Virgin Formica

2014-11-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

Happy Chris-kwaanz-hana-rama-stice!!!!

2010-12-22T07:02:00.000-08:00

I Made the Park Slope Top 100!!!

2010-12-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn

In Memory of Toni

2010-11-17T12:05:00.000-08:00

October 30, 1962 - November 17, 2009

Her true mother

Michael Gizzi 1949-2010

2010-09-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Such sad news just now: poet and editor Michael Gizzi has passed away.

Not sure of the circumstances.

Michael was the editor of my first poetry collection, Half Angel, Half Lunch. He was my first editor, and were it not for him I don't know if I would've had a first book -- I'd been sending that thing out for eleven years, and even Hanging Loose, the press that pub'd three of my subsequent books, rejected it! I'll never forget the phone message he left when he told me Hard Press would take it on. And it was my privilege to introduce him when he read at KGB last summer. It was my privilege to know him.

Goddess bless you, Michael, and thank you once again.

'It Gives You That Lift': Class, Rock and Roll, and Breasts

2010-08-30T14:33:00.001-07:00

... because Linda Schumacher asked... I gave this paper at EMP in 2004...

Thirty years ago, when I was fourteen, I saw a photo of Patti Smith in 16 magazine. (Yes, 16 magazine; Danny Fields, the Ramones’ manager, was editing it then, after the bold tenure of Gloria Stavers.) I dug how Smith looked: weird scraggly hair, untweezed eyebrows, a haunted, intense affect. I’d never seen anyone who looked like that in 16 magazine before (except for maybe that guy who played the vampire on “Dark Shadows”). The small article that ran next to the photo claimed: “She’s a poet, a playwright and soon to be rock and roll star!” The poet/rock and roll star thing got me. I’d been reading everything I could find by Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath at the library, and believing that the lyrics of Bread’s David Gates were something to aspire to. The article continued: “Patti first was a poetess and would ‘perform’ her poems any place that would have her . . . Now she’s much in demand and has just been signed to an Arista record contract. Her favorite clothes are funky old jeans and t-shirts.” I cut out the photo of Smith, taped it to my mirror, and tried to find some funky old jeans and t-shirts in the Juniors’ department of Goldblatt’s the next day during lunch hour. (No luck.)

A couple of months later, coinciding with my discovery of the Salvation Army-as-punk-fashion-outlet, I saw another photo of Smith, this time with her band, in Lisa and Richard Robinson’s Rock Scene magazine. The group photo revealed more of Smith’s physique: in a well-worn t-shirt (which read “New Brunswick Zebras”) she appeared skinny, unpretty and flat-chested — like me. I learned nothing more about her from the caption (like, that she wasn’t flat-chested), but finding a skinny, unpretty girl rock star was a big deal. In 1975 the pantheon of female rock performers was interesting but limited for a girl looking for a skinny, unpretty role model who could rock (if one were a boy, on the other hand, one had more luck: think Pete Townshend). The ballsy-but-tragic image of Janis Joplin still reverberated, and there was Suzi Quatro, who played guitar in leather outfits and the widely popular shag haircut. But Suzi was sexy. She couldn’t speak to issues of not belonging. And Tina Turner (who, in ‘75, the year of her separation from Ike, appeared as the Acid Queen in The Who’s “Tommy”) seemed powerful beyond any hope of emulation. (In later years, of course, her story would reflect the realities of many women’s lives.) Also in the mix was the all-girl band Fanny, but after their ‘71 hit “Charity Ball” they never got much airplay. But theirs was not a cult of personality, but rather sexuality, and sexuality (or, rather, the escape from it) was the issue. Who spoke to the desire to escape the (perceived) confines of the feminine body? Heart? They looked like Edwardian lampshades. Stevie Nicks? What was an Easter basket like that doing in a band with a serious blues singer like Christine McVie anyway? And McVie? Like Glasgow’s Maggie Bell she’d had an incredible blues style; what was she doing singing that MOR crap? Janis Ian? “At Seventeen” did not rock. Kim Fowley’s Runaways were still a year away, but they would come off like high school bitch goddess fantasy camp (although Joan Jett later transcended all that). In fact, until Chrissie Hynde — perhaps the apotheosis of all I’m talking about here — most ‘70’s-era female rock stars seemed like they’d been formed from the collective desires of record-buying boy-men. It wasn’t their fault, of course, and Linda Ronstadt didn’t help. But what if one were the female equivalent of Pete Townshend? Who was one’s totem animal? Where were the women who filled that niche?

It was a relatively new niche anyway, created by rock and roll in combination with the women’s movement, in response to a new category of girl. In my working class, Polish-Catholic high school, the girls fell into one of four broad (no pun intended) categories: sluts, prisses, normals or freaks. There was some crossover; a slut could approach freakdom, for example, if she smoked pot with the guys in the alley behind the convent during lunch and knew the names of everyone in Bad Company. But unless a slut had visionary feminist qualities, she avoided the burdens of rugged individuality at all costs. The freak category, of course, had the most variety (a variety that was augmented by rock and roll). On one end were the girls who always seemed to have a problem with menstruating on the backs of their skirts, and on the other was the new breed of freak: the girls who not only knew the names of everyone in Bad Company, but wanted to be in Bad Company. That would’ve been me. However, had you looked through my record collection, you would’ve been able to count the albums by women or “all-girl bands” on one hand. It was easier for me to relate to Pete Townshend than to, say, femme-y, tit-y Carly Simon. Janis Joplin approached my idea of a female role model (especially after I’d read that her Port Arthur high school classmates had scrawled “PIG” on her locker), but she was dead. I needed someone alive.

Smith filled the gap in the pantheon — the geeky urban tomboy who write and rock. In a 1976 interview with Lisa Robinson in Hit Parader, Smith said the following:

"I didn't want to be a girl because they wore those Elvis charm bracelets and I couldn't get into that. With a lower class upbringing it was real desirable to have big tits and a big ass, and I wanted boys to like me, but they didn't. They liked me as a pal."

“I didn’t want to be a girl.” What kind of feminist rhetoric was that? It was shameful to feel ambivalent about one’s body in the midst of the flowering of the women's movement. Of course, that statement spoke to a huge untapped set of anxieties (covering both straight and nascent lesbian territory), something that Julia Kristeva would later address in her discussions of revolt and creativity in the adolescent “split feminine subject.” But those anxieties had yet to be codified by power chords and/or French feminist semioticians, and all I knew was that even though I had been made fun of by both boys and girls for my lack of décolletage, I really didn't want to have breasts. Breasts meant you were like those benign-looking Virgin Mary women modeling bras in the Sears catalogue. But at the same time I wished I had big breasts, for revenge purposes. It was a very schizy time, and there was no one around with whom I could discuss this conflict — my mother? no way! —although I did mention to my dad once that I didn't ever want to wear a bra.

"Why not?" he said. "I heard it gives you that 'lift'".

In the poem, “Female” (from her 1972 collection Seventh Heaven), Smith had written:

Every feminine gesture I affected from my mother humiliated me . . .
Growing breasts was a nightmare . . .
Bloated. pregnant. I crawl thru the sand. like a lame dog . . .
Roll and drag and claw like a bitch. like a bitch. like a bitch.

This was a novel, polyvalent blend of authenticity and artifice. Smith was deploying a new kind of feminine identity, rooted in the acceptance of difference, of profound (and not altogether understood) other-ness. On her much-touted 1976 album, Horses, Smith defined and redefined that identity — those identities — with ease: as the pursuer (male or female) in her revisionist “Gloria”; as a female paramour mourning her drowned female lover in “Redondo Beach”; as the genderless observer of a boy-on-boy rape in “Land.” Dissatisfaction with existing, limiting gender parameters was not the end of the line, but rather the beginning of a desire to explore rather than ignore those most problematic aspects of sexuality. Suddenly, gender was a fluid moment: male or female, gay or straight, androgynous or voluptuous were just streams in a sea of possibility. Smith also drew on unsettling, often violent images in her poetry as well: in another poem from Seventh Heaven, “Fantasy, for Allen Lanier” (her boyfriend, a guitarist in the band Blue Oyster Cult), the female narrator is visited in her bedroom by a man with a gun who first points the weapon at her head, then commands her to get on her hands and knees:

I crouch down./ he shoves the barrel up / my cunt. cocks the lever / pulls the trigger.

Yet in “judith” (from the same collection), the scene is quite different:

… she is no angel baby. / no candidate for a glass slipper. / she is not the kind of girl / youd find in an eyebrow pencil ad. / no jelly bitch. / but the girl I’d like to touch. / we shared a bed but I could not touch her. / she turned on her side. / rustling of new sheets. / a very humid memory. / I turn out the light. / after awhile desire is overcome. / retracts. retreats. then sleeps and sleeps / and keeps on sleeping.

The other part of Smith’s statement to Lisa Robinson — “With a lower class upbringing it was real desirable to have big tits and a big ass” — also telegraphed something important but, at the time, amorphous: that opinions about the body could be generated by economic circumstances. And if one could escape those circumstances, new ways of being would present themselves. That odd idea had never occurred to me because at that point I’d never been out of my neighborhood (Back-of-the-Yards, named for its proximity to Chicago’s Union Stockyards), where everyone’s father was a butcher, and everyone’s mother was a floor clerk in a discount store, and most girls had learned to equate being “built” with being “beautiful.” But because she moved in different milieux, Smith had been able to connect those disparate and ridiculous ideas. The class realities of her adolescence — as described, for example, in “Piss Factory,” her first single — had no doubt been thrown into sharp relief once Smith foisted herself upon the New York art world, as they would be for me once I foisted myself upon the Chicago poetry scene of the early ‘80’s. What a shock to discover that those kids living in squalid apartments and eating generic pork and beans out of cans were not actually poor! But, on the other hand, breast size really didn’t matter, so the problem then became how to navigate those waters, but that’s another discussion.

At the time of its release, “Piss Factory” was not a repudiation, or even a validation necessarily, of “real” people’s lives; it was just a retelling of an experience many people could understand:

Sixteen and time to pay off.
I get this job in a piss factory inspectin’ pipe.
Forty hours, thirty-six dollars a week, but it’s a paycheck, jack.
It’s hot in here, hot like Sahara, you could faint from the heat,
but these bitches are just too lame to understand,
too goddamn grateful to get this job to know they’re gettin’
screwed up the ass.

In 1975 it was generally accepted that rock had a working class backbone — Rod Stewart was a newsagent’s son; Roger Daltrey had been a sheet metal worker; Springsteen’s lyrics were distillations of his adolescence in a factory town; Hendrix’s first guitar cost five bucks, second hand — and no one really made a big analytical thing out of it. (On the other hand, the fact that all the members of Queen had graduated from college — with honors! — was always mentioned in articles about them as being something a little out of the ordinary.) But, again, all those examples were men. What about the women? Again, Smith’s experiences answered that need as well. The backbone of her image, unlike the images projected by male rock icons, transcended class and gender issues because she allowed herself fluidity in both arenas. She cannily crafted that image from the dynamic tension of honesty and artifice, horror and deliverance from horror (the epigraph for the poem “Female” was by Andre Breton: “To escape from horror bury yourself in it.”) And because of something else. In another poem from Seventh Heaven, she wrote:

Longing. That desire. That tapeworm. A word I hadn’t learned . . .
Seven years old. A song on the victrola:
"He flies thru the air with the greatest of ease/
The daring young man on the flying trapeze/
His movements are graceful, he flies as he pleases/
How I’d love to be like him someday!"

By exploring (and exploiting) the vagaries of shame — and thus liberating herself from it — Smith finally articulated the female longing for . . . what? For everything.

Proposition 8 Overturned; Thank You, Judge Vaughn Walker

2010-08-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

From the decision:

"Although Proposition 8 fails to possess even a rational basis, the evidence presented at trial shows that gays and lesbians are the type of minority strict scrutiny was designed to protect.

"Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs' objective as 'the right to same-sex marriage' would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy -- namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.

"Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society."

-- Judge Vaughn Walker

Flarf Comes To WE-ARE-FAMILIA!

2010-07-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

WE-ARE-FAMILIA is an extensive global network of creative individuals from all disciplines who have come together to explore the powerful, complex ties which consciously and unconsciously touch all that we experience as humans. Spearheaded by Creative Director Jennifer Garcia, their primary ongoing project is a series of 25 one-of-a-kind Keepsake Boxes showcasing original “mementos” engaging the concept of family.

WE-ARE-FAMILIA, with help from sponsors Art Assets, Atlantic Assets, and GFI Realty, have recently transformed a raw, formerly vacant storefront on Atlantic Avenue into an open studio where they will continue assembling new Keepsake Boxes including a special commission for the Museum of Art and Design. The space additionally functions as a gallery to exhibit new works by Keepsake Box contributors as well as a free event space which aims to extend their family dialogue. The space opened its doors on June 11th, 2010, during Atlantic Avenue ArtWalk and has since had a showing of Jeff Lewis’ meticulous pencil grid drawings as well as electronic performances by Mitchell Akiyama and Nina Mehta of bands First Nation and Rings from Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label.

On Thursday, July 22, WE-ARE-FAMILIA Gallery will host a gathering of flarf poets. Flarf is an international avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th century / early 21st century whose 30+ practitioners explore “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Their method is to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts. Recently profiled on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, the flarf collective create hilarious, shocking, and sometimes downright offensive works. Heated discussions about flarf have been broadcast by the BBC and National Public Radio, and published in The Village Voice, The Nation, Poetry, Poets & Writers, and The Wall Street Journal. “Flarf is a hip, digital reaction to... boring, genteel poetry,” writes poet and critic Marjorie Perloff. Whatever flarf is––whatever you think flarf is––it is most definitely the 21st century‘s first poetry movement. Host and flarfista Sharon Mesmer will introduce some of the collective's New York members: Shanna Compton (Down Spooky), Katie Degentesh (The Anger Scale), Nada Gordon (Folly), Gary Sullivan (PPL In A Depot), Brandon Downing (Dark Brandon), and Drew Gardner (Petroleum Hat).

Thursday, July 22, 2010
6 to 8 PM
We-Are-Familia
539 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, New York
646-709-6702

What Do I Know About "What's American About American Poetry"?

2010-07-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Nothing. I just think I do: Poetry Society of America

"Louisiana Isn't The Only Place That Has Shrimp" -- BP rep Randy Prescott

2010-06-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was so unspeakably pissed off that I sent him an email. I don't fucking care if he never sees it. If you feel like calling his office, the number is (713) 323-4093. Email is Randy.Prescott@bp.com.

Dear Mr. Prescott,

If you think what BP has done is only about the shrimp, then you have a shrimp-sized conscience. Which, apparently, is the case with your balls.

Then again, imagining the profound suffering your corporation has caused might be something you don't want to delve too deeply in. And I don't blame you for not wanting to look at that. It's a hideous abyss. A majority of us wouldn't have the balls.

But how about this: instead of making snarky remarks, why not at least try to begin to make an attempt to assume a modicum of accountability? Who knows -- by doing so you might actually get on track to do some good in this world. And, as an added result, grow some balls.

Flarf in the Wall Street Journal

2010-05-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

Hold on to your butts, people, and say hello to the apocalypse:

"'Kitty Goes Postal / Wants Pizza'"

Unattributed title is from Rodney Koeneke's poem "Pizza Kitty."

Sarah Palin's Alaska = $150 for Severed Wolf Limbs

2010-05-04T09:04:00.002-07:00

Keep her off the Discovery Channel here

For The Bitch Moon

2010-05-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

I will not curse you, bitch Moon.
But neither will I increase
nor decrease for you.
I have already dulled your chill
corolla of mystery,
profound in drowning darkness.
Ah, youth.
For you, bitch Moon,
are only doing what roosters do, and I
am only doing what poets do.
What do poets do, bitch Moon?
Good question.
I say: they let flesh fall
from bones.

For you, bitch Moon, even Pluto's
turgid chariot
and his harridan of spatial affinity
are merely novices of grass,
sitting passive beside
your wry timelessness.
Are there really only three ways
to wear the new tunic?
To split all things known to eternity
into two?
Yes.
Alas.
How well you knew.

And how well I know that these needs descend
the trail of scent which begins with a starling's
indivisible luminous threads
and ends with all things connected
in their liturgy.
For here you are, Moon,
abiding in blood
in basic goodness,
and old photos of game show contestants
contentedly eating pussy.
Yes, you say, there is always pussy.
There is always already pussy:
and with this acceptance, subtle shifts
soon occur,
and I finally stop mistaking
background for foreground,
the alpha pure for
Alpha-Bits,
British physical comedy
for dark energy.
And what remains
after every possible negation
is neglecting.
And sweating.
Always sweating
next to some seemingly limitlessly
glistening chick
with freckles.

And so, weird, muddy,
mauve-y moon,
walk right in.
Sit your timelessness
beside me.
I am ready to embrace
these weaknesses
in my relationship to the Midwest,
these strategies
of sic transit.
Didn't the Magna Carta begin its life
as a calf?
Possibly a lamb?
And isn't it, after all,
the dinosaur
that lends us its
surprising depth?

One Day in Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

2010-04-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 9, 2010: A panel discussion and reading, sponsored by the Danish Writers Union, with Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak, Danish novelist Janne Teller and me (curated by Danish poet and translator Aleksandar Sajin) -- just before the volcano!

Pegasus over the town

Aleksandar Sajin (left), poet, translator and curator of the discussion/reading and Ales Debeljak, Slovenian poet and essayist, in the lobby of the hotel, pretty early the morning of our readings

Ales (and kids) on top of the Round Tower

Cold but wonderful Copenhagen, from the Round Tower

Aleksandar and Ales strolling

Bees. I just like 'em ...

In Frederiks Kirke

Ales oughta be in pitchers (I know, I know, sorry ... )

Pennmark (in the bathroom of the Turkish buffet place where we had lunch)

Sightseeing . . .

Hans Christian Andersen and admirers

The Ugly Duckling

"Into the garden presently came some little children, and threw bread and cake into the water.

“'See,' cried the youngest, 'there is a new one;' and the rest were delighted, and ran to their father and mother, dancing and clapping their hands, and shouting joyously, 'There is another swan come; a new one has arrived.'

"Then they threw more bread and cake into the water, and said, 'The new one is the most beautiful of all; he is so young and pretty.' And the old swans bowed their heads before him.

"Then he felt quite ashamed, and hid his head under his wing; for he did not know what to do, he was so happy, and yet not at all proud. He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. Even the elder-tree bent down its bows into the water before him, and the sun shone warm and bright. Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, 'I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.'"

Hans Christian Andersen, "The Ugly Duckling"

Swanning

Distant solo swanning

At the Danish Writers Union

Ales, Michael Svennevig (who read our work in Danish) and Marianne Larsen, Danish poet

Aleksandar and Janne Teller, Danish novelist

Debeljak, Walmsley and Sternberg -- international poets, editors, translators

At Underwood Ink

Janne reading

Ales reading

Aleksandar and me, before I left

Is This Feeling Really the Sweetness of Pure Being?

2010-04-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

I started off this morning feeling peaceful and empty inside, feeling the eternal sweetness of pure bliss, like the Easter Bunny hopped-up (sorry) on all that sugar. There I was in Evanston, feeling the ineffable pure essence and incomprehensible sweetness of sunrise poo (despite Irish car bombs going off everywhere and too much Fever-Tree Ginger Beer, which made me feel feverish), asking myself: with the Nazis being so totally against cake and everything, might this be the perfect time to plant a really neat French Kiss from an angel on a unicorn? A strange feeling of need and longing awakened within me as a unicorn appeared and said, "I actually quite loathe Evanston — you can't open your mouth without feeling like you're bothering everyone studying."

I felt like I had died the death to which I'd been doomed since the day I rushed the Eagles encore at the Milwaukee Cop-A-Feel Festival — the band's alternate melodic sweetness and propulsive rock was something I usually expected from The Pixies, but the final feeling was completely different: kinda like the long backwash off the back of a horny blonde from Malvern's duck/monkey. What I didn't know was that when unicorns reach the end of their lifespan they are drawn to rotisserie chicken and rescuing crushed beer cans from the streets of New York City. I also didn't know that Courtney Love doesn't exist until dinner. Even though she told me, "I've killed more than a few squirrels in my day, ya know, but even weirder was the meeting between my unicorn and Pink Floyd's renown guitarist, with all its dreamy sweetness intact. So angry was my tweeting about it that I misplaced a hyphen and substituted a homonym."

