soon part of me will explore the deep and dark floor of the harbor

look, ma! i'm on the internet!

low log is a site that was started up officially just yesterday by two sarah lawrence grads. have a look around, and spread that link far and wide. there is some good writing on there.

hmmm.... a longer, more real, and less self-promoting post soon to come.

like a brown bird nesting in a texaco sign, i got a point of view

my best friend, stephanie, future politico/high power attorney, is taking her first poetry class and i get to hear about it!

i can taste that diploma

notes on a po fest

the poetry festival is like a holiday. it involves drinking around grown ups, feeling justified in not doing homework, spending tons of money (on books), and fun visitors.

- linda gregg was phenomenal. she is as awesome as her poems are. she drew lots of flowers all over her book when she signed it. she mentioned that she was never married to jack gilbert, but talked about him in between almost every poem. dig dig dig her.

- po fest crush: the dickman twins. damn cuties, how'd you get so good at writin' poems? they had different sounds, but were equally adorable. they read one poem together about their twinhood, one of my favorite moments of the weekend.

- dorianne laux and joseph millar: let me in that marriage today.

- RITADOVE RITADOVE RITADOVE.

- anais mitchell, you're cool.

- mark doty and ck williams: this reading was amazing. i luv u poetry fest. 

PS back into walt whitman heavily don't worry.

devoured as spirit by spirit

wanna hear some poetry?

on friday at 8:15 p.m. i am reading in the slc poetry festival with poet linda gregg. she is rad. you can hear her read a poem here.

highlights include, but not limited to: "the nipples you bit and the body you possessed lie buried in you." ... dig you, linda gregg. 

anyway, if you don't come to see me & linda, at least come to see mark doty, matthew dickman, michael dickman, rita dove, jorie graham, ck williams(!!!!!), and more. 

it's free as hell and happening all weekend, so get down, and look forward to my detailed notes on the festival.

 schedule.

in a field, i am the absence of field

my friend becca recently made a list of songs that she could remember hearing for the first time. there aren't many songs that i can remember exactly when or where i first heard them. actually there are only two that come to mind: "you're so vain" by carly simon and "mahgeeta" by my morning jacket. 

poems on the other hand... there are tons. i guess that's because you have to actually sit down and participate, unlike a song that can creep its way into your awareness. i like poetry, and reading in general, really, because you have to be so present. and at the end, you look at this thing that you were so absorbed in and it's just ink on a page, not like a movie or a play or something else that pulls you in through an (awesome, but) much more elaborate structure.

here's some of the poems that i remember my first encounter with...

- the nails by w.s. merwin -- once at a reading someone requested that merwin read this poem, and he refused, saying that it was too painful to read aloud. don't read this poem if you're going through a break up. i'm jus' sayin'.

- keeping things whole by mark strand -- a teacher showed me this poem when i was taking a poetry class one summer in high school. it changed my idea of what a poem was. 

- directions to the brothel (click around, you'll find it... someone made a video that scared me when i watched it with the lights off.) by michael dumanis -- michael is the teacher who showed me keeping things whole. 

- 13th dream song by john berryman -- i can't believe i haven't done a berryman post on this blog yet. just wait. it's coming. 

- author's prayer by ilya kaminsky -- this link is sweet because you can hear him reading it. ilya is deaf and has a russian accent. he can be sort of hard to understand, so when he read at sarah lawrence he passed out copies of his book so that people could follow along with him. he reads like a rabbi and when everyone follows along it felt like a religious experience. 

uhhh i guess that's enough for now. you guys should read those poems. 

oh, also, i'm reading here (school) today (tuesday) at 8 pm, in slonim house. it's a 6x6 featuring 6 slc students and 6 students from columbia university, all reading for 6 minutes each. cute, right?

black shoe, in which i have lived like a foot

sylvia plath's son committed suicide this month. you can get quite a full story here. what feels odd for me, as the article reflects, is that this man's life seems overshadowed by his parents, more specifically the barrage of suicides that surrounded them. i think plath's career was overshadowed by her death. what i mean is that her death became more famous than her poems.

one of many things that i find strange about this article is the way that the author quotes the poetry of plath and hughes when talking about their son. that just seems so weird to quote poetry in an article as though it were some kind of personal statement or as if it pertains to anything concrete.

i resisted plath for a long time because i really just thought of her as a narcissistically depressed, one-note type poet. i became more interested in her when i heard two of her poems read theatrically this year at sarah lawrence. the first was "daddy" which may be her most famous poem. i  don't know what this poem does for me on the page, but when read aloud, by a guy no less, it was some freaky, freaky shit.

"lady lazarus" is the other. i have to say i enjoy this poem much more for the reason that it actually scares the bejeezus out of me. it's incredibly haunting. i love when a speaker can be totally vulnerable and remain on the offensive in a poem-- it's like the speaker doesn't compromise- sticks with a confident tone. 

the key line in "lady lazarus," the one that highlights intent and tone is "do i terrify?--" the dashes, as though there is some lingering silence after the question. as a reader, this is the first line where i feel the anxiety in this poem, and what i love about it, is that when it's asked, my internal response is not an automatic yes, but suddenly i am receiving the poem differently, understanding the speaker's tone differently. plath is a little more subtle than i initially gave her credit for. 

while on the subject of dead poets, read this poem by hayden carruth.

Graves

Both of us had been close 

to Joel, and at Joel's death

my friend had gone to the wake

and the memorial service

and more recently he had 

visited Joel's grave, there

at the back of the grassy

cemetery among the trees,

"a quiet, gentle place," he said,

"befitting Joel." And I said,

"What's the point of going

to look at graves?" I went 

into one of my celebrated

tirades. "People go to look

at the grave of Keats or Hart

Crane, they go traveling just to

do it. What a waste of time. 

What do they find there? Hell,

I wouldn't go look at the grave of

Shakespeare if it was just

down the street. I wouldn't 

look at-" And then I stopped. I

was about to say the grave of God

until I realized I'm looking at it

all the time....