbursed. This left me with a $10k bill to UB. Even after the PLUS loans I was supposed to get, this leaves me with $3k for the spring.

But wait, there's more.

When I went in Friday, the aid officer told me I had initially only had $8500k via PLUS put up for me, and still needed to request the other $4500 (these are slightly loose figures; I didn't write down the change). I did that while I was there and dutifully waited to see these disburse, while my bank account crept back toward zero, as it does when one doesn't put in any money. I thought things were taken care of, at least to get me above zero so I could figure out what to do with the rest of the shortfall. I looked up some information on private loans. They don't look great, but I need to finish and I need to live while I do that.

Today, I called again. I was told that while the $4500 should post tomorrow, I had never been fully approved for the $8500. I need a cosigner. I'll have to find someone to cosign, get that processed, and hope to get it approved even to pay off my debt to UB for the fall, incurred because they credited me with these loans I shouldn't have had in the first place. This is before my refund/excess comes over to my account, which is, as of today, overdrawn and racking up NSF fees on things that are on auto-pay.

I did end up picking up a part-time job doing web development for the medical school, and it's even cool, but I can't live on it alone. Nor can I live on it with the loans refund I'll eventually get, especially because I have two conferences to go to in February. You know, that month that starts in eleven days? AWP is the first weekend, and I haven't booked travel for it. Louisville is the weekend of the 24th, and I got a plane ticket (with a refund from the ticket I got for MLA, which went unused) but don't have a hotel room yet. I'm on the program for each of these, so skipping out will be a poor option.

So I currently need to 1.) find a cosigner for this federal grad PLUS loan; my only likely option there is my parents, and I don't really know whether they'll do that. 2.) Find some bank that wants to loan a single woman with staggering amounts of debt and shaky future employment prospects a few more thousand student-loan dollars, which will, at the least, also require me to have a cosigner. It will likely be high-interest and have brutal repayment policies attached to it. 3.) Acquire about $300 emergency cash to get a plane ticket to DC before they go up more -- Southwest, bless their heart-shaped logo, still has seats at that price, which isn't bad. 4.) Starve in the meantime and get very little dissertation work done, because of whatever hangup I have that makes it so hard for me to work at home.

5.) ???

I can't even tell you how much I wish the school could just put me back in whatever inappropriate budget category that aid officer put me in, back in August. I would promise not to complain. Ever.

On the chance that I can't get a private loan, which I suspect to be a definite likelihood, I don't know what I'll do for the rest of the semester. I don't know how/when I'll be able to finish.

And none of this even touches what happens to me once I graduate.

The Bony Victims of Epiphany

2011-01-10T22:13:00.013-05:00

An email invitation went around our departmental poetics lists today --

YOU ARE HEREBY REQUESTED TO SIGN UP FOR OPENING NIGHT SPRING 2011!!

"JUVENILIA 2: How it All Started"

BRING IN THE NEW YEAR RIGHT: words, voices, happy faces, entertainment, and YOURSELF in the Lime-Light, making everyone smile! Come on! Share with us how it all started! Why did YOU start writing, studying, reading, researching!?

THE DEAL: There are TWO options:
1) Way back when (longer for some of us than for others!), what did you read that made you want to write, research and/or study literature? What was that FIRST INSPIRATION, that initial inhalation that demanded you create and think, that turned your breath into the fire of creation, and landed you in this darn program? WE WANT TO KNOW!, and we want you to share it with others! This is your chance to present the text that first inspired you to step foot on the crazy and challenging path of being a writer, a scholar, a craaaazy grad student.

2) When you first started reading, writing, devouring, who did you want to write like, be like, think like? What text, what author, became your FIRST INFLUENCE, your initial mentor of style, your earliest guide in the subtleties of language? WE WANT TO KNOW!, and we want you to come and proudly present it for all to hear! Don't miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity to pay homage to your first literary influence while entertaining the graduate masses.

AND DON'T LIMIT YOURSELF! Was it Fraggle Rock? Green Eggs and Ham? Shakespeare? Lyrics to an old rock song that are engraved in your heart? What? Have FUN with this, be HONEST, REVEAL something!

I am immediately -- etymologically, without any mediation, any intervening interface -- pained, worn out, excluded in advance of the event. I haven't been to a poetics reading in years because they've all ended up being these "craaaazy grad student" things, and although no one would question that I'm a crazy grad student, my variety of crazy isn't one that makes me enjoy high-strung energetic communal whatsit. I mean, one of my strongest impulses in response to this note is to correct the phrasing to "Like whom did you want to write, be, think," and it's only after that that I say, I, uh, didn't really idolize anyone. I read a lot of people and liked them, but the sense has always been that I was taking in material I could use, not that I was going to emulate anyone in particular. And -- I truly, unironically, unproblematizedly, unreservedly like poetry readings that are just. . . poetry readings. Rows of chairs and wine in little plastic cups and 20-25 minutes of a person reading his or her poems. I'm correspondingly (conversely? correlatively? pick your vaguely geometric adverb) ugly-duckling out-of-place at things like this. I don't want to yell and cheer. I don't want to make people yell or cheer. I want to listen to some poems and maybe talk about them afterward over finger food. That's really where I am.

Wherever the roots of my being a poet are, their first quiet digging into the wet earth isn't a story that would ever want applause. They might be in O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter," the first poem I ever really got into my head -- and a very urbane, understated, chatty-but-not-loud poem it is. My parents got me a copy of From the Other Side of the Century one Christmas, and I'll confess that at thirteen or whatever I was, I was pretty nonplussed by the vast majority of the poems in it, but O'Hara, and that particular piece of O'Hara's, lit something up in me that made me want to keep rereading it. One of many obscured but very influential ghosts in my closet, Frank O'Hara. Of course, for my parents to have bought me that tome, I must already have shown some interest in poetry, but I truly couldn't tell you how I did that. I read a lot as a kid, but clear through high school, I remember most of it being sci-fi and fantasy novels. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys before that. I did read a heap of cummings at some point, but I'm pretty sure that was after getting the Messerli anthology.

So we could go farther back, to my love of puns from a very early age, or to the first poem (using the term, of course, very loosely) I remember writing, at about age three --

There once was a mouse
Who lived in a house
And never wore a blouse

We did have trouble keeping me in clothes at that age, too. I used to get my parents in mild trouble with base protocol by running out of the house naked, or so I'm told. I don't remember dodging clothes, but I do remember that poem. One of my earliest experiences with polysemic indeterminacy: I asked my mother how to spell "wore" and she freaked out because she thought I meant "war." The discomfort I incited there is probably a main reason I stopped after three lines.

But who didn't do those things as a kid? If I'm to point to puns and rhymes as the nascent moment of my career in poetry, I'd have to have a reason why every kid who plays those same games with words and sound doesn't end up a poet. A frighteningly lonely childhood probably contributed, no less affecting for my ignorance when I was living it of how frightening it should have been, because although I was very articulate from a terribly early age, I didn't have a friend until I was six years old. I didn't have two at the same time until I was about eleven or twelve -- sixth grade, anyway. I spent hours and hours and hours rearranging my collections of rocks and shells and costume jewelry and beat-up marbles and My Little Ponies, not really playing with them so much as examining them and trying out their possible relations to one another. You could say, this is twentieth/twenty-first collage thinking. You could also say it's the kind of things developmentally disabled kids do, though. Those habits of solitude may have been an alembic where verbal acuity boiled and thickened down into bright and tart and delirium-inducing poesis. Maybe. Not like I know. I wasn't old enough or at least wasn't aware enough to keep track of what my bizarre childhood habits were doing to my brain.

These are not things I especially feel like spinning out at a stomping-clapping-hollering-aggressive grad student poetry party. I'll tell the stories (clearly!), but that's not the scene for me.

Nor is it a scene to talk about my first mentor, Kevin Prufer, with whom I can credit my entry into this whole mess of a life. Kevin is and has, as far as I know, always been a mover and shaker, publishing and publishing in major journals, thoroughly likable and even more thoroughly chimerical. He is a consummate player at pobiz, and so, not a welcome name at Buffalo poetics -- but when I took his workshop, totally as a lark, really (I was gone weekends to debate tournaments and looking for classes that didn't meet Fridays so I wouldn't miss tons), he just sort of acted like I was already a writer. Took me seriously from go, without any sense that this was even an unusual thing to do. I'm a much more irascible person and poet than Kevin, but professionally, that's where I came from, and I still see myself as a professional type of poet. A professional type, and then again, a mad, oracular type -- but not a social type. I've never wanted to sit around bullshitting with writers in bars; I didn't even encounter that scene until I'd already made a totally different way of being a poet for myself, out of my own tendencies and what I learned from Kevin, and when I got to the writers-in-bars thing, it seemed like just so much posing. Not that what Kevin does, and what I do by turns, isn't posing, but the AWP gladhanding is a kind of posing that, for me at least, runs its course and then you go home and you're yourself again. The pontificating in bars seems to me to bleed through the rest of a person's life. I can be a pretty insufferable know-it-all, too, but I just do it differently, and always have. So you might site my roots there, since that could be taken as a point where my being as a poet acquired some of its habits, but those very habits equip me atrociously to tell my story at one of these scenes.

It might be Kevin loaning me Lucie Brock-Broido's first book, A Hunger, and the recognition (much weirder in hindsight) that this person out there in the world wrote the way I was teaching myself to write. It might be reading and rereading and re-rereading Four Quartets I don't know how many times in high school and as an undergrad, and the inexplicable way that text still affects me. All the bombs, all the excruciatingly careful, paced philosophy, all the dung and death -- and what I come away with, every time, every time, is this beautiful, arresting pathos, this lambent pink cloud (and boy howdy am I not a pink-cloud person) that fills my chest and expands (me) outward. It might be the way that's the only thing I know of at all with which I associate the color pink that I like, and the way it manages to be so soaked with affect for me without being anything less than sharply, gravely, brilliantly serious at the same time. Lucie Brock-Broido and gravely beautiful experiences reading Eliot -- are also not the material for a scene like Juvenilia 2. The very diffusion of my sense of my origins precludes any performative value, even if any of the pieces fit the scene individually. And I don't especially care to tell my stories as my stories. In an arena like this, I'm talking about myself, so they're germane as they are, but if I'm talking to poets, I want to talk about poetry. With or without me. I don't want applause or grins, either; I want complex, extended conversations about these things. I'll have wine, but, honestly, not more than a couple glasses. And most the time I'd prefer tea. I am an old, old maid in my soul, and as far as being a poet goes, I'm even happy that way.

The past week or two, I've thought quite a lot about what I wish I had in a poetry community but don't. A friend asked me for whom I'm writing, along these lines, and I answered, for poetry. For the dead. If you want to be morbid (and, let's face it, I do love being morbid). If you'd rather not, you could say I'm writing for the canon, in its expanded and indistinctly-bounded incarnations, for literature as a presence with which we interact. After that huge, squishy encomium for Eliot: I'm writing for the tradition. Strange audience, my friend said, and it is, but I'm a strange person, so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone who knows me. The secret behind all this is that if we know enough and have a close enough psychic approach to the dead, to what they've done and how they might have done it and what it means to us and everyone between and everyone behind and everyone yet to come, if we have that kind of heightened sensitivity to poetry -- not to the poets, but to poetry -- we can almost sneak in and speak from the position of our dead. What I want that I don't seem to be able to find anywhere are living people who do poetry this way and who want to read my work, poems and essays both, and to respond from that usurped place. People who feel their arms linked through all our forebears'. Who have both feet in the grave.

I'm not sure that fantastic levels of isolation during one's formative years turn a kid into a poet, but I suspect that mine turned me into this particular kind of poet. And here I am stuck around all these alive people! It's almost as bad as being a ghost.

To dissipate such that one becomes a wrinkle in the world words pass through.

Refracting darkness into its waves.

America might be a sociopath.

2011-01-08T18:42:00.003-05:00

It doesn't end.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), has now been shot in the head at a public event where at least seventeen other people were shot, at least five of them fatally. Giffords was one of those targeted on Sarah Palin's infamous crosshairs map, and in fact made some clear public statements about the danger of that kind of rhetoric in its aftermath, having received death threats and had her offices vandalized. The news celebrities and neon-violent politicians like Palin will come out and decry any suggestion of responsibility, but it comes down to a simple point: if you actually want people to stop acting out in terms of guns and blood, you have to stop talking to them in terms of guns and blood. If you actually want people to engage the polis thoughtfully and productively, you have to speak to them thoughtfully and productively. Persisting in doing otherwise, with so much evidence of the wages your words bring in, makes you an active, blithe part of the problem.

The bizarre picture these figures paint of how media works actually relies on the same principle as their resistance to socialism: I am not responsible for my fellow citizens.

All Our Words Are Selfish Genes

2011-01-07T19:38:00.006-05:00

Since writing the previous post, I've had the peculiar but very strong sense that my name is Iscariot, and it was supposed to have been all my life. I've always had a disjointed sense of my name and on one hand, I suppose this is just the latest incarnation of that, but on the other, I've usually operated under a vague sense that whatever my name was, it wasn't supposed to be that -- not the sense that here was a name that was actually mine. And, of course, it would be something that isn't exactly a name, and definitely not a first name anyone would ever give to their daughter. Good work.

It's an interesting word, though. Very interesting for a poet. Betrayer. Speech is always an infidelity, to its subject/topic, to its subject/speaker, to its intended recipient. It lies. All down the page. And this is how it propagates itself, through infidelity, through being untrue to its own ends: in its image which isn't visual, in its form which is immaterial, Robert Duncan and the rest of us go on and on making sentences that can resemble but never be themselves.

So: we empty ourselves without bringing anything more to be in the world. It isn't a birth; it isn't even emesis. It's a travail the fruit of which fails to exist, and, which, in appearing as its absent self in the place of the existent, creates the hunger in us on which it depends for its perpetuation. To speak is to devote oneself to something that's only and always a parasite.

Speech and betrayal have at their obscure beginnings identical structures; the most resonant betrayal in Western literature was also an act of speech. The breach from world into word is the aperture where God appears and in that same instant is banished. Judas' crime had nothing to do with the thirty pieces, but was the ineluctable effect of epiphany.

And poetry in particular is a kind of speech bound up in betrayal, or let loose by it. The condition of poesis is that one ceases to care about anything else -- not even as an addict or an obsessive, because it's not exactly that the writer has to care about poetry, but rather a transcendental yielding-up of one's own concerns into a state of possibly violent readiness. One isn't willing; will ceases to be a question. The writer passes from subjectivity into the position of a tool, a thing, which can be named ("poet," "iscariot"), a tool that sounds under appropriate agitation, but which is itself incapable of speech.

What was he doing, the great god Pan? He was turning us all into flutes, carelessly, hastily, and would cast us aside when we cracked. Which happened often, not only on the scale of sacred time, but even in the limited terms of our own chapped lives, disposability no imperfection but ultimately part of our purpose. The dragonflies come back, the waterlilies bloom, and then they don't, and then they do again. We get blown out and aren't in a state to appreciate these things. It's hard to say we're responsible.

Personally, I think Shakespeare's greatest accomplishment might be the way he could still pun on "will" right up into the last of his career.

So we betray ourselves, we betray the fact of our being selves; we betray our beloveds (people or politics or visions or anything) and put them in our poems without even, precisely, wanting to do so; we betray our hearts because we talk about them. In betrayal -- we destroy the tender, raw trust we call a secret by causing it no longer to be a secret. It's whoring out something virginal. Which, then, can no longer be a virgin, but transforms into an economic operative. Grown up into pussy and flashy barely-there clothes and coins.

That's what poetry does; not the coins in terms of getting paid, but reduces things down into the coinage of language. We take perfectly good unspeakable things and speak them anyway -- and they may hide, they may disappear, they may be always on the run, but in the moment of writing, we've caught up to them and we tie them down to the page, we open them wide and hot for language's penetration. And for the most part, we don't feel bad about it, or we feel ridiculous, a little insane, if we do. It's just the work; it's not like we're dealing with human beings or anything.

And then there's the other betrayal, that speaking something replaces its bloody little hole in the world with words. The word "hooker" or the phrase "blowjob in an alley," for example: so much is lost! It's an exchange designed to summon forth very damn good reasons to grieve, and in the same instant to hide them perfectly, to distract us all. To feed us another line.

The crucifixion, then, might be a poem. Or the story of the crucifixion might be the story of poetry.

Molly Magpie Hangs Up a Shingle

2010-12-31T11:38:00.006-05:00

A murder of crows showed up around here this morning. Or at least that's what I guess they are -- could have been some other kind of bird that travels in packs and squawks and caws instead of chirping. It was 6 am, I didn't get up to look. They seemed dark and foretelling, anyway, without being ominous. (Despite the etymology of "ominous" in "omen," I'll insist on the distinction.) War-goddess dark, Dionysus dark. Interesting, for New Year's, but appropriate.

Though don't read my take on birds all that seriously. I don't even think I get the animate; I'm a plant person. I got a mini phal at Wegman's for $2 the other week, too.

On the topic of murder, this job market is pretty close. Things aren't over, but they aren't looking good.

A friend of mine really thinks I ought to be able to get some unusual job that the rapidly-evolving internet is about to invent for me. He might even be right; if there were things for resourceful, problem-solvey, highly intuitive and highly polymathic poets to do with the web, I'd be the person, but I don't know where I'd look or what it would be. I'm shit at administrative stuff and not really a programmer. And I'd never want to leave poetry, so it would have to be some job, that would pay (and pay well, with the loans I have), where I'd be creating things on the web and that would be or feed my writing and thinking about poetry the way a good professorial job would. He's convinced, though. Pretty sure he thinks I'm a William Gibson character. . . and maybe that's been the deal all along. What comes out of this is something that couldn't ever have been anticipated because it didn't exist while I was getting ready for it.

My name's Iscariot Daviess. For reasons now long buried in my prosaic individual past, everyone calls me Tokyo, even though I don't look like any Tokyo anybody's ever seen. I'm a reasonably-paid corporate poet with a business in the underbelly in real prophecy. I can get you what you need to know, in a pinch.

Pinch me and we'll get started.

