an ice cold coca cola

listen

2009-09-21T23:57:00.000-04:00

things have been busy.
i'll do a new mfa post tomorrow.
which is tuesday.
and then another friday or saturday.
feel free to leave angry notes here if i manage to fail at this.
i hope everyone had a great weekend.

mfa related post and question

2009-09-14T12:41:00.003-04:00

Alright. So. In Manguso's workshop we talked a lot about intent. Manguso said something about how when she was learning about poetry before college, everyone said that it was the highest art form in literature because it was like an empty basin, or that what we are going to mean by that is that it can mean anything to anyone. Manguso said she doesn't agree. That unless you are John Ashbery [and none of us are or will be, nor will we really discuss John Ashbery on this blog, please do that somewhere else, somewhere maybe where people care, or maybe after I've actually read some Ashbery] that a poem means something, and that it meant something to you when you wrote it, and that this is what we were going to discuss.
And alright so, my question to you, readers of this blog, whoever you are, is whatever follows this statement. The one I just made.

And so when you read how worried are you about what a poem literally means?

Because alright. Me, I use images in my writing. I use images to convey emotions. I do a lot of editing and rewrites to make sure that the images and language and emotions are as specific as possible. However, in terms of direct meanings, literal meanings, and in terms of intended symbolism, I really don't know. I genuinely don't care to think about it. I think it would be neat if one day some English major went through my, yknow, oeuvre, [yeah I'm keeping my face as straight as possible and it's not working, whatever, go fuck yourself] and charted the occurrence of images and the ways in which they occurred in order to correlate them symbolically.
I just. I so rarely worry what a thing really means when we start dealing with symbols and the idea of translating an idea. I understand what it means to me, and I attempt to understand the work on whatever premise it seems to set for itself, but and so I am asking you people out there, How much does this matter to you?

I was going to cut the last line of the first short adventure because everyone kept talking about the poem in terms of loss, and I wasn't certain that's the discussion I wanted. I am keeping the line however, and coming to terms once again with the fact that shit is going to mean whatever other people want it to mean once it's out of my hands.

So.
I guess maybe let's have us a dialog:

news and stuff

2009-09-14T00:33:00.003-04:00

from Octopus Books:

April Open Reading Period Results

After spending quality time with 350 manuscripts, we have chosen to
publish the following two titles in the fall of 2010:

Where We Think it Should Go by Claire Becker
People are Tiny in Paintings of China by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Finalists:

Post-Moxie by Julia Story (forthcoming from Sarabande Books)
Jerusalem by Susan Briante
Flag by Noah Eli Gordon (now titled Zeros to the Left forthcoming from
Quale Press)
Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov
If Nothing Else by Barbara Maloutas
Kings of the Fucking Sea by Dan Boehl
Our Little Oxygen Concert by Patrick Culliton
The Cold War by Kathleen Ossip
The Next Monsters by Julie Doxsee
Goat in the Snow by Emily Pettit
Everything Here is Ok by Sasha Fletcher
Fastopia! by Alex Phillips
Almost Dorothy by Neil de la Flor (forthcoming from Marsh Hawk Press)

The editors have also decided to publish selections from Our Little
Oxygen Concert by Patrick Culliton and Goat in the Snow by Emily
Pettit as chapbooks. We will again read manuscripts in April of 2010
to find a book to publish in the fall of 2011. So mark your calendars.

listen.
I found out about this from kathryn regina sending me a gchat at 930. I got home at 2.
Around 230 I managed to find a blog with the email above copied to it, after finally thinking to google sasha fletcher octopus finalist.
I more or less wept openly. Whatever. Rozi said I should let myself start being happy about good things that happen to me.
This is going to be one of those blog posts. Fuck me, right? Weeping and shit.
Anyway. I feel really good about this. I really and genuinely did not believe that I had any shot at all at this.
Still waiting to hear from Black Ocean.
Considering sending to Fence and Graywolf. I know they take a while, but fuck it. Amelia told me a secret about dealing with the MFA experience and that secret was that I have all the time in the world to do this shit.

THE RETURN OF THE VICARIOUS MFA

2009-09-13T22:59:00.008-04:00

alright. so. hi. this is coming later than i meant it to, but whatever.

hello! and welcome, again, to the return of the vicarious mfa. [hopefully by keeping the same title, the posts will be easily accessible through the search bar conveniently located at the bottom of this blog.]

first week is down. so.

LECTURE:

Richard Howard
The Beginning of the End

Listen. Richard Howard is adorable. He is. Google Image search that shit.

Bam I did it for you. Motherfucker was dressed all in red. Red glasses, red and white striped shirt, giant red ring made of some sort of plastic [all of these also the same shade of deep red, or like a mix of alizarin and cad red medium fr anyone out there that has any idea what i'm talking about], [also the glasses were the same as that picture above, just red], red pants, red socks, and red suede slipon loafers that might could be called driving togs, those ones with the bumps on them. Anyway. This ain't a fashion blog. This here is about Literature and shit. So. I am going to probably just transcribe my notes. Maybe later I'll talk about the reading [Jekyll + Hyde] after it's discussed. ALSO IF THERE ARE ANY QUESTIONS OR THINGS YOU'D LIKE ME TO BRING UP PLEASE LEAVE A NOTE THANKS HEY HIGH FIVE. alright. NOTES:
[some of these will be quotes. a lot will be unattributed. if you would like to attribute them, feel free.]

[NOVELS ARE EPICS FOR A FALLEN AGE.]

[movies, apparently, are not actually [books]]

[Morel was French and when he studied he studied cretinism]
\
[Lombroso was Italian. Possible pinnacle of some such.]

[Degeneracy was all around]
\
[Degeneracy as a form of common sense]
/
[One strength of common sense is that it cannot be reduced to a unity of coherence. That it can allow for contradictions.]
\
[We have no intention here of coherence.
We are here to observe the ways in which things fall apart]

[Consolidation in the form of methodological rigor.]

[A faith in interpretation as a means of therapy
of trying to coax meaning from disparate troubles]

[The losses become inseparable from the paradigms that named them]

[Masculinism as [being] flawed with degenerism [with degenerative -isms]]

Alright. So a note on this format, that will probably not last past this post.
So I bought a bunch of notebooks and didn't notice that they were all blank and unlined.
And so I organize my notes in boxes and connect the related boxes.
I'll post pictures at some point.
And right so anyway the content.
All this was, the first class, was Howard talking about the class. About the time period. About what we were going to try and do, and discuss.
Tuesday we'll talk about J+H so the next post will be more in depth in terms of discussion.
The word [jingoism] kept showing up. By that I mean Howard would mention it, and chuckle. [Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy".[1] In practice, it refers to the advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safe guard what they perceive as their country's national interests, and colloquially to excessive bias in judging one's own country as superior to others – an extreme type of nationalism.

The term originated in Britain, expressing a pugnacious attitude towards Russia in the 1870s. During the 19th century in the United States, journalists called this attitude spread-eagleism. "Jingoism" did not enter the U.S. vernacular until near the turn of the 20th century. This nationalistic belligerence was intensified by the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898.] thank you wikipedia.