Courtney denied that she and Ben Affleck ever "made out" anywhere. I would love "to do" Courtney Love, but U.S. Federal law only allows 100 gallons/year of apricots and rainbows to be fermented to make unicorn semen, and Courtney is apparently angry because she didn't like that she may or may not be involved with unicorn semen, and glitter. Where I differ from Courtney is that I love stretch leggings, Buffy the Vampire slayer, driving in the car and getting really angry about stuff ... I just want to crushcrushcrush the super-TED conference on hot dogs and fake teeth! I mean, after three years the stem cell bill finally arrives, and angry couples are forced to buy dragon/buy unicorn, then make dragon/make unicorn, and then they end up with a kid that looks like Kurt and Courtney shared by Lassie? Come on! Just keep picking at your crabs and passing out, people.

Listen, I see myself as every shrieking Chinese corset queen who ever got the shaft from Japanese Santa on Canada Day, but one thing I cannot — & WILL NOT — abide is Courtney Love as an Olson Twin at my math geek birthday party next week, trying to steal (yet again) my (Romanian version) Weird Al "Supreme Chalupa Mega-Pack." Plus, I am 3 weeks late for my Special Happy Kitten and Unicorn Time, so fuck your gummy Scientology. I believe anyone can be gay at any time. White people, am I right?

I Am In The Becoming ...

2010-03-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

... and other poems for Lucille Clifton at Delirious Hem

Being human, I have always
entered a tethered moment
to redeem the dream
at the end of time.
But where is my body now?

It seems my scars still attach,
but in the abstract —
just as my stars beat in eclipse,
whatever their nature
and purpose.

It’s true that I would know
this one you are now seeing in dreams,
being in community,
together being broken.
But now I am the one becoming,
becoming now.

While crossing a great ocean
or ascending a throne
we may see ourselves
as the winged
revealers of reveries,
beseechers with open hands.
Or thus I have heard.
And thus I now know.

And where is my body now?
My body is in the becoming,
becoming now.

I Am All Over The Oblique Ascensions Required for the Process of Achieving Aphesis

2010-03-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

Untroubled by history, religion or research, I am passed out in this here alley, halfway between the smell of stale piss and rat droppings, naked and Pepto/Caucasian-titty-pink in the cold dim dawn, and it’s Wednesday.

Wednesday is considered either the third or fourth day of the week, depending on whether you start your week on Sunday or Monday. That’s why the Dutch call it something I can’t pronounce. Here in the U.S. we call it “hump day.” Which is what French people call every day, when they’re not using the term “le weekend.”

There’s lonely weekends and there’s lost weekends. Some weekends you’re the dog, other weekends you’re the hydrant. “The Lost Weekend” won the Academy Award in 1945. But Freddy Fender had a hit with “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” in 1975. In the words of the husband of the woman who wrote Frankenstein: “The barely articulate Jack White never found weekends particularly sad.”

I’ve never met Jack White, but I am passed out in an alley and also not particularly sad, but definitely deciding to abandon this heedless delusory sleep of a unicorn Tom Cruise. Where does my “American Idol” cell phone end and my hangover begin? Answer: between the sharp smell of stale piss and the rat droppings which contain bits of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s beef stroganoff that she made with hundreds of petals from the famous Julia Child Rose during the days when fishes walked and forests flew.

I never once saw a Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game, but I have eaten a beef stroganoff, though maybe not the one made by Sister Rosetta Tharpe from the petals of the famous Julia Child Rose. On the other hand, the reason I’m passed out in this here alley in the first place is because I just experienced a foursome with the fetching Olson Twins and rounded out by Penn Jillette.

Penn Jillette displayed a glorious beauty like that of a fat valley, and we know this from the Bible, the part in Ezechiel about the ritual orgies of the Serbo-Croatian beard-pullers, from whom Penn Jillette is descended: “And the glorious beauty of Penn Jillette, which is as a fat valley, as the hasty fruit before the summer, which is what the beard-pullers seeth, and with their walrus teeth eateth.”

These Serbo-Croation beard-pullers were ithyphallic, concupiscent men, whose modern-day descendants continue to luxuriate lewdly in the dandruffy sacristies of academia, visible from every vista, like Tiny Tim marrying Miss Vicki on “The Tonight Show.”

At some point during his life, Tiny Tim emptied a can of spaghetti into a frying pan, in imitation of a crude turnip parody of the woman whose bulbous and squat na-na is the only thing required for the process of achieving aphesis.

Scientists succeeded in cloning a Giant Tiny Tim Squid when Tiny Tim was stranded on a desert island off the coast of Taiwan and the Olson Twins were spotted rearing chicks on jagged reef nearby and in desperate need of a good puppy name. Therefore, a clone was made as a way of getting a chance to start over again with a more creative interpretation of Tiny Tim: Michael Jackson.

The Olson Twins never once saw a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, either, but they did cook and eat squid with Julia Child on her long ago cooking show, “Staten Island: Friend or Foe”? And at some point someone will come to in an alley and rediscover the squid / Tiny Tim clone wearing white sweater socks and singing “Red Leather Forever” at the Pythian Temple. But it won’t be me. I came to this here alley straight from the Midwest in a four-door Impala like a cross between a honky-tonk fiddler and a pretty ballerina, and I gotta get home now, and anoint my azaleas. Why I am always saying I’m anointing when what I’m really doing is abluting?

Oh Lifelong Song That Is Purely and Most Surely Love

2010-03-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

for Toni

Were you the stone collecting dew
and I the flower needing water?
Then to you I owe the debt of tears.

I spent time wondering
more time wandering
through moonlight reflecting on water.

I felt empty when I was done.

But through Time wondering
through moonlight wandering
reflected in the love

of the flower for the water
from the stone collecting dew,
I repay my debt to you.

(inspired by The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin)

Oh Girl of the Bright World

2010-03-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

for Toni Renee Long, October 30, 1962 — November 17, 2009

It’s night and the ceiling light
swings and everything
moves closer.
A bare lightbulb
all shadows and angles
reconfigures
this difficult and beautiful
world into
a place of bright permissions —
to come all this way,
and then as music?
Oh wild holy memory.
It was a long way to go.

The sky was dull,
the clouds rolled by
there appeared
a solitary bell-figure
wheeling
in a gate: it was Love
and it was distance:
first and long-forgotten
world of light
where pure forces shielded us
from distress
and the night
and we woke from that sleep
to verdancy’s harbor.

To know what makes
a moment, to know what moves
the calm abiding, to know
that only death releases
who you were and will be:
oh girl of the bright world
I have opened this door
to make a gateway
for joy:
as long as kindness remains
as long as dreams come true.

(the phrase “girl of the [wild] bright world”
from Cecilia Woloch’s poem “Bareback Pantoum”)

I Am A Lonely Oneironaut, In Need Of Salutary Grounding

2010-03-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

for Harvey Zuckerman

I am a lonely mushroom cowboy
lonesome as the winter ocean
lonely cyclonic rag tag tranny
waking from a battlestar
walking lost & lonely
galaxy-tipping lonely
lonely and in love with
this poor city & the whole world
singing "lonely boy lonely girl
suddenly soul searching”
Miss Demure
lucidly dreaming
lonely drifter Karen —
lonely schnozz, longest walk —
lord of the living room lonely
John Lennon-taking-a-stand-against-
evolution-lonely
professional adult orphan
taking crap on two continents
and always getting rained on
by amateur clouds
lonely

Oh, solitary psychedelic alchemist
Oh, twisted oneironaut:
tell me GPS gets lonely
tell me déjà vu is lonely
tell me the antipodean dream
at the end of time
is lonely

tell me

I Am Registering The Timbre Of A Plastic Bottle Hitting A Wood Floor Midway On My Trajectory Toward Death

2010-03-17T08:22:00.001-07:00

for Steve Evans

I've been doing some interesting work with kitty slippers which,
when sewn out of newspapers headlining Iraqi death tolls,
create a cheap parody of our planet
that constitutes a kind of science.
Or, failing that, art.
I’ve also been taking sick-hot Tommy Hilfiger teddy bears,
made in Ameribama of spindly bones,
and shelving them up high, so that they appear to be
staring down like a cat.
I have also put Arcade Fire in a room with Vincent Price's corpse,
threw in the Berlin Zoo’s flash mob climax
and the three keys to God’s secret uterine temperament.
What I got was an alternative universe buddy movie
where Anthony Hopkins smirks at Chris Tucker
while both of them get fat,
and a single note from the throat of Michael McDonald
echoes across the planet
over the course of a Kali Yuga.

Sometimes I get so caught up in these ornate recipes
that I forget the humble loaf of bread prototype
for the Mount Rushmore / Holly Hobbie
“prairie dildo” trope.

Edward Kennedy Ellington, 1899-1974,
once said something similar to,
“Doesn’t ‘Destination: Redneck’
feature a crude parody of Yoda
getting his groove on with Pink?
Too bad he failed malaria training.”
Yeah, too bad.
I could’ve made some awesome kitty slippers
out of that damn creamy bee.

Why Am I Still Angry With William Blake?

2010-03-15T15:30:00.001-07:00

Anyone can be angry.
But it takes balls to be angry with William Blake.
It also takes termites.
and echidnas and ants.

Being angry with William Blake
can be "deep" and also magnificently real
and critical.
It's not like being a fan of everything,
because THAT'S easy: like being a fan
of a peanut in the peanut gun
of Elton John, straight-shot into the mouth
of the luminous high priest elephant bot
who navigates the stringiest runway
in the history of the battle of rabbit sexing.

Being angry with William Blake is to gravitas
what the Beatles were to Darren Stevens:
Samantha's elephant-bot friend-with-benefits
OR: Hitler's wife in a Prius.
Did you ever see that Twilight Zone
where the guy signed a contract
and they cut out his tongue and it wouldn't die,
it just grew and pulsated and gave birth
to baby tongues?
Well, one of those baby tongues
was William Blake's mother.

How can that be so simple? you ask.
Well, I know for a fact that William Blake said,
“Mother Blake, you are too simple.
You have ten children, and all of them are doing drugs together,
tied up by their eyes by zombies.
And that is just totally didactic and unworkble."
And then Mother Blake said, "William Blake,
you have an extensive collection of hairnets
in your hamlet, and that's enough
to hate you."

Exactly.
If William Blake were ice cream,
he'd be peanut butter and dick.

I Am Sensitive Energy For the People

2010-03-14T11:26:00.001-07:00

Do you perceive fantastic, exotic things that other people can't —
like non-corporeal tongue fungus in Hindus?

Do you sense things that you couldn't — or shouldn’t — logically sense?
Like intangible clouds of Irritable Bowel Syndrome in malls?

Do you feel the pain of the world within your own heart,
manifesting as cat flatulence?

As a highly sensitive person you may know you are different.
After a while, you may be aware that others think you are stupid,
or have stupid ideas: an envied “normal person” just sees
a three-bean salad, but you — a creative, highly sensitive person —
probably see Sam Peckinpah judging the
“Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas Pageant”
in front of a bullfight for vacuum cleaners,
and maybe much, much more.
Like perhaps three white people who are not LL Cool J —
one of them being Bob Dylan and the other two being
a pole-dancing Madame Blavatsky on top of Edgar Cayce —
receiving a brain transplant from a vending machine
for ten cents worth of “Radar Love.”
Or Jamaican children specially rendered into a pickled herring paste
and served on crackers in Jamaica.
Whatever.

It’s not peaceful or calming when we air out the unconscious mind.
For example, in making titanium jewelry we may initiate
a cascade of tortoises.

Uh-Oh … I Think I Just Screwed With the Luminosity of Spontaneous Presence

2010-03-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

There was this vacancy in the corporate air.
Collisions with spontaneous emissions were occurring
even before the initial collisions occurred.
The aerodynamics were way screwed up!
I was totally screwed up.
You, on the other hand, were souped.
And I realized, suddenly,
that if we were The Love Boat, you'd be Julie.
That if you were to poop the rosy promise of techno junk,
minding its own business, drinking a cappuccino,
then I would have to hold my arms against my sides
and name myself Flipper.
I suddenly felt very ancient
and very very Buddhist.

Assuming the position of Christ on the cross,
you whispered, “Fag screwed up.”
The irony of the moment
did not escape me.

Like a Yakuza who will only ever use a plastic spoon,
you got me fucked up, jacked up, screwed up,
and warped in the Dollar Store.
The Eagles were rocking in the distance
with enough conceptual linearity to blow up the Earth.
This wouldn't have been so bad if a flaming liberal whack-job lightworker
hadn’t screwed up the economy with a luminous karate-chop
to the butthole of coffee ice cream.
The reason our world is so screwed up in the first place
is because coffee ice cream isn’t as dreamy as we had hoped.
Hell, I don't even like coffee ice cream.
But what if they screwed up Hot Chocolate?

Do you remember Julie Andrews and the von Trapp children
singing "Do, Re, Me .....” until the city was covered with
gamma ray crop circles?
In the meantime, the sleep architecture of rats
got messed up by the Times Online Spelling Bee.
Wow. How that sucked.
But it was because of all that that I learned
how a life filled with misery, hardship and ill-fortune,
can fulfill its potential by becoming a cappuccino, a latte,
or a macchiato,
birthed from the spirit world.
With the exception of the coffee version of Prince,
the brilliant luminosity that churns behind Penelope Cruise
is really the only thing that screws up my routine these days.
I’d punch her in the eye by accident
then shed tears for her barista.

I Am Having A Huge Asexual Torque Catharsis Over Miley Cyrus’ Hardcore Christian Death Metal Nipples

2010-03-12T16:10:00.000-08:00

(My onging project is to write a flarf poem every day. And I've been pretty good -- I've actually done a poem a day for about a month. I'll post them in backwards chron order until I'm up to date, but here's today's poem ... )

E=mc2 means very, very little to me.
On the other hand, Miley Cyrus’ nipples
lay down some nasty good beats for “The Man,”
and sound like the Eagles playing Christian death metal
while filling prescriptions and feeding livestock.
I used to not be able to dance in tight pants,
but the bong-rattling bottom crunch of Miley Cyrus' nipples
filling prescriptions and feeding livestock
made former Christian middle child Jim Morrison
“look at me.”

It could be argued that Miley Cyrus —
small-time criminal and fan of plastic surgery —
purposely picked up a chainsaw and wrought destruction on
Jim Morrison in an attempt to pay homage to ice cream distributors.
But did losing her virginity have to hurt my whole
pubic shaving template download party?
Miley’s nipples' wicked famous “Funeral Poems
for Death of an Uncle During the Spring Break PA Drivers License
Writing Awards” delivered the death blow to a bull
at the end of a stadium fight.
Hopefully this will prove once and for all that Scientology causes
torque arc fatigue in Spongebob.

On the quality of life scale for dogs.
where do Miley Cyrus’ hardcore Christian death metal nipples fall?
Answer: in the cloudy urine of a preschool’s pet boar
that leads people to dig through sewage sludge
for Baby Vogue knitting patterns.
How much does Miley Cyrus weigh?
As much as four simian brother organs
in full body alchemist mode.
Or a young dick through skimpy material
during teenage virgin birthday sex, and hiking afterward in a skirt,
while a rogue gust of violent wind tears Miley away
from Sandra Bullock in a bikini.
Next question.
 Question: what happens when,
on the hunt for Miley Cyrus underwear,
you fall right onto gay guys fucking to old granny porn?
Answer: if you answered “glorious Hitler death for
heavy metal enthusiasts” you would also be partially correct.
Miley Cyrus’s apple-y lostness appears creekside in Palo Alto
on the “Zelda Fitzgerald Hunt for Best Guru in a Subaru Map.”
I've been told masochism can be cathartic, especially when
making myself pregnant with my own very hot glove
while speeding toward or away from some asexual cosmic vortex
where Miley Cyrus's own special version of “Fuck Off”
(as an homage to the comedy version of the Tet Offensive)
is played on Princess Diana’s trance radio station.

Like a hawk, Miley Cyrus’ nipples are not hatched but “disclosed.”
They are “reclaimed” not tamed, and they are not trained
but “made” or “manned.”
And, of course, they are never actually ill — rather they
“suffer from ungladness.”
One thing is for certain, though:
I could never be Miley Cyrus’ ER nurse,
filling prescriptions and feeding livestock.
A man's gotta know his limitations.
Plus I never read “My Body, My Self,” so I don’t know anything
about my body or myself.
But I do know that a guy refrained from shaving his face until a new
Metallica album was released in 2003.
The painful recovery?
I can't even go there.

Two Polish Girls Standin' Around Readin' Poetry ...

2010-03-11T17:32:00.000-08:00

Cecilia Woloch and Sharon Mesmer
Saturday March 20 at 2 p.m.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker
$7

Cecilia Woloch is the author of four award-winning collections of poems, most recently Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press 2006 Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. Carpathia, newly available from BOA Editions Ltd., is her fifth book. She is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California, as well as the founding director of The Paris Poetry Workshop. She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Shepherdsville, Kentucky; Paris, France; and a small village in the Carpathian mountains of southeastern Poland.

Sharon Mesmer is ... me!

This is Cecilia ...

Me, Louise Brooks and "Pandora" on OnandOnScreen . . .

2010-03-02T10:48:00.000-08:00

... Tom Devaney's new poetry + video site:

"Pandora"

To All Fans of Poetry in Maine ...

2010-02-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

... and all the ships at sea (whatever that means):

http://nwsnews.wordpress.com/UMaine New Writing Series

Please come ... I may even read new writing ...

Tallulah Bankhead . . .

2010-02-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

. . . because Franklin Bruno wrote "For Tallulah" in his book Policy Instrument for me last night, and I love her, and she kind of looks like my mother here . . .

Marc Nasdor's Sonnetaila on Silliman's blog

2010-02-08T14:53:00.000-08:00

Ron sez: "So my question is this: Is Sonnetailia going to be one of those one-brilliant-book-makes-a-career moves, or is Nasdor finally emerging as the big time talent I suspect he has always been? Awhile back, Steve Fama & I were listing off the number of significant poets who didn’t publish a first real book of poems until they were on the high side of 40, starting with one Charles Olson (if not, say, Emily Dickinson). It would be great to discover that there are hundreds, even thousands, of unpublished pages, but my guess is that there isn’t. However, there is no reason at all that Sonnetailia can’t just be the first in a string of great books, and I hope to read every one."

I sez: BIG TALENT! FIRST IN A STRING!

Read the entire review: Silliman's Blog

New Brooklyn Poet Laureate: Tina Chang

2010-02-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

... I think she will ROCK the poet laureate!

Poor Baby Bree Says "I Can't Let the Circus See Me Like This!"

2010-01-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

A modern young woman (Bree Benton) dressed as a turn-of-the-century waif (Poor Baby Bree) in a pinafore and apron, singing vaudeville, music-hall and light classical tunes about dollies, running off to join the circus, dunking donuts and clowns — Mae Questal meets Mary Ellen Walton. I almost cried when she sang “Little Pal” (1929, Lew Brown, Buddy DeSylva, and Ray Henderson) to her rag doll. Plus I was sitting upstairs, and it was like the doll was looking at ME:

At Dixon Place, but tonight's the last night ...

The Grey Dog Cafe / New Yorker Cartoon Show

2010-01-21T16:26:00.000-08:00

Abraham Lincoln and Tits

2010-01-17T13:54:00.001-08:00

Donate: Doctors Without Borders ...

2010-01-14T16:40:00.001-08:00

... for Haiti: http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

My Upcoming Workshop at the Poetry Project

2010-01-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

SIMPLE TEXT(S): POETRY IN AND AROUND PROSE

You’ve heard it before: why is it that poets can write prose, but prose writers can’t write poetry? Maybe it’s because prose writers haven’t fully explored the places where poetry and prose effectively come together — the textural artus points that hinge and pivot to access the strengths of both forms. In this workshop (open, of course, to poets who want to bring narrative intentionality to their work without sacrificing imagery), we will look at prose that blends narrative with idiosyncratic language (Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star; Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), prose that includes poetry (Ki no Tsurayuki’s The Tosa Diary), prose vignettes (16th and 17th century Chinese “hsiao-p’in"; Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet), prose-poem essays (Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make) dream stories (Kafka’s The Bucket Rider), flarf fiction and cut-ups. The above texts and many others will serve as examples for beginning, extending and finishing hybrid poem-stories.

