Ron Sillman has a post which I'm sure you've all seen by now about Conceptual Poetics and Flarf. I'm very good at making connections, and very bad at distinguishing points of contrast, but I do think that Ron's (somewhat lighthearted, I think) suggestion that Flarf is to projective verse as conceptual poetry is to the New York School isn't bad. Although tonally I associate recent Conceptual work more with big Olsonian epics and Flarf with a casual, energetic line and a way of recording daily or seemingly unimportant information in a Frank O'Hara kind of way.

I was also thinking about the footnote to Ron's post:

"From my perspective the great “tragedy” of langpo is that there were no other seriously contesting approaches to poetry. Actualism, which I’ve written about before, dissipated after the death-by-alcoholism of Darrell Gray, and the NY School, gen 3, was never interested in working out its relationship to other poetics, period. Everyone else was pursuing the isolate mode of individualism, still the most popular (and futile) option."

I think of New Narrative in San Francisco and 3rd generation New York School as being the other serious contesting approaches to poetry relative to langpo. But it's true that I can't think of any particular poetics statements. But it's also true that there's a lot I haven't read. Can anyone think of/point me towards something (and by something I mean a piece of writing) that might be an articulated poetics from either group?

I grilled

dinner. On a grill.

Friday Lester

In lieu of going to the NPF conference on the 1970s at UMO,

I am doing many handstands and drop backs. Dear readers, imagine the shock (if you can) I experienced when I learned, some years ago, that the university "near" my high school, the university I drove 1.25 hours to each way twice a week for flute lessons and orchestra rehearsals, organizes conferences that have a history of being interested in experimental poetry. The shock, the shock.Publish Post

If you don't work hard in your 20s, no one loves you in your 30s.

Paul Bowles said that.

Ok, so today really is my birthday. And I'll stop blogging about it (so much) (after today).

My students were surprisingly sweet today--I got a little bookmark in the shape of a Korean kite, chocolate from various countries, and a bottle of very nice pinot noir (I fear that one was a bribe). One of my students kept saying "the whole world congratulates you."

My sister Michelle sent me an organic rubber, totally biodegradable yoga mat. So now that I've finished grading and work etc etc I'm going over to the studio to practice.

Happy Sunshine Blond Girl of Death Happy

I went back to teaching ESL today. I have a group of students that I've worked with off and on for the past three or four months. Many of them are leaving in the next four weeks, so it's nice to be able to send them on their way knowing that their English is much better and none of them have gone insane. It's the first day of the session, so of course I'm happy and optimistic; but it's nice to be working with an especially great bunch of students--everybody likes and respects each other. Teaching intensive language classes is rather...intense. I work with students for 3-5 hours a day, five days a week. It's different than semester-based classes, because everyone becomes either very comfortable or very uncomfortable with each other quite quickly, and the subtle shifts and adjustments that happen in a semester class happen much more rapidly and frequently.

My new bike is a dream to ride. Today was the first day that I commuted to work on it, and I shaved more than five minutes off my ride, and I wasn't even working very hard.

After teaching I headed back to Carlsbad to get a pedicure (part of a credit from a birthday gift last year). I had time to kill and so went up to the yoga studio to chat. I'd missed the hoop dance class, but the teacher was still there, so we hung out and she showed me and the owner, who was also there, a few more tricks. Hooping is totally fun addictive--especially to anyone who used to do it as a child. Anyway, I left the studio with some very excellent and total surprise birthday gifts: a hoop and a pair of pants that I'd been eying for at least two months.

Mark and I just got back from a pre-happy birthday happy hour. I'm feeling quite happy and pleased with myself. I have a book coming out by January from an awesome press, I like my boyfriend, my work doesn't make me crazy (all the time), I live near the beach and a great yoga studio, I'm learning how to do tricks with a hoola hoop, my bike is awesome, I get to hang out with poets I like both in San Diego and outside of San Diego; I'm in good shape.

I am nostalgic in the most self-indulgent way possible.

This picture was taken in Singapore, ten years ago to the day. Actually, I'm not that self-indulgent or nostalgic. It's just overcast and the last day of my half-vacation. I'll go for a walk. Clean, organize, read more Anna Karinina, ponder deep issues such as

What kind of cake should I make?