SEMINARS:

Timothy Donnelly
Poetry Seminar: Meter, Rhythm, and Form
[here on referred to as PROSODY]

Seriously I have like no notes about this class. I am kind of terrified of this class. My notes really read
[This is terrifying + I am terrified]

I am far less so now. Donnelly passed out a bunch of old English ballads about death and murder and madness. So I've decided that for this class, since we're going to be dealing with form, and writing a poem in a different form each week, that to make it fun for myself, that I am going to write all of them using the form of the murder ballad.

I will probably focus more on the American murder ballads, like Crow Jane, In The Pines, Goodnight Irene [suicide as a sort of murder], Deep Blue Sea [drowning as a sort of murder], and also traditionals like Mad Tom of Bedlam.

After this post and another Bourbon and Ginger I am going to diagram plot points and imagery in the various forms of these Ballads.

These will probably end up as poems in themselves, or maybe as a part of that whole digram hybrid essay thing that I think I'll try for. Hopefully if I have time I'll do two. One on murder ballads [the idea of bearing witness to them as a sort of essay on them] and one about various ways of drowning [probably just a multipart poem about drowning. whatever. being swallowed as a form of murder and burial.]

ALSO DISCUSSED
[poetry as a form of justifiable speculation]
\
[also called a LIE.]

[I want to say that it is possible there will not be very many notes for this class. Form and its study is weird for me, and what I may end up doing is just posting about the form we studied for the week, using my murder ballads as examples, and explaining it that way. Hopefully that's cool. If not, well, skip this section. Whatevs.]

Marjorie Welish
Avant-gardes, and Then Some: 20th-Century Experimental Poetry

This is a class that will have lots of notes.

So Welish is awesome. Really. She spent the entire two hours essentially summing up the Calinescu reading [transcribed below in notes that will likely be as abstract as the Howard ones. Don't worry I made real notes on the reading about Imagism, because I got excited.] and when I say summing up I mean for a little under an hour and a half she quoted and discussed the entire reading. This woman can pull quotes from her head, while making eye contact with you. She looks like an older bride of Frankenstein. Listen. I mean this in the most sincerely complimentary way possible. There is this intensity to her that is pretty incredible.
Alright.
Notes on the lecture, then notes on the reading about Imagism.

[Marjorie Welish is so fucking smart.]

[[the idea of placing]L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in a narrative is hilarious.]

[the avant garde as the [forerunners of the new]]
[that which defies traditions + thwarts convention]

[JUNKS THE PAST] V [MAKES THINGS NEW]
POUND___________MARINETTI [fuck marinetti + fuck futurism btw]
[will not aban-______[burn the museums]
don Confucius]
\
[from all of this we get [where does the new come from?]]

[Sorry. I don't think that'll format how I want, and so fuck it, much like a lot of the avant garde, you gotta fucking work for that note.]

they were devoted to that impossible concept of futurity
\that the future is something that the present must address
\that the present must legislate the future

[[the avant garde] as an extreme contract with that which will be.]

also there is nothing reasonable and there is nothing subtle about that which clings to a strict dogma

[THAT HIPPIE SHELLEY]- advocates through the [i missed the word] of imagination rather than through reason. That we should be working towards the possibility of the infinite or the transcendent [how are these things the same? how are the different?]

[olinde rodriguez] ghost writing jew
[robert owen] fucking commie

[the avant garde is just a heard of independent minds]
[Baudelaire]

[it is less purely academic [according to Calinescu's work, which places the notion of the avant garde firmly in a cultural context, insisting, in a way suggesting a man who has found all other avenues of analysis exhausted, that the avant garde, being itself a reactionary dogma, must and can only truly be understood in terms of that which is is reacting against] as it is a cultural context]

and then came Rimbaud.
and the came Mallarme.

So before the Imagism reading I'm going to talk about Baudelaire and Mallarme and Rimbaud, who vehemently objected to the notion of the avant garde, which at the time, sought to unite art and politics. To use the arts as a tool and medium of revolution.
These writers found the notion offensive.
I am using this word because I cannot physically display on the internet the way I feel about it, the ways in which I agree with them, and how offensive to me personally the notion of using art in that way, for this notion of hamfisted social change by a rabid mass of indignation, but whatever. Let's be fair. Shit has its uses.

alright ok, notes on imagism!!!

[the avant garde is a reactionary movement]
\
[this is their definitive characteristic]
\
[it is interesting to note, or consider, the ways in which the avant garde is terrified of change, of no longer being avant garde, and so will attempt to vilify the new [see Pound's frequent declarations that all others were simply watered-down Pound's], and how this is retarded. How this is retarded both in the colloquial sense of it being fucking stupid, but also in the fact that it is the act of slowing down progress by dragging it down and through the mud.]
\
[once again noting that the avant garde is as subtle as a brick through with FUCK YOU painted on it. [or, alternately, I DO NOT LIKE YOU NOT DO I APPROVE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING OR ANYTHING ABOUT YOU WHICH I FIND TO BE CONTRARY TO EVERYTHING THAT IS GOOD ABOUT LIFE AND LIVING AND I WILL DO TO YOU WHAT MY BRICK DID TO YOUR WINDOW AND I WILL SWEEP YOU UP AND PUT YOU IN THE TRASH WHERE THE YEARS OF HISTORY WILL BURY YOU UNKNOWN]]

[Tenets of Imagism as agreed upon by said school when first made new]
[1] Direct treatment of 'the thing', whether subjective or objective.
[2] To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
[3] As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in [the] sequence of a metronome.

and, because it's always easier to say what we are not,

[] Use no superfluous words, no adjective which does not reveal something

[] Don't use abstractions such as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

[] Go in fear of abstraction. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already [i wrote always and crossed it out] been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping you composition [again here i put conversation] into line lengths.[..]

[]Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music[, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music].[..]

[for that one, I inserted the brackets. I found the first part to have meaning to me, and the second one to have less meaning. I understand what they are saying. That this shit is hard fucking work and is about putting in the fucking hours. That you need to do it until it becomes the mode in which you think and in which you process. That it is a thing that you cannot shake. Like how you drift off practicing fingerings without conscious effort. This makes perfect sense. I just don't like the way it's phrased.]

as all this was beginning, they were exposed to the first British exhibitions of cubism + of futurism + in this certainly was a thing that meant a thing.
[began in Britain with Pound, spread to America, more on that soon, pinky swear.]
["Schools + coteries were very much in the air"]

[One published in public, Pound + his poets disagreed.]
\
[Pound split, crankily, to found Vorticism [which I won't go into because whatever I don't care]]
\
[Amy Lowell took over. Shifted to U.S.A.
in 1917 she said 'the collection has done it's work']

Alright how fucking bad ass is that.
Seriously.
How many fucking people have the balls to say 'we made it new, and now there are other people making it newer, and we did out jobs, and we are going to cede the title of [the new] to these people, who are making new what we made new in ways we could never imagine' and so they retired
and they [this is of course me being idealistic but whatever] got down to the real work of [learning to live] with what [they] had done.

Then there were a bunch of notes on how to be hard in poetry.
Gene Morgan, if you are reading this, email me and I will send you the official list on how to be hard in poetry.

