Southern hospitality, good poets, the state of wed

Privyet!

I have forsaken all others. And it is wonderful.

And for all y’all that want tropics without the cancer of wet t-shirt contests and mock Hemingways (forgive me), check out the Hotel Marquesa, manned by the incomparable Carol Wightman.

Just back (pre-wedding) from a tremendous session as a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where I interfaced with the tremendous writers Aja Gabel, Laura Eve Engel, Chloe Honum, and Lisa Fay Coutley. Check out poems from Chloe and Laura Eve in the newest issue of LIT.

New poems coming out in Cimarron Review & Harpur Palate, and am featured in the Oaken Transformations Poetry & Sculpture walk, the brainchild of brilliant & ever-on-style-point poet Anya Cobler.

Past and future readings. Not much else.

Thanks to Tim Gager & fellow readers Kitty Beer and Jim McDevitt for frisky times at the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge. I like a reading where the break-takers and the wine-refillers are urged on, not penalized.

Next Saturday I read at Ada’s Books in Providence with poet Gillian Devereux.

In other news – well, I am news-less as the prep-school shuffle begins, early wake-ups and the fold-down desks and shouts from the soccer fields and good fall smells and gargoyles and gazpacho and cats in literal heat and the futility of discussing ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ in class. And an excess of hyphens, apparently.

W.S., KGB, SBJ, the brilliance that is “Election”

I’ve been living a Siberian hamster-like existence in the palaces of my mind AND the world above. Two readings in New York—the first at a party in Brooklyn feat. veg. dumplings of infinite variety, the second at KGB bar which is, as my friend Kara put it, “very KGB-ish.” Much fun had in the city but the predictable exhaustion/sense of “there are a lot of people doing this thing called poetry and I am a mere ant in the sprawling universe” etc.

Visiting poet Vivian Shipley was on campus of my Place of Employment, where she regaled us with stories of her days as a Kentucky sorority sister (mention of an exploding ‘fake breast’ incited much amusement from the adults in the audience; the kids were all “and so?”) She started out as a Victorian, suffered a brain tumor in her 30’s, and emerged as a poet.

Reading: “The Line of Beauty” by British novelist Alan Hollinghurst (absorbing, elegant, wicked, sad) and Wallace Stevens. Let me be frank: I’ve never “gotten” Stevens; in fact, my perfunctory glance-thrus of his work provoked anxiety. However, however. Perhaps it’s a sign of the oncoming golden years, but “Sunday Morning” is just, well, terrifyingly good. Sweet Baby Jesus, it’s good.

Finally: the presidential elections are being held at my Place of Employment this week. The platforms have gotten so sophisticated! I remember stuff like “french fries every day at lunch” and “better prom.” Or rather: I saw movies where said promises were the bread/butter of platforms. Now it’s all “the greening of campus” and “diversity initiatives.” Which brings me to my final point: I uploaded videos of myself reading and am comforted that my at-rest facial contortion is somewhat akin to R. Witherspoon’s in the infamous “freeze” scene of the film “Election.” See it now. Read “Sunday Morning.” Have a cuppa white at the KGB bar & listen to poems about cherry pie & sleep.

NB: I am fully aware that I am crowing about the greatness of things that time & the vox populi has already deemed great. Forgive me.

Chapbooks are here!

I just received author copies. Sun! Chapbooks! Charles Simic reading tonight!

Chapbook, High Art, Infinite Jest

I just received word from Daniel Lin at Love Among the Ruins that my chapbook The Clever Decoys is nearly ready for release!

I now must commence making a contact list of Everyone I Know, a list which I fear will be petite, and which I am somewhat afraid to use as I loathe the idea of bombarding folks with ‘look at what I’m UP TO!’ promotional emails. Perhaps if I had an angle, an accompanying reason for contact—a volcanic shift in testosterone levels, the sudden appearance of a tail, the ability to conjure blondie batches or speak in T.S. Eliot’s dulcet tones without effort…or if I were, like Ally Sheedy in the nineties queer-cinema gem “High Art”, a phoenix rising from the ashes of my hot photog. career to take the New York art world by a storm…

Embarrasing disclosure/clumsy transition. In my adolescence, I may have considered “High Art” a great film. Female musculature in tank tops, lots of lolling about in amber-lit apartments…I don’t know. The soundtrack? In a fit of mandated “relaxation”, I tried to watch it again. It strikes me now as sort of funny, and kind of bad, and ripe for parody, but nonetheless we all need an infusion of nineties nostalgia in these trying times.

