Monday, May 3, 2010

softblow

Lily Ladewig and I have 4 collaborative poems from our "Natural Wonder" series up this month at Softblow. Also up this month are poems by Fiona Wright, Ian C. Smith, and Justin Runge.

In other news, tomorrow is the last day of class.



I will bring my students donuts and we will play Heads Up Seven Up. Then, it's officially time to start worrying about still not having a summer job. Oh dear.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Jellyfish 2.0



Friends, friends!

The newest issue of Jellyfish Magazine is out, and it's a stunner (thanks to editor/designer extraordinaire, Gale Thompson). Lily Ladewig and I have two collaborative poems from our "Natural Wonder" series in there, along with poems by Caroline Cabrera, Luke Bloomfield, Seth Landman, Zachary Schomburg, Zach Savich, Hilary Plum, Miranda Dennis, Chad Abushanab, Philip Muller, Jade Ramsey, Jessica Dylan Miele, Kristen A. Evans, Samantha Nataro, P. Edward Cunningham, Andy Stallings, Kyle Crawford and Francesca Chabrier.

Friday, April 2, 2010

henry's heart, my heart, etc.



- John Berryman, Dream Song 29


Spring makes it much easier to get back into the life-loving business. Today is a nice start: sun, shorts, cleaning, watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-air at the gym, writing a poem about product testing. In an hour, driving to Philadelphia for the weekend. Goodbye winter crankiness. Heart lifted! Let's celebrate.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

going to [south] carolina in my mind



... and in a car tomorrow morning. Oh, Spring Break. There will be Sun! Warmth! Chik-fil-A! Then, Florida. Publix! The Atlantic! More Sun! Sandals! I'm confident that I will return a whole, happy person. These sunglasses do all the smiling.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

abstraction, imagination, tight pants


From Frank O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto":
But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is "yearning."



From "The Man with the Blue Guitar" by Wallace Stevens:
I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.



From Spring and All by Williams Carlos Williams:
To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.

In fact to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for "the beautiful illusion." Very well. I am not in search of "the beautiful illusion."

And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed--To the imagination--you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force--the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.

In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say "I" I mean also "you." And so, together, as one, we shall begin.