Eve

2010-12-30T18:53:00.001-05:00

I fled at the face of my rival, and I felt her breath at the back of my neck.

So bloodied and chopped it seemed not even to be the soul of a human being at all, but the soul rather of a corpse.

Proposal For Securing Arts Funding In Western New York

2010-12-19T13:19:00.003-05:00

Politically-engaged me grades my students' papers, keeps up with world events (sort of, anyway), transmits that information and my take on it around to whomever I can get to listen, votes, signs the occasional petition, shops as responsibly as I can, recycles, and so on. Not enough, maybe, but that's what I do. Politically-engaged me also trusts escapist-poet me that what we're doing in that role is valuable in some other way, or on some other time scale.

SCANDAL.

2010-11-04T18:47:00.001-05:00

I think the Magpie is an atheist!

Visit From St. Elizabeth

2010-10-02T18:48:00.004-05:00

Eliot Society conference, as usual, was really good. I figured out what distinguishes that organization for me: it's very familial, with the one difference that no one asks me why I'm not married yet or what it is I do again. Got some useful ideas for clarifying & extending my chapter's argument, so it was well timed, although in my attempt at personal austerity I'm not sure I should have spent the money -- I did, and those chips will fall where they fall.

Another poet here and I have been trying to make a writing workshop of sorts happen here, inspired by Spicer's Poetry as Magic thing; so far, attendance at ours has been really spotty, but it has me writing poems again, and I think the time is mostly coming out of my pace/fret/play computer games time rather than job-search or dissertation-writing time. This week, we were supposed to write poems for rejection by some publication(s) or institution(s), coming off Spicer's Book of Magazine Verse, and I did one not for Fence and one not for the AWP Writers' Chronicle. Fence is just always rejecting my poems, despite friends' well-intentioned insistence that they ought to love them and I ought to try again, and I'm pretty sure what they (she, Rebecca Wolff, I think) don't like is the lyricism & lush/sensual language I like, so I drew back and just wrote a lovely, even plaintive, little lyric about boats, and that was wonderful. For AWP, I took the opportunity to voice my dislike of publishing in the form of a love poem to the muse, figured as the fresh, youthful girl writer whose portrait appears on the cover of at least 3 out of every 4 issues, and to critique there the notion of writing in order to get published. I doubt I'll ever do anything else with it, so I might as well put it up here for whatever snickers it might garner:

Ode On the Made: a poem not for the AWP Writers' Chronicle

Cash me in, my love,
let me die again into the words
that light up your bordello eyes, let me sing only
to the time of your tenure on this page.
I will appear on the subway reading your book.
I will laugh like my life is relieved
of the clandestine, the dealmaking
that keeps us all incised, of hangers-on
for blood and glory:
and this will be no task at all.
My cover girl, my reputational angel.
The narrow country we call fame
near to hand.

The title & use of "bordello" are Spicer references (to "Lament for the Makers," a much better poem); the bit about reading her book in public and laughing is from a sordid story I ran across last summer of some novelist who'd supposedly hired actresses to read her book in public and laugh; the last fragment is a dreadful twisting of the ending of Rilke's beautiful poem beginning "God speaks to each of us as he makes us." In Rilke's, God tells the soul about the joy and pain of life & encourages it to meet the whole mess of things, keeping its relationship to the divine very close & therefore sustaining; mine of course inverts that whole set of priorities. It was pretty enjoyable to write, too, for other reasons than the boats one was. Initially, it was going to be much more overtly nasty, but by the time I sat down to do it, I don't know, I suppose I felt less threatened > hostile, for whatever reason, and I like the irony much better. If I were to read it, I'd totally do it completely straight as though I was reading a real poem of devotion to my art. Possuming.

This workshop started me on another poem that's maybe somewhat more significant. Years and years ago, in I think my last semester as an MFA student, I started to think about what poetry book #2 would be, which indicated to me that I had solved the main problems of poetry book #1. (And I had, although following through on the implications of those solutions to turn it from a student manuscript to a book worth reading was still a long process.) Someone asked me if I ever wrote about my family, and I said, no, you know, I don't, even as much as the culture and landscape of my childhood get drawn into my poems -- so, in the spirit of Elizabeth Bishop's incitement that "you must write the thing you cannot write," I decided that book #2 would be about my family. It never really went there; I've ended up writing about circus freaks, psychosis, and genetic diseases, though, so Freud is probably right about sublimation. Poems about circus people and lunatics are much more interesting than poems about my family members, though. And I'd rather write interesting poems than pretty much anything else.

Anyway, as part of an exercise I brought to the workshop, a revamped version of Spicer's 1957 questionnaire, I started a poem and some of the phrases I thought were going somewhere, so I worked on it a while last night. I kind of thought it was somehow about my mother, but it wasn't quite that, although there are elements in it that seem to have to do with my (domestic, as distinguished from cultural) childhood. In line with another Elizabeth B's thoughts on writing, this one Bowen, I thought I'd try to look into the shadowy space this figure was starting to fill, as though we were sitting across from one another in a dim train carriage (her image), and get to know her that way. There's a house that's up above the landscape, which is sort of like the house where I grew up, but not really, as it's by a lot of water, and much higher up/remoter; there's a sense of some dynamic, magnetic, appealing but intimidating woman who has a lot of power over her surroundings & the poem's persona, which is sort of maternal, maybe, but not like my particular mother. I think it's Elizabeth Bishop, of all people, and the poem has me grappling with her presence in my life? writing? -- which I never even thought of as very great. Stylistically, we're worlds apart; tonally and thematically, too. Or so I had imagined -- now that I look at it, she's probably the most interesting writer on family relationships I know of, and her poems have a level of command I admire just abjectly. Command of diction, of a very precisely-controlled way of making emotion happen, & of using her personal material really to make poems, & only that, getting it away from being personal material at all. I don't even know how she does it -- she's merciless without being violent at all. As much as I'd usually situate myself in a showier, more grandiose poetics, she's actually quite a model for me, one I think of as unattainable in maybe a more humbling way than how I think of most other members of my constellation.

And then there's this moment, where she's sinking in the first shovel and turning it over at the unassuming groundbreaking, years ago, that initiated this book project. I hadn't even thought of that in a long, long time. It seems like this must be a landmark to have reached (reached back to), at any rate. The house is her upmountain house in Brazil; the third rail that I felt had to go in it even in the first scribbled draft is her third rail which then reaches back to Crane's subway; Elizabeth Bishop slips into St. Elizabeths, which explains why I felt it had to do with my madness poems. I don't know what I'll do if Magpie takes off while I'm trying to finish my dissertation & apply to all these jobs, but hopefully if that's how things go, the poetry-writing will intrude on more aimless fretting time, to which it's very welcome.

Dove

2010-09-13T19:08:00.003-05:00

I fail absolutely in every effort to believe that it's permissible for anyone to say that building an Islam-focused religious community center near the WTC site -- or anywhere -- is offensive. I don't care how famous or influential the people saying it are. This isn't a side that the media needs to represent in order to be fair. Neither bigotry nor the ignorance on which it depends are positions; they're at best occasions for shame and for shaming.

This isn't the America I grew up in.

Out There

2010-09-09T10:44:00.002-05:00

This morning, Salt pointed me to a discussion about publishing and self-promotion on Magma poetry. They described it as "very British"; if so, one of my London friends might be right and I may have the soul of an Englishwoman, because I sympathized with the very many people talking about how self-promotion made them uncomfortable, although of course the other strain about the necessity of self-promotion wasn't any surprise. My discomfort goes deeper than, as the original post suggests, being shy, though; I have a strong commitment to preserving art's sanctity from capital. A lot of the comments at Magma talk about writing being like any other 9 to 5 job -- but it's not, in many ways, the relevant one here being that your "product" isn't a commodity. Sale alters the ideological framework in which art participates; as soon as you make a novel or a book of poems worth money, it's indebted to financial profit (or minimizing financial loss), and the degree to which art becomes beholden to anything but art depletes its being as art. I'm not talking about a mystical notion of "being," but the pragmatic possibilities an artwork has for interacting with its world. If it's worth money, people with money have authority over what it can be, how it can be presented (or if), etc.

Now -- this is a reality; people do have money, books do cost money to produce, other forms of art do cost money to make/stage/etc., and if we want art to happen, we have to negotiate the resources around by, say, getting people to spend money on our books. The situation is different in the UK than it is here, because they don't have the university press phenomenon we do, where it runs more or less as a charity; on the other hand, they have a vastly larger percentage of the population who's interested in poetry. I'm not sure how it balances out, and so my response has to be to the American situation and not to the discussion at Magma. Anyway, I don't just find promoting myself personally uncomfortable, but unethical and improper to what I want poetry to be able to do. In protecting poetry from capital, I take the term fairly broadly, to refer to exchange systems in general -- there's a level at which I honestly want to protect poetry from popularity. The whole reason I went this route, after having done a bachelor's in communications studies and thinking I'd coach debate or do research on ad campaigns or political speeches, was that when I got a little deeper into poetry, I found that its exceptional status -- the fact that just about no one reads it -- lets it do such much cooler things than popular discourse can do. It's bad for those of us trying to make careers in it, but I think the sacrifice is essential.

I didn't expect to be nearly so opposed to promoting my own work; I love poetry, I love to talk about it, and very little makes me happier than having people be interested in my poems. But when I started to have to account for money, I found hawking books miserable work. I'd rather people spend their $20 on a used copy of Millay's collected, honestly, which is about what it usually costs on Amazon. If people are going to get my book, I want it to be because they're struck by the work, not because they want me to make a buck (and I don't make even a buck; we haven't even sold enough to cover my initial honorarium). The idea of poetry being instrumental is just depressing to me -- that it has to prop up the finances of a press (because presses are always falling apart, because no one reads poetry), that it should somehow pay my electric bills. If I wanted to make money writing, I would have skipped all the poetry junk entirely and gone into tech writing. I know a girl with an MFA who did that -- wrote manuals for Navy submarines. Paid her bills, anyway.

At another level, I don't at all like the position of having to promote my work specifically. I finally put up a website that I hope is reasonably professional, and I now run a Facebook ad to the tune of about $20 a week that directs to the TSUP site. I force myself to hand out the super nice promo cards my press printed up when we have people come in to lecture on anything poetry-related; every once in a while I'll leave a little stack at a coffee place. These are things I did purely for the sake of the job, though, and that's as deep as they go. Even then, I have to fight with myself, because while I'm an advocate of poetry, I'm not much for advocating me. Like I said, you should really go buy Millay's collected (or any such book in about the same price bracket). I completely hate the poet who sets up a reading for him/herself -- I didn't even really like doing my own book launch, although that's of course an entirely common practice. If some other person, and especially if some other group of people (editors, a hiring committee) likes my work, that's cool, but pounding the pavement on my own behalf is too close to using poetry to keep my lights on. Even if in my heart I mean to promote poetry, period, the benefit to me (immediate, selling books; long-term, growing my CV) can't be excised. So it becomes very distasteful. I do it -- but I don't do it frenetically and don't enjoy it at all.

And anyway, I'm so persuaded of the value of staying small, as I was getting at in my last post here. You get to make the pieces you want to make, and their audience may be small, and they'll never pay off financially, but they'll be there to cast their small ripples out, and if what you're doing is good and if you're very lucky, the ripples won't be so small. I despair at having to care about ripple size, to harp on the image, in writing poems, though. Some of the Magma posters talked about promotion as detracting from writing time -- yes, maybe, but I think the far more pernicious threat is that it alters the trajectory of your poems. They're less aimed at poetry, and more at the poetry audience (including editors, prize commissions, tenure boards, etc.). I like poetry's audience; I'm part of it and glad we have it, but it can't be the telos for writing. That has to remain a very dark scene, beyond privacy into the unselving space of poesis.

There's a lot of noise out there.

2010-09-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

One of my D'Youville classes is WONDERFUL. Read that in the handwriting with which Viv Eliot wrote "WONDERFUL" on the section of The Wasteland that used her words. Day two and they were more than on the ball -- we read a Richard Wilbur poem called "Junk," highly anthologized, which uses Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative meter to talk about the life and afterlife of trash, and since it does so in an ancient and largely discarded form, says things about the life and afterlife of poetry too. It's fun, or at least I think it is. Anyway, the 10 a.m. section had plenty to say about the poem from go, and when I told them about the form it used, they immediately picked up the connection and ran with it. They also got a particular critique Wilbur is making of throwaway language (I gave the example of Hallmark cards as the kind of "poetry" most people know in the US) and those who get paid to produce it, and they got it without any prodding at all. The 8 a.m. section, curiously, had a much harder time with that piece and the other one I had for us today, Archibald MacLeish's beautiful "Ars Poetica," with a couple outright misreadings. One student thought "Junk" was about "a working stiff," and I'm not at all sure how he got that because there are barely people in that poem at all. Every class has its dynamic, and I think I'm going to have to find some other ways to teach the earlier section than relying on my usual methods of asking questions and moving the class along based on their answers. It is pulling teeth, and pulling them with pliers made of noodles, to get them to say anything at all, and then, at least so far, what the ones who talk say is a little screwy. Maybe others will warm up and start talking, though -- hope so.

I haven't looked at the students' majors but I wonder if that early section isn't heavy with hotel/restaurant management and finance and pharmacy and generally responsible, unimaginative careers. The other one has at least two students who've clearly had a lot of English and specifically poetry, and about four more who, however much they've had or not, they're picking the poems up really well -- the two I'm noticing most are the only ones I saw writing down the names of books I mentioned on the first day as not required, but cheap and useful if you're an English major or minor. Wish I could transplant some of the students from each section into the other. . . but alas.

I am inordinately happy about the course I've put together, and however the semester itself goes, I think I have a bang-up writing-about-literature syllabus to send out for jobs now. My little homework prompts are all sorted out, my first three essay assignments are written (the fourth will be a research essay and I need to check around to find out things like how many sources I should be requiring), the terms and concepts I'm covering are noted in my copy of the schedule, and it's probably the best class I've ever built. On paper, anyway. Anything can implode, but this one, I'm pretty sure it has the pieces together in the first place.

On my home-sometimes-not-so-sweet-home front, I think I might be about to become one of the bitchiest people in the history of my block. There's this younger couple who moved into the apartment beneath me a few months ago, and they have the single barkiest dog I've ever encountered. My god. It's a terrier mix and boy, it got all the terrier genes for incessant and inane barking. It went for five hours this afternoon without letting up, from one to six, and this isn't unusual. It seems to start up every afternoon around one or two and to go until its people come home, which sometimes is at three or so but sometimes. . . is significantly later. Sometimes they'll have people over, too, and be playing beer pong til three in the morning, which is a problem for me by itself but then of course their dogs are wound up too (they have two, but the non-terrier isn't as bad). Anyway, I've talked to them and left them notes, and I think the next thing I do may actually be to call the police and see if they write tickets for breaking noise ordinance around here. Five hours! I'm trying to write a dissertation and an unattended dog is barking basically into my windows for five hours straight. I don't really want to be the nasty old English teacher who calls the cops on people's barking dogs -- but I don't want to be the girl who never finishes her dissertation either. My concentration is fragile enough as it is.

Needle Has Not An Eye

2010-08-24T11:21:00.002-05:00

Heaven bless the internet. Over the past couple months, I've had conversations with Salt via their Twitter feed and a local colleague, David Hadbawnik, via his blog, facebook, and email that have had me reevaluating my thoughts about poetry's audience, marketing, and community -- in a lot of ways. I've never had illusions that publishing in a giant, nationally-distributed literary magazine means being read, for example, but I'm thinking more directly about how aesthetically useless those organs are, although -- and here's where I depart from Hadbawnik -- a very necessary evil, necessary for one's (my) career. Before I got to Buffalo, I didn't even realize there were alternatives; smaller press, smaller distribution, the even more ephemeral event that has no printed correspondent. That had already had me readjust my notion of what publishing is and can be, but I never got very far into it. None of the poetry people have been doing here speaks to me. One ongoing magazine, P-Queue, I think is excellent but still not to my taste, which is, admittedly, unfashionable. I'm like the 1940s walking around, as far as that goes, and not even the avant 1940s, just the poetry that was "very good" at that time. I think this is fine; I don't think we've exhausted that well, or many others that we opened in the past century, and I think it's perfectly legit to work these excellencies while they remain unexhausted, which I think will be the state of things at least through my lifetime.

So I had these interesting models, but no home for the poetry I love in it -- which isn't even the standard-issue magazine verse; when I go through all the pages of a lot of issues of a lot of magazines, I'm still wincing regularly even at publications that, more or less, I can say I like. I have no patience for flat urbanity a la Billy Collins or flat sappiness a la Virgil Suarez or the hordes of people still writing bad prose given the visual form of poetry without its guts; I can't handle didacticism or philosophy stated as such; I have trouble taking poems about McDonald's or watching tv seriously, even very witty poems about McDonald's or watching tv; etc. Buffalo is safe from all that, of course, but we have our own issues. I think you should not be quoting Heidegger or Agamben in your poetry unless it's because you found a beautiful sentence; it makes me a bore, but I'm not interested in poetry readings where there's a lot of laughter or spontaneous applause, and I'm very rarely interested in the poetry that gives rise to those scenes. Again -- 1940s walking around. Sue me. With dove|tail, I tried to make an entry into the existing culture for poetry and events more along my favored lines; I wanted to get people who love literature but don't identify as poetics students out, and I definitely did that, but I wanted then to bridge the chasm between that world and the more exclusive world of Buffalo poetics, and the poetics people themselves didn't show.

In retrospect, and thinking about Hadbawnik's track, that was a failed project from before it began, because someone who's not, in an almost ontological sense, a member of a community, isn't going to be able to speak into it. What he's done differently, in multiple places and over a long while, has been to establish and maintain a position for work he likes, without first kowtowing to a dominant paradigm. He may have succeeded at this better than I did partly because he's easier to get along with than I am, and possibly tougher as well, but probably -- hopefully -- more because he was more clearly aware of the task he was taking on. Hearing his stories, it looks like he has approached poetry in terms of making a location, rather than by trying to work with whatever territory he came to. Those things are often very rigid -- as much so if there's an established clique as if there's an established absence of poetry, period. In all my years here, as well as the ones in Louisiana, I don't think it ever occurred to me to be my own center of gravity, even though, retrospectively, it's very clear that that's the direction my actions tended. Depending on where I end up jobwise, I'm hoping, now, to get a chance to go back and make some things right, thinking out of this.

