dead line

This time we really mean it.
I mean, we really mean it.
I know we’ve said it before.
And we’ve also said before that we mean it.
Yeah, there was that time last week.
And that other time a few days ago.
But we bluff you not. This time we mean it.
No joke. No halfway, wishy-washy kind of mean it.
Nope, we’re behind it 100%.
Doubt at your peril!
This is really it.

Yahoo! Questions

There is a pain behind my right eye and why do I have a dog? Why couldn’t I have been a man like my neighbor who has his own black lab, an old dog, who’s slow, and would he be willing to trade him for my apeshit spaceship? Golden Lady is my favorite Stevie Wonder song, that’s easy, but why are we still in Iraq? Is atheism normal? Why do people tempt death running out into traffic to catch the train? The trains here run every five minutes. Every five minutes near my house there’s a squirrel that wants to kill me and why is my daughter so nice and so nosy? I have eaten an expired egg. When will I die?

song of the day: golden lady

immediately sheeped

Monday so far has been very very small. Small morning, small mind, small public urinal behind the train station. I think it has to do with the shortening of the Rhine. Tragic, really. The Rhine.

But Saturday was huge. At an exhibition in Bonn, I fell in love with Erwin Wurm. I did everything he asked. I lay down in a public place and thought of nothing. Balanced a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner on my head and thought about digestion. Climbed into a box.

Wurm is the discoverer of one-minute sculptures. You make them with your body, and then relinquish them. It doesn’t have anything to do with Buddhism. That's one in the photo at right. Oranges.

I stopped to write something down in my notebook. (“The house climbed up to the roof and contemplated jumping off.”)

Museum guard: Writing with a pen is not allowed.
Me: What, in the museum?
Him: Yes.
Me: Why not?
Him: Because if ink gets on the artwork, it won’t come off. There are pencils available downstairs at the desk.
Me: And if pencil gets on the artwork, it’s just as bad if you try to erase it.

I know all about the duty to fight stupidity, but I didn’t pursue it. The exhibition, after all, also concerned absurdity. And he wasn’t being a jerk or anything. Still, you’re not allowed that close to the artwork that you could write on it. If I wanted to damage the artwork, I’d bring my gun, which works from far away.

Anyway, Erwin Wurm. Excellent guy.

Done

When the notebook is full it’s like the tolling of a great gong. BONG! it goes, none too lightly. The notebook sits sodden and heavy and warped. The back cover has fallen off, and the pages run on like a long, hairy pair of knit eyebrows. Boy, there’s a lot of crap in there. You could comb through the scrawl, or you could go bury it in the backyard.

There is something I've been looking for

I feel such hope whenever I walk into a bookshop.
I call this particular hope “Near Eureka.”
Maybe I’ll find the book I’ve been looking for, the book I need.

I don’t know what it’s called or who wrote it or if it’s paperback or hardbound, or if it’s fiction, poetry, art or non-fiction or a big-format book with instructions for building 16 different paper airplanes.

If only I can be attentive enough, I might find it.
It might let me find it.

And that’s why I need time to deep-browse the bookshop, like a cow at pasture.
And that’s why I may end up reading a lot of books.


song of the day: schlummert ein

spring prints

And now a word from our sponsor!
I have some poems coming out in print journals in the next few weeks.

The annual RHINO will publish two of my homebody poems, two of a bunch of poems I’d like to package in a chapbook. RHINO took Steam and sPonge, the latter being about a kitchen sponge, written in the tradition of the wonderful Francis Ponge, a great observer who has brought many inanimate beings, including the baguette, to life. My sPonge begins –
“The sponge comes like a cut of beef, a vivisection rife with pocks and gulches.”

Barn Owl Review 3, out any day now, will publish Unseen, a backyard poem that starts –
“An airplane slices up Sunday
and why do I have to listen?”

Whiskey Island 57 is publishing two poems, Riding Backwards on the Train and To Long Division. I hate long division, and the nightmare returned when my kids hit fifth grade or so, and still hasn’t ended.

As to riding backwards on the train, I personally don’t mind it, but I notice how many people do mind it, and the poem is written from that point of view. It starts: “It’s not unpleasant: perpetual surprise.”

I ride the train every day and don’t mind it, with the exception of the occasional coffee slurper, cell phone chatterer and multiple seat hog. Mostly I like babies, even crying babies, which drop into my life like a surprise test.

Chengdu

Beneath a lean-to teashop,
an abacus clicks in dialect.

On bikes overloaded with parcels,
millions of black slippers spin
into markets, parks and hovels.

Add or extract a body
and the scene careens in unity.

Coal dust falls like pepper,
sticks like echoes, ink, and the talc
of butterflies considered long extinct.

