Mrs. Maybe #3 Covers / Realpoetik

Soon, soon, soon to drop:

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Also, I have two new poems up at Realpoetik. Terse ones, these.

Snowmageddon, No Go, Wieners, Schuyler Saturday, Spy Wednesday

So because it was snowing, didn’t make it to Washington D.C. – now back in Merced, where it is raining. Brought home 3 books, Coultas, Handmade Museum, Wieners’ Selected (Score!) and Sorrentino’s Selected (mmm, oranges). Also, regretted not buying Schuyler’s Collected, which I saw twice, and didn’t buy, then was completely absorbed in, while reading last night. Especially “The Morning of the Poem,” with it’s fat bluejays – I want to read that whole poem, now!

Also, at L’s read David Brazil’s Spy Wednesday – very very good book, I should say. It’s a journal of a day as part of a protest marking the 5th anniv. of the war and subsequently being arrested. Now, initially, I got this feeling that I wasn’t in love with this kind of politicking in poems, because, well, you know, I don’t live in the Bay Area anymore, and this kind of thing could be onerously smarmy, positively reeking of Bay Area intellectual politics. But, but, the writing’s so good, and the thinking about the meaning of events is ultimately quite touching, I think. There’s a kind of seriousness to the whole endeavour, something positively Duncanian in the poem’s insistence that one’s “whole being be here in this consideration.” Since I don’t have the book, I have to resort to paraphrase, which I’ll fix soon’s I get a copy  - there’s a moment of unknown pain on the speaker’s (David’s) person, and he says something like ‘I think there was a boot on my head’ and then talks about ‘trying to keep his glasses from being broken, and suggests that he’d always to whatever he could to keep his glasses from being broken. There’s something, something in that moment, that’s all about what it’s like to be an intellectual, throwing one’s intellectual body into the field of the war – he says “The field is / us.”

From the Merced vantage, my politics have changed so much, and are so much more about what Diana Garcia (who was the first person to alert me to the notion) called ‘the criminalization of poverty.’ I’m not given to theorize about politics, mostly because my context does not allow it, but poverty, ultimately, and the paucity of resources in a place like Merced (poor, non-white, babies making babies) and the fact that these are the kinds of places where all the people are coming from (including the people fighting the war), have just put poverty so much more in front of my face than the abstract ‘war.’ But, thanks to David for reminding me of the physical presence of the state.

Also, for reminding me of when we went to the 3rd year protests in downtown Chicago, and the reeking, stinking threat of violence in Federal Plaza. Against the backdrop of all that Miesian rectilinear doom, and riot police in reflective vests, well, let’s just say, one feels docile and weak. I just don’t live in a sizeable polis, with anything approaching alternative politics (unless one reads random violent crime as something other than predation). At the moment, and one’s politics turn local.

Poet / Critics

Look, I’m not a critic. At all. But I’m a poet that teaches, so there’s some degree of criticism I like to keep up with. Anyway, with that in mind, I’m thinking of going over to this conference in Santa Cruz. Could be fun, right?

National Portrait Gallery

Heading to our nation’s capital. Not my favorite place in the world, but, the great part about going to D.C. are the museums. I’m looking forward to hitting The National Portrait Gallery, where’s there’s a show on called “Portraiture Now.” I’m pretty interested in portraits, via Stein, but also via my friend Ann Ploeger, who’s a photographic portraitist (I wrote an intro to her monograph a few years ago). http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/communities/

There’s also some good shit over at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Besides The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millenium General Assembly of the Nations’ Millenium General Assembly, there’s a show of photography from Western Survey Expeditions: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2010/osullivan/

San Francisco Legion of Honor

I went to the Legion of Honor  in SF with my sister on Saturday. It’s the museum in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I think I went there once, in the ’80s, when they had an exhibit of Gary Larsen comics. Again, I was fortunate to grow up in the Bay Area. We saw some amazing paintings, including this image of Thalia, Muse of Comedy, by Jean-Luc Nattier. I don’t think the image here properly describes the quality of the face’s expression. Her expression is pure good humor, plus there’s something quite strange about having the top 1/3 of the painting be cloth, not sky. There’s a gentle uncovering of whatever cloth is here. Just utterly charmed by this, especially because it’s surrounded by all these much less interesting paintings. Did Thalia wear an Ivy Laurel?

There’s also some significantly weirder images at the museum, and probably they’re all the weirder after reading Alberto Manguel’s Reading Pictures, which has a chapter on the erotic relationship between The Madonna and Child. I’ll just say it was in abundant evidence in the medieval galleries.

I’ve always loved the golden skies of medieval painting, and there’s some pretty good Pre-Raphaelite paintings elsewhere that have golden skies, which are weirdly punctuated by dashes! I don’t get it.

We had a great time trying to figure out why one guy has skin colored feet, and another has green feet.

Likestarlings / Siddhartha Bose

The third installment of my poetry conversation w/Siddhartha Bose is up at Likestarlings. It’s been super fun and interesting to do this project with Sid, whom I’ve never met but is a really captivating poet. In addition to our conversation, he’s got some great work up at a mag called Eclectica. I really admire the eye in the work of his I’ve seen, and the rhythms in his lineated work seem to owe something to Bunting, though really compacted and piled – less elegant, and rougher, in a good way. One of my favorite bits in his poem from our conversation, which is in prose, comes at the end of the first stanzagraph: “dialysis edges, psychiatrist, autoeroticality, laughing bamiyan buddhas, frozen fishheads, neatly packaged Qurans, calligraphy flowerpots.” It’s that booming listing that I find so intriguing, and so really kind of rare, in poetry of our moment. So, there’s yr dose of gratitude for the day. Thanks Sid!

Arch, Arch, Arch.

I Heart Eileen Myles. Spent the whole evening yesterday with her Iceland book. Her style is infectious. I took turns playing with the rabbits, who were fighting over a turnip, and leafing thru this book. Her sense of poetry as vocation is so casual. What is it she said about living in New York? Something like there was language everywhere. Graffiti, advertisements – you wouldn’t live in New York if you weren’t OK w/advertisements. I’ll put the right quote up when I get home. It’s that hard won insouciance, just like Jessica Stockholder. Like the way she talks about Antony. In a review, she said she was seriously in like with a painter’s work. Also says another painter’s work is “arch, arch, arch.” And I thought, that’s the only adjective I ever want anybody to use about me. If only I can get my subject matter to cooperate.

Another Poem Questioning the Validity of Anybody Making American Children

Cowboy Song for Airport Screening

Security gives me a boner.
Now, finally, you can see it.
That’s not a vasectomy scar.
I bet they can hear this cheering
all the way in Washington D.C.

Old Woman Cave

Old Woman Cave is located on the eastern side of the massive Old Woman Mountains which dominate this part of the Mojave Desert, and is about 37 miles southwest of Needles, California.

Haiti