20 years

I keep promising myself that I won't wait until past 10pm to write each day's blog post, but then it happens almost every day, because the days have been full lately. I spent a lot of time this weekend reading and writing/editing, thinking about blind spots in my manuscript and how to fill them in or remove them (spoiler: still working on it). I can't believe I defended that thesis just about two years ago. At the time, I thought it was done, and I do still feel good about it as a whole, but two years is a pretty good amount of perspective. I'm making small tweaks in some places, and larger cuts/replacements in a few others. Some of the poems that still resonate with me the most are the most political, the least cautious, and I feel like I need to follow that impulse further.

One of my MFA professors says often that he will know he's succeeded as a teacher if his students are still writing 20 years later, so—I'm working on it. Ten days into the month. Two years into the 20. I'm reading tomorrow night for Painted Bride Quarterly and I can't wait.

A poem to read in bed

My contributor copy of  Parcel jst came in the mail, and I'm pretty excited to read it. The magazine is run by two Bama CFAs, which is cool, but it's also a carefully curated journal and I'm into that. "Golem" is one of the pieces of Doors of New Jersey that speaks most to questions of distance and proxy and fault.

still / here

I have spent some time this morning updating broken links and I realized that I never posted about some of my recent work, out there in the world, living quietly on the Internet. So, for you:

"Nomadic" in TYPO

One theory is about riding a bike
but we cannot apply this to language
Believing in script as a replacement for the body

"Sight by Sound by Shade" in Sink Review

Grafted onto another body     you     looking at you

And I in the future of the imagination look too

[not pictured]

Coldfront Song of the Week: “Cello Concerto in E Minor Op. 85 – Adagio – Moderato” by Edward Elgar

At the center of the stage the body is shaking.

B tells me that blogging is "over," but I am only just now hearing about the phrase "on fleek," so I think I'll stay behind the times for a bit longer. Here's to saying things out loud.

in Iliam

I've been sending and receiving work to/from a friend, and last week I sent her everything that was left from what I had written since moving here. The end of August and the beginning of September were a tired time for me, and I wanted to give my friend everything so that I would have nothing to send. Yesterday I only managed a showing of a revised and expanded poem, but this morning I woke up and wrote for real, for real for real, and it has been really nice. My writing journal alerts me to the fact that I haven't written anything in it in a month. Self, I forgive you. If you want to read something else I wrote, here's a piece for Coldfront's Song of the Week series.

And here's a poem I wish I'd made more of a fuss about when it went live in the Nashville Review. It was one of the first things I wrote last fall while the conscious feeling of my book was sprouting, and it sat for a long time in a very different form, and I came back to it at the end and reworked it and reworked it. It was very frustrating. And then one day I came back to it again and sort of let it lead me where it wanted to go all along.

the fire that consumes all before it

B and I finally made it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday, along with everyone else in town who wanted to go for free for First Sunday. It was crowded and somehow it felt like a hero's journey to get there and back, but I'm glad we did. Some pieces, like the giant Chagall ballet backdrop, I remembered. Some pathways through the contemporary collection, some sculptures I had passed when I was shorter, following somebody else around. I loved a painting by Roberto Matta, The Bachelors Twenty Years Later, and then we walked over to Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, and then the last, Étant donnés, laid bare behind a wooden door. All these questions about experiencing a museum space, moving from art to art, I the viewer / the digester / the reader / the meaning-maker, and the artist points to me / the artist / in my looking and looks back through the glass / the door / the slash mark.

Then we found a room I didn't remember, Fifty Days At Iliam, a Homeric narrative stretched on canvas in long crayon lines. Was it at the museum when I was young? I don't remember. I stared at The Fire That Consumes All Before It for a long time. That depth of red. It made me think of my Bubbe, and I no longer care if it makes me a cheesy person to continue writing and thinking and talking about my dead grandmother. She was the person I followed through the museum space. I was very sad in that room, and that's the truth. Did she love that painting? I don't know.

I can tell the story about how she set me going as a writer, how she made me love art, and those are true stories. But I realized yesterday that part of my sadness is that she died before I ever got to have real conversations with her about art. That's the door I keep peering through.

I had two poems in the Nashville Review that went live yesterday, "Missives" and "A Remnant," and they are both from Doors of New Jersey. That's the whole book, doors / I keep peering through / pressed / as though they could open.