That being said, this post is all about self-promotion. First, behold the latest issue of Gulf Coast, which features two of my poems. More importantly (for you), the issue also features a ton of wonderful writing by other writers. It is a hefty beast of literary wonderment.
Altarwise by Owl-Light
Deeply Deep.
Where's that title from?
I.
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
-- Dylan Thomas
19 July 2010
Me!
That being said, this post is all about self-promotion. First, behold the latest issue of Gulf Coast, which features two of my poems. More importantly (for you), the issue also features a ton of wonderful writing by other writers. It is a hefty beast of literary wonderment.
14 July 2010
Not a proper blog post, but . . .
As a poet,
J. R. R. Tolkien
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
As a fiction writer,
James Joyce
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
As an essayist,
H. P. Lovecraft
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Ha!
03 March 2010
You Light up My Like
"Light" is to be expected, but I was also a little surprised by the prominence of "like." (I did a Tagcloud once for the same ms., but I can't remember the results.) I'm glad to see that "flesh" is fairly prominent, and that it is about the same size as "know."
Yes, this is my soul.
04 February 2010
Some stuff to keep the blog god appeased
Still, there are a few things I've come across recently that I would like to share with you. The first is a link to a new Robert Bly ghazal from the latest issue of Poetry. I like this one a lot.
The second thing is another link, this time to the YouTube page for a musical duo named Pomplamoose. I enjoy them quite a bit. (My last musical discovery was The Swell Season. I wonder why I favor these duos. Hmmm . . . .) They make cool little videos for their songs. "If You Think You Need Some Lovin'" and "Always in the Season" are my favorites. I suggest watching/listening to them right now.
And the final thing (last and, in this case, definitely least) is a parody poem I found recently on my hard drive, in a file full of stuff I'd transferred from my old computer. It's not attributed, but I think I actually wrote this myself, even though I have no memory of writing it. It looks like the sort of shit I'd come up with. (If you recognize this from somewhere else, though, let me know!) Enjoy.
JORIE GRAHAM GUEST STARS ON SESAME STREET
C is for Cookie,
and [but] [there is more] [to say]
that's good [true][what is good?]
enough
for me. [hand on cookie] [absence]
[of cookie]
Cookie,
[inevitable]
Cookie,
[terrible][in its inevitability] [yes]
Cookie
starts with ________.
13 October 2009
Sometimes it's good to be alive
16 September 2009
The Red Blog
10 September 2009
These Are My Dramas
So, now and then I get into a Moleskine state of mind. Even though I already have a few blank ones, I feel a need to buy more. I write poem drafts in them, and if I were to keep a journal I would journal in them. This week was very eventful insofar as I bought a couple of ruled ones for the first time. Moleskine or not, all of my writing journals, for both home and out-and-about use, have always been unruled. Maybe you think this is unimportant. However, I must have spent an hour or two the other day trying to decide whether to make this switch.
Maybe it’s because, as a poet, I am very sensitive to white space on the page. Maybe it’s because my Zen training has made me especially sensitive to the use of white space in some varities of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. Whatever the reason, I’ve always felt a strong, visceral preference for unruled paper. It feels spacious, open, vast. And I can draw on it, too.
But now the ruled paper has called to me. It feels more “literary,” in a 19th-century sort of way. For instance, I’ve seen Whitman’s notebooks from the first drafts of what would become Leaves of Grass; his notebooks had ruled paper. And the resistance the lines provide—the anti-spaciousness, if you will—is kind of nice to work against. It just feels more writerly. Plus, I can draw on ruled paper, too, if I really want to.
(Of course, it could also be that the ruled paper just gives me a handy excuse to buy new Moleskines. Can’t use those unruled ones, no, no, no.)
Perhaps some of you may scoff at my disproportionate concern for such things. What can I say? I am a writer. These are my dramas. (Actually, I have other dramas, but this is not that kind of blog.)
On a related note, this book is being released next month, and it just makes me so f-ing happy. (Seriously.) C.G. Jung is probably my central intellectual/cultural influence. His ideas are fundamental for me (however much I may have strayed from them in my actual life. Damn you, grad school!). Finally, someone is publishing a facsimile of his famous Red Book. Many of Jung's central ideas derive from a period known as his “creative illness,” which sounds euphemistic but really isn't. He had a sort of mid-life near-schizophrenic crack-up, but he climbed out of it and forged this psychic raw material into ideas. He kept a journal (not a Moleskine, alas) of his “active imagination” dialogues with symbolic figures in his own psyche. He then reworked these journal entries into this beautiful Red Book, combining the dialogues and ideas with fascinating and often beautiful little paintings of his own. It is a modern holy book of the soul.
This book has always fascinated me. I consider it representative of what I’d like my body of poetic writing to be.