At the moment, that hope is taking the form of a magazine. Hadbawnik is absolutely right that in a hundred years, no one will be reading old issues of Puerto Del Sol -- they'll be going through the scant files of some small-scale magazine that had a focused, particular, discernible vision, and that put the work ahead of the names who sent it. Big (in the very relative sense that anything is big in poetry) magazines can't afford to do this, and the ones that can afford to pursue vision have trouble being widely-known; I want to make something on one of these more restricted models. Hadbawnk's kadar koli "whenever" model of printing appeals to me a lot -- that's a magazine that's reliably interesting and reliably good, and he puts it out when he has material to make an issue like that, and time to do it right. My aesthetic is a good bit "prettier" than his, though, and if I don't accomplish anything else in my life, I'd like to make a stand for beauty in poetry. Innovation and cleverness both coming second, although those are decidedly good things -- they're still not my polaris, and I haven't personally run across anything really pushing that as its principle. Interesting, experimental, brilliant -- those words get a lot of mileage, but not beautiful, and that's the hole my prosodic soul has been keening over for years now.

I definitely know enough people who write work I love to be able to compile such a thing, and it would probably remain more on the model of editor-requesting than getting work over the regular transom, not because I have any opposition to that at all. I used to rail at Kevin at Pleiades because there would always be some really good stuff come in through our regular submissions, which I read, that would be obviously better than many of the pieces by big names we'd be printing. But if you're operating on a small scale, you're just not likely to get enough material to get good material. Fund it out of my own pocket, so I don't have to be beholden to a dean's office about circulation or reliably regular appearance (and this is another place Hadbawnik and I differ; he's far less skeptical about institutional funding than I am). Bring it out on the dove|tail imprint, which has its preexisting tiny presence in the world; possibly use that as grounds for finding dove|tail chapbookists, as well as or instead of doing them via a reading series. I did love designing books and I want to keep that up. Send it to the contributors, to the archive here, and to other poets and poetry people who'd be likely to read it. Decline to worry about numbers.

If I land somewhere with a literary magazine, I can see this being a problem, if the school saw my duties to Unnamed Mag as conflicting with duties to Their Preexisting Mag. The chances are fairly small that I'll even get on somewhere with a literary magazine, and if I did, I think I'd just talk to the other editors, writing faculty, etc., and see what they thought. Ideally, Unnamed Mag could be my project where I got out my wish-fulfillment, leaving me free to edit Preexisting Mag in better accordance with whatever it already did -- but that's getting very far into a future in ways it can't be predicted. I also have no name yet, hence the placeholding tags here. I want something that suggests sharpness, even potential violence, and beauty, and was thinking about something to do with dragonflies, although they're kind of coopted by cute girl clothes and accessories. Quite a number of which I own. Maybe something with fountain pens or their manufacture. I like verb phrases, too -- what I love about Spicer's titles is how often they're (incredibly peculiar) statements, and I thought of needle has an eye but a.) boring; "has" isn't much of a verb and b.) immediately open to all those stupid eye/I puns that haven't been interesting in decades but that continue to make their ways to conference panel titles. But something sharp, and beautiful, and acting. Watch for it.

Pearls

2010-08-14T08:28:00.000-05:00

3.) Phlebas = Prufrock.

That doesn't go in this paper, I don't think.

Dead Men

2010-08-10T11:13:00.001-05:00

1.) A time in illos tempos which characterizes poesis.

2.) What did Eliot even mean by "feeling"?

Now and in Buffalo

2010-08-08T19:31:00.005-05:00

This quickly, I think I figured out the main bones of my Eliot problem. That mess I wrote the other day did, somehow, help me sort things out -- so never let someone tell you any piece of writing is worthless, even the incoherent pieces. Although English teachers are still allowed to fail you if you try to turn those in as papers.

But here are the things I want to talk about with Eliot: Eliot as a communitarian of a very specific sort, particularly in Four Quartets; his work's complicated relationship to history, which itself has subtypes of its use of literary tradition and its presentation of historical and mytho-historical events; his turn to drama, which corresponds timewise with his conversion to Anglicanism; his spiritual heterodoxy, which persists in the poetry long after said conversion. Tangentially, I have a thing about his work's treatment of femininity, hinging on a shift I perceive in Ash-Wednesday, which ties into history and community both as it engages motherhood -- inheritance & relationality. Which is all fine, but 1.) amorphous, 2.) messy on top of that, threatening to spill out of any boundaries I might try to draw around it because it doesn't exactly have a clear center, 3.) nothing seemed to give me a reason to articulate Eliot with Jean-Luc Nancy's theories of community, which I really want to do. Intuitively, it seemed a fit, but I hadn't figured out how I came to that at all, especially since late Eliot in the prose is so pro-Anglican, which seem not to be the kind of community Nancy is after at all.

The point through which I can pass all this, and which can give me a limiting principle to keep the work chapter-shaped rather than ungainly-book-shaped is the one that's also my strength, prosody. I think Eliot's essays & lectures aren't nearly as chauvinist as they've sometimes been taken to be, but besides and beyond that entirely, I think we can privilege the testimony of the poetry, and the poetry emphatically and consistently testifies to just what I want to show, namely, that Eliot -- as a corpus of work, whether this is true of Eliot the person or not -- works toward a communitarian ideal that parallels Nancy's, albeit with certain circumscriptions. Which I don't necessarily think Nancy precludes. The poetry, in its many levels of polyvocality -- the clearly different speakers in The Waste-Land, the shifts between entirely serious visionary revelation and bebop riffing in Ash-Wednesday, the shifts between modernist-imagist practice and abstract philosophy in Four Quartets, etc. -- presents a model of community held in difference, where the relations among the diverse elements is what constitutes it. When Eliot talks about "unity" in art, this is, again and again, what he means, specifically not the kind of "unity" that demands erasure of its individual members' characters to some subsuming idea/form, thus specifically anti-fascist. Moreover, the work communicates this to its reader across the gap between text and subject, one of the most intimate but at the same time most radically incommensurable interfaces across which ideas might be pressed. The text can't explicate itself the way its author could; its existence as a text precludes its author's absence; etc. So his poetry is communitarian in its content, in its prosody, and at the level of ontology, in how it comes to be in being read.

Something like that, anyway. After this, Eliot's prose starts to look very different, too -- every time he starts railing about the need for unifying principles (standard education, Christianity) for culture, he's talking about a unifying structure specifically for the purpose of giving difference a safe place to come into being, not a cultural regime that would obliterate individuality. He actually makes many, many statements to this exact effect in his prose, but they've been passed over in criticism in favor of emphasizing just the parts where he calls for unifying cultural structures as such. Moreover, there's an important formal problem the Eliot-as-fascist team has overlooked: traditional argumentative prose as Eliot wrote whenever he did write in prose cannot sustain heteronomy. This is the tyranny of the thesis that the rhet comp people are on about, although I think our freshmen as a rule are best served by bending their necks to its yoke. The requirements of stating a claim and consistently supporting it through evidence and logic, though, foreclose polyvocality -- they prevent ideas coming into a piece in a communitarian fashion, instead subjecting them to the hierarchical ordering and structural deformation necessary to fit them into the essay. Poetry, and especially Eliot's poetry, however, is far more capacious, and more flexible, and therefore better suited to suggesting how a capacious, flexible, but bounded (i.e., formalized; finite; real) community would act. Eliot's ideas come across as bossy in the essays & lectures because the form can't help but boss. It commands its own content and commands readers/auditors, where, in the poetry, we can encounter one another in more mobile & more numinous ways.

Among the benefits to coming at the project from this angle, it will let me deal synoptically with his career without having to go into tremendous detail on every individual work, since I can cover a lot of ground taking examples that illustrate recurring patterns. Another nice point is that it will let me discuss the idea of the Eliotic poet as a medium, picking up and giving added weight to some previous criticism & letting me draw nice parallels between him and Spicer. Queerness in Eliot, which comes through especially in his identification with mutilated female bodies, same thing. I suspect all that will let me do some more important thing with the changing trope of maternality I wanted to talk about in the first place, and it definitely lets me do plenty with his career-long interest in the Metaphysicals. But it brings all these things back to a unifying (ha) guiding principle, rather than relying on a messy transitive logic, which was getting to seem like all I had.

I have to kick out a fairly short piece of this for a conference paper immediately, and then I plan to be on Crane research & writing for a while -- which is fine with me, because once I have an idea, I think it's fine, in the sense of all right and in the sense of actively good, to let it marinate for a while before I come back to it. A couple more days on this, then, to get the ten pages together, and then the conference itself in September, and otherwise I'll be on Crane for the foreseeable future.

It's more about teaching yourself to write a book than it is about writing one.

2010-08-04T18:06:00.004-05:00

I haven't forgotten this place; my failure to post much this entire summer has more to do with occupation than anything else: writing too many things in other arenas to have much energy left for here. Wrote my paper-cum-chapter on Spicer, which currently runs to an impossible 77 pages. I don't have any idea how I could possibly have written that much; it might be glossolaliac babbling all through the middle, for all I know. (It isn't.) I wanted to write up here what it ended up doing, which was a lot of things I thought were fairly cool, but 1.) that was a lot and I don't know how to boil it down meaningfully, and 2.) I have a sense of being in a holding pattern with the project, now. I think I need someone to read it and talk to me about it to say any more myself. My advisor has it, but it'll be a while before he can get to it, especially as long as it is; a fellow poeticist here who's also into Spicer asked to read it, and is partway through it, but now moving to a new apartment, so that will probably be a bit, and he may not get back to it; the guy who initially got me into Spicer also said he'd read it, but I doubt very much he will, for a few different reasons. In the meantime -- it's not quite that I feel written out (how not, I can't guess, because I sure wrote a ridiculous amount), but the occasion to write more seems not to be at hand.

I'm this week at work on Eliot, chasing down a kooky idea I came up with to argue that his poetry can be usefully read if one treats him as a contemporary of the Metaphysicals. He's interested in them throughout his career; his conversion is to George Herbert and John Donne's Anglican church; he has this very peculiar sense of time where history is fairly active within the present, not just backgrounding it, and where the present goes back to alter history (thinking of the statement in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" about a new work reconfiguring the relationships among all its predecessors, for example). I heard a very meandering, centerless paper by a young type at the Brussels conference on Eliot as a "metaphysical" poet, lowercase m, that didn't itself seem to have a clear sense of what it even meant by the term, but it got me thinking, what might be unearthed if we considered Eliot as a Metaphysical poet, capital M? There are plenty of difficulties with doing this in the very essays and lectures where Eliot explores his regard for and interest in these poets, because of course he does talk about them as antecedents, since, well, they are, rather than as contemporaries -- but again and again, he talks about their poetics in exactly the terms of his own work. And his poetry certainly offers this disturbed kind of a past that's always erupting into the present, through its whole arc, so I want to go ahead and privilege the evidence of the poetry ahead of the empirical fact of Donne, Herbert, et al., having died centuries before Tom was born. Seemed like a fun conference paper, anyway, and I'll be giving it at the T. S. Eliot Society's meeting in St. Louis next month.

I'm starting to think, though, that I want to reframe my diss chapter around this notion; it appeals to me; it gives me a chance to engage some older poetry that I love, too, which most my scholarship doesn't handle; it's probably got no broader appeal than my previous approach (i.e., no one but other Eliot scholars will ever care), but it's maybe a little less conservative/more fun, at least. Lots of problems present themselves immediately though -- for the sake of the diss, I don't want to lose the treatment of Eliot's turn to drama or the entry to community I want to say it signals in his thinking. That's what makes regarding him as a Metaphysical interesting, I think, at least at this early stage of building the piece -- it puts one of the core figures of 20th-century aesthetic innovation in the middle of a bunch of 17th-century innovators. Speaking here primarily to Donne and Herbert, who seem to constitute the first and last of Eliot's confreres out of the whole group of them. That itself is a peculiar engagement of community, since these are people who radically cannot speak to one another, being on opposite sides of the grave, which ties to some interesting models of community as necessarily heteronymous and non-authoritarian. I want to draw parallels between Eliotic polyvocality and a wish I'm going to claim he has for a community of intellectuals from various fields, which, again, I plan to claim, underlies the passages in Four Quartets that seem more philosophical or diaristic or whatever than poetic.

All this sounds more or less fine, I guess, but my original plan was to put a lot of weight on his conversion to Anglicanism as the key manifestation for a wish for community. His turning to poetic drama right around that same time, I've taken as an embodiment of this drive. As clever a link to dead poets as his conversion offers, though, I'm not sure it's going to show him as communal in quite the way I want (that is, the way I think the poems are communal). Can you ever willingly join a community for the sake of engaging across difference? Doesn't that sort of act tend more toward what Jean-Luc Nancy specifies as communion, the situation of people brought together under some subsuming quality, rather than being primarily constituted by difference in contact? I think the answer for now is to write the conference paper and see what I end up with as far as analyses and then figure out how to make a chapter happen.

The other serious problem is that this is sounding more like a book on Eliot than a dissertation chapter. Most the seminar papers I wrote while I was in classes, looking back, had that form, which is no doubt a lot of why some of them were such bears to write. I'm never stuck for ideas, but I run into brutal levels of blockedness because I'm always trying to cover 300 pages of potential work in 25 pages of graduate student writing. I'm so much more interested in and persuaded by writing that treats poets synoptically, though -- attending to the full arcs of their careers, their work in multiple genres, etc., and making its claims out of all that. Got to do that with my Spicer chapter and I am really, really happy with that aspect of it. There's much more material that could potentially come into play with Eliot, though, and I'm not sure I can cover it in the shape of a single chapter, even a very long one. I don't mind writing the pages, except for the part that no one will probably ever read them because the pieces they're in are so long, and that's a bummer, but not a reason to keep from writing a thing the way it needs to be written. I do, however, have time management pressing in around me: this fall, I need to turn out a couple more chapters and do the job-search writing/research. I need to graduate this spring more than I need to write amazing things, or even aesthetically proper things. Heading toward a project that long on Eliot would be suicide as far as those timetables go.

My current order of operations has me doing up this short piece on Eliot and then putting him aside for the most part while I go through quite a bit of reading on Crane and pump that chapter out. For that one, as for H.D., I'm not worried about length or overextending myself writingwise, because I think The Bridge is better read as its own thing than as a part of his career. Feel the same about Trilogy, which I only realized this summer while rewriting parts of that chapter. So those are more controllable projects, even if, with Crane, at least, I have a pile of books and articles to get through that's currently about as high as my knee. Several uninteresting-looking but necessary books on Crane and a couple Kierkegaard volumes I need to go through to make the case there that I want to make. The writing there should be relatively straightforward, though. And then I'll be face-up with this Eliot project, and may still be undecided as to how to take it in hand.

And at the moment my brain feels a little glazed. Overcaffeinated, oversugared, and several hundred pages to go before I write a draft of this paper if I want to do it right -- which I do. Ben Lockerd is chairing the thing I'm on and has offered to give some serious feedback, which would be especially useful to me because I think we read Eliot in some similar ways. I've liked everything I've heard or read by him, anyway.

Partly want to sign off study for the evening and spend it stabbing pixellated zombies & ice demons or watching cartoons, but I think I'll see if I can go through Eliot's late treatise on Herbert instead. Flipping through, he appears to write about "The Collar" and gosh but I love that poem.

None as sweet

2010-08-03T09:47:00.003-05:00

Violets are purple, daffodils yellow --

Of course I do. Always will. Private words addressed to you in public, but there they are.

Wishing you love & rays that get through the clouds when they appear.

Stately Homes For the Lords

2010-07-04T21:42:00.000-05:00

Heavenly brats. It's Independence Day, in spades.

I'll tell you this, though: there are no pawns left in my heart.

The heads of a town like this have minimal contact with the aether.

2010-07-01T21:44:00.000-05:00

Two loves I had,
One rang a bell
Connected on both sides with hell

And the other appeared but disappeared, and he’s someone I doubt I’ll ever stop missing because he was kind to me in ways no one else ever has been, and he was the best reader I ever had. But he is gone. The first isn’t a love, even, but the hell part is accurate. There’s that. And we’ll see what comes of him showing himself all of a sudden, but probably nothing along the lines of comfort or cause for joy. I think I might try to banish myself.

I backed out of performing the friend’s wedding I was supposed to perform at the end of July, and since I started that story here, I suppose I should finish it as it’s finishing. Not a good thing to do, at all. The problem, though -- there were a few, I guess. The most recent was that she’d written me to tell me I needed to book a room for the Friday night before the wedding, although she had one for me for the Saturday after, and that the option was a Hilton for $111 a night. In terms of rooms at a Hilton, this is fine, but in terms of me trying to skate through the summer without a job so I can write, this is not fine. I’m promising myself things at the moment like, I won’t get my hair trimmed until fall loans. I think she’d been thinking of this as like me being a bridesmaid, where you just kind of sign up to pay for the dress and the travel and so on, where I’d been thinking of it as a job I could be getting paid for plus travel expenses, which I was going to do for free for friends. Once I talked to myself and said, ok, maybe if that was my idea I should have done more to make it clear to her and I have kind of put myself in this position, I said, ok, if I’m going to do this I have to pay for the room somehow. . . but, I’ll tell you, what my reaction there told me -- which was unhappiness, trepidation, and outright fear of how it was going to be -- was that whatever the logistics of travel, I couldn’t go through with this, as terrible as it would be to bail.

What ran me off was that initially, the couple had had a reading from a pro-gay marriage decision in their ceremony, a beautiful passage that went on about why marriage is such a good thing and then ended by saying this is exactly why we can’t deny it to anyone. The bride’s father asked her to remove it -- and she did. I was shocked, I was deeply disappointed, and I was immediately scared, because that signaled to me very clearly that the kind of person I am would not be received well at this scene at all. I buy Michael Warner’s point that pushing for gay marriage nullifies a lot of the transformative potential of queerness, but I still think that gay people who want to be normative should be able to do so, and I feel extremely, extremely strongly about this. I’m pretty sure I get angrier about gay rights issues than most, maybe all, the gay people I actually know, for whatever reason. So, that, right off, bothers me and I feel like I’d be acquiescing to the situation in performing the ceremony.

