poetical distractions/obsessive movement

Suspended Animation // Circular Thought Processes

2011-10-26T21:28:00.000+01:00

To be in suspended animation: life processes slowed, without being terminated, by external forces. The process of ideas slowed, without being terminated. The process of making decisions, slowed, without being terminated.

There are no insights to offer, no stellar advice, no directions to follow. Or there are directions, I just don't know how to follow them. I don't have the right key, and I'm struggling not to fall into metaphor.

I am not sure about the motivation/functioning/forcing. If there is no clear beginning, how to begin in the first place, at the beginning? You say to begin in the middle, and lay out the path for me. But then we can't agree on how to move forward.

Abstractions to build a wall, distractions from the actual thing. Wondering how obvious to make the entrance, or allow you to enter in.

I don't understand why we can't have a conversation about this. We're coming from the same place, it doesn't have to be an argument. I'm just as confused as you are. And equally frustrated.

The test is to push through where others would falter and quit. It's not whether you have the dream or passion or not; it's whether you follow through with it, taking it further than the rest.

Too many different ways to go, and none looking promising. Well, at least not the one that I want to look promising.

Is the opposite of suspended animation resurrection? Or is it just forward momentum?

Fragmentary thoughts leading in fragmented direction // cold feet // city of knots. Pop up advertisement: if you died today // who would take care of your family // ? // playing with lines // feelings twisted in my stomach // a rambling migraine // first right eye, then left // waiting for the phone to ring // rambling // rambling // rambling //

Words/Definitions/Sparkling Things

2011-07-12T19:06:00.004+01:00

Which definition of languish is more appropriate for a blog?

-To fail to make progress or be successful - or -

-Suffer from being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation - that being the Internets, dear readers. Maybe here I'm referring more to the words, not the blog. Oh well.

Have you read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester? No? You should. Really. The book came out a few years ago, but I only recently had the pleasure to read it. It's very well-written, and the story (true story!) is incredible. I mean, if you like words/dictionaries/defining things. One of the most prolific contributors to the first edition of the dictionary was an incarcerated murderer/madmen; the author can't definitively say for certain why he went mad, but one of the postulates is that he was traumatized from his time as a doctor in the Civil War, forced to brand deserters with a hot iron. It's really a tragic, touching story.

I love words/dictionaries/defining things. Growing up, my mother had a copy of the Compact Edition of the OED, complete with mini microscope to aid in reading the tiny, tiny print. I admit I didn't make as much use of it as I should have -- but it was a treasure.

Dismantling words, too. Misuse/abuse. Rhyming, spinning, sparkling things.

The Revisionist's Dream II

2011-06-19T16:44:00.002+01:00

She dreamed and the dream was of language. She dreamt
words had yellow wings, had a thousand delicate fingers,
had big tusks, had balls - that their mutable voices rose
from some distance and carried to her on a blue wind. No.
She dreamed of water. She dreamed of a single bright leaf
tangled in a dark stream. She did. But you can't take
her literally, and the story changes all the time.
-Renée Ashley

something after a temporary halt

2011-06-18T16:25:00.002+01:00

to resume. a space for critical thinking // cracked glass

glueing the city back together

i have decided to forsake, momentarily, capitalization here.

something meaningful, and full of meaning, from someone not me:

Any form of thought whatever requires a preparation by emptying one’s mind. You have to lance the cumulative abscess, since we know too much about everything. And there is nothing better than mindless diversions to rid us of that deadweight that crushes thought. Nothing like a good bout of obsessive gymnastics to dispel received ideas. The preparatives for thought are as mysterious as the preparatives for anger. - Jean Baudrillard

writing = thought // -distraction +mental stretching // incomplete equation

resuming a space for this preparative

hopefully you'll do some somersaults too

there are also older poems in past issues of online journals that i never posted about. read them:

Spiral Orb One - Window Conversation

Tattoo Highway 20 - I wanted to Write a Short Story

to be continued...

Waking Life

2010-02-23T22:15:00.003Z

New poem up here:

Melusine

Read it! And while you're at it, read the rest of the current issue as well! :)

Hereing/Hearing Music

2010-02-16T03:58:00.003Z

"On waking, the pattern of the dream fades, but its aura, ambience, timbre and tonality remain, though there is no image. It's the same with a piece of music. You have it in your mind, you can hear it mentally, but you can't summon it up as form. Or with a face, whose features and smile you can feel in a tactile way, but with no recall of what it looks like. Where on earth does this force of the dream register itself, this reminiscence without image?"
-Jean Baudrillard, Cool memories IV (51)

Please join me at a lovely concert this week:

FANTASIES AND SONGS:
NATHANIEL LANASA, SILVIE JENSEN, AND RICK QUANTZ

Wednesday, February 17 at 7PM
Bechstein Piano Centre
207 West 58th Street

Schubert: Der Wanderer
Schubert: Wanderer-Fantasy
Schumann: Kreisleriana-fantasies
Brahms: Viola Songs

Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Rick Quantz, viola
Nathaniel LaNasa, piano

Go to the Event Announcement at the Bechstein Centre website HERE.

HEAR/HERE more here as in where I will be hearing on Wednesday:

2010-01-25T02:15:00.002Z

Marie Ponsot
J. Mae Barizo
Claudia Cortese
&
Nick Thran

Where: Cornelia Street Café
When: Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, 6pm
$7 admission gets you one free drink!

Marie Ponsot is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Book Review. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo was shortlisted for Canada's Robert Kroetsch award for Innovative Poetry and Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Bellingham Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, among others. She is the author "The Concert Review" and "The Marble Palace."

Nick Thran is the author of one poetry collection, Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press, 2006). A second collection, Earworm, will appear in 2011 with Nightwood Editions. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Claudia Cortese is the recipient of Kent State’s Undergraduate Wick Poetry Award. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the poetry editor forLumina Magazine and a featured reader at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and At-Large Magazine.

Rivers and Art

2010-01-20T16:51:00.004Z

Last week, back in NYC, M. and I went to the Georgia O'Keeffe and Roni Horn exhibits at the Whitney. I am drawn to the indescribable colors of O'Keeffe, and the intellectualism of Horn. The O'Keeffe installation consisted of her more abstract work, less flowers, more more more...A woman I met recently told me she loves O'Keeffe, not least because all those vaginas turn her on. Though not explicitly publicized, Horn can be found listed as a lesbian or queer woman artist. Were the curators intentional in this pairing?

I was very impressed by Horn's work. Strangely enough, this exhibit was at the Tate Modern while I was living in Oxford last year. Though I passed by, twice I think, I never went in as it cost extra to see the special exhibit. I now wish I had seen it! Since I did associate this exhibit with my time in Oxford and London, it was bittersweet for me; this deep yearning to be back there, down in my gut. My favorite piece by Horn, a series of close-up photographs of sections of the water in the Thames, entitled "Still Water (The River Thames, for example)". Each photograph contained footnote numbers in the water, in shadows, in waves, its movement and stillness; these corresponded to thoughts and questions written below the photo. I think I could have stayed looking and reading for hours. The whole exhibit, entitled Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn, dealt with explorations, questions and feelings towards identity, experience, relationships.

The Thames River. The Hudson.
Identities of rivers, the people who live on them.

At this very moment, where you are is the very center of the world.

(Photo from Roni Horn at the Whitney here)

The Under World - by Melissa Kwasny

2009-11-29T22:37:00.002Z

1
I had an idea midwinter. It was ruby, glistening. It was garnet,
menstrual. I would have it on my table, centered, a red rocking
thing to measure time. Which doesn't move, they say, which is
an illusion. Unemployed: traveling to the woodpile and coming
back with sticks. I know the shrunken world is an experiment.
Bird shell caught in the teeth. So far I have waited mole-eyed, the
body puffy. What huge desperation devises these tests? I open
my eyes when I haev been asked to keep them closed. I peek and
then the fascists come down on me. I have tried to be a good
therapeutic model, to choose to be happy, that jingling of coins.
But there is no room for heart in the cold earth place.

2
The world circles around me with its pack of lies. Shall I give it one last
chance? And another? ...
One lives the life one was meant to, or one doesn't...

7
Up in the air. A peculiar phrase. What does it mean that nothing's
landed? ...

9
When I broke with the earth, in grief, the animals still gathered. The iris
skimmed the pond, turning it to azure. I felt the coolness on my arms.
Re-pressed. Implying the property of buoyancy. Re-petition. Implying
the king or queen might still say yes. Though the soil still clings to me.
Though I drag my bootleg pain. Though I still believe in perpetrator and
victim. Deep need, I am bending into you. Pulverized by being. Nothing
else will wake me. Bite deep my driving hand. If I am progeny of thorns,
I am also mother of a sea of roses. If I am sea, I am anaphora. Casting a
calm above the undertow. Speak to me, work, or I will be forever lonely.
Help me to remember who I am.

