Author: peg

I believe I would come out and wash my face

Today’s subject line is from James Wright’s “Yes, But,” which is mentioned in Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life as the one she read at her father’s memorial service. She writes that her father “would have loved the fact that this poem allowed me to say ‘making love’ — while wearing fishnets, I should add, an edgy touch he would have also applauded — before a priest, a bishop, a rabbi, and an overflow crowd of 550 people in an Episcopal church in Bible-belted Oklahoma City.”

The poem, and more about her father, are in this 2004 post at her blog, Orangette.

I picked up the book on remainder earlier this year, on impulse. I took it to bed with me last night (having slipped on a step fourteen hours earlier and landed on it hard, I was feeling too achy to think and too sore to sleep) and it was just right — it includes a fair bit about Paris, and a powerful chapter about her father’s last days, and a cast of opinionated food-lovers that include a vegetarian composer and a Seattle menage-à-trois: “Jimmy is the baker, John is the cook, and Rebecca is the force of nature.” MW continues:

“Moll, you need two husbands,” Rebecca announced, stirring a snowdrift of sugar into her iced tea. “You can’t expect one person to be everything for you. You need at least two. At least.” I nodded. She had a point. I have thought about it many times since, and I don’t know that I entirely agree — so far, one husband is almost more than enough for me — but she did have a very good point. But that morning, the scent of melted butter was rising from the stove, and talk of husbands, singular or plural, had nothing on it.

The book also devotes pages 216-17 to “radishes and butter with fleur de sel,” MW having reminisced two pages earlier about visiting her boyfriend on West 123rd Street in NYC and how “sometimes we would wake up late and walk to get a jug of orange juice, a bunch of radishes, a baguette, and some butter. Back at home, we ate lazily at the wobbly table with the window open, the box fan blowing, and my bare feet on his lap.”

Reading this took me back to the last time I’d eaten radishes — which was indeed with toast and butter and salt, over at Holland House, with three dear friends — and it made me wish there were radishes in the house. And I went shopping earlier today, so now there are. What marvelous times these are.

not broken, but rearranged

I’m liking what I’ve read so far of Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne’s poetry:

  • Reb reprinted On the day of your favorite color: at the BAP blog
  • A selection at the Drunken Boat (including “It is not impossible to survive,” from which today’s subject line is taken)
  • Five poems in the No Tell Motel archives. Mmm. I’ve printed “Bend, Bend, Break” to put in my re-read binder.

    • As for me, there’s The Silence of Too Much To Say at unFold, and a packet almost ready to mail out. According to my submissions log, it’s the first snail mail batch I’ve prepared this year. Oy and oof. Maybe I’ll declare October to be la grande PegPoSubMo. (Maybe I should get back to the Must Dos currently in the way of my Wanna Writes. Yeah.)

    divine suppleness and strength

    A couple weeks ago (8/29), the New York Times Magazine published photographs and videos of elite women tennis players by Dewey Nicks.

    In yesterday’s magazine, the writers to the editor included one Sam Abrams, who quoted Walt Whitman at length:

    fierce and athletic girls … are not one jot less than I am,/They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,/Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,/They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,/They are ultimate in their own right — they are calm, clear, well-possess’d of themselves.

    “Let me see your feet.”

    It’s the height of summer, and my hands currently smell of basil and garlic. (I’m making pesto with the last of last week’s leaves before improvising some sort of okra-onion curry for dinner.) I’ve got Rameau on the CD player and assorted windows open. Let me tell you about some of them…

    Recently published:

  • You can tell…, at microcosms (today!)
  • Cheshire knife…, at microcosms (August 2)
  • The song goes…, at PicFic (July 19)
  • By the waters…, at microcosms (July 16)

    • Some poems I’ve printed out or e-mailed:

  • Pin Setter, by Chris Green
  • Lightning Bugs and the Pleiades, by Coleman Barks
  • Horizon of Feet, by Philip Dacey

    • A collection I’m enjoying (and which I’ll be reviewing for Galatea Resurrects): Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