Tuesdays, 7-9 pm, beginning February 9, in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church,131 E. 10th Street (near 2nd Avenue), New York City

Workshop fee is $350, which includes a one year Sustaining Poetry Project membership and tuition for any and all spring and fall classes. Reservations are required due to limited class space, and payment must be received in advance. Caps on class sizes, if in effect, will be determined by workshop leaders. Registration begins officially on January 5th. If you would like to reserve a spot in this class, please call 212-674-0910 or go to http://poetryproject.org/ and click on "Program Calendar" and then "Workshops."

Should be good! I am personally looking forward to it!

The Subterranean Homesick Blues Project

2009-10-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

30 poets (-including me-) read new poems riffing on lines from Bob Dylan's famous song:

Friday, October 30th
Ding Dong Lounge
929 Columbus Ave (between 105th and 106th)
7 – 9pm

Justin Taylor / Mark Bibbins / Ari Messer / Roddy Lumsden / Monica Youn / Dai George / Amy Lemmon / Jason Schneiderman / Timothy Donnelly / Brett Fletcher Lauer / Kathleen Ossip / Cheryl Burke / Douglas Martin / Melissa Broder / James Byrne / Jennifer L Knox / Sharon Mesmer / David Yezzi / Katy Lederer / Joshua Mehigan / Jeffrey McDaniel / Jeremy Schmall / Deborah Landau / Farrah Field / Josh Bell / Thaddeus Rutkowski / George Green / Anwyn Crawford / Adam Fitzgerald / Sasha Fletcher / Justin Boening / Ethan Hon

FREE

Hosted by Roddy Lumsden

Poetizing Old Skool with Paul Beatty and me

2009-09-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

Live from Whitman and Mos Def's lovely Fort Greene. . .

It is finally here! The long awaited continuance of the Brooklyn College MFA reading set, fresh with its new flesh, design and locale.

Brooklyn College readers are:

Ian Parfrey
Nickolas Henderson
Gloria Munoz
Jenny Williams

Ex-Brooklyn College readers are:

Paul Beatty (White Boy Shuffle, Joker Joker Deuce, 1st ever Poetry Slam champ)

Sharon Mesmer (Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Half Angel, Half Lunch)

* * *

This will be an amazing night of destruction and creation. We need to pack Frank's Lounge with human minds and bodies; so please send this invite on to all friends and foes.

Frank's Lounge is located in the Fulton-Lafayette triangle, right off the A/C, the G (Fulton), or a three minute walk from the Atlantic Center.

Please mark your calendars, datebooks, moleskines, and please please PLEASE come out and enjoy your comrades' work.

Flarf Is In Bookforum

2009-07-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

With thanks to Franklin Bruno, for this.

One Tiny Thing About Michael Jackson

2009-07-07T09:16:00.001-07:00

What do I have to add to the Michael Jackson discussions? Nothing, God knows. Well, maybe just one little thing: last Friday evening I was sitting at the kitchen table in the cool half-darkness after finishing the dishes. A beautiful blue light, like the blue of blue glass, was filtering into the kitchen from living room windows which look out onto state game land. (This was at our little “country house” in Pennsylvania, where we’d gone to spend the holiday weekend.) That particular quality of light always brings on the same memory: when I was a kid in the ‘70’s I used to dream of being in a clean, cool blue room, in a house that was — to use a phrase of my dad’s — “way out in the country.” He’d use that phrase when describing the suburbs where his more successful brothers had homes, suburbs that were not really “suburbs” yet, but more like semi-rural areas bordered by prairies. To drive out to visit those relatives was a long haul because my dad didn’t like to drive on expressways: “You gotta have a t’ousand eyes,” he’d say. So, we took local streets, usually Archer Avenue until, after an hour or so, it ceased to be Archer Avenue and became (what looked to me like) a dirt road cutting through forests and farms, like in fairy tales, or in the photos that went with the life stories of famous movie and TV stars who came from humble beginnings. All the way out I’d sit in the back seat behind my dad, staring at the “evening in the country” landscape and listening to a transistor radio pressed to my ear. My sister, who always sat behind our mother, had a radio, too, and it was pressed to her ear because we listened to different stations. She listened to one station, WVON, the soul station, but I switched around constantly from ‘VON to WLS to WCFL.

I was ten when “Never Can Say Goodbye” was a hit by the Jackson 5 in the spring of 1971, and spring was when these long drives out to “the country” would usually begin, bringing with them the promise of summer and longed-for summer vacation. There’s a particular quality of longing — for summer vacation, for friends, for a boyfriend — that one feels at the age of ten. And that song had that particular quality of longing to it: a light 3-note harpsichord riff repeated four times drifts into a sigh, which then floats down into a dreamy, twinkly-sounding cloud of young male harmonizing on a rhythmic “oo-oo.” Then a hypnotic, snake-charming flute brings in the voice of 12-year old Michael Jackson singing the title, and his brothers in the background sighing, “Giiiirl …” “Even though the pain and heartache seem to follow me wherever I go,” sings Michael, “though I try and try to hide my feelings, they always seem to show . . .” I don’t think I ever reflected that this was a 12-year old singing. What he was singing, and how he sang it, rang so true, even to a ten-year old. There was something about that song that matched the deep blue quality of the “country” light – we walked into my aunt and uncle’s house, into their air-conditioned, plush-carpeted living room — in our place, you entered through the rickety, cigarette-stinking kitchen — and all their lights were turned off (ours were always on, and hideously bright) except for the color TV and the lava lamp, which was, of course, blue. And I probably had a crush on Eddie Jozefiak and he was probably ignoring me, and I wanted to be beautiful and wasn’t, and I hated myself and the way I looked and wanted more than anything to be like my cousin, who lived in that clean, cool, blue world. Even more than that, I wanted to be adored, to be a singer on a TV show with a whole studio audience applauding for me, and a big clean, air conditioned house way out in the country to go home to, where maybe I would be interviewed, and fans could come and visit me. That’d show everybody who ever made fun of me, who thought I’d amount to nothing, or thought I was too ugly to love.

And now I do occupy a clean, cool, blue house — at least on the weekends. I know I’m not ugly, but it took a long time to come around to that. But that ugly girl’s still there, feeling sad about something and listening to Michael Jackson. Who was, we now know, feeling sad about something, too.

I Was Columbia College's 2009 Alumna of the Year

2009-06-26T09:54:00.001-07:00

Chicago, May 2009

As Alumna of the Year, I got to boss people around. For instance, I demanded that Michelle Passarelli, Director of Alumni Operations, meet me at the airport wearing a mask . . .

I demanded that they put me up at the Four Seasons, in a corner suite with a view of Lake Michigan . . .

I demanded that a selection of masks be provided (Chicago *is* my hometown, after all, and there had been some, uh, "incidents" ...):

Of course, my friends Jessica, Pablo (I heard he won a Pulitzer or something) and David had to travel with me in the limo:

Poor Josh Culley-Foster -- he's the National Director of Alumni Relations for Columbia. I really put him through a lot. Look at him not enjoying himself:

And poor Michelle! Having to keep up with my demands for certain "favors" ...

Here, Debbie Pintonelli, my one friend left in the world, is saying, "Don't you ever shut the hell up?"

Randy Albers, my beloved teacher: "Why did I think this was a good idea?"

Yeah, well, they didn't exactly put the fizz in my Fuzzy Navel, either. Thank the Holy Mother of Monkey Poo that I had these babies. . .

Here's their reaction when I said, "Kiss my MacArthur, bitches":

Here's me giving the president of the school, Warrick Carter, an earful:

This is Laurel Carter, the only nice person I met the whole time I was there:

No, wait ... Marcia Lazar, of the Board of Trustees, was nice, too:

Okay, Dean Eliza Nichols, too ...

But then meeting all those nice people just started getting to be too ... nice. I needed a drink. I demanded Josh take us all out for drinks. If you could see his whole face in this photo, you'd see how pissed off he was. Thank God you can only see half!

Now, don't even get me STARTED about Commencement! Everyone wanted to get their photo taken with me!

I TOLD them I didn't want to put that stupid hat on. It totally ruined my hairdo!

Take a look at this -- Dean Deborah Holdstein is making devil horns behind the photographer! What the hell kinda school is this?

Oh, and check this out: we marched in to "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith:

Aerosmith??? What, they didn't KNOW I have a poem called "Retarded Aerosmith World?"

Retarded Aerosmith World

Where dirt bikes meet hips
there's a smell of wood smoke and pussy
there's a windswept junkyard dog
there's nothing for a long time and then there's sex
where the twelve-point centaur rests:
little blue trailer
far end of the parking lot
behind the Walgreens
where there's starlight through dimity curtains
and someone bent over a bathtub
and three people in another room
smoking on the soul cakes.
Later there's a lily bath
and a new hairdo for a funeral
and a great love torn asunder
but another love renewed.

People ... research????

Oh -- check this out:

They told me, "Go ahead -- invite twenty people." Twenty people? Twenty people is what it takes just to get my eyes open in the morning!

Well, finally, it was all over but the drinkin' (and -- quelle coincidence! -- that's when Margaret Sullivan and Debbie show up!):

Yes, Debbie, there is a Santa Claus . . .

Good freakin' riddance, Chicago. Here's what I think of you:

Vote for Me for Brooklyn Poet Laureate!

2009-06-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

The article, from yesterday's Brooklyn Paper: "New Poet Laureate Has Big Muse To Fill"

VOTE HERE

Flarf Is In POETRY (And So Am I)

2009-06-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

Flarf is in Poetry, and I’m in flarf, so I’m in Poetry too. Oh, Harriet Monroe. Oh, Ruth Lilly, whose family’s liquid vitamin B — Homicibrin, or some such name — I took as a child for underweightedness. I can still taste it.

In this, the July/August issue, with a summery watermelon smiley on the cover, flarf falls under the same watermelon smiley as Philip Levine, Tony Hoagland and Jane Hirschfield, whose poem (“Perishable, It Said”) ends with the line . . .

inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

For comparison, here’s Philip Levine’s poem, “An Extraordinary Morning” . . .

Two young men — you might call them boys —
waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get
them downtown. Yes, they’re tired, they’re also
dirty, and happy. Happy because they’ve
finished a short work week and if they’re not rich
they’re as close to rich as they’ll ever be
in this town. Are they truly brothers?

. . . and here's fellow flarfista Nada Gordon’s “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”:

I was sort of doodling Hitler at my friend’s
house and we couldn’t stop watching
unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards
containing scenes in which the baby angora unicorn
and Hitler stay warm on a cold night.

Here’s a taste of Tony Hoagland’s poem, “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” . . .

And here is my niece Lucinda,

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,
who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

. . . contrasted with Drew Gardner’s interstitial “Why do I hate Flarf so much?”:

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried, “But that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” . . . Hate and love — if those are the options I just want to hate and love lobsters.

Finally, here's the watermelon smiley cover . . .

. . . and here is flarfisto K. Silem Mohammad's cover:

"Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?"

2009-06-22T08:49:00.000-07:00

By Shell Fischer, in this month's Poets & Writers

If You STILL Can't Get Enough Flarf ...

2009-04-22T18:47:00.001-07:00

... and, really, who could blame you, here's another chance!

NADA GORDON!
SHARON MESMER!
GARY SULLIVAN!

READ THIS SATURDAY!
APRIL 25th @ 8pm!
390 SENECA AVE.
CORNER OF SENECA & STANHOPE!
RIDGEWOOD, QUEENS!
BEER!
POETRY!
BEER!
FLARF!
BEER!

www.poetrytimeatspacespace.blogspot.com

At the Whitney: Flarf Versus Conceptual Writing

2009-03-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Surely, one of the signs of the Apocalypse . . .

On Friday, April 17 the Whitney Museum of American Art presents eight poets associated with two cutting-edge movements in contemporary poetry: the Flarf Collective and Conceptual Writing. The followers of both movements employ technology to create their works, often using strategies familiar to the visual arts: appropriation, falsification, insincerity, and plagiarism. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to webpage, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Featured poets are Christian Bök, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Rosenfield, Gary Sullivan and Darren Wershler.

This event was conceived and organized by poet Kenneth Goldsmith on the occasion of the Jennny Holzer exhibition PROTECT PROTECT. Reading begins at 7, and is free with Museum Admission, which is pay-what-you-wish during Whitney After Hours on Fridays from 6-9 pm. Advance reservations are recommended. Tickets may be reserved at the Museum Admissions desk or online at http://www.whitney.org. Inquiries: (212) 570-7715 or public_programs@whitney.org/

Fracking

2009-01-31T16:17:00.000-08:00

This is some serious shit. David (my husband) and I went to a public meeting about this two weekends ago in PA, but it affects New York as well. Please read this and pass the information on. (I'm doing this quickly, so please copy and paste the URLs into your browers -- I'll change it all into links later) ...

Dear Friend,

As part of the Bush-Cheney legacy, the oil and gas industry is
accomplishing what we feared would come from foreign terrorists: the
contamination of our water supplies.

Gas companies use the Halliburton-invented hydraulic fracturing
process to drill a mile or deeper, forcing one to four millions of
gallons of water and toxic chemicals into the earth with each
drilling. The waste water, stored in open pits on site, contains the
deadly chemicals as well as underground radiation.

The 2005 Energy Bill exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe
Drinking Water, Clean Air, and Clean Water acts.

Gas companies have been drilling and polluting across the country. Now
they’re in New York—and they have leased land near and in the New York
City watershed to drill for natural gas using hydraulic fracturing.

If the drilling moves forward, New York City will have to build a
filtration plant at a cost of at least $10 billion. However, it is
unknown if the chemicals involved in drilling can be filtered out—
especially since by law these chemicals may be kept secret.

How can you help? Here are two ways.

1. Please sign this petition to protect New York City’s water.
http://citizenspeak.org/node/1436

2. US Congressman Maurice Hinchey, from New York, has co-sponsored the
bill HR 7231, reinserting the regulation of Safe Drinking Water for
hydraulic fracturing.

It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Please email your Congressperson
and ask her or him to support HR7231.

Here’s what I wrote my Congressman: Please support HR 7231 and help
protect our drinking water from unregulated gas drilling practices. In
addition to repealing the exemption of the Safe Drinking Water Act
from hydraulic fracturing, please support repealing the exemption of
the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. It is very dangerous for this
practice to be exempt from environmental regulations. Thank you.

For a quick link to your Congressperson, use this link:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

To learn more about hydraulic fracturing, read this Scientific
American article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=drill-for-natural-gas-pollute-water

"What's In That Fracking Fluid?": http://www.riverreporter.com/issues/08-12-04/fracking.pdf

Twenty Years On

2009-01-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

(Written a few weeks ago...)

Today I ended up back at the first place I lived in New York, and from where I moved exactly twenty years ago today. A set of fortuitous circumstances got me to the place in the first place, and the same could be said for how I got back there today. I haven’t figured out the cosmical/meta-symbolical reason I ended up back there today, but maybe that’s for later.

The first time: I’d always wanted to live in New York, to be a poet in New York. The New York I’d formed in my mind was a juxtaposition of “That Girl” and ideas gleaned from articles about punk in rock magazines. It may not have been entirely cohesive, but whatever it was it was the opposite of dull, judgmental, racist, comformist, narrow-minded working class Chicago. It seemed open, improvisatory, vulnerable, strong, self-creating, self-deprecating and celebratory — the perfect place for me. When I finally resigned myself to the fact that becoming a world-famous poet/rock star like Patti Smith was not my fate, I decided that getting myself into one of those poetry MFA programs everyone was starting to talk about would be the best way to establish myself in the Magic Kingdom. At least I’d have something to do, a place to go, some structure. I applied to Columbia University’s MFA but they put me on the waiting list, which pissed me off. At the urging of my therapist I quickly applied somewhere else — Brooklyn College. I knew absolutely nothing about Brooklyn College (except that they had an MFA program), not even that my idol Allen Ginsberg was teaching there. The outdated information I’d found in some catalog of graduate programs at Kroch’s and Brentano’s — this was 1987, and pre-Internet, so information was sometimes hard to come by — listed John Ashbery as the MFA poetry teacher. Ashbery was someone whose work I certainly liked. I could definitely see myself studying with him.

After I was accepted, my therapist then suggested I call the English department and see if I could visit the campus, talk to somebody about housing, job opportunities, a student loan, etc. I dilly-dallied at that point because of the now-pressing need to put my vague plans in action. In general I’m always on the alert for omens and clues as to how to proceed, and when I found the tarot card Temperance on the sidewalk outside my apartment building I decided that was how I had to proceed: with moderation, patience, reliance on intuition, and a willingness to experiment until I got “it” — the establishment of myself in New York — right.

I called the Brooklyn College English department and got an appointment with Maurice Kramer, the Graduate Deputy. I had no idea how to get to the school, or to Brooklyn. And where would I stay? I couldn’t afford a hotel, and the few people I knew in New York were mostly my boyfriend Carl’s friends, and lived in tiny Lower East Side studios with plenty of chairs but nothing you could rightly call a couch. On a visit with him a year or two earlier we’d slept on folded-up sleeping bags on wooden pallets on the floor of his friend’s windowless, unlit, under-the-hallway-stairs utility room. (Remember that “Seinfeld” episode where Elaine pretends she lives in a storage room, so she can get Chinese food deliveries? It wasn’t that nice.) “Good thing I’m the super,” Carl’s friend assured us, handing over a flashlight. “Don’t’ worry — this is one of the few buildings that doesn’t have rats.” I still have nightmares about that place. That night I decided that no matter how desperate I got, no matter how important it might ever be for me to be in New York, I’d never stay in a place like that again.

With some prodding I got Carl to recall another old friend who (he thought) maybe still lived in the East Village. He made some calls, got some numbers, made more calls, and sure enough, she was still there. I stayed with her and slept in an actual bed. She had a subway map, and I was ecstatic to see that Brooklyn was accessible via many trains — who knew? The Brooklyn of “Car 54, Where Are You?” seemed like a made-up place. And Brooklyn College was even on the subway map — the last stop on the 2/5 lines, also called “Flatbush Avenue.” Flatbush Avenue? There was actually a Flatbush Avenue? Like in “The Lords of Flatbush”? Not only was this easy, it was hilarious.

On what had to be the hottest day of June, 1987, I trudged up the subway stairs and onto Flatbush Avenue. The first thing I saw was the huge, hulking Flatbush Federal Savings and Loan building. Flatbush Federal? I had to smile. And then across the street was a store called “Carl’s College Beat,” with a window full of 1950’s-looking baseball jackets with leather sleeves, alpaca sweaters and button-down shirts. Were these people for real with all the Brooklyn-y stuff, or what? I laughed out loud, and some teenage kid walking past me said, in a mellifluous Jamaican accent, “Didja just see your reflection in the window, gal?”

This was really going to be something else.

I had no idea where to go. I looked around and saw no signs for any college. I’d figured Brooklyn College would be like where I got my BA, Columbia College – a nondescript block-y gray building on a corner. I checked the address; it wasn’t Flatbush Avenue. I looked down the block and saw some trees. My intuition told me to go that way, and I did. I walked past a building with a sign that said Brooklyn College (thinking: oh, that’s the college), through iron gates and then further on, curious, towards more greenery. When I saw the ivy-covered brick buildings and the grassy quad for the first time — the whole vista so restful and pleasing to the eye — I was absolutely shocked: it was a real school. A real beautiful school, too. With students sitting on the grass with books — open books! And there were birds singing, too. Birds! Winding around on the paths, I came upon a pond. With lily pads. Freaking lily pads! I really couldn’t believe it. This was the place I had chosen, sight unseen, with no information, to spend the next two years of my life. Somehow, I was doing something right.

Of course, I was late for the interview. I was wearing a white blouse and totally sweating my ass off, and I knew I’d not only ruined the blouse for further use on the trip but I’d also ruined my chance to make a good first impression. But Maurice Kramer was really nice. I told him I was really excited about being able to study with John Ashbery.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You must’ve gotten some outdated information. I’m sorry to tell you that John isn’t teaching here. He got a MacArthur and took a leave.”

“Well, no matter,” I said, shrugging. “I feel like just being here is important. Who took his place?”

“Allen Ginsberg.”

He said something after that, but I didn’t hear him because the voice in my head going HOLYSHITALLENGINSBERGHOLYSHITALLENGSINBERG overwhelmed everything else. I felt like crying again. I had to really pull back. It was hard, trying not to cry and/or sweat more. He then asked me if I needed a place to live, and I must’ve said I did.

“Because,” he said, “a place just became available today — one of our professors, Nancy Black, is going to France for the semester and she’s looking to sublet her place for three months. Three months isn’t a long time, but you’ll be able to have a base of operations while you go to school and look for a permanent place. Here’s her phone number. Call her as soon as you can because there’s a high demand for apartments here, as I’m sure you know. Oh, and are you looking to do some teaching? Because the department chair just happens to be here today. I don’t think she has anyone in her office right now. Let me just call her . . .”

