kingdom of the invisible

I've been thinking about this story, listening

to Cynthia Ozick read it, pondering how to sink

beneath the crust of the visible, spreading out

some plans for the new year all over the floor,

preparing to assemble.

Listen to In the Reign of Harad IV

And happy new year.

white out

how the snow looks like chalk marks

against the slate night as I shovel

foolishly/joyfully into the wind

merry

Gone but not forgotten...Coney Island's boardwalk.

Some photos from last year.

It's the holidays of course.

Food, family: good stuff.

Merry New Year, Happy Xmas!

Long Night Moon

or Moon Before Yule

or crumpled moon

(To Rebecca who comes up with much

better names for the full moon)

blue moon

Over the reservoir at dusk, a good chill in the air.

And I can see clearly now the leaves are gone...

I dreamt about my poem last night; in the dream

I remembered the part in The Iliad about the great

shield of Achilles, and how I should re-read that

part of the poem again, it could be useful.

I can see all obstacles in my way....

drowning

beautiful

broken

When I was awarded the fellowship the deal

I made with myself was to get to the office

at Purchase at least one day a week. Well,

this week stuff intervened and I never got

there and that feels pretty bad. Not that I didn't

work on my projects. I did. And I don't have

to go to that office to do the work, to write.

In fact, it's a schlep. But it's a good schlep.

And I want to schlep there. I'd like to schlep

more than one day a week, but there's

work and family and now the leaves-- oh those leaves.

Which are nearly gone, thank goodness. Except

for the damn oak. Its leaves hang on till

December. Anyway, there's always this coming

week. And by hook or crook, I will spend time

in that office. I will be a good fellow!

PS...happy halloween...don't you love this photo.

From the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.

Afghan Women's Writing Project

One of the great things about the interwebs

is being able to do things like co-edit an online

journal with a writer in Scotland as I did last

year with Anna Dickie and qarrtsiluni.

Next month I'll be mentoring women who live

in Afghanistan via the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

The photos above are of the new office the women

now can use in Kabul.

The women will write and I will read and offer

feedback and eventually their work may be published

at the online magazine started by writer Masha Hamilton.

It's completely run by volunteers and the aim is to give women

the power and the place to write and "have a voice in the world

despite a deteriorating security situation."

Check out the website.

I think I'll be learning a thing or two or three in November.

where

All week I was trying to get to the office

where my poems are tacked to the wall, waiting,

burning. I barely made it there Friday morning

for two short hours, what with the yadayadayada

that fills up a week.

The poems waited and waited, like hungry kids

what's for dinner/where's my shirt/get out

they were whiny and I don't blame them, stuck

on a strange wall alone all week with no one

looking after them. But I got there and looked

and fiddled and wrote and looked and they burn

and that's good.

Whale Sound

Nic Sebastian has undertaken a pretty wonderful

endeavor -- to read other people's poems and post

the readings at Whale Sound. It's lovely to hear

my poem in her voice.

The poem, Sometimes a bone, is re-imagined as she reads

it. And there are lots of other poems over at Whale Sound.

Go there and listen.

whoosh

It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Don't try this

at home

IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS

By Colin Nissan

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

lightning

LIBRA

Usually you specialize in having a light touch.

You'd rather nudge than push. Nimble harmony

is more interesting to you than brute force.

You prefer your influence on people

to be appreciated, not begrudgingly respected.

And I certainly don't want you to forsake

any of those inclinations. But I would love

to see you add a dash of aggressiveness

and a pinch of vehemence to your repertoire

in the coming week. I'd be thrilled if you raised

your voice a bit and gesticulated more vigorously

and projected your confidence with an elevated

intensity. According to my reading of the astrological

omens, your refined approach will benefit from a dose of subliminal thunder.

Sunday

I spent part of the late afternoon thumb-tacking

my manuscript onto the walls of the Writer Center

office I'm now inhabiting. I like looking at the poems

from this perspective, not always on a screen or page.

I've been living with this manuscript for almost two

years and am struggling to understand its hodge-podgeness.

I think if I can look at it like a curator looking at an array

of work by one artist I can see/understand in a new way.

This afternoon I looked and looked and that was good.

No great revelations. The poems will stay up for awhile.

I want to keep looking at them.

on certain days

bluster

Someone asked me if I was obsessed with death.

He didn't say what he meant by obsessed.

I love this painting. Frida Kahlo's "Dream"

would be my answer. But, in the moment I

was tongue tied. Then the conversation turned,

as it does at dinners with people.

