an ice cold coca cola

AMELIA GRAY'S NEW NOVEL 'THREATS' IS GOING TO BE THE BEST SO YOU HAD BETTER THANK HER NOW

2011-08-20T11:26:00.001-04:00

NO PERCH reading series: Amelia Gray on a moped from Angeline Gragasin on Vimeo.

things!

2011-07-05T13:22:00.007-04:00

Four poems from EVERYTHING HERE IS OK just got published over at Hart House Review thanks to Prathna Lor. I'm going to post the earliest versions of the poems I can find here just to see if that might be neat.

[these two poems combined to be the earliest draft of everything was very calm]

i didn’t feel like making lunch because

there wasn’t any food in the fridge.

i walked down to broad street and then

i took that up to mcdonald’s

where i stood in line for a very long time

and in my head

a great speckled bird descended

from the clouds and swallowed everyone there whole

shrines were be built on the corner

and everyone stood around

like a fire drill.

i felt an overwhelming urge to sit down

but i didn’t. i felt decisive. i took a bite

of my burger, and it tasted exactly

the way i needed it to.

if i was a detective i could get to the bottom of things

if i was a gunslinger i could shoot you between the eyes

if i was more efficient this wouldn’t be a problem

i thought about all of this as i cleaned the kitchen floor the other day

and then i didn’t think about anything

except how i’d managed to clean the kitchen floor.

please leave the lights on

i stayed down on the ground and let them all have my neck

and in the morning something had changed.

categorically, there is something about ghosts

that i cannot understand.

imagine death as a skeleton on a skeleton horse.

now picture that skeleton riding the skeleton of an automobile,

or some type of dirt bike.

i thought about that last night

and then i dreamed about a man named walt, with a peg leg

and a pea coat

standing on a pier and watching as the delaware parted

in such a way that he could never cross it ever again.

he watched as a great big clipper ship

carried something very important to him

very far away. the look in his eyes

made me think of the way a lighthouse must look to a sailor

intent on synchronized shipwrecks.

send me the money you owe me

the tv was on. she watched a show about crows that took your bad dreams

and ate them from your fingers. these dreams were rooted

in fears and your childhood and the ground.

come back it’s starting she said over the phone and waited.

i could picture the way it would feel

with someone else on the couch.

she said hurry. i did. i saw several pigeons land

in the parking lot. their form was perfect.

it was like an instructional video.

all of our problems will be eaten by crows i said.

she said that was close but not quite it but that i almost had it.

i pulled out my six guns and fired one into a lake

and i killed a fish and i took it out and i held it

and it nibbled on my finger a little. sort of.

certain bodies of water

do you believe in ghosts she asked me.

i said you mean with sheets?

she said no. she said not with sheets.

she said she believes in ghosts.

in something involving physics

and a need to hold on. she said she believes

she would like a glass of water.

i tell her i would bring her the ocean to drink.

she said the ocean is salt water.

she said i just want a glass of regular water.

i thought about catfish

and the mississippi delta

where i have never been.

some other things

2011-06-24T00:26:00.003-04:00

this sort of looks neat and i think i want to see it

it almost feels like if peter greenaway was not very much a dude. in that peter greenaway's movies, while real real pretty and also pretty fucking weird, feel very much like the product of a dude. which is whatever. i honestly have no idea what i am talking about here.

anyway so i've been re-reading josh bell's NO PLANETS STRIKE and it's still awesome. josh bell you should read this post and then finish and publish yr second book already please and thanks not to pressure you or anything.

also if you don't know this poem this poem by mark leidner has saved my life a lot of times.

Charismatic Ambulance Driver

It’s WWII.

I’m a charismatic ambulance driver.

You make me French toast

and when you set the plate down

you kiss my neck

and I just stare and stare at you.

We’re tilling a field in Poland

when the clouds break open

and we throw down the reins of our plows

and make love in the wind and the mud

while the mules, mute, look on.

You are about to take a spacewalk

and I stop you in the airlock

by shouting your name

and as you spin around to face me

your hair splays out in the absence of gravity.

Not without this, I say

handing you your helmet.

It’s Texas and you’ve tricked me

into attending a bake sale.

We’re out in the desert, resting

in the shade a small cliff is creating

and you gently pat my stomach

and ask me if I am gay.

We’re driving through Atlanta

and it is the end of the world

and you point out the window

and I follow the pale curl of your arm

and the line extending from your finger to the moon

and the moon is full

and on fire.

You’re panicking

because you can’t remember the meaning

of nonchalant, but I’m massaging

your neck, whispering,

It’s what you are.

You catch the flu but you refuse

to blow your nose because you’re scared

of looking sick. I finally get you to blow it

by offering you $5, and when you do

the most beautiful music comes out.

I call you sport

and you get a funny look in your eye

and say, Don’t call me that.

You split our bread into two parts,

the crust and the center,

and you give me the crust.

I finally say, I’m leaving you!

All you ever gave me were the wretched crusts!

and you look up at me,

tears brimming in your eyes, and say,

But the crust was always my favorite part.

We are trying to purchase a car

and you are heavy with child

and we are test-driving a small coupe

and I take a corner too fast, and your water breaks

and you tap me on the shoulder and say,

My water just broke. And I say, Is it okay

to drive this car to the hospital?

It’s not ours yet, you know.

We end up getting a different coupe.

You ruined that one.

i am going to go eat ice cream. i hear ryan madson has a beard. apparently roy oswalt's back was made out of jose contreras's elbow. and polanco's bat was made out of oswalt's back. oh well. it's weird how i keep complaining about shit when the phillies still have the best record in baseball. it seems real similar to that whole first world problems hashtag thing. in that like i should shut the fuck up because they are obviously doing really well, but i cannot seem to accept that. whatever. still have the overall losingest franchise in baseball. we win at winning AND losing. hooray! that should have said the phillies win at but i can't fix it because, again, keyboard's busted.

GOSH I AM SORRY I HAVE BEEN SO NEGLECTFUL

2011-06-24T00:08:00.003-04:00

my chapbook 'i ain't asked any pardon for anything i done' is now available from greying ghost press.

you can read a bit about it here

and you can buy it here

and maybe one day i'll stop ignoring this thing because i don't know quite what to do with it now that i am unemployed and out of grad school?

the return of things that well whatever anyway

2011-04-02T13:34:00.003-04:00

So lots of things have happened around here I guess and while this would be the place and time to mention them I have decided to not do that at all!

I am still working on the book. It is coming along. I need to cut 2 poems and seriously reconsider 2 other poems and then there are 2 poems that I need to play with how they're ordered or they might need to get cut, even though I think they are pretty swell. In other news it's baseball season. It is difficult to find shoes that fit me right especially since I do not like stores because whatever, the internet.

Mostly though I've been watching Adventure Time. Also I've been writing poems and getting sick. I had a migraine from 9-5 yesterday. I am thinking about the future. The future is a thing that does not actually exist but I am going to go get my dvd player from my old roomate and that will be neat. Last night we watched a really awful werewolf movie but we made pretty good french bread pizza and also the Phillies won. In addition, Bats Out of Hell is awesome but could have totally lost some stories in the third quarter. But I feel like the last two stories in Captain Maximus could have gone too. But whatever.

RAISE YOUR HANDS, PILGRM.