    A collection I need to return to: the postings at the Blue Print Review blog under the “moment” tag. The entries that held my eye at first glance:
    “sky crossing 2,” “sky crossing 1,” “missing words,” “december in just a moment,” “samurai” (this one’s getting rec’d on the fandom blog when I steal some other moment to update it)

    Current squee: I’ve managed to draft 22 pieces in 23 days as a participant in 24/7 (actually 23 pieces in as many days, but I didn’t manage to finish anything within day 8), as well as one twelve-line poem outside of the project. That pleases me — and so does one of the pieces being scooped up for publication within hours of my posting it privately to the group. (The editors said they were “smitten” by it! I will thunk back to earth as soon as I turn to the next page of my notebook — ars longa, verse nty-nth — but at the moment, I’m as full of bubbly glee as a flute of sparkling wine.)

    (And speaking of returning to earth, I’d best get back to the making of pesto and curry…)

    “the side of a highway into Nashville”

    The subject line’s from Sarah Lindsay’s “The Driver,” one of the poems featured on the NYT’s Hot Type: Poems for Summer page this weekend. I love both the wordplay and narrative of Tony Hoagland’s “Summer Studies,” and am entertained by the pairings created by the slant rhymes of Edward Hirsch’s sonnet. (They make me want to spend some time expanding them into new poems of my own…)

    Pieces published since the last time I posted here:

    A Study in Setting at qarrtsiluni (text and audio)

    free from school… at tinywords

    Abyss has no biographer…

    …but its would-be cartographers are legion, if you ask me.

    At any rate, via poems.com, I came across James Longenbach’s Nation review of Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds earlier today. I was put off a bit by the royal assumption within its opening (“We don’t reread great novels or poems because we can’t remember the story; we reread because we want to feel our familiar world becoming strange again”), but I like the incarnation of Dickinson that Longenbach says that Gordon presents, in descriptions such as

    Emily Dickinson was an extraordinarily powerful woman, an artist who was intimidated by nothing—the opposite of a fear-driven recluse, the opposite of the lovelorn spinster that some of her family members were driven to concoct for the world. … The great virtue of Gordon’s biography is that it makes Dickinson the person—sister, friend, seducer, adversary—seem as scary as her poems.

    and

    The people to whom Dickinson was most closely related or most passionately attracted were rampant, larger-than-life figures, and as Gordon demonstrates, “Emily was not an oddity amongst them.”

    and

    A variety of factors may well have determined Dickinson’s decision to seclude herself, but to champion illness as the single most determining factor is to disregard what is otherwise so bracing about Lives Like Loaded Guns: its portrayal of Emily Dickinson as an artist who was, during her lifetime, the victim of nothing.

    I don’t know when I’ll get to this book — or whether I’ll agree with either Longenbach or Gordon once I do — but Longenbach’s writeup definitely makes me more inclined to seek it out than before.

    Publications since I last posted here include:

    “the hem of my dress….” tinywords, 16 June 2010.

    “snatched by the wind…” tinywords, 11 June 2010.

    “Schrodinger plus Descartes….” microcosms, 16 June 2010

    …and I do intend to resume building and revising longer poems later in the summer or fall, but right now other exigencies keep hopping to the front of the queue. It happens:

    Gam zeh ya’avor

    The only way you’ll find happiness
    is to know what you want
    when it is already yours

    and to know
    after it is no longer yours
    that it isn’t the only way you’ll find happiness.

    ~ pld

    (originally written for Joanne Merriam’s Ampersand Project, January 2003)

    “pouring your light into their mouths”

    Hullo-ullo-ullo!

    It’s been (and remains) somewhat messy in the county where I (and Joanne) reside. I’m itchy, itchy, itchy, both literally (water shortage) and figuratively (time shortage vs. things I want to write), but very grateful to have escaped the worst. (The baseball field seven blocks from my house was underwater before the Cumberland had even crested.)

    Since I last posted here, some new poems of mine have been published:

    “dozing April fool…” at 7×20

    “She’s building…”, “Here, I’m able…”, and “That giant glass slipper…”, all at microcosms

    “The Wailing Well” (text and audio) at Goblin Fruit

    Also, two reviews at Galatea Resurrects, issue 14.

    Reading has been even more piecemeal and snatched-moment than usual, so not much to say. At the moment, I’m mulling over today’s feature at Poetry Daily, Aliki Barnstone’s With God in the Morning. Some of the language is too prosaic for my taste (and the ending perhaps too abrupt — something about the “dear God” doesn’t work for me, even though I recognize the clever double meaning in its placement there) — but I’m intrigued by the connections the poem wants to trouble me with.

    Oh! I must not neglect to mention, there have been poems written for me as well. Molly Gaudry’s Fingertips riffs on some lines from my Sonic Crochet Hook, and for my birthday, a fellow Taurus sent me a verse portrait of a bull. 🙂

    And on that note, I’m going to go intimidate another 100 endnotes into submission, and then maybe I can treat myself to revising something or other into a submission.

    *glee*

    From Luc Reid’s “What Goes Around, Stays Around” (flashfic):

    “Mechaieh … the poet?”

    “Of course the poet.”

    “But I heard that all of her poems turned into flocks of birds when you read them.”

    “That’s only her recent ones. This is one of the old ones.”

    “So you’ve read it?”

    “Of course not. You think I want it to turn into a flock of birds?”

    Not much going on with me poetry-wise at the moment, although I’ve got a couple ideas I might try to turn into flocks of birds later tonight, after the roasting of a chicken and napping à la cat. (One of these years I will swing a full night’s sleep before Easter services. This year’s was nice — the readings included two poems by Rilke and one by e.e. cummings — but I confess there were also stretches where I simply let my mind wander, focusing less on the sermon and more on the gorgeous cerulean blue of the thangka (traditional Buddhist painting) behind the pulpit.)

    “adorned with laurel and lightning bolts”

    If I could get all y’all to buy one poetry book in the near future (say, in celebration of spring, or National Poetry Month), at the moment it would be Alison Luterman‘s See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions, 2010). Today I quote to you from “The World Card,” which begins:

    I always wanted the World card,
    naked androgynous figure striding the globe,
    adorned with laurel and lightning bolts…

    and builds and builds to

    …I wanted to cross the sky and come back
    bearing dead stars in my hands, fossil fuel
    for poems. I wanted to inhale God’s breath
    till it singed my lungs; to be used up by love,
    to hang from a tree by my heels.
    “Be careful,” the old fortune-teller advised me shrewdly
    at the shop where I paid her ten bucks
    to turn the deck over in her ringed, swollen fingers.
    “It’s not always a good thing, you know –”
    but I wouldn’t let her finish. I didn’t want good,
    good was too small. I wanted the world.

    Speaking of Tarot cards, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a new series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot. I associate BPAL with poetry in part because many of the fragrance names and descriptions borrow from Poe, Swinburne, Keats, and others, and the CBLDF series is associated with Neil Gaiman. I should also note that, over the years, I’ve received some incredible responses to BPAL scents on me, and some fond memories (as well as a few “OMG scrub that off NOW!” moments — no risk, no reward) — a vial of “Embalming Fluid” came to the rescue in a too-small ScotsRail compartment after a too-long day sans showers, and there was an elevator ride where a stranger exclaimed “What IS that?” in a happily gobsmacked way in reaction to the Nanny Ashtoreth.

    In other news, my sometime partner in crime Greta Cabrel has a new poem up at Thirteen Myna Birds, I have a booklet of hay(na)ku available via Open Hand Press (all proceeds donated to Haiti relief efforts), and last night I read Wendy Babiak’s The Uninvited Guest, thanks to a rec Joanne made on Twitter. (And speaking of Joanne and Twitter, I really like today’s tanka by Peter Newton on 7×20, the zine she edits, which incidentally is open to submissions…)