It's actually on exhibit in New York this fall. I’m sorely tempted to go, even though I can't really afford the trip. I mean, it’s the Red Book! For me, this is like seeing the True Cross, if there were a True Cross. At any rate, I’m damned well buying the facsimile, even if it is very pricey. His insights are like talismans than I can use to ward off the evil spirits of banality and nihilism that devour our culture so rapaciously. It is my hope that reading this book, and just looking at it, will propel me back into the Jungian waters that used to nourish me so well, and which gave birth to my sense of poetry vocation in the first place.
As far as that vocation is concerned, I guess I’ve once again accepted that it is just my fate, no matter how horrified I am by many of the trends in contemporary poetry. Maybe my work has a place here, or maybe not. (I did get a nice acceptance e-mail recently from a very fine journal, the subject line of which read “Your wonderful poems.” Maybe the ice is beginning to crack.)
One of my current projects is an essay/presentation called “That I was blessed and could bless”: Toward a Poetics of Joy. Let’s just say that I am very concerned about what poetry has become, especially since I’ve resigned myself to the job. It seems so narrow now. I was talking recently to a non-lit, non-creative-writing professor at a local university, and when I mentioned that I was a poet, she said, “I like Billy Collins. He gives me a chuckle.” Of course my first impulse was outrage at her (inwardly, anyway; outwardly, I just smiled and said, “He is very popular.”) But then I thought, can I really blame her? Why would any sane person who isn’t already fully embroiled in the poetry world submit to the grim, often-petty, hair-shirt “interrogations” of language that constitute a good chunk of contemporary poetry?
At any rate, I didn’t get into poetry to confess anything or to subvert the relationship between signifier and signified. So, currently I’m trying to develop a poetics that makes, or regains, some room in poetry for the sort of experiences I consider worth having as a human being. (This is not to say that I find there to be no room at all for such experiences in contemporary poetry. As with any polemic, I guess I’m focusing very strongly on the side I disagree with.)
I will continue to fuss with these thoughts—possibly in a Moleskine!
(This blog entry is not brought to you by The Moleskine Company, though it might as well be.)
05 June 2009
A Victorian hallucinogen!
My current favorite quote, by Adam Gopnik in his book Angels and Ages, about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:
“It’s a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds’ giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them. What looks like the fixed, unchanging solitude of the beach and ocean suddenly becomes alive to, vulnerable to, and endless chain of change and movement. It’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.”
04 June 2009
Spaced Out
Now and then, someone or some circumstance will call my attention to some artist whose work had not been, prior to that moment, especially important to me. But for some reason I happen to be newly receptive, and suddenly that artist's work seems really essential as a clue to my own doomed, quixotic project.
31 May 2009
I used to know a guy with a big tattoo of Baudelaire's face on his arm
It actually looked more like Don Knotts.
21 May 2009
2009, You Fickle Bitch
Anyway. I've also been thinking a lot about writing mi poemas, if not actually writing much. Or at all. But I feel things are looking up in this area, because this morning I had a brainstorm about how to solve my problem with finding a new form and a new voice. It is the kind of brainstorm that makes me think, "Duh, how retarded was I not to think of this sooner?" I am feeling a strong desire to write prose poems!
I used to be really into prose poems, but I haven't felt at all close to that form for the last few years. Now, suddenly, it seems like exactly the form I need to use. Instead of fussing with lineation--wondering whether I should stick with the traditional flush-left variety, or try Wright's drifty dropped line, or go full-on Graham-eque--I will go in the opposite direction.
I'd already decided that in my new poems, I want to use dream logic, and I also want to invite in many sub-voices, archetypal ones, mystical ones, psychoanalytic ones, lyrical ones, all sorts of different registers and cadences. So now I'm thinking how excellent it would be to let them all pool together in a thick yet spacious linguistic field, a.k.a. a prose poem. Plus, I have to admit that my prose is probably better than my verse. (I almost said "better than my poetry," but as Russell Edson said, the opposite of prose is verse, not poetry.)
At any rate, I'm feeling more excited about writing than I have in a while, so that's a good sign.
In related news, I have a poem in the excellent new issue of RHINO, so buy that. There's a link over on the right. And another of my poems will be presented online at Glass: A Journal of Poetry (also linked over on the right), but not until August. But what they have up now is also worth reading, so check them out.
23 January 2009
Here comes the other hand!
One thing I would like to do in 2009 is blog more regularly and substantially. So this is a step in that direction.
I am confident about 2009. Maybe it’s just because I’m so glad 2008 is over. For whatever reason, I have a good feeling about 2009. Especially creatively. I still haven’t quite managed to reinvent myself as a poet, but I think I’m moving in that direction.
As I wrote in my Facebook status: I feel like, as a poet, I've been like the North in the Civil War (according to Shelby Foote) --- fighting with one hand behind my back. 2009 is when the other hand comes out, baby! I really feel that I have not yet begun to write.
