Teacher: "Quick come up with an excuse other than 'I overslept.' "

Student: "Yes."

No more ESL teaching for the next month. I have about 15-20 hours a week of online teaching, as well as a few professional development things I need to do, but that still amounts to significantly less work than normal. I actually really enjoy teaching ESL, but it's also exhausting, so it's nice to take a break from it every six months or so.

I'm going to typeset Terminal Humming and give a copy again to a few folks to look over--at this point, many people have read it and given me advice about the poems and order, but now I need help catching really nitty-gritty things typos and word choice mix ups. Loose/lose, for example is one that I make constantly. Basically, I make the same annoying word choice errors that my students do--that's probably obvious to anyone who reads this blog regularly. I can catch 95% of those errors after very attentive proofreading, but the rest--no chance.

Mom, I couldn't reach you by phone,

but I dedicated all my handstands and back bends to you today.

But I'm way too fried to tell you about them.

I bought a bike today, then graded and graded. I'm nearly done grading, but I have one final batch of ESL essays to do tomorrow.

As of this Tuesday, the next four weeks are mine for writing and making art things and going to poetry events and giving readings and spending time with friends and on the beach. Even if I only do 1/8 of what I have planned, I'll be extremely happy.

Other things are happening and being thought, by me and others.

The bike is awesome. Awesome doesn't do it justice.

Lies lies lies

I don't hate grading. I just hate it when I have to grade a lot in a short period of time. To a deadline. In a specified format.

I can probably scrounge to cover the legal fees myself.

If I had any capital at all now, I'd buy this apartment in Roses on the Costa Brava. Close enough to Barcelona, close enough to Toulouse, about 300K less than less than the cost of a tiny apartment here in North County, and probably more rentable.

Please let me know if you would like to donate a mere $138,000 to my cause. That would cover the cost of the property.

11 hours of it in the past two days alone.

Argh. So. Much. Grading.

Today I am Little Lord Summerfield

Wearing overalls and pointing at the boats, mournfully.

Important Updates

I have decided to not get my hair cut short. Instead, I will grow it long(er) again and consider bangs.

My Life as Gilgamesh

I’m continuing to think about binaries, specifically gender binaries, and, yes, still in the context of Alma, although this post is going to noodle quite a bit. Basically, I grew up with some of the gender binaries that were important to certain kinds of 70s feminism—the kind of pop Feminism that celebrates and emphasizes woman’s connection to the earth, aboriginal peoples, and children. (Ah, even writing that sentence makes me want to leap out of my skin!) So, despite the many non-normative aspects of my childhood, no one was really overturning gender binaries. There was a lot of earth mother love though.

I received a pretty steady diet of hippie aesthetics and values as well as Western mythology growing up. Most of my friends came from global nomadic families, like mine, or else they were hippies (some wealthy, some genuinely not) who moved to Maine to establish communes and farm with various levels of success and failure. I lost touch with one particular high school friend after he graduated because he went to live in a teepee somewhere and was impossible to locate. Lao, if you’re reading this, drop me a line if you’re so inclined!

I moved around a lot as a child, but for several years I went to a Waldorf-inspired school in Blue Hill, Maine called the Bay School. Although the school now has an amazingly beautiful campus, when I went there, most of the classrooms were in a converted barn. We began everyday by lighting a candle and singing, reciting poetry, or playing musical instruments in what we called “opening circle.” I studied all of Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman mythology. The only science I remember was the history of science—the Copernican revolution, Pythagoras, and stuff like that. I learned how to knit, and crochet, and how to weave on a loom. Although they didn’t do this at the time when I was there, during the third week of May every year, the fifth grade participates in a Greek Pentathlon with other Maine Waldorf schools “as a celebration of the harmonious nature of that age.”

It’s really too bad I didn’t study Sappho when I was learning to weave (that was in high school), because then I could have sung “O sweet mother, I cannot work the loom,” while working. Except that I probably wouldn’t have felt the perverse delight about it that I certainly would now.

It’s because of the Bay School, in part, that I can enjoy reading the section in Isadora Duncan’s My Life where she describes going to Greece in order to build a Greek temple. In retrospect, that section of the book is hilarious—she performs dances among the ruins and wears togas, all while being laughed at and at times cheated by the nearby villagers.

In yoga the other day, my teacher told us to imagine ourselves as maypoles—calm and steady while people were dancing all around you. Except that I actually do know how to dance around a maypole to create different weaving patterns. And a maypole is a big phallic symbol. So the whole class I kept on thinking that I didn’t want to imagine myself as a phallic symbol, and I don’t want to imagine myself as the happy child in floral dancing barefoot around the phallic symbol. Instead, I imagined the dead cat I’d seen on the road that morning.


And only a few days ago, I drew a picture of a maypole on the white board in my ESL classroom with little smiling stick figures holding attached ribbons, and tried to explain about dancing around a Maypole. My class of mostly Korean and Japanese 20-somethings looked at me, blankly. Finally, one young woman said. “That is strange.” And I said, “Most Americans do not know how to dance around a Maypole. Yes, it is strange.” Then I taught a lesson on conditionals (my favorite grammar!) The largest events at the Bay School were seasonal festivals. Apple fest in the fall, Nowell in winter, and May Day in the spring.

I like to make fun of the Bay School, but I’m so glad I went to school there and not in the suburbs. So very very very very glad. My education was better, and I was spared some of the hidden physical and emotional violence that comes with living in the suburbs. My teachers were amazingly intelligent and creative (and that bio doesn’t mention all the years Charles Hutchison, my 5th grade teacher, spent with Greenpeace); and many of them had very non-normative ideas about what success meant. My 6th grade teacher, for example, spent ten years of her life living in Hawaii, working as a waitress and surfing. I was a pretty uptight young kid, so I despised her and thought she was stupid while she was my teacher—what driving, intelligent person would want to hang out in Hawaii and surf? Now, of course I’m grateful that my adult role models weren’t all suggesting that I needed to grow up and become a doctor or a lawyer.

It wasn’t exactly a feminist curriculum, though, and why would it have been, I suppose, given the context. Given all the earth mother rhetoric, I’m surprised that I never developed the strong desire to have children—I’ve got the farm fantasy down, but not the baby fantasy. Still, I absorbed fairly classical masculine/feminine binaries. At the same time, though, I was allowed to play with being one or the other.


There were never any female heroines in any of the school plays, but I did get to enact the role of Gilgamesh in our end of the year 5th grade play. As Gilgamesh, I got to spurn the love of my best friend, J--, who was Ishtar. There’s a lot of gender tension and weirdness in that moment to unpack: I played the hero of a story that describes conquering the savage or feminine wilderness. I tame Enkidu, the beast in the desert, then love and spurn Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. After loosing my chance for immortality, I return home and build a walled city and write my story on the walls. How classically masculine is that?

No no no. No!

The third section of Alma is called "Guardian of the Earth." Still, this moment from the poem "Crudites of Enlightenment":

"thousand-armed. the one female version, a not-quite-deity, is always a principle of mercy. the mother fuckin' mother. are we merciful?" (140)

and this

"i live in negative space with all the dead women, whose potential erased while they lived i seek to restore, via the vengeance of language and the spreading of a message of pure negativity. the unveiling of light in our owl-like faces at midnight. i am enlightened and we are, i can say anything i want to. i am saved and we are, because i say so not to you. do you know that if my poetry lasts--that is if there is a future that is similar in any way to this present--my condemnation of our leaders will have considerable weight, and i am loading it down, the words that count will be mine. and our present leaders will be despised and laughed at. because this is the way literature works. though they are all too unread to know this" (141).

Before yoga class yesterday I was laying on the floor of the studio, trying to stretch my quadriceps, the other five women in the room began to have a conversation about children, and then pregnancy, and then giving birth, and then the cost of education but also how "children are a gift that lasts forever."

I like children as much as I like other humans. So that means I like some of them and don't like some of them. I respect their right to exist, like I respect everyone's right to exist, but I'm not going to be friends with everyone.

