Poem-A-Day #2 : Limelight

Limelight

There's that moment where Charlie Chaplin is dressed as Hitler and he's about to speak at the podium and no one is sure what he's going to say and he doesn't even know if he can speak...

And the obviousness of it - Chaplin the great silent actor about to speak unable to speak fearing what may come out of his mouth...

The other day the students said they disagreed and I stared into the tiny high windows of the classroom and deep within my throat there was a catch a valve or some chord that was in neutral and the sound of the whirring fans in the heating ducts was the sound in my brain and I wanted to flip the table for no other reason than I could...

Each time the words begin there is that moment - who is this person daring to person on this space and who are you to sit there and read this...

It's the saddest metaphor ever phored - a crowd waiting for sound - sonic catching in throats - fists suspended above their heads waiting for a demagogue - the performer insecure as the sky - dressing up to deflect its emptiness...

Poem-A-Day #1 : Quis?

So. I'm doing this again.


Quis?

This box
sealed shiplap painted with tobacco
hinged and watertight

It houses a dead star

Collects the crumbs from a planet
chewed up by dueling black holes
on its surfaces

Bought in the back room of a store run by a blind man
taken into the house of a woman with a third leg

It trembles thinly

A metal sheet punched from an old can
scribbled on with a stick and tossed
into the mouth of a sulphur spring

It is your tongue
ripped from your skull and folded
into an airplane

Lying-ass Song

 ...Some things in this world
Do not depend on speech to be felt.

That is how Terrance Hayes new book, How to Be Drawn*, ends. The lines seem to both soothe and to warn. They are almost a hex.

There is a listlessness in the end of winter. It's like the final days of illness when you are feeling better, have an appetite, even energy. But you are still hacking up phlegm and oozing from your nose. You may go back to work/school/etc. but you will be coughing like death for a few more days.

You might lose your voice.

How does one get back their lost voice?

Hook up a battery to it and jump?

Mid-semester and I am not writing. I'm editing, which is great, let's not get hysterical about this. But I am not producing new. It is easy to blame this on teaching. That I am spending a lot of brain-space on being creative in a different way.

The reality is that I get tired too easily.

I have very specific spaces that I am able to get creative work done in.

Mental and physical.

I need to be rested, but not too rested. Awake, but not over energized that I can't sit. Distracted by my surroundings just enough to go to that imagination place to make weird connections, but not too distracted that I start transcribing the lyrics tot he song playing or start live tweeting the conversations at the next table.

I need to have a jolt of creation, but not a jolt of someone else's energy.

If this all sounds like excuses. Well. It feels that way to me too. But these are the rules that my brain has given for the 'work' to commence.

Lately. It just hasn't.

That isn't to say I am out of ideas. I have mapped out a series of linked short stories. I've reworked bits of the novel-in-never-ending-progress. I organized a chapbook and printed a bunch of poems to try and pin together a manuscript. I even wrote a new poem the other day.

But it doesn't FEEL. And maybe this is a limit of that word. Or of the word 'work' or 'creativity' or or or or or.

I keep waiting to feel like I've turned a corner, or the ball is rolling, or something akin to that absolutely not able to be defined thing.

Maybe I'm waiting to be an 'adult'. Or a 'professional'. Or.

The Hayes quote above ends with this:

Remember too that the eyes are not flesh,
That crisis is initiated by the absence of witness,

That Orpheus, in time, became nothing
But a lying-ass song
Sung for the woman he failed.

It isn't that I am waiting.
It is that I am not sure I ever learned how to feel it when it gets here.


* How to Be Drawn is out March 31 2015 from Penguin

I Do So Well In Chaos...

January was difficult.

Expensive car issues. Prolonged illness. The semester beginning.

I'm choosing to think of it as a late expulsion of all the stress from last year. My body held this toxic mess in for a very long time. It had no choice in the new year but to release.

While staring at my $4000 worth of bills that I've accumulated since Jan 1st, this thought makes it very slightly (very very slightly) better.

Below is the reading list for my lit class - Body Snatchers: The Fragility of Identity. I include it as a means to illustrate where my mind has been.

The Lifespan of a Fact - John D'Agata & Jim Fingal

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

Lose Your Mother - Saidiya Hartman

City of Glass - Paul Auster

Every Day - David Levithan

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

There are a bunch of other readings inserted around these main texts. Those readings have so far included A Million Little Pieces by James Frey and Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. I tend to wing the extra readings. Trying to gauge where the conversation is leading and what the room's interests are.