I had once said to someone, jokingly, that I’d never move to New York unless I had a job, an apartment, and a career waiting for me. I got back on the subway that day with a job, an apartment, and Allen Ginsberg waiting for me.

A month or so later I received a letter from Professor Black, with photos of her home — “Just so you know what you’re getting into.” The first photo was the exterior of 178 Lincoln Road — a classic, attractive Brooklyn brownstone with geraniums in planters on the windowsills. Wow! My apartment would be a room in that nice place! The next photo was of a big kitchen with a stove/table/butcher block island in the middle. Wow! I’d be doing some cooking there, which would definitely help me save money. The next photo was of a huge, airy room with a curtained bay window, a couch, a chandelier, a fireplace with a mantle and (wait for it) a grand piano. And the photo after that was a bedroom with a four-poster canopied bed, a stained glass bay window, a chandelier, and an antique divan. On the back of those photos was written “your living room” and “your bedroom.” This was my first apartment in New York, for which I would be paying (wait for it) $500.

Go ahead — hate me. All my Chicago poet-friends did. It felt great.

It was to this gracious place that I returned earlier today. An old friend back in Chicago had mailed a Christmas present to me at that address because she didn’t know my current one, and I was going back to retrieve it. Interesting, I thought, that I’m going back exactly twenty years after I left (minus two weeks). I’ve only lived in two places in New York, and so I still have very vivid memories (both good and bad/sad) of Professor Black’s beautiful home — my first home in the Magic Kingdom.

Getting off the subway at the Prospect Park B train stop I kept my eyes open for things that had changed/things that had stayed the same. Oddly, almost everything seemed the same: Sister Patricia the psychic was gone, but the Chinese take-out place where I first ate lo mein, the little grocery on the corner with its not-so-great produce, the pharmacy on the other corner, and “French Dry Cleaners” on the opposite side of Flatbush Avenue were all still there. Yes, I was living a block away from extremely Brooklyn-y Flatbush Avenue. In fact, when Carl and I drove into the neighborhood for the first time, and stopped at the light at this intersection, a man in the next car saw that I had a map open and yelled, in a classic Brooklyn accent, “Where ya goin’?”

“178 Lincoln Road!”

“Go ta da next cornah, make a left, go two blocks, make anudda left, den anudda left after dat, an’ go two more blocks — it’s on ya left!”

Walking toward 178, I tried to recall and feel the things I thought and felt twenty years ago. Was I always happy to be here? No, not always. Why the hell wasn’t I? Looking back, I was damn lucky to have landed where I did. But what did I do with all that luck? Studying with Allen Ginsberg had been an amazing experience. He nominated me for, and I received, the coveted MacArthur Scholarship (John Ashbery had graciously donated a portion of his MacArthur money to fund the award). And Ginsberg had chosen me to represent Brooklyn College at a Poetry Society of American event, “Best of the MFA Programs.” He wrote recommendations for me, wrote a blurb for my first poetry collection, introduced me to his friends at poetry events as “one of the most talented young poets around,” counseled me when my father was dying, and defended me in class when other students criticized my work. Once he called me at my boyfriend’s (not the same boyfriend I moved to NYC with) apartment at 11 am on a Sunday because he’d woken up thinking he’d forgotten to do something for me, and was worried we’d missed a deadline. The night before I got the call that my first poetry collection was accepted for publication, I had a dream that he and I were standing in front of my childhood house on Racine Avenue in Chicago, pressing our pregnant stomachs together and laughing about how funny it was that we were both pregnant at the same time, and that a man could get pregnant. But mixed in with all the good memories festered a major regret. In 1997, a Japanese literary magazine put me up in the Chelsea Hotel for a week, and told me to “have experiences and write about them.” An interview with Allen, I knew, would be perfect for the article, so I called his office to schedule it. Bob, his secretary said he was out of town, but he’d have him call me as soon as he got back. Sure enough, Allen called, but it was too late — I’d already written the article. But why didn’t I just interview him anyway? He died a few months after I spoke to him on the phone. Ours would’ve been his last interview. I totally blew it, but even in death he taught me something: be ready, think ahead, say yes.

Crossing Bedford, with 178 Lincoln coming into view, I recalled how Carl and I sat on the “stoop” our first night in Brooklyn — August 15, 1988. Those first days in Brooklyn were happy, so funny. Carl and I broke up soon after leaving Lincoln Road, but no matter; I met my soul-mate (and now husband), David, later that same year. New York had been so good to me, helping me get rid of what was no longer serving me. New York had known what I needed, all the way. Why wasn’t I ecstatically happy back then? One of the reasons was the other person that Carl and I had shared 178 Lincoln Road with: a relatively established writer who was also in the MFA program. Relatively Established made sure that we knew his connections were not to be shared. One time he invited us to come along to what would certainly be a very interesting, totally classic New York literary party. One of the reasons I had moved to New York was to go to totally classic literary parties. When we were all ready to leave he announced, “Oh, the hostess said I couldn’t bring you. Sorry.”

Nancy Black answered the door. She looked exactly the same as the last time I saw her, when I handed back the keys. She smiled and ushered me in. There was the table where we’d had the shitty Thanksgiving dinner; there was the counter where I sat when Ma told me over the phone that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer; there was the little table made out of a sewing machine at which I planned to read and write in the mornings until Relatively Established decided it was his favorite place to smoke. On the wall back then had hung rusted garden implements from Professor Black’s family’s antique shop, but those were gone now, replaced by needlepoint samplers.

Nancy made me a cup of tea and gave me a band-aid (I’d scraped my knuckle in the subway coming over) and we went upstairs. Ah, the carpeted stairs! I was always worried I’d fall down those stairs on my way downstairs to the bathroom in the middle of the night. There was the living room with the grand piano, the curtained bay window, the fireplace and the mantle with the antique clock and two brass bird sculptures — I used to write in this room, on the couch on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The guy I cheated on Carl with sat there once. And last was the room that was the bedroom — now back to being an extension of the living room — with the stained glass bay window, chandelier and bookshelves behind glass doors. While talking on the phone to a friend in that room the beautiful antique divan I was sitting on had suddenly shuttled back and forth across the floor. I thought it was a ghost, but it had been an earthquake — the November 25 Saguenay earthquake, the epicenter of which was in southern Quebec. The next day the Daily News’ front page headline was THE NIGHT THE APPLE SHOOK!

Nancy and I sat down and had tea, and after a while her husband, Michael, joined us. We talked about her retiring from teaching, medieval women writers, Christmas, Allen Ginsberg, how I really should join the Park Slope Food Coop, and how Relatively Established screwed up Thanksgiving. Michael asked me how I came to live in their apartment, and I told him the story. “Things don’t often happen that way!” he laughed. I agreed.

I felt sad when it was time to leave. I wished I’d had more time there, to look at objects and the space between objects again, to concentrate on the trajectory between then and now to understand what was gained and what was lost, and to get inside the wonderful, dream-come-true feeling of being newly arrived in New York. I guess I wanted to go back and really feel the excitement of being there, in a way that I didn’t before. Relatively Established’s emotional depredations kind of put kibosh on feeling excited, as did reading Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye To All That” on a rainy August morning a few days after I first arrived:

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.”

I was only twenty-seven when I moved to New York but I felt very, very old, and those lines sent a chill through me. Was it already over? It hadn’t even begun. Relatively Established made me feel that way, and so did Carl, at times, because he was such a nay-sayer. To a self-expressed bohemian like him, the idea of an MFA program, even with Ginsberg teaching in it, was about as repugnant as a coffee table and Lladro figurines. The people who were solidly behind me during that transition I could count on one hand and still have fingers left over. And reading that Didion essay was a mistake. But, looking back, it was one of the few mistakes I made in terms of the move and my first few months in Brooklyn. I had done everything right, actually. The effortless way it happened made me think that that was the way things always happened. But, as I now know, that’s hardly ever the case.

But what did I do right then, and how can I learn from it now?

I had a real plan, but I allowed myself to be open to experimentation with the process of seeing it through. I often felt scared, and like I was abandoning my family, but while I acknowledged those thoughts, I never “invited them in for tea” — that’s what Allen taught me when he taught me to meditate on the floor in front of his little altar on a quiet, sunny afternoon on the Lower East Side. Afterward, he heated up some soup for us, and packed the leftovers for me to take home. What I learned from him went beyond rhyme and meter. How I wish he were still alive. How thankful I am that our paths crossed.

Look at the View
Right to horizon
Talk to the sky
Act like you talk

Work like the sun
Shine in your heaven
See what you done
Come down & walk

From “Gospel Noble Truths”
AG, New York Subway, October 17, 1975

Things I Hated About the Inaugural Poem

2009-01-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

That there were no goats or sheep in it
That there was a farmer with a pencil in it
That somebody was doing their business in it
That Larry Fagin could’ve written it

That it didn’t rhyme
That she read it like she went to the William Shatner
School. for.
Poetry.
Reading.

That it contained nicknames for potatoes by people
who really hate potatoes

That there was no candy or baked goods in it
plus I fucking hate crochet white tights --
really cute, but they're bunching around my ankles
like a granny

That it treated me like a deadbeat who missed car payments
That the reason leftists are so sensitive is because
they’re LOSERS!!!
That there was not sufficient attention paid to the recent death
of Stooges' guitarist Ron Asheton

That metal rocker Lars Ulrich and Lars' dad Torben
and Lars' dad's wife Molly tried to pay $33.8 million
to see a fat guy and social loser
cruising on a Segway
pulling out of Gaza

That she's ushering in an era of someone trying to make
a somewhere of spoons

That in China lately people are playing ping pong with nunchucks

That I watched it from the doc's office where I'd gone for my
follow-up visit and was recovering from a gigantic injection
in the ass :(

That the Obama Youth Parents ordered a Kool-Aid mega-hurl in it
That Hitler goes off on Hollywood, Obama, the birth certificate,
FACTCHECK.ORG and Schwarzenegger in it

That she had a thing about how Hitler is really angry
about the Hollywood airheads, led by Demi Moore,
pledging allegiance to Obama even though it’s a fact
that Obama's name “intersects" with a passage
in the book of Daniel, specifically Daniel 7:25,
which speaks of the last "king" who will oppress God's people
under the rubric of bringing about "change" in it

That Kevin Davies is a meanie in it
That she totally skimmed over the Evaculated Elmo Head thing* in it
That there was no “wtf?” in it
Wtf?

(* see previous post)

Evacuated Elmo Head Elmo

2009-01-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Wal-Mart:
Elmo vs.Tigger vs. Barney is mildly funny.
Also funny is Barney hijacks stuff plucked out of his head
with iron pincers.

More funny is Suicide Pact/Potty Training Elmo,
Beat Me Up Elmo Elmo,
and Chinese-led Anti-Christian Conspiracy at Wal-Mart
to Brainwash our Children Elmo.

Not funny is Condi & Those Fucking Googly Eyes Elmo.
Not funny is O’Reilly Factor for Kids Hosted by Richard Nixon
Livin’ Large on His Gold and Diamond Potty That Spells Out
"Elmo's Gotta Do What Elmo's Gotta Do” Elmo.
((No, wait — that *is* funny.))

Funny is Bird Seed Milkshake/Oxycontin Cocktail Elmo.
Funny is Jay Gatsby, Fat-Elvis-Playa-at-Large Elmo.

Not funny is Do I Really Want To Get Beat Up by
the Ginormous Black Man Who Plays Elmo
Fisted By Fat Elvis? Elmo.
If Fisher-Price had taken my concerns seriously
none of this would’ve happened.

Funny is Mary Poppins Toy Tells Boy To 'Beat Up Elmo'
After Screwing Osama Bin Laden and Then Shooting Up
with Shoot Me Up Elmo Elmo.
Funny is Elmo Farting All Over the Teletubbies (Uh huh —
jazz hands!) Elmo.

Not funny is the feminine lack of a penis.
Not funny is my otherwise wonderful child
who wakes up every morning wrestling Elmo’s huge nipples
and stinking of breast milk.

Not funny is trying to find a penis faucet.
Can you club a baby seal to death with a flaccid penis?
NYU’s school of medicine didn’t beat around the bush:
“That’s a flat NO.”
And don't get me started on that penis.
That penis is the most sickly, mutated thing formed.
And what is up with that pubic hair?
Before I get into how Beat Me Up Elmo beat up Grover,
I’d like to tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, there was a great lord in Japan . . .

Inauguration Day Poem

2008-11-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Crap! I was just checking out the Best American Poetry blog because I'm going to be guest blogging for them next week, and saw their "Inaugural Poem Contest." So, I wrote one. THEN, after I wrote it, I discovered that faculty from the New School Writing Program can't enter. Oh well; fair enough. I think I wrote a good poem, tho, so here it is. The first line is from Laura Cronk's poem "Entering," which appeared in BAP 2008 (one of the rules was that the poem had to contain a line found somewheres in BAP 2008):

Inauguration Day Mouse
(for Laura Cronk)

The mice must have these visions:
the founding fathers, their poor eyesight,
the littlest mus musculus escaping the trap
to ultimately become the most recognizable

American icon, after the flag.
Today I personally honor these smallest
of small world contributors, so full of integrity,
faith and hope, ever steadfast in the face

of so many bigger and stinkier heels.
Where the faithful and hopeful mouse goes,
there go I, squeaking Change to Power.
And soon, in some undiscovered corner,

in the middle of the night, I shall find
some savory delicious and nutritious
crumb of something, and for once — just once —
it won't snap its breathtaking jaw.

Where Billie Holiday Once Sang ...

2008-11-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

Please come to a great reading ...

Sharon Mesmer, Susie Timmons and Bob Hershon
The (new) Zinc Bar
(formerly the Baggott Inn, formerly the Cinderella Club --
where Billie Holiday once sang)
82 West 3rd, two doors west of Thompson
New York City, New York
Sunday, November 23
7pm

$5 donation goes to the poets
Your hosts: Joe Elliot, Kimberly Lyons and Douglas Rothschild

Park Slope Euphoria, November 4, 2008

2008-11-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

What's So Funny About Community Organizing?

2008-09-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Six minutes into his speech to the Republican convention, Rudolph Giuliani said the following about Barack Obama:

“He worked as a ‘community organizer.’ What?”

Then he shrugged and laughed. The camera cut to the audience, also laughing. Giuliani tried to continue, but the chanting of “Zero! Zero! Zero!” drowned him out. The former mayor of New York City, “America’s Mayor,” the hero of September 11th, was barely able to fire off his next comment: “This is the first problem on the resume . . .”

Since when is service to one’s community a “problem”? Since when is it something to be laughed at and mocked? Isn’t the presidency of the United States basically service to one’s community? Don’t Republicans engage in grass-roots community organizing? Isn’t that how they propelled George Bush back into the White House in 2004 — the same George Bush who has let them down so badly that they are now, finally, demanding change?

But there’s a bigger issue at hand: if the Democrats don’t strenuously address that moment, they don’t deserve the privilege of running this country. Yes, Senator Obama responded in a measured, dignified manner. Yes, political action groups used it in their mailings. But it’s not enough. This revelation — completely antithetical to the Christianity that Republicans so vociferously promote — should be broadcast and re-broadcast until the truth of it is securely planted in voters’ minds: that any group of people who would publicly mock the grass-roots community work that they themselves engage in cannot be trusted with picking the next president.

What Republican voters may not realize is that Senator Obama worked for three years on the South Side of Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization. How is that different — in practice — from the faith-based community organizations that moved George Bush back into the White House in 2004? Republican voters also may not realize that Obama directed Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive that registered 150,000 African-Americans in Illinois. How does that differ — in practice — from the mass voter-registration drives that occurred in Ohio from 2004 to 2006, sponsored and underwritten by the state’s Christian mega-churches, meant to propel Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, to the governorship (a race he ultimately lost)? Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, and Russell Johnson, pastor of the Fairfield Christian Church, formed Reformation Ohio and Ohio Restoration Project to win the state for President Bush in ‘04, propelling him back into the White House for his disastrous second term. And they laughed at community organizing??

I grew up on the blue-collar South Side of Chicago, in an area called Back of the Yards, named for its proximity to the Union Stockyards. My neighborhood was the home of the nation’s first — and still functioning — community council, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. Founded in 1939 by Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, and Joe Meegan, manager of the Chicago Park District's Davis Square Park, the council’s motto is “We the people will work out our own destiny.” According to Robert Slayton’s 1986 book, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy, “As the established representative of the community, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council began working for control, stability, and freedom, articulating goals and realizing them. To do this, the Council not only placed pressure on powerful groups outside the neighborhood, but also dealt with powerful local institutions. During its founding years, the BYNC confronted both the meat-packers and the political system, and emerged victorious. Its power was based on the neighborhood’s new sense of unity and on its leaders’ skills . . . Back of the Yards, though its formal representative, practice[d] participatory democracy in an efficient and meaningful way, using its residents’ energies and skills to create a better community for all.”

For my neighborhood, change came from within. And for Republican voters, change needs to come from within as well: with self-reflection, self-education and the embrace of true compassion, which they are fully capable of doing — as evinced by their community service groups. And this is where the Democrats really need to step up. NOW. Republican, swing and undecided voters need to be shown that truly ugly display of mocking laughter in the hope that they might somehow look within and embrace true change. Those voters need to be shown that moment to prove once and for all that any people who would publicly mock the same community organizing that they themselves engage lack the self-education and self-reflection to pick the next president. And if the Democrats don’t show it to them — and to everyone — they don’t deserve the privilege of running this country.

Books for Barack

2008-09-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

This came from author Ayelet Waldman. If you can spare copies of your books, send them to her!

Hey guys,

We're doing a fundraiser (one of MANY) for Barack out here that's going to include a silent auction. I'd be your best friend if you would send me a signed book. I know I should be offering to buy one and send it to you with a return envelope, but I'm hoping you'll decide to just go ahead and give me one from your stash, and if it was for any other of my philanthropic ventures, I'd do that. But since the world is going to come a fucking end if Obama doesn't get elected, I'm thinking maybe you'd be willing to donate the book and the postage. The event is in 2 weeks...so I'd need it before then. I hope to get a few thousand dollars for this "signed book basket."

I'd also love you forever if you'd ask a few of your friends to send one,too. Turns out I have far fewer email addresses than I thought.

Send to:

Ayelet Waldman
2815 Woolsey Street
Berkeley, CA 94705

At-Home and Online Writing Workshops Taught By Me

2008-05-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

"Sharon's workshop was a mind-expanding, block-busting experience. I walked out of the class with great new material, a wealth of fresh ideas, and renewed creative confidence."

-- Janice Erlbaum, author of the acclaimed memoirs Girlbomb and Have You Found Her? (both from Villard)

"Sharon's workshops at The Poetry Project have always been big hits with the diverse range of students taking them -- the expansive humor, energy and meta-charged language found in her own work translate into a great working and learning environment for writers looking to come into themselves or finish a specific work or both."

-- Anselm Berrigan, author of Zero Star Hotel (Edge Books) as well as many other poetry collections, and former director of the Poetry Poetry at St. Mark's Church

I'm about to start up my fabulous at-home writing workshop again, and this time I'll also offer it online. I'm a published author of seven rockin' books — four poetry collections and two short fiction collections — essays and reviews, recipient of a Fulbright and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in poetry, as well as residencies at MacDowell, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland) and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain). Through the nomination of my MFA teacher, Allen Ginsberg, I was awarded a MacArthur Scholarship, given through Brooklyn College from a gift of John Ashbery. I've taught both live and online fiction and poetry workshops for thirteen years at the New School, and can pretty much guarantee that you will generate amazing stuff via assignments, model texts and discussions — stuff you never thought you had in you. This workshop will be especially good for you if you think you have so-called "writer's block" (a non-existent condition, in my view). If you're interested and want more information, please feel free to email me at shardav @ verizon.net (remember to delete those spaces when you put it in the address field) and I promise to get back to you with great alacrity!

For those interested in the at-home workshop, you must be recommended by someone I know.