Oh, it bears mentioning here that the bride and groom had come to what they thought was a good compromise, where they were going to wear pins that signified their support for gay marriage. They’re not upset about this at all; it’s not a situation where I envision them brimming with hostility while the bride’s father gloats about his victory -- definitely nothing like that. As far as the family is concerned, according to the bride, and I have no reason to doubt her, they’re fine. But I was decidedly not fine with it. Beyond the political issue itself, the notion that a father has any place telling his adult daughter what can and can’t, or even should and shouldn’t, be in her wedding freaks me out, angers me, frightens me. That's not even a world I live in. Again, the bride felt like this was a good compromise and she was glad they were able to talk it out civilly; I don't think she felt like there was anything wrong with her father making the request; this isn’t about me not wanting to get in the middle of intra-family conflict, but about me having a conflict with the family's acts, which is much stickier territory as far as whether I had any right to do what I did. That is an interaction that goes completely against my notions about parents and children and independent being and respect, though; it’s not a thing I would even have imagined happening in this century, involving anyone I thought of as an intelligent person. The bride and her fiancé are definitely extremely intelligent people, so I said, well. . . I have to guess they have very different values about all this than I do.

Does this matter to me? Should it? I can answer the first and say that yes, it does. I used to read tarot for pay and probably still would, but I refused to read for certain people and I didn’t take their money if they made me uncomfortable. Otherwise, I don’t do any spiritual thing for money, and won’t, because it would obligate me in ways that I don’t want to be obligated. This would not be showing up and carrying a bouquet and dancing at the reception for me, like it would be if I were a bridesmaid; it would be on my soul, and just based on the values conflict, I felt more and more strongly that I did not want that.

The event itself was sounding -- pretty awful for me, honestly. The bride herself has been the tensest, least happy bride-to-be I’ve ever known. I don’t really understand what’s been going on there, because I’ve never known anyone to be quite like this, but I don’t picture her suddenly relaxing on the weekend itself, and she and her fiancé would be too busy to talk to me anyway. Outside them, there are going to be a lot of family members -- a hell of a lot of family members on one side -- who don’t at all sound like people I could talk to without upsetting them, or at best being extremely tense myself in order to avoid saying anything awful. Then the couple’s friends, and he went to Harvard and she went to Mount Holyoke; the things I’ve heard again and again describe these people as probably very nice, young (quite a bit younger than me), energetic, successful people. All or nearly all of them are married or getting there. It sounds terrible, but with the positions I’m in right now, emotionally, professionally, financially, etc., just trying to talk to people like that brings my self-loathing to full, violent force. This is the chip on my own shoulder; it probably shouldn’t be there, but it is and in spades right now and I have to work with it for the time being. Like the hotel thing, I could probably handle not being able to speak as myself for a couple days -- worse than trying to come up with $111 plus tax I don’t really have, but probably possible at a stretch, and I can be, er, stretchy -- if that were all it were, but there were just too many things piling up, very red flags that said I’d end up in a state of collapse, and I can't have that any more. I’ve been too collapsed for too long, and the dissertation has to get done within the next year. I tried to sacrifice myself and still be able to write, and that turned out not to be possible, so if I want to get out of here and make anything of my mentally debilitating and very expensive education, I have to fend off those destabilizing situations, even when there’s quite a cost attached to doing so.

A few weeks ago, the bride had told me she wanted to sit down with me and go over exactly what I was going to say. This sort of pissed me off, first because at the time her wedding was two months away and I had stacks of things to do between then and, well, then, and second because it seemed like a mean and slightly nutty request. Did she really think I was such a loose cannon that I would say something horrendous or offend her relatives? In the meantime, though, I thought. . . wait. That may be it exactly, which is suddenly a genuinely terrifying prospect. I don’t know these people, and -- when the bit about removing the pro-gay-marriage reading came down, I said, all right, yes, we are operating on profoundly different paradigms, politically, familially, I don’t know what else. And I am walking into a vipers’ nest of potential fuckups that would mar this wedding that’s been such a source of disquiet already, and rebound on me spiritually, at the very least, if not in some more immediate fashion.

And I said -- no. I can’t do this. I’m not in any kind of shape to try to navigate my own extreme insecurities, my perennially short cash supply, and to deal with those more ordinary problems as the officiant in a wedding that’s been written over before it’s even begun with conflicts that seriously matter to me, deeper than my bones, where I am on the opposite side from the central parties.

The bride says this has ended our friendship, and. . . I’m so short on people these days, and so expect them to eventually be done with me, that it just seems like the way things go for me. There's nothing to fight, or maybe nothing to fight with, or -- I don't even know. It may be that I am as thoroughly unlikable, as selfish, as I get accused of being. I don’t think I’m in any shape right now to tell.

As a few years ago, I wish I could become a function over language, a cipher. I would produce texts (you see how well I do here? if only you knew what it’s like in the parts of me that aren’t occupied with sentencemaking! ha!) & there would be nothing else to me. So I suppose I can revise my critique of therapy from my last post. They shouldn’t make people like me into different people: they should destroy us as people entirely and leave only the useful programmy bits. We don’t serve for anything else but to cause trouble and suffer it.

fitter happier

2010-06-22T13:39:00.001-05:00

Although I want to write up all the bits here about Brussels and London, which were both very good to me, especially London, the bit since my return hasn't promoted cheerful discourse and I want to be able to do those things justice.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot that feels like it belongs here is that the whole therapy industry is bullshit, and not at all in the way that assholes who themselves probably need therapy they'll never go in for think it's bullshit, or the way lunatics like Tom Cruise do. I'm not sure the basic technique of making a space for a person to figure out who s/he is, of inquiring into very difficult and upsetting material in a setting that protects one's daily life from the potential destabilizing effects of that kind of archaeology, really ends up helping. It works -- that's not what I'm saying at all. I am a huge, 110% believer in the efficacy of the talking cure. I'm very fortunate to be able to have had counseling for free through UB for quite a while, and every single time I go in, I feel like I've figured something out. I am without doubt better off in more ways than I have fingers and toes to count as a result.

But getting the much sharper picture of the etiology of one's sadness and one's habits, and even the much more effective tools one builds from that that permit one to go out and do things and respond to opportunities in new ways and respond to bumps in the road in new ways only does so much. All the increased understanding and concomitant confidence therapy could offer won't necessarily make one any better a fit into things. You can say, I have these peculiar characteristics, and they're perfectly reasonable ones to have, and they're even actually valuable, and here are ways I can make them work for me and kick a lot of ass along the way. It only goes so far, though, and ultimately, the vast majority of the population isn't going to see you that way, and couldn't even really be expected to because they won't have the background in reevaluating these things. You still have to work with those people, you still have to try to connect with them for friendships and whatever else we might be able to get from one another. And if you are very peculiar, that's often -- more often than not -- going to fail.

I'm not saying this lightly. I think we'd be better off if, instead of therapy to get us to understand ourselves better and like ourselves better and maximize our potential, we had a system that would destroy what was there and construct an artificial, banal personality in its place with wishes and capabilities well within normal tolerances. It would be a mercy killing. The species can either evolve creative geniuses who are easier to deal with, or it can quit evolving, and in either case, the end would be less pain going out into the universe.

For the Hand of the Dead Letter Officer

2010-05-15T02:31:00.000-05:00

Sean, you were so right about me in London.

xo,

Bloomsbury Transplant

What Was Left In Our Backyard

2010-04-25T22:54:00.005-05:00

"bees kissing rose petals
cufflinks from a funeral

[multiple blank lines to indicate dramatic pause]

and your loaded gun."

^ This is my new shorthand for terrible poetry.

If they'd been shooting the bees off the rose petals, and drunk, that might at least have made a decent scene for a story, if still not much of a poem. "I'll tell you what I'm doing, I'm shooting these goddamned bees off the goddamned roses. Is what I'm doing." BLAM!! "Fuck me, what the fuck does it look like. Goddamned bees."

BLAM!!

Yet I shall try the last --

2010-04-20T00:50:00.000-05:00

Incredible things that will happen on my London trip:

* Going to see Mahler's 2nd at the London Philharmonic, which will be my first time even at a symphony and which is apparently an amazing piece
* Hopefully going to dress up kind of as Paddington Bear (raincoat, floppy hat, bag marked PERU, anyway) and get my picture taken at Paddington station
* The major London knitting group says they'll make sure they meet "somewhere really Londonny" for me while I'm there
* Finches playing electric guitars
* Things blooming at Kew Gardens, and I don't even know what, nor do I care, because any time of year that's guaranteed to be a place I can spend hours and hours
* The photodocumented travels of Batman Duck (trust me on this one)
* Goddamn MACBETH is playing at the friggin GLOBE!!!!!!!!!!

This last, I just found out this afternoon, and tickets are going fast but they're affordable -- as low as 5 pounds. I think I'll buy a couple and hope to find someone there to go with me, because holy Jesus crack smoking what in hell bwaaaahhhhhhh!!! Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare play -- I'm absolutely convinced it has the best monologues of any of them, and the coolest characters. However, as is more often the case than it should be, my bank account is overdrawn and I'm waiting for my tax refund to deposit, so I hope like hell there are a couple tickets still available when it finally posts. If anyone would like to PayPal me a short-term Shakespeare loan, you just let me know. (Don't judge me. You'd make some tacky pleas, too, if you felt about Macbeth the way I feel about Macbeth.)

Taxes are bizarre this year -- the logistics of them, anyway. NY state and TurboTax claim I can efile my state taxes for free; however, when I went through the site, it ended up asking to charge me $30.95. Judging by the message boards, this happened to a ton of people. I said, screw that, I'll go do them by myself, but NY state doesn't have its own efile system, and filling out the forms by hand, I came up with a refund of about $40, where TurboTax got me one of $866. Quite a difference -- fortunately, if you're getting money back, no one penalizes you for being late, so I may give it a few more days to see whether they're going to fix their code and let free filers actually file for free, but if not, I think I'd better go through and fork over their undeserved $30 just to get the far more massive refund. The federal one went through fine, anyway, so that should be coming to me any day now. Hope like crazy it makes it in time for FRIGGIN HOLY CRAP MACBETH AT THE GLOBE WHILE I AM IN LONDON THIS IS SOME INSANE SHIT MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! tickets.

Words' Worth

2010-04-14T15:13:00.003-05:00

Been thinking lately what my dream job would be -- not that it exists or that I have much chance of getting it, but if all the chances are as slim as they sound like they are, one might as well daydream about things worth daydreaming about. Walking through the book fair this past weekend, I thought, you know what I really want to do is to head up an institute for aesthetics. UB has its Humanities Institute, of which my advisor is the current director, and I'd envision something similar in structure, with a slightly different angle of interest. Cross-disciplinary, bringing together people and ideas from English, comparative literature, maybe foreign language depts, music, visual arts, new media, philosophy, anthropology, etc., to promote inquiry into and rigorous practice of beauty, however it might be defined. Oh, add ecology/green studies to that list, too, and identity studies in whatever incarnations a university might support them -- gender studies, disability studies, critical race studies and postcolonial theory, etc. Even math and the sciences, in fact, could have contributions to make, depending on what people in those depts at my university were doing. Run conferences & smaler colloquia, bring in exhibits and speakers, support faculty and graduate research and performance, etc. etc. etc.

This is only going to happen at an R1 university, or a smaller school with lots of money and trust to hand over to its faculty. Or at least to me, and I would need lots of money, for one thing, because I'd have to have a grad student to keep track of the errandy things since my head up in its clouds is no damn good at that. Used to be; not any more. It would be such an awfully cool thing to spearhead, though, and my particular set of interests and skills equips me to draw a lot of cords together under that rubric.

I've backed off of thinking things like this for a while, but lately, I'm starting to feel like it's better to dream big and be a little disappointed than not even to try for projects that one's heart can get all the way into. Maybe it's just because we finally have a few things blooming around here, in which case around October I'll go back to where my biggest dream is having an office with a phone. A basement office, in fact -- the last couple years, I've wished only to be the Fox Mulder of an English department. My spirits are rising just now, though, with the sap filling out trees' trepiditious new leaves and daffodils' bright petals.

By the Mountains We Gather: With Smarm, But With Joy As Well

2010-04-12T05:03:00.006-05:00

Is two hours' difference for one hectic weekend enough to justify jet lag? Don't think so, but here I am, having woken up at a time when I'm generally happier to be going to sleep. Fell asleep -- and really asleep, not a nap; I was out for a couple hours, at least -- right at my laptop last night. Upper back is less than delighted with me for that one.

So I've returned from AWP highly ambivalent, which is a far better state than the ones in which it's generally left me. On the one hand, there's the desperate-to-get-into-print scene, which I avoided for the most part this year, since now I have the book, and whatever other things might happen to me (and things do have ways of happening to me), that isn't going away. I did have several ~~aggressive~~ very assertive novelists walk up and just start talking to me out of nowhere, leading quickly into, "yeah, I have this manuscript I've been showing around," then a pitch rattling off the three novelists they most resemble (Mary Gaitskill and Chuck Palahniuk, both? Uh -- really?) and some sort of suggestion that I might be interested, too. I tell them the only paragraphs I read are theory, then there's a thing where they express probably trumped-up awe at people who do PhD's, then a conversational trip over a curb when I clarify that it's a critical PhD and not a creative one and they've already used up their supposed awe. . . and then I extricate myself, claiming -- a meeting, a panel, a lunch date, a weak bladder. I could do without those exchanges. And as a side note, by the time I was headed home yesterday morning, I'd half-decided to start saying outright, "I'm finishing a PhD -- like, a real one, not a creative one." Creative PhD's. Eeesh. Don't even get me started.

Not even on another hand but perhaps on that same hand's stiff, prematurely arthritic fingers is the please-have-me-read scene, and that one, I'm in, like it or not. (I do not like it.) My press is after me, you should do more readings, are you doing readings?, etc., but, realistically -- I'm a graduate student in the latter stages of a fairly heady dissertation. First, this means that my time and energy for poetry-promotion are limited, even if I didn't find it a personally distasteful and ethically questionable thing to have to do. Actually, if my energy, especially, weren't so short, I'd probably have more fun with it and therefore do more of it. But anyway -- more, my current position means that no one gets anything for having me at their school but having me at their school. I don't have any favors to trade, and in a world where there are dozens to hundreds of poets, lots of them even good poets, angling for every spot in every reading series, running a reading series of one's own, administering a summer program, editing a major magazine, etc., offer huge advantages.

The woman at my press asked if I did readings around Buffalo, and I forget how, but implied that she meant ones where a bookstore would sell books for me. There's a hellaciously active scene here, of course, but it's not a scene driven by sales or the possibility of sales. Kind of allergic to sales, in fact; a lot of things in people's attics, things where you've got two people reading non-syntactical sequences of words at each other simultaneously, things where people are inventing/ad-libbing/improvising a performance which will never be repeated (and, let's admit it, in some cases that's a good thing for everyone) -- not only is my far more conventional style of performance tough to home with all that going on, but it's socially uncool to show up with my book and be all, "hey, doggs, give me your booze money for my poems." In a scene like this, it's very easy to come off that way. Especially since I rarely go to performances, too (because a lot of them just don't interest me, even in the cases where I support the kind of work theoretically -- call me a counterrevolutionary, but I want poetry rooted in beauty and I've lost all ability to pretend otherwise). It becomes, "hey, doggs, I know you haven't even seen me in months and you all have your free DIY books and unrecordable/unprintable free-from-all-systems-of-exchange art thing going, but here I am all of a sudden and you should definitely give me your booze money for my poems in their shiny book published by a major press etc. etc. etc." Put that back in contact with the limited energy, and, no, I don't, in fact, do a lot of readings locally. Ho friggin hum.

As for things at a greater distance -- that's where AWP reliably brings me down. Every year, everyone is so nice and so enthusiastic and so really sounding like they're serious about bringing me to their school. "That'd be great, yeah! Would you mind talking to some classes while you're there, too? Oh, awesome, perfect, we'd love that." I follow up on these conversations, and nothing ever materializes. They dodge everything that might lead toward putting anything into action, and that's gotten old. I'd honestly be happier if people would just come out and say that they like me and/or my work but their programs aren't going to fund someone who's not better-established; at least if we could come out and say that, I could stop barking up some of these trees. But, you know -- young poet (young in poetry terms, if not in dating-life terms), one book out, no favors to trade at the moment -- even if these people do love my work, and who knows whether they do or not, it's a long shot. I'm cheap, but you can only put so many events on each semester's calendar, and a Cole Swenson or a David Baker or a Doug Powell are going to beat me out until I've got professorial, and ideally editorial, legs.

Oh, and speaking of those possibilities, I saw a panel yesterday where a guy teaching at a small college in the hinterlands of Maine said they got 454 applications for one American lit job this year. Good my lord. Jobs in English depts have never been rich pickings, but it's really crashed in the last couple years and nothing's expected to begin recovering for a couple more. Me and my $150k in student debt have some great timing.

This year, though, unlike most of them, I came back with some great writer moments that mitigate the frustrating ones and then some. I met a guy named Pablo D'Stair who runs a press called Brown Paper Publishing, focused on "progressive" fiction. Progressive might be the new innovative; I'm not sure. I have no fiction, progressive or regressive, to offer, but the editor also does a publication called Predicate in which he prints extended dialogues with writers at a pretty high level. Of course this is right up my street, and while I'm all, oh blah blah blah! How cool! More people should be doing things like this! -- he asked if I wanted to be in the next one. Er. Yes! You really want to let me get up on that soapbox and you want to give me a chance to get it read by piles of people who've never even heard of me? Really? Is this what Santa Claus does in the off season? It's even a format in which I have a preexisting interest, dating back to my work on the Dickinson journal, when we published the dialogue between Brenda Hillman and Katie Peterson -- two more wonderful poets you should be reading. So that sounds like quite a win.