I think the pregnancy/children conversation at the yoga center is the default conversation the women have when they don't have anything to say to each other. Just like people who happen to move in shared contexts but don't actually have much in common talk about movies or how much they hate George Bush.

We usually say "I was born on June 11" not "my mother bore me on June 11." Blake says "My mother bore me..." in "Little Black Boy" and Jeremiah says "Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed."

If you are the mother, you could say "I bore the child on June 11," or "I gave birth to the child on June 11." "I had the child on June 11" is common, but vague.

Another default conversation yoga conversation, or even greeting, is the "be positive and relax" conversation, often with the subtle but rather snobby suggestion that one person is actually more happy and relaxed than the other person.

One of my high school friends, who was very nice and positive, failed many of his classes during is first year at a University. I remember him saying, cheerfully "Oh well, I know I can do better next time," and I remember thinking, "dude, no you can't. You need to deal with the fact that you failed most of the beginning-level classes in your major."

Also, all during yoga, I kept on thinking about a dead cat I'd seen on the road that morning. In pincha mayurasana: dead cat, in urdhva dhanurasana: dead cat, in ardha chandrasana: dead cat, in ardha chandra chapasana: dead cat. Finally I said hello to the cat (not out loud, of course), and imagined breathing in all the elements of the cat that were now on the road by the lagoon, and in the air around it.

It's not my favorite song on the Nuggets box, but still

Dance Round the Maypole is a classic--that's a link to a short MP3 of the song, should you not be the proud owner of Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969.

Other favorites include "How Is the Air Up There?" by The La De Das, and "I am Just a Mops," by the Mops.

However, it's May Day, so our focus must be "Dance Round the Maypole," by the Acid Gallery. It's disc 4, track 20, just in case you need to play it right this minute! Otherwise, listen to the link above, and read these wondrous lyrics.

"I like your boy," said Caroline to Jane
"You must know why, for it's the first of May"
Let's go dancing on the green
Fair girls one to seventeen

Chorus
Dance round the maypole, dance round the maypole
Over the green field and down to the hay
Lift up your hearts and dance round the maypole
Run to your true love and dance all the day

Said my friend, who's a handsome Cavalier
"You and I will escort her to the fair"
Bluebells round the cherry tree
This girl gave them all to me

Chorus

Bridge
One minute seemed to to be right
When she expressed her delight
At finding sixpence in her shoe
How can you romance a heart
And gaze on out to the stars
When there's a shadow chasing you

3rd verse
This young girl threw her cares into the well
Now I've learned Father Time has rang the bell
No more dancing on the green
Since I've found another scene

Chorus

La la la la la la la .....

Also, there were people selling fresh fish at the farmer's market in Carlsbad yesterday. I need to learn more about their sources, but still, that's an exciting development.

No more meyer lemons, and the fava beans are too big to be good now, but the asparagus is still great.

I have a new recipe for hummus that I'm going to try--the hope is that the result will be smooth, creamy, nutty, and tangy (not mealy and overly lemony).

I finished posting all my April poems to See it Everywhere. That manuscript gets more and more unwieldy. It's probably two manuscripts, not one.

I continue to read Alma.

One step-up from my reading notes, and really a process of thinking.

The writing in Alma is expansive and messy. On the level of the book, I like it, on the level of the sentence or line, it's hit and miss for me. That's a vague thing to say, so I'll try to clarify. The expansive messiness is energetic--it's not the kind of beautiful lush s l u g g i s h prose that weighs down some experimental fiction--the energy of the language does carry me through each section. The punctuation in this is often interruptive and substantial--a lot of commas (pauses, breaths, interruptions) in places that don't always make traditional structural sense. Periods used like commas. Not a lot of question marks, though there are a few--this isn't an especially questioning book. Alma makes declarations and proclamations: here's a brief section from "State of the Union" that I hope will illustrate the kind of interrupted energetic language I'm trying to describe:

"and when she. so the novel. glistens in all its propriety. and then he. no it was
where i spied no on knows any doves. and the cool features of one one blue as
the sky, which i've been studying. you are, were you, that time. i don't have it's
in my body. hemmed in by if the all-powerful, but they're cliche-inscribed..."

The values this book ascribes to men and women continue to irk me, even when I keep in mind that the book is supposed to be a relentless rant / curse, and that it's written, at least in part, to irk. Here's a section from "Curse Tablet of Dead Women" that made me write "mmm" in the margin:

"...we demand the binding of the tongues and
limbs of any who would usurp our power in present or future, as male presidents,
leaders, officials elected or appointed or self-appointed, directors of institutions,
all men of wealth, and also men of no apparent stature, who would steal our
power. may your tongues and limbs be bound indefinitely" (125).

Then in my notes I wrote: it's kind of interesting to speak in the language of the oppressor, or to reverse a binary, but it's still a binary, and power is power.

Women who support patriarchy are also cursed later in the poem:

"...as for those
who would want to justify our lives in their own sentimentality: that we must
have been happy and found our own fulfillment: may you be bound from speak-
ing so, male or female..."(125).

I'm excited about any moment in feminist writing that thinks about how certain kinds of feminine behavior might support traditional patriarchal hierarchies instead of undermining or resiting them (one of the things I obsess about in my own writing). I like the fact that Alma is aggressive--it's not passive aggressive or subtle about it's accusations. Of course, that's also it's weakness.

(Aside: I feel pressured to write poems and criticism that are open-ended and questioning. Lyn Hejinian is right--closure and conclusion certainly do have their problems. I like Leslie Scalapino's question marks. But I admit that I like things to be definite, too. I want to say "you are a total asshole," and not question it. I also want to say, "I will organize the party" or "I am happy to curate the reading series." I hate it when people stand around talking about how no one will do anything, and then hating the people who do something. This happens a lot in any community where everyone is supposed to be equal in some usually undefined way but really isn't. That's my own Alma-rant of the day).

Alma in Alma is almost perfectly feminine in the postmodern sense: she's total negation and non-symbolic otherness--she enters the world through archetypal symbols or marks imposed on her by men. On the other hand, the voices in Alma are also agressive in a way that, yes, is violent and masculine. The curse I quoted from above expresses a desire for a world where women rule and men are bound and punished--it's not a critique of power, it's a critique of the fact that men have all of it.

So, the voices in Alma remind me of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' description of the numerous kinds of feminine subjectivity at work in Anne Waldman's work, and how Michael Davidson describes Sylvia Plath in Guys Like Us. Here's a quote from DuPlessis' "Anne Waldman: Standing Corporeally in One's Time," (from Jacket Magazine #27) that also quotes Davidson:

"Waldman is certainly one of the exemplars of female masculinity. Indeed, Waldman might be closest in her ferocity, performativity, and aggressions to the picture Michael Davidson draws of Sylvia Plath in Guys Like Us, with those “self-conscious assaults on gender binarism” (Davidson 160) by someone who will “interrogate masculine aspirations from within a speaker who embodies many of those aspirations” (Davidson 170)."

In terms of content, Alma doesn't really attempt an assault on gender binarism. Like Descent of Allette, it holds on to gender binaries and doesn't let go. However, structurally, Alma does mess with gender binaries--it's lyric and epic, it's declarative and aggressive but full of disruptions (in grammar, sentence-structure, and punctuation, for example), it moves from reportage to song and back...Form and content (or content and form, if you prefer), always exist in tension with each other (whether we want them to or not). I like poems that make this tension interesting (Kristeva's notion of the "ethical text," maybe I'll elaborate later).

Alma does have an interesting form/content dynamic, especially when I consider the ways in which that dynamic both supports and undermines gender binaries.

Fluff and Fold

There's been a cooper's hawk hanging out in the acacia trees around our apartment. Yesterday, after chasing and being chased by one of the local raven gangs, it settled into a perch just outside the window by Mark's desk. Lester is a parrot, and a hawk is a hawk, but they're both birds, and they preen like, well, birds. The hawk sat on the branch and preened for a good fifteen minutes. After preening, it stood on one foot, relaxing, and fluffing her/his breast feathers. I've never seen such a fluffy hawk! The fluffing and folding didn't last long, though; in a few minutes, the hawk became narrow and focused, and flew off to another tree.