Squat in a bamboo grove
sits the cottage of Du Fu,

master poet of the T’ang,
who wrote everywhere I go, I owe
money for wine.

n.(OFr. riote) wild or violent disorder, tumult, uproar

They don't do verbs or adverbs in dictionary illustrations, and I really must object. I remember being 13 or so and just dying to see an illustration of akimbo, which is an adjective AND adverb and a very cool word. It doesn't seem that hard to depict.

I imagine pinch, point and punch are also easy enough to do, but verbs are apparently tabu.

They do do adjectives. The dictionary is full of shapes, for example, and I appreciate that. Lobate. Sagittate. Obovate. They don't do relative adjectives, though, like long and short. Hell! The dictionary doesn't want to be judgemental.

Mostly they favor nouns, but generally not those denoting ordinary, well-known objects that most people (who spend any time in dictionaries) are familiar with. The manatee trumps the mouse, and gaff outranks the goat. One of my dictionaries, however, has the octopus , the panda and the oboe, which I hope are recognizable in most households. I can only assume these guys are irresistible for illustrators. Irresistible, period. Speaking of goats, I'd like to see a goatee . I personally love the goatee. If I were a dictionary illustrator, I would argue for the goatee.

I wish they'd do abstract nouns, but they don't. I could use help with despair, harm and marriage.
HELP!

I'd also like to see riot done. And meleé.
They should hire Breughel.

On pages 1254-1255 of my old Webster's unabridged, they've got illustrations for opthalomoscope, opinicus, opium poppy, opossum and opposite leaves. I guess all these are useful. I thought all poppies were opium poppies. What do I know.

As Ms. Scarforo used to say: look it up, people!

i fondly remember smoking

In my mouth
I once planted a star,
a crackling white rifle
pinched between a finger
and thumb, stuffed
and rolled
with sumptuous crumbs.

dictionary neighbors: M

menopause - menorah
mensch - menses
menswear - mental
mercy seat - merde
merciless - mercurial
merlot - mermaid


song of the day: bitterblue

day off

walnut grove

If – instead of Arthur Miller – William Faulkner had married Marilyn Monroe, and then had a baby with her, that baby would be the author of this book.

If Walter Cronkite had had long dark hair and shown a penchant for mauve, he could have been the author of this book.

Reading this book is like licking tunafish out of the can.
It’s like whacking a scoop of chunky cherry ice cream with thong underwear.
It’s like a lactating yak springing from a river.

If a hillbilly married his bastard aunt off in a shotgun wedding to a mythical beast, and that beast was not a unicorn, you’d be on page 56 of this book.

If Orwell had been down and out in the town near the Little House on Prairie, disguised as Mrs. Ingalls, that would sort of say what this book says.

This book will augment your bookshelf.

If you like this book, you’ll also enjoy cutting your hair with an exact-o-knife while sucking the cream from Devil Dogs with a straw.

If you went to jail and a guy called Cheebo bought you for 2 packs of Salems and a bottle of prison moonshine and then raped you repeatedly while watching The Days of Our Lives until you had to be hospitalized, that would about equal the denouement of this book.

It’s like Jude the Obscure meets Dracula on crack.

It’s like Yukio Mishima meets Susan Sontag meets Charles Bukowski in a long series of deceptively lyrical sentences.

The colorful, heart-warming characters come to life, and would nearly jump from the page if they didn’t die in the apocalypse.

If John Cleese had been born in South America and raised among monkeys, he could have written this tour de force with his right foot.

If this book had a soundtrack, it would involve the harmonica.

a pass between hills

Some months ago I took up the habit of sitting in my office chair with my right foot tucked up under my left leg. Soon after this we hired Geoff, who says this position is bad for me.

It is a very comfortable position.

*
Forced to choose between pants and trousers, I’ll take slacks. The word drapes so nicely, so casually. It hangs like the jaw of someone very recently amazed.

*
Tonight our exchange student from Moscow arrives. She’s 14 years old and speaks some German. The school has sent along a list of instructions. “Russians like to eat bread,” it says. “They sometimes have to be cajoled into taking second helpings.”

*
Speaking of cojones, my son and daughter need to be soldiered into practicing piano. I have always been a spoon, at most a ladle. I make a terrible sergeant, but I try.

*
Song of the Day: 70 Million

Feng Shui

When the bridge between east
and evening lies down to die

and the rain drops as freight
unevenly among the doomed,
I decorate my mind with drapes,

untie the silk ropes and tassels
that cinch them back

and appoint my room with jewels
looted from the later dynasties.
I am among immortals!

Still, there’s just so much
one soul can rearrange.

Also the river tires of coursing.
And the earth gets fed up
wth the burdens put on furniture.