-From Reading Novalis in Montana
* * * * *

What huge desperation, indeed. It is not midwinter yet. I don't think I have had an idea in a long while. Even whilst I think about choosing to do this something, I am doing something else.

How does one know if one is living the life one was meant to?

If I have not landed, I don't want to. Or maybe I do. I am indeterminate, flapping invisible wings.

I am utterly defeated by being, she says. What can remember who I am?

* * * * *

2009-10-26T01:57:00.003Z

"For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the acolytes said, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"
-Petronius, Satyricon ch. 48

~~~~~
And moving on, with no connection to the above: Go Hear/Here Tomorrow

A Canadian Invasion!

Nick Thran (Insomniac Press)

J. Mae Barizo (Fields Press)

Moez Surani (Wolsak & Wynn)

8PM, Oct. 26

Unnameable Books

Neighborhood: Prospect Heights
600 Vanderbilt Ave
(between Dean St & St Marks Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

(718) 789-1534

Mind and the Moon

2009-10-23T19:36:00.002+01:00

All things were together. Then mind came and arranged them. - Anaxagoras

I came across this quote by Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th Century BCE. He put forth theories on cosmology and celestial bodies, theories which ultimately of course set him in opposition to the established religious dogma.

His search for knowledge led him to conceive of Nous (mind) as an ordering form in the Universe, causing motion and the separation of object from object, like from unlike, creating the cosmos and distinguishing living bodies. Chaos refined into reality.

Anaxagoras distrusted the senses. Humans, animals, and vegetation sprang from moist clay created by mist and ether. This theory of creation, though, still relies heavily on mythical assumptions.

Though separated, all remain connected on some level. So your hand passes into mine, lightly brushing the skin. So your words, questions, sighs.

Near the north pole of the Moon, Anaxagoras is a lunar impact crater. It possesses a ray system, debris ejected during impact still extending visibly away for up to 900 km.

The Mind moves the Moon, my face in the window.

Gypsy Woman

2009-10-05T22:59:00.002+01:00

I am between lands, exhausted from trying to keep my head above water.
The flashing lights allure me, her voice beckons me back. Languages haunting me from across the water.

This is what she said to me:
You know I had someone ask if I was a gypsy. I said maybe.
He said he could tell by my eyes.
I said those ones are tired, wait when I wake up. Then look.
And then he gave me chocolat. I love my life. haha.

I could see her lovely laugh and the rolling out of chocolat in French, lacking an e.
Lacking. There is a line from a Jorie Graham poem, "what concerns us is luck" that I always, every time, read as lack. What concerns us is lack. What concerns me, it seems.

S. speaks in French, Arabic, and emoticons. Little smiley faces to punctuate the time.
Gypsy woman is what she used to call me.

Burning Man Photos!

2009-09-25T07:51:00.005+01:00

Please see all the photos here:
Visual Poetical Distractions, Burning Man 2009
I promise, they're great!

~~~~~

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it until her teeth
were only accidental stars with a talent for squadrill.
I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each
momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns
of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.
An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly
spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying "If the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..."
I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be
stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might
be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.
-T.S. Eliot

Burning Man 2009

2009-09-09T23:57:00.003+01:00

This is what the Playa gifted me this year:
-A rainbow bead necklace
-A game to go with the necklace ;-)
-A rainbow earring
-Many nice compliments
-An amazing massage
-A fun little contraption (!)
-A beautiful magnet
-Two Playa moments (random encounters with random interesting people)
-Incredible and engaging conversation
-Wonderful connections with people
-Burning Man and Beaverton combined silver necklace (really, really special)
-Awe at the power of the desert and dust storms
-Momentary peace
-Thankfulness for knowing these amazing people

The Playa didn't resolve all of my questions, and perhaps this is good. I will continue to wonder if there is this one thing I need to let go of from back in Oxford, and do I need to be ok with letting it go, or can it just be gone?

Yesterday when I arrived back in NYC, A. commented that I had the Burning Man aura dripping off of me...this elated sensation that everyone is caring, nice, accepting towards me and others. Which is not always true in the default world. Decompressing back to reality here...

I will put up photos shortly, time permitting.

http://burningman.com

Photography thoughts

2009-08-01T11:26:00.004+01:00

Apparently, it is a great idea to post photos on Flickr.

I have a photo included in a new online Paris Guide!

Also, in the past few weeks have posted many, many more photos on my page. These are from the final events with the Hertford College, Oxford MCR (Formal Hall and Boat Ride), London Pride, as well as an album from my trip Nowhere, the European Burning Man Regional in the Spanish Desert. Click on the link to the right, or just click here.

"My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface." - Richard Avedon

LEGEND

2009-07-27T00:41:00.001+01:00

"
-The heart's affection is enmeshed in vicissitude.

-What's most real is that which we never know, yet there - mid-point, invisible - constancy comes to find itself.

Inscribe these lines beneath a portrait, in which the eyes' impress and the mouth's disposition evoke a perpetual vigil. "

-David Miller, The Waters of Marah

You were in my dream last night.

2009-06-23T08:50:00.003+01:00

She was standing behind him in my dream. He was speaking of people, encounters. Those that move through your life and then move out. I looked at her, she smiled, looking back. Yes, this is what we are.

Yesterday she told me that our interactions are new to her, we are both discovering them. I don't know how much to believe her - have never seen her any other way. We always talk of dreams, brains, spinning things. French words seep through in her conversation, delicious as sweets.

The School of the Dead

2009-06-15T09:57:00.003+01:00

It can also happen that an author will kill himself or herself writing. the only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed. It is combat against ourselves, the author; one of us must be vanquished or die...

What torments me is that the person who writes and who is sensitive to this kind of danger cannot not have the desire to die. The desire to die is the one thing in the world we cannot permit ourselves to admit; I am not talking about suicide: the desire to die and the temptation of suicide are two different things; suicide is murder, suicide is aimed at someone or something, whereas the desire to die is not this at all - which is why we can't talk about it.

The desire to die is the desire to know; it is not the desire to disappear, and it is not suicide; it is the desire to enjoy.

-Hélène Cixous. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. 32-34.

Poets, Academia

2009-06-04T16:55:00.002+01:00

Please go here to read a very interesting article about poets, poetry and academia, specifically in light of the current Oxford Professor of Poetry saga. Highly recommend.

Go Here/Hear - in NYC

2009-05-27T14:48:00.004+01:00

If I was in New York right now, I would be attending THIS:

My friend and brilliant poet J. Mae Barizo is reading with Frank Bidart, Matthea Harvey, and the American String Quartet. GO!!!

Hearing/Here-ing

2009-05-12T22:49:00.002+01:00

Two wonderful events I will be attending this week, that you should attend too:

On Thursday, in Oxford:
Back Room Poets present a poetry reading, featuring Brian Catling, Peter Robinson, & Vahni Capildeo. With members of Oxford Improvisers, support by Elizabeth Birchall and Josephine von Zitzewitz.
When: 14 May 2009; Doors open 7 pm, start at 7:30
Where: St. Mary Magdalen Church (opposite Borders), Central Oxford
Tickets: £6 (-£4)
See below for more detailed information about this reading and the fantastic poets.

On Friday, in Paris:
Shakespeare and Company presents Cecilia Woloch's Paris Poetry Workshop. A tradition for many local and visiting poets, this May workshop is now in its eighth year. It introduces English speaking poets from various corners of the map to one other and to local audiences and writers. My friend Jennifer Huxta will be reading.
When: 15 May 2009; 7 pm
Where: Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005 Paris

*****

About the series and the poets:

BACK ROOM POETS has provided a valuable forum for Oxford-based poets to perform and
discuss their work for many years, and continues to present live poetry to a wider
audience, most recently at the Oxfringe Festival and at Art Jericho, Liz Birchall
has been a member since the foundation of the group. Her collection *The Forest that
Sailed Away* pays homage to Wychwood Forest, and she is now working on a cycle about
bees. Josephine von Zitzewitz has been a member since 2004 and is currently working
on a D.Phil on Russian Literature of the 1970s at St John's College.