The wind is wild today and I'm waiting on a storm.

Bluster and blow-downs littering the back roads.

Power still on. It's fall. All kinds of rot -- peony

and mushroom. The dead snake. A tiny turtle carcass

along the shoulder of the road where I run.

The smells. Grapes ripen. The maple trees

are nearly past color to disappearance.

My favorite season.

mourning

Finally I've caught up and read last week's New Yorker,

especially moved by Roland Barthes' grief notes,

which he started writing after the death of his 84-year-old

mother, Henriette. Perhaps these became the stuff of his

final book, Camera Lucida, which is a kind of tribute

to his 'maman' as he ruminates on photography

and memory and loss.

But these sweet, diary fragments are raw, made before theory,

in the middle of mourning. Translated by Richard Howard, Barthes'

notes capture that sense of upheaval that stalks you after loss.

Barthes lived with his mother all of his life. He died three years

after his mother.

I love the photo of them -- his long

legs, her long skirt, the sandy road.

In the sentence "She's no longer suffering,"

to what, to whom does "she" refer?

What does that present tense mean?

~~

Sometimes, very briefly, a blank

moment--a kind of numbness--which

is not a moment of forgetfulness.

This terrifies me.

~~

The desires I had before her death

(while she was sick) can no longer

be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her

death that allows me to fulfill them--her

death might be a liberation in some sense

with regard to my desires. But her death

has changed me, I no longer desire what

I used to desire. I must wait--supposing

that such a thing could happen--for a new

desire to form, a desire following her death.

~~

A strange new acuity, seeing (in the street)

people's ugliness or their beauty.

~~

I don't want to talk about it, for fear

of making literature out of it--or

without being sure of not doing so

--although as a matter of fact

literature originates within these truths.

make over

Today was filled with fall: the light on the meadow where

I walked late afternoon, the wind that came in and tossed

out some leftover humidity, the tree turning away from green.

One season is leaving and another's on the way. Change always

changing. Time for a new look. I fiddled for a bit.

I'm too lazy to ditch blogger, but it's so clunky.

I like this okay. What do you think? Before/after?

thanks

EARL for the good breeze today.

Ponder fall

Libra Horoscope for week of 8/25/10

The odometer will turn over soon, metaphorically speaking. The big supply of the stuff you stocked up on a while back is about to run out. The lessons you began studying a year ago have been completed, at least for now, and you're not yet ready for the next round of teachings. These are just some of the indicators that suggest you should set aside time for reflection and evaluation. The world may come pounding at your door, demanding that you make a dramatic declaration or take decisive action, but in my opinion you should stall. You need to steep in this pregnant pause.

Two

years ago today. My father. RIP old man!

atmospheric

From Fragments of a Broken Poetics

by Jennifer Moxley

VII

What does it matter if there are poets or poems?

XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.

XII

The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence.

It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge.

It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance.

It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well.

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

XLII

It seems as if the able use of metaphor has precipitously fallen off since doubt was cast upon language's ability to represent the real, and yet simile, a far less interesting trope, somehow continues to thrive.

VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.

XV

The poet must understand seduction, because even capricious human attention is susceptible to courtship.

news

I received some good news recently.

(but never know quite how to go about

"sharing" in here. Write it/duh.)

I was selected to be one of three inaugural

fellows at the new Purchase College Writers Center

this coming fall.

I'm amazed and pleased and surprised

and have already reorganized my summer reading.

Soon a new notebook. Maybe a new pen!

I have a manuscript that needs serious fixing.

And a new project/book/something underway.

I get some space and time and, most wonderfully, a research library.

This all makes me very happy.

Fire

by Anthony Discenza

sale today. Enough with all

this talk about words.

tropical

Bluet or cornflower or centaurea cyanus

nevermind it's the color oh and the heat again.

How could all the shreds of garbage bags stuck

in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping

over every shanty and fish stand in the world,

be, in essence, the fingerprints of God?

Maggie Nelson, BLUETS

frida

It's hot here-a heat weave,

I keep writing.

And it's Frida Kahlo's birthday.

In her honor this door and her words.

I would like to be able to do whatever I want behind

the curtain of "madness." In this way, I would arrange

flowers, all day, I would paint pain, love, tenderness,

I would freely laugh at others, but above everything

I would laugh at myself. I would build my world

that would be mine and theirs as long as I live.

beach

EXPLANATION

by Josh Kalscheur

It will take a good fight to bring her back
and the chief there orders his men to call
her in with conch shells, even if it means love

or staying on the beach when the sand hardens.
There’s the chance she’ll float like Olofat
who spat blood and broke himself

into an archipelago. There’s the chance
she drank the sweet water in Tol
and poured her body out as a spring.