Met the guy who runs Illinois Fictioneer's press, Press 53, and a couple of his other authors, all of whom seem like thoroughly great people, and one of whom, a fiction writer named Mary Akers, lives in Lockport. For those of you who aren't local, that's one of our suburbs! It sounds like her collection of stories (Women Up On Blocks, with a cover photo I immediately loved) and my poems might have a bit in common, too, and she knows a third woman writer who if I remember teaches at Buff State -- we may try to get a reading going locally. Cross-genre feminist whatsit. That would probably help me find readers outside the Buffalo poetry scene, actually, because while my poetry is very poemy, at the level of content, it's relatively accessible if people can figure out what I'm doing in the first place, and a setting like that would let me lay some of that work down for people who might be readers, if not usually readers of poetry.

The best, though, I've saved for last. Saturday, when everyone was trying to unload books so they wouldn't have to take them home, a woman came up to me at the book fair and said, "You have such a wonderful energy, I have to stop you and talk to you!" I looked down at her name tag: Annie Finch. Annie Finch! I love her stuff! She was hawking copies of her new book, Among the Goddesses, which is described on its back cover as "an epic in seven dreams," a phrase I coveted on reading it. Forget writing the book, I'd be happy just to have come up with that phrase. Anyway, she's also the co-editor of An Exaltation of Forms, a collection of essays on poetic forms by contemporary poets I bought for a workshop at UNO and to which I've returned tons of times since, for teaching ideas and writing stuff, too. She found out I have a book out, and we did a book swap, mine for her new one, which was, to me, starter-outer poet, awesome and a little incredible. She's delightful in person, too. I read most of Among the Goddesses that afternoon and I can recommend it. Really interesting -- it's two versions of itself, a fairly poemy and very beautiful long poem and an operatic libretto, woven together, in each of which a central female character encounters a series of goddesses -- a ten-year-old bereaved Isis, a backpacking Diana, Astarte as a carved pillar of stone -- and. . . loses them, or transcends them, or takes them on. Haven't yet decided what I think is happening at the narrative. It has, as I'd expect, great voice and great lines and this very interesting thing going on formally. So anyway. Annie Finch has a cool new book and there's a slight chance she might read mine. She'd like it, if she did, I think.

Other minor things; a couple mags I like but that have been too straightforward for my work have switched poetry editors, and I plan to send to them; had some admittedly amazing Belgian beer at a restaurant with a Belgian (i.e., very meaty) menu; had a tasty calzone and some great gelato delivered to my hotel room my last night in town; lost one out of a pair of glass plugs with flowers on them that I can't afford to replace at the moment; talked to a few people about openings their universities may have next year. I'll call AWP 2010 a success -- an expensive success, as is always the case, but a success, and with 450-some people applying to jobs that aren't even top jobs, I'm glad I didn't give it a miss.

Derivation of Carriage

2010-04-10T20:34:00.000-05:00

What it means is: yes, I'm a kook.

What it means is: everything's made out of sunlight. Check the pennies.

Rabbit moon, snow moon, paralysis moon.

2010-03-31T23:56:00.002-05:00

Lesson over the last few weeks: I must never again try to churn out a dissertation chapter in the middle of a semester. I should only have two more semesters to be writing said dissertation, but for those two, it's a rule. I'm so far behind on everything else I need to do, and now migraine season is starting. Not that I would have called spring migraine season previously, but they get so much worse during wet weather. Flowers? Warmer temperatures? Easter candy, fresh asparagus, sun tea? No. As buried as I continue to be in work and the terror of not being able to do enough work, my primary association with spring this year is definitely going to be the pukin'-bad headaches I'm starting to get again.

People foaming at the mouth about the evils of socialized medicine can have some of these things and be unable to treat them. Please, those of you who have private insurance, take my migraines. Take my friend's seizure disorder. Go through another friend of mine's pregnancy. Try to raise a kid and put yourself through an MA with Graves' disease, like yet another friend of mine is doing. And deal with these things while you're teaching or building houses for underprivileged people or doing social work or some other cheerfully idealistic leftie job for next to no money without benefits.

The other night, I was thinking quite a bit about the cost of pregnancy. I have no wish at this moment to be a single mom or even a coupled-up mom, but if that were something I wanted -- forget feeding and clothing and a child, forget putting one through school and taking one to summer camps and paying doctors' bills and buying sports equipment or bug collecting kits or musical instruments or whatever else, because before we ever got to any of that, I wouldn't be able to afford a pregnancy. Prenatal care for someone in my class position would mean buying the biggest jar of folic acid I could find and crossing my fingers really hard. Unless having a home birth is cheaper, I'd have to deliver in the emergency room, attended by doctors I'd never met in my life and who'd be rushing around to however many other people came in to the ward that day. Scheduling labor inducement or C-section would be right out; postnatal care would be a weak joke: stitch me up and tell me to stay off my feet.

The capitalist's answer to this is, well, you should have gotten a better job! Capitalists: even if you don't give two shits about poetry (and you don't, as a rule), I teach your kids to write. I've stayed with it as long as I have because I do love what I do and I do believe in it -- but also because I was terribly oblivious when I started out. If I'd known ahead of time how it would wring me out psychologically and financially, I don't think I would have stuck it out, and that would be a loss. I could be more organized, but most English teachers could, and overall, I'm good at my job. And I sit up, my skull probably sparking like a thunderstorm if you could see it on MRI right now, too woozy and in too much pain to do any real writing or thinking, but also in too much pain to fall asleep. Without insurance, 27 tablets of Imitrex, the main drug used to stop migraines in their early stages, can be had at drugstore.com for $735.98. Oh, but the generic version is only $569.97! So much more reasonable, right? Appallingly, the prices have gone down -- before the generic came out last summer, it was going for around $120 per dose. This stuff doesn't even work all the time, either, and, frankly, as much as I can't afford to lose a day every week, or, like this week, have several days in a row where I'm running at about 30% -- I can't afford the substance that would have a chance of mitigating that, either.

So I'll sit in my near-dark apartment, typing with my eyes closed, feeling the fireworks in my skull, wishing I'd been better on my electrolytes and possibly held this off, wishing the weather hadn't been swinging around the last few days, wishing I weren't prone to these in the first place, wishing I could take a month off and recover from what's been a grind of a semester before coming back to finish the last bit of it. And, in spite of all that, relieved that it doesn't seem like it's going to get incapacitatingly bad -- just painful, exhausting, not the kind where I sprawl against the tiled wall in my bathroom, barely moving for hours, or the kind where I make it into bed and pass out but alternate between dread-driven nightmares and waking up to puke.

This post is almost devoid of content. I have some things I want to write up about the challenges of structuring a writing-about-literature syllabus, and other things I want to write about roller derby, and on and on -- and it's just not coming. I want to cry out in text; all these words, honestly, come down to an inarticulate bleat in the night. A yawp. Out of barbarism and against it.

Kindness of Strangers

2010-03-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

London trip's shaping up. Flight scheduled, lodgings secured, and if I can wade through the card security procedures, this morning I'll sort out a Eurostar ticket for the Brussels part of it. Apparently you have to buy these way in advance, something I didn't know and wouldn't have known were it not for a kind soul over there informing me. There seem to be a lot of kind Londoner souls, in fact; everywhere I've looked for advice, information, or possible company, people have been so friendly I can barely believe it. I have plans to go to the Royal Philharmonic one night to hear Mahler's 2nd; I have someone going to take me to some unbelievably cute tea place for Proper English Tea with Proper English Scones and Proper English Accompaniments (strawberry jam & clotted cream); loose plans for a picnic at some stone circle; and piles and piles and piles of recommendations for things to do and places to go. I found a big SnB and some other London knitting groups online, and the woman organizing the SnB told me to remind her closer to when I'm there (actually, she said "give me a shove") and she'd make sure they met "somewhere really Londony." I can see people maaaaaaaaaybe doing this for visitors in a town like Buffalo, although here you'd run into the question of whether there were enough friendly people around even to be able to find them online, but definitely not in NYC or LA or Chicago or etc. Very definitely not in New Orleans, where at least two thirds of the economy relies on tricking tourists out of their money. Probably more, post-Katrina, in fact. Nor in Kansas City, whose local culture has deep and thriving roots in show-me-state suspicion.

One non-Museum goal I have yet to sort out is lining up a poetry reading there. I have the one in Brussels, which is pretty unbelievable by itself, but it would be good for my CV, my book, and my soul to do something at a regular venue, university or cafe or whatever. I emailed the Poetry Society, who run a very culture-central cafe with lots of readings and events, and who were in charge of the worldwide collaborative mystery knitted poem a while back, which turned out to be Dylan Thomas' beautiful "In My Craft, Or Sullen Art." In fact, apparently they're embarking on another knitted poem project, according to that page! Sadly, they've not even responded to my email, which probably means they get more poets wandering through begging for reading time than they could possibly accommodate. It's a while yet before I'll be there, and they could be mulling me over, but I think it's been a couple weeks since I wrote them now, so likely that's a dead end. I have zero poetry contacts there, though, and other than the Poetry Society, what I've found online are slam- and performance-oriented series, which aren't quite my speed. I do an awesome poetry reading of regular poetry that lives on a page and does its millennia-old poetry thing, and people laugh and have collective gasps and the whole bit -- but if the audience were up for slam, they'd be nonplussed by me. Noninterested, probably. So I don't know if I'll be able to make that happen. . . but if you're in London and happen to stumble across this page before I get there in May, go tell the Poetry Society people they should have me on! Tell them I'm charming and dynamic and that in five years they'll be very glad they could claim having offered me my first reading in the UK! (Shhh. It's not lying if it's for a good cause.)

Last night, I got the idea that I should hook up with the grad groups right here and see if any of them, or some collective, would care to help organize a presentation of whatever I find over there. I am supposed to be going for research, after all. British studies people might be interested, poeticists, even American studies since the poets I'm working on are all Americans -- that would be good to give me some short-term goal toward which to bend my efforts. The work should support my dissertation, and ought to be very publishable as an article, but, for example, it only occurred to me in considering a presentation that I should think about taking pictures or getting high-quality scans of some documents. It's good to have scaffolding to hang a developing piece on.

Leaves are coming up and out around here, slowly, but they're doing it. Not much on any of the trees so far, but we do have some bulbs up and the yards are getting green again. Today is the second sunny day of my entire spring break, though, so I've not been out in it at all. And this sunny day will be spent grading at Spot. The world is stretching its joints out of winter, though, and before too long I'll be back on my porch, playing with my plants. Lilies and one rose already have new leaves coming, in fact.

Before that, though -- Eurostar. The tangled maze of international debit card transactions. Wish me luck.

This puts us more or less at the Quip Modest. Perhaps proceeding toward the Reply Churlish, albeit in cool tones.

2010-03-24T12:41:00.000-05:00

Ha.

HAH!

I may have solved the meme problem, which is to say, found a way to account for the embarrassingly obvious fact of memetics' relevance to my chapter theorizing myth. I'm on spring break and have more or less been sleeping for days -- not coming up from feeling destroyed as I was last year this time, on the 8 am schedule -- but I had worn myself out, and break was well-timed, and, contrary to appearances, I seem to have been doing some Legit Work in my days unplugged without realizing or even intending to. Hence the triumphant crowing opening this post.

Goes back to basic freshman-compy principles -- you can respond to a counterargument in one of three ways: accession, accommodation, or refutation. I mean, you can do a ton of other things, many of them much more fun, but in the normative bounds of intellectual argument, you're down to those three. Acceding won't do me much good; that's only generally useful when you're arguing policy, and you say, oh, yes, it's true this will cost skazillions of dollars and it's true lots of people won't even obey the program's dictates, but we still have to do it because X Y Z. Refutation, man, I wish; but, no, it's true, myth is memetic. Has to be. Not getting out of that. So this morning, with one kitty curled between my ankles and another kneading bread and purring like a just-tuned Cadillac under the covers next to my hip, I asked myself, can I accommodate that perspective? It may have had something to do with the kitties, but I feel like I found a tiny glint of Diogenes Teufelsdröch's Everlasting Yea. It got me out of bed, anyway.

It ends up being pretty easy. Don't think it'll add more than a sentence to the conference paper and no more than a page or two to the chapter. Essentially, I'm going to claim that while myth is certainly propagated memetically, it still has its founding action at the interface between subjectivity and the real, i.e., its roots are still firmly in the irrational. Myth as meme (oh, watch out, terrible extended metaphor coming) is like the sprigs of creekside mint that break off and happen to be lucky/well-suited enough to the environment to make new roots in the damp sand there and establish itself as a new plant. Myth can be social -- ok, I mean, it is social, dammit, as much as that cheeses me off -- but only latterly. Chicken-and-egg, it still has to come from somewhere before becoming kicked around culturally as a meme or abandoned. In this particular case, I'm going to argue that that close interface to the real is the primary component that makes a myth more suitable for memetic propagation, particularly across time and among cultures, which will actually let me emphasize my take, in the act of responding to this possible other viewpoint. Some of these things may be retained and reproduced for social purposes, but at that point -- I think I can claim -- they move out of the domain of myth.

Conveniently, this will let me make a tiny clarification on my definition of myth, which is pretty messy so far. I want to be able to rule out things like folk tales (I think; at one point, I was wanting to discuss them in some context or other, but I can't figure out how or why anymore), urban legends, and Biblical parables, because those seem to me to occur at the interfaces among individuals, or between individuals and their culture's mores/norms/laws. Most of them. Some of the really odd folk tales, I don't know what to do with, because I can't see or find explanations for their oddness -- but I'm not an anthropologist, and only the sketchiest kind of amateur researcher in anthropology, so there could be tons of work on Russian folk tales, for example, that gives brilliant explanations for why Baba Yaga's house walks on chicken legs. Not having either rational or interestingly irrational explanations for these things, I want to be able to avoid dealing with them critically. The more sensible things -- parables, Aesop's fables, boogeyman/highwayman/etc. stories that establish a threatening other outside the community, and so on -- have a more clearly pedagogical/inculturating drive. Those, I can draw outside the bounds of my analysis easily. Anyway, this small new insight about the nature of myth as, after all, social in some ways, will let me draw that boundary more confidently. Win all around. Meme and I can measure swords and part.

The inverse of pwnt:

2010-03-15T00:45:00.000-05:00

Paper remains unfinished. I've never in my life had this much trouble writing something -- and it's not even the writing, it's pure psychology. The thing is wrapped up in so much ugly history.

So no fellowship app for me; so, no time off for me next year. Should anyone like to become my wealthy benefactor, please do let me know.

Mid-chapter telegraphic transmission

2010-03-12T16:00:00.000-05:00

Can I back a policy that would permit shooting anyone who teaches in an English department who runs around claiming literature is irrelevant? And I'm not talking about kneecapping some folks -- I want their craniums (crania?) slowly leaking the vital red as they sink to the bottom of Lake Erie. I might append this to my federal bill to make it illegal to teach sonnets without teaching "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Look for that coming through the House first this session -- Pelosi is in my pocket.

Still fairly well buried under the Spicer paper; had several good days on it, and today, my energy appears to be at something of an ebb. Reading the same sentences three and four times to even figure out what to do with them, that sort of thing. Slow progress, though, even with that -- and, man have I had a number of micro-epiphanies about the dissertation in the past week or so that basically come down to duh.

* Spicer's intent on the problems of community, specifically those that inhere in the project of building a community of poets -- the discord, the necessity of those bonds, their artificiality; queer theory is intent on the problems of community, too, in like seven hundred ways. (Maybe seven hundred and twelve; I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed a few.) I'm not going to have time to go back through all that for this draft, but it's going in the chapter version. Duh.

* Every damn model for poesis Spicer presents echoes facelessness: unknowable aliens, invisible signals, indistinct ghosts, even the baseball catcher wears a mask that renders his face unrecognizable. This means that his accretive seriality not only rules the form of his major poetry, but his discourse about aesthetics, too; further, it resembles (geometrically, even) the accretive logic of images Bersani notes in whichever novel it is he discusses late in Homos, and the notion of aesthetic subjectivity outlined in "Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject." So my emphasis on headless Eurydice is probably kind of a good one.

* "I had two loves. One rang a bell / Connected on both sides with hell" -- Faustus is banished to hell with a bell/book/candle ritual in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: Marlowe is an important queer antecedent (laying aside the question of whether Elizabethan buggery is really the same as 20th/21st c. gayness, because they're both going to be queer) for Spicer, not to mention other poets. He references Faust in one of the Vancouver lectures, too. The poet of Homage to Creeley then takes on something of the appearance of Faust, and the lover here, that of a bishop, banishing him from one hell (perhaps the relationship) to another. Easy! How did I miss this? I love Marlowe. I love his Faustus. Have not been on my A-game with this mess of a project.

* Back in chapter one, an artist friend who's into memetics mentioned very casually that the similarities of myths across time and geography -- well, "It's all memes, innit," was precisely what he said. Dang. It. . . it might be. Not all, but partially -- enough, anyway. I had this great, seamless picture of myth as arising directly from grappling with the irrational real, that leading to its strangeness, and the gross similarities of weather and reproduction and so forth being responsible for the gross similarities through various mythic systems, and then the differences at finer levels of detail being responsible for the really peculiar idiosyncratic character of local/distinct stories. Memetics immediately, and obviously, rearticulate all that back into a social scene, which gets persuasively in the way of my picture of myth arising from formalizing the real in a scene which precedes sociality proper. Damn damn damn! So now I have to read about memetics before I can do that chapter or the Brussels paper that will be a short version of it. Fortunately, most the books on memetics look pretty weak, but still. I was so happy with that model! Now unsure it's as right as I thought it was. Quintuple damn and damn a few more times!

Booked my London flight, and one to Denver for AWP next month. Behind on most other obligations. So all that goes.

Crystallize it, as we used to say in debate.