PETER ROBINSON has published nine books of his own poetry, the latest of which is
*The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001 - 2006* (Shearsman Books, 2008) as well as a
collection of aphorisms and translations from Italian and Japanese. He has also
engaged with a poetry as a critic and editor. His own poetry has been described
as exhibiting 'the urgencies of new creations' (Roy Fisher) and as 'some of the
most courageous poetry written in Englsh' (Adam Piette). His most recent work has
been praised for its 'intense but nuanced detail ' , the subtlety of its syntax,
and its ' unconventional rhythmic virtuosity ' (Jacket Magazine). Having held
a variety of academic posts in the UK and Japan, he currently teaches at the
University of Reading.

BRIAN CATLING 'has been exhibiting and publishing internationally since the 1970s, haunting
zones mostly unregulated by institutions or the art market' (frieze). He says of himself: 'I am obsessively
engaged in the collision of separate activities that sometimes fuse together in a hybrid event -- they being the
writing of poetry, the constructing of sculptural installation and the action of performance.' He has published
eight books of poetry and a collection of his poetry, *A Court of Miracles*, is due soon from Etruscan Press.
He is a Professor at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and a Fellow of Linacre College.

VAHNI CAPILDEO is 'one of the most exciting and ambitious young Caribbean writers at work today ' (Antilles).
Her debut collection of poems, *No Traveller Returns* (2003), was praised for its elegance and originality.
It was followed by *Person Animal Figure* (2005), a series of dramatic monologues. Her third book,
*The Undraining Sea*, will be published in 2009. She currently lives in Oxford, where she previously completed a
D.Phil on Old Norse, in 2000. She will be reprising a successful collaboration with members of the well-known
Oxford Improvisers at this year's Oxfringe Festival.

Movement of her Mouth

2009-05-05T17:05:00.004+01:00

There are eight walls to the room. A green couch.
Tiles around the fireplace depict scenes from the bible
and her voice dropped in from another time. It's not
insistent, this distraction, this obnoxious presence
of desire. Manipulation of the mind. The hand reaches out
to nothing, confusing implications of a board game
with wine. What concerns me is lack
disguised as wanting, or the color of her shoes
under a microscope. Red to be walked on by.
It's not that she does not say anything
but that the red drips from her mouth
to her shoes and perpetually twisting time.

Iron

2009-04-29T15:19:00.001+01:00

Iron
Originally uploaded by poeticaldistractions

Boat

2009-04-29T15:17:00.001+01:00

Boat
Originally uploaded by poeticaldistractions

Face

2009-04-29T15:16:00.004+01:00

Face
Originally uploaded by poeticaldistractions

Bull

2009-04-29T15:15:00.001+01:00

Bull
Originally uploaded by poeticaldistractions

Shifting Cities

2009-04-29T14:59:00.004+01:00

Traveling means never being in one place for more than 4 nights. It also means taking lots of photographs. During March/April I traveled for 5 weeks, starting in Madrid and heading down to southern Spain, then up the eastern coast to Barcelona and southern France. Afterwards, I went down the western coast of Italy and up the eastern, stopped in Venice on my way to Munich, which itself was only a stop on my way to Amsterdam. Then I went to Paris. Here I got to see the the de Chirico painting "The Uncertainty of the Poet" which is definitely one of my favorites, and which I was upset not to see the last time I went to the Tate Modern in London - because it was on loan to Le musée d’Art moderne in Paris. When I returned to London, this was the only thing I was missing.

See these photos, and please go here to see more photos.

*****

She said something about something that suggested something else like that eternal Starry Night set in the room.

FOAM

2009-04-10T17:02:00.002+01:00

"My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface." - Richard Avedon, 1980

FOAM

Something sticky or...light. Not photographic light, light that equals weightlessness. Like a soul.

I watched an interview documentary of Richard Avedon today, after pondering his photographs. He talked about his shoots; looking. Who is in control of the photograph? The end-product? The photographer or the subject?

They said that he was able to reveal the actuality of the people in his portraits. He looked, they looked back. Yet their actuality was always the reflection of his own: questions, answers. Foam, or something like it.

Firenze, Roma, Bologna...

2009-04-01T13:11:00.002+01:00

Still traveling.

The days get longer and the distance, too. The separation more complete, as Saskia once said about my poetry. There was never any pain, but the desire now less acute. I say these things objectively, from far away, but don't know what will happen later. I say these things after more than two weeks, more than two miles, more than two thoughts.

You know that feeling on a train, that feeling of movement only and not actual movement? That is the trajectory of my mind, I think.

Morte al pacifista. (Italian graffiti, Firenze)

Desire Caught by the Tail

2009-03-21T18:09:00.004Z

Today I learned that Picasso wrote a play, entitled by the above sentence fragment.

I also went to the Museu d'arte Contemporani de Barcelona, and walked on broken glass:
This is Cildo Meireles and his instalation, which I very much enjoyed. I had to sign a waiver before I walked inside it.

Before that, there was a room. A red room. All red. White walls, white light.

It might make you go mad.
A sink, running red liquid·blood
with which to paint the room.
With which to paint everything.

Photo credits: Leitura Favre, Maria Gimenez

For you.

2009-03-20T18:48:00.002Z

If I was in Oxford, I would make you some homemade soup.

However, I´m not. That´s sad.

2009-03-03T21:06:00.003Z

It was the song that shattered when the musicians stopped listening.

In the White Horse, a boy asking for pie and a man staring blindly into space.
Loneliness as tangible as incomplete thought or moment of time years past.

Time always. Not the right time, she said. I agreed. She wore a beautiful gold necklace.

Not that I do not want it to be.

an appropriate definition.

2009-02-18T13:52:00.000Z

So you know:
Manipulative, adj.
Exercising control or influence over others esp. in a malign, devious, or underhand way.

ex: The blonde woman, her again, in the middle, in the crux of the problem, distraction. When she speaks to you, you are the only one in the room. But sometimes you become aware of her wandering eyes, waiting for someone else to talk to, to use. She tells you only what you want to hear. Laughing, wondering how far she can push/pull, until you will realize what she is doing. Some people never do.

"The manipulative and the declarative are the twin incentives by which the development of language is fostered in the child, and remain the essential functions of language in society." M. M. LEWIS Lang. in Society i. 24 from oed.com

Pier in the Sand

2009-02-08T21:06:00.004Z

My new laptop desktop background is one of those generic photos that came with the computer. Black and White, it's a photo of a large dock emerging from sand into a body of water - a large body, as there is no type of land visible in the distance. It's entitled 'Pier.'

I am in one of those moods where I want to listen to music, but from my mp3 library of 7000+ songs, nothing interests me. It's not that I have too many choices and can't make a decision, it's that I don't have any affinity to the plethora of choices. Like when you stand in front of the refrigerator, looking for something you don't know what but knowing you will eat something, but not really even hungry to begin with. Or when you can't find anything you want to watch on TV but are too lazy to do anything else besides sit there uselessly flipping channels. Or that I also put up a generic photo as my background because I knew I couldn't relate to any of my own photos at the moment. (Also note the change in this background. It will most probably be changed back next time I write a post.)

There is going to be a full moon tomorrow, and I want to burn something. Some of the Burning Man contingency in MI is getting together for an effigy burn, as a cleanser to re-begin this New Year that seems to have started out pretty poorly for many people. Hmmmm...I should build something. Should find some wood. Maybe I'll burn a poem or two.

I have done nothing all day, and this is not a good thing.

Much Too Volatile

2009-02-02T08:45:00.002Z

Looking at photos
it is snowing and
listening to
My Brightest Diamond.
Inside a Boy.
I don't have time
to be doing this.

Functions

2009-01-25T01:06:00.002Z

Last night I watched this crazy Japanese film. It was one in the morning by the time we started it, and I was already half asleep. I had never heard of it before, but S. had it lying around and had only watched the first 20 minutes. So, Friday night/Saturday morning we lay on the couches in the basement of Winchester House and turned on what turned out to be, on reflection, an entertaining little distraction.

Five characters with seemingly disjoint story lines eventually end up relating to each other somehow, but they never really do come together. My favorite was the first character introduced who repeatedly must murder his wife because she won't stay dead. Or she's dead, but keeps appearing back at home when he returns. But the best part is that she then tries to kill him. Repeatedly. She grabs him from inside the full bathtub, pulls him in to drown him. She is able to shoot off her appendages to attack him after he uselessly cuts her into pieces in an attempt to keep her dead. She blows fire at him after he kills her again and burns her.