All birds are individual birds, and different species have different ways and concerns, but all birds take on a similar demeanor when they're preening and relaxing. It seems absurd to compare Lester to a hawk or the ruddy ducks that I see by the lagoon every morning, but they all preen in the same way, and they all get fluffy and one footed when relaxed.

So they, of course, chose the monks.

Tomorrow I'm taking my students on a field trip to the Prince of Peace Abbey. They have a copyrighted logo. A teacher I work with knows some of the monks there, and so he's arranged for both our classes to visit, tour the monastery, and then ask the monks some questions about the challenges and joys of monastic life. I'm excited about the visit, but my students think I'm strange. I told them it was either the monks or an exam.

I'm recently returned from Barbara Henning's reading at CSUSM, and am thinking about some odd and unexpected ways that her work reminds me (and doesn't) of Leslie Scalapino's work. I'm writing that down so I don't forget.

In Honor of Earth Day I Graded an Essay about Earth Day

And had a conversation about Earth Day in my ESL class. None of them had heard of Earth Day, but they had heard of pina coladas.

I also drove to work, which I do less than once a month, and bought wine glasses. They are not the most beautiful glasses, but they will do.

I also went running.

Last week I sent out fliers about Earth Day events at Yoga Swami, even though I couldn't actually attend any of the events.

I wore an iridescent blue dress and white, pattent-leather sling backs. It was all very absurd.

I've been grading almost non-stop since 1 pm.

I can't really do the splits.

I went from urdhvadhanurasana to handstand and then back to standing, and also from standing, to handstand and down to urdhvadhanurasana. It was cool.

I also did hanumanasana, because today is hanuman's birthday. I really hate this asana. It's basically the splits.

For kicks, here’s the Hanuman Chalisa from the animated film The Adventures of Hanuman.

Hags rant about things you wish they wouldn't rant about.

Rereading, with more attention (and interest) Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women. I'm not going to write a review, since I'm not finished with the book, but I think it will help if I blog my thoughts as I'm reading and thinking.

This is an angry book. I like it that Alma is angry. She's not a heroine like Allette. Alma's a hag, not a warrior. She's a bit like the Cailleach or Morrígna--she's a god but no one really treats her like one. Alma shoots up into her forehead and dreams/hallucinates the world. It reminds me of how the fire and light from Shiva's third eye can annihilate evil--but also how he often opens up his third eye when he's angry, to burn things (like Brahma's 5th head that liked to badmouth him).

So, Notley continues to work with big archetypal female characters. I can't think of any other epics where the central figure is an angry, often self-righteous hag. It's true, hags are dangerous, erratic (Baba Yaga sometimes helps you, sometimes tries to eat you, and she lives in a house built on dancing chicken legs, so the house moves and looks really creepy), and often annoying. I often find the character Alma to be all of these things--but it's hardly an accident. In "The Invisible Organ Presence," Notley writes:

"That a woman is a composition? a trial lawyer, a severity, a bother to one who would move up, an aging hypnotist an aging theoretician, always the nag, the complainer, the denouncer, the radical feminist. nothing you can say, it doesn't matter what i say, it's always heard in the image of the ear of another, this has been said before, everything you do is meaningless..." (42).


Alma, or The Dead Women imagines the hag as a powerful alternative to being any of these things.

The female/male binary in this book is pretty absolute. Men kill and make war, women don't. This dynamic comes up over and over again in the book, and it irks me. But then there are moments where this dynamic is undermined. So maybe the book doesn't hold firm to that dynamic. I don't know. Here's a section from "The Stupid Guy Etc" that I think is quite funny, although I don't really associate camp or humor with Notley's work, so maybe it's just me:

"because this guy is stupid, you find out by fucking them don't you, and who is there but the stupid to fuck at this point. the moment is the one just past when the seeds have spread throughout the world that moment when we were still just fucking almost fearlessly" (33).

(Note to self: that section also makes me think of San Diego county, bad decisions about marriage, and fantasies about domestic life that still exist even when they don't work).

or this one from "Of Luz, Cosette and of Vengeance":

"Do we want people to die? no, we want them to know they are guilty, and stupid. we want to abolish sexes themselves. races themselves. we want to abolish everything you stand for" (37).

The you in the first section, I think, implicates women readers, and the you in the second section refers to all the evil, nasty, war-loving men that show up throughout the book. Not all the men in the book love evil, though. Dick Cheney is there, but so is Sonny--who is mostly a stupid and naive young man who wants to go to war because he knows nothing about it, really. He's stupid and tragic.

This poem is mostly a poem about women in a world of violence, men, and war. But let me quote one more section, this one from the second half of the book, a section called "The Boys and Men":

"the boys and men who came with us just chose to come with. and no make no new social order, make no social order, they just chose to, to come with us. they too had nothing left, in or outside. this is a story of women but i want you to know"(205).

Not all the men are stupid and violent, but this book isn't about them.

Allette is angry, but she rises above her rage, or at least uses it for something productive. Alma is productive in any normative way, and she exists because of and through her rage and pain. I'm both attracted to and annoyed by mythic archetypes in poetry--but I see their value: a hag can really, really rant. And rant. The point is that a hag really rants a lot. Of course you want her to shut up.

Other stuff to think about:

• Nagging sense that Alma is just as pious and uptight about her world view as the men in the book. This really would be, I think, the major problem...
  
• Old Hag Syndrome (sleep, hallucinations...)
• The hag (in Persian mythology, maybe, who lays on your chest at night so you feel like you can't breath. Associated with Old Hag Syndrome).
  
• Hag's connection to battlefields (Morrígan in the Táin Bó Cuailnge)
• And sovereignty--land, etc. Hag is sometimes the barren land. Hero usually has to confront her.

Do I mean it?

I was behind on posting, but not on writing.

I posted more poems at See it Everywhere.

I think I am going to make this Eggplant and Lentil Stew with Pomegranate Molasses soon. I love stew, but stews aren't so great when the weather gets warmer. This is a summer stew!

More more mysteries.

I am still grading. Still and always. Until May, when I will only be partially employed for a few weeks.

In between teaching and grading and grading again, I did something that looked kind of like this:


Except not quite. I can hold my toes, but I can't put my forehead on my foot. And my hips aren't nearly as square or as rooted. Rajakapotasana is a wacky pose, and it seems completely astounding to find my toe, there. It doesn't ever seem like it could possibly be my toe. But I am glad it is my toe and not someone else's, which would be even weirder.

Many people, including Mark, are at the &Now Festival, just up the road from us.

It will long and perhaps monotonous.

The house finch hatchlings are getting larger and louder every hour--they're nesting in the most protected corner under the awning of our balcony. As usual, one of the chicks is more curious or courageous than the others, and s/he eyes me from the nest while I eat my breakfast or lunch (the others usually only stick their heads up when it's time to feed).

Other mysteries:

• My nails are getting long
• My left thumb-knuckle is still recovering from its sprain
• I made twice as much money in 2007 as I did in 2006.

I'm going to write a poem with DOD acronyms. It will go on longer than you want it to.

More Mysteries

I live by the beach.

In California.

In southern California.

I went in the water today. The water was 59 F.

There was a surfer dude playing the guitar on the beach. I keep waiting to see someone playing the ukelele on the beach, but that hasn't happened yet.

The 70s last forever in California. California invented the 70s.

Mysteries

I always look astoundingly nerdy in my running clothes.

I think I sprained my thumb.

Or not sprained, but torqued it. Is there a specific word for almost sprained. Like, a bit swollen but not black and blue? I'm not sure how I injured it. I think in yoga class, just now. Maybe in pincha mayurasana somehow, though that makes no sense to me...

I bought artichokes today. And also asparagus. At last the asparagus is in season. Nice enough to eat raw.

Hootlessness

I'd like to write a poem called "energetic men" or maybe "energetic young men." It could be a good Lorraine flarf poem, although most of the search results are about war and missionaries, which seems a little too obvious, though there are a few gems: "The woman decides to make a film about these young revolutionaries and upon arrival in India she gets involved with a group of apolitical but energetic young men and women who love to party and only reluctantly agree to be cast in her film."