2010-12-11T13:00:00.004-05:00

TABLE OF CONTENTS [thus far]

my eyes have seen the dawning...............................................................................1
let me tell you about my day....................................................................................2
like teeth singing......................................................................................................3
jawbone....................................................................................................................4
birds flying south......................................................................................................5
but it’s alright...........................................................................................................6
all hands and the cook..............................................................................................7
city living..................................................................................................................8
i can see your bones from here.................................................................................9
torch song................................................................................................................10
abide with me...........................................................................................................11
it’s not a snowstorm it’s a shipwreck......................................................................12
let me tell you about my boat..................................................................................13
wake up your saints and settle down for the night.................................................15
lead me to water lord i sure am thirsty...................................................................16
it is going to be a good year.....................................................................................18
tightrope...................................................................................................................19
mama don’t care if you ain’t a preacher so long as you say your prayers..............20
some accounts of travelers on legends and fables..................................................21
i have got my suitcase, my starry crown.................................................................23
prove it.....................................................................................................................24
if that is what it takes..............................................................................................25
poem called ‘a grand pronouncement’...................................................................26
some accounts of travelers on legends and fables.................................................27
this is what it has come to......................................................................................28
trouble! o trouble! ..................................................................................................30
almost killed me......................................................................................................31
i will be going away.................................................................................................33
bedtime stories.......................................................................................................34
meet me here at dawn............................................................................................35
you are a beauty and i am alright...........................................................................36
woe is me.................................................................................................................37
two or three nocturnes...........................................................................................38
after all is said and done.........................................................................................40
well that’s just it isn’t it? ........................................................................................42
the sky is falling......................................................................................................44

audible humming

2010-11-29T23:04:00.004-05:00

i don't often post on this thing. most of the time i don't really know what to post is a big part of it i think. so i guess i am just going to write a long rambling thing about my thoughts and feelings.

things are good overall. living with skyler is great. tonight we had indian food. it was awesome. we should probably not order out much. which i mean i guess we do it between 2 and 6 times a month, which isn't that often maybe, but whatever. we [i] need to eat better. i need to exercise. because saying this in a public forum is helpful and constructive. i wish i was really really absorbed by a tv show right now. i am reading this great book called ORIENTAL TALES by margaret yourcenar right now. it is for an awesome class on linked/unified collections of poetry and fiction. so far i have mostly just liked the fiction.

part of me thinks i should submit more. mostly i guess i want everything here is ok picked up before i start putting too much of this new book out there. i am going to try to get a ruth lilly and fail. i have looked at their finalists and i do not think they will like me. i could use that prize money though.

josh bell told me the other day that awp claims this is the shittiest year for the job marker of teaching creative writing since awp started keeping track of these things which was probably 1992 or something, so whatever. speculative quantitative data can suck my dick. there is probably a better way of putting that, but hey.

i feel good about the new book. i feel really really good. there are things in there right now that might not belong, but i turn it in to workshop in a week so i'll just let the class figure that out. it's probably going to be around 50 pages. so us workshopping it may take something like 6 hours. josh bell will probably say funny things and then i will put them here on the internet and it will ruin his life.

i bought flannel sheets fr the bed when i went home for thanksgiving. also happy thanksgiving. also when i say i bought flannel sheets for the bed what i mean is that my mom bought us flannel sheets because she is rolling in that tenured faculty dough. which is still probably not enough money to fill a swimming pool. probably like a kiddie pool, like the one we had as kids with a whale head that you hooked up to the hose and it sprayed out a blowhole and this was all on the deck and i think my dad would put a tarp down and just sit in the shade with a book while my brother and i sat there shouting for an hour or hours or whatever how do you tell how time passes anyway? really. i mean it. it's hard. josh was telling me he doesn't have a watch or cell phone and so he's always really really early for stuff because he assumes that since he has no real way of keeping track of time outside his apartment where there is a clock and a computer that he will be late. so he's early. hopefully soon he'll finish his second book and someone will publish it immediately and then i can read it because i have been reading no planets strike something like once a month for almost two years now and i would just really like another book of his to read is all.

just read jason bredle's two books. i think i liked his first one better, but either way i think he's awesome and am real real excited for magic helicopter to put out his third book. i hear if you preorder it you get a free pair of glow in the dark vampire teeth until they don't have any more to give.

should probably have put more hyperlinks in this post. whatever.

friday morning me and ben mirov and eric amling are headed to north carolina to read poems out loud and get drunk. we are probably going to fart a lot in the car. eric amling's girlfriend: i am, in advance of this probably occurrence, real real sorry.

new review

2010-11-24T10:59:00.003-05:00

josh schneider just wrote a review of my novella and i thought i should share it.

in december j.a. and i [by and i i mean j.a.] are [is] going to release the pdf chapbook that came with all pre-orders as an html ebook for everyone to read because we [he] believe[s] in the spirit of giving.

the thesis is coming along. feeling pretty good about it. going to do some laundry and pack fr thanksgiving break. hope everyone is doing well. should really start posting more. maybe longer rambling things that don't have a point. that way it can be just like my writing. everybody wins!

current table of contents fr the thesis

2010-11-08T15:46:00.001-05:00

my eyes have seen the dawning
let me tell you about my day
like teeth singing
jawbone
short adventures with shipwrecks
but it’s alright
all hands and the cook
city living
i can see your bones from here
torch song
abide with me
it is going to be a good year
now we sit us down to eat
short adventures with rivers
after all is said and done
a report from the settlers on their progress
some accounts of travelers on legends and fables
i have got my suitcase, my starry crown
prove it
if that is what it takes
poem called ‘a grand pronouncement’
no news today
some accounts of travelers on legends and fables
this is what it has come to
throw your arms around me to the sea and back
almost killed me
i will be going away
meet me here at dawn
my mouth is full of trouble
mama don’t care if you ain’t a preacher so long as you say your prayers
trouble! o trouble!
a pile of bad news
two or three nocturnes
i apologize
the sky is falling

things!

2010-10-13T11:32:00.003-04:00

I did a reading! It starts with me reading from THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU. The first poem I read has audience participation and you can't really hear them but if it's loud enough you sort of can. I stumble a little, then I don't. My bad dudes.

In other news, EVERYTHING HERE IS OK was a finalist for octopus again. Someday soon someone will want it and that'll be sweet too. But being a finalist is pretty sweet.

I've been waking up late. Or getting out of bed late. Sometimes these are the same things.

These poems are awesome. Ben Fama pointed them out to me. Hot damn.

I am working on a poem that starts "george washington chopped down a cherry tree because he needed some teeth but all we got is wolves and crows."

I am reading at this event in Brooklyn on Sunday. Sunday is the second game of the National League Conference Series. I am going to shower and probably reheat some fried rice assuming it has not gone bad. If it has, I will have me some Kraft Mac'n'Cheese.

oh this and that

2010-09-13T13:44:00.005-04:00

wrote two poems since i got back. mostly i've been building furniture. on the other hand, i've done massive amounts of rewrites on other poems and also the two new ones are i think pretty good. the are called ABIDE WITH ME and also TORCH SONG.

things are alright here. time to make lunch here. been reading and rereading 31 poems by dean young. first time i ever got excited about dean young. i am excited by a lot of this book. some of it not so much at all. but a lot of it. reading and rereading CRUSH and NO PLANETS STRIKE. these books are probably going to guide me through this thesis a lot. reading a lot of emily pettit and ben mirov. have you been reading emily pettit and ben mirov? this is a legitimate question.

i need to get back into exercising

2010-08-27T00:36:00.004-04:00

today i built the couch. right now skyler is in a box sailing across the kitchen. tomorrow i will show you what that looks like. a few minutes ago we ran the toaster oven to burn off what was in it. we did. it is gross. it smells like burnt synthetic gross stuff and also the smoke alarm went off and we are terrible neighbors but also i do not care. i need some pants tapered. i started two poems today. one is called TORCH SONG and the other might be called ABIDE WITH ME. skyler just said I AM A BIG PIECE OF LAME POOP but i am pretty sure that was her speaking for me, and not an actual declarative statement on her part. she says that i suck. that this fact surprises no one. one cannot argue with facts. this: is a fact.

the beach is nice i am getting a sort of a tan it makes me feel neat

2010-08-20T12:25:00.004-04:00

I haven't been very good at this blog thing lately. Many things have happened. For one, I am at the beach. Up in Vermont, where I was not posting, I played lots of games that involved drinking and flinging hammers into the air. One night I had some Jager. My friend Keith bought because A it was Jager and B it came with a free tshirt and C duh. So then the other day I said KEITH I AM AT THE BEACH and Keith said SASHA I DID NOT KNOW THEY HAD BEACHES IN BROOKLYN [duh Keith] and then NO KEITH I AM AT THE BEACH IN NEW JERSEY ON THE LONG ISLAND WHICH IS ALL BEACH and then Keith said that it was a slippery slope from Jager to Jersey and he was not and is not wrong.

And so but anyway I read in New York on Tuesday and people said nice things about me. [also over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn they say more nice things about me, but the article itself is a thing I maybe have some problems with, and I do not know how much I want to talk about it, other than to say that I do think this guy seems like he genuinely cares about literature, but that he spends more time talking about himself and his opinions than he does examining or engaging with what was happening, and there's a huge preamble thing that just goes on and on, and I don't know.]

And so there have been lots of awesome write ups of the novella and I am maybe too lazy to type them all up and so here I am going to link you to the page on the site with all the reviews and things on them and hope that you maybe read them and think about buying the book or something, and in particular maybe the ones from elimae and the brooklyn rail, because ken sparling did the elimae one and he is amazing and because the one on the brooklyn rail just about. I had no idea someone would think enough of this book to write what got written. It just blew me away. Anyway.