The class came from a place of being fascinated with the idea of public vs. private faces. How we are different people in different situations.

The mess that was my January isn't fatal, it isn't dire. Being sick for 10 days was not great and I'm still recovering, the car issues are expensive but will work out. All will be well, settled, etc. But it feels connected to the year I had in 2014.

I'm not a super private person. I adhere to the open book style of living. I don't see a benefit in holding cards close. That being said, I don't discuss my private life too much on social media. This is because I've begun to see online as less an extension of my private face and more an extension of my public one.

I think that MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal, etc were at one point a space for close friends to see your thoughts. They were a weird liminal space between private and public persona. Today that is pretty much off the table unless you don't mind being a complete open public person. Some of us seem content to exist in this public/private space. I'm not completely sold on it. But I don't have a child whose every movement I can plaster all over social media. That may sound judgey, and it is, a little, but I really don't care what people do with themselves.

All of this is a round-about way of introducing the idea that 2014 was hard for me. I didn't really deal with that. And it seems to be tied to how my 2015 has begun.

The big thread in all of those books up there? The theft of identity. The stripping of it in various forms. In each of those books there is a kidnapping of sorts. And in each a fallout blankets the lives involved.

2015 is, for better or worse, a year of fallout.

From _ to _

Brian Oliu dared us to do something.

Gawker published a chart of the most used words in pop music by decade. It's oddly psychological. Oddly vague and uneasy to read.

Brian thought we should write poems.

Here is his.

Below is mine.

            From _ to _

There was a moment when the sky opened and you cried uncle

up until not the clouds had kept it all at bay         collapsing into yourself you cried uncle

and the giving was somehow –                   It has begun to rain gems

they tink on the pavement              collect in arroyos       are water blue

Remember when we spoke in phases of the moon

When the children all looked like they were doing a polka

Look    I know that we left you crying in the desert but we were on mushrooms

             – It’s Christmas…

On the radio – baby

                        it’s cold outside woman –

            That song is always creepy              I hate the sound of the word love

What did you see out there when we left you

In the breaking clouds was there a face – did it come for you

stretching into a scream I never believed in – I know it was terrible when we –

We Are

College is a time when you are putting yourself together. In a very real way, it's THE time you are doing this.

I know. 0-5. When the body is literally putting itself together.

What I'm talking about is self-control on the where each thing goes.

A college freshman must (usually) deal with: being alone for the first time, living with non-family, sorting through a schedule on their own, time management, laundry, food, etc.

All while doing the work the classes demand.

Let's not pretend that the college freshman is somehow a blighted individual worthy of our sympathy. While the debt they are taking on is definitely worth a few tears, I won't lose sleep over these new kids joining the already massive crowd - Today more than 40 million of Americans have student debt. That pile of non-existent cash tops out at $1.2 trillion.

This fall I am teaching two sections on identity in America. The classes are basic English 101 deals, with the bonus of me being able to design the reading list.

I could not think of a better topic for incoming freshmen to deal with.

Who we are as a country, as groups, as individuals needles its way into every day life. Into the make-up of the country. Politics, communities, online scandals.

This week we are reading The Gettysburg Address and looking at it for rhetorical devices. It's in prep for the students working on their own analysis paper. Read over the lines I was reminded that the Address was read at the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 2001 terrorist attack in New York. That we, as a country, turned back 138 years for comfort.

And there is something in that about who we are as a people.

That we looked backwards to explain the present.

I'd make some analogy about how the nation at this point in time is like a college freshmen, figuring out how to do laundry and eat properly on our own for the first time. But I think that's obvious.

... Rose ... Rose ... Rose

Gertrude Stein is sexy.

Murmur pet murmur pet murmur.

Push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea.

Those two lines are from 'Sacred Emily'. Later in that poem Stein pens what is her most famous line: 

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Say these lines out loud for a second.

What does 'push sea' sound like? What about the later line:

Cunning is and does cunning is and does the most beautiful notes.

And of course there's this great line from 'This Is The Dress, Aider':

Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.

I mean...

Gertrude Stein is sexy.

She was a Nazi sympathizer and all around narcissist, but sexy as hell.