I've always been fond of carrot cake, but I also have a recipe for an almond-plum cake with crème fraîche and a crazy banana layer cake with mascarpone frosting. However, since Mark and I can only eat so much cake (and I'll make a second cake for his birthday later in the month), I wonder if I should make something simpler, like flan (which I love but have never made). I won't be doing any cooking until this weekend.

3 More Days Until I am 30

Not counting today. I am making a medium-sized deal out of this.

I did a medium-length asana practice on the beach yesterday. I like practicing handstand on the beach, because the sand is soft and nice to fall on.

My left hamstring/femoris is sore, but I learned a few ways to make it less sore.

I want the Celtics to win, but I don't think they will.

No one can drink alcohol legally on Mission Beach anymore. There were 400,000 less people there this past Memorial Day weekend than the one before.

I made fish stew. Yes. In San Diego in June it is still cold enough to eat stew. It is 98 in DC.

I went to a women's teachers club meeting. Yes, I did.

I'm going to attend a 2 hour training seminar on critical thinking on the evening of my birthday.

There is new construction in Carlsbad. It will be a mixed-use building. There aren't any high rises here, although there are a few in Oceanside.

Still reading Anna Karinina. She did not die in childbirth. The wedding scene between Levin and Kitty is crazy and long and ritualized and both characters are very beautiful and very dazed; neither of them has eaten very much because they are so elated and overwhelmed and in love and clueless.

T-1 day until the end of my half/medium vacation.

There were many tourists on the beach today. I overheard a few conversations like this:

A: The air temperature is so cold. There's no way I'm getting in the water.
B: But please, we are on vacation.

Dear friends, don't come to San Diego in June for the warmth. Unless you live in the Pacific Northwest, it is probably warmer where you live than here in coastal North County.

Friday Lester

Pig Angels of the Americlypse

Excerpts from Rodrigo Toscano's "Pig Angels of the Americlypse" performed in Olympia, washington as part of the PRESS cross-cultural literary conference, may 24 2008. Thanks to Tom Orange for the video.



and another excerpt.

I made salad

I turned my phone on. And off.

I, of course, have yet to post mine.

Tom has posted his pictures from the Press cross-cultural literary conference at Evergreen here and here.

Still enjoying my half vacation and vaguely following the conversation/debate over at Jasper Berne's blog about "The Liberalizing Ideology of the Internet" and this prose poem/essay thing by Stan Apps and Matt Timmons.

I've never, ever had a successful diet that didn't include alcohol, bread, and cheese.

I did three rounds of hanumanasana in my yoga practice today, and also worked on jumping up into handstand from two legs. Hanumanasana remains a challenge, but I think my hamstrings are opening up a bit. They'd better be after all those hanumanasanas! Handstand, though, was more satisfying. I managed to jump up (with two bent legs--instead of kicking up) and balance before I hit the wall. That must mean that my core muscles are getting stronger, since I have the strength to not only jump up, but also break and balance. I'm still working on jumping into it with straight legs, though.

Yesterday we went to the beach and today we also went to the beach. I have one more week left before I start teaching ESL in the mornings again. I intend to go to the beach a lot this week.

I've been looking at Mario Batali's new book on Italian Grilling. I like his recipes--they work, even if you don't have a fancy kitchen, etc. Yum. I'll still be cooking/grilling my favorite Middle Eastern and South Asian recipes this summer, but I've decided that it also won't hurt me to begin studying updated European traditions, either.

I said that today's birthday wish would be something about health and vanity. I've been reading Anna Karenina. Levin's just started his obsession with death, and now Anna has picked up on it as well. I'm not obsessed with death. I am at times obsessed with the nexus between health, beauty, and physical comforts. I spend quite a bit of time maintaining my health (through exercise, yoga, and food) and my beauty, but I'm not interested in maintaining either of those things at the expense of enjoyment.

So, today's birthday wish is that I'll practice yoga well into my 70s and beyond, that I'll never develop some weird sensitivity or allergy to cheese, wine, or scotch, and that I'll maintain my ability to stay up well past midnight.

How cute, I will be 30 soon

11 more days until my birthday. Although this day is not yet over, I am considering it over. Since I know I'm not going to receive real estate in Spain (or anywhere else), today's birthday wish is for all of my friends to keep visiting and to keep inviting me to visit them; I also want to give more readings, go to more parties, more art galleries, etc.

Tomorrow's birthday wishes will probably be about health and vanity.

Friday Lester

We're home again.