That is all there is. On Monday we get furniture and can finally stop living out of boxes and have a real home type apartment. Everyone is excited!

Also, I am reading for s u p e r m a c h i n e on September 18. And for the La Petite Zine/Annalemma launch on October 17. Details will come. I hope you are all well.

shit goddam

2010-08-07T23:57:00.001-04:00

Some Traffic
by seth landman
from coconut twelve

I'm listening to permanent footsteps, ahead,

in the future, the whine of a breaking machine,

the sound of putting off for tomorrow what

I could do today could I do today. I'm listening to

the whole year, saying it back. Saying it, losing

the whole thing. Talking back to it at the end

of the day while the fridge hums.

Well, electrocution; well, stargazing. Listening

the cicadas into the year where what year is this

empty husk. Seeds listening to a constant

forge, forgetting the white noise of the factory,

factoring in the possibilities while the world said

this is how to lose an entire year and go back.

Listening as cars take in birds and begin to fly.

As in this is the year I'm hearing, knowing this year

is far away. What you hold is only small,

is in your hand, is not far away. In your head,

not out loud. I'm hearing myself think

in the frozen traffic waves that pause,

hearts that stop and shatter,

highways in constant repair, all night long.

just a quick note

2010-07-10T10:51:00.003-04:00

so when you submit yr story how about you change the cover letter so it actually matches what you send so we at least assume you are sort of professional and actually give a shit about being published by us and not just blanket submitting the whole fucking internet?

THANKS BOO!

so here're some things

2010-06-30T00:04:00.002-04:00

Have you read Chris Heavener's thing about being less insular ? You should.

secondarily, there was an awesome review of the novella over at Pank courtesy of Troy Urquhart.

Pretty much everything i own is in boxes. I own mostly books, and some plaid shirts.

I also want to say that Chris Heavener is a real nice guy with a real sweet beard.

2010-06-16T14:26:00.002-04:00

i need to make a list of what books to bring with me to vermont.

so far probably

book
pee on water
objects for a fog death
battlefield where the moon says i love you
nox
mlp first year
no planets strike
27 props for a production of eine leibenzeit
scary no scary
the man suit
holy land
poe to the present an anthology of american prose poetry
my 5 dalkey books plus europeana
kamby bolongo mean river
whole bunch of greying ghost chaps
maybe not knowing and the teachings of don b
if i get a hold of them, airships and bats out of hell

i don't know. one month. no idea what i might need in order to figure things out.
will post final list eventually.

2010-06-13T18:34:00.003-04:00

short adventures with housing

The wind swung down low and gathered up all the birds on all of the branches and it moved them on down to edge of town and down into a man’s chest and that is where they decided to stay.

want to move tomorrow/ oh well

2010-06-13T13:58:00.003-04:00

fixing up poems. ate pie for breakfast. need to read more.

girlfriend found a tick or mite on the wall of the place in midtown. want more than ever to move. need to go back to bushwick and pack and clean and get started on all of that.

went to a friend's for dinner last night. as we got there he had gotten himself into trouble.

he was baking this amazing bread it was three different baguettes one was regular one had cured meats on top and rolled into it and the other had kalamata olives on top and rolled into it and so anyway he decided he'd read on the internet that setting the oven to clean got the temperature up really high and but so then it was harder to stop things because it locks the door of the oven and so but it was all ok and the door magically unlocked as we were going to flip all the switches on the unlabeled fuse box in hopes of fixing something.

then we ate this amazing lamb ragu that was made from hand ground lamb and lamb stock and mushrooms and mint and i think ricotta all reduced into this thick creamy ragu with ground lamb chunks and it was amazing.

anyway the moral is don't cook things on clean and also you can probably fix a bad poem some of the time and other times it is just a bad poem and so what throw it out don't do it again there you go lesson learned.

all over the goddam internet

2010-06-11T10:44:00.003-04:00

The first review of the book is up over at big other. I was not expecting such a thoughtful and in-depth review. Shit. Thank you, John Madera.

Also in terms of people reading things and then talking about them, here is something I wrote about the idea of reading.

I ate empanada's last night and they were real tasty but I got real gassy. So oh well. Things happen.

I just told Shane about that in a gchat and it made me think maybe there are some things I should keep to myself, but then I'd have to do something about it, like both actively in general and here in terms of deleting this and the above paragraph, and I just don't quite feel like it.

Thinking about watching Brief Interviews tonight on Netflix.

I hope everyone has a great day.

door to door

2010-06-07T17:33:00.006-04:00

The book has been showing up door to door. Which feels pretty awesome.

If you happen to read it, I'd really appreciate you rating it on goodreads or writing a blog post about it. You know about blogs right? The New York Times does too.

Also, people have been taking pictures with the book. I will post some of them. If you take a picture of yourself with the book I will post it here. If you want, I will send you a pdf of some stories I wrote once. A bunch of them are pretty funny at times. I might maybe write another novella or longer type thing using some of them. So that could be some neat ground floor type shit, right?

I should also really listen to High Violet more. And James Brown. Please Please Please is pretty awesome. It really is.

Other things that are awesome include Skyler and I signing an apartment lease tonight which means that not only will I have a home when I get back from Vermont in August [and that I will need to leave for Vermont the day after I move] but that I will have an awesome home with enough room for an office so for the first time since I started doing homework somewhere other than the kitchen table I will no longer sleep in the same room that I work in and that feels like the coolest fucking thing ever.

Other things included in that list are those air conditioners that are already installed in the wall when you move in. And have a fucking washer and dryer in the building.

I GOT INTERVIEWED

2010-06-03T19:46:00.001-04:00

please read and comment? we can have a dialog! it'll be neat.

the vicarious mfa continues to show you how to write a paper

2010-05-27T14:47:00.005-04:00

so for richard locke's fiction lecture we had to write a 5 page response to two of the authors we read over the semester. i did this. he liked it.

Grace Paley in a tree, Donald Barthelme beside her.

Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme sitting around in the backyard, having themselves a chat.

Grace Paley is sitting in a tree. This is not so odd, as they are in the backyard.
“The drinks” Don says.

“We did not want for drinks.”

“Did?”

“I have been known at times to confuse the present with the past, Donald, you know this about me for it is a fact and one certifiable by indeed even the City of New York itself.”

“The library” begins Don, and the whole world sighs. We say begins because the sentence is not finished. It is, in fact, not a thing that needs to be finished. There are you see moments wherein we begin a thing only to remind ourselves of it, because it in fact already exists, it is a fact, it has been certified by time and inscribed on our bones and only in the cold hard light of the reminding do we maybe even remember it.

Other times we go to Sweden. Other times we find some young thing to bury our sadness in for a time, until it too grows in them, and we are once more reminded of the certified fact we have carried along with us.

“Phooey” says Grace, in the tree.

They are in the living room now. Red bright leaves strew themselves about the carpet. It is a nice carpet. It is certainly not a shabby carpet. It has seen its share of spills and slips. It is the sort of carpet that likes it when you play old blues records. It prefers when you read aloud, preferably from Great Literature. It understands when certain words are capitalized.

It is a pretty great carpet we are talking about.

Grace says again “Phooey” as the children gather with their rakes to pile up the leaves.

“Now don’t jump in those piles,” Grace goes, “You never know what is hiding in them.”

And it is true, they do not.

Again in the living room. Drinking their drinks.

“Grace,” says Don, gesturing, “if you could ask the child to fetch me another drink,”

“What child?” Asks Grace. “No child of mine I will tell you that much. No sir, buddy.”

To this, Don can only scream.

Grace is on the roof, in a tree. Don entreats her to come down.

“Grace,” he says, “There is someone here to see you.”

I would not mind seeing someone thinks Grace so long as he had some sort of poise. Some sense deep down somewhere of the very realness of the world. And a fatherly figure of sorts for the boys. Ideally I think he might be the Lone Ranger. I think horseback would be best. For traveling. For so many things.

“Grace,” Don says, “He is Mexican. He has a mustache. He has known suffering, I can see it in his eyes. He seems gentle. He entreats you.”

“I entreat you,” entreats the Mexican, looking more and more like the Lone Ranger with each passing breath Grace holds within her, testing the waters of hope once more.