Today I don't care about authorial intention and I'm sick of the debate about it at Harriet. I guess I'm not that sick of it though, because I'm about to talk about it for a paragraph or two.

I love this moment in Willa Cather's The Professor's House when the Professor is watching Tom eat lunch: "At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen." It's such a goofy pun, but I love it anyway.

I don't care if you were being sincere but the audience thought you were being ironic, or vice versa. Maybe your intentions weren't clear, maybe the poem changed your intentions, maybe the connotations of all the words you used spun out of your control. I named one of my chapbooks (and the URL of this blog, and also my first book manuscript for that matter) "Terminal Humming" without considering how quickly humming could become "hummer," and how the title of the chapbook could connote a kind of melodic, deadly and perhaps mechanical blow job. It now occurs to me that, of course, a hummer is a kind of car that is rather popular here in San Diego county and in the military in general. It is also, apparently, a kind of lobster and a slang term for a smelly corpse (that last definition fits with my intentions, kind of). Anyway, I clearly like the word, since I've used it so much, but at this point it's spun away from my intentions, even though I did, in fact, have specific intentions when I chose it.

I don't mean that words don't have specific meanings and rules of usage--of course they do, and poems generally use words. But finally there is no guarantee that anyone anywhere is going to understand your specific intention when you send your poem out into the word. Meaning and intention aren't they same thing--meaning is something that at least two people have to make together, through their intentions. Language is social, that's why every word in the OED has a long entry.

This CD is Dirty

I had a great time at the reading yesterday--the audience was larger than when I read at DCAC last October (ahem), and very low-key. I did not wear the fancy shoes I brought, but left them on stage as a kind of talismanic object (like the small, magnetic statue of Hotei Buddha that I used to take with me to exams as an undergrad). I also played a sound piece I made called "I still have a problem with agriculture," complete with two flute parts in D minor and vocals. It's meant to have something performed over it, but I just played it; I'd never done anything like that before. It was good, I think, and quite goofy. But now that I've done it once and didn't die of horror I can do it again. Maybe at the Evergreen conference in May.

After the reading, a guy complimented me on my performance and said, "So, are you a writer?" I wasn't sure what to make of this question, given the context, but I decided not to be a jerk. I just said, "yes." Then smiled and said, "thanks so much for coming" and left to go get some wine.

I also got up at 7 this morning for a workshop with Sienna Sherman. It was interesting to practice with a group of absurdly accomplished yogis (yeah, I know, it's yoga and some might say I shouldn't talk about accomplishment, but there's plenty of ways to value accomplishment and plenty of accomplishment in yoga). We did a lot of psoas and hip opening leading up to several back bends, including a few back bend inversions I'd never done before. Recently, I've been focused on opening up my hamstrings and external rotators, but I've been neglecting the front of my legs and hips. Thigh and psoas stretches are my new friend.

Tonight at Agitprop!

Please join us for a literary reading in the company of "Colby Jackson's Alien People" (ceramic sculpture) at Agitprop in North Park, co-sponsored by the gallery and local poetry presses 1913, Kuhl House, and Tougher Disguises.

Susan Maxwell & K. Lorraine Graham
Saturday April 5th 7pm
2837 University Ave in North Park
(entrance to the gallery is actually on Utah)

Susan Maxwell's first book of poems, Passenger, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005 as winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series. Maxwell earned her BA in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in such publications as 1913 a journal of forms, American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Bay Poetics Anthology, Verse, VOLT, as well as other journals and art installations. She's currently a doctoral student in Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of several chapbooks, including "Diverse Speculations Descending Therefrom" (Dusie), "Terminal Humming" (Slack Buddha), "See it Everywhere" (Big Game Books), and "Large Waves to Large Obstacles" (forthcoming from Take Home Project), and the recently released chapdisk "Moving Walkways" (Narrowhouse Recordings). Graham has just completed the extended manuscript of "Terminal Humming" and writes the blog http://terminalhumming.blogspot.com/ from her home in Carlsbad, CA.

This event is free and open to the public. Donations to the gallery are greatly appreciated.

I bought a Peter Rabbit bowl to match my Peter Rabbit mug.

Maybe it's time for me to get over my somewhat totally irrational but definite dislike of Gustaf Sobin. But I can't even think about The Fly-Truffler without wanting to rant. Young orphan woman becomes lover, language, earth, and food, all at the same time, and is then consumed by old husband, both literally while she's alive and then figuratively when she's dead (honestly, there's nothing sexier than a hot dead young woman). Barf. I'm interested in obsessive desire, but this book feels so cliched in a sexy, international way that I find it maddening. I know: my reading and rant aren't especially nuanced. Are any of you readers Gustaf Sobin fans? What should I read?

I'm going to attempt to participate in NaPoRiMo. I've already posted some poems, even. Wow.

I just finished reading Elisabeth Workman's Opolis. I liked it. I will review it.

I just finished eating some butternut squash soup to which I added arugula and a tablespoon of peanut butter. It was actually good. It's all part of my non-diet diet. Soups are good for that.

I made a sound poem thing, complete with weird ambient flute stuff in the background. For now I am going to call it "I still have a problem with agriculture."

I've been thinking about things that would make me cool(er). What are they?

Breathing Again

My nephew is nearly 2, and is already talking up a storm. He's energetic, inquisitive, and sweet. And he's proof that toddlers aren't always picky eaters: he has his favorites, of course (blueberries) but he'll try almost anything. And he doesn't like potatoes, which means that he doesn't demand to eat fries all the time. I also discovered Quorn, which is really one of the best meat substitutes or meat-free foods I've ever had. I think that I had the "chicken style tenders," which were toothy and had a nice texture.


I stocked up on sumac and dried pears at the Berkeley Bowl, and also bought a copy of The Transformation from Pegasus Books. And I'm going to read it. And I'm also going to take a nap.

Off to Berkeley

But not for poetry, dear readers, for family--four generations of it, in fact.

(Not so) secretly, of course, I want us all to go to Tartine on Saturday. I've already over planed food options. I have to go to Cheeseboard, at least, even if I don't make it all the way across the bay.

Ba ba etc

Last night I dreamed that I'd actually taken that job. I woke up in a sweat and had thrown all the blankets and pillows off the bed. That job haunts me every few months. I make plenty of money, but I'm not making $60,000 a year. Thinking about that salary really does make me want to throw up, for several reasons 1) $60K is a lot of money, I think 2) I'd really, really have hated the job, which would have involved me managing a combined design and writing department and encouraging them to work really hard and really fast so that the people upstairs could make even more money, and 3) It's hard for me to imagine a world in which I could make $60K doing something that wouldn't make me want to vomit. I don't mean getting 60K doing something that would make me happy, I really do mean something that wouldn't make me want to vomit.

Honestly though, at times I wish that I did have a tolerance for office work. It would make things easier. But nope. I prefer having a crazy, precarious schedule. Because with that crazy, precarious, and totally unsupervised, uncubicalized schedule and income, I can still:

be an artist, pay my bills, save a little, sometimes do some traveling (more of that in the future, after said bills are paid), practice yoga, bike along a lagoon each day that has several excellent birdwatching spots, walk two blocks to the beach, go to readings (not as often as I'd like, but more than I thought I'd be able to around here), publish chapbooks, write, drink wine, go out to dinner sometimes, get Lester new toys every few months...

The Old New Sincerity

The overwrought child who made this sandcastle cross at the Carlsbad State Beach on Easter kept trying to get his father's attention. "Dad, Dad," he said, "check out the details on the cross. I put nails in it and everything!"

Hey hey, it's my sisters' birthday!

They are nine!

I missed their call from Australia. I tried to call them in Australia, but no one was home : (

There are many reasons why they kick my butt, but here are three:

1. They have passports from both Ireland and the USA. They can live and go to school anywhere they want.
2. They're super intelligent, and funny, and cosmopolitan.
3. There are three of them: they have their own built-in posse.

M & L California Beach Day

Grading, design, make a poem, walk on the beach, nap on the beach, grading, shower, beer outside in the sun, tacos outside in the setting sun, more beer, a walk home through an unfamilar neighborhood, many spring birds.