We're in Seattle now that conference festivities are over. We spent the day being tourists, walking around down town, and trying different food from the many places around pike place. The conference was fun and productive--I'm on vacation, so I'm not going to do a thoughtful post about it now, but later. I did a handstand as part of my reading, which is a good indication of the whole atmosphere of the event.

Off to Olympia and Seattle

Last night I dreamed that I went to Kaia and Jule's panel on Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry and Public Space and the audience was me and fluffy kittens that look suspiciously like the ones in some of Anne Boyer's recent pieces that she's been posting on flickr. And then, here's the paranoid part: I checked my AIO work email, and there was a message from Alma haranguing me for not posting an announcement about the "apocalypse festival" to my class.

The Umbrella Above our Table at the Julian Pie Company was as Beautiful as the Pie

1. Finishing my essay on Alma and other things for the Feminist poetics panel at Press this weekend. It's not really an essay, and it's not really finished, but I think it will be a good "talk." I've never been one for reading my paper as a presentation start to finish anyway.

2. Trying to familiarize myself wtih Pig Angels of the Americlypse; looking forward to rehearsing and performing.

3. Laundry and getting Lester ready to head off to the vet for boarding tomorrow.

4. Packing. I like packing. I'm not sure if I'll bring any dresses. Certainly I will bring some heels.

5. Organizing my poems for readings both at the conference and later in Seattle in the Subterranean Yak series.

No broken bones, just sore--but in a good way, not an injured way.

It's important to be decisive when you're doing any form of acrobatics. A half-assed jump up into handstand doesn't work. And if you're the base/support, you can't be indecisive about when you need to come down. You need to be able to know you're done about five seconds before you're done so that you don't collapse with everyone balancing on top of you. Being indecisive especially doesn't work when you're doing handstand on someone's ankles while they're in plank and someone else is doing an inversion on their back.

I took the acro-yoga workshop because I don't feel comfortable doing partner work; I don't want someone to support me, literally or figuratively, I want to support myself. Acro-yoga is all about partnership. I'm usually game for anything in a yoga class, but it was amazing how timid and even negative I was at moments about some of the balances and inversions we did. I do much better when I know the person being the "base"/support.

Hopefully I won't come back with any broken bones.

I've been grading all morning, and am now headed to an acro yoga workshop. Apparantly "the mystery of inversions is no match for the wisdom of acrobatic training techniques!" I already have no problem being upside down, but I'm hoping to learn more about assists. The workshop description also suggest that we're going to learn how to build pyramids. Mmm. I'll let you know how it all goes. Maybe I can learn a few moves to use as P4 in Rodrigo's "Pig Angels of the Apocolypse" that we'll be performing next week during Press at Evergreen. Piggy pyramids!

Friday Lester

I've been reading a review copy of Danielle Parfunda's My Zorba (Bloof, 2008). The diction is more domestic than Glenum's Hounds of No and less blatantly grotesque--though there's still plenty of ovaries and medical treatments (not so many explosions or references to mucus membranes). I'm enjoying the energy on the level of the line.

Laura Glenum's Hounds of No

We're in the midst of a slight heat wave here on the coast. The guy I buy bread from at the farmer's market told me he thinks the strange weather is a sign of the End of Days, and also of global warming. "It's never colder in Escondido than it is in Carlsbad," he said. I told him that when the oil runs out and the apocalypse comes, I'll be in good shape with my bicycle. He laughed and said that I could ride up into the clouds and away from the horsemen.

So, in light of that discussion about the apocolypse, I thought I'd post my reading notes about Laura Glenum's The Hounds of No. Again, these are reading notes, not a full-fledged review. It will take several days to weed out the typos. I find that when I think "review" I'm unable to say anything useful. So, I write "notes" which later become "essays" or "reviews." So, on to the notes:

I've now actually read Laura Glenum's The Hounds of No (instead of just looking at it and reading every other poem and then skipping to the back to read the end). I really want to like this book. In theory, it's got everything I love:

macular holes, mucus, aliens, pigs, corpses, ovaries, aborted fetuses, sperm, aliens taking over bodies and exploding (again, with lots of mucus), bodies that explode (even without being surrogate alien parents), insects, S&M, parts of bodies (both human and non-human), doll houses, museums, dioramas, tableaux, Victorian wigs...

And more.