It has grown chilly in the winter. Grace has been briefly imprisoned. Wars are being waged and children set on fire. Don reads about this every day. What can he do? He is uncertain. He considers writing something of war. Each time he writes another sentence the previous sentence folds itself into a bird and flies away. That seems ridiculous he thinks, and he is, in all likelihood, not at all wrong.

“Grace,” he says, “We missed you so.”

“I should think you would, what with the cold weather, and the cold water, and the creaky pipes and the leaky faucets. You, Don, seem to be leaking from the eye. No matter. We are all sad, Don. We all suffer. If you need to take the time to do so you might as well do it. I myself have preferred never to speak openly of suffering. What I have done is known as is what has been done to me. The world is like a big radio, like a tin can phone, like a newspaper you can read, and it’s printed on our hearts. Don I don’t care.”

Grace tosses the other half of a tin can phone line to Don.

“For your heart,” she says.

They are not certain what to do, so they order in. Their children and spouses have taken to adjacent rooms and have also ordered in. The merits of ordering in have been discussed. Some insist upon family recipes. Upon pot roasts left to roast all day long, gently simmering in the juices of history and tradition. Others feel differently. Sure, it’s delicious. And who doesn’t like to eat it? But let’s face it, some days we don’t have time for that, so what, so we should go without? Without food? Some of us balk at such things. We wrangle our courage and hunger up like wild stallions and we use these wild stallions we have wrangled to trample everything in our path. We will not be stopped. We will be fed.

Donald Barthelme proposes a contest. They will take a younger lover. They will not tell their spouses. Their spouses will no longer be their spouses. In the night, when they cry out, their spouses will be there. The world will be a comforting place. Donald Barthelme proposes they get drunk. He proposes they maybe screw. He does no such thing. He says nothing in fact of the sort. They sit down and play a game of cards. They cannot decide between Go Fish or several other games involving cards. They play them all. At the same time. Grace Paley’s father dies of disappointment. Then he gets better. They all get better. Their game improves. The sun rises. The children are fed and bathed and sent off to school, where they learn all sorts of things, many of them good and sound and wondrous. They learn of hardship and defiance. They learn of terror. Of horror. Of pain. Of the wounding of brother by brother. Later, at night, in the dark, the children practice this. And then they cry. Then they too are held tightly by the parent, who calmly explains that this was just a dream, and that it may also have been real, and that there are many terrible things in the world, and that sometimes we cannot help these things, that we cannot assist them and we cannot resist them, that sometimes the world is a bitch and a god damned half. The child reminds the parent that it is but a child and should not hear such things and the parent of course apologizes. The parent, distraught, begins to wonder if they are doing a good job here. If they are just repeating and revisiting the horrors of their own parents. The child assures them that they are not. That this is different. That we make our own beds. The child does make its own bed. Every morning before school. The child was taught to tuck the sheets in under the mattress, and to fold the corner of the blanket at an angle approximating 45 degrees, to better invite one to pull back the sheets and to come on in.

i am putting this here so i don't forget about it, even though it's basically a lot like something else i've already said before

2010-05-27T00:52:00.001-04:00

A man approached on horseback. He held in his hand a small fistful of fire. I asked him where he had gotten that fire. He told me he couldn’t say and elaborated no further upon that fire. It seemed to burn the very air. It licked at the sky as though hungry for more. For a great expanse. Since that day I have not seen fire such as that.

and brings with it the news

2010-05-26T19:26:00.004-04:00

have you been reading rob lopez's blog? because i have not. and now i will change that because the thing about rob lopez's blog is the thing about rob lopez which is that rob lopez is a goddam national goddam treasure.

in other news there are 39 copies of my book in a box. i have got some new pants, although it is proving too hot to wear them at the moment. skyler and i are starting carnivale tonight which is a show that she has not yet watched.

i have been working on longer poems lately and it feels good. it is a stretch. soon shorter poems will be a stretch and so i will do those. then i will write some real long poems and we will see what we will see.

other things i have seen include several apartments skyler and i are not moving into as well as iron man 2 which i liked. i did. it was neat and i was captivated and mickey rourke's teeth were quite shiny. many things shone. and many things did gleam.

what can be gleaned from all this? i ate an italian ice out of a plastic cup with a pull-top top made of paper and it, the ice not the top, tasted great. aside from the bottom of it which got all sugary and weird and i do not like that so much these days, the really sugary things, they hurt my teeth, which hurt sometimes on their own, oh for all sorts of reasons.

also i have been reading really good books, like gordon lish's collected fictions, which took a bit to grow on me and now has done just that and also the two new chapbooks from octopus books both of which are great and i hope you are too.

REAL LIVE BOOKS

2010-05-23T20:02:00.002-04:00

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

WHOA

2010-05-17T10:00:00.002-04:00

So yesterday i contacted J.A to see how many copies of the book we'd sold for pre-order. there were all but 25 accounted for around 3pm. I made a post about it on facebook and we sold 2. I told J.A.
we sold at least 2, and that I was going to see if we could sell them all. J.A. told me J. A. Tyler
to me

3:46 PM (18 hours ago)

if you sell out these last copies today on pre-orders, I will paypal you
the money for fancy beer and you can get drunk on our mlp dime.

J. A. Tyler

And so I mentioned it to Mike Young over gchat and he did a post on the Giant. I continued to update facebook and twitter and we sold the last 25 copies. When I went to bed around 1 we were down to 3. As of 7am this morning we sold out of all pre-orders. 2 weeks before it is released.

J.A. has already ordered more and will continue to do so as the public demands.

Thank you to everyone who helped me get drunk last night.

a sort of repsonse

2010-05-09T20:42:00.002-04:00

so there is this interesting talk about how we use surrealism over at gulf coast.

earlier this year i was supposed to do an interview for the novella, and it didn't work out, but i thought since it didn't work out, that i would paste it here for all of you to see.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your novel is a surrealist one. Surrealism is said to free the imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. In short, allowing the ego free reign. Do you agree with this assessment, and what techniques have you embraced in your writing? Was the writing, for you, an enjoyable experience?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would say that I was a surreal writer as opposed to a surrealist. And I still don’t know that I’m all that comfortable with the term. There was a really great discussion on this over at Gulf Coast.

I’m not certain that I really like the idea of allowing anything to have free reign. And on a basic level I’d have to agree with Russell Edson when he says, “Why should we have to be surrealists? Breton didn't invent our imaginations.” I also want to say that I write about and within very controlled situations. I edit and rewrite rigorously, and the goal of all of this is for very specific things to happen in a very specific way to evoke some sort of an emotional response. I also want to say that when we break it down, surrealism means something that is over above or more than realism. Which requires us to not forget that this is a thing grounded in something. That to be above or over or more than a thing we must be aware at all times where it stands.

I have absolutely no interest in relinquishing conscious control. We’ve been talking in one of my classes about the notion of felt sense. The idea that there is this thing, this gut feeling, that sort of guides our work. In sports it’s referred to as being on fire or in the zone or on point or things like that. On the ball. What I am trying to say is that the techniques I employ to write involve sitting down at a desk and trying very hard to feel something that seems real and important.

Process is very important to me. Rewriting is, for me, a very generative process. The book was pieced together at first from three short pieces [all of which are available online] that I had to rewrite to fit together, and then I went from there.

I paid close attention to each page and to the ideas and images that were at work and made sure to allow them all the space they needed to breathe and exist without crowding things out or detracting.

I write the way I do because I find that it allows me to indirectly address the things I am really concerned with. Things that I find very difficult to explain in any meaningful way while speaking about them directly. Primarily: 1) the idea of a sadness that is not sad, 2) surrealism as supra-realism as realism, and 3) the idea of a sort of quiet desperation that manages to give a sort of sense of triumph.

So. 1) That no one should really be sad that they are sad. 2) That nothing should be treated differently than anything else. That the act of cooking bacon and the act of filling someone’s chest with birds so that they can be lifted up by something moving, that these are both pretty much the same action, or at least equally important ones. 3) That having a purpose and moving towards it is quite often founded on the principles of a sort of blind faith, and that more often than not this faith is born out of a desperate need for something greater. Like when one says of a relationship, “Being with them forced me to become a better person than I knew how to be.” Which might maybe have something to do with a later question.