2010-03-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

Here's why you should apply for grants, even when your chances of getting them are very slim -- the application process is so, so useful. For this NEA whatsit, you have to write up a tiny blurb describing your project. I asked my undergrad poetry teacher, who's been an NEA fellow, for advice on what to put in there, and he said, oh, talk about what your aspirations are for your writing, how history has influenced it or other things -- show that you're in touch outside the world of MFA programs and university offices. Talk about regionalism if you have to, he said; talk about politics. I'm highly allergic to the idea of being pigeonholed as a regional poet, but all that definitely gave me some ideas on how to shape the thing, and now I have a cool little blurb for poetry book #2 that should come in handy on the job market --

My second manuscript, The Magpie, half-completed, draws together tropes from carnival and circus life, genetic disease, birth defects, the material technologies of writing (e.g. letterpress), biological and mechanical flight, and possession--ghostly, demonic, territorial, emotional--channeling them through a figure part harlequin, part oracle, and part squalling hatchling of unidentifiable species. These themes become bound up with my long-standing interests in mythopoesis, feminist politics, environmentalism, and folk traditions, bending them to explore the meaning of deviance. Studying Georges Bataille’s work on art as waste or excess, Lacanian theories of language and psychosis, and writings on exceptionality from Michel Foucault to Leo Bersani to Maurice Blanchot during my PhD work at SUNY-Buffalo has opened up all sorts of possibilities for thinking and writing, in and out of poetry; an NEA fellowship would offer me the chance to focus on poetry and bring this new book into being.

Hopefully intriguing, clear, and showing a nice range of interests (which are even legitimate; sometimes you have to make things up to do these applications, but that's actually all stuff that's been going in the ms), and it ought to be easily adaptable to drop in to writeups for different kinds of teaching jobs, too. Would you hire that person for your hopefully-not-too-lame MFA program, or your intellectually-serious-and-somewhat-hip English department? I hope so. I think I would, anyway.

Former professor already emailed back and declared it "PERFECT," all caps. So who knows what the NEA will think of me or my work, but I'll call this an evening well spent.

Making and Made and Making

2010-03-04T20:33:00.000-05:00

Woke up today bent pretty much double with various symptoms of gastric distress, probably set off by eating and sleeping ~~like a writer~~ very poorly while I'm working on this paper -- a practice I fully intend to continue through the weekend because hell, high water, or stomach flu, it has to be done by Monday night. Then remembered this evening that NEA apps are due tonight. Oops!

There's not much to applying for an NEA grant: ten pages of poetry, a list of your publications, and a couple sentences about what you'd do with the money are about it. I don't think my chances are really strong because I haven't been publishing much while I've been in the PhD -- but it's worth the time, even this week when I don't even have time to be sick. Too easy and worth too much money not to do it, thoughts I'm sure are going through a thousand other poets' heads tonight, too, unfortunately for my chances. The biggest pain in the butt is going to be digging out all the magazines I've been in to find their dates of publication and ISBNs, but that's work I need to do on my CV anyway. My pubs list is patchily ordered because when I started keeping track of them, I didn't know what a CV should look like, so I don't have dates for a lot of things and hardly have page numbers for anything.

All very quotidian.

Two more yarn projects during my non-working hours the last couple weeks, Ysolda Teague's Ishbell shawlette --

-- for which I ran out of yarn and am now awaiting another skein to come in the mail, and a yoga mat bag I'm designing --

Ishbel has maybe three hours' work left on it, and the bag. . . quite a bit more. Neither will probably get any attention til Spicer is off my desk, but there's some eye candy in case you needed some color in these last gray dregs of winter.

On Pleasure

2010-03-01T01:18:00.000-05:00

"We're talking about a birdcage veil fascinator hat, here. Practicality has already gone out the window."

She has a point.

You can stop praying for me now.

2010-02-24T17:42:00.000-05:00

Alas, alas, alas. Came home last night to an email from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation: I will not be receiving the Newcombe Fellowship. So, no sitting back and just writing for this chickadee next year. There's a smaller award (much smaller) from my department to which I'll apply, and I think a creative grant of a couple thousand available from the university that I might write for, that might let me go down to one class instead of two per semester, that sort of thing. And I've been thinking about applying for an NEA -- the chances are miniscule, but it's not a difficult application to put together since all you do is send in some poems and a list of publications. I really thought I had a shot at that Newcombe, though. Feeling a bit low about that.

I did get my car back yesterday, for $417.55, which is basically free. They put it on the frame puller and as far as I can tell, didn't even charge me for that. It's ugly, but less so than I expected. Maybe if nothing else people will stay well away from me in traffic, seeing those battle scars. Had a fun meeting with a student today, ran into a cool fellow PhD-er I hadn't seen in a while, made plans to catch up on Monday. Actually, we made plans to go to the nearby Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, which I'd just been talking to someone else about, but then I saw that this very weekend they're hosting an orchid show. I think I'll hie myself and my battered vehicle down there whether said fellow PhD-er can go or not. Suppose I can get orchids to climb on my fingers, like the butterflies did? I may have to try.

Welcome to Two to the Fifth

2010-02-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

No surprise packages from gorgeous, mysterious men this year, but it's been a good birthday nonetheless. First, my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful mechanics are going to put me back on the road for about $500. It won't be pretty, but it will be driveable and legal, and the car only has to last me another two years or so. I was so tremendously worried that I'd have to be carless here, or, as I said in the last post here, that I'd be juggling my already-threadbare budget around to squeeze thousands of dollars out for new-to-me wheels. But no -- they're in the process of beating out the fender, installing a new radiator support/brace/something, and putting in a new headlight. Whew on that.

Saturday, I went to the Niagara Falls Butterfly Conservatory -- the website doesn't begin to do it justice. I went in the spring a couple years ago, loved it, and have always wanted to go in the winter, so since I was stuck in the area anyway for the weekend, I got a couple people to go up there with me and had a fantastic time. It's the coolest tourist thing I've ever done. Magical, really. One lady had a giant Blue Morpho land right on the palm of her hand and hang out there with his wings spread, and I wasn't that lucky, but I did coax two different ones who were in the path up onto my hand. The first one may have been unwell, or just out of his cocoon, because he was sort of sluggish anyway, but the second was fine. He was, however, very determinedly drinking from a small puddle and I was worried he might get stepped on. A friend got a picture of me working on him and labeled it, "Here is [Poetrix] trying to reason with a butterfly," which is fantastic, first because "trying to reason with a butterfly" is, somehow, me in a phrase, and second because I was. It went something like -- "Hey, little critter, you need to not be here. People will step on you! And I know you're a badass in the butterfly world, with your tuxedo-style wings and all, but you are no match for big human boots. Come on, let me get you somewhere safer. I know you want your drink! You're going to have to drink somewhere else. Come on, come here, just for a minute." Eventually he did, and after riding up to my eye level, took off for puddles where no one would bother him. There are signs all over saying not to touch the butterflies, but I think in cases of squishage-prevention, exceptions are allowed.

I couldn't find my camera in the morning, but I borrowed other people's and got some neat shots, especially of the emergence room, which is -- I could sit and watch butterflies in and coming out of cocoons all day. Honestly, if I go back, I should take a folding chair and just set it up there.

I had looked and looked online for a cool lunch place, and settled on Casa Vostra, which this very evening is having Polenta Night. I love this place just based on the fact that they will have a themed night based around polenta; unfortunately, that's all I have to love it for, because they turned out to be closed for lunch on Saturdays. Super lame. We ended up at a much less cool Italian place, with a much less varied and less vegetarian-friendly menu, and the least competent waitress I've had in a very long time. Maybe ever, honestly. But, eh, the food was fine and the company was wonderful, and although I wasn't offered dessert (blasphemy!!!), I went to Buffalo's snazzy Dessert Deli, where I got a birch beer and some crazy citrus-cranberry-poppyseed torte that definitely went with the energetic and lovely spring-in-winter theme of my butterfly trip.

If I'm going to mention Dessert Deli, by the way, I have also to mention Dolci -- Dolci's tarts and cakes are definitely better, and their cookies may be, though I haven't tried them. They're down in my neighborhood and we give them a lot of business for departmental receptions. But Dessert Deli is no slouch, and they were in a better location for where we were coming from on Saturday. Plus they have piles of awesome cake books to look at. A guy came up and asked if we were in the market for a wedding cake. No, I told him, we're just cake fans.

I picked up a cold, though, and other than that outing, I've basically been sleeping for the past few days. Should have graded, cleaned, etc., since I was home, but I did not. I'm heartily tired of this business where every time I get sick, it turns into a sinus infection and I'm out of commission for two weeks, so I went after it as aggressively as I could this time, with vitamin C at 2000 mg/day and, like I said, massive doses of sleep. (Noam Chomsky is so wrong -- one can definitely sleep furiously; I have been.) Knocking on wood, I seem to be keeping it under control, and today, I went out for birthday sushi with a friend who'd never done sushi before, introducing her to a whole new world of cuisine confidence. (Thank goodness, she ended up liking it.) She got me a very pretty row counter bracelet for knitting, made with red and pale pink pearls and a focal bead with pink roses on it, and a rain coat that just a few weeks ago, I carried around and around, and finally put back because I decided I didn't have $40 for a rain coat, no matter how pretty, when I already own one. This one, however, is lighter-weight and has a hood -- and it went on clearance, so my friend got it for ten bucks. Even better.

It's got a nice, trim shape:

And comes with a little tote bag, as you can see, which some people might use to store said rain coat. Me? No way. I know a perfectly-sized knitting bag when I see one! For small projects, like, say, the fish-scale-patterned scarf I'm now working on.

Some of the stuff Target puts in their "go spot," and, for that matter, in their clothing generally, is weird for the sake of being weird, or retro for the sake of being retro, without much regard for basic aesthetics. IMO. They have some real hits, too, though, and this is one of them -- lovely colors, great use of soft, faded-looking warm tones and punchier brights together, flattering shaping and total utility. I'll have this and wear it and love it for a long time, especially if I keep moving to swamp biomes, as, so far, seems to be my tendency.

Closer look at the print:

Last night, I sat up with a UK friend talking through some of my ideas on myth that will lay the groundwork for my dissertation, and got to put a few things into print that had so far only been hazy thoughts. One formulation I came up with that I hadn't before is that my argument positions human subjectivity as rational only in a very latterly sense. We are first interacting with the real, second articulating those experiences into narrative (i.e., systems of mythology), and only in the third place deriving social norms, law, etc. from those narratives. Looking at it that way, it seems peculiar that we should ever have thought of ourselves as primarily creatures founded in reason, because where would that have come from? Assuming you have any belief in contiguity between humankind and the rest the living world, you have to put our mode of consciousness in the context of our evolutionary ancestors and siblings, and that situates law as some kind of effect of subjectivity and group living, rather than the other way around. Maybe I'm reading too many mystic philosophers. . . but can one really read too many mystic philosophers? I'll say no.

So there's that, and by early May I'll need to have a twelve-page writeup of my notion of myth and its relation to 20th c. mythopoesis, which, if I dare to say it, seems very doable. I never did finish out the version of my Crane paper I would have given at Louisville, but I made hellacious progress on it and will be able to go forward with it under good steam when I do get back to it. For the immediate future, Spicer is back on the front burner. After sushi tonight, I ran through the (kind of complicated) outline of how that project is shaping up, and after my lengthy trip through Levinas and Blanchot and whether ethics can be a foundational philosophy or not and what Spicer's poetry testifies to about aesthetic practice that neither of those theorists quite gets right and how what's called for is a somatic relationship to Otherness, because in spite of himself Levinas' model is based on the very phenomenological move he wants to critique -- etc., etc., etc. -- then I got to say, "so, basically, it's a paper about how poetry is like buttsex." Big grin. Friend cracks up. And it's true, my Spicer article is, in fact, ultimately about poetry being like buttsex. If I can get it published, believe me, links will be posted here and you'll be able to see the whole thing spelled out if you want to. I roll my eyes at people who do whole careers on porn, but I do love the occasional entirely legitimate use of overt erotics in serious critical thought.

I probably shouldn't roll my eyes at the porn critics, but I can't help but feel like, come on, you're a bunch of horny nerds, and who isn't in this business, but most of us do have other things we're into as well.

Anyway. Very good way to start another year of my life. Cheers to that.

And things were going so well, too.

2010-02-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, driving to Louisville to go to the conference there, I crashed my car on the interstate. Didn't even make it out of NY state, and I was driving fine -- but I guess there's only so much you can do with lake effect snow coming down and making the road greasy. Lost traction and slammed right into the guard rail, bashing my passenger side headlight assembly to pieces and crumpling the quarter panel on that side pretty impressively. No highway patrol stopped, though I was pulled over for a bit over an hour while I called people and wondered just what I was going to do; that ended up being cancelling on the conference, which is quite a bummer. Louisville the town is a hole, but Louisville the conference is a really good scene and I was looking forward to it a lot. Had gotten my Crane paper out and realized it was bad -- like, hilariously bad; I have no idea how I ever thought that was a good paper -- and had done so much new work on that. All good for my dissertation, of course, but I had wanted to give it this weekend and get some feedback, and just have the fun of doing a conference.

My dad thinks the car may be totaled out. . . except, of course, that I don't carry the kind of insurance that writes me a check if I wreck my own car. Nor can I, on my ten grand a year plus loans, buy a car right now; the happy Honda was really going to have to last me through the PhD. So I might not be paying the no-driveway tax for a while! Because I might be carless, in a city with weak public transit. There's a bus that runs just a couple blocks away from my apartment and that gets partway to campus, and I may be on that next week -- but it's still a real walk and we aren't scheduled to stop having snow any time soon. A friend said she'd drive me back from the mechanic's later this afternoon, so I'll drop it off and see what they say then.

It was a real crash, though. My arms really hurt from the impact. Kind of frightening, honestly, since I wasn't even doing anything to cause the crash but driving along. My dad said, "Well, I guess they decided it was time for another lesson for you!" Lesson in random shit luck, maybe. Or in the notion that if I care about where I'm going, I should never plan to try to drive there. Or that I should always keep a cushion of a few thousand dollars in my bank account for emergencies like this, which I know, but of course am not in a position to do.

One option would be to take out a chunk of student loans just to pay for a car -- my father, without having to say anything himself, speaks up immediately in my head about robbing Peter to pay Paul, and I answer that, yes, but Paul is keeping me from driving right now. As he probably would, were he around today and writing letters to the Romans or the Americans or whomever else he wanted to convert. My loans for this year are maxed, but it would conceivably be possible to get some kind of trade-in on my car, take out a loan, pay it off (somehow) and carry the crazy expensive insurance (somehow) through the summer, and then finish paying it off in the fall in one big lump. That would still leave me screwed for living next year, but maybe I can refine this plan. . . somehow. A lot of questions circulating right now.

I need that fellowship, for real. I find out if I made the first cut in March and I find out whether I actually get it some time in April. If you haven't put me in your prayers, rituals, wishes, etc., for a bit, now is so the time. I promise I will put a word in for you with the inscrutable forces of fate, who seem to be the deity primarily concerned with my life, in return.

Hello, McFly

2010-02-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

At coffee with a fellow poeticist the other day, I was talking about some of the more mystifying behavior of undergrads, and he gave me the best way I've yet heard to describe a particular pattern we've both noticed: the generation of students currently in school have a strange ability to ape presence. I first noticed this at UB just in the past, oh, two years or so, I think, maybe about three years; students will seem to be paying attention, nodding along when they should be, facial expression clearly conveying that they're tuned in, and somehow, they're not. My friend told me about having been in a mixed grad/undergrad Latin class where the professor would have the whole class go through declensions with her, in order, nominative, genitive, ablative, dative, accusative, vocative; then she'd call on someone individually, and even with hints and prodding, the student wouldn't be able to do it at all. That sort of thing is incredibly common, and didn't seem to me to be when I started teaching several years ago.

The other week, I spent half of a 90-minute class on George Herbert's poem "The Windows," in which he compares a good minister to a stained-glass church window; I used the poem to illustrate symbolism, metaphor and simile, and what a conceit is, and wrote all the characteristics of church windows the poem mentions on the board, and then had the students talk about what each of them meant in terms of someone being a good minister. The next class day, I gave a quiz, part over poems we'd discussed and part over the ones they were supposed to have read for that day. The first questions were supposed to be easy points, gimmies, especially since everyone was present for that discussion. First question: To what object does George Herbert compare a minister? If you even half-remembered the poem's title, you should have been able to get partial credit, right? A third of my class either didn't even try to answer, or put down something completely random. When I handed the quizzes back, I said outright that that part of the quiz isn't even a reading quiz; it's a quiz over whether you were conscious or not for forty-five minutes. It's not the lack of engagement that astounds me, since I've seen that since (no exaggeration) the very first day I ever taught; it's that the students who turned in those quizzes show no signs that they're so checked out. I used to have one or two out of every twenty students who were clearly hostile to school -- at LSU, baseball players were horrible that way. I remember one freshman who wrote in a mini-essay about what he was doing in college that he was only taking classes until he got drafted. I don't remember his name or I'd google him and no doubt find that he never did get picked up by the majors, but that was the attitude a lot of the baseball players there had, and I learned very quickly that when I got a note from the athletics program saying I had one or two in my class, they were going to do as little as they possibly could. Freshman football players were great students, and basketball players seemed fine although LSU made as big a deal out of those programs as they did out of their baseball team, so it must have been something in the coaches' attitudes or the way the teams were set up -- for example, I know on the football team, freshmen usually didn't play at all, and had to work like crazy to stay on the team and get game time in the future. So they were fine, but the baseball players, oy and a half. I've also had plenty of students who wanted to be in school and had more than sufficient intelligence to do their degrees, but who were so unprepared as far as study skills, listening/note-taking abilities, etc., or just so flaky that they had real difficulties. In either of these cases, I could see what was going on just in their expressions during class and in the ways they'd talk to me and to other students before and after (and occasionally during) class, and I could try to alter whatever I was doing to get them on track. Those phenomena appear to have disappeared, though, to be replaced by students who present a seamless appearance of alert attention, but behind that -- heaven knows what's going on.