This book resonates with all the Modernist literature most dear to me: Mina Loy's "Pig cupid rooting his rosy snout in erotic garbage," for example, or practically every love affair in Djuna Barnes Nightwood. Maybe even H.D's Nights for it's masochistic and symbolic order that finally doesn't lead anywhere definite--"Two straight lines run into infinity." There's even a bit of Breton's Nadja here, although she shows up as something like an exploded mannequin, and the trail left by her plastic body parts doesn't lead any where sacred (even in a profane way).

I like the camp in this book, I appreciate the very obvious critique of female objectification, I like the fact that Glenum seems to care about what both Freud and Lacan have to say about the world (I think this is the first book I've read that quotes from Dora) and is able to critique them without shunning them completely.

In short, this book has many of the concerns of the Feminist avant-garde Modernists I mentioned above, and also New Narrative (There's a lot to unpack in that statement.)

And yet I'm not howling with ecstasy. Which puzzles me. Hounds of No is working with concerns with which I am, um, deeply concerned, but it also feels very familiar. Point #6 of Glenum's "Manifesto of the Anti-Real," is this:

"To be Anti-Real is not to be Surreal. The achievement of Surrealism lies in displacing correspondences, in the poem not arriving. In the Anti-Real, all assumptions are disabled, too, with one difference: the Anti-Real displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence."

Sound's good. But Surrealism is interested in violence, too. Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror is all about violence (and evil, and grotesque bodies, and how when you push these things far enough they become strangely beautiful and, dare I say, sacred), n'est pas? Although I guess he was really pre-Surrealist; they claimed him posthumously, right? I suppose pushing profanity until it becomes holy is a kind of arrival. And the heroine in H.D's Night does arrive at the bottom of a frozen lake, but the text doesn't have anything grand to say about it, except for the fact that the suicide is annoying and puzzling for everyone else still alive, so the text opens up again without arrival.

Surrealism isn't Feminist, of course. In many Surrealist poems, women are sacred entry points to the divine (often very literally) or guides to the mysteries of the universe. They show up naked in the woods at night, or they are lovers like Nadja who embody all that is mysterious, dark, violent (and, you guessed it, sacred) about the night cityscape. A cunt is great as long as it's imaginary. It's been a while since I looked, ahem, at Louis Aragon’s Le Con D’Irene, but still.

Ok. So I like The Hounds of No, but it's finally a little too neat for me to love it. The poems know their contexts--the grotesque, Christianity (which I haven't discussed), Surrealism and psychoanalysis and Feminist critiques of both, nods to critiques of post 9/11 politics--but I'm not sure the language went far enough for me. Let me try to be specific. The moves are really good, but they felt familiar. I keep thinking about Kathy Acker's Kathy Goes to Haiti :

"Is he your husband."
"No. I don't have a husband."
"Listen, you don't understand how things are in Haiti. Women in Haiti don't go around alone."
"What about the women who aren't married. Are there any women who aren't married?"
"They live with their families."
"It's not like that in the United States."
"You can't go to Jacmel alone. You have to have a boyfriend."
"But I don't want a boyfriend. I want to be alone."
"If you don't have a boyfriend, the driver of the Jeep'll become your boyfriend."
"You mean he'll rape me?"
"No. No. There is no violence in Haiti. Anybody can do anything they want in Haiti."

There's nothing formally crazy about that passage, and it's not fair to compare poetry to fiction, maybe, but that passage is super creepy and funny and it plays will all kinds of familiar problematic racial and gender stereotypes and fantasies. The last line makes me laugh and leap out of my skin. I'm not leaping out of my skin with Hounds of No. Maybe because its form creates distance between the reader and the text, and it does so on purpose. And "distance" isn't a code word for saying "it is experimental and uses enjambment and disjunction etc," although it does all of those things and I like all of those things. It's probably more of a code word for "performance," something else I like, especially when thinking about gender.

That doesn't quite describe what I mean when I say that Hounds of No is a bit familiar and that the language was good but didn't go far enough. But I'll have to stop here. I need to eat an early dinner so that I'm not sluggish during yoga this evening.

Maybe part of the problem is that I wasn't raised as a Christian--I've never even been baptized. I enjoyed the performance in Hounds of No, but I think I'd like to feel more threatened by it.

It is beautiful.

I brought home the bicycle today.

Mark and I just returned from a bit of happy hour festivities at Las Olas. We walked home along the 101 and the beach. There are many vacant homes along the 101 and the beach. The old ones were built to be actual homes, but are now rented, and the newer ones were built to be investments, and they are tacky.

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.