As to the second part of your question, the writing was a very enjoyable process. I had just quit my job and moved in with my parents for six weeks before moving to Brooklyn. For those six weeks I read a lot of books, played tennis three times a week with my dad, and worked on the book every single day. I don’t know that I could work that hard every day for the rest of my life, but those six weeks were pretty incredible.

wherein we address the idea of the cover and reveal things not yet known by men

2010-05-03T22:39:00.010-04:00

here is the actual cover, designed by skyler balbus, in full and in front.

i am posting the rest of the cover images here. they will not all be the same sizes. do the best with this.

will gladly have conversations about decisions and things like that with anyone who wants to converse.

zach dodson

steven seighman

luca dipierro

WOW THAT IS SO PRETTY IT WOULD BE SO CONVENIENT IF I COULD CLICK ON THIS TEXT AND BE LINKED TO A PAGE WHERE I COULD PURCHASE THIS FINE OBJECT

SASHA FLETCHER: SELECTED WISDOMS

2010-04-27T21:16:00.004-04:00

we had to write wisdom for writer as teacher. here is my wisdom. i am imparting it to you.

When it comes down to it, one of the great things about poetry is the fact that it’s essentially abstraction. That this is as close as writing gets to abstraction. I am saying that if literature was New York City in the late 1940’s, you bitches would be all Willem de Kooning and shit. This is the way we go about it. We can be direct or indirect. We can use any form we want. We can use whatever structure best gets it across. Everybody knows poems don’t have to rhyme or conform to a specific structure to be called poems. You have nothing to be afraid of. So write a poem.

Don’t bring in anything to workshop that you aren’t ready to have talked about. In theory you know what I am talking about. We all have poems we are too close to. People offer us help and our immediate reaction is to explain why they are wrong. This helps nobody. We are not those people. Those people who help nobody. We are here to make our poems the best poems ever.

Sometimes you write a poem and you think to yourself THIS IS NOT THE BEST THING EVER I AM TERRIBLE. No you are not. We all have terrible things we have done. File that shit away in a folder marked UH OH? and look at it in a few months. Worst case scenario is you delete it out of shame. Best case scenario is it’s like finding a map to awesomeness that you wrote in your sleep and lost and found again and it led you straight to awesomeness.

When talking about work in a workshop, we are going to talk about the poem and what is on the page. We are going to say what we think is working and why, and we are going to say what we think is not working and why. We are going to try to talk about what the poem is trying to accomplish and the best possible ways for it to do that better. We are going to try to not talk about much else.

When you hit the point in a poem where you do not know what to do and start freaking out, save the document and put it away for a week or two. Try real hard not to do something unless you have a solid idea of what you are doing and what you want to do. This way you avoid the weeks of agony of having no idea what you are doing and trying desperately to fix things. This is a lot like being set on fire and running around in a linen closet exclaiming that you are on fire. Best sit yourself down in the bathtub and have a think.

Other times, maybe just keep writing until something happens, and if it does then that is called a breakthrough, and if it does not then that is called life and we go to bed and try again in the morning, or maybe when we have a better idea, like later on, after sitting in the tub and having us a think, or maybe in the morning we see that we did a good thing and all that worrying was just silly and got our heartrates up and made us write terrible panicked emails to friends and loved ones and instructors.

It is always a good idea to look at your work and figure out what it is that you are not doing, and then write poems about that. Me, I like to write poems sometimes without using “I” or having weird surreal shit happen, or maybe not let myself use images I use way too much.
On a related note, figure out what kind of poems you don’t know how to write and then write them. Always try to work on something that is outside your general interests/what you consider to be your “body of work”. This keeps you nimble and also presents you with a widened image bank/vernacular/trick moves to then fold into your “body of work” making it super formidable.
Formidable is something we should all of us aspire to be.

Don’t every worry about turning in a bad poem but do fucking worry if you think about turning in a poem you don’t care about.

Wallace Stevens once said that poets are born not made. Gordon Lish once said "I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire."
One is an asshole and the other was an insurance salesman.
We are trying to say here that being really good is great but that if you don’t work your fucking ass off every second of every day then all you are is a lazy asshole squandering talent.

Find yourself a real smart lady or gentleman that will help edit the shit out of your work. Also nice is that when you read them a poem you become real aware of if it’s awesome or not, because you are trying to sleep with them, and you want your poems to be awesome enough for them to also want to sleep with you. This way everybody wins.

Sometimes you gotta take a day off. So maybe take a day off.

book stuff

2010-04-18T13:39:00.004-04:00

so we're finishing up the cover. i made all the final edits. about four times. which doesn't include the giant revisions that happened between j.a. sending me his notes and the first final edits. at least 6-8 pages were cut, around the same added, and whole pages rewritten for syntax and clarity and that whole punching you in the heart thing that my girlfriend talks about a lot.

anyway. i thought i would write a post about the book, about how it came about, and maybe soon make a post on these long poems i'm trying to write. i am trying to write long poems. i am using lines sometimes instead of sentences. it is fucking weird.

book. yes.

so this goes back.

in june 2008 [we'll say by june 3rd or 4th] i started a series of poems that was going to become the book everything here is ok [excerpts of which you can find online all over the place. most of my publications are from that.]

basically i'd been writing poems all the time pretty much every day since i started this blog in 2007, and the whole time i did that i'd been sending chapbooks to bear parade without ever really stopping and thinking about what a chapbook was or could be. gene morgan was and is a great guy and at one point told me it wasn't likely he was going to publish me right now, but that i had a couple of really good poems, and then gave me a bunch of places he thought i should send to, which included pineapple war, who has since published a couple of pieces by me, and which is run by prathna lor, who has since become a pretty great friend and is in fact an incredible writer.

anyway, i decided when i moved to south philly that i would sit down and write ten-twelve poems that worked together and created a sort of concise whole. i came to this conclusion after reading jesus' son. i figured out how i'd try to approach changing my writing to let it grow into what it is now after reading cognitive behavioral therapy. so i sat down and wrote what became the second section of everything here is ok, it is gonna rain [an earlier version of which was published by ixnay press in volume four of the ixnay reader, which is linked at the bottom of the page, so just scroll down or something].

anyway gene almost took it but he didn't. which was fine because for the first time ever i felt like i was actually really doing something with this. like i had a purpose. and so, over a period of time that is well documented on this blog, i wrote a book of linked prose poems.

after i finished this book i wrote this thing that was a finalist for the lamination colony this is not a contest contest. i didn't pay attention and things were unclear so i sent the piece to j.a. for a mud luscious chap because for some reason i thought it wasn't being published. it was. so i wrote another one for j.a., and that was the piece in alice blue. around this time i sent j.a. everything here is ok. we'd been talking about where we were sending books and i mentioned this one and he asked to see it, so i sent it over.

while he was reading it, i got invited to participate in the dollar store tour. so i wrote the piece that's in noo journal.

soon after this, j.a. got back to me, saying
sf.

thanks for sharing this EVERYTHING HERE IS OK ms with me. much appreciated. I really enjoyed the sort of callous and vehement style of reporting in these fictions / poems, the way they are approached almost journalistically, as if to provide information rather than to contextualize in imagery / design. some really grabbing things in this. it is not a good fit with what I am looking for in terms of future mlp novel(la)s, though I cannot even remember if we had discussed that possibility, but I would love to see how the style used here would apply to an overall narrative, a ms structured as a true novel(la) rather than as a prose / poetry collection with the section breaks and subtitling. what are you working on next? if it is something along those lines, this flash organization applied to an overarching narrative, I would love to take a look at it for future ml press consideration. we are still hoping to get a few more mlp subscriptions to really push the novel(la) series into concrete existence, but we are going to read ahead regardless. best, and thanks again for the chance to see this one.

so i had just quit my job at whole foods and moved back into my parents' house in allentown pennsylvania. in the middle of july i took all three of the above mentioned pieces and put them one after another in the order they were written. i then sat down and wrote them together. once they made sense, i went from there.

i sent the ninth draft to j.a. on august 14 and on august 23 he accepted it. it was, i think, my second day in brooklyn.

there are lots of things without which i would not have been able to do this. aside from quitting the job. ken baumann helped me get through writing the lamination colony piece and shane jones gave me some good advice on the ending.
as i wrote the early pieces i was reading this long ron padgett poem called i think MY METHOD from his book HOW TO BE PERFECT. i was also rereading all of shane jones's numbered stories.
when i was working on the novella i was reading deb olin unferth's VACATION and frank stanford's THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU.
deb's book made me really and truly believe that it was possible to write a longer piece. her book is just one perfect sentence after another, forever. it was seemingly written that way, one perfect sentence at a time, and the idea that all you had to do was just put one good thing after another until you couldn't anymore was somehow a thing i could not have figured out on my own.
as for stanford, he got the epigraph.

there were shit tons of revisions. an entire subplot involving a bizarre telephone interview that loosely expanded upon several portions of the book was cut entirely. it may yet see the light of day. news on that soon.

the first page was rewritten easily eight or twelve times during the course of three final layout edits. the fourth i blindly approved as even after reading it i couldn't tell what was happening anymore. reading the whole thing that many times got a little numbing. but we got through it. and i feel great about it.

in closing here is a photo from a shoot that may or may not lead to the cover.

photo credit: skyler balbus

HEY! DO YOU LIKE BOOKMARKS?