The colors are amazing, scenes shot beautifully. I must say, though, that nothing much happened. Interesting though, and I was really just too tired to care. Maybe I'll like it more if I watch it when I'm awake, conscious, and so can actually pay attention.

The English assassin in the film is obsessed with one question: What is your function? He asks everyone he meets.

What is your function?

Excerpts

2009-01-22T23:04:00.002Z

'Many things are gone, they ceased to exist long before vanishing into oblivion. Things like faces, names, words, and also a pair of scissors lost last summer, as well as a few books, the fate of which is still a mystery to this day. Unimpeded, impatience lapses into indifference, making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. According to dictionaries, "monumentality" is derived from the concentration of power apparatuses - such as military forces, wealth, intelligence services, universities, and industries - into one locus.'

'Many people have gone mad, without even realizing it, in an attempt to connect their image (in the mirror or photograph) with themselves. In the disruption between "oneself" and "self" in/on the image, the mind loses its habits of recognizing its own presence. Insomnia is capable of prolonging only a chain of comparisons.'

'We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it that we are saying. As a result, we allow ourselves to speculate that, all in all, we have fallen, by change, into a distorted phrase - "here and now" - the "correctness" of which, when uttered repeatedly, despends on how we disappear into it.'

--Arkadii Dragomoschenko, from "Dust" 2008

Painted Elephants

2008-12-31T23:35:00.010Z

Taj Mahal, Agra

Taj Mahal, Agra

Fields and Children, village in Bharatpur

Yellow, Nimaj Bagh

I spent seventeen days in December traveling throughout the state of Rajasthan, in northwestern India. Originally ruled by the warrior caste known as Rajputs, this amazing land is home to both bustling cities and their majestic forts as well as great stretches of rural villages, fields and desert. I have never before been anywhere as photogenic. Unique and vibrant, the culture of Rajasthan and its people richly permeate the traveler's senses. Women, in vividly colored saris, stand out against the landscape, while men, though clothed in jeans and more western-wear, model great Rajasthani mustaches.

They paint their elephants. And cows. Please go here to see more photos.

*****

I also remember that he watched her, curling his mustache.

Memory Gardens

2008-11-27T17:32:00.003Z

Sometimes you come across something so appropriate to your current circumstance that it strikes you in such a way as to imprint itself on your mind. Something you must return to over and over again, in reference to all points of your life. Seconds ago I opened up my copy of the second issue of the St. Petersburg Review for some good reading while waiting for my friend, and decided to re-read the essay by Arkadii Dragomoschenko, entitled 'Memory Gardens'. I love Dragomoschenko's work, and have had a wonderful conversation with him this past summer, and so always enjoy reading whatever I can of his, for the first, second, or even third time. Though I had read it before, the opening of this essay had a particular effect on me now because of the events in my life in the past two weeks.

Sometimes a few encounters, no matter how long or intensive, in the end form something like a ghostly constellation that owes its linguistic content, the valence of its anticipations, its mutually substituting intentions - in a word, the laws of its existence - not so much to chronologically distributed facts or neuroleptic recollections of certain attendant, contextual circumstances as to the logic of an unforeseeable ("future") exchange of that which can be rightfully called "generative possibilities": they open to the imagination - but not all to the permanence of memory - in forms that are ungraspable yet anticipate unimaginable perfection.
In certain other regions of discourse, these possibilities are sometimes called "desire," which lends some vague value to the clarity of forestalling. The influence of such interactions is unpredictable. Sometimes such encounters happen in life.

Is it too much for me to hope that the confusing and absurd encounters I have had with one specific person in the past two weeks can come anywhere near this idea of an influential, generative, ghostly constellation of interactions?

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out - by Richard Siken

2008-11-25T23:24:00.003Z

Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.

Today there was

2008-11-24T19:22:00.003Z

a fire, and a question still unanswered. I have been talking about it for a week. More.

At the market, I bought two sweet peppers, one red and one yellow, and a cucumber, green. I couldn't remember what else I wanted. I ate an orange for lunch, and drank afternoon tea. H. asked me about last night, and I told her it didn't happen. Therefore I don't know what I'm doing.

I have a greeting card I bought for myself years ago put up on the wall above my desk. It's a fantastical drawing of a tiny naked woman standing on shoulders, reaching into the ear of a head, holding an axe in her left hand and placing a chopped up log onto a pile.

It's all about fantasies and deadwood - chopping up useless thoughts...clearing room to dream.

I know that I have been dreaming recently, I just cannot remember about what.

Playgirl

2008-11-19T00:10:00.008Z

Returned from an amazing concert by Ladytron, who's music you can listen to here. I reveled in the beating of the bass speakers that pounded notes into my body. One of the best concert's I've been to, and needless to say their recordings do not do these songs justice. Three years since their last album, the newest one entitled "Velocifero" is definitely their most accessible. With more streamlined lyrics and more flowing sounds rather than straight electronica, this album has been their most successful release yet. I must say, however, that I do love the incessant beats and words of their second album, "Light & Magic."

Maybe this is because I like thinking about light so much.

My persistent companion on all thoughts pertaining to light, I find myself again flipping through Elizabeth Block's "A Gesture Through Time." She writes:

Light races, especially in a digital era of fiber optics. You race at the speed of light. Though it moves through time, we only know its absence/distance/deferral from its object, the source of light. Light is not pure object. It is mere representation. Not the thing itself. The virtual memory of the memory, as OS X operating system becomes OS 9's parasite. Light becomes God of mediation. Light moves, light presents as if. Not is. But, no. Light is (in the twenty-first century): Artificial projection.

Lights behind the musicians, blue, red, white: light and magic. I sent this quote to E. yesterday because I couldn't think of anything else to email her. I also spent all of today sitting in front of a warm fire, tea in hand. I love the fire; I do not love this desire and ensuing confusion.

Photos: Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie, by Guus Krol on Flickr.com

A Tease

2008-11-14T00:12:00.003Z

Dark red of screams and daylight sucked out of / Trying to escape
Surrounded by noise, screaming mouth sounds. A wine glass / lacking
A base. Calling my name and then / and then bodies pressed against windowpane
Something sharp that breaks / open mouth, closed face. She said it again.

I couldn't know your thoughts, I only wanted to close the space.
A terrible tease. Tormenting me.

Wine, champagne, people sitting in chairs. A fire, there was. Bad music, conversation somewhere between interesting and not, and interesting if I cared. Thinking about footsteps in snow, crossing the yard. New snow and crystals. And now, nothing more to say.

From Wednesday, on the Thames

2008-11-07T23:01:00.002Z

I love cities. I love the noise of cities. I love the lull when traffic is stopped at a light and then the rush of sound when it all starts up again. I do not like sitting in a room for two hours waiting for my number to be called. But I do like the sound of the word 'clock'.

Today, I like fog. I don't always. I like the sometimes kiss of light mist as I walk along the river.

I like poetry. I like walking.
I like thinking about poetry as I walk in London.

ROTHKO

2008-10-27T15:26:00.008Z

Mark Rothko, Late Work

A long overdue reflection on the Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. This photograph of his painting does not do it justice; nor do these, but they're better and you can learn a little bit about the exhibit too.

Many of Mark Rothko's late works were composed in series, one stage or color haunting the frame. The Seagram Murals, commissioned in 1958 by the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram building though never actually displayed there, loom over museum-goers from their placement high up on the very large walls. My notes tell of a framed penetration and the massiveness of invention. They must speak to each other - the paintings.

My favorite, though, were his black-form paintings composed in 1964. These are marked by Rothko's shift from the brilliant colors of his more well-known paintings from his earlier years, to this pervasive non-colour1. These paintings demand attention, for the longer you look, the more you are rewarded with the discovery of depth and layers underneath the surface. It is also important to note how Rothko had moved away from the soft edges of his earlier works to the straight edges of these works.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. -Georgia O'Keeffe

I agree.

While here, I thought of a woman walking into a painting. Not a landscape. Just color, a block of.

1. Black, a. literal. The proper word for a certain quality practically classed among colours, but consisting optically in the total absence of colour, due to the absence or total absorption of light, as its opposite white arises from the reflection of all the rays of light

Findings

2008-09-30T22:49:00.003+01:00

"Dear X,

You were in my dream last night. I was looking at you from behind and you were bent over doing something so that I could see that you had a tattoo on your lower back...The tattoo on your lower back was quite large. It was a still life - of sorts - a pitcher, fruits, vegetables, a half-filled glass, among other consumables. It was, in short, the view into a refrigerator. You know when you're kind of hungry but not really and you feel you want something but you don't have anything specific in mind and you just go to the fridge by some unstoppable compulsion and you open it up and stand there gazing, half conscious, not really looking, just wanting but not exactly wanting anything you're seeing? Well, exactly that was what you had tattooed above your ass...she's a genius, I thought. Extraordinarily inspired, I realized the only way to overcome the embarrassment of my old tattoos was to go out right then and there and get a new one. Then I woke up."