WORKSHOP

The Sarah Manguso

I don't really know what to type about workshop.
It was good.
The class, for me, was really helpful and responsive, The Manguso steared The Discussion when necessary, primarily focusing on the idea of whether or not the class felt i had earned the use of the word 'forever' at the end of the last short adventure. [After nearly ten minutes, no consensus was reached.] [This was brought up because The Manguso stated that there were words that she generally outlawed in her undergraduate workshops, primary among them: [always], [forever]] [obviously this means i am going to write a poem for workshop titled always forever, because I am a dickbag, which is a bag filled with dicks.]

Things said in class that were worth writing down:

[What to say when we have nothing to say to each other]

[Not all movement is progress]

[What could be more performative than grace?]
[this last one the only one not uttered by The Manguso, but muttered by a Welshman during the discussion of the final couplet of a poem in which a man says the Lord's Forgiveness for his bounty, and the Welshman interpreted this as the man taking the forgiveness as his bounty, as opposed to asking for forgiveness for the killing and cleaning of the doe. Which is what the poem was about. The killing and cleaning of a doe. And listen, although I don't think it was the meaning of the poem at all, it is a way more interesting read, and also it gave us that awesome line above, and so whatever.]

That's it.

Ladies and fucking Gentlemen, I give you the first official week of THE RETURN OF THE VICARIOUS MFA

poetry is a poem that has line breaks

2009-09-07T16:37:00.001-04:00

i had some poems up at la fovea today.

my friend kate decided to give them line breaks.
since everyone knows real poems have line breaks.

[this is not kate's opinion. it is a joke. kate is down with the prose poem.]

here they are!

these days i barely get by

I kissed my wife and shot my dog last night.
After that who knows. After that the sky split open.
After that it went to sleep in a hole in the ground.
I was up late digging it. I dug it deep.
There was a mountain of dirt. I shoved it down my mouth
until it filled my lungs and then I didn’t anymore.
A note came crashing to the ground last night. It got lost in the mountain.
I shot everything full of holes last night.
I bent my knees in supplication last night. I tried prayer last night.
I walked around the corner and had a beer.
I met a friend. We got to talking and then I stopped listening.
Then I gave it another try.

there is a darkness on the edge of town

I was the space in between words
I was a vast encroaching darkness
and I swallowed up every word
that came spilling out of your mouth
and when they got to my ears they
weren’t there because they had
been swallowed by the vast
encroaching darkness. I was a chair.

I was useful. I cradled you. I was a cradle.
I was a baby. I was made out of clouds.
I was placed in a basket and delivered to a doorstep.
I was a series of steps. I was the series of steps
by the bridge at the point where the river
starts swallowing the ground.
I was the river. I swallowed the ground.
I was a flood. I came to you in the night.

Please do not blame me for the things I will do.
I cannot leave enough notes to tell you
just how sorry I am all of the time that I am
sorry and this is alright, it is ok.
I will cover you in a blanket
when you are tired and we will talk
until you fall asleep and when you fall asleep
I will cover you like a blanket and like a flood
I will swallow you.

THE RETURN OF THE VICARIOUS MFA

2009-09-05T13:04:00.007-04:00

Lacey used to do this over at the giant. But then she graduated. So now I figured, I'll do it. Regardless of interest. Alright. So.

ORIENTATION
Occurred. It did. Some of it I was glad for. A lot of it could have been skipped an replaced with the sentence "Look it up on the internet" because that is where information is found.
But anyway.
So I am here for poetry. I am going to poetry school. I have never been to poetry school. I have never studied poetry. Aside from things I've learned from the internet. Now that we've gotten that out of the way.
The poets are a diverse group. They are. There are about 22 of us. Or, between 20 and 22. I am not saying that I cannot count, just that maybe I didn't do so good a job of it.
Anyway. One of the poets was a guard in a corrections facility (which is another way of saying prison) and apparently has a network of knife scars all along his chest. His biceps are I think bigger than my thighs. He is from Puerto Rico. I think he has spent the last 8 years outside of Egypt. This may have been where he was a prison guard. Or corrections officer. Whichever. And so he has a wicked stutter. And he walked around New York reading that Lorca book about being in New York and he read it in all the places where it occurred. And he read Hart Crane's THE BRIDGE on the brooklyn bridge.
There is someone here from Florida who is an assistant editor for narrative.
There is someone here who has worked as a carny. As a barker for skee-ball games. And who spent time in Ghana.
There is someone here who spent time working a rural postal route in I guess rural Arizona.
There is a dude here who grew up in Torino (Turin, whatever, this is America, the fuck do I know anyway, at least I'm capitalizing things now right?) and went to northwestern and is really well tanned and wears flip flops and jeans and polos and his hair looks like it just knows what to do and sticks with it and he's spent the past few years working various corporate jobs and the motherfucker loves the shit out of poetry.
There's a girl who reminds me of all the cheerleaders/field hockey players I knew in high school, which is not a negative, just that. I don't know. It seems like they decided to pick 22 different poets. And I find this really exciting.

Anyway orientation was two days and lots of hours and the only big things I took away from it were as follows:
Heidi Julavits is really attractive.
In John Haskell's class, he likes to read things and also to speak out loud, and that is what will happen in said class. (this was his entire speech about what his workshop will be like. He said "I like reading things. I like speaking out loud. This is what we'll do. Thanks." and sat down.)
Sam Lipsyte said something like what I am about to type: Sam Lipsyte said that in his workshop your job will be to lead you stories to the promised land. And he said that it is possible that you will die, alone, out there in the desert, before being able to rescue your people, but that maybe, just maybe, you will be able to make sure that they manage to get to the promised land, even though you have died, alone, in the desert.
Victor LaValle said that some of us may be constitutionally incapable of enjoying ourselves, but for those of us who are not, that maybe we should figure out how to get some enjoyment out of this writing thing, since it is what we seem to maybe want to spend the rest of our lives doing.
[There is a vast array of fiction faculty. Most of the nonfiction faculty said something along the lines of "Well, I mean, what is non-fiction? Is it just that-which-is-not-fiction? Because I mean, what is that anyway? How can it just be that-which-isn't?" Or some variation on that. No offense nonfiction people. But I get it. I do. Nobody understands you. I guess if you were a poet, you could go write a poem, all about your feelings of sadness and misunderstanding. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. But one of you was really attractive and wearing a low cut dress. Whatevs.]
And Sarah Manguso said that in her workshop, that it was for maybe people who felt more comfortable saying that they were writers, because that's what we're all supposed to be anyway, and a sentence is just another way of saying something. And then she talked about how her office hours were available primarily for anyone that wanted to discuss Etymology.

After this they gave us pizza and they gave us wine. But there were nearly 100 of us, and the majority of the faculty, probably a bit over 20 or something like that maybe.

And then they ran out of wine, so a bunch of poets [or it was like 5, and then we lost 3, and then we gained 2, and I think after that we may have even lost another, I don't know] and so but we went to the bar down the street, which was cheap. 3 dollars for a pint of Lager. And at happy hour it's 2. So there were maybe 5 of us, and then within twenty minutes there were more than 12 of us. I think there was one fiction student. His name was Dave. And we drank for a bit, and then once everyone thinned out, we talked about Springsteen. And it was good. And everyone went home. Except I think the former corrections officer I heard that he maybe went to the village with some strangers and continued drinking. But I did not ask him about this the next day. There are two kids in the program fresh out of undergrad. Probably around a third of us are between 24 + 27. Maybe. I think they said the median age for the writing program was 28. Or mean. Whatever. Whichever. The one that means average. And so yeah. That's all. Welcome to Poetry School.