How the workshops will run: eight weeks for both the at-home and online, with an option to extend it to ten if things are going well. For both at-home and online, our first "session" will be devoted to figuring out the best project for you to work on, and a strategy for generating ideas toward that end. If you're already working on something but are stuck, we will brainstorm how to get you unstuck. If you don't have a project but just want to simply write, that's absolutely fine; we'll discuss what you're interested in, and how to generate and see your ideas to fruition. For each subsequent session, you'll have an assignment to work on, either connected with the project or free-floating. The subsequent sessions will be devoted to fleshing out the project. If you get new ideas for new pieces along the way, great. We can make detours to pursue new ideas, or discover if these things will feed the project. Everything serves to further. Toward the end of the run we'll begin to think about where to send the work, if that's what you'd like to do. If you don't want to send it anywhere — perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with writing for your own pleasure.

For the online workshop, you'll send me one piece per week that I'll make comments on, and we'll go back and forth in discussions until the following week, when you'll either resubmit that piece or send a new one. As with the at-home workshop, I'll suggest ancillary readings/model texts and give you weekly assignments. And toward the end of the run we'll have the same discussion about where to place the work, if that's what you want to do.

The price for the at-home workshop is $500; the online is $600.

The Virgin Formica ... out at last!

2008-04-08T08:39:00.001-07:00

Please come to the Hanging Loose book party, celebrating The Virgin Formica and the other recently released and fucking brilliant titles:

Indran Amirthanayagam's The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems
Marie Carter's The Trapeze Diaries
Michael Cirelli's Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard
William Corbett's Opening Day
R. Zamora Linmark's The Evolution of a Sigh
Tony Towle's Winter Journey

Friday, May 2 from 6-8pm at Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 2020 (between 36th and 37th Street)
New York, New York

FREE!!! LIQUOR!!! ILLUMINATING CONVERSATIONS WITH DRUNKEN POETS!!!

Flarf Is Life — Flarf Festival '08

2008-04-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

FLARF IS LIFE
2008 Holistic Expo & Peace Conference

THURSDAY, APR 24, 8 PM, DIXON PLACE, 258 BOWERY, $8
Film, neo-benshi, and theater by:

Brandon Downing: Two new short films
Rob Fitterman: Film: Bisquick / Bismarck
Nada Gordon: Neo-benshi: "Uzumaki"
Mitch Highfill: Play: "The Secret History of the '60s"
Rodney Koeneke: Neo-benshi: "Mary Poppins"
Michael Magee: Play: "William Logan: A Sedentary Life"
K. Silem Mohammad & Gary Sullivan: Play: "Chain: A Dialog"
Kim Rosenfield: Neo-benshi: "Meglio Stasera / The Libido Theory"

FRIDAY, APR 25, 7 PM, 300 Bowery, buzz "Sherry/Thomas"
Publication party for new books and DVDs by:

Brandon Downing: Dark Brandon (DVD)
Mitch Highfill: Moth Light
Sharon Mesmer: Annoying Diabetic Bitch
K. Silem Mohammad: Breathalyzer
Mel Nichols: Bicycle Day
Rod Smith: Deed
Gary Sullivan: PPL in a Depot

SATURDAY, APR 26, 6 PM, BOWERY POETRY CLUB, 308 BOWERY, $8
A Segue reading to benefit Bowery Arts and Sciences, featuring:

Shanna Compton
Katie Degentesh
Benjamin Friedlander
Drew Gardner
Nada Gordon
Mitch Highfill
Rodney Koeneke
Michael Magee
Sharon Mesmer
K. Silem Mohammad
Mel Nichols
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
James Sherry
Rod Smith
Christina Strong

With music by the Drew Gardner Orchestra and The Saw Lady.
Hosted by Brandon Downing and Gary Sullivan.

This benefit reading will help keep Segue readings at an affordable $6.

Bettye LaVette in the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center, February 8, 2008

2008-02-10T15:53:00.000-08:00

There’s a strange magic about the years of toil, heartbreak, and humiliation—but only when you can look back on it all from higher ground. For Bettye LaVette, with her backstory of unreleased albums and singles, cancelled tours, and a log-jammed career, her appearance at Lincoln Center last month came as a much-deserved Cinderella finish.

Her comeback began in 2000, with the release of her mysteriously shelved 1972 Atlantic album, Child of the Seventies, continued through 2005’s magnificent I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, and has finally reached its perfectly pitched crescendo with her Grammy-nominated The Scene of the Crime, which debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Blues chart. Just writing these details gives me a chill, as did seeing her sing in the Allen Room in front of floor-to-ceiling windows with a glittering length of Broadway at her feet, as part of Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series. And, judging by the response she got, every single person in that audience must’ve felt the same. But at the same time there was a feeling of everyone — LaVette included — holding their breath.

The last time I saw LaVette perform was in Paris in 2006, at the venerable Montmartre music hall Le Cigale. At that show, she wore the years of toil, heartbreak, and humiliation on her sleeve—with attitude: She introduced her 1962 song “You’ll Never Change” by saying, “This was my second recording, and it did not sell one copy. Not one. Don’t know why you all didn’t buy it.” At her New York show, standing in that elegant room before that incredible vista, she said, “You could never make me believe forty years ago when I was living on the streets of New York that someday I would be here.” But here she was, demonstrating from the very first song perhaps why her career had stalled, but likewise its uncompromising greatness, as she kicked the band into Free’s “The Stealer.” Her material has always been eclectic: Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” Ron Davies’ “It Ain’t Easy” — covered by Three Dog Night and Long John Baldry, but maybe best known for sitting weirdly at the end of Ziggy Stardust — and Kenny Rogers’ “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was in).” And on The Scene of the Crime she retools Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Talking Old Soldiers” in a way that makes the song utterly her own story. That night, her interpretation of “The Stealer” showed off her genius: by turns funky and rockin’, while all the time referencing gospel and blues. She reached back into the bad old days a magical three times, first for 1965’s “Let Me Down Easy,” her signature song, and then even further for “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man,” the single she cut at age sixteen, and then to “Right in the Middle (of Falling In Love)” from her only Motown album, 1982’s Tell Me a Lie. “Close as I’ll Get to Heaven,” from her 2003 W. C. Handy Award–winning CD A Woman Like Me took on new coloration. When she performed it at Le Cigale it was bittersweet — perhaps this was as close to heaven as she was gonna get — but here, with the city at her feet, it was as sweet as a triumphant homecoming, especially when she sang the line “This time for sure I know I’ve broken through the right door,” with everyone at the tables in front smiling and nodding.

She followed that up with “Before the Money Came (the Battle of Bettye LaVette)” from The Scene of the Crime. As the title announces, the song, written by LaVette with Patterson Hood (of the Drive-By Truckers, her backup band on the CD), chronicles the bad old days and celebrates success—with reservations:

There was a time when I would call it luck
 If I got me a gig for fifty bucks 
Now I got all these big decisions to make 
Never thought success would be hard to take

When something appears, something else disappears, and at this stage of the game some artists have suffered some sort of loss. Often it’s their talent. But that’s not the case with LaVette: Her voice is more powerful than ever, her interpretations of material more revelatory. As at Le Cigale, she sang her final song — Sinéad O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got” — alone on the stage, a capella, with special emphasis on that last word, “got.” In 2006 she was almost there. Now, here, what will success’s strange magic impart and at the same time take away? It’s an interesting moment for Bettye LaVette, and for all those who’ve been with her this far.

Annoying Diabetic Bitch and Sonnetailia -- the Book Party!

2008-01-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

Sharon Mesmer and Marc Nasdor cordially invite all of yous
to fête with them on the occasion of the release of their books

Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books)
Sonnetailia (Roof Books)

Thursday, January 24
8pm
Mehanata Bulgarian Bar
113 Ludlow Street
NYC

F/J/M/Z trains to Delancey/Essex
Free admission until 10:30
Cash bar
Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello DJ-ing at 10:30

Drinkin’!
Dancin’!
Rockin’!
Aww yeah!

More info:
http://www.myspace.com/mehanata
http://virginformica.blogspot.com/

Our Celebrities, Our Celebrity Cheese™

2007-12-20T07:21:00.000-08:00

The more corrupt our country gets
the more we love Our Celebrities —
their jobs, their haircuts,
their money.
One year is as another,
and it becomes hard to remember
even the death of one’s own mother
when Nicole Kidman’s Botox issues
stand firmly in the way.

Let's face it: we hate our fat people,
but we love Our Celebrities.
Posh Spice's love life
is more on our daughters' minds than dolls are,
and every damn day
Brangelina dies a little for our sins.
Yea, though I be surrounded by despair,
I shall not let it engulf me,
for you shall take my sufferings from me,
George Clooney.
The darkest and harshest of life’s events
are simply mysteries of gentle benevolence.
Hasn’t Christina Aguilera ministered to this?

When Our Celebrities heard that England
was at the bottom of the European Tree League
they sprung into action with five thousand pounds
of nutrient-rich goo sealed in lard
and swirling with bacteria.
That’s how Celebrity Cheese™ was created.
Celebrity Cheese™ has become the most important
of all celebrity cheeses
in the post-Diana celebrity cheese-making genre.
Celebrity Cheese™ is milk's leap towards immortality.
And somewhere in the world today
lives a Celebrity Cheese Child™
who will change everything.

Our Celebrities are regularly asked,
"Do you make and eat your own cheese?"
Whitney Houston, for example,
packages and finishes her own cheese logs.
And Robin Gibb wants Bulgarian sheep milk cheese
in his dressing room on the day of his concert.

What cheeses would you like to see
in Celebrity Cheese™?
What cheeses would you like to see
in Celebrity Cheese Deathmatch™?

Today I got calls from David Bowie,
Melanie Griffith
and Celebrity Cheese™.
Whose do you think I answered first?

With their basic human themes,
Our Celebrities are one of our most powerful
and personal ways of working out
what we feel about celebrity.
And cheese.

So let's cozy up in celebrity style,
in love with every living being in the universe.
Let's take a good look at Alec Baldwin's chart
to better understand why he would mouth off at his kid.
Yes, there is a lot wrong with this picture.
But I think you'll understand that if I suddenly slip into
my dirty ballerina flats and stained sweater
it's only because I love Jennifer Garner.
I love her and Victor Garber.
I love her and Ben Affleck together.

What is my message?
That we are living in The Great Celebrity Days,
and let’s hold ourselves to that power which gathers
on the celebrity side of transcendence.
Let's drink our fill of love ‘til morning.
Let's gorge ourselves on terrible perfect apples.
And let's accessorize!
Because the ability to accessorize
is what separates us from non-celebrities.
And cheese.

Annoying Diabetic Bitch -- Imminent!

2007-11-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

From Combo Books, in the next few weeks . . .

(The cover came out blue here, for some reason. But it's really sort of champagne colored. Thanks to Christian Palino for a totally rockin' graphic.)

Dream of a Crow/Raven

2007-09-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt a crow or raven landed on my shoulder. I say crow or raven because it was as big as a raven but looked more like a crow. I was in some suburban house with other people, it was cloudy outside, maybe early evening, and the bird landed with its claws on my shoulders and its head above mine, sort of like ...

(That's a falcon. Horus, to be exact, resting upon Khafre. But you get the idea.)

Its claws were light and delicate, like a chickadee's. I said, "This bird is trying to tell me something," and I went into a meditative state, listening. Sadly, I received no message. Then the bird flew, manically, all around the room.

Interpretations . . . ?

To Lydia

2007-09-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

(Lydia Tomkiw, 1959-2007)

You remembered the day we met better than I did. I'm still not completely clear on it; my memory of it has been inflected by your various tellings of it. If you were alive, I could call and ask you to tell me again how it went. Sometimes you'd just go into it — "My God, Sharon . . . you can't fool me . . . I remember you when" — and I hated when you did that. So maudlin, in your "red rum" voice. The same voice that said, "I have at least one bit of information on all my friends that I could ruin their lives with. But I won't." Now I miss that voice. I want to hear it again, telling me anything.

It was 1978, our first day of college, Columbia College, and our first class — Paul Hoover's "Pound, Eliot and Williams." I had actually cried before I left for school that day, knowing that my life would change as soon as I stepped on the 44 Wallace-Racine bus out of the south side. I think I saw you for the first time before class, in the seventh floor lounge, smoking and writing in a notebook, before a vast panoramic view of Grant Park and Lake Michigan. I thought it was cool that you were writing in a notebook — a "journal." I kept a journal, too, 'cause that's what poets did. I wanted to ask you if you were a writer — a poet, like me — but you looked too cool to talk to. Then I saw you again in class. Did you walk in first or did I? I think I did, and watched you make your entrance. Your hair wasn't red yet, but it was down to your ass, and your dark eye makeup was dramatic. How did you get your lashes that long? (An eyelash curler and Maybelline's "Great Lash" in black.) The next part I don't remember, but you did, although now I don't remember how you told it. You must've sat down next to me as I was talking to some hyper gay kid about the punk scene or something. I mentioned I wrote for the Gabba Gabba Gazette (I'd only written one thing for them at that point: a rant about being a teenage punk on the south side). He asked me my name and I said "Sharon Sharalike." "Oh, I read your personals in the Reader all the time," he said. "You're famous!" I was pissed that he knew me from the stupid personals and not from "real" writing (even though what "real" writing had I published? ). I was going to be a famous poet, and this was not an auspicious beginning. He'd said it so fucking loud, too, and I was embarrassed. Mercifully, Paul walked in, and I turned to you and said, "I hate when people think you're famous 'cause you sent in some personals." "Oh, I don't think you're famous," you said, deadpan. Then we both laughed.

I don't remember how things progressed after that, but by winter we were going clubbing every weekend (we groupied Devo together, after their show at the Park West) and you went to my boyfriend Arnie's wake a few months later; he died on the Ides of March, 1979, and you were the first person I called with the news. We'd been with him at the last concert he attended — Elvis Costello at the Aragon Ballroom. We'd stood in line in the freezing cold in the alley, waiting to get in, with Miss Elinka and her boyfriend, Rover. As soon as you walked into the funeral home you pressed a couple of valium into my hand. After the service you took the bus to work (St. Mary's Hospital in Ukrainian Village) and I went to Wax Trax with Joe Bryl, Arnie's best friend. By that time I was in Paul's beginning poetry workshop, you were in the advanced class, you'd dyed your hair red and we were starting a school of poetry: the Neo-Contempo Movement. What was our point? You'd remember. Something along the lines of We're going to write good poetry.

We did our first reading together, at the Paul Waggoner Gallery, April 8, 1980. Instead of reading one after the other we alternated three poems each. The title of one of the poems I read was the name of the perfume you always wore: Night-Blooming Jasmine. I made the poster:

I remember that photobooth session: it was at the Woolworth's on Broadway near Belmont (I think; I wish I could ask you). I wore a black beret and a black and white striped top from Amvets; you wore a black dress. The photos later appeared in the Banyan Press Anthology (sponsors of the Paul Waggoner reading). Your bio: "Lydia Tomkiw, ghetto kid, pom-pom girl, college kid who dresses funny, fond of things priced under 79 cents; dyslexic, arthritic, devout pantheist . . . craves only revenge through fame and a leather couch against her thighs in summer." My bio: "Born 19 years ago. Early honors were spending the entire second grade in the corner and almost getting thrown out of eighth grade for spitting on holy statues. Began writing poetry at 14 and printable poetry at 18 . . . Currently employed as a WMAQ Dancing Dollar." Our work statements: "All art is non-utilitarian . . . if it can't amuse you, if it's not any fun, it has no purpose and is 'useless' and thus is nothing but a waste of time" (you). "During this time of staunch conservatism, I would like my poetry to be heart-wrenching, surprise-giving and easy to dance to" (me).

The Step-Hi: the bar across Harrison Street from Columbia. On the jukebox: "Cleo's Mood," "Satin Doll," "Misty," "Train in Vain," "You Can't Hurry Love." The bartender: Texas Bob. Always on Thursday nights and sometimes in the afternoons. I turned twenty-one there. Twice. I started going out with Tom Corboy (who you had a crush on) there, one night after Paul's workshop. You never let me forget that. (You also went out with Chris Holda before I did; in his poem "Flag" he referred to you as "Veronica Leather.") We both wrote prose poems about the Step-Hi with pinball-playing dwarves in them.

Remember the first poetry slam at Tut's on Belmont in the spring of 1981, put together by Al Simmons. It wasn't called a slam then; what was it called? Jerome Sala was in it, and you went up against Michelle Fitzsimmons who was dressed like a waittress and won. Sue Greenspan yelled "Sell it to Hallmark, bitch!" A riot broke out. I had done blotter acid for the first time the night before.

Remember when Allen Ginsberg came to town and we decided to ask him if he'd let us kidnap him so we could get on the cover of Time magazine and become famous, and he agreed?

Remember when I was going out with Bob1 from Devo and you were going out with Johnny Bentley from Squeeze? Remember the night you, me, Cy K. Delic and Bob1 ended up at the White Castle on Milwaukee Avenue and Cy and Bob1 agreed that you looked like Lily Munster (a good thing)? Remember the drummer from TuTu and the Pirates who liked me? What was his name? Remember when I interviewed Lenny Kaye in his Holiday Inn room? Remember "We're on the guest list"?

Remember how we couldn't keep from laughing at the Robert Bly reading at Mundelein College and some woman told us to leave?

Remember how we used to call each other in the middle of fucking?

Remember when I was your maid of honor and I got into a fight at the reception with your Aunt Lydia? Remember how I knocked over a candelabra and the wax got all over your dress? You had two wedding receptions, one was a Halloween party, and Chris and I came as a B&D couple. You and Donny were Lucy and Ricky. Or were you Carmen Miranda?

Then came problems. My engagement to Chris broke up and I had a breakdown and drank a lot. You were in the foyer of his building, by the mailboxes, when I slit my wrist. We were supposed to be going to Project 1999, on Sheridan Road, to talk to the guy about starting the Gizmo Reading Series. The first time we met him (Ed ... something ... what?) he pointed to the cover of my book, Jayne Mansfield's Head, and said, "This cover is good." Then he pointed to yours — Popgun Sonatas — and said, "This is better." I was jealous of you for some things, and you were jealous of me for others. A few months after I slit my wrist you dumped me with a letter saying I was too out-of-control to deal with, and we didn't speak for many years, the years when you and Donny formed and performed as Algebra Suicide; when Debbie Pintonelli, Connie Deanovich and I started B City; and when Debbie and I went on to do letter eX with Carl Watson. Carl and I moved to New York in 1988, when you were doing Lower Links and seemed incredibly successful, with an international following. I couldn't wait to leave Chicago and live somewhere where people didn't assume I wrote poetry because my boyfriend did. (You, of course, knew the real story.) I saw you again in 1991, when you were in town and Debbie invited you and Donny over to watch me in "Live From Off Center" on PBS. You had long blonde hair, you looked great, and I didn't know if I was happy to be with you again or not. Nothing was re-established that night, but at least we were civil to each other.

Then, I don't know why, I wrote you a letter a few years later. No, I know why: I missed you, and from that night at Debbie's I knew that I must've seemed more together to you. Despite you blowing me off when I needed your strength and humor the most, I missed our intense friendship, totally focused on poetry. You were always the best reader of my work. Your work inspired me. You were my older sister because we came from the same place: working class, immigrant, Eastern-European. Our parents had never gone to high school. Our grandmothers barely spoke English. You wrote me back that you'd been in rehab for alcoholism (alcoholism? you?), Donny left you, Lower Links had gone under, the band was history. You said while you were in the hospital you ordered yourself a room full of flowers from FTD and posed on the bed with a lily on your chest. It didn't sound like you. The whole letter was crazy and flailing and I felt sorry for you. I said maybe you should move to New York and start over. You came for a visit to check things out.

You were supposed to meet me and Bart and Jose and some other people at The Levee for dinner. This was in the days before cell phones so we couldn't call you. But you called at the restaurant and said you'd gone to my place instead, sat on my steps for awhile (just like Lorri Jackson had done), and my downstairs neighbor, Al, had let you in. You'd wait there for me, so we should all just eat dinner and not rush — everything was copacetic. When I got home I almost didn't recognize you: your beautiful hair had been badly permed, your clothes weren't you, your eyes were all wrong. You'd spread pesto on a piece of bread, folded it over, and were eating it like a mouse that'd never eaten before. You said you'd made out with Al. "It wasn't gross," you said. "He didn't have old man smell." When you left after a few days I discovered our vodka had been replaced with water.

Still, New York seemed the place for you. Especially since you'd seen the aurora borealis on the plane coming over, and I'd had a dream about us sitting on a curb in Soho fashioning a mental movie of the story of our lives. Debbie was going to sublet her place to you, you already had a reading at the Poetry Project. It all seemed perfect. We'd be poets together again, as you started over. Your life would turn around.

