HAS IT BEEN FOUR YEARS?

North Dakota

JOURNAL: SPILT BRAIN ON SPLIT LIP*

"Anyone lived in a pretty how town" says e e cummings. In sixth grade I tried to write my name on my papers in a lower case letters. I don't think I knew much of e e cummings poetry, I definitely wasn't much of a poetry fan in those days, but I knew of him and his small e's. My teacher asked me if my name wasn't a proper noun. Proper noun. What a strange term. I went back to capitalizing my name. 

There is another term, ambiguity tolerance, that in the context in which I learned it refers to how well you handle broad instructions on an assignment. Do you prefer itemized rubrics asking for a personal essay that's five pages long, single-spaced, Times New Roman 12 point font, making sure to cover the points of your birth, most embarrassing moment, graduation from high school, and how good you are at sticking to a grocery list? Or do you prefer the looseness of being asked to write a personal essay, taking as long as necessary to fully explain your thoughts?

Or, outside of the classroom, does your heart feel at peace when you read:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Or, how frustrated do you become with my blog?

My ambiguity tolerance in liberal arts and the kitchen is usually very high. For instance, my ideas for Halloween costumes this year have been: The Beatles' "Revolution #9," Light as a feather/Stiff as a board, or a constellation which was such a concrete idea it quickly transmuted into Outer Space. (Which, in reality, just looks like I'm wearing a giant navy blue mumu and trying to be a wizard.) However, situations that are typically classified as straightforward are highly foggy to me. Like biology and this goals/performance review worksheet I'm to do for work. I've an email here with a list of questions to help me come up with goals. "What career goals do you have? What sorts of training do you need to get there?" Within the confines of the job I'm at now, because they require temps to participate as well, these questions seem the height of ambiguity and therefore must each require three pages of conjecture. Instead, I have a spreadsheet to fill in. This is a part of business that confuses me. "Here, human, tell me your hopes and dreams but in a succinct enough matter that it will fit in these 4 merged spreadsheet cells but compelling enough that we promote you, give you health insurance, and treat you like a human being."

Have I been dropped in an unfamiliar sea? In a place where the sun casts its light so evenly there's no telling cardinal directions and what land awaits me who knows where? Never mind, New Sea, I don't worry, I can swim.

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

   

*from The Woman Who Laughed on Calgary by Heather McHugh
anyone lived in a pretty how town by e e cummings

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY

North Dakota

POEM: CATERWAULING

They made me a tiny violin.
Meaning,
they did not make me a gift
of a tiny violin.
No.
I am now a violin.
Tiny,
Screeching.
And there's a dreadful
din of caterwauling
coming from the alley
accompanying me.
I finally don't feel lonely.



This is part of a series of horrible poems that I'm writing as a 2014 New Years Resolution.

POEM: Grapfeld the Antlered

Grapfeld the Antlered
wandering far afield,
felt cold in the knees,
nose, and soul.

He was looking
for something to do
with his life and the earth was
a wide place to be.

So he roamed
and he fell down a cliff.

POEM LE XII*

modified from original source

Everything fell apart
Once they realized the moon was filled with gak.
The people from Nickelodeon,
understanding the industrial components of gak,
felt like life had lost its magic.
Everybody's zest grew stale and
blew away in the wind
causing dust storms in unlikely places
like aisle seven of McGruff's Family Grocery
and between the toes of certain sailors.
Civilizations get shanked by the most unlikely things.


*written 12 January 2014

THINGS YOU MUST LISTEN TO TODAY

because I can't stop thinking about the character of Gertrude Stein in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) saying the job of an artist is to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence. I would say Existence is not empty, but that we live emptily. So listen to the First imagining you're with me sitting on a living room floor at the foot of the record player, eyes closed and sharing a drink. Listen to the Second for words most beautiful about love and searching ("I will love you...til the ocean is folded and hung up to dry // In headaches and in worry / vaguely life leaks away"). Listen to the Third being quiet and still, remembering moments you're grateful for. 

ANOTHER POEM MORCEL

The lopsided grin
grappled with reality
and found it was wanting
a beard.

APOCALYPSE 2014 & THE PROPHETIC UNDERARM SEATS!!!!

My NYR, as they're called, is to write a piece of horrible poetry every day, what's yours? Most of my little frightening beauties will be kept just for me in my journal but I accidentally started 2014 with an apocalypse and those can't be kept secret. I make no apologies for what is about to follow.
Happy New Year!

source

She knew it was the end when her armpits began to itch.
They turned soft, puffy, red and the need to scratch was unnerving.
Soon she looked like a baboon with both arms curled up as she grated at the prophetic pits.
She'd always known she was allergic to meteorites
but usually they were so few and so far away, landing in strange places like Russia.
Now her knee pits were exploding in hives, world destruction couldn't be far off.
She rolled out of doors a mess of irritation, arms flailing about her
and she grimaced at the sky.
It was a brilliant, beautiful blue
then fiery, ablaze with light
then



Based on actual events. 