Classes start next week.

Alright so these are the classes that will be reported on. And by reported I mean I will post the readings, talk about what was read, and record anything really funny or mean or smart that gets said. Why? Because I'm vain and silly and I liked it before when it was done. I am still figuring out how to write about real things on a blog, which seems silly, but whatever. If anyone is reading this and wants more of a certain thing, leave a comment. Or less. Whatever. I will give the people what they want unless I don't want to.

But so yes. Classes to be reported on. With course descriptions. And reading lists. Because I just bought 8 poetry textbooks and plus Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String

ok. so.

LECTURE:

Richard Howard
The Beginning of the End

In the last decade of the 19th century, the culture of the British Empire appeared to be marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Readings from these seven English fictions will explore ways in which that perception of loss was cast into archetypal narratives, myths of transfiguration which sought to account for the culture’s troubles, if not to assuage its anxieties.

She (Rider Haggard) 1887
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) 1891
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) 1891
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) 1894
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) 1896
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (R.L. Stevenson) 1896
Dracula (Bram Stoker) 1897

Close attention will be paid to representations in these works of three forms of fin de siècle decline—national, biological, and aesthetic—which late-Victorian degeneration theories utilized to “explain” how the nation’s twin obsessions with Decadence and Imperialism became intertwined in the iconography as well as the mythology of the period.

[Jekyll & Hyde to be read by Tuesday]

SEMINARS:

Timothy Donnelly
Poetry Seminar: Meter, Rhythm, and Form

This craft course is designed to provide students with a historical and theoretical overview of prosody in English and also to encourage original composition in—and informed experimentation with—traditional poetic meters and forms. Extensive primary readings will range from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse through Modern free verse and onward to contemporary traditional and innovative work. Considerable emphasis will be placed on iambic pentameter (Surrey, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Frost) and the history of the sonnet. Critical readings will be rigorous, including Derek Attridge’s The Rhythms of English Verse and John Fuller’s The Sonnet as well as excerpts from Antony Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse and Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. We will also examine a handful of key defenses and manifestos, including Sidney’s “A Defense of Poesie,” Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” and Wordsworth’s Preface; crucial essays such as Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” Federico García Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende,” and Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought”; as well as shorter articles such as Louise Bogan’s “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry.” In the spirit of that essay, participants will be expected to question any received notion of traditional poetic form as merely restrictive. Weekly written assignments will aim to deepen the participants’ understanding and appreciation of traditional versification while affording them the opportunity to experience firsthand the aesthetic and expressive possibilities that traditional versification offers. Beginning in the third week, the third hour of every class will be devoted to an investigative workshop of students’ written work. The workshop will be ‘investigative’ insofar as our objective won’t be to provide editorial input towards the polishing and perfection of the individual work so much as to scrutinize its makeup, to perform an inquest into how and why the poet chose to make the poem the way he or she has chosen to make it.

READING LIST
- Poetic Rhythm [an introduction] by Derek Attridge
- Toward the Open Field [Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950] edited by Melissa Kwasny
- The Making of a Poem [A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms] edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

for tuesday: pp 1-62 of Attridge

Marjorie Welish
Avant-gardes, and Then Some: 20th-Century Experimental Poetry

This seminar will focus on poetry that seeks to revolutionize the word, the phrase and the sentence. Imagism, Vorticism, Russian Formalism, Toronto Research Group, Objectivism and its legacy in the provocatively named Language School will provide the core study, with meaningful side trips to the New York School and other relevant poetry. Emphasis on poetics will guide our understanding of the cultural strategies in utopian activism that would mandate formal invention.

Readings to be studied will include some of the works below:

Ezra Pound: Cantos: Cantos XIII and XIV
Gertrude Stein: Motor Automatism, from Tender Buttons
Mina Loy: from Love Songs to Joannes
Vladimir Mayakovsky: from Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams: from Spring and All
Louis Zukofsky: from All
Jackson MacLow: The Pronouns
Clark Coolidge: The Crystal Text
Christian Bok: Crystallography
Emmanuel Hocquard: This Story is Mine
Lyn Hejinian: from Oxota
Barrett Watten: Conduit

BOOKS I HAD TO BUY
- Five faces of Modernity [Modernism, Avant Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Post Mondernism] [these are listed on the cover descendingly with commas and i like that and wanted to note it] by Matei Calinescu
- Modernism [A guide to European Literature 1890-1930] edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane
- Contemporary Poetics edited by Louis Armand
- Poems for the Millenium [Volume One From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude] edited by Jerome Rothenerg and Pierre Joris
-The Contructivist Moment [from material texts to cultural poetics] by Barrett Watten

WORKSHOP

Sarah Manguso had us email her a poem- or poems- in-progress. I sent her the three below this.

anyway. thus begins The Return Of The Vicarious MFA, which will, theoretically, be posted every Friday.

short adventures with ghosts

2009-09-02T00:28:00.008-04:00

Inside the closet there was a bird and it was moving its wings and it was perfectly still.
In its beak was a note and the note asked if this was what you were looking for.
There was no way to answer the note.
There was no way to close the closet.
You could hear the bird from every room in the house.
You could hear it in the floorboards.
Outside there was a cloud.
It was full of birds.
It swallowed them whole and it moved away.
These are the ways i have missed you.

***************************************************************************************

I put a sheet over the kitchen table.
I put a sheet over the chairs.
I wrapped all of the silverware in a sheet.
I put a sheet over the cabinets.
I put a sheet over the bird.
I put a sheet over the floorboards.
While you slept I put a sheet over you and I tucked it in.
I put a sheet over the house.
The sheets were a note.
The note was to tell you that I cannot pretend to be a ghost today.
The note was to say that the clouds were coming.
And then they came.

***************************************************************************************

There was a room and the room was covered in clocks.
The face of each clock was a note.
All the words on the notes kept moving.
One day I smashed every clock with a hammer.
The letters stopped moving.
I picked them up.
All the words fell off of the notes and onto the floor,
where they slipped through the floorboards and they became birds
and they stayed there forever.

***************************************************************************************

MOTHERFUCKING NOVELLA'S GETTING PUBLISHED

2009-08-23T16:50:00.004-04:00

IN THE INTEREST OF FULL DISCLOSURE

sf.

just finished reading WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS. it is vibrant, lovely, chaotic, and sprite. this needs to be the third novel(la) released from mud luscious press.

the details in brief:

we would like to release this in dec. 2010.

it will be sold directly for $12 (no shipping) or can be had for less if purchased as part of a subscription to either our mlp chapbook series or alongside ben brooks AN ISLAND OF FIFTY (scheduled for release june 2010). we cannot afford a batch of ISBN numbers at the moment, so this will not be distributed through amazon, spd or others, though we will most likely sell a dozen copies or so to powell's for those who don't want to buy directly from mlp.

we will send pre-release review pdf copies to as many places as we can, will set you up for interviews as well, and will keep WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED in print as long as possible (instead of a limited edition run).

depending on the subscription base / demand, our initial run will most likely be between 100-200 copies, then we will print second, third, and other runs as new orders come in.