Returning to my Jungian roots is an element of my little scheme. About ten years ago, I had a moment of clarity, while browsing in Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, as to my vocation. I would be a poet, and Robert Bly’s poetry (which I was buying at the time) and the work of C.G. Jung (especially his extraordinary “Red Book”) were to be my keys to the kingdom.
For some reason, I have never quite been able to achieve what I envisioned so many years ago. Maybe it’s because, like everyone else, I keep getting pulled down into the undertow of the manic extraversion that is our culture. Maybe I just wasn’t mature enough to pursue the inner life as seriously as I hoped to. Maybe I’m still not. But I’m feeling that 2009 might finally be the time for me to get my psychic shit together.
I’ve never been one of those poets who has to struggle to find a theme or an overall vision. Perhaps because I started writing poetry a bit later than most poets, I’ve always known what to write about in the larger sense. What I struggle with is the details: what to write about, specifically, in each individual poem, and how to handle that stylistically. As I’ve previously noted, Jorie Graham seems promising to me as a link between my past work and my future work, since she also writes about the interplay between mind and not-mind (I hesitate to say mind and world, because mind is part of the world, as I see it), as I do; she also lets her form bend and flurry in keeping with her thoughts, which I still aspire to do.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. (What the hell; it’s a blog.)
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I am confident my poetry is about to take a leap forward, or at least a hop forward, in 2009. I hope this will lead to more publications. I’ve got two poems coming out in journals this year (in RHINO and Lake Effect), and I really hope to have more. I must admit that, despite my being a Jungian introvert, my relative lack of publications thus far is really frustrating to me. I am not one of those writers who writes for himself; I want to participate in the culture. It’s not that I want to be famous; I just want to be read. (Okay, I wouldn't mind being a little famous. But that's not my primary motivation.)
I’m hoping there will be a big craze for poems about the ontological status of matter. Fingers crossed!
Also, I intend to finally start doing some cartooning again. I started out as a cartoonist, long before I was a poet, and for a couple of years now I’ve been feeling an itch to get back to that. Sometimes this is more important to me than the poetry. Sometimes not. I’m writing a graphic novel, and improving my drawing skills in the meantime. I hope to actually begin production (which means pencilling and inking the actual final for-print pages) by late spring or early summer. Until then, I hope to post scans of an old comic-book that I made and self-published when I was 19. But first I have to find a copy; I can’t remember where I put the damned things.
So, creatively, my life is full. Not so much otherwise, but that’s not unusual. It seems I’m to be one of those people who lives for his work (and for watching DVDs of Doctor Who; I love that show so much). Therefore, I’m pleased that the work seems to be taking off, published or not.
2009 will also likely decide my professional future: PhD/professor? High school English teacher? Bum? (I’m hoping for the first, not entirely horrified by the second, and wouldn’t be surprised by the third.)
In future posts, I’ll try to elucidate my various brainstorms in greater detail, probably related to the things I’m reading. Right now, I’m about to begin a big coffee-table book about Joseph Cornell. How he fits into the great project, I don’t know, but I have a clear feeling that he does. Then Simic’s book on Cornell, then some of Simic’s own work. Then I might delve into Rilke for a while; I’ve been feeling drawn to him again. And Jung/ian stuff on the side. And drawing practice. And watching Burn Notice and Battlestar Galactica and 24 online (damn you, mid-season-starting tv shows!). And the things I do for money. Honey.
17 January 2009
Just a little something to watch
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08312007/watch.html
23 December 2008
Happy 82, Old Man
But this is a time for renewal. Winter solstice and all that. The birth of light from darkness. I'm going to take another shot at it, and to hell with publishing. (Unless editors wise up and decide they love my poems. But I won't go changing to try to please them.)
Anyway. Once again, in honor of his birthday, I present one of my favorite Bly poems. Enjoy.
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,
He cried, ""You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.
And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life
Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.
27 November 2008
You go, A.L.!
"Writing -- the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye -- is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it -- great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions. . . . Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it."
I knew I liked him.
What a strange, intensely literate miracle Lincoln was. I mean, there was actually a period in American history in which the president of the United States was actually one of the country's best writers—even with figures such as Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne writing at (more or less)
the same time!
Probably this will never happen again, but it could be that our current president-elect is the closest thing, in terms of writerly potential, to Lincoln that we have ever had since. But I doubt that the culture will allow him to shine as Lincoln did. Obama knows how to milk any speech for the best effect, but underneath his speaking prowess, the language of his speeches has been very disappointingly bland. Even his famous racism speech given shortly after the Wright debacle doesn't measure up to the least of Lincoln's texts. Or even to the speeches on The West Wing, for that matter. The language is just so denatured and dull, probably because it's thought that the
American people would react with suspicion to a perceived excess of eloquence from their commander-in-chief.
There will never be another Gettysburg Address as long as this kind of oratorical timidity continues. And that is a loss that saddens me.