It didn't happen that way.

Lydia, I hate myself for behaving. I didn't used to behave, but somewhere along the way I got whittled away by bad boyfriends and negative poet-friends into behaving. Into being afraid. You, on the other hand, never stooped to behaving. That was what drove people away — it's what drove me away. I was so angry at you. I still am. But I love how you were never afraid, in a way. You wanted to feel like the most beautiful, smartest person in the room, but when you drank to feel that way you were the opposite. Still, you'd go to any length to get that feeling back, and I understand because I had that feeling once, too. You were there to see it.

You told me not to tell you about the problems I was having with a mutual friend, then you went and talked to him about me. Did you tell him I'd gone to an AA meeting with you when you asked? Did you tell him about the Chicago concert at Jones Beach? When we sat in the half-empty stands (it was Chicago, after all) with the wind off the water almost blowing our words away and I told you I was jealous that you seemed completely okay with getting drunk and barrelling around and letting your life go to hell, while I obsessed about every word I said? You said you understood how I could feel that way. I said I knew you were trying to keep it together, but it was too frustrating to hear your "red rum" voice every time I called, or you called. Too frustrating to have to wonder what was happening to you, if you were still alive. Because you were once so utterly alive. I learned how to be alive from you.

We had some really horrible times. Like that weekend at the house with Bart and Nina. I was angry with you, I yelled at you. I'm so sorry. But when we were making plans I asked you to please not drink, just as an experiment: with all your friends around, you'd see how you didn't need it. But you were drunk when you got in the car (you always smelled a certain way — salty — when you drank vodka). You spent the whole weekend in bed. On the floor, a bottle of vodka was visible in your purse. At some point you came up to me and said, "Don't hate me." I did hate you, and I didn't. You were stepping all over my attempt to get you to not drink so you could see that you didn't need it. There'd be no pressure to perform. In fact, we could all be as ugly, boring, and untalented as we deeply feared we were. It would be okay because we so weren't. You most of all.

Right now, the person I want to cry with most of all is you. Even though during the last months you lived in NYC you were the last person I could talk to. You betrayed me so many times, in little and big ways. And I betrayed you, too, ultimately. For that I am truly sorry.

When I was in Chi in 2004 for AWP and staying at Karen Volkman's apartment in Ukrainian Village I walked over to look at the house where you lived with your parents when we first became friends in 1978. Standing outside in the cool March night, the first time I was back in Chi since my mother died, I really wanted to call you and tell you I was standing in front of your old house and it looked exactly the same (I could almost smell the gangrene stench from your downstairs neighbor's apartment) but I couldn't get a number from Phoenix info. And it made sense that the connection had been been broken. But not lost: it still existed somewhere because there was still palpable proof in the landscape — we had been there. Some things still stand, and can't be ruined. There's always a moment outside of time, when all the hurts and resentments go away and you're left looking at the physical proof that something beautiful and important really did exist once.

We both know it did.

A Pig Grows In Brooklyn

2007-04-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of last week a sad thing happened: the crazy bitch whose yard is next to the yard behind ours decided to have her tall, healthy cherry tree cut down. This tree gave everyone who could see it a lot of pleasure when it bloomed in the spring: beautiful white blossoms against the blue sky and a graceful, mottled shade . . .

And then when the cherries came out the squirrels and birds ate them. So last week she had the crack-addled, chain-smoking, dentally-challenged tree surgeon who cut down her long-dead ailanthus (hail, ailanthus) earlier in the year come back, and he and his crew made quick work of the tree. Because I had loved the tree and wanted to mourn its passing I forced myself to watch as they severed the last and tallest bough and cut the trunk down to the stump. My downstairs neighbor, Chris, participated in the mourning ritual, too, by sending photos of the tree to our other neighbors who'd also loved it. For days we looked out our back windows at the spot where the tree had been and felt really bad. It had been a bad week anyway: first the tree, then Virginia Tech, and then Sludgie the Whale died in the Gowanus.

Yesterday afternoon my husband, David, was looking out the kitchen window as I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom.

"Oh my God," he said. "There's a pig running around back here."

Sure enough, there was a big grey-black pig rooting around in the yard next to the yard that's next to crazy-tree-cutting-bitch's yard (can you picture that?). Several people stood on the deck looking down on it, bemused. Chris and his partner Jack were in the backyard, sitting in chairs, oblivious to the pig action going on near them. I called Chris on his cell. He and Jack climbed on a bench, looked over the fences, and saw it, too.

When we ran into Chris and Jack later in the building, as we were going out to a concert at BAM, they told us they'd gotten the story: the woman who lives in the house had been on vacation somewhere about ten years ago and found a four-month old piglet. She'd brought it back to Brooklyn with her and tried to get various parties to adopt it, but all had told her they'd euthanize it. So she raised it herself. The funny thing was, for years we'd been hearing strange sounds coming from that house -- like some kind of mad parrot/changeling. Chris and I imagined some helpless half-man, half-parrot/changeling bound to a wheelchair, and so we named it The Pigman. Little did we know it was a pig. We'd never been able to see into that yard because of crazy-tree-cutting-bitch's beautiful, opulent, prolific cherry tree next door, with its profusion of blossoms in the spring, its thick cover of leaves in the summer, and its trunk (and the shadow of its trunk) in the fall and winter. The removal of the tree revealed an interesting story.

I still miss the tree, but I really enjoy watching the pig . . .

A Reading At Poggenpohl Studio

2007-04-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

My friend Lisa, who always knows about totally weird cool things, got an announcement for a reading at the Poggenpohl Studio on Park Avenue South. I knew that Poggenpohl makes, you know, high-end, design-y kitchens, so I couldn't picture a reading there (being a veteran of readings in, mostly, dandruff-y bookstores and damp-smelling galleries for the most part, although I did once read in front of a thousand or so students at the morning assembly of a high-falutin' private school in New Jersey, and for $500 I wouldn't do it again). But, yeah, it was at the Poggenpohl Studio (showroom), and there was a spread of savory and dainty hors d'oeuvres and top shelf-ish sparkling wines and men with good hair and woolen scarves and women with perfectly half-considered make-up and pointy-toed shoes. A writer named Akiko Busch read from her new book, Uncommon Life Of Common Objects: Essays On Design And The Everyday. The excerpt she read was about Sam Farber and how he founded his company, OXO (this next part isn't from her book, but it'll give you an idea what she read about):

In 1960, Sam Farber founded the successful kitchenware maker Copco, Inc. Before this, he had worked for 11 years for his father Louis, who owned Sheffield Silver. Farber's uncle Simon had founded Farberware in 1900. After 39 years in the kitchenware business himself, Sam Farber retired in 1988 at age 66. With all those years of experience, it wasn't until retirement that Farber realized the impact of his family's business on people with disabilities.

Shortly after retirement, Sam and his wife, Betsey, rented a home in Provence, France for two months. Betsey had developed arthritis and the available kitchenware at their rented home was difficult and painful for her to use. The more cooking they did together, the more inadequate the utensils seemed. Betsey's discomfort forced Sam to wonder, "Why can't there be wonderfully comfortable tools that are easy to use?"

In 1989, Sam Farber decided to unretire and establish Oxo International to produce kitchenware with older and disabled users in mind. Farber chose the name because it could be read horizontally, vertically, or upside down.

from: http://www.design.ncsu.edu:8120/cud/projserv_ps/projects/
case_studies/oxo.htm

Akiko Busch's excerpt highlighted the kindness and humanity that can be inherent in the most innocuous objects; we just need to look. It was a nice moment and I think I may buy the book used on Amazon at some point (it's $30).

Lisa and I sat listening behind an expensive metal Poggenpohl table, drinking our sparkling wine. We didn't know anyone there. People walking by outside looked in quizzically. After the reading was over we moved to another expensive metal Poggenpohl table and continued eating, drinking, talking. We didn't notice time passing. Then, over by where the reading was, at the back, came the sound of loud singing into a microphone, like you might hear at a wedding in New Jersey. It was close to eight by then, and we figured this was how they were throwing people out. But it was just the showroom staff, drunk-ish, reading from the book as from the Bible in ponderous tones. Somebody mentioned Jesus, and I gave the "rock on!" hand signal. Some guy who works at the showroom asked Lisa and I if we were Polish. He said he used to go out with a Polish girl, and he always could tell when someone was Polish -- by their eyes. Then he asked if he could show us something. Uh-oh. But it was photos of his incredibly cute six-month old daughter. You know how babies are ugly (oh, be honest!)? How they all look like Yoda (but uglier)? Well, this kid was beautiful. Like the Virgin Mary in Fra Lippo Lippi's "Madonna and Child with Two Angels" at the Uffizi. We congratulated the guy, and extended the sentiment to his wife. What else do you say? I felt like saying, Well, she'll be a hideous teenager, but once she grows out of that she'll be okay. Hopefully. Personally, I was ugly until I was nineteen, after my Freddy Mercury teeth finally got fixed.

Then Lisa and I wanted to leave, and so we excused ourselves to go the bathroom. We were young on the punk scene in Chicago, and so we always went to the bathroom with our friends, and like back then I averted my eyes while Lisa peed in the high-end Poggenpohl bathroom (in their medicine chest was a copy of Architectural Digest).

Walking out into the faintly rainy evening, we laughed about how Lisa and her husband and me and my husband all have the same doctor now, and Lisa said that she and Geoff often run into him on the street in their neighborhood, and he never acknowledges them.

If they ever have a reading at Poggenpohl again we're definitely going.

Nick Piombino's Fait Accompli

2007-04-11T17:53:00.001-07:00

I hate blogs. I agree with what Artaud said:

"People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs."

Of course I myself have come out of nowhere to try to put into words many parts of what goes on in my mind. And I have a blog. That makes me a pig (plus I live near a pig -- see "A Pig Grows in Brooklyn"). Or, at the very least, ambivalent.

Nick Piombino has something interesting to say about ambivalence:

"The ability to tolerate ambivalence, or ambiguity, can create an opportunity to wonder, to wander, daydream, to think, to puzzle or figure things out. Full circle: isn't this often what is wanted from artistic expression in the first place?"

That quote is from Nick's recent book, fait accompli, a compilation (or, rather, a mindful layering) of blog and journal entries covering many years (the blog entries span 2/03 - 5/03, but the journal entries reach back into the '70's). I read it in its entirety during my almost three-hour wait at the podiatrist's office today (I re-broke a bone). The book is absolutely redolent with the possibilities of thought(s), the opportunities created by situations and/or absence of. Here's an entry, perhaps my favorite:

"How easy it is to turn away from the difficult and obscure and how natural it is, in order to live. But inside here, in the ordered and still world of words and images it is as equally natural to pause before the opaque and the mysterious and to comtemplate the unknown and the unknowable ...

"Of all the many things that are hard to do, and even almost impossible sometimes, the hardest thing there is to do is wait and see."

On this beautiful day I'm re-reading Nick's book and re-thinking my blog, wondering if I can make it the record of a brilliant and fascinating mind -- as Nick's is.

Fascist Girlfriend

2007-04-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag,
And you will soon discover that your fascist girlfriend
Is some fascist’s ex-girlfriend.
She will deploy evil sexual sponges,
Annoying sing-a-longs while driving,
And her whole “dance-of-light-with-several-scarves" thing
Will suddenly seem all strung-out (sort of).
All those lovely mornings-after
Will be bourgeois attacks on nationalism
With five fascist planes always circling overhead.
Boy, you shouldn’t have to pay for that, if you’re a union man.
Besides, you’re fighting against fascism for The Girlfriend
Who Wants To Get Herself Pregnant By Hitler.
She’s a fascist meme transmitter,
A garden-variety corrupt Republican a-hole.
And there’s some consensus among the young
That certain fully-brained girlfriends exhibit the ten distinct fascist features of
Former Trotskyite right-wing chicken-butt Klingons.
Musharaff isn’t exactly a populist, but isn’t he more nationalist
Than your fascist girlfriend?
I mean, she thinks “Starship Troopers” was a good movie —
The sign of a true fascist.
Look – this is Saddam, this is Mussolini,
And this is your girlfriend’s crack.
Or maybe her dad’s.

(from Annoying Diabetic Bitch, forthcoming from Combo Books, fall 2007)

Fetish Model Life Partner

2007-04-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

The biblical strategy for choosing a fetish model life partner
is to seek Jesus in prayer.
You just need to be ready for His direction.
You must abide in Him.
Then again it may be easier
if you could find a dolphin with a foot fetish,
and make him into Jesus’s personal sex slave.
Then again, this begs a question:
what would the Jesus I know do,
when confronted by Fetish Model Life Partner Jesus?
Would he fight him?
Then again, "anyone who tries to make a distinction
between education and entertainment
doesn't know the first thing about either" —
Marshall MacLuhan.
Then again, all I want is to be Jesus
at the Fetish Model Easter Party.
First I'm laid out on a pink marble slab,
with only a wisp of loincloth about me,
and then my fetish model life partner,
who is Jesus,
and sounds like a flock of geese passing gas over Brooklyn,
chokes me until I begin to worship football equipment.
Then he helps me with my pig training.
I am the writer/fetish model/cultural historian wife
of Marilyn Manson.
I am sinewy with an elk fetish hole cover
and the restlessness of Adlai Stevenson
who carried on a messy pussy blowjob affair
with farm animals despite pubic lice.
I am Corn, the famous Italian fetish model,
a 5 ' 10 " metal vocalist/student-goth,
with long dark blonde hair and blue green eyes .
Im curvy and told that Im very pretty.
Fetish model pretty I guess . . .
but whatever.
I heard that Fetish Model Life Partner Jesus
had a dream girl for several thousand years
and a tampon fetish.
Does that make him a filthy commie?
I sincerely hope not.

(from Annoying Diabetic Bitch, forthcoming from Combo Books, fall 2007)

Atomic Bitch Wax

2007-04-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

A play starring the Olsen Twins
Setting: a bench in Washington Square Park

Mary Kate: All my heroes are dope fiends.

Ashley: I wish I were Ronald McDonald and weighed three hundred pounds. Then I would rape you.

Mary Kate: I don't believe it is possible for impaired people to rape.

Ashley: Why not? George W. Bush just broke into our backyard and raped our favorite kitty.

Mary Kate: Maybe if we raped him back he'd give it up and stand up for something important. I think the Olsen Twins should sing to him about love and freedom.

Ashley: And small nude art boys raping big nude patriot cheerleaders.

Mary Kate: I love the 50 daily effects of white privilege. Native Americans don't bitch about how the Olsen Twins raped and pillaged their people.

Ashley: No, they love forced feminization

Mary Kate: Remember when we lived in the underground tunnel to the official Olsen twins biography that contained photos from the whole Olsen family?

Ashley: That's where you unleashed your warrior ass tits of torture!

Mary Kate: Location?

Mary Kate and Ashley: Inside your momma!

Ashley: I like it when the cleaning people don't actually move the vacuum. That's when you know they're FBI thugs.

Mary Kate: Wow, I'd hate to see Bill O'Reilly have to face that alone.

Ashley: I hate him for making me be born white.

Mary Kate: I hate Scott Baio. He has no love for me at all. That's fine. I don't blame him really. We were never friends and I threatened his baby. I'd hate me too.

Ashley: Usually, I’m all like, “Don’t you fucking look at me.” 'Cause I hate people who look at me.

Mary Kate: I hate that Paypal doesn't want slain soldiers' families to receive aid.

Ashley: I hate Mexicans who hate Paypal.

Mary Kate: Mexicans hate eeeevvvverrryboooody! THEY FUCK OUR BEST LOOKING WOMEN, PLAY THEIR CRAP SHIT OVER ROCK OR COUNTRY and then mime over the credits of "Charles in Charge."

Ashley: Which ethnic group does Scott Baio hate?

Mary Kate: I would love to go total Amistad slave ship cartoon toilet Olsen Twins on his ass.

Ashley: What do you love about Amsterdam?

Mary Kate: The architecture, riding round on a bike, local women on bikes (I love the bikes), and balding, elfin-eared Francois, who enters a hooker in a window.

Ashley: Do you know why pirates love parrots?

Mary Kate: Do you know why you love God? Do you think often of God? Do you think much of him? Do you love to think of God? And when you do think of him, is it with delight, or with dread?

Ashley: Needless to say, once I was able to help a sista make a new friend my DREAD turned into DELIGHT. And yes I missed church. Or did I ... ?

Mary Kate: What do you think of my atomic bitch wax?

Ashley: I'm in love with your atomic bitch wax. I'm gonna marry it. It's probably legal now. It seems to me that you have all the bases covered. I mean come on, is there anything else you could really offer past the Emergency Atomic Bitch Wax Removal Kit?

Mary Kate: You are a fucking fat former model trying desperately to be the replacement for fatness.

Ashley: Hey, I hate Tyra!

Mary Kate: I hate having to hit a tee shot linearly over a cart path. The world is not all big greens, but big and small, huge and tiny. ...

Ashley: I would like to rape her, though.

Mary Kate: Me too.

(from Annoying Diabetic Bitch, forthcoming from Combo Books, fall 2007).

Famke Janssen

2007-04-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

I would like to be her Toodle Boople
And she could be my Poodle Boople.
And from that comfort zone,
Famke and Rebecca Romjin could pretend
To undress each other,
Or at least undress each other’s poodles.
I’d like to dye Famke’s poodle mauve,
And I know how I’d do it, too –
Kool-Aid.
It should also be mentioned
That not only does Famke have a giant ass,
She also has a very powerful mind
And a hoo-hoo like Tura Satana’s
That snaps into action at the first sign of trouble.
And speaking of poodles,
Have you heard about the many children
Forced out of Eric Estrada’s cocker spaniel?
It must’ve been painful
Like Famke’s lasik surgery in British Columbia.

(from Annoying Diabetic Bitch, forthcoming from Combo Books, fall 2007)

Annoying Diabetic Bitch

2007-04-03T13:36:00.000-07:00

Combo Books is publishing my flarf collection, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, this fall (thank you, Michael Magee). In celebration of this long-awaited literary event, I'll be posting selections from ADB until it comes out. Here's the title poem (which will be featured in the upcoming Spring issue of LIT magazine) ...

ANNOYING DIABETIC BITCH

You annoying diabetic bitch.
You anorexic bulimic diabetic bitch.
You dumb annoying talentless diabetic bitch, eat some diabetes.
You and your bitch monster diabetic junkhead father,
and your diabetic cat, your pathetic geriatric diabetic cat that eats birds —
bitch birds —
you fuck-ass body monster, you're lulling me into a diabetic coma
like that annoying secretary from Ally McBeal, you cold British diabetic bitch-dick.
Look — I've played a hooker, a diabetic inmate requiring hormones,
a divorced shit-ass son-of-a-bitch, a kitsch bitch, an idiot, and — oh fuck it,
all this diabetes is making me into a bitch.
Go eat your diabetes, bitch,
I have never seen someone so loud and moronic and annoying and diabetic.
The last thing I need to find out is that I am diabetic,
someone with six diabetic relatives who beat each other to death
with their own shoes.
Is there a chat room? Because this is just fucking annoying.
Just take into account that I am a heartless bitch, Millicent.
I have a kick-ass diabetic section and I'll turn you into a diabetic.
I'm what's called a pre-emptive diabetes bitch.
Top model bitch, you do not want to be a diabetic in a
typepad-cum-hammer/peg situation
I can be extremely diabetic, and you can be only slightly diabetic.
So that's Queen Bitch to you bitch,
you're annoying like a fucking annoying
diabetic bitch.

My Roast of Nada Gordon (and Nada's Response)

2007-04-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

(I roasted Nada Gordon at the party celebrating the release of her fabulous poetry collection, Folly —— which, by the way, is dedicated to ME! —— at the home of James Sherry on Sunday, April 1.)

First of all, I'd like to say -- wow. Just look at all the literati gathered here today. If assholes could fly this place would be an airport.

What can you say about a woman who is admired, revered, and loved by everyone? Well, I'll start by saying she’s not the woman we’re honoring today. But before I talk about our guest of honor, I’d really like to introduce several people who do admire and revere her. I'd really like to, but there’s no one here like that, so I’ll just talk about her myself.

Nada Gordon ... you know we all admire you. And I think you’re beautiful. And as for smart…well … you are REALLY beautiful. But seriously, I love your face, Nada. Can I borrow it for a few weeks? ‘Cause my ass is going on vacation.  And you’ve got some style, too. What a great, eclectic style you have. Who picks your clothes, Nada? The Happy Bollywood Hooker?