When like most of us
the clouds have had enough
of bunching up and sundering,

I get on my bike,
circle three times the ditch
identified as best for resting

and fall asleep
head first.

aunt jemima in a bottle

Thursday, sliding into the homestretch, I find is a good day to link together my elongated thoughts. All the time I spent thinking them; all the work spinning them out past the point of what seemed a decent and natural death. It’s not Wednesday and not Sunday. I might be tired but it’s too early to give up. I link them together like a paper chain of dolls. Here’s the drawn-out thought about dangerous dogs with bad masters. The poetry in numbers. The plan I nursed about making a deserved prank phone call: Is your refrigerator running? / Do you have Prince Albert in a can? / The police got your number. . . Like Grandpa Decker used to say when Nana passed him with a plate of too-chewy beef, potatoes, gravy and peas – “I’ll mush it all up together. It’s all going to the same place.”


song of the day: the godfather theme, acoustic

march sunsets

1) 6.07 2) 6.09 3) 6.10 4) 6.12 5) 6.14 6) 6.15 7) 6.17 8) 6.18 9) 6.20 10) 6.22
11) 6.23 12) 6.25 13) 6.27 14) 6.28 15) 6.30 16) 6.31 17) 6.33 18) 6.35
19) 6.36 20) 6.38 21) 6.39 22) 6.41 23) 6.43 24) 6.44 25) 6.46
26) 6.47 27) 6.49 28) 7.51 29) 7.52 30) 7.54 31) 7.55

elsa

I was checking out an actress’s website the other day and her profession was listed as “actor.”

I’m sad about the widespread extinction of the –ess suffix. It clung to female thespians for a long time, but seems increasingly absent. “Actor” sits so awkwardly on women. I’d insist on “actress.” To be honest, I’d prefer to be a poetess, but that died out long ago. Ditto sculptress. And among the –ess words now dying an institutionalized death are waitress and stewardess. By that I mean society seems determined to kill them.

“Hello, my name is Jane and I’ll be your server tonight.”
“Flight attendants! Please be seated!”

Some believe they’re being forced out in the name of equality, but I don’t buy the argument that –ess is a “sexist” suffix. There’s nothing demeaning about it unless you enter the equation with a sexist attitude to begin with. If you google postmistress, you’ll get Wikipedia telling you it’s been dropped in favor of postmaster, which “has no gender quality.” Which is a lie. Master has no "gender quality?" Isn’t it a worse chauvinism to have to give up your true calling for the masculine version? Couldn’t we all change to the feminine version?

I think the feminization of professions/roles is an enhancement of the relevant words, and the shift away is a linguistic impoverishment. Is “Diana the Huntress” the same as “Diana the Hunter?” It doesn’t have to be just –ess; other forms are also lovely. For example, as if the word connoisseur weren’t beautiful enough, think of Sharon Olds’ “connoisseuse of slugs.”

I know I can’t stop language from changing, and luckily there are some words in which the –ess suffix appears fossilized. No one seems ready, for instance, to give up temptress and adultress, which pack more wallop than their male (generic) counterparts ever could. And the -ess is also permanently parked at the end of stately titles like baroness, empress, countess, princess, and the magical professions of enchantress, goddess, sorceress and priestess. If you can break into those fields, your femininity is safe.

Knochen

We're going to see The Lovely Bones today. I read the book, appropriately, on a trip to Disney World about 6-7 years ago. Despite the fact that I didn't want to like it, I actually did like it. Until about halfway through. Then it deteriorated in disneyesque fashion. I rated it "schlock" on Good Reads, but must confess I went back a couple months ago and upgraded my one star to two because I gave the book to my daughter and didn't want her to think I'd given her a book I found stupid. (She's on Good Reads, too.) Honestly, for 13-year old girls I think it's probably a totally cool book. Anyway, I fully expect to dislike the movie, but to cry my eyes out despite my better judgement, because I am unfortunately very susceptible to sap and schlock, being hormonally and emotionally at sea, as only a melancholy, middle-aged, overtaxed, sentimental ex-pat keeper-of-the-motherly flame can be.

Song of the day: Eric the Half a Bee

Fish Heads

I didn’t have any acceptances in my inbox this morning.
But I didn’t have any rejections in there either.
Somebody did send me a WC Williams poem.
THE WC Williams poem, ie "This Is Just To Say."

This is just to say I never particularly liked that poem.
And the worldwide frenzy for it only turned me off more.

Why didn’t somebody send me this poem instead?
Either that or some fish oil supplements.


Song of the day: Raindrops

it's hard to overlook

the lust in slut
the broth in brother
the boom in bosom
the zoo in floozy
those torches in the orchestra

farewell, sapocalypse

“As the Olympic Cauldron is lit – the unique magic of the Olympic Games will be released upon us.