2010-03-22T16:40:00.000-04:00

the first Mud Luscious Press bookmark contest:

anyone who has ordered from us in the past knows that we have already made
some slick looking ephemera bookmarks with cover designs & excerpts from
forthcoming novel(la)s, but we plan on giving all of our back-stock of
those away at AWP & will need something new to send in June with our next
two novel(la)s & our chapbook subscriptions.

the guidelines:

150 words or less, no genre restrictions, $5 per entry or $8 for two.
paypal & submit your entry(ies) here: www.mudlusciouspress.com/contact

winners (x2) will each receive one quarter of the total entry fee pool +
c. copies of the bookmarks to share as they see fit.

these bookmarks will go out with all orders of our June novel(la) releases
of WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED by Sasha Fletcher & AN ISLAND OF FIFTY
by Ben Brooks as well as with our July chapbook subscription mailings &
then with all other orders until we run out & host another leg of this
contest.

questions? please email us here: jatyler@mudlusciouspress.com

otherwise, we are accepting submissions now, go forth & submit.

NOVELLA

2010-03-16T14:45:00.004-04:00

All the blurbs are in. I have been shitting golden bricks of smiles for days on end. Deb Olin Unferth's came in as I woke up. VACATION is sort of the reason i was able to write this book in the first place. The fact that when reading it you can tell the entire thing was written one sentence at a time was incredibly important to me in terms of being able to see how a thing could be done. Could be tackled. I am someone who has a hard time writing any way other than one sentence at a time and rarely can I even think about how to put them together other than as a continuation or a response to the previous one. Apparently I am writing with capital letters like a grown ass man or something. Anyway. What I am saying is that Deb's book made me feel, in a sort of real intimidating way, that I could write this thing. This novella. Which is probably not very long. But it was a motherfucker for me to write it.

ANYWAY. so maybe some of you out there are thinking I WOULD LIKE TO MAYBE BUY THIS BOOK BUT I WANT TO KNOW WHAT I AM GETTING because a lot of the time presses I like put out books that look neat but I don't know the author all that well and also they don't tell you what pieces are in or from the book so that maybe you like a bunch of their poems and none of those poems are in this book you bought and maybe you don't like any of them much, or they make sense later but not now, but you have got a limited budget and lord knows you don't need to go tossing them dollars around all willy nilly and higgeldy piggeldy.

WELL LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SASHA FLETCHER IS HERE TO HELP
PRESENTING UNTO YOU THE FIRST THREE PIECES THAT WERE WRITTEN BY SAID AUTHOR AND BECAME MORE OR LESS THE OPENING PART OF THE NOVELLA IN QUESTION SO THAT YOU THE DISCERNING BOOK BUYER CAN BE MORE DISCERNING!
COLON:

we are going to get paid and then we will dress for the weather [yes that's an ODB reference]

i laughed so hard i fell down [yes that's a department of eagles reference]

burning the air between here and there [yes that's a deadwood reference]

Bam.

Soon I will post thoughts and things about the book. Probably at the end of the week I will tell the drawn out story about how it got written and published.

I have got edits to make.

It's a goddam nice day in Brooklyn today.

that's all for now

2010-03-06T09:58:00.005-05:00

the other night i went to crack an egg to use in making chicken parm but when i went to crack it there was resistance and i realized the egg felt pretty solid and i freaked out.

i left a bowl with a small amount of spaghetti next to my computer last night while i was editing the novella.

the bowl was a present for [i am pretty sure] a wedding my mom never had, and i had a whole set of these bowls and plates and little plates with this sort of flower plant thing going on in yellow and white with sort of yellower flowers and blue and green leaves and it looks great but over time i have lost most of these dishes and this makes me not so much sad as not happy.

made some serious cuts to the novella. by "made some serious cuts to the novella" i mean j.a. cut out a recurring series of phone calls and after reading it twice each way and sleeping i read it again each way this morning i realize he is right. BUT. GUESS WHAT:

i am going to rework the excised portion into a separate companion piece and we will include it with all pre-orders. if this changes, the information about all this will disappear, but i thought it was pretty neat and that i would share it with whoever reads this, which i am assuming is not many people as it's real rare i get answers to my how are you doing questions.

this is not to be all boo hoo hoo nobody reads my blog i am so so sad. because really if we were worried about if people were interested in what we said, probably most of us wouldn't write or talk or anything, not to say this is a bad idea, just to say that it's not so much the central concern here.

read a lot of TYPICAL by padgett powell last night. need to read some barry hannah at some point, but i don't know where to start. my dad always told me to read bats out of hell.

i also need to do some laundry as i am all out of clean underwear.

also that poem i talk about down there, it's called SHIPBUIDLING and the motherfucker is going to take me a good long while to figure out what to do with.

here is something really neat that tim donnelly said to me about me
I like the whole thing very much but think the 3rd and 4th sentences are a little too wordy. I know how your work gains from a strange fusion of simplicity and repetition and a strange way of revealing the most important information in a sentence via not main but dependent clauses (The duck quacked on the lake that I drowned in on purpose because you didn't say hi to me when I walked down the street Hitler used to live on). Still I think I'd advocate for something perter at the start. Like so or something:

I was standing outside waiting to see what the sky would fall into when it fell into the hole I’d dug which was a dark ditch on white ground because the ground was covered in thick wet snow.

A fog or mist or cloud piped up from the ground as if a village of chimneys were buried in that snow and it rose into the sky and that’s where it stayed.

which feels maybe like i am trying to say look how great he thinks i am, but really it was the whole hitler thing as an example for what i would say that seemed, yknow, neat and adorable. lord knows.

well i am coughing up hard green phlegm so i will stop this post.

more or less?

2010-02-26T12:38:00.002-05:00

sending EVERYTHING HERE IS OK to fence today.

had to write a confessional poem fr cate marvin's workshop.

failed.

but i address facial hair and shipwrecks so there's that.

have been neglecting this thing lately. haven't been sure what to put.

either way right now i am very hungry. i am going to start editing the novella soon. i am pretty excited to do that. i've been feeling weird about it, like i failed, and like it's boring and no good.

this too will pass.

there is coffee waiting for me.

how are you?

books!!!!

2010-01-26T13:58:00.004-05:00

starting to finalize things. planning on adding these to paragraphs somewhere, which means i need to the write some more paragraphs so that they make sense.

I was downstairs and drinking a glass of water and I was thinking. She called down the stairs to ask what I was thinking about. I thought I heard a dull thud. I made my way upstairs, where she was standing over the bed, choking the life out of me. I was then stuffed under the bed, where it seemed quite a pile was growing. I asked if I had just seen her choking the life out of me. She said No. You saw me doing no such thing she said. I asked if she was hiding anything and she said no. What about under the bed. Do not she said Look under the bed. Not under any circumstances she said. I asked what was under the bed and she said there were buckets under the bed. I asked her what was in the buckets and she told me that they were full of tears. I asked her why they were full of tears and she just looked at me. What about behind the window I said. Behind the window and across the street there were four kids standing around with sheets on their heads. They were standing perfectly still. I could hear their feet moving. I could hear their sheets rustling. I could hear the wind move through them. I could hear their breathing. I could hear it carried up to me on the arms of the wind through the open window and she heard it too and the world seemed to stop for an instant. The world became a sharp intake of breath, and it marched forward. The kids marched forward. Our bones walked out of our mouths and joined them.