- Dexter Sinister

The first finding, a piece of paper containing this excerpt, picked up at the 2008 Whitney Biennial in April. I never read this paper when I picked it up, but obviously found the installation interesting enough to warrant taking something to remember it by. I have been thinking about getting a new tattoo not so recently (think: for at least a year). The more persistent feeling I have, however, is that I stand in the front of the refrigerator and there is something I want, something, I just don't know what, yet it is something very specific, and I don't know how to get it. This is my life.

"Although you are interested in the body, sensation, but you want to see how far sensation can be taken from the body itself -- the beloved, in these poems (unlike, say, your work last spring), more remote, the pain less acute, the separation more complete."

- Saskia Hamilton

The second finding, a short note on some poems I wrote between January 2008 and April 2008. A very acute, and on my own reflection, correct, observation. The pain is replaced by more pain, or less, or merely the difference between the two. The separation is enacted, rather than imagined, or projected. Separation of body. Separation of identity. Separation of thought.

A woman whom I do not know told me recently that she found it courageous that I once said: Abby is pretending she knows what she is doing.

Metal Alloys

2008-09-12T20:12:00.002+01:00

An intermetallic compound: the process of connecting metal
to flesh: dotted line of a seam. Hammer, spike, a sharpened hook.
Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper; she is electrum,
silver and gold. An atom of a different shape.

Outside of Civilization

2008-08-24T16:08:00.002+01:00

This is where I'm going:

Burning Man 2008

I have my tent, dust goggles, bandanna, camelbak, hopefully everything I need to survive in the middle of the desert for a week. Also my pens and of course notebook.

Don't really know what I'm doing, but what's the fun in always knowing?

Working. Or something like it.

2008-08-09T02:56:00.003+01:00

Check out this entry I came across today, it's quite interesting:

"I Do Not Submit!" By Troubled Guest, M. R. Shamasneh

Sitting peacefully on the Oregon Coast, doing more thinking about writing than actual writing.

Times, dates, Petersburg...

2008-08-02T05:04:00.002+01:00

I am having trouble with days, dates, timing things. It has been a month since my last post. But this is not an accident; I have not wanted to admit that I am no longer in St. Petersburg! I have been to Israel and have returned to the United States since then.

I have been to Petersburg twice and still want to return. I do not speak Russian. I do not know what it is about that place: the city, the light, the language. Or maybe it is the incredible people I meet each time I go - though this could be more to do with the Summer Literary Seminars than with that city. But neither would be what it is without the other, for me. And I could not be what I am today without either, as well.

::
Reading
"The Collected Stories" - Amy Hempel
"I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems" - Mei Mei Berssenbrugge
"Crime and Punishment" - Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Untitled] 118

2008-07-03T03:10:00.001+01:00

We shall meet again, in Petersburg,

as though we had buried the sun there,

and then we shall pronounce for the first time

the blessed word with no meaning.

In the Soviet night, in the velvet dark,

in the black velvet Void, the loved eyes

of blessed women are still singing,

flowers are blooming that will never die.

--Osip Mandelstam, tr. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

Rain, Nevsky Prospekt

2008-06-29T15:45:00.002+01:00

On her last night in St. Petersburg, she said to me "I have realized this is just a very lonely city."

And I agree with her.

I can't quite pinpoint it, but there's a pervasive loneliness. It could be the buildings, timeless in their decay, or the ridiculous number of brides that pass in front of the beautiful churches and gardens day after day that seem to be alone. Merely the idea of togetherness hinted at by the couples on the streets.

I'm also thinking of the constant weariness from the sleepless sun. Missing all the fantastic people that I only met two weeks ago but have come to know so well. Hoping to keep in touch.

Graffiti, etc.

2008-06-21T14:31:00.003+01:00

St. Petersburg, Russia. Outside Mayakovsky Library

Inspired by K.'s wonderful photographs from last year, I came upon a photo-worthy tag of my own. A questioning glance.

Here in Petersburg, time doesn't exist and when you realize this, it is all gone. I have been here for more than a week now, and I will be leaving in 11 days. I am obsessed with the sun. Minimal amounts of sleep even amount in the most ridiculous dreams; witnessed seizures, seductions, murders in my head.

I have written. I have read. Workshop has been great. I went to Peterhoff Palace today and watched the fountains. This is something you should see.

I am trying to talk to this woman I met here. I have this feeling. I am afraid that I have talked about it too much so it has merely become a projection. But it persists. A desire to discuss the writing, my writing and her own. Hopefully this conversation will take place soon.

Kazan Cathedral, no clouds

2008-06-13T13:00:00.002+01:00

I am in St. Petersburg! I am sitting in "The Office" restaurant, enjoying free wi-fi and a beer! I am also distracted by memory, its insistence and lack.

It always comes with advantages and disadvantages. Though I still don't speak the language, I am familiar with the area and more confident in my ability to point and gesture for things than I was last year. I remember the cathedrals, the streets, the restaurants, the perpetual light. Beer at 2 in the afternoon, to be ingested as water...When I arrived yesterday I couldn't believe it when I looked at my watch and it was 11:30 pm, and still light!

But I miss the people - I miss everyone I met here and knew last year. I miss the workshop, the amazing poetry.

On my list (what I didn't get to do last year): Pushkin's house, St. Isaac's Cathedral, absinthe...
more to come...

Blue lake, no clouds

2008-05-29T20:54:00.003+01:00

Something to do with the sun and a Thursday that feels like a Saturday. "Up North" in Michiganian speak meaning a weekend in the upper half of the lower peninsula, on the north-west coast of the state that resembles a mitten. I am currently between Lake Charlevoix and Walloon Lake, the sky more blue than -

The Bear River Writer's Conference. An expectation of silence, noise from words heard only from the page. Sometimes I can't sleep because there are no traffic sounds. Oh, New York!

I am reading "The Bishop's Daugher" by Honor Moore and making to-do lists. So much to do before Russia, before Israel, before Oregon, Nevada, New York. Oxford, England in October and disappearance from the known.

Thoughts

2008-05-10T03:24:00.003+01:00

I am thinking too much. Or not thinking enough in the right ways. The ways I want to be thinking. I am writing short sentences and contemplating the rain.

It has been raining all day. Not a fun, thunderstorm downpour, but merely a thin mist as if the water does not know what it is supposed to be doing or where it is going, falling from the sky as it is. The air is cold.

I like Fridays. I like lifting weights and still being sore two days later. I like my spinning class and listening to long remixes of techno songs as I work out. I don't like feeling judged. I like thinking about what I will do next week when I have free time. I like thinking about the return of the sun.

Time, Time, Time

2008-05-03T04:27:00.002+01:00

Written words as a substitute for sound, but I can't think of a substitute for time. At the Whitney Biennial, a video by Amie Siegel with a memorable frame: one car driving, a sticker in the bottom left corner of the back window: DDR.

In the video, an interview:
"How was life for you growing up?"
"It was good. I had no existential fears at all. Later, then, I feared for my existence."

A black box. A broken moment of perfection. Time again. Always time (not more of it, nor less, just the word in space).

Two nights ago, after a concert, a woman hitting on me on the uptown 2 train.

A Matter of Sound

2008-04-19T06:39:00.003+01:00

I was recently asked how I would describe my voice to someone who had never heard it. My response was which voice? My speaking voice or the internal voice that defines me? I would be at a loss to describe my speaking voice, because I never listen to myself speak. For all I know, I could sound like a two-pack-a-day, twenty-year-long smoker, though I've never smoked a cigarette in my life.

But that other voice is the one that most interests me. I would say it is a hurricane, but that might just be an avoidance of the actuality. I feel as if I am constantly in danger of slipping into the voice of someone else. How do I avoid doing so?

This is what I am trying to say: My lines write the melody, so please stop trying to cross over them.

Definitions and Prepositions

2008-03-26T01:17:00.004Z

Tasked to write an autobiographical essay about "secret spaces of childhood". This is an issue for me, as I do not have memories, or choose not to remember, these things. Perhaps as a consequence of this, I frequently experience the feeling of deja vu. An excursus into the Oxford English Dictionary provided the following:

Deja vu, An illusory feeling of having previously experienced a present situation; a form of paramnesia.