Magic so rare that it cannot be controlled by borders –

The kind of magic that invades the human heart touching people of all cultures and beliefs –

Magic that calls for the best that human beings have to offer –

Magic that causes the athletes of the world to soar -- and the rest of us to dream.

Tonight – here - in the glow and wonder of the Flame -- we can all aspire to be Olympian . . .


(From the opening ceremony. Italics mine.)

tinnitus

in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano
in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano
in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano
in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano
in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano
in the next room
they’re slowly strangling the mezzo soprano

Joe

In the first chapter, the author could give a general description of what an average guy would do throughout a complete day.

An average guy wouldn’t walk into a Phoenix coin shop on September 5th, request information about purchasing $154,000 in gold bullion and present his brother’s passport.

An average guy would never dare to contact a successful businessman to present him with an idea he believes in. An average guy would see a tank with a lot of nifty plants and say “why’s it so overgrown and green?”

If you’re standing next to an average guy, you’re not really scared of him. But Jesus would look just like an average guy – wouldn’t be anything special about His appearance. He’d buy light bulbs or a new screw for a hinge just like any average guy would do.

An average guy would not want to date a very bright woman. In short an average guy would be effectively destroyed by this. An average guy would be airlifted straight to the hospital.

An average guy would break you split you up would break you a million times more than a relationship with the troubled guy with the guy who’s troubled. An average guy would bash the thing’s head in with his fist to free himself.

He would make haste to the boss lady, and ask to mercifully cut out the crap that is Char Siew, and make the chicken smaller size, like how an average guy would normally have his chicken.

The best advice for an average guy would be to only wax or pluck the hair that extends way past what seems to be the normal eyebrow range.

I wondered for a long time how an average guy would cope with a world of Lovecraftian horror. An average guy would give you his limbs for submission, and the fight would be over fairly quick.

Shaker

Winter was salt.
Salt in the road.
Salt in the snow.
Salt in the throat.
Salt like no tomorrow.

room enough, and time

What I like about February is how short it is. In Germany most people receive a monthly rather than a weekly or bi-weekly paycheck, so from the employee point-of-view, February is a bargain. Soon after, though, March seems like a lugubrious slog.

I woke up to new snow but even as I took the dog out for her morning tramp the pocks of treedrip were marking the snow.

I think it’s over now. Snowtime, I mean.

Let all the rain come! I got a thirsty new purse.

a whole sunset on my head

I’ve been lucky so far this year book-wise. I read Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, which I liked much more than I expected. I hadn’t intended to read it, but my mother had it along at Christmas and left it here. I thought, oh yeah, more literary obscurity from the Nobel Prize folks, but her writing is great. The book is peppered with sentences like this: “On my way home I was carrying a nutria fur cap in my hand and a whole sunset on my head.” (p. 184)

I also read Chris Bachelder’s Bear v. Shark. A few pages in I thought I was going to hate it, being largely a poke at an over-the-top media-drenched society. But it was hilarious. And it answered all sorts of important questions, like “do the Dutch have a culture?” and “does a shark have a neck?”

The first book I finished this year was John Banville’s The Sea. I didn’t like it as much as Athena, but still, he’s an incomparable prose stylist. I’d like to say Banville is a marvel at describing characters, but in fact he’s a marvel at describing everything, from a breeze to a dog’s hind leg.

As for poetry, I have yet to have my socks knocked off but I did hugely enjoy Howie Good’s 5-poem ebook Pig/Iron. You can read it here for free! I can be a hard sell on prose poetry, although I write it myself, and though I didn’t like the first poem that much, I was convinced by the second that I was in good hands.

Now I’m reading Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms, and can only say I’m more than impressed. May I say I feel less alone in the world? May I say “The miracle worker was very tall?”

I guess it sounds like blue skies&black coffee but I’ve read some so-so stuff, too, including some poetry I couldn’t even begin to understand and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which annoyed me and weirdly enough is on the (in)famous list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Goes to show that books need a decade to stew before being propelled to “classics" status.

ghost stories

When I try to speak French, Italian spooks me,
less the form than the mood of it, the flighty rise and ebb.
*
People talk about phantom limbs, but rarely of the phantom itch.
The itch occurs, but what’s under it?
*
The song in my head this morning, a song I didn’t know I liked.
*
The parts haunt the sum.
The choir in the ostrich.
The goon in kangaroo.
*
Illness is a kind of haunting, too.
Of behavior, maybe, or a ghost in the genes.
*
The typewriter, too, is not extinct. It lives on
in street work, factories, rivers, in feet descending stairs.
My father’s boxy black one.
My electric Brother.
*
“Haunt” refers to a place a man can frequently be found.
He occupies it, fills, inhabits it, looking for something
he’ll never come home with.
*
In the house without children, the mind fills with children.

accidentally like a martyr

It’s a sure thing that by noon everyone has thought at least once of death, if not their own directly, then indirectly and subconsciously, since every death draws that line.