But I admire Nada – she doesn't know the meaning of the word “failure.” And that’s not the only word she doesn't know the meaning of. But don’t worry, Nada. Brains aren’t everything. In fact in your case they’re nothing. With most people, the left side of your brain does some things, and the right side does others. In Nada's case, however, neither side seems to do a whole lot.

But seriously, I don’t think Nada is stupid, or a bad poet. But what’s my opinion compared to thousands of others? You all probably think I met Nada on the poetry scene, but I actually met her at a pagan ritual. A lot of you probably don’t know this but Nada worships nature. In spite of what it did to her.

After hearing this, you people may not think Nada and I are actually good friends. But we really are. There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face. Both of ‘em.
Seriously, one thing I really do admire about Nada is her sensual nature. She is a beautiful, sensous woman. Did you all know Nada recently failed her driver’s test? She couldn’t get identify the front seat. But I love Nada’s always been a swinger. Did you all know she sleeps standing up, so the implants won’t move? Right now, Gary’s mad ‘cause Nada cut him down to once a month. But he’s lucky -- I know two guys she cut off completely.

But despite her reptuation, Nada never puts on airs. Shit, after all the eating she does, she has enough trouble just putting on her pants. But seriously, for a second, a tragic thing happened to Nada recently. She got her belly dancing and Riverdancing classes mixed up and she got kicked out of Riverdancing for using her arms.

But enough about the bad things. What about the good things? One good thing I know for sure is that Nada is a committed poet who knows everything there is to know about poetry. Except how to write it.

Okay, seriously, some people say nasty things about Nada and her poetry. Like, she has so much wonderful poetry in her; too bad it never gets out. Like, her poetry is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good. Like, she's a bad poet's idea of a good poet. But I don't feel that way at all. I feel like, when I think of all the poets I most respect and admire in this world, I know Nada is right up there with them. Serving them drinks.

* * * * * * * * *

Nada's response: "You have such wonderful stage presence. For a retard."

A Cool Thing

2007-03-27T09:41:00.001-07:00

Nietzsche Circle presents the premiere of

REQUIEM AETERNAM DEO
A Play for Everyone and Nobody

Written and directed by Fulya Peker

Date: March 22nd - April 15th, Thurs - Sun

Place: The Kraine Theater, 85 E. 4th Street, between 2nd & 3rd Ave., first floor
(no wheelchair access)

Time: Thurs - Sat at 7:30 PM, Sun at 3 PM

Tickets: $15 or $10 for students. Purchase tickets through Smarttix or at the theater the night of the event. Advance sales are highly recommended.

Your Invitation to the First-Ever Poetry Roast

2007-01-31T13:19:00.000-08:00

Winter will warm up again on Tuesday, 13 February, when Mercury goes retrograde and the insults start flying at ...

THE ROAST OF SHARON MESMER & BRENDAN LORBER

Dress appropriately -- it's going to get uncomfortably hot, at least under the collar. We suggest a tuxedo or gown tastefully accessorized with a martini glass or maybe something simple that you won't mind getting mud slug on.

Be advised: NOTHING WILL BE OFF LIMITS

The secret shames & foibles of both roastees & the untold failings of our knavish panel of roasters will be exploited for cheap, unfair laughs. The horrible thing that just popped into your mind? That's what'll be dredged up & made fun of.

THE LIVINGROOM LOUNGE
23rd Street at 5th Ave
in South Slope Brooklyn
Tuesday 13 February 8PM

THE PANEL OF ROASTERS: Brandon Downing, Todd Colby, Carlos Reynoso, Kim Lyons, Edwin Torres, Matt Easton, Ian Bascetta, Aaron Kiely, Mitch Highfill, Rich O'Russa & others.

THE ROASTMASTERS: Jim Behlre & Tracey McTague

THE FORMAT: The panelists, cruelly introduced by the roastmasters, will defame, cut down & level gross injustice upon the two roastees. Then Mesmer & Lorber will respond.

YOUR ROLE: Eat, Drink, witness people being contrary.

FREE ADMISSION!
FREE FOOD!
FREE INSULTS!
SOMEWHAT CHEAP BOOZE!

Check out lungfull! for updates on the roaster roster & other details.

The roast comes from a long & ignominious tradition in America. Some say that The Roast, rather than jazz, is the one true American art form. If that helps you come to terms with this, that is, if you have to elevate a night of ribbing & ribaldry to High Art then, well, we'll remember this when you get roasted in 2008. But the rest of us are just here to enjoy the insults — for one night there'll be no backstabbing nor solipsistic blogging — it'll all be straightforward blows to the face & gut.

DIRECTIONS: LIVINGROOM LOUNGE. Take R or M to 25th Street, walk 2 blocks to 23rd then make a right. Uphill one block. 245 23rd St.

DEFINITION OF THE ROAST: According to wikipedia, a roast is an event in which an individual is subject to publicly bearing insults, praise, outlandish true and untrue stories, and heartwarming tributes. It is seen as an honor to be roasted, as the individual is surrounded by friends and well-wishers, who can receive some of the same treatment during the course of the evening. The party and presentation itself are both referred to as a roast. The host of the event is called the roastmaster. It is also known as a burn, as one is insulted various peers will call "Burn!" In short, it is both the opposite and the same as a "toast".

The Friars Club has held celebrity roasts in private since the 1920s. Only recently has the public been invited to see them. Dean Martin hosted a series of roasts on television during the 1960s and 1970s as part of The Dean Martin Show. The humor at these broadcast tributes was far tamer than the sometimes extremely vulgar and explicit language of the private, non-televised ones.

Fond Memories of Spring

2007-01-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

Blue-Collar Typeface

2007-01-29T08:52:00.000-08:00

“Gotham 2003: This plain yet quintessential font was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and is based on vernacular architectural lettering
found throughout New York City. It is a blue-collar typeface that is both utilitarian and perfectly simple.”

From the colophon to Aaron Simon’s Carrier, Insurance Editions, 2006

Some people would like to be blue-collar
without actually having been born blue-collar.
They take visibly rigid stances against,
for instance,
public television
and eating in restaurants,
because public television
and eating in restaurants is
“bourgeoise,”
while you,
who were born blue-collar,
kind of like public television,
and walk past those very same restaurants
wishing you could afford something more
than the Wendy’s salad bar.
Some people are proud of how blue-collar they are
when they speak roughly to waiters,
never look them in the eye,
tip them miserably,
and refuse to pay to get into poetry readings,
while afterwards
they’re back home
putting their Manhattan co-op on the market
so they can buy a house on the outskirts of Paris.
Some of these people are so anxious to prove
just how blue-collar they are
they will say things like,
“Well, at least you have a grinding truck,”
when you tell them over the phone
that the grinding truck has pulled up outside,
never mind that they’re in the process of closing
on their house on the outskirts of Paris.
Some of these people are your friends.
They will surprise you.
Because someday you will discover
that all that time they seemed so interested in what you had to say about your
blue-collar upbringing
they never found actual blue-collar people
all that interesting.
Because a blue-collar person can’t recommend them to an editor
or get them into an MFA program
or set them up with a teaching job
or introduce them to important
(i.e., non-blue-collar)
people in Paris.
Blue-collar people often don’t care about
academic poetry,
the breaking of the line,
and they may not necessarily give a shit about anything
Noam Chomsky ever said.
But that doesn’t mean that blue-collar people are
“utilitarian” or “perfectly simple.”
I know lots of useless, imperfectly complicated
blue-collar people.
And their line breaks
can kick your line breaks’
ass.

Is This What It's Come To? Really?

2007-01-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

Back in September, when my severely broken foot had four rods poking out of it and I was getting around on a walker, I called a writer friend to ask if she could sub for me for the first day of my fiction class at the New School. I got her machine, so I left a message that it would be just the first day: hand out the syllabus, explain to them why I wasn't there, take attendance ... that's all. I told her I could pay her $50. She never called back, so I asked my department if they could get someone. They chose another teacher, and graciously paid her a guest speaker fee so that I wouldn't have to shell out.

Yesterday I ran into this friend at an event at the New School. She said the reason she never called me back about subbing was that she was deeply offended that I would ask her to do it for only $50.

"What about my time getting ready?" she demanded. "And the time it takes to get there and back on the subway? I was so offended, Sharon, because I respect you so much and I thought you were my friend."

I asked her why she didn't just call me back — we could've discussed a higher rate.

"I shouldn't have to bargain with you."

I explained to her that $50 was all I could reasonably offer because I was looking at having to pay $75 a week for fifteen weeks just to get myself to school and back in a car service, because as part-time faculty I don't qualify for disability, and the school has no provision for reimbursements like that.

"That's none of my business," she said, and turned away.

She Over Brooklyn

2007-01-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

Carthage and Fusion

2007-01-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

She would yet make amends
croaking and complaining
the harvest was late
there stood a strange dog
by the wire fence that circled the haystack
a row of red winged girls
clad only in a cause
thin bit of the weekend and of the fright
together shared
thanked

To search a muslin
which a pamphlet scarce covered

Blur of homesickness
of many pleasant evenings
the wind sang dismally
sickened blackbirds
like a string of jet beads
waiting for oat structure

She served dinner to a long line of stoppers
she was Lys, and she was
teaching brute spacecraft
along the danger-infested way
known as the Red River frame
and the corners

The guests at table were a typical pioneer group
a joiner at each side
homesteaders
speculators
machine men journeying through the country
loudly recommending and gesticulating
forced to take to dairy products
to crab trees
to escape the clutches --
wildly
competitive

So spent in her little shack
with the same wind making eerie music
of the boys she had not seen
since the winter before
and while she finished the fashion called saddle
she discussed neighborhood matters with them --
the pleasing
see sex unharmed

A huge brute
just the litter bin --
and his foot reached the cliffs when --

Yesterday and today were separated by a gulf
a sizzle of eggs
frying on a hot pan
making a running accompaniment

Whatever can be done to a house
to spoil its appearance
had been done to her words
wide as death itself

She was so close
to selling machinery
to harvesting grain
not yet grown

(this poem currently appears on morton hurley's
blog anthology of spam poetry)

"In Ordinary Time" (1)

2007-01-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

(title story from the collection In Ordinary Time, Hanging Loose Press, 2005)

-1-

The cab from Midway Airport turns right at the Tootsie Roll factory, crosses the boundary of south side to suburb, and sails past the now-empty State Road house. As the cab takes a left at 79th, en route to Cousin Snooky’s place, I keep my eye on the house until it disappears behind the Walgreen’s. What’s awaiting me there, I wonder, now that Ma’s not there? To begin with, five generations of family history going back to Poland to sort through before I put the house up for sale, and only three weeks to do it.

It's early evening and dark, with a crisp two inches of new snow on the ground. As the cab pulls into the driveway, past the fiberglass wishing well and St. Francis statue, Snooky appears with her arms open, smiling. I haven’t seen her in seventeen years. Her red hair is blonde now. She looks like the mature Debbie Reynolds.

"Hiya honey," she whispers, embracing me. “It’s good to see ya. It’s been so long.”

“Thanks for letting me stay with you, Snooks,” I say as I breathe in her signature “Vanilla Fields” cologne which, mingled with the winter air, reminds me of Christmas when I was a kid.

“Oh, honey, you’re my godchild and I’d do anything for ya. You got a big job ahead of you, too. I just wish I could help you more, but I got that little balloon in me now and the doctor says I can’t exert myself.”

We eat dinner — “Friendship Chicken,” her specialty — at the little table in the corner of her kitchen. A figure skating competition plays on the black and white TV perched on the corner of the counter: Olympic gold medalist Oksana Baiul’s emotional comeback. She’s shaky, she falls, she gets a shitty score, but a standing ovation from the crowd anyway.

“Oh, my God,” Snooky whispers, voice quavering. “Wasn’t that wonderful?”

The phone rings. Brushing away tears, Snooky gets up to answer it.

“I bet that’s my mom,” I say, and get up, too.

“Hello? Oh my God, Frannie! Sharon just said it’d be you. She must be psychopathic!” She passes the phone to me.

“Did you start on the house yet?” Ma wants to know. “I wanna know if you found the Thorn. I think it’s between my mattresses in a little box. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away, okay? It’s from the Cr0wn of Thorns, you know.”

“I know, Ma, I know. But I haven’t even been over there yet. I just got here an hour ago. I’m going first thing tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’m just sayin’. Don’t get all hyped up. Put Snooks back on, will ya?”

I hand the phone back and sit down. On the TV, the words “Stop Feeling Everything” appear. A message to me from the ether? No, just an ad for shock absorbers.

After Snooky hangs up we do dishes — I wash, she dries.

“The last time I was in this house I was twenty-one,” I say. “God, that was a long time ago. Do you remember that time? Right before I was going to get married? Ma brought me over here so I could talk about calling off the wedding with you and your mother. We all sat at the table over there —”

“That time you slit your wrist. Oh, that was a terrible time. You were such a rebel back then. But that guy really was no damn good.”

“Everyone was so adamant that I call the wedding off.”

“So . . . ada-what, honey? I don’t know that word.”

“Everyone was so insistent that I call the wedding off. And your mom told me that story about how your stepfather used to hit her.”

“That’s right. Drunkie John they called him. Oh, he was no damn good, either. But God rest his soul anyway. When he got drunk he usta tell my mother that if she didn’t give him sex he’d get it from me. That’s why Grandma Mesmer raised me at her house. My mother didn’t want me there when he was there. If my real father had lived, life woulda been real different. But John was a nice man when he wasn’t drinkin’. You know how my mother met him? He was the milkman! Oh, she had so many boyfriends around the neighborhood, after my father died. Probably when he was still alive, too. He just turned the other cheek. Did I ever tell you he was the seventh son of a seventh son? And his one brother, Basil, could talk to trees — he was a healer. He would just put his hands on people and heal them. His other brother, though . . . His name was Elmer, and he married a big, mean, red-headed woman and they had a tavern with a whorehouse upstairs called the Bucket o’ Blood, over by Sherman Park. All the gangsters used to drink there. He ran the tavern and she ran the whorehouse. After my dad died my mother hung out there, with the gangsters. Can ya beat that? Jesus, I don’t wanna think about half the stuff she did . . .”

After the dishes are put away we go into the living room. Snooks says she wants me to see something really beautiful on TV.

“It’s the . . . how do you call ‘em? The Royal Lippi-something Stallions? You know, the white horses? They perform to classical music, and it’s just gorgeous. You’ll watch them, and you’ll feel better about yourself and everything.”

She puts a tape into the VCR. After the opening credits (and some harp music) there’s a trumpet fanfare, and six Royal Lipizzaner stallions gallop in sync out of a dry-ice fog. Together they rise up on their hind legs, and then jump and kick. “The Blue Danube Waltz” begins, and they prance in time. I steal looks at Snooky watching from the couch, smiling and shaking her head. I recall how glamorous and beautiful I thought she was when I was little, with her red hair and red lipstick and the emerald green dresses she always wore when we saw her on holidays.
After it’s over she asks me what I thought, and I tell her it was nice. She looks crestfallen.

“You didn’t like it, did you?”

“No, it was really nice. I’m glad we watched it.”

She gets up from the couch, smiling to herself, and walks toward one of the bedrooms.
“I shoulda known it wasn’t your style. You go all over the world. You’ve seen a lot of things. But I like it, and I wanted to watch it with you.”

“Snooks . . . “

She comes back with a pink flannel nightgown tied with a ribbon and hands it to me.

“This is for you. You must be tired, honey. I’ll help you get ready for bed. You’ll be in the guest room. That was my room while Jerry was dying. So there are no bad feelings in there.”

“You know, Snooks, all those times I stayed at my mom’s after my dad died I slept in his bed. I didn’t care.”

“You know how Jerry and I met? Did I ever tell you that story? I was eight years old, and I was sitting on the steps of my house over on Aberdeen, and he came along with his dog. The dog went in the gate, and up the steps by me and wouldn’t leave. That dog just stayed there, and Jerry had to come in and get him. Diamonds was his name. We fell in love that day and we were together until the day he died. He died in my arms.”

“That’s a great story, Snooks.”

She turns and heads for the guest room.

“Come on. I know you’re tired.”

The guest room is a return to the past: it smells of the kind of perfume women used to wear — Heaven Sent or Chantilly — and on either side of the dresser two lamps with frilly pink shades give off a warm glow. It’s that light that’s most redolent of the past, evoking memories of the various apartments that Snooky’s mother, my Aunt Jewel (dead ten years), lived in when I was a kid. I loved visiting her. She had beaded curtains hanging in her doorways and Uncle Donny’s paintings (which she referred to as his “modern abstracts”) on the living room walls. She burnt incense and played Little Richard and Bobby Sherman records. And when she talked about her chronic insomnia — “Every night I walk the floors, thinkin’ about stuff I shouldn’t be thinkin’ about, like my mother’s stomach cancer and my sister Lily’s lobotomy” — I pictured her as some kind of glamorous woman from an old movie, waking up at 2 am with cold cream on her face and curlers in her hair, tuning her big Zenith radio to a talk show, and smoking in the glow of the dresser lamps.

Snooky comes in to kiss me goodnight.

“Sleep well, honey. And don’t worry about nothin’. Your ma’s in one of the good homes. You’ll see when we go there tomorrow. And don’t feel bad about her goin’ in there. She talked to me about it even before she told you. She just didn’t feel safe in that house anymore, with Nick hangin’ out with the gangs and all. And she didn’t want you to feel responsible for her decision. That’s why she went in when you weren’t here. She didn’t want you to have to spend your life takin’ care of her. That was her gift to you. She knows you’re not the kind of person who could take care of someone. And Nick’s not hangin’ out with the gangs no more ‘cause he’s with the Andersons, and they’re people he knows and they’re a real good family. I met them one time, in your ma’s room. They’re good people. I could feel it. And when you see him, you’ll see a difference. He really is a different kid. I’m tellin’ ya, it was a miracle how that all turned out. So see — everything’s gonna be just fine from now on. You mark my words.”

She kisses my forehead, pulls the covers up, and turns out the light. As the sleeping pill kicks in I wonder what she meant by “You’re not the kind of person who could take care of someone”? All I did for the last ten years was deal with Ma and her problems. And long distance, too.

(to be continued)

The attributed master left unstated

2007-01-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

The attributed master left unstated
the correlation that seemed to exist between

my hand and his arm
as though we were a pair of friends;

the constitution of the two, he said,
was a probable inference

that I had the corresponding rapier.
But had I been him, I might’ve

found the common boundary
at which the parts join

in the that which is less —
and by the that which is less, I mean the less which is greater,

more dense, owing to the fact that its parts are closely combined
with long-lost relatives.

Practically all such cases convince us
that genius is relatives —

as in the case of Nietzsche, for instance,
and his sister Elisabeth —

and the relatives, also,
which are said to be such and such

in virtue of some or one of their qualities,
and properly so.

Later, at a merchants in the Luckenbooth’s
I had myself fitted out,

for people are said to be the sum of what can be found
in their pockets, and by what I could make out,

these pocket-findings are interdependent
in bodies thrust low, and simultaneous

with that of the “other,” which is always
a young-ish lady.

And it becomes obvious that these pockets
have the matter of expressions double and half

with reference to the contraries of bad bipeds
overly receptive of knowledge; in other words,

they are human, and thus should be removed.
Naturally, the parts do not reference to anything outside

themselves, such as wood, which, ultimately,
is only wood.

From "Sic Transit" (8)

2007-01-17T10:34:00.000-08:00

She rummaged inside her purse for a cigarette, but instead pulled out a roll-on bottle of Avon's "Rapture." She applied it to her wrist while describing her journey from backstage tryst to committed relationship with the lead singer of the local proto-new wave band, Guest List. I was mildly surprised by the scent of "Rapture": it was like an old church on Easter. Her silver rings clicked together as she untangled her feathered hair from her new sweater. The next day I ordered some "Rapture" from a classmate whose mother sold Avon among the candlepin bowling winners. And when the girl passed me the perfume in the bathroom between classes I rolled it on my hands, arms, neck — all areas of exposed flesh — on the edges of my textbooks, even on the furry parts of my chukka boots, elated that I was now on my way to being more like B. I suddenly found it easy to believe what I'd read years before in Taffy's Tips to Teens: that someday I'd create something about the human condition as great as anything Harry Chapin had written. Being more like B guaranteed the inspiration.