We live here, yes, but it's not like any of that happens very often.

Friday Lester / Happy Full Moon

Lester has many, many toys in his cage (and outside of it). His most recent game, however, is to pull up the paper lining at the bottom of his cage (rough drafts of manuscripts) and make a tent with it. After he's made the tent, he chews the paper and sings.

Ce Soir

Please join us on Thursday, March 20 at 7 p.m. for the next reading in the Community and World Literary Series at California State University, San Marcos, featuring Edwin Torres.

The reading will be held on the Cal State San Marcos campus in Markstein Hall Room 125. The event is free and open to the public, but there is a fee for on-campus parking.

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He has received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University, among others. His work has been widely published and his CD Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. His books include I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books) and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books).

Event Information:

Thursday, March 20, 7 p.m.
Markstein Hall, Room 125
California State University, San Marcos
333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Rd.
Campus Maps and Directions: http://www.csusm.edu/resources/images/maps/
For more information, or to sign on to our mailing list to receive announcements of future events, check out our website:
http://www.csusm.edu/cwls/

Ali Warren's Cousins

I've been catching up on my long overdue chapbook reading.

Ali Warren's Cousins (Lame House Press, 2006), has been close to the top of the stack for some time (it's now 2008, for G-d's sake)!

These are poems of a self/selves very much entangled with the social--the languages of bureaucracy, consumption, family, and material objects all move through the poems not as disruptions, but as everyday syncopations. The chapbook's title implies familial and social connection, obviously, but there's also plenty of ironic humor to go along with this interest in the material world that makes me think of a Tim Davis reading I heard in New York probably a long time ago, especially when I read lines like this one from "My Factless Autobiography": "I wrote a narrative about our collective pain / and went shopping."

But the irony in Cousins isn't quite as harsh as what I remember of that reading. (Note: I'm a fan of harsh irony, as long as it's original, so this comparison isn't a put down to either Warren or Davis). However, the way Warren's poems connect the problems of constructing a fixed identity to the material world does remind me of the more postlanguagey New York School writing of the mid to late 90s.

"Imbedded Report" is a good example of what I'm trying to describe--it's full of bodies, babies, shopping, and hints of punny psychoanalytic language. Here's the first two stanzas:

The stations are landmarks The cars haul Drives
No ideas but in organs Atoning for drives In the unerring there

Let's say infants take up arms Free-ranges begin to sag
With what greasy nonchalance is the belly full?

It warms my heart to read poems that are thinking about identity in a way that is funny and connected to the material world. It makes me think that someone still might care about French Feminist theory and have a sense of humor! There's no lyric I in these poems floating off into white space and gentle images of love, the weather, and birds. Instead, the I is going shopping, or pulling I's self (and a rotting rabbit head) out of a Versace handbag before morphing into grotesque conjoined babies and being "slated for major redevelopment." (Note: I love love, the weather, and birds, but I admit I'm bored with many of the recent poetic renderings of them I've read--a topic for another post).

This is a chapbook that makes me feel competitive in the best way.

I've been told that I should focus more on exhaling--by both the last doctor I had who treated my asthma as well as one of my yoga teachers--and that this will make inhaling easier and more productive.

According to an article I read in the Yoga Journal, "Dr. Gay Hendricks, author of Conscious Breathing (Bantam, 1995), and Dr. Konstantin Buteyko, a pioneer in the use of breath retraining for asthmatics, consider the malady to be more a disturbed breathing pattern than a disease."

That's pretty interesting--asthmatics tend to breathe at a rate two to three times faster than most people do, i.e. our breathing pattern is not normal. We take in a lot of oxygen, but then we breathe out too much carbon dioxide. Again from the same article "If CO2 levels get too low, the hemoglobin that carries oxygen through the blood becomes too "sticky" and doesn't release sufficient oxygen to the cells."

After a while, the body gets starved for oxygen, and so it resorts to rather drastic measures to slow breathing down and build up the CO2 levels again. Basically, it resorts to creating an asthma attack--muscles around the airways tighten, the body produces mucus and histamine, and breathing becomes difficult.

So, that's why trying to change my breathing pattern might help. I tried focusing on my exhales during yoga class this morning and it was incredibly difficult. When I'm forcing myself to exhale completely, all I want to do is stop halfway through and inhale again. However, I did notice that after about three or four minutes of breathing this way, exhaling completely became easier.

I just have to remember that when I'm not on the mat.

The wind

blows. So we went for a goodly hike in the Daley Ranch. One day we'll make it to the desert, but not when there are 40 mph winds. The weather here is stupid. I don't understand it.

One of the days I spent in the Ramlat al Wahaybah was very, very windy. I understand why desert mythologies are about the wind and wind-demons. There's no rain, snow, etc, just the wind. And it can be a problem. A headscarf can help. And a low riding vehicle.

Touchy

No trip to the desert this weekend--in San Diego county where the weather is supposedly so great, the weather is often not great. 40 mile an hour winds are no good for desert hikes. Plus, Ilya Kaminsky is on the front cover of the San Diego Reader. My hamstring attachment hurts. I'd like to separate my femur from my hip joint and just get it over with.

I posted new poems. Still in the draft stage. And these actually are spaced differently--but HTML doesn't render space well...

Real Jobs

One of my current students found my myspace page last weekend, and friended me. Most of my students on myspace eventually do find me, so it wasn't unusual. However, after class today he asked, "so, your real job is as a writer?" I told him it was, and he didn't respond with the disbelief or obvious discomfort that other people sometimes have. This little exchange stands out because he concluded that my real job is as a writer, where as teaching is something I do "on the side." That isn't quite true, but it's the exact opposite of the conclusion that people usually come to, so I thought it was interesting.

List of my current jobs:

• Teaching English as a foreign language
• Teaching developmental English
• Tutoring people about writing
• Designing t-shirts
• Doing research for a marketing company
• Creating marketing materials & public relations materials for a local yoga studio
• Managing the web site of that same studio

List of my current writing, art, and editorial projects

• Diligently shopping my first book manuscript around to all the places people said I should, even though I'm pretty sure I already know how it will eventually be published.
• Editing my second manuscript. Getting ready to, yes, diligently send it around.
• Kind of putting together a third. I don't think the third is really a manuscript--the pieces are too disparate to make a coherent book.
• Writing my fourth manuscript.
• Still working on "Memory Lessons," a series of visual pieces.
• Thinking already about my contribution to the 2008 Dusie project, now that the 2007 one is complete and live.
• Little bits of an essay thinking about the concept of "The Gurlesque." I need to plan ahead so that I have something to say by the time the anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg comes out from Saturnalia in 2009. I've been a slllooowwww critical writer recently.
• Little bits of a review on Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, even though it's been reviewed. Maybe the review and the essay will be the same thing. Maybe I'll send them/it to Absent.
  

List of current yoga projects:

• Dropping back into urdhvadhanuasana from standing. Standing up from urdhvadhanuasana.
• Jumping up into handstand from two feet but with straight legs.
• More flexible hips, hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps. So, that means a lot of hanumanasana and krounchasana.
• Learning and memorizing all the asanas named after birds. Krounchasana is the "heron pose--a very appropriate homage and counter balance to my bike rides around the lagoons.
  
  

Dumb Rebellion

I hated everything about yoga. I hated the stupid new age music with its pseudo Hindi ethereal vocals. I hated all the vinyasas. I hated the "centering" at the beginning of class, the pranayama at the end of class, and I hated the chanting. I thought, I don't want to feel centered. Being centered and balanced is for suckers.

The teacher who taught is one of my favorites, but I was in an unusually agitated mood--unusual even for me. I'm not sure I've ever been more agitated during yoga. One reason why I do yoga is to turn my brain off, but even during some of the inversions and crazy arm balances I couldn't turn my brain off today. I was hostile and perverse. I thought things like, Fuck you, Shiva, I hate this asana. I cursed sages by name! To hell with Koundinya and Marichi!