Particularly with the recalcitrant types, I always felt like, somewhere along the way, they learned an important lesson that education didn't matter to their future. With the spacey ones, I felt like they hadn't yet decided what role education had to them. I could try to counteract either of those forces, and in at least a few cases, I had definite successes. These very pleasant-seeming kids, though, who manage not to do anything in my class (or out of it -- I get about, oh, two thirds of each class turning in homework assignments), I wonder how they got that way. It's like they learned that school requires this smooth presentation from them, and explicitly does not require anything else but the manufacture and maintenance of that facade. It's a bit creepy from where I stand, to be honest, because it's so radically dishonest, and at the same time emphatically nonconfrontational. It absolutely avoids the assertion of -- well, presence. They aren't even being themselves enough in class to show signs of daydreaming.

Another friend, who's a few years younger than me, is having trouble with her freshmen this semester, and we've talked a lot recently about what you should or even can do as a teacher to reach these sorts of people. The unanimous conclusion of her, me, and every other college instructor or professor with whom I've had this conversation? Fuck 'em. Not out of cruelty or even lack of caring -- we all care tons about our students, probably more than we even should; I have more nightmares about being a boring or underprepared teacher than on any other theme -- but because there's factually no way open for us to proceed. It's like someone who's lactose intolerant accepting an invitation to go out for ice cream, and not telling you they can't eat dairy, and ending up doubled-over and wincing all evening. The main difference here is that the students I have, or their parents, are paying I think $25k a year for their knotted-up guts (if I can even assume an F upsets someone who's that disengaged). I can call on them, and having seen a bit of their writing and a couple quizzes, I have been, but when they're not even reacting enough to show me their level of interest or comprehension, day to day, there's not much else I can do to try to raise the level of either one.

My worry, really, is that they don't even have an awareness that they should be learning things, thinking about them outside class, etc. I wonder if they've gone through elementary & secondary schools where showing up and not causing the teacher any problems was enough to get them an A or at least a B. This is what I picture as most likely having produced this behavior, anyway, and in that case, they've had maybe thirteen years of conditioning, of lessons on what school is and how one acts as a student, and I'm not going to overcome that in our three hours a week. That's a far deeper problem than one college course can address. So, I teach to the ones who are definitely in the classroom scene and try to prod the others and hope they'll absorb something like a kind of intellectual contact high by the end of our four months together. If anyone's got a better solution, I'm all ears.

On Viewless Wings of Poesy

2010-01-29T12:24:00.002-05:00

For a change, I've been too busy to write about what I'm doing, and in pleasant ways. Started the new semester with what seem so far to be two bunches of good kids. A couple who'll need to get their hands verbally smacked if they keep coming in late, especially because I realized yesterday that they're late because they go to Wilson Farms to get coffee between classes. I've done this, too, but it wasn't cool and the only teachers I tried it with did let me know so I shall carry on in that fine tradition. But, only two weeks in and both classes are talking really well, asking great questions that take the conversation in interesting and useful directions -- yesterday, for example, one person asked about Blake's lines, "On what wings dare he aspire?/ What the hand dare seize the fire?" because she didn't have a clue what they were about. That's exactly the sort of thing I read right through because I started reading classical myths pretty much at the same time as I started reading; Blake's referring there to Icarus and Prometheus and comparing the tiger's maker to those doers of beautiful, superhuman deeds with dire consequences. It's also exactly the kind of thing that people who aren't already lit people -- that is, 99.9999999% of the American population -- wouldn't know, so I got to tell some stories from Ovid, define allusion in full, and open up an important dimension of that poem because that student was conscious enough of her reading to see where something left her blank and brave enough to say it.

The last couple weeks, I've been thinking about how key that is in approaching poetry, that ability to admit you don't get it. You never get it, after all, and the fact that there are some aspects of a text that will always elude full comprehension is exactly what makes it poetry; therefore, the only way you can even access a poem is to give up the idea that you're going to master it. You're not. People who've written multiple genuinely insightful, even brilliant books about Eliot still draw in their breath a little in humility and delighted awe when they read Four Quartets -- or at least they ought to. If they don't, they're missing the point. On the very first day of classes, my comp class was unexpectedly talkative, just really got going. . . and of course, rather than simply be happy at the discussion windfall, I freaked out at myself and wondered if I'd done anything wrong with the poetry-lit-class group, because they were only normal. (Sheesh.) I think the deal was that I just happened to have a couple people in composition who were unusually comfortable with that mode of being interested in something without having to understand it, and who additionally happened to be talkative. It's a gamble, talking about one class in order to instruct another, but I brought this up to the poetry section, and I think I pulled it off in a useful, helpful way, because they have chattered right up now too. We may all crash after midterm -- that kind of happened with my last really talkative class -- but we may not, and if nothing else, it's great to go in and have three energetic hours on the thick, grey, bone-cracking cold days we're now having here.

On the always-frustrating side of teaching, only ten out of fifteen students in my comp class bothered to do their first homework assignment. 500 words, describe your experiences as a reader and as a writer: what have you done, what do you like or dislike doing, what do you think you're good at and what would you like to improve. I've been having people do homework on Blackboard (i.e., electronically) for the past few years, for a number of reasons, but DYC's computers seem to be a little sketchy at times so I've gone back to paper, and I'd forgotten what it was like to get those slender stacks of work. And, again, my instinct is to worry that I've motivated them inadequately or given them too hard an assignment. . . but, uh, that was a pretty easy one, like, pitifully easy. It's supposed to basically be free points -- which should be plenty of motivation. Not a response rate out of the bounds of normalcy, but irritating to see, nonetheless. I also gave that class their first reading quiz yesterday, and although I haven't yet graded those, I'll be interested to see how they did. Other than full-length papers and exams (in classes where I give exams), none of my assignments are ever worth very many points individually, so if people are slow getting up to speed or get too busy to read/write some week down the road, it won't hurt them, and if all goes well, the ones who aren't doing much yet will kick it in gear and do well from now on. And if they don't, I have to keep reminding myself that contrary to my wishes, students are autonomous beings whose behavior can only be encouraged, not controlled, and when they end up with crappy grades, that really is on them.

(You like what I did there with extending the metaphor? Get up to speed, kick it in gear? Secretly, I really do want my students to be idealized learning machines, you see. The imagery testifies to it, and who am I to argue with images?)

Both classes were fantastic yesterday -- Shakespeare in the lit section and as mentioned above, Blake in the comp one. Teaching Shakespeare makes me want to ditch 20th-century studies entirely and go over to Early Modern stuff and spend the rest of my career teaching Shakespeare. (And Marlowe and Herbert. Oh man.) We had such a fantastic time with some of his sonnets, anyway. They loved "My mistress' eyes," they took on the extremely particulate way I approach "Since brass, nor stone, nor earth" without hesitation, and just -- the whole period was a dream. I told them it should be in the Constitution that it's illegal to teach sonnets without doing "My mistress' eyes" and that I guessed this was why my career in politics never took off. They laughed, and, by the end of talking about that poem, they saw why I made that silly-sounding claim, which is a total win all around. A year or two ago, mid-crisis, when I had begun to believe that deep down I had no future in this gig and no resources to make one for myself, my advisor told me that I just needed to get to a place where I was teaching poetry, regular poetry classes and creative writing classes and all the things to which my heart is so sappily, happily devoted, and he was so right. I was in no shape to see it then, but he could, and so, again, I can thank my only-occasionally-fortunate stars for putting me in touch with him. After years in the ghetto of teaching comp at giant state universities with next to no respect for the humanities, for the first time I finally feel, through and through, like I made the right choice in this career of mine.

Beginning 2010 in relative peace and comfort:

2010-01-01T16:19:00.000-05:00

My new year has begun with a lesson in orchid species vs. hybrids. My collection got, er, pretty emaciated the last couple months. Almost everything I had that didn't have pseudobulbs -- gone. Plus a couple Cattleyas, one a C. dowiana var. rosita that I was really fond of, and that will be expensive to replace unless some of the nurseries selling them bring up some smaller plants than they currently have for sale. Might happen, though. I'll hope. Anyway, the ones that came through the best were my C. aclandiae, a species from Brazil, and C. brabantiae, a primary hybrid, i.e., not far from its species stock. The C. aclandiae barely even looks bothered -- that is one tough little greenbaby. For some reason, my Howeara (I have a Lava Burst) looks really good, too, so there's another recommendation for those of you who are curious about orchids but maybe not likely to be very attentive orchid parents. Those are all doing better than the presumably-tough bag babies I've gotten, anyway. And C. aclandiae is so cute you can't believe it's a flower and not a native South American pixie pretending to be a flower. I'm now convinced that every aspiring orchider should have one in their collection.

I think the C. dowiana suffered from lack of light more than anything -- that, an Lc. Mari's Song, and a pendulous Dendrobium I had all bit it, and they were some of the farthest from the window. Should have paid more attention and rotated them better. . . but I finally ordered a grow-light, so that sort of thing should cease to be a problem. Of the ones that aren't dead (which is actually most of them), nearly all have fat new roots going, so they should pull through, and the couple that don't look good in the leaves, so I'm guessing those have been in states of relative dormancy anyway. Of course, maybe my heinous neglect drove them to dormancy. On the other hand, a lot of them like to be starved through the winter, or at least starving them stimulates blooming in the spring, so perhaps it's most accurate to say that orchid growers like to starve their plants through the winter. Maybe I scared them so bad they'll all go, "holy shit, we gotta get our genes out of this place!" and make huge crazy flowers in the spring.

Got off the crafting thing for a bit too but I finally sorted out a problem with my H.D. shawl, undid the ~20 rounds I needed to undo (painful; equal to about 10 hours of work) and started forward progress on that again. Tra la la.

Wanted to have a Crane chapter in some kind of whole shape by mid-January but that's not close to happening. Break has been revivifying, though, for me as well as my poor plants. With a little luck, some good tea, and the slowly-returning sunlight, it may get done in what'll still feel like good time.

Happy Holiday

2009-12-21T19:53:00.000-05:00

Today is the winter solstice; tonight will be the longest night all year, and then beginning tomorrow, we start to get minutes back to our days. I mentioned this to my Mexicana compadre -- who was raised Catholic -- and she said, screw Christmas, that's something to celebrate. I know! Believe me, I'm aware of how cool a day this is. It's often been a good day for me to think over where I've been and where I want to be in another year, and this year, both of those are reasonably positive things to contemplate, which is nice.

Last week, I put up my xmas tree for the first time in five or six years, which is a major (and shiny) victory over a few different things. My fat kitty made a beeline for it as soon as I laid out the tree skirt -- whether she remembered it, or whether she could just tell that this was special, and warm, and had a cuddly velvet blanket underneath it, I'm not sure, but she staked it out immediately. She and her sister have been taking turns napping beneath it. It's not as gorgeous as I remember it, or I may just not be as pro a tree-trimmer as I used to be, but it's still very very pretty. Plus, I already have my personally-meaningful ornaments -- some beautiful blown glass ones I got with my mother one year in purple and navy and pewter, some other beautiful glass animals (a snowy owl, a frog) and flowers (white dahlia, calla lily, morning glory) I got with my dad; some folksy wreaths I remember us buying when I was about three years old; a few of my dad's favorite glass ones from before I was born; the clusters of mini disco balls I got at some craft store or other; the glittery glass pine cones I bought all as part of one ornament and separated; the little soap-bubble ones I decorated myself a decade ago or more; a tree-topper I made out of a big beaded icicle thing turned upside down and a raft of different types of ribbon. I keep meaning to take pictures but haven't yet. My gifts for people didn't get here before they left for their winter travels, so I think I'll wrap them when they do arrive, put the presents under my tree, and do gift exchangey things when people get back.

Yesterday I had quite a Buffalo day. Cowpok is running a thing through xmas eve where you get $10 off any piercing if you bring in a couple cans of food to donate, and I thought, hey, that's a good excuse to get one done. So I popped down there, and found that half a dozen people all had decided to get piercings at the same time on a Sunday afternoon. Ended up waiting two hours to get a silly forward helix in one ear, but while I was there, I was treated to numerous somewht dopey-looking, slightly glaze-eyed, young, semi-sketchy Buffalo kids coming in for piercings, which was pretty cute. One skinny, but weirdly misshapen girl came in with her canned goods and two very rotund guys and asked for a piercing "downstairs." It should probably be a requirement to get a hood piercing that you at least be able to call it a hood piercing, but whatever. No idea what was up with the two guys -- two friends? Boyfriend and a friend? Boyfriend and a brother? Two boyfriends? They couldn't get the piercing because the female piercer wasn't there, unfortunately -- but it was simultaneously gross and entirely awesome and adorable for me to watch their giggly parade in and out. I did finally get my very minimal new metal, and then went up to Amherst to have dinner with a friend who lives up there, which consisted, appropriately enough, of giant calzones from Mister Pizza. We should have had beer to really do it, but I didn't think of that til I was home.

Today, after lunch with la Mexicana Picante, I went to the craft store to get some pieces to make earrings out of some wonderful little fairy-photo charms I got from one Etsy seller and some great handmade polymer clay flower beads I got from another. Got almost everything I needed, and meant to go to the other craft store, but I forgot. I did go to Target and Macy's to check out clearance ornaments and found a bunch of really great ones, especially at Macy's. Among others, I got a penguin in a snowglobe and an electric/neon/lime-green blown glass stocking with fancy Dutch shoe kind of curly designs on it. Plus some pale blue balls with glitter designs on them, some grey/silver/white glass ones in various shapes, a little angel girl chasing a star, big glass stars in purple and blue and silver. . . the stores seem to be short on the icy colors I like best this year, but it's not like I'm hard up for ornaments anyway. But, so I found these ornaments, and also, at Macy's, a fantastic bucket hat in a brown and multi houndstooth-plaid suiting fabric. Very warm. The cashier was having a hell of a time with someone on the other end of the phone who was either deaf or stupid or both -- and possibly because of that, she forgot to charge me for the hat! I got out and thought, wow, how did I get out of there with all this stuff for only $40? Hat must have been cheaper than I thought. How about cheap as free, sled dogs? Nobler people would probably have gone in and asked to pay for it, but I am not such a person.

When I got home, more cool Etsy stuff had come in the mail: some nouveau-looking brass earrings with lily-type flowers, dragonflies, and pearls on them; some beautiful horn hair/shawl pins, one with a big sunflower on it (very solstice-appropriate), one with a butterfly; and chopsticks carved to look like bamboo. Today I also got to wear for the first time this fantastic ring I got with a big cabochon made of polymer clay with a purple-and-green flower, in a filigree antiqued brass setting, with a blue-green gem at the flower's center and more, smaller ones around the edge of the brass part. Super funky, super pretty, and I got compliments on it from multiple strangers. And, as if that all weren't enough, I also got to wear some earrings I made myself out of fountain pen nibs, and while strangers didn't accost me to tell me how amazing they were, I know they actually are.

At Cowpok yesterday, I almost had them do my lip -- I've wanted a lip piercing since I was nineteen, now twelve years. Didn't get one for a while because guys kept telling me it was too much or just gross, and by the time I got over trying to please men who were never going to like me anyway, I was thinking I should keep myself somewhat professional-looking. I can get away with a lot being a poet, but only so much. But the more I thought about it, the surer I became that I should do that, and if it annoys me, I can lose it after a few months, but in the case that it doesn't (I'm betting it won't), I can get a damn retainer for job interviews next year. And to teach with if I want to. Twelve continual years of wishing I had something is really plenty to attest that I actually do like it. Had planned to end my day by going back and having that done, but by the time I got back to my neighborhood this evening, the piercing place was nearly closed. Tomorrow, I think. Need to go out to get those other earring-making pieces anyway.

I do have the first season of CSI: NY to watch. Figured since LOST is about to go out, I should find a new second TV show to watch and, you know, I don't want to travel too far from safe territory. The Miami one, I know I can't stand, but I've heard good things about the NY one. So we'll give it a shot. Good guys cracking wise and putting the bad guys away via impossibly cool and impossibly fast science will sit the midnight vigil with me. Me and my free hat and my awesome jewelry.

See? Really, really good day.

Pass the cream, please?

2009-12-08T21:02:00.000-05:00

At about nineteen, a couple friends of mine told me they never understood why I was with a guy I'd been with for a couple years before. They said, "we always thought, she's too classy for him." I was flattered but perplexed at the time, but I can see it, looking back. I get described as stylish these days, which is in the same ballpark, but somewhere along the way I transcended class entirely and became a poet. We are not the tastemakers; we are not the appreciators of taste. We are what culture consumes.

An Ague Wracks These Transistors

2009-12-03T13:16:00.000-05:00

* A few days ago, started having trouble with Google searches; if I click a link right out of the results, it sits for a few seconds and then reloads the search page. Happens across browsers and on different networks. I have to copy a link into the address bar to go to a page; irritating, but I keep some nonstandard things enabled and disabled, and every once in a while that causes problems -- I'm perpetually having to switch between US and UK English in Gmail because they'll tinker with one in a way that breaks it for me, so I have to use the other til those kinks get worked out.
* Yesterday or the day before, started having worse troubles than usual with my wireless. I've had weird network issues the whole time I've lived in Buffalo, with different computers, different routers, using different software, in different apartments; I can't, for example, keep a torrent client running for more than a few hours before my connectivity goes belly-up. Not hitting my router with anything like that number of requests, though, it's now only letting me load pages for an hour or so before I have to reset it. Most peculiarly, I can stay logged in to a site long after I lose the ability to load new ones. Not. . . not good.
* Yesterday, found that trying to load Perry Bible Fellowship comics, of all things, redirected me to random spam sites. Today, I just discovered that blogger.com has been hit with the same problem for me. Ruh-roh.
* Ad-Aware doesn't find anything, but won't update. Teh intertubez suggest this is a common problem for Vista users, as yet unresolved by Lavasoft, so it may be unfortunate but not related to my other problems, or it may be getting stuck by virii.
* Malwarebytes will install (I think, anyway) but won't run at all. Click the shortcut: nada. Attempt to run from a cmd shell: nada. Uninstall Ad-Aware, uninstall Malwarebytes, restart, reinstall Malwarebytes, try again: nada. Doesn't even try. Unless this is Windows just acting like a virus on its own -- would hardly be the first time, but I've been pretty happy with Vista 32-bit, and I really don't think it's screwing itself up that way -- that's definitely due to some infection.
* System Restore won't complete. Oh yeah. I got critters in this here box.