I will take you to Germany. I will let you off near a church made of bones. There you will get a job and the job will be that you must clean the bones. I will leave a note in your pocket explaining that when you come home, I will have such a thing to show you as you have never seen before. Then you will fly home. I will be here. We will go to bed for it will have been exhausting. You will tell me I am exhausting. I will tell you to go to sleep. I will say Go to sleep or I will punch out all of the lights and then you will have to go to sleep because that is what you do when surrounded by total darkness. You will tell me Whatever. Whatever you want you’ll tell me. I should tell you that what I want is to be set on fire. That what I want is to wake up in the middle of a desert. To split open the sea with a two-by-four. To rise up out of mountains and bathe over you. I will pull my revolvers from their pockets and I will offer up a prayer right on into your chest and I will lay you to rest with what is left of me. I will wrap you in cloth. I will shine your bones. I will lay my weary head to rest there. That is all I want.

we're narrowing down cover options. waiting on one more artist to send us some sketches.

really excited to start edits. haven't actually looked at the book really since it was accepted in august.

have workshop with cate marvin this semester. not sure how i feel about her as a teacher. i like her as a writer. and i am pretty sure the class will help me as a writer. i am also pretty sure that some of the time it is going to frustrate me.
[update: i am going to man up and not say whiny shit like that.]

and none of us are surprised.

reading mark leidner's full length. really hope someone publishes it.

reading dara weir's selected.

waiting on lydia davis's collected. dear postal service, help a dudebro out.

also today is lauren spohrer's birthday and she is going to the opera.

i am going to meet my girlfriend for lunch as i am hungry.

2010-01-23T13:44:00.002-05:00

i have a cold. it is alright though. i am just tired all the time. also my pipes sound like the song underground by tom waits and they make that noise from 4 am to 5 am.

the world is not perfect.

working on some new poems.

finished duties of an english foreign secretary. will write real thoughts on it soon. i liked it a lot, and will probably come back to it again a few times to let it sink in, but i feel that it is too long. it's around 106 pages and, for me, other than the first poem, it didn't start to grab me until around page 33. i think macgregor card has an incredible way with a refrain and uses this to great and incredible effect in his longer poems, but sometimes you have to trudge through a lot in order to get there.

it is though a beautiful book full of genuine beauty. i just wish it was shorter and every poem had some impact. an argument could be made that if every poem hit you hard then you wouldn't appreciate it as much, but i feel that i've read enough poetry that i find boring to just not want to read any more.

also read 19 names for our band, which maybe wasn't as consistent as some books, but that i felt was genuinely strong and sustained my interest. plus it made jokes and that is always a good call i feel.

if the top of my head is not going to be taken off, i want to be goddam entertained.

sarah manguso told me once that if the top of her head is not going to be taken off, that she wants to play video games while listening to choral music.

sarah manguso is pretty great some of the time.

chapbook!!!!!

2010-01-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

greying ghost is publishing my chapbook I AIN'T ASKED ANY PARDON FOR ANYTHING I DONE some time next year.

it has lots of cowboys and 8.5 train robberies.

new novella excerpt up

2010-01-18T12:49:00.001-05:00

i laughed so hard i fell down up over at alice blue review

late night blogging

2010-01-16T23:25:00.003-05:00

had beers and some pizza with ben mirov today. ben mirov is tits. ben mirov is other superlatives. like tits. which are great.

so. 5 poems are being published in a pamphlet and packaged along with any order at all from greying ghost. ANY ORDER AT ALL. until there are no more.

girlfriend typed that code in just now. she's a winner. these here are pictures of her, winning.

writing a sentence for a luca dipierro animation that turned out to be about what most of my poems are about. this is a rough draft of the sentence:
"and I will place my hands upon the table and I will set your house on fire and you will weep and while your tears turn into rivers full of fish I will watch as the birds they tear you limb from limb."

this is actually a closer to finished draft of the sentence. it needs to be as long as the animation i have decided, but i talk sort of fast, so there's that.

i got 19 names for our band in the mail today. thursday i got duties of an english foreign secretary. i am excited about both of these. i ordered the stupefying flashbulbs today, on the recommendation of blake butler, who is a fool. and old.

i am kidding i like blake and he is fun to drink with too.

book is officially being published in june. going to have a book release party in new york and another one in philly. this is all in theory. which is a place that exists in my head. and also apparently on the internets.

ruh roh raggy

2010-01-12T00:24:00.004-05:00

my girlfriend says my blog posts make me seem sad.
well motherfucker i am not sad!
not one bit!
tonight i ate mint chip ice cream in bed! and it was delicious! i may even have more!
except that then i would have to walk to the kitchen and get it, and i am getting tired, like a pussy, or a little bitch, or, well, somehow coward and yellow are synonymous with having a vagina or a cooter and also maybe asians too. luckily for everyone, my girlfriend will go do it for me. right now. because she loves me! she said i have to tell you, the internet, that she is only doing it because she loves me. i made dinner tonight and did all the dishes in her apartment, so i mean, i do things sometimes too. but i am being gotten and served ice cream right now. delicious mint chip ice cream!

also sleepingfish 8 is out and it looks great!
look!

see how great it is???

all this can be yours for twelve dollars!

BAM.

ICE CREAM.

IN MY BELLY.

BUYIN MY WORDS NEWS

2010-01-11T13:47:00.002-05:00

through tonight [january 11] my mlp novella 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 is TEN DOLLARS for a pre-order. tomorrow [january 12] it goes back to twelve. if you are into this whole savin money jam, go here to do that.

ALSO greying ghost is packaging a free pamphlet of five brand new short poems along with ALL PURCHASES and especially with all shane jones pre-orders and kristen orser books. if you haven't yet bought shane's i will unfold you with my hairy hands, you should, as it pretty much changed a lot of the ways i put words down and the things i try to do with them. also, kathryn regina's i am in the air right now is a pretty much perfect chapbook in the ways it accomplishes a unified whole and narrative cohesion and breaks yr goddam heart with how wonderful and lonely it is in balloons all the time with bears and dudes that don't know what they are talking about.

ALSO have a great day. my girlfriend bought a french press. we are drinking coffee in the mornings and it is a great idea no matter how grey of a day it is and i like that, but i also like jasper johns and his paintings sometimes look like this:

EVERY DAY

2009-12-29T19:38:00.003-05:00

everyday genius is basically done. tomorrow [wednesday] is a previously published and long out of print rob lopez story from i think the second sleepingfish. provided rob is not a liar.

i feel really good about how this ends. new year's eve is a dan bailey short story. it is probably my favorite thing dan has written.

i updated slowing down the time instead of starting a new post.

oh well.

yes.

2009-12-22T23:05:00.002-05:00

slowing down the time

2009-12-21T18:51:00.003-05:00

i need to slow down and live with things for a while.

i have a tendency to just barrel through poems and then freak out that they're not where they should be.

i tend to rewrite a lot due to do this. part of me feels it could be solved by slowing down and spending more time with the pieces. by writing less.

i think overall i just need to worry less and spend more time thinking about the poems.

-sure enough and yes i do
-everything, all the time
-ways of drowning
-waiting for the sky to fall
-things i will hang from trees
-an attempt at a comprehensive guide to ghosts
-horses and what they can do
-birds and what they can do
-clouds and what they can do
-bones and what they can do
-notes on being torn apart by horses
-my back is split and broken
-i apologize
-and in the silence was heard the sound of a galloping of horses, and of a great many wings

everyday genius is finishing up. i have two stories in the next gigantic and two poems in the next lit. three novella excerpts are coming out next year, one in sleepingfish one in alice blue review and one in noo journal. with an umlaut.

poems i am working on

-bones and what they can do
-notes on being torn apart by horses [basically done]
-everything, all the time [basically done]
-waiting for the sky to fall [basically done]
-i will build this boat my damn self

-we are all of us up to something [several short adventures involving bullets tied to some colored rope]

i don't know. i've been neglecting this thing a lot. i'm not sure what to put. i feel worried about all sorts of stupid shit. which is probably what i should put here. my fears and feelings.

and so it's like, i don't know a week later. it's december 29. this probably could have been a separate post, but it wasn't. oh well.

i've been talking to ben mirov about this whole slowing down thing. it's hard. it is really goddam hard to just sit there and wait to figure something out. which is why i start new poems. so that i can have something to take my mind off it.

books feel weird right now but this will pass.

my right boot leaks. ordered a new pair of boots for more money than i wanted to pay. paid anyway. we are all of us some kinds of tools, right? or, i am. i am becoming more ok with that as time passes.

need to get a job. will put the short adventures away. feel good about the notes on being torn apart by horses. i think the narrator of that poem is the same as the narrator of the new short adventures. i am not yet certain if it is the same narrator as the other two horse poems. one of which is going to be in the next issue of LIT. it is called ON MY BACK IN A FIELD IN THE RAIN. the other poem is about the kitchen and is called NOW WE SIT US DOWN TO EAT. WAITING FOR THE SKY TO FALL also takes place in the kitchen and it doesn't include an "i" which is nice and feels weird right now as all the poems are "i" poems. all the poems so far. most of them. probably yes all. there is one "you" poem. about paper ships and ghosts.

i still want to try to write a poem called AN ATTEMPT AT A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO GHOSTS. it should probably be a long poem told in sections, each section being a description of one idea of a ghost.

if anyone has any ideas about what a ghost is, please let me know.

two excerpts from my avant gardes paper on the relationship between mayakovsky and ohara

2009-12-12T00:43:00.004-05:00

[Most of Mayakovsky’s works consist of political and revolutionary poems-as-tracts.] What remains are his satiric plays and his lyrics on the themes that were central to Mayakovsky’s life: a man’s longing for love and his desolation in a hostile and inhuman world; his yearning for the absolutes of human experience and his rage at his impotent self.

