from this weekend
+ :
twice watched (I learned a lot such as what “stet” means and that I like Alec Baldwin):
& the reading & listening to:
& the gut-wrenching:
I have really been enjoying the break from the excess of paperwork I’ve endured over the past few months. I haven’t fleshed out any poems, but I’ve mostly been freewriting and making word association lists for some poem ideas I’ve been sitting on for a while. In fact, I have a pretty large mental list of poems I want to write and this is a rare and good thing. I keep returning to “A Poet’s Companion” and “Michelangelo’s Seizure” and can’t get past them. I read and reread and reread because it’s so good and it’s like waking up that little poet inside me that knows these things but forgets them when she becomes intimidated by the big scary poetry world. But anyway, I’m almost ready to jump in. That first dive is always the scariest when you’re making art. Diving in and coming out of the water. I am much better at dwelling, sitting on the edge and floating inside the pool.
And all this water talk reminds me how much I want to go here again before I potentially move states/lose all income. Floating in mineral pools inside a cave (I don’t even care if parts of it are manmade) all day is quite possibly one of the most divine experiences one can receive or give to oneself. (You really forget about the few hundred dollars it takes for you to get in there and wallow around in pools and steam all day and have old Austrians or young, clean-shaven mountain men rub your back into a warm mush…Somehow I feel that I’m not describing this properly but hopefully you get the point.)
Last night I attended the MFA readings at Queens, which featured poet Steve Gehrke, the author of Michelangelo’s Seizure, winner of the National Poetry Series and quite possibly one of the coolest poetry book titles ever, in my personal opinion.
Steve was one of those poets who in person reads his poems like he’s in a marathon – fast and barely taking breaths from beginning to end. At first, this was distracting. I took a big breath for him to ease the pressure and nervously looked around at other people who were leaning forward and squinting as if someone had sucked the air right out of them. But after a little bit, it was kind of like sitting in the passenger seat of a fast moving car, with your head out the window and your hair smacking you in the face, catching glimpses of signs and other landmarks on the road as you zoom by. He had some phrases and images in there that just really hit me with a “pow!” that may have been more like a tap if it were just read silently while reclined on the couch. But I’m yet to know that for sure, since as soon as I got home I had to bury my head in some freelance paper work, while Scott selfishly broke in my brand new copy of Michelangelo’s Seizure for me. Jerk 
I’m a little (ok a lot) jealous about Gehrke and this book. You see, that title should belong to my first manuscript. Not because I’ve already written a poem with that title (because I haven’t), but because it’s the kind of poem I imagine myself writing, or that I hope to write one day. If the personal must weave its way into everything I write, then it would seem only natural that I would write a poem with this subject matter because 1) I’ve had minor seizures on and off since I was five years old, 2) I have been a visual artist most of my life (longer than I’ve been a poet, that’s for sure), 3) Michelangelo is one of my favorite painters, 4) I’ve stated in MFA application essays and in other mediums that if I were to tackle a “research project,” it would be “to read the biographies of visual artists to write dramatic narratives or tie their own narratives into my own.” Lame, lame, lame, I know. But I’ll read this book anyway and hope for the best and that my subconcious doesn’t try to steal everything. And I’m a firm believer that just becaues someone else has written about something, doesn’t mean that you can’t. It just makes it harder.
I am a couple steps ahead (or is it behind?). I do already have a few poems that separately deal with art and seizures, although I’m sure that I’ll erase them from all memory down the road.
(This is where I take a big gulp and consider coming back here later to delete all of this)
two poems by me…
(Oops you’re too late… she did indeed delete these!)
Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
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To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (note: I have started this book 3 times but never finished it. However, Mrs. Dalloway is one of my all-time favorite reads. I’m going to try to stick to it this time!)
I’m getting in the festive spirit on my lunch breaks with Holidays On Ice. I think this leaves me with only one Sedaris book I haven’t read yet…
And I’m also re-reading Ariel.
Bob Hicok, This Clumsy Living. Hicok is on the staff of Virginia Tech University and also recently taught in the Queens MFA program. I saw him read at Queens last spring. This book was winner of the Pitt Poetry Series (University of Pittsburg Press.)
Paul Guest, Notes For My Body Double. I found Paul’s work on Verse Daily this week, and loved it. Also had no idea that he taught at UTC. This book was winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry. He also has a cover note with praise from Hicok (not sure if he was the judge or a friend.)
While at the beach, I finished Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (I know, it took me forever to read, since my lunch breaks are shorter at my new job – 10 minutes at best - and I didn’t take the book home until our weekend vacation). But it was excellent (thank you, Casey, for recommending). If any of you have read my creative nonfiction, you know that I love a “braided” story, and this one was a wonderful example of how distorted chronology can create momentum and keep imagery strong. I definitely thought “I wish I had written this” throughout reading the whole book. Also, for those of you who have visited and/or lived in/loved Chicago, this is a must-read. Even though I’ve only been to the city twice, I found joy in recognizing where certain scenes took place in the book & city.
So, to keep up with my “novel & Internet reading at work, poetry & magazines at home” practice, I started reading Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, which I had picked up from Park Road Books’ “2006 Reader’s Choice” shelf back when I bought Time Traveler’s Wife. Coincidentally, Gruen is also a Chicago author. So far, I’m loving it, and it appears to be a fast read. The story is set in a present-day nursing home and in a flash-back to the Great Depression era, when the narrator had joined a carnival as a veterinarian. I might get this book for my sister, who just completed vet school, for her birthday or Christmas, depending on how it unfolds.
So yeah, it’s good to delve into some nice contemporary fiction. I think it takes the edge off everything else I stick my nose into
Wyslawa Szymborska, View With A Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. I like her sense of humor and rhetorical thinking. Recommended to me by a friend (thanks, Brian!)
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The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. I’m not far into this one but it is a great tool. Lots of prompts and exercizes to delve into when in writer’s block. I can see myself referring to this book for years to come.
Magazines I Subscribe To:
Online journals I read regularly:
