so, say it really happened. that doesn't mean

"synonyms do not exist." - donald hall

no one could write a novel about this family: too many similar characters

i think we should discuss louise glück. brace yourself.

Lost Love

My sister spent a whole life in the earth.

She was born, she died.

In between,

not one alert look, not one sentence.

She did what babies do,

she cried. But she didn't want to be fed.

Still, my mother held her, trying to change

first fate, then history.

Something did change: when my sister died,

my mother's heart became

very cold, very rigid,

like a tiny pendant of iron.

Then it seemed to me my sister's body

was a magnet. I could feel it draw

my mother's heart into the earth,

so it would grow.

there are a couple reasons that i like louise. FIRST: she's a sarah lawrence girl. rad. second of all, the voice is incredibly straightforward. so straightforward that it is, in fact, alarming. and lord knows i love to be alarmed. i enjoy her darkness the way i enjoy todd solondz movies. the detachment of this voice is so... accurate? it characterizes so much that is beyond the poem. do i hear pity? and what about the end, where the mother's heart is drawn under ground, away from her still living child, and it flourishes. what of that?

last night i remembered how to write poetry after having not done it for a while. i remembered that before anything goes down on the page, there must be emotion attached to it. but then i look at this poem. and where is her emotion on the page? it's like she's not even there. and yet i'm reacting. but is my reaction emotional? not really. i would characterize it as voyeuristic. the poem is displayed through a very very very very filtered lense. she's bold. the writing reflects the physical nature of the mother's heart, "cold and rigid," not to mention the rigidness that we would associate with you know, dead babies.

this poem is a good example of what you can expect from glück. these particular poems are from her book, ararat, which if you're in the market for poetry, i really recommend owning, so that can submerge in it and live life from under the water.

one more!

Brown Circle

My mother wants to know

why, if I hate

family so much,

I went ahead and

had one. I don't

answer my mother.

What I hated

was being a child,

having no choice about

what people I loved.

I don't love my son

the way I meant to love him.

I thought I'd be

the lover of orchids who finds

red trillium growing

in the pine shade, and doesn't

touch it, doesn't need

to possess it. What I am

is the scientist,

who comes to that flower

with a magnifying glass

and doesn't leave, though

the sun burns a brown

circle of grass around

the flower. Which is

more or less the way

my mother loved me.

I must learn

to forgive my mother,

now that I'm helpless

to spare my son.

letters

when my head hurts i don't need a doctor to tell me why;

i know it's because there's nowhere to put it. where it's put

dissolves, and then there is my head, scorching, freezing,

dripping against a simple insistence on temporary limits.

today was just so. i felt such revulsion looking at my fries,

each one exposed so much like myself, but even needier,

trusting me, my head, belly, for shelter. There's no shelter

here, friends

this is why we wake up late at night and light up the candles of our tv sets

i'm going through a thing right now with valzhyna mort. i discovered her for the first time two weeks ago when she read with cynthia cruz at the central park zoo. she has an awesome reading voice and the best hair cut. i bought her book, factory of tears, and although i have read it almost every day since then, i've only read three poems in it. they're just too good and i'm not ready to move on. we'll talk more when i've read the whole book.

what i would actually like to talk about is capitalization, you know, of letters, and how it is completely absent from 1. this blog & 2. the three poems i've read in mort's book.

i never thought about why i don't use capital letters for informal writing on the internet. it just seemed less... formal, and then became habit. one thing i like about words is that we visualize them when we hear them or speak them. if nothing else, sometimes i say a word and visualize how it's spelled. the less i used capital letters, the more i came to visualize my spoken words without them. so when i read these poems, i try to understand how valzhyna mort made that choice.

read it.

Music of Locusts

by Valzhyna Mort

what i wouldn't give

to be a small freckle on the wind's nose

to ride in a convertible

beside a middle-aged man

a teenager will do

it's as if everything that has happened

is nothing but Security which you have to pass through

in order to get into summer

god tossed a heart like a coin

inside me

as if i were a pond

he made a wish

and lingered in the air

and everything belongs to me but hope

the mountains are kneeling like runners at the starting line

their green t-shirts billowing in the wind

then they are gigantic tortoises

he will offer to leave me

the color of his skin is

like the color of the sun at dusk

and the road is parting in front of the wheels

like an army of locusts as it rushes ahead of us

like god's stray eyelashes

the stars are falling- more light! more!

god has no time to make a wish

all he can do is cry out faster! faster!

it's impossible to fall asleep next to this man

at night all that's left of my body

is the music of locusts

we ourselves flash and yearn

i have a feeling this blog is going to turn into a parade of cool shit that my roommate shows me. i've never really blogged about john berryman, but he is my favorite poet. berryman is the author of the "dream songs." for these poems berryman created a protagonist, henry, a character that he described as a middle aged man who has "suffered an irreversible loss." there are other characters as well, but yadda yadda yadda you should look into it for yourself, and then you should call me because i always want to talk about jb. the vision/language for the dream songs was conceived by berryman through his dreams, duh. BUT the poems do not reflect the dream-like state, nor are they a stream of consciousness. instead they are intricately constructed. i think that he used his dreams less as subject matter and more as a method of research. when i say research i mean that he was able to access his deepest and truest feelings in dreams, because he felt that it was the least inhibited state.

anyway, my roommate showed me john berryman READING. on YOUTUBE. i don't know how i never thought to look for that. i've always hated that i can never see my favorite poet read (he jumped off the washington avenue bridge in minnesota in 1972.) it's truly amazing to watch him read and hear his voice, and understand how the poems sounded inside of his head.

they took away his teeth, white & helpful

poetry friends are the best because you get to bond over something that pretty much no one else wants to talk about. plus you can read each other's poems and say more than "cool, i like this one."

recently i moved into an apartment with the great meghann plunkett, a long time poetry friend. so far the perks are that we've been able to vent our frustration about the shitty poetry selections at most bookstores, like the goddamn strand. we also have access to each other's books. this is mostly to my benefit because meghann has way way way more books in this apartment than i do.

when we're feeling groovy we work on wordy art projects.

my roommate found this book in the trash. it's about animals. enjoy my nails.

then meghann started doing erasure on the pages to make poems, then she illustrated over the words that were erased.

it says "the flocks of tiny/giraffes,/with/their/purplish/birdseed,/a silvery dream/melt away/ the nighttime,/parade/to/water/sparks/and/sometimes/another dimension/is/bottomless/ under/ the/ helpless motion."

then our friend natalie made one.

"water-stalk/daytime/hot/loaded/vinyl/on/inner/drop/from a beach/of basking/I/drift/up/slowly/solid/filling/landscape/the gun/pebbleworm-/some muggers/uhhhhhhh shhlushleeeee uhhhhhh/-a beauty/mud pack/forever./glamorous goo"

i made this one when i was feelin prett-ay groovy.

"swine to poachers/ world-record rhinos/long/silver/lions/monkey-eating/ill-tempered/exotic secretary/cameras were busy/An Eighty-Foot Fall/far/unmistakable/giant ventriloquists/Somewhere/eyeballs/closer to/ GNAASHAHRRRRR/crouched low,"

my girl stephanie made this funky one.

"the hunter/gliding/Breathing/close-up/scraped/downhill/Distance okay/Beads of sweat/ I could see nothing/Years/just/my head/freaking,"

we also wrote some group poems recently but i'm feeling too shy to post them just yet.

this post sponsored and brought to you by solitude

say the word 'fond' over and over and observe as it loses all meaning.

THIS DOESN'T ALWAYS HAPPEN.