I hope this all sounds workable and good. give me the okay and I will shoot up all the new info to our website today including an excerpt, a release date, and an email contact for those who want to start thinking about reviews / interviews.

thanks again for sending this. we are really looking forward to having it,

j. a. tyler

HOLY SHIT

HOLY SHIT

HEY YOU DO YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO ME READ TO YOU?

2009-08-22T15:18:00.003-04:00

WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF I GOT PROGRESSIVELY MORE DRUNK WHILE DOING IT?

CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU ARE EXCITED

it's the date marked june 23.

thanks to joshua rosenzweig, well, for all sorts of things.

an open letter to my new bank account

2009-08-22T10:56:00.003-04:00

Dear New Bank Account,

Will you be shiny? Will you gleam? Will you tuck me in? Will you get here soon? Will you help me to establish a line of credit? Will you be there to remind me to pay it in a timely fashion? Should I start printing out calendars and putting them on the wall to better help me keep track of all the days and of all of the things that need to be done inside of them? Will you work with me on these headaches? Where are you right now? Can you get here soon? Dear New Bank Account I am waiting, I am not being needy, I will give you a good home, I will put out, I will cook, I will not ask too much in return. I will ask for undying devotion. I'm not sure if you'll be able to do that. But I'll take you regardless. I need you New Bank Account. I do.

i think this might be the last blog post without capital letters. lordy, what is happening to me?

2009-08-22T10:32:00.004-04:00

]] in brooklyn.

]] ja, if yr reading this, the zoo, a going is great. also i haven't done my pages fr battlefield yet. to anyone else reading this: the zoo, a going is great and you should read it since he's putting up a new chapter every day because he has that much love to give and by that much i mean 76 chapters worth and listen you already missed like 4. or 3. or 4. i haven't checked exactly.

]] still can't seem to get out of bed before ten

]] really need to go get groceries today. really hoping i stop dicking around and do it.

]] read scary, no scary. really liked it. there were a couple poems in the first section i thought weren't important, like reading them i felt it wasn't important to read them, that they wouldn't change anything, but they added something, i just wish they were things that on their own were better, a lot of this is also sort of stuff i wonder about my work since it's all designed to add up, so there's that too, but the second section was awesome and the next part was awesome and the pond was even better. I like Schomburg.

]]sort of also working on both bad bad by chelsey minnis and also this clumsy living by bob hicok. the first section of this clumsy living was awesome. the second was alright. the third is pretty good so far.

gene morgan and i were talking about bad bad's design the other week. i hadn't yet read it. i think the design is perfect. in that it's really obnoxious. and the font of the titles is really obnoxious. and i feel like that's the overall effect. like that's what she wanted. i mean the blurbs on the back are excerpted to seem exactly like the word bubbles on the back which read "childish!", "decadent!" and so yeah. good design work. in terms of the idea that how a book looks should interact with what the book is doing in a way that creates a complete thing.

]] also reading part of the world by robert lopez. which took like two days to get here. after i ordered it. calamari press does not fuck around people.

]] met gary lutz. he's from allentown. we talked about yacco's. made me miss yacco's. he claims gray's papaya on 8th and 6th is the closest i can find. i will check it out soon as i need to go to columbia to figure out how long it'll take anyway. hopefully one day i'll be visiting my parents and send gary lutz a facebook message and it'll turn out he's in allentown and we'll go to yacco's and it'll be fucking awesome.

]] i need to figure out what to do with the wall in front of my desk. there are some things on it. this will take some time.

]] feel weird about a lot of the poems i've written this month. feel like the book is changing. like it's a ship and some weird wind is hitting from out of nowhere and you can't tell if this is good or bad.

.....................................................................................

2009-08-16T14:15:00.004-04:00

]]re-packing. organizing. building furniture. ordered bad bad and poemland. ordered quaker guns. they are going to my new apartment. in brooklyn. where i am moving to tomorrow. by tuesday i will be a resident. of the apartment. there are a few more things i need to do before i can become a real resident. they involve measurements. more than that i'm not sure i can say.

]]how is everyone doing? is everyone ok? has anyone read anything good? i just read zirconia by chelsey minnis. i'm not sure exactly how i feel about it, other than that it seems important. to me. that it's right now just sitting in my stomach and at some point when i'm not ready it'll get digested and all sorts of things will come out all sorts of places.

]]i have an excerpt ready for sleepingfish. i have a poem thing. i am freaking out a bit about gary lutz and derek white reading my sentences. whatevs. will do line edits again soon to make sure shit is right. as right as i can get it, which is sort of wrong.

]]saw thumbsucker last night. really enjoyed it. been getting a lot of writing done recently.

]]will start posting some of the emails ja tyler and i have been doing about the battlefield where the moon says i love you. i don't know that anyone will be much interested. it's basically us making sure we keep doing it, with HOLY SHIT LOOK WHAT THIS FUCKER JUST DID I WANT TO CRY I AM SO HAPPY moments occurring with sporadic constance. if that's not a real word i made it one.

]]applying for a new bank account. student accounts for life.

]]does anyone read this? more importantly when was the last time you felt in awe of something?

]]the other day i woke up and it felt like there was a small bomb in my heart. that was weird.

teh chat about teh words

2009-08-15T17:27:00.005-04:00

adam robinson made a post about a gchat we had last week in response to sam pink's question on html giant

this is that gchat.

Adam: I don't understand short short writing like yours
me: ?
Adam: I think I'm having "a spell"
me: hahah
i have no idea how to take that.
Adam: I think I'm being cynical about it.
me: ouch
why?
Adam: Why ouch?
Not just about yours. I mean, your stuff is very good.
Its very accomplished
me: i don't know. i don't know how to take it i guess. i am confused about your feelings?
oh
OH
thank you
Adam: About The Form
me: AH
yeah
Adam: I don't see a lot of value to it
me: i think of it as being poetry. and that the line breaks i've used have always seemed arbitrary. so i just got rid of it
Adam: On the other hand, I don't wonder about it when it comes to joe young's stuff
HIS is more like poetry, YOURS are more like aphorisms
me: i sort of understand what you mean. (also was going to ask about joe) but that's why i write with a book in mind. viewing them as an aggregate
oh
hah
Adam: Yes!
Probably as a whole I think something else happens
Like in amelia grays book

[for the record i am pretty sure that adam robinson knows that he probably thinks as a whole something else happens, as he's publishing an excerpt from my full-length poetry book at some point in the winter.]

me: yeah i don't think they do a whole lot alone. some of them do.
yeah
Adam: Correct
Sometimes alone they do a lot
I think one thing that works for other ppl
Is using 3rd person
me: i'm trying to whip them more into shape. the newer ones. i'll send you some of those. and sometimes alone they do do a lot. (doo doo. HA. um. " ".) but at this point i'm not certain i understand how to sort of do it as a self contained thing. i like books as being a thing in itself, not like a collection. like an aggregation.
yeah
i may or may not start doing that
Adam: Have you thought about that
Ah
me: not seriously. or, not right now. not with the things i am working on now
but in the future yes
Adam: So you know, like I said, this isn't just about you
me: i want to write slightly longer pieces that can stand on their own as well as they can add up to a larger thing.
yeah
no
don't worry
i know that you don't dislike what i write
and i understand very much what you're saying.
Adam: I think its the form, with the I voice
I am glad you know

a list of sectional titles from the new poetry book which is called I CANNOT PRETEND TO BE A GHOST TODAY