N. was confronted with it first thing in the morning, when she switched on the radio.

P. got a glimpse of it when two teenagers rushed across the street to catch the bus. Alongside the tension, he resented it, as if the boys had dragged him out into the traffic, too. (The boys managed not to be hit by a car.)

T., W. and Wm., and everyone else who went through the train station saw it on the front page of the newspaper.

U. read about a character’s suicide in the chapter she finished on the subway to work.

O., the office hypochondriac, thought of it at least three times, always directly and without embellishment.

S. put it out of his mind when he killed a couple fruit flies in the kitchen, which he considered his right to do.

E. had to deal with it when he read about the Georgian luger who crashed, and again when he saw a photo of the mother mourning, and wondered if death would have her, too.

i heart chinese

Happy Valentine's day.

Ambrosia

Sometimes when I read poetry book blurbs I find the ingredients that go into the book funny.

Take Circle by Victoria Chang, for example:
“Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.”

Wow, huh? It’s like a recipe for some crazy salad.

“In a poignant body of work that releases us from the dungeon of routine while casting an unflinching glance at our inextricable connection to the Greek classics, Ambrosia combines one container of Cool Whip with walnuts, shredded coconut, pineapple chunks, mini marshmallows, maraschino cherries, mandarin slices and a dollop of sour cream.”

A Walk Through the Memory Palace

This is the current stop on the virtual tour of A Walk Through The Memory Palace by Pamela Johnson Parker, sponsored by Read Write Poem. The chapbook is a steamy one, full of hot weather and heat-slick slugs, sexual desire, family relationships, the body and iced tea. It teems with color and flora, and I almost wished I’d read it in summer rather than a German snowstorm. Parker is a poet obviously entranced by sound, hepped up on nature and attuned to emotion.

I went two ways on the collection. There was a lot that I enjoyed, including many images and the use of sound. I appreciated the subject matter and I admired the craftmanship, its attention to linebreaks and structure. On the other hand, there were a couple things that weren’t my cup of meat. I’ll touch on them later. And, before I go on, you should know there’s a marvelous website devoted to this book, where you can not only read the poems but also listen to the poet read. Do that.

The first striking image in the book occurs in the first poem, 78 RPM. Here, an adolescent couple, sometimes chaperoned by an aunt, are hanging out on the porch listening to music. The poem is slow, in a good way, also because it’s hot out, and there’s an audible undergurgle of teenage longing, and all the senses are engaged. Halfway through, there’s a suggestive image of the needle as it drags along the vinyl record.

“The stylus traces
Its sapphire finger

Down the record’s groove,
As he skates a single
Finger along the sun-

Bleached down of your
Arm”

Not that y’all wouldn’t have gotten it, but these lines clearly evoke the vagina, like a fuzzy groove in a record, like a closed purse about to be plumbed, and BOOM! it is a very sexy poem.

My favorite poem in the book is probably Breasts, the last one. Actually, I’d usually scrunch my nose up at a poem about breasts, the poor things have been so romantized and adored and exploited for literary purposes. Parker doesn’t ignore the symbolic baggage of breasts – nurturers, sirens, cancer factories – but she handles the subject well, and in all those guises. The poem is broken into six parts - Figures A to F –each segment prefaced like a text book illustration, as in “Figure D. Table showing statistical survey of definite tendency toward the development of breast cancer among family members.”

Figure A shows a woman inspecting her breasts in a mirror. It’s an intimate shot, adoring but respectful. Very tactile, very sensual. Figure B is similar, showing a woman examining her breasts laid back in bed with the fingers circling the breast “inward like a nautilus,” an image I liked a lot.

Figure C is the absence of breast after a masectomy. The body in this segment comes across as hide, as material, a bother, a wound. The scars are like zippers and the chest is disturbingly nippleless.

Figure D harks back to childhood where a girl observes her grandmother’s wobbly breasts, and is glad to be yet undeveloped. But the tree from which she observes is “weighted down with a pearly spray of bloom,” and the child shakes the branches knowing some day she’ll “sag like gran.”

Figure E is my favorite part of the poem. The subject is the speaker’s boyfriend, a pathologist working in cancer research. I like this segment for its distance, its clinicicity and it’s humorous last line, where the boyfriend tells the speaker, “You’ve got great lungs.”

