Sometimes "I" is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. This makes the first person a symbol for something.
The pronoun barely holding the person together.
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen
Reading
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I was wonce in a copse where we lived with no deathTrees stood together. The room never darkened.
- Laynie Browne
This incarnation of Evening Will Come, towards a discourse of conceptual poetry, is great. I'm still working my way through it.
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The next morning, I stepped out of my motel room and into the furnace of Monroeville in August. The Best Western is on Highway 21, which becomes Alabama Avenue. To reach the courthouse, according to the clerk at the motel, all we had to do was follow the road about five miles. It ended right at the town square. We passed an unremarkable stretch of auto parts places and assorted businesses. Next we came upon the Monroe County Hospital, up a short, steep hill to our left, then a strip mall with a Winn-Dixie supermarket, a Rite Aid, and a dollar store. That's about as far as I got into this book excerpt on Huffington Post before I had to get up and leave the room and sit quietly being sad. I've never even been to Monroeville. These roads are familiar, though, strips of commerce laid out across yellow fields. One corner down 82 was always overrun with giant sunflowers, not long before you found the Northport Walmart.
I'm wary of idealizing / idyllizing the South, seeing it as some simple place where people are all good neighbors—that's not how it was for me. I don't want time away to change that. But I had so many pockets of calmness, and long drives, and the heavy pollen on the breeze that wasn't enough to cool me. I had dread when it rained. I had the cows along the bike route and everyone I knew ending up in the same backyard on a Friday night. I had the intense green leaves of any 100-year-old magnolia, my snakes in the water. I had confrontation with a history, all the time, in the big white houses, in the biased rental codes. Bad roads. Wet winters.
It occurred to me I've been too busy here to take time to miss anything, and so the missing occurred to me all of a sudden, in a public place, mostly alone, memory jogged by someone else's words.
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To stay the magistrate lean into this world or the next. I need the flesh of my body
for favors, my fill
to die, to slowly die, your body the hole,
hair dingy as if white trash
meth, she's on limbs, cramps, potatos. I
let myself cry hard jogging the Barrio.
- Shelly Taylor
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This came in the mail yesterday:
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I'm halfway through, taking down page numbers as I go, notes for a review. It's funny to think about how we both write from a Jewish perspective--not necessarily out of choice--and how differently the poems come out. The sense of shared inheritance versus individual expression, which I mean in the sense of genetics, biology, bodies as organisms that live in a living world.
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Last night I dreamed I was filming a movie with Gaby Hoffmann and I told her how many times I’ve watched This Is My Life. She laughed. /
Father sleeps like a black cow in the middle of the highway at night. Night is a calendar without knowledge of boxes. - Samantha Schaefer
From Issue 20 of TYPO, this poem is the kind of poem that makes me want to go write. It seems like it comes from a larger manuscript, maybe? Unless I'm just wishing that into evidence. I want to read more.
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Listen: the snowfall makes a wounded sound.
Flicker of teeth, flicker of teeth.
- Claire Hero
I'm spending my morning rereading—three books are on their way to me for review, so I'm waiting for some new poetry to read and until then, reacquainting myself with my own bookshelf.
Today: Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, Claire Hero's Sing, Mongrel, Cynthia Arrieu-King's Manifest, and Joanna Solfrian's Visible Heavens, which I've had for years and just realized I never read.
that each one hangs in the sky on its own steady hook /
I've been waking up at 6am every morning, either to go for a run and or to write. Somehow I never seem to actually sit down to write until about 40 minutes have passed. I've had this problem my whole life—time moves wrongly in the early morning, episodic, feeding the cat and making tea inexplicably separated by ten minutes while I just stood very still. I'm still glad to set aside the time, but I'm not sure if I can sustain this schedule. Mornings are time-weird, lunch breaks I'm even more zombie-like, afternoons are spent sighing and prone, and my eyes start closing around 9:30pm.
In other news, I just loved this poem by Sasha Fletcher. I will be looking for this book.