Oh boy, once you (I) post something here, I have to post some more, right away. The push it down the page syndrome.
What feels a little queasy is self-interrogating even now – like a self-cleaning oven – I came home after picking up copies of a er my new book Picture Palace from SPD and wanted to blog, blog until I puked. But I also came home after months of considering the dead object and wanted to blog, blog until I puked, and never did. For all that time. I come home every day and – consider the dead object. Maybe I’ll puke it up, fall asleep and be done. “Design’s not dialogue” said the poem, about relation with dead objects. I keep thinking, who do I want to tell this book about or tell about this book? Apparently tonight the internet, and in a hopeful moment I think that may have something to do with this book’s sometime or a lot of the time trying to address these conditions. The a-href I’m writing in right now.
Or maybe just – hello.
Interesting and lovely conversation with Laura Moriarty and Joshua Clover at SPD, lovely in its being so immediately struck up, fallen into, in the middle of such heat (ridiculously and ‘unseasonably’ hot in berkeley today but I was still sweating way more than usual, sweating more than the weather even, I probably stunk! I stink right now!) and me sweating and zoning out in excitement/anxiety, we sat in front of the fan momentarily and talked about poets who live or live a version of their writing, of writing, especially those who do so without a safety net (money) – who risk falling through the net – and what would that look like in one’s own case – and –
Sorry because this is/will be a total over-simplification, but part of what came up in this conversation were kids, real-life kids, parenting, but also various comparisons of writing and parenting – poetry as progeny? The metaphor wasn’t exact but it came close, or it is multiplicitous, if that is a word – maybe it was more like, the life one lives, as one’s progeny? Of course it’s an old and totally useful comparison (Fanny Howe’s Pinnochian Ideal!) (Tag to add: “I have a problem with exclamation points”) and I am pushing or turning it here to talk about how I was thinking about the feeling of having a kid, which I haven’t had, but watching friends, poets around me go through the process of having kids, and the helpless interesting and special attachment to kids born at the same time as one’s own kids, and so one of the best parts about today was of course seeing KEVIN KILLIAN’S BOOK! Action Kylie, and John Sakkis giving me a copy of his fantastic new Cy Gist chapbook Gary Gygax (replete with stickers – two of them – both both) and also a copy of Chris Vitiello’s Irresponsibility – apparently 7 copies of Chris’s book arrived from the printer with their insides printed upside down (rendering the back cover the front cover if one orients the book to the direction of its insides, and in this case it’s a doozy, a girl in gold slippers holding a pastry in front of a glass case of pastries…) and I received one of these 7 misprinted copies, these homeopathic fuck-ups which in their own way I am sure must have guaranteed the clean and safe printing of the rest of the print run, what a gift, and then reading Brent’s really great blurb for Chris’s book and then reading some of Chris’s book and being very excited to read more, here is poem 11 from the section titled “Blowing Rock, NC”, and I will quote this only if I can simultaneously make clear how incomplete this section is without reading the poems and pages that precede and follow it, its nest:
The legal system is set
up to determine conviction or acquittal
The forest is visited by me
I have lost a sense of where to break lines
and will try my way back into it
Practice on a sentence from the paper:
Tank fire destroyed the
mosque’s 50-foot-tall minaret,
from which the insurgents were
attacking
Iris played with toy guns for the first time today
**
Also thinking about Maggie Zurawski’s THE BRUISE coming out so recently and can’t waiting to get a copy – that great thing Maggie blogged about, the sheer unbelievability of her book being in the world, and how glad I am, that THE BRUISE is – also how generous and very Maggie that blog post is, how much I have been having some grateful internal laughter over the book as a bruised cousin. The fantastic spiralling outwards sentences of that blog post. You want to read a book written by this person right? Hi Maggie we miss and love you and congratulations!
August 27, 2008 * 8:29 am
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