Paramnesia, Memory that is unreal, illusory, or distorted; spec. the phenomenon of deja vu, an instance of this. Also: loss of memory for the meaning of words.

This last sentence fascinated me immediately; sans punctuation but with the connector for it can be read two ways:
1. That one cannot remember what words mean, or
2. To indicate that the meaning of words is given at the cost of memory.

Consider:

Memory like a void, or the bottom of the well where water seeps into ground. A black hole of experiences. An obsession with words in exchange for memories. Ambivalence towards a belief in the unconscious.

Hoopology

2008-03-17T03:48:00.002Z

Slightness of sound and then its dissipation, inaudible mouth hissings. The woman said something about the representation of wholeness and my first thought was of the circle of a mouth, lips to form an O.

Even so, this mouth-circle is less a whole than a hole, and I have the distinct feeling that I am missing something important.

Intrigue, n.

2008-03-12T03:26:00.002Z

:To excite the curiosity or interest of; to interest so as to puzzle or fascinate.

Mysteries like the hollowness of a womb. No one home.

A balancing act of lurid dreams and formidable conceptualizations.
I am waiting for some(one)thing.

::

Reading "Elders and Betters" by I. Compton-Burnett, first published in 1944. Examining the characterizations and positions of women, as conceived by a woman writer. I am seeking to understand dialogue, as I usually find myself entrenched in description.

In the beginning, in a move to a new house, a bag has gone missing:
"Well, does it matter so much?" said Anna. "It will follow by itself."
"Cook had it with her in the compartment, Miss Anna."
"You mean it had no address? Why did you not bring it in the cab?"
Jenney's eyes went from Anna to Ethel, as if to measure their mutual effect.
"We only brought what was needed for the night, Miss Anna," said Ethel, throwing some light on this.
"Did you leave the bag to speak for itself at the station?" said Esmond. "A label would have saved it the trouble."
Ethel met his eyes in silence.
"You must know what you did with it," said Anna.
"We thought it would come with the other luggage, Miss Anna."
"It would have been wiser and kinder of it," said Bernard.

...

A Panel on Embodiment:

2008-03-10T03:27:00.004Z

Interdisciplinary conversation on the subject (substance?) of the body. This is where everything gets a little tangled; how do we discuss the body as a material thing? What has happened to the substance, the subject?

How do we return to the question of an ethically informed politics of substance? This substance is an anchor of certain formations of power. The question is of theorization; how to theorize various formations of bio-politics, sovereignty, etc. How do those theorizations help us to understand why the critique of the body was so important in the 1970s and 80s?

Discursive formations of the body. Or has the substance been abandoned?

Thinking in circles. Physical ellipses. The body as simply an imprint of discursive formations. Torture shatters the substance so that it is unable to do a politics anymore - except be shattered.

Mind

the gap.

Disassociation from the body. My body. Or yours.

Triolets and Turing Machines

2008-03-03T05:13:00.002Z

If I write one line, it will repeat three times in the form. The second line will repeat twice.

These are the rules for writing a triolet: first, make sure the line can be repeated without becoming stagnant. Second, make sure the second line is interesting. Third, know where the repetitions fall.

I wanted to write a triolet, and so I did. Perhaps I will show you sometime.

::

Am currently reading Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous. When I described it to M. she aptly described it as one of those books where each sentence feels like an indisputable truth. I couldn't figure out why, though I had read more than 100 pages, each page seemed like I had read it only one page ago.

"I will talk about truth again, without which (without the word truth, without the mystery truth) there would be no writing. It is what writing wants. But it "(the truth)" is totally down below and a long way off. And all the people I love and whom I have mentioned [Writers: Clarice Lispector, Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Tsvetaeva] are beings who are bent on directing their writing toward this truth-over-there, with unbelievable labor; they are fighting against the elements and principally against the innumerable immediate and exterior and interior enemies." -Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 6

Only one of many passages I could quote, and only one of many passages I have taken deeply to heart. M. is away and I wish she was here so I could share this with her.

"Writing is learning to die. It's learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give us." 10

I desire death, which is to say, I desire to write, and that is all.

The Side Show

2008-02-25T02:11:00.005Z

This weekend was filled with delicious sounds and exploding colors. On Thursday, M. played a magnificent concert at Holy Trinity Church on 65th and Central Park West. A Tuba and a Piano! The church yawned down on us, holding the notes in its mouth. My favorite was the Plog.

On Friday A. dragged me to Fuerzabruta! downtown. I did not want to go, but have since revised my initial opinion of the trek. What a spectacular onslaught of light and color! The show was perfectly disconnected and entertainingly distressing. I recommend it to everyone - think Cirque du Soleil on acid in a rave. I did not want it to end - I wish I could always exist in such a surreal state of expectational disturbance.

Tomorrow I am going to be between A & B, listening to Susan Stewart, Thomas Devaney, and Susan Briante. A perfect way to start a week.

::

A Mona Lisa
I.
I should like to creep
Through the long brown grasses
That are your lashes;
I should like to poise
On the very brink
Of the leaf-brown pools
That are your shadowed eyes;
I should like to cleave
Without sound,
Their glimmering waters,
Their unrippled waters,
I should like to sink down
And down
And down
And down . . . .
And deeply drown.

II.
Would I be more than a bubble breaking?
Or an ever-widening circle
Ceasing at the marge?
Would my white bones
Be the only white bones
Wavering back and forth, back and forth
In their depths?

-Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)

Saturday

2008-02-17T05:56:00.005Z

Here, there, and an ear.

2008-02-13T11:41:00.001Z

A feeling of concavity and vacillation.

Between what, I do not yet know.

Meaning, or the time after a poetry reading

2008-02-06T02:28:00.000Z

I am contemplating the dissolution of words

the spaces between lines solidifying into tactile objects -

employment of the five senses

Emptiness denoting thought, preoccupation
only when there is room in which to move:

there is not.

The North Wind

2008-01-23T03:17:00.000Z

This pianist's fingernails
reach all the way to the floor
only the north wind knows his name
he doesn't play the piano anymore
doesn't eat
doesn't love
doesn't sleep

He is king

Down below the carpenter is nailing wood
when suddenly the piano sounds again
in the shadow of a huge frozen sun
the carpenter's beautiful daughter
is scrubbing the flagstones of the north wind
who alone knows
who alone knows how to love
the poets the
true poets

-Miltos Sachtouris, from "Poems (1945-1971)" translated by Karen Emmerich

Letters and Nouns

2008-01-15T19:51:00.000Z

Afraid and Alone both begin with the same letter, but they do not end the same.

Measuring worth against a teaspoon of sugar, so sweet, but the apparatus slips from my hands. Perhaps I should have used a cup? That too has the potential for falling, for spilling.

The control must have too much in common with the measured (we do share a name, we are both nouns).

::

Listening over and over to Sia, Breathe Me:

Ouch I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found,
Yeah I think that I might break
I've lost myself again and I feel unsafe

Be my friend
Hold me, wrap me up
Unfold me
I am small
I'm needy
Warm me up
And breathe me

Hands\Thinking

2007-12-27T01:57:00.000Z

I think, if I think hard enough, you think of me too.

Then I need to find things to do with my hands.

A (Perfect?) Day

2007-12-22T04:50:00.000Z

The sun through the window is a different shade of bright in the winter; it seems to absorb the white of the snow. I leave two shutters open so that it can filter through. My window looks out onto the Huron River, frozen and still, except for the train at two a.m. and the geese sometimes, afternoons.

It's darker in the mornings here, the sun reaches this longitude about an hour after New York City - not that New Yorkers are awake when the sun rises, though. I rise at six-thirty.

There may not be reason, but there is power in motion. It is an impulse, an obsession, and an obligation. It is difficult for me to write about the body, just as it is difficult for me to incorporate writing into the body, the movement. One cannot yet speak to the other. Or through it?

Please don't ask me about the writing. Please don't ask me about the running. I don't know how well I can do either.