Figure F has the speaker up late nursing her daughter when she gets a call from her sister with the news the sister has breast cancer. This is the emotional apex of the poem and the book and, while it packs a punch, I would have liked it served up more subtly. As it’s written, the speaker learns of her sister’s cancer while clutching her baby to her breast... Nevertheless, I liked “Breasts.” It’s an honest poem that works like a 360 degree examination.

Parker pays close attention to sound, and, regarding structure, is an impressive craftswoman. If I have a quibble with the book, it’s that sometimes it reaches too far for me for what is traditionally considered “poetic,” for example with alliteration, such as the “feathering fronds of seafern” in the poem “Engendering.”

In the same way it brings scrolls of beautiful language, which, while pleasurable, don’t seem to serve to convey much beyond themselves. The poem “Unreal Gardens with Toads in Them” begins “Today’s listless, nothing to / enumerate — no light / in its hues of jade, and no white- / green heads of hydrangea, / no dark hearts of redbud leaves, / no celadon of the sun- / lit maples, no sea-green treefrog’s / back with each inclusion / of amber and topaz (though he’s / never seen the sea, why / not sea-green?), no silver-tipped spears of lavender now / poking up in the herbal bed —“

By that point, I wanted a reference point and lacked it. This is all, of course, a matter of personal taste. Parker’s chapbook took first place in Quarrtsiluni’s Chapbook Contest, judged by Dinty Moore. As it says in Moore’s blurb, “this poet sees through the obvious to something radiant on the other side, painting a startling portrait of an intimate world.”

All the info on this tour can be found here, including past reviews and those upcoming.

minimalism

**

almost amazing grace

"Chris Allen, the aide who sat alone in the car with Sanford as he spoke to his furious wife on the phone, told CNN in an e-mail Friday that the drive to Columbia was 'awkward, emotional, almost fictitious, and at this point a blur.'" (CNN)

I must admire the invention of “almost fictitious” here. It’s completely screwed up, but delightful. I think he must have meant “almost unreal.” Of course if the drive is now "a blur," I don't know how one could judge it to be fictitious or not fictitious. Still, I’m going to steal the expression, since “almost fictitious” makes a great description.

I have an almost fictitious love of Puccini.
I spent an almost fictitious weekend in Rome.
My grasp of the situation is almost fictitious.
By ten o'clock, the evening was almost fictitious.

I think this is the expression many book reviewers have been searching for to describe that new animal, the embellished memoir.

Rattle

It’s my dad’s birthday – 75 today. He was born in Scranton, PA, but lived most of his life in NJ before moving to Santa Fe over a decade ago. He loves it there. I love it there, too. My dad and I have a lot in common. Neither of us is a terribly enthusiastic person. We both had kind of unhappy childhoods, his worse than mine. We both like elaborative humor. Neither of us is into horseback riding. He writes. I write. I hope my dad lives forever. Thanks to my brother Thatcher for letting me use this photograph of pops dressed as a skeleton.

Here's a found poem from one of my father's emails.
*****************************
I had a dream Saturday night
you were abducted by gypsies.
You were very young, like in kindergarten,

and we were traveling somewhere. June came
to tell me some people were taking you away.
I saw a group of men and women walking away and one

of them was pulling you in a little red wagon.
By the time I caught up with them they’d gone
into a house but two of the group, two

men, were standing outside. I said I had come
for my daughter, I had to have her
because we were leaving tomorrow –

this wasn’t true, but I thought I needed a reason
to get you back. One of the men asked how
late do you let her stay up?

I figured he was stalling me while the others left
with you by another door or hid you somewhere
and so I started for the door,

and I looked in – the door had windows in it.
It was a frightening dream.
But June said it was about poetry.

spacemanship

The snowstorm has been irresponsible, and now the snow sits thawing on the lawn, nursing mud. From the window, all I can see is mud, smashed-up grass and the last patches of snow.

Stare long enough and the earth is more like a photograph of the earth from outer space - the water, wispy clouds and continents that we know so intimately from tv.

song of the day: la vie en rose

not the crown but the tiara

The Literary Bohemian told me this morning that my piece "Attending the Tasting" has been selected for Best of the Web 2010. Thanks to the editors there for nominating my writing, and congratulations to them, too, as they had three pieces selected for the anthology. Not shabby!