Several people I know through the yoga studio are pregnant, and I thought mean, nasty things about pregnancy and children. During one asana, someone joked that the class was becoming "like a prenatal class" and I said, rather too loudly, no thank you.

I stayed an extra three breaths in headstand two or three or whatever it was out of spite. I wasn't enjoying being there, I just didn't want to come down at the same time as everyone else.

I was at the beach today.

Well. I walked near the beach. Along it. As a kind of very mellow exercise.

Before that, I did three and a half hours of grading.

I stared reading Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold. I don't know what I think of it it. I like it enough to keep reading.

I maybe have a possible shot at possibly teaching classes at Palomar. Maybe.

I have never wanted a job, though I've needed, applied for, and had many. Maybe the exception is when I applied to be a counselor in training at Nichols Day Camp in Sedgwick, Maine.

Deep Change

I own a pair of white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals. I noticed them in my closet just now, realized I'd forgotten about them (bought them on sale at the end of last summer), and immediately started planning an outfit around them.

But white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals? I like them, but I'm skeptical. I look at them and think "Orange County." I also think of a potentially sexy but usually just depressing youthful look that gives off an "I am hot and dressed up and 17 but I don't really know I'm hot and I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm about to get married to a real douche bag" kind of vibe.

I'm not 17. I know what I'm doing, and I'm not about to get married to a real douche bag. Still. What does it mean that I am now ready to plan an outfit around a pair of white, patent-leather, high-healed sandals?

I just looked at them again. They're slingbacks. That helps me feel more confident.

I'm not exactly a rich Italian heiress on a yacht, either, so I can't pretend I'm working a nautical look.

O. Friday.

I have no personal weirdness

It's spring! There are wildflowers all along the bluffs above the ocean.

Felonies of Illusion

138 pgs.
Cover by K. Lorraine Graham
$15

I won't go on about how much I like the poems in this book, but I'll go on at least a little: the lines are twisty, the rhythms complicated and unexpected. The poems have a trippy tension between how they feel/sound and what they are and are not saying.

Plus, I'm proud of the cover.

You can order Felonies of Illusion directly from Edge Books for $11!

Here's what other people say about the book:

A master at making genre question itself, Mark Wallace gets the square peg in the round hole again. A stark and aphoristic long poem about living and working during the war—direct, wise, and brave enough to skip the decorative—bumps up against the witty, clanging, angry, top-speed, palimpsestuous title series—lyrics that swallow their own tails. Wallace is cynical, clear-eyed, and resolutely jokey on commerce, war, love (the "therapeutic use of commitment") and exhausted longing ("This day could be about today, leisurely and bright/if the days weren't stacked like nights inside it.") Nobody gets away with anything in Felonies of Illusion: we're all skewered till we grimace and grin.

Catherine Wagner


Mark Wallace invents only what's real. If democracies could talk, we would in fact be able to understand them, but we would need the help of poems like these. As its title suggests, the language of Felonies of llusion is premised on a sense of justice and reciprocity. The need is real, and thus the need for invention is constant. The writing betrays no qualms about showing this. There's serious play going on here.

Bob Perelman


Elegaic without strings, passionate without bravado, up the tragic creek without a cathartic paddle, Mark Wallace’s Felonies of Illusion is an intensely personal collection of valedictions, an extended suite of lyric leavetakings written in the infinite series of penultimate milliseconds before an always-imminent obliteration—a “now” that “is not that long from now.” These already painful goodbyes, however, are suspended in a nervewracking holding pattern as “the total system / shouts back that there’s no way to leave.” Wallace rehearses the purgatorial illogic of perpetual orange alert with unsparing gravity, but also with empathy and wit. His poems confront us with the human truth of the narratives we spin daily in the name of individual survival at the same time that they caution us not to “get / too attached to the story told / imploding.”

K. Silem Mohammad

We did not discuss "May gray"--I didn't want to upset them too much.

Today the weather is more like what people imagine when they imagine San Diego weather. "Gloomy" was a vocabulary word today, so I taught my students about "June gloom."

Still reading Hannah Weiner and loving Code Poems.

My sister Sarah sent me a card from Adelaide with a lovely picture of a rainbow lorikeet on the front--and also one on the inside that she'd drawn. She inquired about Lester and asked if I ever "try to draw the birds I see." She signed the card "All the dearest colors of the rainbow, love, Sarah."

Lester is practicing a new song

--a version of "who's my good baby b?"--one of the many silly things I say to him all the time. He's now learned it and is experimenting with incorporating it into his repertoire. If I go into the living room to look at him or even talk to him, he'll stop--when he's practicing, he likes to be alone. On Mondays, Mark works late, and I work here in the afternoon and eat a very early meal so I have time to digest before my 6:30 yoga practice. Lester and I eat together; after I go back to working in the study, and Lester practices his songs.

Lester will spend weeks perfecting a new phrase or song. He often will get the tone or rhythm of the vocalization first before he begins to enunciate it. Moreover, Lester likes to develop several different versions of the same song. For example, he has several different laugh sounds that he uses in different situations. When Mark or I talk vigorously on the phone or with each other, he'll make a loud, guffawing sound. He also has two different higher, more twittery laughs that he uses.

I've blogged before about how Lester says "peep," which is a version of him imitating Mark and I imitating him. However, Lester's favorite song is "salt peanuts," followed by a three-note salt peanuts whistle. He does at least three different versions of "salt peanuts," one that is like me, one like Mark, and one like our friend Dan, who met Lester as a baby bird and spent a lot of time talking with him. Lester also does the three-note whistle in multiple keys, depending on what he's just sung before it and what he plans to sing after it.

I think he might also be learning "I love you," but it's hard to hear clearly from here.

After Lester has incorporated a new song or phrase into his repertoire, he likes to riff on it--he'll combine one part of a song or phrase with another part, or sing everything in a different order.

My understanding of domestic happiness and order has been deeply influenced by Lester's afternoon practice sessions--and by birdsong in general. A vocalizing bird is a healthy, happy bird. Mark's parakeets would sing vigorously at sunrise and sunset, whenever there was music on, and whenever anyone sung or talked with them. They liked to join in the party.

I remember taking a nap one afternoon in our old apartment at 1401 N Street NW in Washington, DC. Lester thought I was asleep, so he felt free to practice. At that time, I knew he was vocalizing, but I hadn't clearly picked out any of his specific sounds. In a sort of half-awake daze, I listened to him practicing some of the first vocalizations he picked up living with Mark and I--"salt peanuts," "Lester's a pretty bird" and their corresponding whistles. Of course, when I got up from the couch, he stopped practicing.

Lester does vocalize when people are around, especially when people are talking energetically or there's music on--but he doesn't practice then; he practices in privacy, on calm afternoons or early evenings, preferably after we've both eaten a meal.

The reading was fun

The reading was fun.

Tomorrow is Monday. Before I wrote "Monday" I wrote "Munday." I think I was thinking of "fun," and the general lack of it on Mondays (though I think Tuesday is actually a worse day than Monday). But hence the "mun" in the "Munday" I erased. I suppose "mun" could be "money," too.

The reading was fun.

NEW Triple Threat Reading Series

Mark has a good blog post about the ways in which San Diego is and is not a poetry city. I'm simply posting the information about the reading this Saturday--I'll be there, hopefully with freshly manicured hands and pedicured toes. Yes--a reading in San Diego is that exciting.

NEW Triple Threat Reading Series--sponsored by 3 San Diego Small Presses: 1913 Press (ed. Sandra Doller), Kuhl House Press (ed. Ben Doller), Tougher Disguises Press (ed. James Meetze) announces its inaugural event...

Come one, come all to the first reading in North Park's new and explosive series. We begin with Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson who are reading in support of their fresh new collaborative book Figures for a Darkroom Voice.

Agitprop Gallery in North Park
2837 University Ave. San Diego, California 92104
(entrance to the gallery is actually on Utah)
7:00pm Saturday, March 1st.