I am 198 pages away from finishing “Infinite Jest.” O, it is good. It is so good.

Slow Dancin’, Year of the Tiger, Love Poems

The Valentine’s Dance, held in a space that would comfortably accommodate twenty, feat. 70 + adolescents storming the floor in the outfits du jour (spandex shorts and mesh jerseys, all day-glo) & fist-pumping, jumping, grinding, etc. My place of employment mandates that I occasionally chaperone these events, and I’m always torn between feeling creepily voyeuristic—I am watching other people in the midst of some fairly intimate bodily gyrations—and being interested in/curious about what constitutes the Dance these days.

Not much has changed in fifteen years. Sadly, I am too young to have enjoyed the heyday of chiffon dresses and Enchantment Under the Sea, Back-to-the-Future stylie—but the music choices are really inexplicable. Of course, you have your thumping beat, your Alvin+ Chipmunks-style vocals. I’m not begrudging anyone a good beat. I was struck, though, by the songs that are being re-mixed for dancing purposes. Steve Winwood’s “Valerie”—yes. Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”—well, OK. But “Dreams”, by that that sweet-as-tapioca staple of my youth, the Cranberries? Bizarre, friends, bizarre.

I’m also saddened by the Death of the Slow Dance. When I was thirteen, I kind of loved wrapping up the night in the arms of a Davidoff Cool Water & Dorito-scented boy, both us swaying to a choice ballad like “End of the Road” “November Rain” or, for the bold of heart, “Jump” by Kris Kross. But seriously: the slow dance has profound charms best enjoyed by the young & starry-eyed. Bring it back.

I’ve been scouring the interwebs this week for model love poems. My poetry students (all four of them) claim to hate the assignment, but they love—love—reading and discussing love poems. It’s fun to speculate about the nature of the relationship, fun, even, to hate/envy/admire the poems that positively seep joy. John Donne, Frank O’Hara, I’m talking to you.

Here, a wee sample. Look ‘em up if you’re nasty.

Recite (in between bites of Nian Gao) to your Object while slow-dancing.

“I Wrung My Hands” Anna Akhmatova

“Love Story” David Avidan (featured in the newest issue of Drunken Boat)

http://www.drunkenboat.com/db11/01poe/avidan/love.php

“Casabianca” Elizabeth Bishop

“litany” Carolyn Creedon

“For Love” Robert Creeley

“The Good Morrow” John Donne

“At Gettysburg” Laura Kasischke

“Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out” Richard Siken

Weeping, imprecision, J-Cam, Poe

And thus when by Poetry—or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods—we find ourselves melted into tears—we weep then … through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

—Poe, “The Heresy of the Didactic”

The Feeling.

Like, post-nasal drip with caramel. A certain downshift in regions of the sternum & below.

I think EAP’s designation of the “glimpses” comes close to articulating what that Feeling is, that blissed-out/heartbreaking sensation. It’s close to nostalgia but nostalgia assumes the real occurrence of something in one’s past, and an ensuing longing-for, but this is more like (forgive me, it’s early and cold in the Cottage, and the post is labeled ‘imprecision’ after all) profound nostalgia for what you never had/could have, combined with despair that you will never, in fact, attain it.

It’s the richer, fattier, brinier version of nostalgia.

After two weeks of procrastination, I finally went to see “Avatar”.

I cannot believe I began a paragraph this way.

So: I will spare the Interwebs my opinions/thought/theories/condemnations of the film and offer only that those were real tears under enormous 3-D glasses. And thank you, Mr. Cameron, for giving me the Feeling.

Revise, Vicodin

does not have quite the same prosodic charm as “Speak, Memory” but as the second part of that phrase is doing perverse little jigs on my gray matter, I can’t think of anything better.

Bad news: I, aged 28, of sound mind & body, will be the proud recipient of a second root canal tomorrow at noon. This fact unsettles me because 1. they’re dramatic and painful 2. they cost as much as say, I don’t know, a functional vehicle or exotic import pet, and 3. they seem to suggest a certain…negligence/lassitude in the receiver? The Impending Root Canal produced a personality-morph, whereby I dashed, blubbering, into the Dean of Faculty’s office and said “I want my mother.”

Good news: Daniel Lin at Love Among the Ruins (http://latr.tumblr.com/) sent me the proofs of my first chapbook. I am, well, psyched. The press has put out chapbooks from Heather Green, Ernest Hilbert, and Laura Jaramillo. I sped-read Heather’s “No Omen”; “Feathers, Quiet, Light”, in particular, is lovely.

Teeth, chapbooks. Live it, love it.