I actually shuffled my links yesterday and "Attending the Tasting" is over there at the top if you'd like to read it. It's about wine. In generous quantities.

if a body meet a body

I haven’t said anything about the death of JD Salinger, who gave us The Catcher in the Rye. It’s practically uncool to like this book, being so conformist, but alas, I love it. I haven’t said anything about his death because, 1) in effect, for our purposes, it’s as if he passed away a long time ago, and 2) I figure lots of people love The Catcher in the Rye their own selves and it’s presumptuous of me to go expounding about it like an enormous selfish baby.
*
Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. p. 141.
*
It’s been snowing like mad here. Lovely, and yet almost like being blessed too much. Not to complain. On the way home it was even snowing inside the tram. It was dark out and I thought it might be a trick of the streetlights or a reflection in the window. I closed my eyes tight and opened them. Closed them again and opened. Nope. It was snowing in the tram. All I had to do was look at my black sleeve and see the snowflakes land and turn to water beads. Somewhere a window or vent was open and it was snowing in the tram, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it, and besides there was a toddler in the next car making a racket and that was kind of distracting.
*
People never notice anything. p. 9.
*
Over at Good Reads, one of the groups I’m in has a thread on foreign words. For today, mine was the German word “Brustwarze,” which literally means “breast wart.” Translated into English it’s “nipple.”
*
I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact. p. 63.
*
Song of the day: Lived in Bars
*
I'm not kidding, some of these very stupid girls can really knock you out on the dance floor. You take a really smart girl, and half the time she’s trying to lead you around the dance floor, or else she’s such a lousy dancer, the best thing to do is stay at the table and just get drunk with her. p. 70.
*
I'm taking down the part about my sad review, lest it be misconstrued. I'll leave up the Salinger quote, though.
*
I was still sort of crying. I was so damn mad and nervous and all. ‘You’re a dirty moron,’ I said. ‘You’re a stupid chiseling moron, and in about two years you’ll be one of those scraggy guys that come up to you on the street and ask for a dime for coffee. You’ll have snot all over your dirty overcoat, and you’ll be – ‘ Then he smacked me. I didn’t even try to get out of the way or anything. p. 103.
*
Another funny thing my Purple Haze brother used to do at 13 or thereabouts was buy two copies of books he really liked. Of course we all rolled our eyes at him, but I have to admit it made sense in a way, and maybe I was a little jealous of what a lunatic he was. The Catcher in the Rye was one of those books, the duplicate copies right next to each other on the shelf.
*
“Perhaps you know my son, then, Ernest Morrow? He goes to Pencey.”
“Yes, I do. He’s in my class.”
Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pency, in the whole crumby history of the school. He was always going down the corridor, after he’d had a shower, snapping his soggy old towel at people’s asses. That’s exactly the kind of guy he was.
“Oh, how nice!” the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice and all. I must tell Ernest we met,” she said. “May I ask your name, dear?”
“Rudolf Schmidt,” I told her. p. 54

sync in progress

So weird I've been having John Martyn songs pop into my head the past couple days and I just checked and he died a year ago yesterday. Such a talent. Adding a couple of his songs to the iPotty today. This video is nothing special, but "Fine Lines" is a great song.

I think I said this a year ago, but when I was in China in the late 80's, someone left behind a cassette tape of John Martyn, but without any song list or identification. I had no idea who the artist was. But since "May You Never" was on it, I was able years later -through the miracle of google- to find out. Of course, I thought John Martyn was covering Eric Clapton, not the other way around.

(Thanks for reminding me, Bob.)

beeline

Why would anyone even try to follow "a train of thought?" Trains move fast. You couldn’t chase after it on foot. You’d need a car, although there’s probably no road alongside, so you’d need a horse, and a pretty quick one.

Doesn’t it seem like the expression would be better as “a trail of thought” or “a track of thought?” More doable and probably more interesting, too. If you see animal tracks in the snow, it makes you want to follow them, right? Which animal is it? Where does it live? Even if it’s a bird and doesn’t live on the ground, it’s still a treat to see the scrawl and imagine the hop.

But a train. I do like to see trains go by. If it's a subway train, sometimes I cover my ears.
Still, you shouldn’t follow a train, you should get on it.

Maybe the expression should be “I am on your train of thought.”
“I am comfortably seated on your train of thought.”
“Riding on your train of thought, I can see the mountains!”

Are You Experienced

When my step-brother Shane was little, one day he claimed the Jimi Hendrix song Purple Haze was his favorite song. He must have been about seven. The rest of us kids, a couple of years or so older, made sure to remind him that he had never actually heard Purple Haze. Still, Shane was very firm about it. Even so, he said, Purple Haze was his favorite song, and he was sure hearing it would only confirm that.

We had a good snicker about that. Poor Shane, what a dope!

And yet over the years I’ve also suffered from Purple Haze syndrome. Even before I’ve read a book, I’m sure it’s going to be essential. Or I hear of a poet I’ve yet to read, and I’m sure they’re about to become my favorite poet. Or a restaurant I’ve never been to, a dish I’ve never eaten, a song I’ve never heard. A career, a country, a movie, a moisturizer.

I think I’ve only ever been disappointed.

And that’s why the Purple Haze phenomenon is important.