Motherfucker.

Haven't even gotten my desktop up and healthy yet, because classes started and I had to finish that chapter and there hasn't been time to finish getting it all the way together. On the good side, classes are now almost done and I was ready to wipe this one and do a clean install anyway -- but it's not a thing I needed to have to deal with. I got xmas presents to crochet (and papers to grade, and an apartment to clean, and an article to work on, and a chapter to read for, and a car to have repaired, and an eye exam to schedule so I can get new glasses, and a couple dozen or so other things to do).

Also noticed this morning that I'm really looking sick -- other than the still-substantial fatigue, I don't feel otherwise ill, but I have some very hollow-looking eyes and a serious pallor even for me. I'm guessing it's just exhaustion and once I let myself relax for a few days I'll start to look healthier, but it's unsettling. Then again, maybe it's just sympathy illness with my poor afflicted computer. Definitely wouldn't put that past me.

I think it and I are going to have to limp along for a week or so, though. No way do I have it in me to chase virii or set Windows up from nothing right now.

You know what, though, when I do that, I might give Open Office a try. That'll be something to look forward through after seven hundred reboots to get Vista back to itself.

Snap/Crackle/Pop

2009-12-02T02:48:00.001-05:00

40 mins later, I've laid down to sleep and can't because the nausea and shakiness and vaguely unhappy head I'd been ~~ignoring~~ fighting all evening is now clearly turning into a migraine, sparklies and all.

This can't be the weather -- we had our first snow last night and that didn't get me, and it's calm out now anyway. It can't be allergies because nothing I'm allergic to is alive right now. Stress? MSG overdose? (Haven't had Chinese food in an age.) Dehydration? Demonic possession?

Oh, wait, I know. Lack of health insurance. That's why I keep getting these things, because the pills I could take to even try to combat them run $30 and up per pill, and it sounds like I'd need more than the minimal dose. The meds in question -- Imitrex or Treximet, which is the first thing plus Aleve -- are so spendy not because they're made from high-end exotic components, but because they're patented. Patented migraine medicine that, thanks to said patent, is only made and sold by one behemoth of a corporation at whatever obscene price it wishes in one of the many mysterious, sacred practices of the profiteers' bloody religion of obeisance to capital. Fuck you very much, you tea-partying Neanderthals and all the jet-set CEOs who bank on your rage. I hope you all come back a few times in a row as caterpillars who get parasitic wasp eggs implanted in them and are liquefied slowly and eaten from the inside out.

I also hope I just stop getting pukin'-bad headaches someday.

I think I know what it feels like to be a camel.

2009-12-02T02:02:00.001-05:00

The sun has gone into the witness protection program.

This is my last week teaching (hooray) at this 8 am schedule (HOORAY!). I have grading I should seriously finish tonight and it's just not going to happen. Trying, truly. I've always been a slow grader -- I try to leave enough time in my schedule to get things back relatively quickly, and it's never enough. Eight years and I've never gotten to where I can do a paper in less than twenty minutes. Plus I'm so easily distracted that I have to grade where I don't have internet access, which means that when I finally get to my email, I have piles of it to wade through, which is its own discouragement. All this bodes poorly for me, although if I can just land a job where I don't have to teach comp, and therefore don't have to do the intensive grading comp requires, I do think I'll be fine.

Nearing the longest night of the year, with lake-effect cloud cover hanging around all the time, doesn't help a bit. Having spent something like a third of the semester officially sick also doesn't. All the same, if I taught at eleven tomorrow instead of eight, I could probably finish these and hand them all back.

(If I get the later schedule going next spring and am still behind all the time, I guess I'll have to admit I just take on too many things and manage them too poorly. Please let that not be the case, because if so, boy am I in for a rough career in the long term.)

Actually have a triple-duty ton of things that have been on my mind as I reach the end of this semester, but it'll be hours to post & that, I may not have til I get final grades posted.

Realized after I posted this that it's basically a repeat of the last post. I'm leaving it up, though; it's a testament to how depleted my cognitive abilities are, which really is about all I have to talk about right now anyway.

Dull.

2009-11-22T18:42:00.000-05:00

While this end of the semester isn't kicking my ass the way several have -- it would be quite an understatement to say I'm a bit tired. The new school, two classes instead of one, doing more substantial work on my diss than I have been, and solving some life problems that have been digging in have taken a lot out of me, and there's a limitless amount remaining to do on all counts. I think I've been sick almost as often this term as I was my first in Buffalo, too, and I was sick continuously from that November through the end of the spring semester. My friend Mafia had the same thing happen at the same time, and although I don't think I'm going to get quite that bad off, I have sure lost a lot of days this fall to illness.

A friend in the UK might go in and get a migraine prescription just to ship it to me, in fact. Hope he does and hope it makes it here. I don't have $10-$50 a pill for partial chances at heading those things off.

Only have to teach one day this week -- we have Wednesday off, which is amazing to me -- and I actually feel tired even thinking about that. Then Thanksgiving break, then one week back, then finals week and final grades and I will be another semester along. I bet winter break goes fast for me this year because I suspect I'll spend the first three weeks just stabilizing my sleep schedule, and then I have some projects around my apartment to work on. . . and then it'll pretty much be January and time to get ready to go again.

Paper accepted to the Louisville conference, which is good, but they turned me down for a poetry reading. Burn! I didn't notice lots of people with award-winning first books on their slate last time I went, but for whatever reason, they didn't want me. Oh well. One less thing to worry about, although the line on the CV and the motivation to turn to creative work would have been nice.

I'll be in Boston for a weekend in March. If you happen to be associated with any entities there that could schedule me for a talk or reading, I'd love to do one; unfortunately, I don't think I know anyone who could make that happen. Drop me a line if you could.

It's 7 pm and I could honestly stand to go to bed right now. Spent the whole weekend basically fighting with my pained head, with no idea what set me off. I kept thinking I was coming out of it, but no such luck. For all I know I'll wake up tomorrow and still be sick and shaky and photophobic, but surely not. Now I seem to mostly just be exhausted, nothing worse than that.

Next entry, I hope, will be more interesting. This time I was really just trying to see if I could make paragraphs. Hooray.

Cruising on the underpants gnomes' model.

2009-11-14T02:18:00.002-05:00

Your prayers, good wishes, lit candles, burnt incense, and other transmissions of vibes are working. Not only do I have my application materials together, in time, but so many unexpected good things have worked out for me this past couple weeks I couldn't even tell you. I'm so used to people being impatient with me and not giving me a chance, and having to fight and scrabble to get anything to happen -- and suddenly, problems are just evaporating; things are giving way. Giving way like a choked river finally creeping through the weeds, then washing stronger until it has its valley back, not like a rotted floor crumbling beneath one's feet. Which, again, is more what I'm used to. It's amazing, and I definitely believe that a lot of people have been wishing me well.

If you have been, or if you would, and you read this, spare some kindness for my father. He's had some kind of infection in his legs that's kept him from work and that isn't responding well to drugs. We're all a little worried and I'd like to see him stick around a while yet.

My immediate plans look like: chocolate milk > sleep > shower > meeting with my advisor (<3) to finalize this thing > send it off > ??? > PROFIT!

I think the ??? is where you come in. :)

Woman at Work

2009-11-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

I must remain single all my days because no one can ever be permitted to see me working. When I'm on a roll, it's like I'm a teenaged guy pwning whatever FPS is the game of the day -- greasy skin, tip of my tongue creeping out between my teeth all lost-looking, vague/semi-vacant grin, and plenty of random "HA!"s and "yeah, motherfucker, damn!"s and "uh-huh"s. I do tea instead of Mountain Dew, but that's really the only difference.

A World Blessed With Cute

2009-11-08T18:47:00.000-05:00

What's the deal with lace knitters hating on seed stitch? I find it infinitely preferable as an edging to garter stitch, but I've yet to see a single lace pattern that recommends using it. Am I missing something? Are my laces all tacky because I use an uncool edging on them?

Charted up the first part of the proposed H.D. shawl and felt very, very, very happy. Why they can't give me a PhD for knitting I don't begin to understand. That's at least as legit as studying Serenity fan fiction. At least.

Tried the custom cupcake bar at Zillycakes today. You may have seen mention of the woman who made the bluescale portrait of Obama in cupcakes and donated them to some of his volunteers? Well! That is Zilly Rosen of local Buffalo fancy-schmancy cake shop Zillycakes, and she made the national news for that. Last February she did a fabulous dual portrait in DC of Obama and Lincoln, too. I had red velvet with their chocolate-orange buttercream and the frosting was -- oh goodness. I'm sure there are districts of Kansas where such treats are illegal. The red velvet cake was far superior to any I've made, too, and I'm at least a decent home baker. Perfect texture. I might indulge in having them make me a birthday cake this year -- they had one on display that had fondant buttons all over it, and where the spacers between the layers were done up to look like they were wound with yarn, and there was more (sugar) sewing paraphenalia for a topper. Adorable! I'm wondering if I could come with with a way to involve knitting/crafts, fountain pens, orchids, and goofy New Age things all on one cake. Probably not. I do think they could do me something pretty wonderful, though, and not, like, a giant multi-tier wedding cake, but just a small cake-sized cake my friends could ooh and aah at before we ate it.

I've been wondering what people who make real money do with it all; I live below the poverty line and still find ways to buy fancy bath/shower items, expensive(ish) yarns to knit with, expensive(ish) fountain pens, freakin exotic orchids from Hawaii, very decent wines, teas so good they should probably be called indecent if tea can be indecent, and more clothes than I need. Friends and I have figured out that the main differences would be that I wouldn't shop as hard for these things and would just get them at normal prices. . . but most people who make, say, $70k annually don't have houses full of trinkets like I do. They also don't seem to travel tons, which would be high on my list of expenditures if I had the means. Do TVs and newer cars really cost that much? What the hell else do you do with that much money if you have it?

App for this fellowship I want is due one week from today and I am far from ready to submit it. FAR. Students' papers may get delayed a bit because, mother of god, it's $25,000. I could make finishing my degree just be my job and stop worrying about so many things that come between me and it. They need the papers back because their last one will be a revision of one of their first two -- but they have a whole other paper to write in the meantime, and both classes seem very mellow and realistic, compared to students I had at UB. Not sure whether they're older, or if it's a feature of DYC's community, or if it's just a fluke with the ones I have this fall, but there's none of the chaotic/neurotic OMG WTF SCHOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL BWAAAAHHH!!!!!! thing I'm used to having to get past to reach students. It would definitely be an understatement to say these kids care -- most of them seem plenty serious about school -- but they don't seem to freak out about things, which of course is very good for them, regardless of whether it also makes my life easier or not. I think if I just tell them, straight up, that I have this massive, crucial goal that must be accomplished this week, and I've been sick as sick, they'll actually understand.

I wonder if that's somehow connected to it being a smaller school? Might write my acquaintances who are at other small schools or have taught at them and see what they think.

Anyway, more things to do than time to do them and while organizing my thoughts in the form of a blog post is indeed helpful, I should probably get back to producing text while my eyes aren't watering.

A shawl like a Christmas-rose.

2009-11-07T03:00:00.000-05:00

I think I'm going to start making shawls in honor of all my favorite women writers. I have most of an idea for one for Edna St. Vincent Millay but it's going to take enough thinking that I won't be starting it tonight. However, tonight, after the school gears wound down, I figured out enough of one for H.D. that I could get through at least the first two skeins of yarn (out of four):

* round shawl
* center medallion from Feather and Fan Shawl / A Gathering of Lace
* spiral spider motif from the body of Cobweb Doily / same book
* shape that into points with a contrasting pattern coming out as a back ground, as in the Cap Shawl / Victorian Lace Today
* not sure what contrasting pattern to use, but thinking a twig pattern of one sort or another
* finish with a border that uses the Harebell pattern with either the Striped Border or Clarence Border pattern added on to the outside, all from Victorian Lace Today

This would use some Araucania Ranco Multy I ordered recently for another project. As is so often the case, the yarn I got was way different from the seller's picture, and not suited for the shawl I wanted to do with it -- it was really cute yarn, though, and I decided not to send it back because I got a good deal and knew I'd find something to do with it. I think the colors are good for H.D., very feminine and also very cool and natural: pink, wine, grey, green.

Fairly certain the answer is "no one."

2009-11-05T20:43:00.000-05:00

If one more person asks me, half-excitedly, whether I have swine flu, I'm intentionally sneezing all over him or her. No. I do not have swine flu, or any type of flu; I have yet to have even a mild fever. And swine flu isn't even as deadly as regular flu, anyway. If it weren't for the evening news, no one would care. I much prefer when we're being made paranoid about more abstract things like global temperature change, or more gruesome things like vCJD.

So anyway, I don't have swine flu but I'm still damned sick and the timing is less than ideal. The fellowship app I want to get in so badly is due on the 15th of this month and I have some major work to do before that can go off. Plus I got a set of student papers on Monday which I've barely glanced at -- and I am very tempted to cancel class tomorrow for illness. Felt better Wednesday morning, had a really fun day accomplishing errandy things, and then late in the afternoon suddenly went back to zero, hard and fast. Seriously considered napping in my car before driving home (I was out in the suburbs), and when I did get here, I went to sleep and stayed in bed for nearly 24 hours.

The worst of this isn't the watery eyes or the cough or the congested head that feels like it's in a vise; the main symptom this cold is hitting me with is stupidity. I send someone a text message, and by the time s/he replies, I've forgotten I sent it. I write a paragraph and when I go back to read it, I have no idea what I was talking about. I go to the store, as I did this evening, and come home with the most random bag of food imaginable -- although I did remember high-octane fancy vitaminned-up juice, which was my main goal. It's like even my neuronal pathways are clogged with snot, I swear. I think I taught pretty well Monday and Wednesday, too, though heaven knows how I pulled it off. I definitely feel more sluggish, physically and mentally, right now than I did Sunday or Tuesday night, and I'm not confident about how much good I can do the kiddies tomorrow. Actually, I'll probably give it another hour and if I'm still this out of it (and I'm not on any medicine at all!), I think I'll have to email them my regrets.

I had a delightful dream today about my dissertation advisor and I stealing a plane, though. I did most the flying and talked to him at some length about how they really shouldn't make these things so easy to fly because it actually made them easier to steal -- if I were ever to steal a plane, and be able to fly it, I'm pretty sure that's what I'd actually say, too. Our destination seemed to be not-America; at first we were going to Ireland, then to Canada, then to Madagascar. Somehow we'd stolen only the outside of the plane; the other passengers and crew were on a smaller plane, headed to safety, that had been inside the one we stole. At some point, a swarthy-looking man came up from nowhere and accosted me, and I overpowered him (hey! it's my dream, these things can happen) and threw him out the door. My advisor and I then had the grand idea to claim that the plane had been hijacked by terrorists all along, and we'd fought them off, with the one guy I actually threw out of the plane taking the blame as the last of them. This way we could go home as heroes; settling on this plan, we did a high-five and I said, "Here's to not going to federal prison!" The control tower got ahold of us, and I handed the mic to my advisor because they seemed suspicious of me. They believed him immediately, though, and so all ended well.

Who else do you know who'd dream about stealing airplanes with her dissertation advisor?

Lament for a maker.

2009-11-01T01:43:00.000-05:00

Spicer's poetry is so god damned hard. We really lost something with him drinking himself to death.

I'm going through My Vocabulary Did This To Me, and working through the poems again is tiring my brain out as though it were scrawny little me bucking bales of hay at age eight, and at the same time creeping me out in the Dickinson top-of-my-head-being-taken-off kind of way. Not like Yeats but like his inverse; as the poems go on, they excavate everything out from under me, and then excavate the air, and then space, and then God, and so on, and it's no small amount reminiscent of sex that's taken both (or all) people completely out of control. Probably similarities to the use of or in this case by hard drugs. Or angels or etc.

"Both of us were object" looks tame after you get through the later work. Not to mention that I continue to have a blazing envy for his ability to title a poem.

Hang it all, Jack. (I guess you did; card zero, real pasteboard.) There was only one of you.

In this case, "the other side" is something like 1 + 1 = 2.

2009-10-30T10:18:00.000-05:00

From BBC news:

The memoirs of one of Adolf Hitler's closest aides could shed new light on the Nazi leader's personal involvement in the Holocaust, media reports say.

Fritz Darges, who has died aged 96, was a member of Hitler's inner circle for four years of the war.

As Hitler's last SS adjutant, he was present for all major conferences, the UK's Daily Telegraph reported.

Historians believe his manuscript could provide key evidence that Hitler ordered the deaths of six million Jews.

If so, it would debunk claims by revisionist historians that the Nazi dictator knew nothing of the Holocaust, the newspaper reported.

Who is giving Holocaust deniers enough credit these days to think their patently wrong views need debunking? Are they the same people scheduling airtime on major news programs for birthers?

Your school should fly me in to do my thing while I'm still cheap.

2009-10-29T13:46:00.000-05:00

Had lunch with a friend the other day who said she had been having allergy troubles. It sounds more like a cold, I kept telling her, and she kept saying she'd been like this before and it was definitely allergies. The next day I woke up with a sore throat, went in to teach, came home, laid down for a nap -- and slept for just about twelve hours. Am now sick as a proverbial dog. Honestly, someone with a cold can drive by me on the street and look at me from behind their rolled-up windows, and I'll somehow get whatever they have. Anyway, I'd pay someone Good American Dollars to go to Wegman's and obtain for me 1.) gallon of Super Skim rGBH-free milk, 2.) a few packets of instant chicken noodle soup (they're no worse than the canned kind!), 3.) a box of kleenex, and 4.) a mini Ultimate Chocolate Cake. I actually only want half the cake, but boy do I want it. The frosting on those things is basically fudge.

Some happier and longer-term news, the Tools of the Sacred conference organizer asked about my book and poetry awards, and asked also if I'd like to be in one of the poetry readings they're apparently putting together as part of the schedule. Holy COW. This will be the first reading from the book that's been unsolicited, i.e. where I didn't have a big hand in setting it up myself, or set it up entirely on my own. And it will be at a major European university, at a scene packed with people who do the same things I do. When did this become the way my days go?