the mystery of the world is the world

After a discussion about totemic writing words, I realized that I have a little bit of shame about writing so often about bodies. Bodies are totally on-trend in poetry, and it makes me feel like a follower. But I don't want to deny what I find so interesting about bodies—not necessarily their possibilities for the grotesque, but their existence in time and space. How permanent and how never-there. How personality and thought and memory can be temporally and spatially located. There's a lot of "three years ago today" going around on my social media today, because it is once again the anniversary of the tornado. Three years ago today I knew the space around me and felt it when it wasn't there and then no longer, replaced by a new one. Though I can still feel what isn't there. Three years ago today I learned that if everybody else could hold a chainsaw, if they could be the hale bodies of the town, I could be the voice on the phone and in the spreadsheets. Around that time I began to need daily allergy medication, because the body is surprisingly porous. The wind went in and the wind went out.

have i mentioned how deeply i love the writing of my friends?

when you read a thing and it is a thing you think you

could read forever / spinning

around its drain

at the pressure's edge

I'd quote here, but the work itself is unpublished. Not for long, I think. Instead I wrote you a poem.

Since I've been busy lately, here's a little publications catch-up:  

Review of Rob Schlegel's January Machine for BWR (live today! it lives!)

Poem "Sand Map" in the latest Ghost Proposal

Poems "Possibilities of Fingers" and "The Offering Itself" in the latest MiPoesias

Now to roll ahead into figuring out the rest of my foreseeable future. No big deal. I dreamed last night about a crashing plane, but surely that meant nothing. I dreamed the night before about meeting James Franco, which was awful, and probably an equivalent experience to actually meeting James Franco, so I hope that also doesn't come to pass.

Passover is my favorite holiday, so I was home this weekend, eating all the things I can't find in Alabama and sleeping in my old bedroom. We went to an old folks' Seder at my grandma's assisted living center, where my 95-year-old grandmother read the Four Questions by heart (because she couldn't read the 14-point font), and if was funny and sweet and sad. There are so many years behind the wall of complaints and sticky stories and refusals to speak about certain subjects. The night before, we had sat around laughing with close to twenty family members, wearing plague masks and stumbling to remember where we were in the Haggadah. I think in both cases it was the ceremony that propelled us, a performance of memory and identity, each of us the youngest kid at the table asking in a high voice the questions we already knew the answers to.

convinced / contained / concluded

I am officially a Master of Fine Arts.

I defended my thesis yesterday, and in a strange twist of fate I wished that the defense was longer. I'm very conscious of the fact that I'll be leaving Alabama soon, and that carefully considered conversations about my poetry will not be happening on a regular basis. But now that I'm a Master, I can just command people on the street to talk poetry to me, right? Right. It was so nice to hear all the nice things the committee had to say, about flatness and intimacy and the constructed body and pronouns! and all the other parts of my thesis that I fretted over. My advisor even admitted that although we had disagreed over my pronoun usage, I convinced him in the end that it was right for the project. I feel like the book came out the way I wanted it to, which is maybe the highest compliment I can stand to give myself. I'm proud of it.

My MFA friends will all be defending their work soon, so I plan on observing their defenses. I'd like to hold on to this community as long as I can, and also, their work is so great—imagine a mashup of Ovid and Peter Pan and black bears and poured-concrete mountains and Monumental Women and spaghetti westerns and Beanie Babies and the baddest of bad sisters and hulking ships and delicately shaving someone else's legs. I feel lucky to have been around such crazy good writers for so long.

And

does everyone eventually crave the landscape of home?not the municipalities but the land upon which those municipalities grew? The particular kind of tree?

In preparing to turn in my thesis on Thursday, I'm going back through some old notes and I found this: an imprint of shared experience from where? rapidly expanding universe

Laying the foundation is the most difficult step. Measuring and leveling, again and again. Everything needs to be so certain. My body is not a male body except in the sense that it is male. The box I sometimes check. I look awful with long hair and all the best dresses dip in the wrong tight way. It's no different than everything else you know about me, still and glittering in the air. And even were I strong and clear, someone like a sky to fly in, I still know you saw me first down a path, thought a thin boy was shuffling toward you. I place cement blocks and above them I will place the floor, the walls, a place to stay. - T Fleischmann

One of my favorite things about this book was its bookiness, the way it built itself out of itself. Everything moved steadily, looking back over the shoulder with a certain rhythm. So much loveliness. The self building the self from the self of the house to the sense of the body as a room as an art form as a gallery display. On and on. B and I had a small conversation this evening wherein we both listed off the books that we're intending to read, both lists ending in on and on because it just keeps coming, the emergence of books that make me want to read them again. When I was a kid, that was my habit—I'd get to the end of the book and I'd turn right around and read it again. In my car, I've been listening to the same CDs for over a year. I like to know all the words. It becomes a certain rhythm, certain, I mean to say, in the sense of knowing oneself. In building oneself out of the gallery all around, taking it in and exhaling it. How dare you sit on my body. I'm art. Look at me! I'm god damn art. - says the body.

To console myself about not attending AWP, I took advantage of this awesome deal at Action Books, so now I have these beauties winging their way to me through Priority Mail: Wet Land, Lucas de Lima Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, Kim Hyesoon Rain of the Future, Valerie Mejer Only Jesus Could Icefish in the Summer, Abraham Smith

I intend to write at least one review out of this bunch, and I realize I could have requested review copies for free, but I like supporting presses that publish great writing. Abe Smith also happens to be an XFA from Alabama, and I always try to buy any Bama warblings that come on the market. But I'm excited most entirely because of the writing in these four books. I can't wait. I'm going to light a candle and put my feet up and drink tea and read all the way through AWP weekend.

My eyes are a little crossed from working on a review—my first assigned review, which is both exciting [because I read something I wouldn't have otherwise, before it was actually released] and less exciting [because I have particular writer-crushes that I want to shout to the world, and I have to wait on those]. So naturally, because I can't think straight enough to write without extensive use of em-dashes and bracketed asides, I turned to my blog to write even more. Just to tell you how crossed my eyes are. [They're very crossed.]  [   What   ]   is going on is how I feel—after this kind of work and I [LOVE] it.