February 2012
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From the Department of Student Writing
For his crimes, my father was sentenced to ten years of penetration…
January 2012
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“There is beauty as well as hatred in [Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’], and it...”
– Jeanette Winterson brings the heat in The New York Times’ Sunday book review. (via millionsmillions)
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Maybe tomorrow will be the day everyone wakes up to write a poem. Or maybe just you and me, fallen asleep on duty, fallen asleep to duty forever. No one knows what will happen, but you and I at least, while the music of the murmur invents us, will have no part in anyone’s war, we will waste nothing, a signal going through us, like an inkling of god or a hunger for strawberries or the...
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Literal Pain in the Literary Ass
Any other runners ever get a butt cramp? Last two runs at mile 2, center of my right butt muscle cramps up and though I try to walk it off, it never goes away entirely while I’m running. No back pain, and I’m stretching it, but any other ideas?
Because it sucks.
…how I love you the same way I learned how to ride a bike:
Scared.
But reckless.
- Rudy Francisco
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
- Anne Sexton, from Wanting to Die
Notes On Your Windshield
Woke up with the beast. All day, the same inconsolable blade nicking my heart. Add Etta James if you want. Add a warm winter. Add a to-do list like Everest. An empire falling to ruin. My kingdom for a moment of joyful reverence, of simple amusement, of adoration. I’ve stayed quiet and alone in this house all day. I turned you over and over in my mouth. I’ve resisted whiskey and...
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Horse Piano
The idea is to get a horse, a Central Park workhorse.
A horse who lives in a city, over in the hell part of Hell’s Kitchen, in a big metal tent. You have to get one who is dying. Maybe you get his last day on the job, his owner, his tourists. You get his walk back home at the end of the day, some flies, some drool. You get his deathbed, maybe. And then, post mortem, still...
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The Icelandic Language
In this language, no industrial revolution; no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone; only sheep, fish, horses, water falling. The middle class can hardly speak it.
In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble through dark and rain with a handful of rags. The door groans; the old smell comes up from under the earth to meet you.
But this language believes in ghosts; chairs rock by...
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Eavesdropper Notes: 20th Century Students
Student A: Shit. Professor C wants us to pull up our literary blog by Friday?! It took me 6 months to figure out the Facebook.
Student B: Don't worry. She's from the internet; she'll help us.
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“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple...”
– John Green (via lexluthr) My gift and my curse: to say what I mean.
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Andrew Bird- Tenuousness During the first winter,...
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pairaudeux:
David Foster Wallace’s syllabi and various other noted on documents
“So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense, will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am...
Note to Self.
Fourteen hour days stacked back-to-back for the next 16 weeks, and most of the work cerebral. Very few “days off” until summer. Everything other than work is simply me drinking water. I like it. It’s good for me in all the ways. Then, I’m done. I have to be. It’s all ancillary to the task at hand. Except dawn-writing and dusk-running. Those may be saving me. I need...
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Yusef Komunyakaa
writersroutines:
Yusef Komunyakaa wrote back to me! This makes up for being rejected by Leonard Nimoy. Here’s his amazing response about how he writes:
I don’t have to think about writing. I just write. I keep a yellow notepad beside the bed and in the middle of the night or in the early morning I scribble down a word, a few lines, sometimes pages. Writing, for me, is an improvisation on an...
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Harmony in the Boudoir | by Mark Strand
After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything he says there is more that he does not say, that behind each word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more be- hind that one. All those unsaid words, he says, contain his true self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her. “So you see,” he...
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Voice of the Shuttle →
ALL the Literary Links!
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What I Do Instead of Revising Syllabi
Work on my Irish accent
Use Google Sketch-Up to design my Craftsman Bungalow and numerous outlying studios and guest houses in the forest, connect them with raised walkways.
Think about building an Artists’/Writers’ Colony.
Make a board for Tiny Houses and Cabins and Studios on Pinterest
Design my Tag for ensuing “Street Art” Projects.
Try (and fail) to narrow next...
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On Thursdays I Clean the River
Ever since it occurred to me to tell the animals how to kill themselves, I’ve been finding possums on the bottom, their pouches filled with rocks. A friend of mine weeps on the banks of the Mississippi. He does not know I told healthy animals how to perform actions that result in their immediate demise; he just loves the constant rushing, thinks that river is mighty. Today the horses are giving...
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When gods die, they die hard. It’s not like they fade away, or grow old, or fall asleep. They die in fire and pain, and when they come out of you, they leave your guts burned. It hurts more than anything you can talk about. And maybe worst of all is, you’re not sure if there will ever be another god to fill their place. Or if you’d ever want another god to fill their place. You don’t want the...
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Hard Freeze
Between my thighs, his hand hard, like any dull edge;
above the collarbone, his tongue and lips, like any rough fabric; the second knuckle of his index finger sucked, blooming, between my teeth into someone who is not you.
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December 2011
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Your Dog Dies
It gets run over by a van. you find it at the side of the road and bury it. you feel bad about it. you feel bad personally, but you feel bad for your daughter because it was her pet, and she loved it so. she used to croon to it and let it sleep in her bed. you write a poem about it. you call it a poem for your daughter, about the dog getting run over by a van and how...
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Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.
—Lynda Barry (via favoritepoems)
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Happy Christmas (War is Over) / John Lennon
...
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So, Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel are sitting in a bar when Kim Jong il walks in…
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“I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of...”
– Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (via aequinoctium)
“There is a common superstition that ‘self-respect’ is a kind of charm against...”
– joan didion, “on self-respect” (via wwjzd)
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Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
armenotti:
“Realize, Allen, that if all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and...
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“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
– Cormac McCarthy; No Country for Old Men (via wordpainting)
The Double-Bed Dream Gallows
Driving through hot brushy country the late autumn, I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence. I guess as a kind of advertisement to other hawks, saying from the pages of a leading women’s magazine, “She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”
- Richard Brautigan
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Open Letter to Eros | Simone Muench
I want a love that is imprecise, one that sprawls over the bed, spills out windows, disrupting churchgoers as they stroll across the green glow of mowed lawns. I want a love that commandeers the world, a bone- clanking, hydrant-splashing, dog- salivating affair. The ravaged and the ravenous — those lycanthropes of lust. No candy hearts or delicacies of language. Do not ask me to be demure, clean...
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