2009-08-01T19:15:00.006-04:00

I CANNOT PRETEND TO BE A GHOST TODAY

SOME OF THESE DAYS

AND WHEN I WOKE ALL THIS WAS JUST BEGINNING

SOME THINGS I KNOW AND SOME THINGS I DON'T

WE'VE BEEN HAD

IT IS FRIGHTENING AND I AM FRIGHTENED

DO NOT BOTHER ME WHEN I AM IN MY AIRPLANE SUIT

TRIALS TROUBLES TRIBULATIONS

i should probably start writing ghost stories or something for this

maybe a better note on the editing

2009-08-01T12:57:00.003-04:00

i built a steamboat in the meadow

I could smell coffee. I was in the bathtub. Water was falling on my head from somewhere. I got out of the bathtub. I placed myself inside your eyes. I made my way up to the roof. There was a leak. It called me on the phone. I did that thing where you put all of your weight on the front of your feet and then all of your weight on the backs of your feet. It was hot. When my feet melt to the roof my only option will be to shoot myself in the face and crumple up into notebook paper and then that sheet of paper will get blown away by the wind and the sky would eat the sheet and the clouds would eat the sky and what was left would call me up and say there is a man in the alley. There was. We waved. His was sort of cautious. That’s how I’d describe it, if I had to.

i built a steamboat in the meadow

I was in the bathtub. Water was falling on my head from somewhere. I got out of the bathtub. I placed myself inside your eyes. I made my way up to the roof. There was a leak. It called me on the phone. I told it to stop that and it did. It told me that there was a man in the alley. There was. We waved. His was sort of cautious. That’s how I’d describe it, if I had to.

i built a steamboat in the meadow

I was in the bathtub. Water was falling on my head from somewhere. I got out of the bathtub. I made my way up to the roof. There was a leak. It called me on the phone. I told it to stop that and it did. It told me that there was a man in the alley. There was. We waved. His was sort of cautious. That’s how I’d describe it, if I had to. He threw a sheet over his head and a wind came out of nowhere and carried him off. Or he stayed there and we both went on like nothing happened. He was holding up a sign and pointing to the window below me. When you come home I will have something to tell you. I hung windows all around the backyard to the top of the roof. They looked like slow moving water. They were slow moving water. We could reach through them to birds and see where that takes us. I built a meadow in the yard. I put a steamboat in it. Lord knows where that will take us. Lord knows where this is going. That was written on a note tied to a bird that tried to swim through the window but didn’t. Another bird hit. The note read Well? I had no ready answer. I continue to have no ready answer and will remain that way for the foreseeable future, with little apology. I buried the birds in a box in the yard.

i built a steamboat in the meadow

I was in the bathtub. Water was falling on my head from somewhere. I got out of the bathtub. I made my way up to the roof. There was a leak. It called me on the phone. I told it to stop that and it did. It told me that there was a man in the alley. There was. We waved. His was sort of cautious. That’s how I’d describe it, if I had to. He threw a sheet over his head and a wind came out of nowhere and carried him off. Or he stayed there and we both went on like nothing happened. He was holding up a sign and pointing to the window below me. When you come home I will have something to tell you. I will tell you about how the thunder and lightning fell from the sky and how I put them in boxes labeled Thunder and Lightning and walked those boxes on down to the post office. We will sit in the steamboat on chairs made of wood and sip cool drinks and wait for the summer to end and the breeze to come and we will sit like that, in the wild silence before the dawn.

a note on the editing

2009-08-01T12:51:00.003-04:00

you know i’m gonna miss you

There are days when I wake up and I wonder if this is going to be the day when instead of coming home from work you decide to take a trip on the wings of a great speckled bird or some sort of airplane or that when I wake up you will swallow me whole. Some of these days when I wake up I go back to sleep and dream of you naked and on top of me and other days I go back to sleep and continue to wake up. Each time I wake up I forget what it was I was waking up from. I wake up from matching luggage. I wake up from boat rides. I wake up from have little else to do. There are days when I wake up and forget who you are and there are days I wake up in the shower. With the water running. And little to no idea how I got there.

a supposedly fun thing i will never do again

When I woke up I got swallowed whole. When I woke up you were naked and on top of me. When I woke up you crumpled into a sheet of paper and a strong wind blew you away and the sky ate the sheet of paper and the clouds ate the sky and what was left called me up on the phone to wake me up. When I woke up I went back to sleep and continued to wake up. Each time I woke up I forgot what it was I was waking up from. I woke up from matching luggage. I woke up from boat rides. I woke up from having little else to do. When I woke up I forget who you were. Then I woke up in the shower. With the water running. And little to no idea how I got there.

some things i know and some things i don’t

When I woke up I got swallowed whole. When I woke up you were naked and on top of me. When I woke up you crumpled into a sheet of paper and a strong wind blew you away and the sky ate the sheet of paper and the clouds ate the sky and what was left called me up on the phone to wake me up. When I woke up I went back to sleep. When I woke I woke up from matching luggage. I woke up from boat rides. I woke up from a first date and feeling her up a bit for the first time and it was great and when I woke up I woke up from a charting of the interiors, from a gunfight, from hiding under a bed holding bullets what could explode a foot sending you keeling over like a ship getting flipped. I woke up from a ship getting flipped. I woke up from being sound asleep. I woke up from being wide awake. I woke up from having little else to do. When I woke up I forget who you were. When I woke up I woke up in the shower. With the water running. And little to no idea how I got there.

some different ways of drowning

When I woke up I got swallowed whole. When I woke up you crumpled into a sheet of paper and a strong wind blew you away and the sky ate the sheet of paper and the clouds ate the sky and what was left called me up on the phone to wake me up. When I woke up I went back to sleep. When I woke I woke up from boat rides. I woke up from a first date. I woke up from a charting of the interiors. From a gunfight. From hiding under a bed holding bullets what could explode a foot sending you keeling over like a ship getting flipped. I woke up from a ship getting flipped. I woke up from several disasters. I woke up from being sound asleep. I woke up from being wide awake. I woke up from having little else to do. When I woke up I forgot everything about you. I woke up with my head in the sand. I woke up in the shower. With the water running. And little to no idea how I got there.

dear sarah manguso

2009-07-23T21:17:00.001-04:00

in case you google yourself often, and this shows up, lemme take that workshop with you. you are my number one choice. and josh bell said it'd be a good idea too. so there's that. ac/dc is telling me that it ain't easy. i feel they are not entirely wrong.

ugh

2009-07-22T10:46:00.005-04:00

wrote a novella.

halfway through scorch atlas. stand by every word i said about it. stand by those words in a way that is slightly taller and sturdier than they way i stood by them before. no more locking my knees. that sort of thing.

scouring cragslist for places to live. hoping people email me back. possibly with subject lines like hell yes. fuck yes. shit yeah. some sort of variant of that would be slammin.

fell behind on my pages for the battlefield where the moon says i love you. going to make those up today.

owe someone a story about playing tennis with an old man and eating breakfast with him later. a gigantic breakfast sandwich of a breakfast.

lordy. who knows. we'll see. i certainly don't.

from 'vacation' by deb olin unferth

2009-07-17T13:54:00.001-04:00

You know how it is to want something. Desire builds like a little house in your head and it sits there, half-constructed in your mind. Women who want children are this way. Artists are this way about pictures. It doesn't go away. You may forget for a few months but then it's back, the unfinished pieces of what you want.

holler.

packing for vermont. a note about blake butler.