There’s the half-caste joke about the men
who left the lighthouse years ago.
No one can discuss sunsets or the fiberglass

of the boat or the story about her breasts
bloating later in the shape of an island,
into real rock. A bulletin goes out

and the boys climb trees for signals.
It could be days she stays huddled there,
and the oddsmakers on Saipan

place their faith in the fish she might spear.
Big deal some say, remember when the cliff
had imprints of hands, and the sliding streaks

of Sudal. There’s the chance she’s stuck
in a tunnel of coral or torn to tufts
and in that case the son could start killing

the pigs. She left the Mortlocks at night
and now the women cover the fences
with fronds and start with the baskets.

There’s the hope she’ll drift again as scraps
of land, as the upper half of a woman’s body,
the curve of sand in her neck.

Thanks to Matt Nienow for finding this poem.

I was at the beach today. I'm still here I think. Or there.

some poems

Up at BigCityLit

Photos from the exhibition at the NY

Botanical Garden on Emily Dickinson's

garden. I read some of her poems there Saturday.

Poems on death, bees and roses, my favorite topics.

bad

writing: the documentary

repetition

here

Alcove

by John Ashbery

Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, "mugwump
of the final hour," lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It's breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who's to say we weren't provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it's not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That's how we get around obstacles.

the winner is

linhelen!!

Please send me your email so I can contact you and get your address.

Thanks all for participating.

and the

winner is...

linhelen

Address needed/books in mail on Monday.

Congrats and thanks all for participating!

nox

Some things Anne Carson said tonight:

I thought a lot about vanishing anyway.

My profession is about having an effect

on people by making sentences.

A real moment of exhilaration came

when I discovered staples.

Overtakelessness.

I wanted to fill my elegy with light

of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.

Helplessness built a wall in her.

Prowling the meanings of a word,

prowling the history of a person,

no use expecting a flood of light.

But all those little kidnaps in the dark.

Anne Carson read from her new book,

Nox, an elegy to her brother who died.

She calls it, "an epitaph in the form of a book."

I went to Poets House in New York, an amazing

place near the foot of Manhattan.

Here is Carson's translation of a poem

by Catullus that she says has been with her

since high school -- #101. He wrote it

as an elegy to his brother.

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed--

I arrive at these poor, brother, burials

so I could give you the last gift owed to death

and talk (why?) with mute ash.

Now that Fortune tore you from me, you

oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,

now still anyway this -- what a distant mood of parents

handed down as the sad gift for burials -

accept! soaked with tears of a brother

and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell

going ggggaggaa

This video is making the rounds. It brought a little lift

to another rainy chilly day. Only a few days left to join

in my poetry giveaway. Come on, add your name, you

know you want to!

sometimes

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal
living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

-Carl Sandburg

giving

The Poetry Book Giveaway is happening here.

Send me your name and email -- you have

until April 30. Then on May 1 I will select

at random one name and mail you one

copy of the above books, postage paid!

And the winner will actually receive eight,

yes, EIGHT chapbooks for free. That's because

Toadlily Press features the Quartet Series,

four chaps under one roof. My chapbook,

The End of the Body, is part of The Fifth

Voice. Such a deal.

haunt

This image haunts me. From a book out this month by Siglio Press, The Torture of Women,
a series of paintings made by Nancy Spero in the 1970s. I bet the book is expensive.
I need to learn more about this artist. (I like that the word haunt is etymologically
related to home.)

paintings

Poetry Book Giveaway

I've been hemming and hawing. What if no one is out there. What if no one signs up. I missed the deadline, proscrastinator. Then a note on Kelli Russell Agodon's blog that there's still room. A sign. I'm in! And thanks to Kelli for this great idea. Participating bloggers give away two books, their own and one other. The winner will receive my chapbook, The End of the Body, which is part of The Fifth Voice, published by Toadlily Press in its Quartet Series. The other is a favorite (also out from Toadlily Press), By Way Of. It features chaps by 4 poets: Diana Alvarez, Emily Carr, Matthew Nienow and Diana Woodcock.

Check out the Toadlily website for more info. To enter, leave a comment with your name on this post letting me know you're interested. You have until April 30. Then on May 1, I'll randomly select a name and ship the books (postage on me) to the winner. It's that easy.

flaw

present

the artist is present

marina abromovic at MoMa