Walking to a reading between a & b:

2007-12-19T03:45:00.000Z

Mon. 7 pm, E. 10th St. between Ave. 1 and a:

Tai Chi in the Villages
Yang Style
Must be willing to yield
to play
Only the serious must apply
If you are serious you can play
Inhalation becomes substantial
Exhalation becomes insubstantial

Beautiful Distractions

2007-12-16T16:02:00.000Z

Recently have read, Reading, Re-reading, or Reading in the very near future:

A Seahorse Year, Stacy D'Erasmo
Man in the Middle, John Amaechi
The Plays of Anton Chekhov
ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Metamorphosis, Ovid (hopefully a 16th or 17th Century translation)
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Time and Materials, Robert Hass
Elders and Betters, I. Compton-Burnett
The Selected Poems of Osip Mandlestam
Stardust, Frank Bidart
The Lyrics, Fanny Howe
In the Surgical Theatre, Dana Levin
Dark Back of Time, Javier Marías (and a huge thank you to M. for this! I can't wait to read it...)
...

You, in sentences. Almost.

2007-12-07T04:07:00.000Z

Wanting. Like the escape of a moment or the near-brush of a body.

Bodies ungraspable.
Temporality and spacial distances creating a whole. Full gap of space, a river canyon.

You know I exist, just not how. This is what makes words empty, lacking body.

2007-12-05T22:52:00.000Z

Opening books to random pages and finding

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music." - Ezra Pound

The Day After

2007-11-23T20:07:00.001Z

To not step on the toes of others. To not be enough.

And in not being enough, to know. But who is to say what is not enough? Or to know?

To give thanks. For you, and for others (even in not knowing what it is to be thankful in them).

Spending hours preparing poems. My voice, a slight whisper. Slit in the face. Somewhere a woman speaks, or speaks through objects; touches the keys of an instrument, touches the handle of a weight. Layers and mass of meaning. Haunted by specters of words and their uses.

::

Reading a gathering of matter a matter of gathering by Dawn Lundy Martin.
Wondering at the genre of fantasy and hoping for enchantment. (this has nothing whatsoever to do with the aforementioned book of poetry).

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares to other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours directly and clearly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep that channel open.

No artist is pleased...there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others" -Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

Not my desk

2007-11-15T05:23:00.001Z

To M. and her desk:

Colors can be luminous, I thought earlier, walking down Broadway in the orange glow. Unfocused, not of streetlights, but the impermeable halo that rises from the city. Like M.'s desk, which neither of us can seem to stop meditating on since I was over there last week and we decided to do some writing exercises; for one of them I wrote about her desk. She painted it white I don't know how long ago and now it flaunts wax and water marks as well as cracks where the wood peeks through. The opposite of black. The opposite of so many things.

Later on a slight wind creased the iridescent water (46)
It is compelling the words you are drawn to and the ones that I choose to engage...

2007-11-12T22:42:00.000Z

At 7 a.m. a blond woman in a red suit spilled Starbucks on the sidewalk on Broadway.

A Blue Chair

2007-11-07T03:23:00.000Z

I have been thinking that I want to crawl into your head. Let me know when this is possible. Perhaps Sunday? Or the day after next week?

I am currently ensnared in disembodied descriptions. I cannot seem to paint any pictures, real or otherwise. Here, I will try; judge for yourself which are real and which are not (assuming that it matters, or that it doesn't; oh, I seem not only to be stranded but indecisive as well!)

A blue chair, plastic. Transparent, with palm of hand visible through the back. Gash on palm, like a story, only an accident (but stories can be accidents, too, I suppose). The sterling silver ring, no diamonds, taps a rhythm out loud for no one to hear.

The two yellow lines never really end, but I'm sure they must cross somewhere. Deceived by the air, the trees are green until they are not; the trees are full until they are bare, and no colors to delight the eyes. Watch, and you will see. This will not be apparent, though, if you are colorblind.

The price of abstractions -

Ambivalence and Reality

2007-11-02T05:43:00.001Z

It is finally November, and so I wonder:

Is that which reveals itself in shadow actually that which is totally real?

Or does the light illuminate that which was really there all along?

These are questions that are best contemplated in the dark. Turn off the light. There is a place where space exists divorced from time: sunrise and sunset. If light were not so bright, would the truth reveal itself?

I am supposed to be thinking about sound, but I cannot free myself from this incessant iridescence. I wish I had a candle, or two, but I don't. Only white light. White electric light.

Writing in Vodka

2007-10-26T05:22:00.001+01:00

Currently wandering in international waters: reading "A Child Is Not a Knife" by Goran Sonnevi, Swedish poet. Am under the influence. And drinking Russian Standard. Am enamored.

What makes you think it is possible to understand other people? Contemplation of nuances against words. Verbs cannot describe your actions, but adjectives describe your countenance; it's blue with a hint of deceit. I want to stop talking about it, but there was never anything to talk about to begin with.

There is something to be said about your brilliance. I will not say it anymore.

Repeat. Repeat.

2007-10-21T07:23:00.000+01:00

What is it about recurring themes, recurring dreams? The unconscious shift from obsession to preoccupation persists in this liminal space, temporally cataloging my thoughts. This happened then, and that happened there; returning. Electricity and blackberries, road music and initial theories, to name a few.

Conversations repeating themselves until they are reduce to one word and one breath. Choose one: Blackberry. Russia. Poets.

J. is moving on Wednesday but today we met up for coffee. I don't remember everything we talked about, but I know it involved something existential, New York, Keats, Blake, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, K., and sex. Not necessarily in that order.

the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

--Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas"

Poetry/Play

2007-10-14T09:07:00.000+01:00

Light returns again; as the cycle of days, the cycle of subjects. Stein's "Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights" impeding on my consciousness and too stubborn to go away. Read before seen, read as writing, not theater (not my medium). Now returned to, a production. The Wooster Group production; video monitors and recordings. Writing again, this time about the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century. White electric light pervading my sight. Rhyming. Refusing structure as Post-Modernist experimentation.
Attempting to return to the source (without knowledge thereof):

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,

Die früh sich einst dem trüben Buck gezeigt.

Versuch ich wolh, euch diesmal festzuhalten?

Fühl ich mein Herz noch jenem Wahn geneigt?

Ihr drängt euch zu! Nun gut so mögt ihr walten,

Wie ihr aus Dunst and Nebel um mien steight;

Mein Busen fühlt sich jugendlich erschüttert

Vom Zauberhauch, der euren Zug umwittert.

-Goethe, "Faust"

[Once again, you draw near, wavering shapes,/ from the past in which you first appeared to clouded eyes./ Shall I try this time to hold you fast?/ Do I feel my heart still inclined toward that illusion?/ You push yourselves forward! All right, have it your way./ As you climb out of vapours and fog, / My breast feels itself trembling in a youthful manner/ from the breath of magic that hovers round your train.]

Sunday

2007-10-08T05:08:00.000+01:00

Musicians
and Wine.

Russian Standard.

Poets in the
minority.

An unimportant
fact.

Postcard

2007-10-05T04:23:00.000+01:00

On a postcard I picked up at the NY Art Book Fair last weekend, tacked to the wall above my desk:

"Playful talent wanted. Must write well."

It is something about the writing. Of the writing. First-drafts looming over me; the revisions usually more quickly executed than initially thought, but the time first. Finding the time, as if it could be locked up and stored for later. But if that were the case no one would be afraid of running out of it.

Or running out of thoughts. Not quite penetrating deep enough for a new one to emerge: this is such a difficult point to judge for oneself. I try, I think I try. Is this exhausting?

I cannot move enough. When I am sitting, I want to be cycling. When I am running, I want to be reading at the same time. I don't know where the time goes, really. The digital numbers move up or down depending on what machine I am on, but always moving towards the conclusion. Lifting, sets are monitored by seconds, minutes, rest-periods and exertion. My heart-rate monitor my constant companion.

I have not had a good work-out in days.

In case you had forgotten

2007-10-02T13:48:00.000+01:00

These are
my words.

I am
not you.

I wish I did, but I don't

2007-10-01T05:52:00.000+01:00

create art.

Art that consists in looking that is, as opposed to
envisioning.

This afternoon I wandered in my jeans
and Adidas shirt amidst vintage clad beings;
I could not melt into the walls because the
warehouse was glowing: white: sterile:

a showroom for the books but illuminating
so much more.

::

Reading In Praise of Shadows (1933) by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - among other things, explaining the reasons why modern appliances, white, white, white, do not fit harmoniously in Japanese rooms; the Western preoccupation with light, white, bright, sight.

The banishment of mystery.

Experience

2007-09-23T16:39:00.000+01:00

n. The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. Also an instance of this; a state or condition viewed subjectively; an event by which one is affected

Wonder at what it is. There are so many changes, rearrangements that go on over the years. Petersburg is not static; yet the greatest, fastest changes happen to those who go there, and that experience is forever suspended in time in their own minds.