The rough draft in my journal is funnier because I was trying to find alternative appellations for armpits. How does "irritated underarm seats" sound to you?

things that make me laugh

“the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him.”
-Daniel Mendelsohn–as quoted in "When you're strange: Should we consider Jim Morrison, rock's Bozo Dionysus, a real poet?" by Daniel Nester, an essay on poetryfoundation.org.


update: WAIT A SECOND, wouldn't David Bowie be the Dionysus of rock? After discussion with my sister we have decided: Mick Jagger is Dionysus and Bowie is Hermaphrodite. I mean Aphrodite. But that's not quite right either. Who's the Greek god of enjoying a good dramatic lip-sync? Would't Queen be Aphrodite? He's really looking for somebody to love, and check him in that white jumper!

What's really awkward is when you're peering through the windshield of a car in the shade and you start to realize there's a person in there looking back at you. This isn't a napping person–which you will find fairly regularly as a parking person at this college campus–this is an alert person staring back at you. "Ha, ha...Oh, hi" you'll say–as if they can hear you–you'll give a small wave of your hand and move on. 

at the end

I have a lovely friend who travels the world to further the cause of poetry, here's a bitty she sent to me. 

Watch the full episode. See more Poetry Everywhere.

I am my mother's daughter: part "last night I learned about..."

Sometimes my day starts at 1:00 am, just because I wake up and decide to make bread. And the next thing I know it's 7:00 a.m. and I can do yoga with my roommate and run people to school (in my mom van) and run errands (in my mom van) and then settle in for work (not in my mom van).

This happens periodically–the odd hours of wakefulness–and like my mother before me I spend these hours delighting in the time I have alone in the quiet to get things done: cook, clean, paint, watch a movie, read, grocery shop, watch the sun rise, make sure every sleepy child has breakfast before they leave the house.

Sometimes in my growing-up years when I lived under my parents roof, my mother would tell me about all of the things she learned in the night from documentaries she'd watched. "Trubuchets! They're like catapults but instead of swinging like this (here you imagine my mother diagramming with her arms), they swing like this." She now has a model trebuchet with which to shoot mini marshmallows and other tiny things.


Yes, I treasure these times.

Today I got a poem in the mail from lovely old-lady-in-training-M.M. She's my Poem Friend who's traveling the nation staying with nuns and general orthopedic-shoe-wearers, spreading the information of poetry. Sometimes she finds a select piece to share with me. This one took out my breath. Ask person to person-like and I'll tell you more about it–but eh, you know, sometimes you don't share poems. Or in some mediums you don't share poems. They're meant to be scattered in piles on wood floors and sorted through while everyone sits searching through them, reading them silently or out loud, sharing thoughts or looks or life stories. Oh Heaven, I'm planning you out already. I hope you can pardon that, Heaven.

There are so many letters I'd like to write to you. Oh gee.

I would wear my sweaters and curl up to watch Jaws

These mornings my heart falls over inside, as it has done almost everyday since I've returned home from Paraguay because Paraguay and a million other things that have happened this summer have pulled my heart out into the open. Where it is immediately affected by what is going on in the world. And it falls over from joy, pain, laughter, love, and surprise all the time.

But these mornings it falls over because the air is cool and I wear my sweaters and break out my oversized sweater slippers and curl up in the hammock and read like I would when I was sixteen, summer mornings lying on the couch at home with the wind blowing those long drapes.

Sunday night we had a discussion on the front porch of Hot Chocolate House. Apparently some philosopherorother proposed that women do not think in words, they (words) are a construct of men and that women have just subscribed to communicate verbally in the language of men. Because we (women) do that kind of thing, I guess (here I make a weird, inexplicable face). That's probably a simplification of what he was saying, and whatever it is, it's a simplification of something. There is something that is more than words and that's what I think in. 
But words, they go straight to my heart (that falls over all the time now).

I used to worry about having my heart in the open because I have a tendency to expend myself so much in loving everything that maybe I could get worn out and use up all my love and things wouldn't be special anymore. I stopped worrying about that a year or two ago, I've never run out of anything. But. But some words stay safe. I made the decision a long time ago that there are a few things that I will keep treasured and hidden and special for just that final one relationship that my secret romantic self hopes is in my future. I promised myself that I would never share my favorite love poems with any male outside of that...ugh...marriage. That may sound trite, if I weren't me and I were reading this I would roll my eyes and gag, but you read Neruda or Borges and tell me if you find trite dribble. You don't. That is all. I have told you what is in my secret, sacred corner of my heart that is now mostly completely open for the world.

i wonder how long rogue framed poetry lasts on center street

well. it was guerilla poetry night. we poetry-warred all over this town.

before the battle commenced someone showed me a long poem by a wordsy guy who said, "why use one word when you can use six?" so i read and felt that i would only find the coherency through a thorough study but that, for now, i enjoyed sections of words put together. particularly the use of one word, "scumble."

which brought me back to my topic of thought from yesterday:


why from hence came this book called revelation?
am i looking for angels shaking out the earth like a bed sheet from the four corners?
if i met a man on the street with six wings i'm sure i'd fall over dead.

i read and thought and imagined and wondered
i hypothesized and cross referenced but mainly
slowly and not too deeply, just wondered.


then came chapter five verse eight:
"golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints"
and then i knew that was all i needed to read that day.






Read Revelations 5 here.