2009-07-17T13:20:00.006-04:00

so i'm going to vermont for a few days to visit family. will be back around tuesday. will at some point post about the dollar store tour in philly.

so i've been reading vacation by deb olin unferth and it's been blowing my mind. really. this and don b's paradise are the two novels that i look at for. for how i would write a novel. paradise for the way it manages to use very small pieces to tell a much larger story and move you along without a sense of being moved along at all. but vacation. the word tight doesn't describe it. tight is like. tight is how a fucking shirt fits yknow? it describes a fit. this fucking prose it just perfect. everything about really short fiction that anyone in the world would ever love, really just sentences that are like a trampoline in their construction, that propel you upwards and onwards, and after each one you think where could this go that could make it more perfect and then fuck me there 200 pages left, because that was after like the second chapter or something, and fuck, it's like miles and miles of trampolines, tightly constructed, heartbreakingly fucking gorgeous, moving you upwards and onwards, forever and ever, holy fuck. it was 5 bucks from mcsweeneys. get it now. fucking buy it.

also at the dollar store i picked up an early copy of scorch atlas.

first off it's incredible. the design of this book. as an object, it's goddam magnificent.

and second. i've been sort of reading scorch atlas. the other night i couldn't sleep and picked it up instead of going on with vacation. and listen. blake butler i need to say something to you. in public. for everyone to see.

generally it is safe to say i stay away from the grotesque. from the things that seem to consume you and gary lutz. they tell me "In modern English, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or bizarre." blake i don't feel safe when i read your writing all of the time. but like with lutz, and sometimes more so because of how tightly wound lutz's words are, but what it is is that i am dragged, sentence by sentence, inch by inch, into your words and every moment inside of them bristles with this strange magic i don't feel in any way comfortable around, and because of these words, the ones you picked from your head and put on the page, all i can do is awe at it. at this strange and bristling and wonderful terror.

i got a real man crush on james tate

2009-07-14T23:13:00.001-04:00

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE SUMMER SAYS I LOVE YOU

2009-07-12T10:26:00.003-04:00

have you read this?

The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You is a 15,283-line epic poem by the poet Frank Stanford. First published in 1977 as a 542-page book,[1] the poem is visually characterized by its absence of stanzas (or any skipped horizontal spaces) and punctuation and is recognized as a complex, unusual work — at once both highly humorous and tragically beautiful.

Stanford worked on the manuscript for many years (beginning as a teenager in the 1960s[2] [or possibly even before his teenage years])[3] prior to its publication — a joint-publication by Mill Mountain Press (Stanford's publisher throughout the early and mid-1970s) and Lost Roads (Stanford's own press) — in 1977.[1] After being out of print for several years,[4] the book was republished by Lost Roads (under succeeding editorship of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander) in 2000; this second, corrected edition — 383 pages, equipped with line numbers — is in print, having been reprinted by the press in 2008. A common misconception is that the 15,283-line poem (as evident in the 2000 edition) was actually over 21,000 lines in the first edition (which suggests that the two texts are actually different), but the seemingly longer line count in the 1977 edition is merely resultant of the paper's octavo size, effecting many lengthy lines to be necessarily broken with indents employed.

from wikipedia.

so. j.a. tyler and i were talking about how neither of us has ever finished this book.

why would anyone want to finish it?

here are lines 3001-3199

I am afraid after reading all these so-called initiation books that some
cortege of boot lickers will enter my room while I am sleeping and suck
my eyes out with soda straws they will be older men and women much like
the amanuenses with bad breath in the principal’s office who call
up and tell on you the Unferths of the world better beware
I know Jesus would have kicked your teeth in you couldn’t pull that shit on him
he was telling his buddies one night boys I’m glad y’all decided to come on up
and eat supper with me I hadn’t got much there’s a few things I’d like to say
at this time Matthew says to Simon I sure as hell don’t know what he’s got us
here this time for I’m beginning to wonder you talked to him lately
yea I was shooting the shit with him on the mountain but I want to tell you
this Matthew don’t never come up on him when he’s alone he jumped on me
I thought he was going to kill me he was just walking around just talking
to himself waving his arms like he does he’s worse than John
Jude put his hand up to his mouth and said down the table I think Jesus is going
off his rocker get Simon to tell you what he asked me
Simon says he didn’t want to talk about politics or dreams or nothing he just said
Jude next time y’all are over in Mesopotamia why don’t you pick me up a few
bottles of that wine they make over there
sure thing Jesus I says
well now the boss is talking he is saying I asked y’all up here because frankly
I’ve been feeling a little sick lately and I want to make sure y’all know what
to do in case anything happens I know one of you is going to do me in I know
that but goddamnit y’all know those people in town are after my ass
the other night I walked down the streets in a disguise and I seen a couple
of you messing around and drinking with the soldiers what’s going to happen
if one of you gets drunk and lets it slip where I’m hiding out then I’ll
be in a fix you know if they was to find me they going to cut me y’all ever
think about that and Peter ain’t you ever going to get it straight what you’re
supposed to do give me one of those biscuits Judas and go outside and take a
look-see I got you Jesus Judas says
John leans over he says been catching any fish Peter
oh well I been getting a few of a morning they ain’t biting too good now you know
on account of this blamed weather nobody is even listening to Jesus he’s just
talking to himself like he was crazy Matthew says I believe he’s been hitting
that wine a little too hard don’t you reckon
Jesus says another thing I told all of you it’d be better if you didn’t get
involved with women
now just listen to that little two-faced bastard James the Lesser says
we all know what he’s up to shacking up with all those town girls
the other night he was dressed fit to kill and drunk as six hundred dollars
a rolling around in the mud like a hog kissing that whore’s foot why shit
I wish he’d let us in on what he really does
Thomas spoke up for once he says I know what you mean the other day Andrew
and I asked him about some scripture he said leave me alone I don’t know
nothing about that shit and then we seen him cussing out a priest over at the
temple he knew more about it than the elder did
another thing Matthew says I wish he’d start writing what he wants done down
and do it so I can read it you know as well as I do that damned Peter can’t
keep it straight he won’t get anything right
Bartholomew says don’t make no difference atoll cause Paul is going to tell
it like he wants to that’s for damned sure
all the time Jesus just mumbling to himself wine spilt all over his robe
the rest of them chattering and cussing trying to figure him out
John the Baptist about the only one Jesus can count on except for crazy John
is banging his goblet on the table he is saying now ain’t this a sight
spitting in the lord’s face at his own birthday party I’ll swan
Brother John why don’t you tell Jesus what the real problem is
the crazy one says everyone of y’all is chickenshits you are afraid to look
those elders in the eye and tell them what you think ya’ll get up on a rock
to talk and you see a soldier coming and you say anybody seen a stray mule
Jesus is saying to himself I’m going to pull those temples down if I have to
get me a rope and tie it to a pillar and a jackass and do it myself
wake up Jesus Philip says
Paul who hadn’t touched a drop gets up and gets his paper out and says
the nature of the problem Jesus is this the people don’t believe you
those fellows in the temples have got it all organized all they have to do
is send out stooges and hire a couple of rednecks who make out like they’re
crippled they have a big gathering they say the same things you say they
pull off a fake healing the redneck’s wife stands up she says LIE he ain’t lame
he’s just drunk and so all the people go home saying those christians what a
bunch of wind see Jesus they are using your material but they ain’t coming
through so that is making you an enemy of the people we just got to get
organized as is proved here today by your followers carrying on as they did
so I’m getting sold down the river by the elders and their hirelings uh
that’s right Jesus ask anybody here why I didn’t think they’d do that he says
I told you a long time ago not to keep talking with them temple people John says
you should a know’d what they was up to ain’t nobody going to understand you
why you ought to know that when we first run on to you we had second thoughts
we thought you was crazy there’s probably still some sitting down here right
this second that still thinks you are a crazy one but Jesus you should a known
we been through a lot together we go a long way back you should a listened
all they wanted was you they liable to get you yet then they won’t have no
competition they want to keep feeding the hogs the same slop
they the ones that want to get fat man you listening to me Jesus
he says ok if that’s the way they want to do things at the temple
I’m going to change my tactics I going out after these chillun more than I have
been they’ll know I’m telling the truth I still got a few things up my sleeve
left what’s that Paul says
I’m going to do a few things can’t nobody follow
we could always go back to biting the heads off fish and chickens Peter says
why don’t you let us in on it for a change Paul says we follow you around
like we were a bunch of sheep picking up your tab bailing you out of jail
coming up here all the time for supper and what do we get to eat nothing
why can’t you have a little faith in us Jesus
ok this is what we going to do he says hold on who is that walking up the steps
it’s just Judas
how does it go boy Jesus says and the other one answers just fine Jesus just fine
and John the Baptist turns around he says to the one who has just slipped in boy
didn’t I see you talking to some white folks the other day
here endeth with a chord on the guitar that’s how the men did Jesus like he was
old like he was young just like Elvis did to Big Dad Arthur I know
just like another blind singer the men come down to see with their equipment
they get his song they pay him twenty dollars and he don’t hear from them ever
again except sometimes in the mail on Christmas when one of them might send a
five dollar check there won’t nobody cash oh tell me brother how do the old men
feel who were young as purple flowers from Hawaii once when they listen to their
songs coming in over a borrowed radio tell me don’t they take up a notch in they belt
don't they tie another knot in they headband don't they wring that sweat out
have mercy Jesus deliver me from the lawyers and the teachers and the preachers
and the politicking flies can’t you hear them buzz can’t you hear them bite another
chunk out of me oh brother I am death and you are sleep I am white and you are
black brother tell me I am that which I am I am sleep and you are death we are
one person getting up and going outside naked as a blue jay rolling our bellies
at the moon oh brother tell me you love me and I’ll tell you too I want to know
how do they like it when the ones who sung shake they leg on the Television
I want to know Jesus don’t a blind man count no more some by signs others by
whispers some with a kiss and some with a gun and some with a six bit fountain
pen whoa lord help me and my brother help us get through this tookover land