My questions arise: what do we talk about once the subject has been exhausted? If there is nothing in common; or if there is? Pauses in conversation, awkward silences (or are they only awkward to me?).

An attempt at definition. Shared Experience. And then?

Writing, or Remembering:

2007-09-19T02:40:00.000+01:00

from: "A Gesture Through Time" by Elizabeth Block

"Memory is so imperceptible. It is a skeleton of embodied experience gone by -- only to hit in a wailing voice crying for what is without. A tale includes a plot-like tease -- a plot-like disease -- yet its outcome eludes us. Like music. Perhaps this is why we listen to the same song over and over again. We listen, hoping for resolution, but it never comes. Only the event's vibrations and movements -- crooning crooning crooning. We seek those high E's and F's; a chorus feigns a flight from loss. Perpetuates some fantasy -- lets us believe the memory is really a present and living body.

But so much of living now is juggling all these instances of loss as they shuffle and interpret the now. Where is this split?

If you had a choice between losing your hearing or your sight, which loss would you endure more comfortably? What if, after you lost, you changed your mind, not knowing for sure what life is without." --p. 36

"The limit of fiction remains its inability to get out of 'the real world' as a reference for the work. Language buckles with psychological bounds and gags. Language is as conceptual as art gets." -- p. 42

----------

Buy it. Read it. Pass it on.

Journey

2007-09-17T03:53:00.000+01:00

Today I made a pilgrimage (v. a journey to a place associated with something well known or respected) to the Brooklyn Book Festival. It was the second annual, and I hesitate to write only. It was extremely well attended, though some of the main stages ran behind schedule after only the second readings.

I went to a couple of readings; the first was a panel of first-time novelists reading from their recently published. The second was called Crack in the Facade, readings by Mary Gaitskill, Colson Whitehead, and Peter Melman. All were excellent, however...

I spent most of my time at the SLS/St. Petersburg Review table (if you haven't checked it out yet, this is my pitch: go find a copy of the St. Petersburg Review; this year is it's inaugural publication - it is an international literary journal of approximately 50% English speakers and 50% works in translation - mainly Russian translations in this edition). Spent time catching up with friends I met on SLS and pitching the Review to slyly glimpsing festival-wanderers.

Clearly, I cannot disentangle myself.

But this real world is also much different than the delusion of the White Nights. And are the people the same? Am I? And I miss it now, I do. And I don't know what to do.

The destabilizing force comes with reflection. Is time not enough? Distance? How far must I go - if I keep walking west, I will eventually end where I began. And then I anger myself and my preoccupation with things that happened, things that never were, things that were only in Russia that I didn't even want, don't want now.

And I always feel as if I am outside: watching: waiting:

But the explanation always remains: Only in Russia.

Pause.

2007-09-14T21:25:00.000+01:00

As when time stops. The distant chiming of the elevator
becomes more distant still. Writing as preoccupation in
suspended time floating from consciousness. Her voice
repeating as music (her medium) other words. Too similar
in the absence of delineated space. There are no boundaries
in the mind. Fewer or more between them?

a haunting.

2007-09-12T04:26:00.000+01:00

“Seafood poisoning, a cigarette lit as the person is drifting off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets, or, worse, to a woolen blanket; a slip in the shower - the back of the head - the bathroom door locked; a lightning bolt that splits in two a tree planted in a broad avenue, a tree which, as it falls, crushes or slices off the head of a passer-by, possibly a foreigner; dying in your socks, or at the barber’s, still wearing a voluminous smock, or in a whorehouse or at the dentist’s; or eating fish and getting a bone stuck in your throat, choking to death like a child whose mother isn’t there to save him by sticking a finger down his throat; or dying in the middle of shaving, with one cheek still covered in foam, half shaven for all eternity, unless someone notices and finishes the job off out of aesthetic pity; not to mention life’s most ignoble, hidden moments that people seldom mention once they are out of adolescence, simply because they no longer have an excuse to do so, although, of course, there are always those who insist on making jokes about them, never very funny jokes.”

-Javiér Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Synesthesia

2007-09-11T02:53:00.000+01:00

Санкт-Петербург

As we walk down Claremont, my friend N. tells me that "Petersburg" is a very green word to him; and I see this, I do. But I am also unable to disassociate this seeing from my experiencing: St. Petersburg is a very dark city (though N. then adds that New York is a very black word to him). There are no trees, it is a gray forest of cement. Intriguing, yet. The character fits, of course, the quiet strength of the people and their melancholy history. It is as if stepping into a time capsule, with the neurotic paroxysm of Time's Square dropped down in the middle.

"Drink today, you won't buy a house. Don't drink today, you won't buy a house"

This is what Andre Zorin told us in our Untranslateable Russia lecture, the one where I could hardly hear what he was saying through his mumbling and tried desperately not to fall asleep. Though afterward I reported enthusiastically to others that it was very interesting, very good.

I agree with N., and don't have the heart to explain to him fully the contradiction. Maybe it's the glow, the never-ending days, that lend it an intriguing brilliance amidst the gloom. And after you have left you say "Ah! That was what it looked like all along!"

Now Playing on Broadway:

2007-09-09T04:34:00.000+01:00

Hallelujah! Praise Jesus!

A man walks holding a bible in his right hand, raised next to his face. He is speaking loudly; not quite yelling, but loud enough.

Walking quickly, my three friends and I get caught behind a huge group of women. When we speed up and slip to the side of the sidewalk to go around them, A explains:

we were trying to avoid the cigarettes and heels

A few days ago I almost stepped on a dead mouse in one of those small island parks here in the city. The keyword is almost. I saw it just in time, and was relieved that this time, in this place, it was a mouse. But this in no way excludes other, more disturbing things that are seen here.

At a farmers market in Union Square, A. and I admired artwork that we could not afford. My favorite was a diorama containing a dolls head with a large button over the mouth; I wanted to look at it longer, but A. walked away. Why do these moments always pass too quickly?

There must be a reason for this discomfort

To intertwine.

2007-09-02T15:17:00.000+01:00

This is an attempt at cohesion.

A gathering up and into.

Both sides expanding; differently.

This side of my mind breathes through creation, opening and releasing.

The other breathes most literally, an increased oxygen intake through cardiovascular respiration brought on by sustained movement, opening and releasing.

Can I describe the one at the same time as describing the other?

Announcement!

2007-09-01T23:46:00.001+01:00

This only needs to be said once, in a loud, exuberant voice:

I HAVE A GYM MEMBERSHIP!!!!

Laugh, scream, yell, jump for joy.
More to follow later.

Landscapes

2007-08-30T20:47:00.000+01:00

to move (v):
1) go in a specified direction or manner; change position
2) change or cause to change from one state, opinion, sphere, or activity, to another

move; go; leave; relocate; act; affect; impress; disturb; influence; inspire; change.

Yesterday I observed the silence in the trees by the road near City Hall. There were only a few cars, only a few people. The sun highlighted her beauty.

Tomorrow the city will be yelling at me. I am bracing myself, and preparing to be a better listener than I have been in the past.

To Continue...

2007-08-27T20:51:00.000+01:00

Enter into
or

an Entering into
of

Thoughts
or
Counter-Thoughts

It is not
what is Expected

But the
Expecting

In the End.

----------

My friends who are poets sometimes tell me my writing can be too philosophical; lacking a picture to grab onto and relate to. This is something I'm thinking about; it is not a bad thing, I don't think.

Today Arnold and I worked out (not as if, like the rest of this place, I need to point out the fact that everyone calls her by her last name of Arnold, and she does bodybuilding like Arnold Schwarzenegger...). It was chest, bi, tri and ab day; we did supersets with a minute rest in between. Cardio for 45 min. on the stepper after the weights. This was after I went for a 35 min. jog earlier in the morning and took the dogs for a walk. I am heading over to Physical Therapy later to do the jump training for my extra knee rehabilitation...

This is what I mean by the pressure of the moment. It is just so much easier to be active all day - no need to face the silence. It's not quite a distraction, but it is a taking off; a different direction. This blog is also a bit out of character, but if one were always predictable, what would be the point?

to begin\where? there.

2007-08-24T18:14:00.000+01:00

It is not as if I need another distraction in my life.

It is the immensity of the moment that proves too daunting sometimes, the expectant suspension of time.

Walking around downtown today I encountered two small, curled animals laid out on a piece of fabric in front of an old house. At first I thought they were dead mice, but on second glance realized they were puppies. And it wasn't my second glance, but my friends. I didn't want to look. Now I am disappointed that I didn't look longer.

There must always be someone as witness to these things.