Noah Eli Gordon's first book, The Frequencies, was published by San Diego's own Tougher Disguises Press in 2003. Since then, he has had five other books appear, including Novel Pictorial Noise, which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series, and published last year by Harper Perennial. Last year also saw the release of Figures for a Darkroom Voice, a book
written in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He writes a column on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, and his reviews and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly. He teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado in Denver. See him reading with Joshua Marie Wilkinson here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw


Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, a documentary about the band Califone, is due out next year. He curates Rabbit Light Movies, a website devoted to short poem-films, and recently co-edited an anthology of conversations between younger poets and their elders, which is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. See him reading with Noah Eli Gordon here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw

It's definitely blowing the top of my head off

"There is a difference between fashion copy and our 'poems' which are imitations of fashion copy. There is a difference between a real fashion show and our imitation of a fashion show. We are interested in these differences in spite of the fact that we have tried to eliminate them.

"We want to show the difference between presentation and representation by bringing presentation and representation as close together as possible."

--Hannah Weiner, from "The Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay"

So, yes, I've been reading Hannah Weiner's Open House. I bought it at Bridge Street last October, and I'd been waiting and waiting to read it until I could actually read it with attention.

Recently I dreamed that Mark and I were in the last house I lived in in Sedgwick, Maine. Fish started floating out of the sky, and eventually jellyfish. A large apartment building space ship came down, and a military man said we had to come with him. I was skeptical, but also nervous about the fish in the sky. So I ran back into the house and grabbed an already-packed suitcase, and also Hannah Weiner's Open House. We got into the apartment building space ship, and things got weirder from there. The last part of the dream included Mormons and ballroom dancing.

It's still February, after all

Read a student essay today that suggested being a hippie was, for the student, about making better style choices and having more interesting conversations. That particular student is a good conversationalist, and does a great sense of style.

Another student said that you could rent a one-bedroom apartment in Milan for about $400 a month. I don't really believe it, but still.

Today a student asked me the difference between "reality" and "real estate." In San Diego county, there isn't a whole lot of difference.

Also, I want this; this would also be nice.

Going to yoga this evening to pry my shoulders out of my ears.

Altered States

One of my coworkers at one of my many jobs asked me for advice about sensory deprivation tanks--did I know of any? Apparently the only one this person had found is in at Full Circle Yoga Institute in San Diego. My coworker knows I practice yoga, and that's why this person asked me--if one yoga center has a sensory deprivation tank, why not another? I had trouble focusing on the question, because the moment this person said "sensory deprivation," I thought of a scene in "Altered States" where the main character Edward Jessup has regressed so far back into collective consciousness that he's become a kind of Neanderthal who goes on a killing rampage at the zoo. Later he says something like this to his wife: "Last night I hunted, killed, and ate a goat. It was one of the most sublime experiences of my life."

I have trouble remembering facts if I don't understand them.

No rain today.

I ate a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. It was good.

I am tired.

It is Monday.

My students said several interesting things today about their ideal neighborhoods. Many of them would like to live on an island in the Caribbean. One student wants to move to Anchorage. Another student wants to live in a city in southern Europe. My basketball playing Turkish student is being recruited by a school in Edmonton, Alberta. Their utopias were all basically mixed-use, economically diverse urban communities near a beach (except for the student who wants to move to Anchorage).

How is it possible that tomorrow is Monday? I had a three day teaching week last week, so now I feel like every week should be a three-day week.

A yogurt went bad. We had to throw it out. Quel dommage.

Mark and I watched an episode called "The Lost Child" from the 4th season of Prime Suspect on Friday night. It was tense. I remember my mom liking the Prime Suspect series. The episode felt very 90s pop Feminist. Detective Inspector Jane Tennison is woman in power, but the rest of the bureaucracy is all men, and she's often at odds with her superiors. The episode begins with the suggestion that she's had an abortion, and the plot revolves around the problems of motherhood and having a career. The murder victim is a toddler and the murderer turns out to be the mother (who was crazy, tired, studying for law exams, and frustrated with bourgeois pressures). Interestingly, there's a character who's a (former) pedophile--he's the main suspect, but completely innocent. In some ways he's a rather sympathetic character, even though he's also disgusting.

Anyway, the episode made me think about 90s Feminism, and Hilary Clinton, and the Democratic debate in Austin on Thursday. I drank almost too much and stayed up past midnight--both of which are pretty hard to do in San Diego north county. I want the primaries to be over.

We went to the zoo today.

Last night I dreamed that the house was a huge maze jungle gym for Lester.

Sympathy and Empathy

So, today, for the umpteenth time, I explained the difference between sympathy and empathy to my ESL students. (Aside: I remember the first time I heard the word "umpteenth." Dan Rather said it during coverage of the first Gulf War. I don't remember any more about the context, but I went and looked up "umpteenth" in the dictionary. I have a problematic soft spot for Dan Rather because he gave my Dad topographical maps that helped him backpack out of Baghdad to Jordan).

I think the word "sympathetic" has a bad reputation. As in:


We tend to focus on the concept of "pity" (pathos, etc) relative to sympathy, but I think sympathy can be about the capacity to imagine someone's experience while at the same time recongizing that you cannot possibly accurately imagine someone's experience--especially their suffering. It's the combination of the willingness to imagine and the recognition of the impossibility of imagining that is important. When my Dad's dad passed away nearly 10 years ago (I never new my grandfather, all I know is that he ate wheat germ and was once hit in the head with a wrecking ball--mythology) I didn't know what else to write except something along the lines of "Dad, I have no idea how you are feeling, but if you want to talk, let's talk."

When I explain sympathy to my students, I talk about it in terms of identification. Sympathy is when you can imagine or identify with someone's experience, even if you've never had a similar experience. Somehow, there is an affinity--even if it's only imagined. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (if some kind person with access to the OED wants to send me the entries for sympathy and empathy, great), sympathy is "almost a magical notion at first; e.g. in ref. to medicines that heal wounds when applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound." Sympathy as a way to connect to someone else, even though true connection is impossible.

Empathy is a much more recent term, coined (again, I'm citing the Online Etymology Dictionary) in 1858 by Rudolf Lotze. Empathy is initially about identifying with art, not with people. (The art object as a mirror of self, bla bla). When we talk about empathy relative to another person, it's still largely an intellectual concept: empathy is a kind of intellectual vicarious experience of the feelings of someone else. At least that's how I explain it to my super smart advanced ESL students.

So, I think of empathy as being intellectual, and sympathy as being imaginative. Yes, I know, it's a false dichotomy, but still. It's truly impossible to understand someone else's experience. You can't really know what another person is experiencing any more than you can know what a parrot is experiencing. What you have is your ability to imagine someone's experience based on your shared interactions. This is how Lester and I interact: we have our own knowledge of ourselves, and our own knowledge of our shared interactions.

I was confused about many things

Alas, there are no readings this evening.

I am going to make a lentil stew thing with greens. Lentils are good with greens. Also, I have a rather large amount of lentils in my cupboard, and also a lot of greens in my fridge.

I want to brine my own corned beef for St. Patrick's day this year--all in practice for one day spending St. Patrick's day with my sisters and Dad and Mary in Westport (we'd have to climb Croagh Patrick the next day to work off the corned beef). This will likely never happen, but I want to be prepared. Mark and I will eat leftover corned beef on sandwiches and in breakfast hash.

I wish that Jean Rhys had written more. I wish Jane Bowles had written more. I have to stop myself from rereading Good Morning, Midnight and Two Serious Ladies every month. When I'm tired and frustrated with reading, those books are all I want to read. I think it's probably time for me to reread Nadja. Maybe I'll be able to appreciate it without feeling so hostile towards it and endlessly comparing it to Nightwood.

Here are some books I would like to read:

• Insel - Mina Loy
• Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin De Siecle - Elaine Showalter
• Trauma: A Genealogy - Ruth Leys
• The Open: Man and Animal - Giorgio Agamben
• The Blindfold - Siri Hustvedt
• CALAFIA'S CHILDREN, The California Heritage Poetry Curriculum - Oakland Unified School District
• Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity, 4) - Joel Robbins

And a lot of other books

Riding in the Rain

I should get rain pants. It turns out that they would actually be very useful, even here in southern California. Also, riding in the rain would be easier if I wore contacts. I've tried, but I don't like them. I should also go to a real eye doctor who can fit me with contacts that aren't irritating. I like the fact that my glasses cover up the circles under my eyes.