so. in the tradition of infinite summer, starting monday july 13, we will be reading 40-50 pages a week. and emailing. if anyone wants to get in on this, maybe we'll start a blog and everyone can have a discussion. if you come late, that's fine! check goodreads for our current page count, or email one of us.

everyone should fucking read this.

it's fucking epic.

it's going to be awesome.

(570): [I just called a phone sex line and you know what I did?] I sat there and cried

2009-07-10T13:13:00.003-04:00

Prathna Lor
to me
12:58 PM (11 minutes ago)

how long, do you think, will you be able to continue writing about birds and water and fire and trees and the sky

(503): I didnt attack him, I heard I threw a chair at him- big difference. And you know Im not a creep so whatever

2009-07-08T13:25:00.000-04:00

(the sequel)

Shane: gchat is for interns only
12:33 PM me: i hope a fire breaks out and you have to carry every one of those fatties on your back down the stairs
one at a time
12:35 PM go write a novel. and see if you can make it, yknow, past 200 pages or something.
i hope you eat so much folded up pizza that you explode. literally explode
12:36 PM i hope the state of new york fines you for every time you feel sad
i hope you fucking miss me one day
i'm gonna go cry more
Shane: sorry, talking to new intern

(832): 'Watching yourself cry on Photobooth' is the new 'watching yourself cry in the mirror.'

2009-07-07T17:10:00.005-04:00

3:58 PM me: right now i am trying to figure out if mariah carey is black
3:59 PM "of afro-venezuelan descent"
4:02 PM also, irish
4:18 PM me: now you don't need to look it up
what are the worlds best part time interns for if not this
4:45 PM Shane: i have some terrible news
i hit the wall with the # stories
me: OH NO
what happened
Shane: keep thinking about a novel
4:46 PM me: shit work on that and go back to them
problem solved
Shane: something bigger
me: how does my solution not solve this problem
and turn the terrible news into simply really good news that i'll have to wait a little longer for
i don't understand
Shane: hahaha
i felt bad
4:47 PM i just thought "fuck these stories, i hate them"
me: fuck you i hate you
no, don't worry put it down work on the novel you'll go back to them because fuck you they're good
ryan call and i both think so
4:48 PM Shane: hahaha
me: and i mean, we
are fucking awesome
at writing and at being people
Shane: very true
4:50 PM me: so there
once again
i am the best part time half assed intern you could ever ask for
4:51 PM also, really, just about the third or fourth best thing ever you could ask for. top ten maybe. i'll places cede to all sorts of blowjobs.
Shane: you're fired
that's right, i'm firing you
me: WHAT
you can't fire me
Shane: you haven't done anything
the worst
4:52 PM the absolute worst
me: who will get you your fire marshall hat
Shane: ryan manning
or ben brooks
that's right, ben brooks is the new intern
he'll probably do something
and not just sit on the porch reading
me: FINE
Shane: where there is no internet
me: SEE HOW YOU LIKE ME NOT BEING YR INTERN
4:53 PM Shane: should be okay
nothing will change
4:54 PM me: when you wake up to an email from ben brooks but when you open it you think it's from me because you're still sleepy and have been dreaming about me and my emails, and then you read it and realize, unmistakeably, that sasha fletcher did not write this email, as it is capitalized when appropriate, and when this happens you will get a little sadder, but not in a way that will help yr writing, but in a way that will make it just a little bit harder to make it through each day, and also it will make yr erections last for shorter periods of time
incrementally.
but, i accept being fired, as i have done nothing.
4:55 PM you can however not fire me from being your internet friend, as google looks down on that sort of thing
Shane: well, of course
me: alright
if we are settled in all of this, then i accept
4:56 PM Shane: don't let the door hit you on the way out
me: I FUCKING WON'T
Shane is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when Shane comes online
DON'T LET THE SADNESS CHOKE YOU TO DEATH

and i'm not bitter about it one bit.