It’s the hope, stupid.

red reminds me

Some books I ordered came today, finagling a positive end to what wasn’t a great week.

WS Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius
Robert Shearman’s Tiny Deaths
Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls
Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions
Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest
Chris Bechelder’s Bear v. Shark
Laynie Browne’s The Scented Fox
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

A couple of these are true whim purchases. For instance I knew exactly nothing about Tiny Deaths and Bear v. Shark before I saw them lauded somewhere and spontaneously decided they’d save my life. (My mother got me an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday late last year – still $24 to use up...)

On the other hand, I’ve been waiting to get a copy of Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, and what do you know but whoever it was that the poet gave this book to as a gift (the Mims? - the handwriting is not clear), it now belongs to me with Manning’s signature in the front cover.

“To Ted and Sandra Mims,
With appreciation,
Maurice Manning
March 5, 2004.”

This is the third time I got lucky with a signed copy in an online used book transaction. The others were an Elaine Equi book, and the novel The Art Lover by Carole Maso. This is another reason to love used books - you never know what you'll find inside. A bookmark. Old opera tickets. A profession of love. Some helpful thing.

To God

"If you have formed a circle to go into,
Go into it yourself and see how you would do."

William Blake

winter morning misanthropy

Our snow is gone, which is sad. Our slush is also gone, which is good. Not gone are those tiny pebbles they throw on the sidewalk to keep folks from slipping. These are legion, and mostly stuck in people’s shoes where they scratch across the floor of the subway car when the lazy shuffle in, just to annoy me.

let's spit on what we loved

The ReadWritePoem tour stops at Jill Crammond Wickham's blog, where there's a very kind review of my chapbook. Thank you! There have been a couple other reviews as part of the tour recently, which you can also read here and here. I appreciate ReadWritePoem's arranging the virtual tour. A lot.

Speaking of ReadWritePoem , this week they're talking about knock-out first lines of poems. I did something similar last year for first lines of novels, but the first line of a poem is even more important. I chimed in with mine, but here's a fuller list, which I may add to.

"My chest wants and does not want its color" Cesar Vallejo - untitled poem

"How much 14 there has been in existence!" Cesar Vallejo's Anniversary

"At last you are weary of this ancient world" Guillaume Apollinaire's Zone

"My love is building a building" ee cummings

"supposing i dreamed this)" ee cummings

"When I went out to kill myself, I caught / a pack of hoodlums beating up a man" James Wright's Saint Judas

"The whole town has come into my room" Philippe Soupault's Horizon

"Brave as a postage stamp" Philippe Soupault's Sporting Goods

"You do not do, you do not do / Anymore black shoe." Sylvia Plath's Daddy

"Let's spit the two of us let's spit / on what we loved" Louis Aragon's Poem to Shout in the Ruins

"Sky of a hanged man, is it going to rain" Benjamin Péret's Song in the Time of Drought

"Since you ask, most days I cannot remember" Anne Sexton's Waiting to Die

"I want the water to go on without its bed" Lorca's Ghazal of the Terrifying Presence

Please chime in if you have a favorite first line(s).

Aloft and found

I find the department store ladies who want to spritz you with perfume menacing. Sometimes they don’t wait for you to say yes or no, they just start squirting. These ladies are required to be very made-up and lipsticked, and wear high heels. They’re scary. And armed with something potentially awful.

I don’t spritz perfume directly on my skin. I spray it in front of me and dash through the mist. I call this the lion-through-the-hoop method of perfumery. Subtle, no? Sometimes I spray it straight up towards the ceiling, close my eyes and let it fall on me. I haven’t got a name for this. My husband laughs. Apparently there’s a joke about the Italian police doing the same thing. I don’t get this joke.

My perfume is Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. I like pretty much all the Guerlains, in fact, but there’s gluttony to think about. Today at the store I spritzed myself with Mitsouko, a fragrance that reminds me of almonds crushed in warm milk. I think that’s what it is. I could concoct it at home. Ignore all that talk about bergamot and oakmoss.

Another scent I like is garlic being sautéed in oil. And gasoline. Bacon. Cake baking. Campfire. Marijuana, too, though I abstain. Also the smell of those mimeographs that have become obsolete.

now you try

I tried lying on my back, but sleep would not have me.
I tried fetal position, left side, then right, but sleep would not have me.
I tried sleeping on my stomach with my right foot dangling off the bed, but sleep was not buying.
I tried the pharmacopoeia nesting snug under the childproof, but sleep was not fooled.
I tried holding my arms & legs in the air until they were exhausted. No go.
I tried feng shui brain,
yoga brain,
rack and pinion brain,
and brain of the fat shambling Buddha.
I tried breathing through my mouth.
I tried not breathing.