But then B disappeared before graduation. Rumor had it she was in an institution because her boyfriend switched from heavy metal to fusion and she couldn't get used to it. I figured I still had the bottle of "Rapture" whenever I wanted to remember, and so decided to open it and smell it, but never again use it. If the smell evaporated I could always just order it. But then Avon discontinued it. I wrote to company to inquire; their only answer was that it had been unpopular. And so when the bottle was finally empty there was no trace of B whatsoever. For awhile, I forgot about her. But then a few years ago I found a tiny vial at a tag sale in Vancouver, and I was right back to being a senior. But at that remove, what good did it do? Besides, cultivating the memory of B had long since become a labor of love that I longed to be quit of. Isn't it tribute enough to be occasionally thought of?

But who laid the foundation for B? For all my years of intrasigence in tenements I still seek the beauty of a slop sink at evening. Someone somewhere has the responsiblity for sowing that seed.

Meme, Myself and I

2007-01-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by fellow flarfista Mel Nichols to post five little known-facts about myself. All facts about me are little-known, so ...

1.) I worked as a "Dancing Dollar" for a country music radio station in Chicago for one horrible summer in the early 80's

2.) I married a guy whose column in Seventeen magazine -- "Relating: A Boy's Advice to Girls" -- I read (and laughed at) in eighth grade

3.) I grew up in the same neighborhood as the Unabomber (Back-of-the-Yards, Chicago) and my grandmother bought meat at his family's store, Kaczynski Sausage, on Ashland Avenue

4.) In grammar school I won an honorable mention for a haiku about Nicholas Copernicus in a city-wide contest sponsored by the Polish Roman Catholic Union (or something) of Chicago

5.) I like to pick up and hold bugs

On to: Douglas Wolk and Todd Colby and Christina Strong

Christmas Day

2006-12-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve

2006-12-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve dinner at a restaurant called Tre Alberi, in a town called Barryville, just across the Delaware on the New York side.

It would be easy to miss Tre Alberi from the road — their sign is small and weathered and set back on what is essentially a front lawn, and their three-tree logo looks like a burn mark from far away. And the name of the place is so small, and in such an old-fashioned, decorative font, that you can’t make it out even when you’re pulling up to it. It feels like the sign was part of a much smaller landscape originally.

When you step in through the front door you see that it’s really a house converted into a restaurant: there’s an enclosed white-wicker-and-chintz-pillows porch, where it would comforting to have tea on a sunny weekend morning (although at the same time there was something about it that brought to mind sore throats and headaches and menstrual cramps, and a bad relationship from my twenties), and then a carpeted hallway and a staircase going up to formal parlors or bedrooms. You hang your coat up in the hallway, off of which on the left are a private dining room (for “banquet-style dining”) and then the kitchen, but you can’t tell it’s the kitchen until you’re right there, and the smiling black-haired hostess with the non-specific Eastern-European accent is greeting you.

The seating area is two rooms: the room that would’ve been the dining room (in the front), and what would’ve been the kitchen (in the back). In a typical converted railroad-style apartment building, or an SRO (“single-room occupany”) those two areas would’ve been individual apartments, the biggest and most coveted. I lived in one like that in Chicago, in fact – my room was the back one, the kitchen. There was already a big table full of people in the front part of the dining area — a family, I could tell. The two littlest kids were dressed like something out of the past: the boy had his hair parted neatly on the side and combed back, and wore a wine-colored vest, a black bow tie, and a crisp white shirt. The little girl had on the kind of dress my mother used to love to dress me in when I was that age: black velvet top, big red sash, and red plaid skirt, plus the requisite lacy white tights and black patent leather shoes. Her hair was curled into ringlets and held back with shiny barrettes. There was another kid, a boy, maybe twelve years old, dressed in a polyester jogging suit-thing, like my nephew in Chicago used to wear ten years ago when he was trying to look like he was in the AMBROSE (“Almighty Mexican Brotherhood Running Our Streets Everywhere”) gang.

The waitress came over with our wine, and I asked her if the place took credit cards. “American Express and personal checks,” she said. I couldn’t believe the personal check thing. “You must really trust your customers,” I laughed. “We do,” she nodded, smiling. “Our customers are great.”

A group of older people came in — an elderly couple, two somewhat younger women, and two late fifty-ish--looking men in dark sport coats. All the women were wearing minks that looked like they’d been gifts from their husbands from many Christmases ago, proudly worn every Christmas since (and sometimes on Easter when it was cold enough). They wafted Chantilly or maybe Emeraude. The black-haired hostess with the Eastern-European accent embraced all of them, wished the older couple a happy anniversary, and stage-whispered “I’m very sorry,” to one of the late fifty-ish-looking men. The waitress came by, too with the same greetings but minus the hugs. The group put their coats on the table in front of ours and went into the front area and quietly greeted the big family — one of the two little kids said “Hi Grandma and Grandpa.” The men at the table got up and embraced the women. Suddenly there was a feeling of being in an old restaurant somewhere in Europe just after the turn of the century. The décor buttressed the fantasy: little painted pitchers hanging on the walls, ornate steins on ledges, and above us, in a locked case was a bottle of Moet with a red “White Star Line” ribbon hanging down from the neck.

The two little kids followed the older group back to their table by us, and were handed shiny plastic backpacks by the grandmother, who was wearing a black jacket with a pattern of embroidered leaves. Her gray hair looked like she’d had it “set” at a beauty parlor every Saturday and wore a hairnet to bed every night to protect it. The kids said thank you and walked back to their own table. Soon I heard one of them say, “Hey, there’s stuff in here!” Then they fast-walked back to the grandparents’ table and said, “Thanks for the flashlights! Flashlights are our favorite things!” One of the women, a great aunt I’d guess, said, “Now you can read under the covers!”

Yet another group came in, this time three very tall men of varying ages, and one dark-haired, dark-skinned woman, and they greeted the elderly couple and also the family at the table in the front. All these greetings and visitations, which would’ve been annoying and invasive, were carried out quietly, respectfully. I wanted to know the big family’s story.

As we were finishing dinner a group of women were seated near us. One woman introduced another to the others: “She wrote the made-for-TV Mother Teresa movie.”

From "Sic Transit" (7)

2006-12-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to believe that C and D were not anomalies. Perhaps their precedent was set back in '77, by B.

A senior year transfer student, B's elfin features and pentacle necklace recalled the youthful insouciance of Stevie Nicks, while her flippant promiscuousness suggested a glamorous Los Angeles groupie. But she was different from the others, those Aerosmith-loving others who sewed Rolling Stones tongue logo patches onto their crotches and wafted a cloud of strawberry lip gloss, Love's Baby Soft, Key West cigarettes and Clairol Herbal Essence. When B threw back her head to a Foghat song she was pure beauty like a surprise of butterflies once native to these shores but now, sadly, no more. One day at lunch we sat next to each other at the counter of the Back-of-the-Yards Diner and decided to ditch classes together. It was the first day of Spring, unseasonably warm, and Bad Company's new album had just reached number one. We took the 62 Archer downtown and bummed around Chinatown. From there we ranged up State Street past Warshawsky Auto Parts, Mexican Joe's Chili Parlor, and the scrap metal pits, talking of Kiss, Aerosmith and Robert Fripp. Her ability to discuss Fripp put her in league wtih those long-torsoed teenage boy-men who were not Canadian but could've been. We ended up on the short of Lake Michigan, on the wet, sloping cement behind the Shedd Aquarium. Air guitar rhythms spilled forth from her like condensation off a carburetor. What was once sacred became familiar:

"I think all Masses should be celebrated with Stratocasters!"

(to be continued)

Apropos of Monkey Penis

2006-11-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

— Thanksgiving, 2006

Spatchcocked, ectopic,
modified and sebaceous:
Monkey Penis Sausage
and Schmookums on Thanksgiving ...

arriving with their children,
J. Penis, Scrotum,
Doodiekins . . .

and Debbie ...

singing “Happy Birthday, Cowboy Sally!/
Your penis is three inches /
And leaves a short flavor.”
Cutiegoo made advances
toward the timid monkey aunts
seated on toilets by the table . . .

What he wanted was freedom;
what he got was monkey penis.
Moopsieface placed
crocheted granny square blankets
at the feet of a boy prostitute . . .

Moogliepie mixed the concrete
grinning, applying lipstick.
Pookieboo straddled his giant hose
spewing frogs, saints and little Davids
into the vacant blue spaces
of Foofiecake's naivete . . .

It was a cultural thing:
the Nookumboos wanted
the moon's asbestos
a glimpse of something infinite
like the President's address
and pieces of my own excrement.
Cuddlelips loved looking
“exactly like a kumquat" . . .

and needed a huge vat of penicillin
just to clean her monkey.
I greeted Mushyboobie’s mother
by screaming,
"Afternoon, penis!” ...

with my lips on “Missy Dolly,”
the obese proboscis monkey.
As usual "Walter" was still Walter —

a bone from the penis of a walrus,
a gift perfectly suitable
for anyone named Mao.
But Brett Favre? ...

Revolutionary?
With his penis in a zipper?

Then came the monkey penis fights ...

with Andres Serrano impersonators ...

testes hanging out of
spangled lamé jumpsuits.
It’s too bad the monkey penises
got mangled by
all those Lovecraftian references.
My own penis remains a locus
of cheeky brassy monkeys.

Hot Tuna Fantasy Camp Panties

2006-11-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

For Mike Magee

When I think of hot panties, I think of 3 things:
pirates, the Rock, and vodka.
I recall seeing Jerry Lee Lewis putting on a pair of panties tossed at,
oddly enough,
the members of Hot Tuna.

Well in Miami they still do that -- but without panties

* * *

When I lay between my two aunts (father’s side)
the younger always made sure I was around when she changed her panties.
I once wore her granny panties and wound up in an accident
with a chocolate milk child imprint on my smokin’ hot outfit

* * *

Who said “One pair of girls’ panties is a cardboard guillotine?”

Hot “IDon'tLikeYouInThatWay” Momma

* * *

“Well someone should have told the bull she rides sans panties”

* * *

Cubey Tuna!
Inside, it's hot, humid, and packed like sardines
Cubey Tuna's Avatar? Tuna-Tuna

* * *

I certainly have some questions for Charlie Tuna

* * *

I don't care about and don't wear panties
I just thought this was greatest song ever written
and she sure seems hot to me cuz she cries every time
women who want to feel sexy, special and individual wear pistol panties

Ring ring...are you wearing pistol panties?
Ring ring...are you wearing pistol panties?

* * *

So she removed her panties, and hung them over
Jorma Kaukonen & Jack Casady.
Touring with Hot Tuna must’ve been a great training ground
for working with kids.
No panties vending machines, though.
Just loud pipes on choppers, scuffed up boots,
and white cotton panties -- 50's kitsch

* * *

“Immediately, Marco's panties started a tuna meltdown”

Oh, give me a break you Hollywood sheet shiner
Stuck up lush
u r sofa king-ugly

* * *

Ivanka Trump: Hot Or Not?
Horny oyster Courtney Love not getting love?
Lindsay Lohan sans Panties?
Now, if gay magazines keep coming out with hot issues like this,
I may have to get myself a subscription

From "Sic Transit" (6)

2006-11-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

And so on a trip to the gambling boat — a yeasty, floating oasis known locally as "Shitty Vegas" — as I played the three of spades on the first of May, it came to me that I'd made a Faustian bargain for emotional comfort, and that I would live to regret it. Experience may be its own reward (and punishment), but the fall into the field of Time is humanity in its natural element. Within days it became obvious that change lay in the past, and the present would contain nothing less than stasis.

But perhaps the good thing about blandness is that although sorrow ages one to some degree, malaise renders one ageless.

Last week on the street I met up with C again. He was with a girlfriend. Little kids flying by on bikes seemed to frighten them. He made fun of my clothes again, but this time it was because I was wearing black.

"I'll just keep wearing black," I said, "until something darker comes along."

They didn't seem to understand. The dynamic had obviously shifted. Walking away, I heard him say, "Look at the butts on those hunchbacks, honey."

I had to laugh — I liked him better as a bastard. But it was sad: C and all the horrors he stood for were now part of the dark magic that is the past.

My Underdog

2006-11-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

"I want my underdog to stay under long enough for me to get attached to him."

-- Robert Frost

Holy Mother of Monkey Poo

2006-11-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

for Shanna Compton

Mm, monkey chow.
Or rather: ZuPreem Pre-Prepared Dry Diet Primate Food!

There is really no way to dance around the delight
of a week of eating nothing but monkey food.
It's like one of those '70s TV movies about teens
except instead of Annie taking drugs
or Joe delving into radical politics
it's a human trying to live off nothing but monkey food.

Day 2: Poo pretty smelly.

Day 3: Moderate desire to fling poo.

Day 4: Poo succinct, but deep.

Day 5: Munchies galore!

Day 6: Spotted a macaroni, a tasty pastry and some pre-prepared panini in my poo

Day 7: More savouries again

I can barely look away from the wedges.

From "Sic Transit" (5)

2006-11-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

But against my better judgement we got back together a year later, at the Beat Reunion Reading at the downstate university. We snuck off to an unused classroom to fuck, and afterward argued, first about his inability to take punctuation lightly, and then about how I was too immature to fulfill my own destiny — he had me believing we'd had that past life together as Jews in Nazi Germany. I hurled a small desk at his head. Allen Ginsberg heard the ruckus and burst in and yelled at us.

Our final break came a month later, when I telephone him from the Step-Hi Lounge to say I wasn't pregnant. Indignant at being made to fret falsely, even for a second, he said it served me right for making fun of the Feast of the Assumption — he'd suddenly become Catholic. When he began ranting about the threat of hell I hung up and stumbled out, dazed by the wide, bright boulevard. These streets expect too much of me, I thought. I can't fulfill the demands of these happy avenues. In Woolworth's cafeteria I ordered a bowl of Fruit Loops. They must've been tainted by a trace of the ancient ergotism plague, because on the way home I hallucinated the triple fish Toastmaster logo in the shaded arcades. But once that crisis passed I felt relieved.

And for a few weeks I was free, free enough to finally rid myself of C by employing a ritual bath using a ewer full of water from the Sherman Park lagoon, a drop of oil of vitriol, and a pilfered undertaker's tool. I stirred the lagoon water and the oil with the tool, and intoned the ancient hymn of praise to Pluto. After an hour the sun moved behind clouds and the light through the frosted airshaft window faded and I knew my wish would be granted. But in the intervening years I've come to believe that something worse happened. It hadn't occurred to me then that when Pluto is invoked for removal of obstacles, what is removed is never completely occluded. It's sort of either/or, and you tend to get something bigger than you bargained for.

... to be continued

Salty Tiny Pony

2006-11-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

"There was something salty on her tiny pony" -- Todd Colby

From "Sic Transit" (4)

2006-11-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

C made fun of my white Polack socks as a way of engaging my shame. But I was able to remain myself for most of those moments because it occurred to me that the real work was not to change the socks — change the mind and the socks will change themselves. It was ridiculous how many changes even my jeans had been through with him. It was ridiculous, the waste of so many moments. The source of my darkness was just my own dullness. I for whom all things should've been attainable had chosen the path of my resistance. The difference between the wild, precious life I'd chosen in Eternity and my life with C was just the watered-down fact of "how it stands": someone — me — didn't fulfill her promise, and so someone — not me — was living her life the way I should've been living mine. It was probably Madonna.

Suddenly I felt like the teenage me, sketching still-lifes of peaches on Saturdays at the Back-of-the-Yards Art Academy. And then I knew what I had to do. Any escape would be ascent because now I had peaches to protect. "Defenestrate this master," said the voice in my head.

The next time I saw C I was able to ignore him, because my only thought seemed to be "Are red Keds really sexy?"

... to be continued

The Beautiful

2006-11-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

"The Beautiful is everywhere, perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in the eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums." -- Fernand Leger

Duende

2006-10-28T17:23:00.000-07:00

"Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form . . . But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood . . . The true struggle is with the Duende."

Lorca, from "Duende: Theory and Divertissement"

Diarrhea Permutation

2006-10-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

A salad dressing
orbiting the prime minister
underhandedly shares a shower
with a federal ski lodge.

A prime minister steals pencils
from a knowingly vaporized
cargo bay. Now and then,
the pickup truck
behind the short order cook
ignores an apartment building.
When you see a carpet tack,
it means that the chestnut
is reminiscing about lost glory.

The chestnut flies into a rage.
Or a dust bunny slyly assimilates
a crank case.
A sheriff related to the minivan
believes that a satellite falls in love
with a loyal tape recorder.
But they need to remember
how a load bearing burglar
wakes up.

The load bearing burglar
with an inferiority complex
secretly admires
the power drill.
A frustrating briar patch
satiates a boiled recliner.
An overripe blithe spirit
is muddy.

At Princess Olga's

2006-10-25T15:30:00.000-07:00

The smartest of us found a coatrack;
We had linguine and peaches to protect.
First, from a rectilinear curve of earth fell Myrna,
Expellable one-hundredfold because hunchbacked.
Her form was as the moondog's,
Lunescent as Miami relatives parlaying lilaceous fake vaginas
For tape-dancing lessons.
The many Albanians were eager for tape-dancing,
Though most didn't know the first thing about dipping.
Enter the coincidental Caucasian —
Rod Praecox and his "bucketful o' muscle" —
Challenging the Albanian counterman from downstate
By one-offing Urkel with scores of sonnets each beginning:
"Even mistletoe gets the gristle."
Impeccably occluded but impotent in the afterglow,
Missy Bodybuild's side-cleaved loquacity was spent on the subject of
groin fluency.
Number One Necromancer mercifully interrupted her:
"What do you get when you cross a Dadaist with a brooch?"
(Answer: Aldous Huxley, who wrote with his nose.)
Meanwhile, Aggrieved Deodorant Gal unbuttoned Obese Basso's shirt
to his navel;
His rust-colored alluvial boots begged her to.
His conceit, he said, was to meet interesting people in Nebraska,
While working as a temp for Keith Richards.
Suddenly, the many Albanians began beating their women's heads
Like bongo drums.
The women stuck their tongues through their button holes.
Most needed water after.
Silas deployed his famous Franciscan buss as a pre-emptive measure,
Though only Aggrieved Deodorant Gal showed optimism.
The movement to dispensate any budding footpath perverts
Set off cautious offspring onto already rickety arpeggios of
"Want to make more money, Dane?
Let hogs root through your shame."
Then, I guess, the babysitter appeared.
And maybe even a twelve-point centaur was there.
If he was anywhere.

Begin Transition

2006-10-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

The way the light looks this morning is strange,
like it’s coming from a different direction.
But it’s beautiful too,
like how mornings on other planets in sci-fi movies
are beautiful, with two suns or three moons.
Yesterday the sign on a construction site
by the doctor’s office said,
“Begin transition.”
And so, when I got home,
I exfoliated my foot:
long, luminous rivulets of skin,
papery and apricot-colored.

I’ve been in a cast since August.
I haven’t walked on two feet for thirteen weeks.
My leg has atrophied,
is markedly shorter than the other,
while my arms and shoulders are incredibly muscular,
from constant use of a walker.
Vertical extension
is a singular exclusion,
replaced by the flawlessness of tedium.
But within that tedium hides another kind of life:
like when I’m sitting at the kitchen table
and I turn away from the window,
and the flights of birds are reflected
in the shiny surface of formica,
and a woman passing by outside
smells like the fragrant breath of a laundry vent
from a red brick apartment building
that I passed one long ago Chicago October
when the orderly cleanliness of that scent
was merely a reminder
of an anxious evening’s lack of comfort:
the dark dirty kitchen,
the stained slop sink,
the oblique metal fittings
of glossolalia:
of silver/crack/intrude,
of an angry person’s wisdom —
death wish, fleshy kingdom —
a parasite’s suicide
which is really just a vast appetite for life.
Oh, you who were my poverty.
But the fetters of forgetfulness
are temporary
and speak of another kind of purity,
maybe Lucifer’s purity,
(it must be an allegory
of the memory
of drunkards joining hands),
of prudence,
beauty,
humility,
the romantic exuberance
of goo.

What am I doing?
This isn’t memory,
but the illusion
of remembering:
a new cuteness
relating to history
and the everyday,
like the popularity
of Rachel Ray.
Fuck that chipmunk.
The real need right now
is to dust/sweep/mop,
toss away all nonsense,
take down those cardboard boxes,
replace them with expensive plastic boxes,
and find or design a system of efficient, color-coded filing.
And, most of all, pick my skin up off the floor,
start sending out submissions,
begin the aforementioned transition,
because the light this morning is strange
like it’s coming from another direction.