I have a new ESL class this week, and so I no longer have the very vexing and scary student I had last month. Apparently, he complained about having a new teacher and told the director that I was the best teacher he'd ever had. He's like a guy who beats you and then says how much he loves you afterwards.

Edwin Torres arrives tomorrow to read at Cal State San Marcos. Leslie Scalapino is also reading down in San Diego. If only there were two of me!

Off to yoga. My open-floor handstand is much stronger now. My quadriceps feel like they're shrinking, though--one downside of cycling, so I need to work more thigh stretches into my sequences.

Missing Cupcakes

I can't find the cupcakes we brought home from Auntie Em's Kitchen. I think I remember taking them off the train. Maybe they are in the car? I am sad.

LA + Poetry + Poet Friends + Art + Armenian Food + New People + Me + Mark =

Big, big love.

And I love the sleepy, somehow not quite hungover train ride back to north county, too.

Today it was 41 Degrees

And there was hail.

And yet many people are still in T shirts.

Tomorrow Mark and I are going to drink cava, but that has nothing to do with the weather.

I'm pointing you all towards what Nada Gordan said about Hilary Clinton, gender, and the recent primaries.

I admit that I voted for Edwards by mail before he dropped out.

I will not complain about my students.

All I want to yap about is how difficult and challenging (in a boring way) the current group of students in my ESL class is. I'm also in the midst of three days of insane final grading for one of my online classes, which is just ending. I'm testy.

The shower won't drain.

A few weeks ago, I finally potted the clipping from the jade plant that Mark and I had in DC. It's doing quite well, and it's nice to have a little plant here in my office.

It's nice to have an office.

I found my old English grammar book from the first half of my sophomore year in high school in Mexico City. On the back page is a list of potential gifts for people, a note that says "remember Lord of the Flys" (my spelling was even worse then), and a cheesy quote from the song "Fragile," by Sting.

Here's a quote from the grammar book:

"To people who speak standard English, an error in the use of even a single verb is as conspicuous as a smudge on one's face. These additional drills are included to clean up any remaining 'smudges' in your use of the irregular verbs that you have studied so far in this chapter."

or, a favorite sample sentence:

"After Elmo added raisins, he put the cake in the oven."

I'm not sure how studying English grammar in an environment geared towards non-native speakers of English at the same time I was learning Spanish resulted in me enjoying grammar, but it did. Spelling has always annoyed me--grammar I like. It explains structure. Thought. Logic--or lack thereof.

I'm going to name my style: it is called the My New Style is Your New Style Style. Alternatively, it could be called, "I hope this doesn't feel good"

or also "it pains me."

I have a new student who really really wants to talk about condoms. He's 28. I fear that his presence in the class will mean that I have one overwrought young man too many. They all came to California because they thought it was warm all the time and they could go to the beach and meet girls. It's cold now. Too cold for the beach, and most of them don't live near the beach, and getting to the beach takes an hour on the bus, even though it's only five miles from their house. They are overwrought and lack the ability to pay attention to detail. None of them even bought a guidebook before coming here. They didn't look up the weather, they didn't even really research where Oceanside is located. No one gave them any useful advice before they arrived and it didn't ever occur to them that studying English in California would NOT be like starring in an episode of the OC.

In general, I like and respect my students, but I'm having trouble doing that this month. I don't respect them. I want to, but they need to give me some indication that they are thinking. I feel like everything I say to them is a disappointment: they're so fragile. "California is cold. No, not all women are sluts. No, there is no street life in Oceanside. No, you will probably never have the opportunity to go to a house party while you are here. No, the public transportation is terrible. No, you can't go to a club until you are 21. No, there aren't really any clubs to go to. No, the water here is cold all year round. No, the weather isn't nice here in May and June--it's cloudy and overcast every day" etc....

I'm nostalgic for my DC students, who were, in general, tough, polite, funny and independent.

I'm in a pissy mood, so I'm not going to conclude this post with my usual sympathetic counter argument about how my students really are OK sometimes.

how much I like being upside down

This morning I woke up with an Alfred de Musset poem in my head--"Tristesse"--one that I had to memorize for a French class in high school. Most of the poems we had to memorize were by Musset, Jacques Prévert, Verlaine, sometimes Rimbaud. Nothing really surprising. Although I guess we did do a whole unit on Apollinaire and caligrams. And we also read Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve and Beckett's En Aattendant Godot. My French teacher had us reading Beckett while I was still hung up on T.S. Eliot and writing imitations of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Meanwhile, in French, I was writing awful but strange poems about salamanders and gypsies. You will never see any of those poems.

I'm not sure I have anything else to say about the "Numbers Trouble" article that I haven't already said before. Doubtless I have much to say about gender and avant-garde art. Yes. Much to say.

I've been reading back issues of Elsewhere and also Hanna Weiner.

I've been trying to figure out what I did to my neck.

Rat Year

Dim Sum over at Delirious Hem. I was too overwhelmed with student behavior problems, plagiarism issues, and two annual reviews to contribute to this forum, but do have a look. If you're even here, though, you probably already know about it. I'll be blogging/commenting on it soon. Maybe.

This was an awful week. I taught my students the verb "whine." Soon, I'll have to teach some of them how to say "momma's boy."

road rode wrode

It is difficult to learn English in English class if you are never in English class. I don't care how much money your parents foolishly paid for you to come here.

However, today was a good day. I rode my bike to work this morning for the first time in weeks. I saw a red-tailed hawk in one of the acacia trees near our apartment, and three herons, and two feral parrots. I rarely see feral parrots around here, so I was very excited. They were smallish, green, and loud. Some kind of conure, probably.

I also now have my California drivers license. At last.

Lester's been in a pissy mood because he's going through his spring molt. Today I gave him a shower/steam bath, which helps take care of the pinfeathers, and he's in a noticeably better mood now.

Ce Soir

Poets in the Galleries
6:00 p.m.

Focusing on women poets living in California, SDMA and the UCSD Department of Literature are proud to present award-winning poets Sandra Doller and Fanny Howe.

Sandra (nee Miller) Doller's first book, Oriflamme, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005, and her second book, Chora, is forthcoming from Ahsahta in 2009. She was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University in spring 2007 and a recipient of the Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship in 2004. She currently teaches in the literature and writing department at California State University, San Marcos.

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose, several novels and prose collections, short stories, books for young adults, and a collection of literary essays. Additionally, she has won several awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.
$5 members/$10 nonmembers/$7 students

It's not my assignment

Oh, I wish my sinuses would just explode--that would feel nice(r).

I would never design an assignment that requires developmental English students to write a cause-effect essay on global warming. It is a boring, uncreative assignment, and someone plagiarizes every time. It's bad for the student, obviously, and it's an administrative nuisance. I tell students, "it's easier for you to write a solid essay than it is for you to plagiarize and not have me notice." They do not listen. If someone plagiarizes so well that I can't tell they are actually plagiarizing, then on some level I don't care, because it means that they must have pretty good writing skills.

Probably I am supposed to model qualities of "excellence" and "leadership."

I typed up a poem. I wish html rendered spacing better.

I'm grading. Oops, I mean I'm "providing feedback." I keep forgetting that I'm not actually a professor or a teacher, I'm a "facilitator."

The student who has missed four out of the past ten classes told the evaluators that my class moves too quickly, and the student who dropped down from the advanced class and never does the extra assignments I give him (and which he requests) said that the class moves too slow.

I bought my brother a gift membership to the Audubon Society. I can write that here since I know he doesn't read this blog.

I'm going to make tea.

things between me and death at the hands of two simultaneous performance reviews

are

• 8 year anniversary
• dinner
• beer
• Fanny Howe et Sandra Dollar reading on Tuesday
• pay raise
• tedious community college job applications
• California drivers license test
• cava

All Problems at All Jobs All Together

And all must be solved, even though all are a waste of time.

I've been writing poems, which must mean that I am a poet.

I feel like reading the Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim. That can't be good.