Mayakovsky’s life was guided by an almost inescapable sadness, one that for him was as inescapable as the dune buggy that ran over Frank O’Hara on Fire Island. (It is important to note two-thirds of O’Hara’s work is not devoted to political tracts). (And also that Mayakovsky killed himself and O’Hara died of injuries sustained from being hit by a dune buggy while idly standing by a busted jeep in the middle of the night on an island.) But here too is a point where they differ.

Mayakovsky had a need to be consumed, to be swallowed whole by something greater. For most of his life, this need was consumed by the revolution, and once the revolution became the party, then it was the party; and whenever it wasn’t the party, it was love; and when it was love, it was an all-consuming tragic obsession, a “yearning for the absolutes of human experience.”

Frank O’Hara had a need for fluidity, a need to be able to walk away. It’s not so much that he went from lover to lover, but that even in his breakup poems, even when he screams his head off in “A Rant”, after naming all the things he isn’t going to take anymore, he calls out for the lover to come back, “for a minute!/ You left your new shoes. And the/ coffee pot’s yours!” There were no/ footsteps. Wow! What a relief!” Even when he gives all the reasons in the world to be rid of someone, he still calls them back; and even when he calls them back, he still hopes that they never come, that they never hear him, that the world will continue to turn, and that O’Hara can once more feel “[himself] again.”

For Mayakovsky and O’Hara, interactions with the arts were a full immersion experience. They exchanged ideas with painters, dancers and actors throughout their careers. Mayakovsky in fact went to art school and spent most of his life designing posters and slogans for the party, while O’Hara spent his life thinking: “I would rather be/ a painter, but I am not.” These lines are from the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter,” where he goes on to talk about how confused he was by his friend Michael Goldberg’s method of painting, and then recounts the methods used to write his poem (or twelve-poems-in-one-poem) “Oranges,” and the similarities that occur within these two methods.

Kazimir Malevich designed the set for Mayakovsky’s play “Mystery Bouffe.” Malevich was a Russian painter and founder of the Suprematism movement, and wrote: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.” His work has often been understood in terms of a negation of realism (due to his obsessions with monochromatic works and geometric figures), but it can more readily be described in terms of a need to be consumed by something greater than oneself. In Malevich’s case, this meant the one image and the one color. Suprematism stood for holding true above all else: the giving of oneself over to that which is inside and doing so wholeheartedly. When there was only night within him, Malevich painted the Black Square, which is a large black square on a white field. And while Mayakovsky’s work may more readily be compared to that of the Futurist artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (with whom he worked as a poster designer), it is the need to be consumed by something greater than us that indeed exists in all of Mayakovsky’s work. And in the end his life was consumed by his inability to internalize the irreconcilable difference between his need to be consumed with his need to assert his ego and place in history. His friend Boris Pasternak wrote: “Mayakovsky shot himself out of pride because he had condemned something in himself... with which his self-respect could not be reconciled.”

O’Hara had a long and well-documented relationship with the majority of the artists working in New York during the 1950’s and 60’s, particularly Willem De Kooning and Larry Rivers. However, it is his relationship with Jasper Johns is the most interesting in terms of a painter whose will reflect back to certain aspects of O’Hara. In 1961, Johns painted In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara. It was also in this year that he made Painting Bitten by a Man (which is exactly what it sounds like: a canvas covered in encaustic and bitten by a man and mounted in an old type plate), Water Freezes, Liar, and No. This period represents Johns’s need to internalize and organize the gut; to take his resounding emotions of sadness (which are evident in the titles: the paintings are called No, Liar, Painting Bitten by a Man and In Memory of My Feelings) and to lay them out and organize them into ways of dealing. And while Robert Rauschenberg might be easier to compare with O’Hara, as the two of them were constantly turning out material, it is this need to organize rather than embrace our emotions that seems so present in Johns’s work, and connects so well to these aspects of O’Hara’s. When Johns encounters sadness he works through it. He takes these gut emotions and finds a way, through his art, to organize and document his pain and sadness. His work seems to, in this case, be a proponent of the notion that by giving voice to a thought we are letting it out of ourselves and into the world. In Painting Bitten by a Man, Johns gives us a painting bitten by a man. It is a raw and visceral expression of pain and frustration, but at the same time it is an incredibly controlled action. Johns had to wait until the wax was hot enough to take the imprint of his teeth, but not so hot as to burn him, or to continue melting on until the canvas was one even surface. In order to express this pain he had to wait, and he had to think. He, much like the narrator in “Mayakovsky,” had to find a way to be himself again.

the paper is called

INTERNALIZING THE DIFFERENCE
Frank O’Hara’s internalization of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetics, and the
difference between them.

and it's in chicago which is why the quotes don't seem to be cited because they are footnotes.

the vicarious mfa shows you how to write a paper

2009-12-05T15:25:00.009-05:00

for the howard lecture we had to write a 3-5 page paper about something in one of the books that we read for the lecture. we were told that if our paper was great howard would talk to us about how great we are. we were told if our paper was terrible howard would talk to us about how we need to rewrite it if we want to pass the class. we were told that if we were neither amazing nor awful we would never hear from him again.

this is that paper.

Dear Richard Howard,
I am writing to you from Bushwick (which is, as you know, in Brooklyn) where our skies and weather reports have become colonized by a cold and thick rain. I am writing to tell you of this short paper for you, wherein I attempt to chronicle
THINGS THAT GET COLONIZED BY OTHER THINGS IN BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

Jonathan Harker colonizes Vienna. He colonizes Buda-Pesth. He colonizes the lateness of trains using his journal and then colonizes the town of Klausenberg. Jonathan Harker attempts colonization of the Carpathians using the German language and also maps. He then colonizes Bistritz. At Bukovina, the townspeople attempt to colonize his safety in the form of a crucifix. The townspeople also attempt to colonize his safety by bringing him along to Bukovina in a hurry. The Driver of the Strange Carriage successfully colonizes Jonathan Harker and later attempts some sort of colonization with blues flames that sprout out of the ground, which probably indicate treasure. It is possible the blue flames are a form of colonization. The Driver also has fully colonized the wolves of the area.

Jonathan Harker believes he has colonized the castle Dracula and the Count’s real estate needs. The Count colonizes Jonathan Harker’s knowledge of England in order to better colonize England. Jonathan Harker is colonized by fear.
Jonathan Harker colonizes the Count’s knowledge of the area’s history. Jonathan Harker’s veins are nearly colonized by several Vampire Ghost Women in a room he was told to never visit. The Vampire Ghost Women then colonize a baby.

The Count forces Jonathan Harker to write pre-dated letters informing his loved ones of his extended stay in Transylvania. The Count colonizes the Postal Service via Jonathan Harker’s letters. Jonathan Harker’s letters colonize his impending sense of his own death.

The Count colonizes Jonathan Harker’s clothes in order to colonize the veins of babies and also to colonize Jonathan Harker’s reputation and do terrible things to it once it is colonized. Jonathan Harker tries, unsuccessfully, to colonize the Count’s face with a shovel. The Count leaves to colonize England. Jonathan Harker colonizes a river, and later colonizes or is colonized by a convent and its staff. Meanwhile, his fiancée Mina Murray colonizes the Postal Service through her letters to her friend Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra colonizes the hearts of several men (John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris), one of whom (Arthur Holmwood) colonizes her heart and also her hand in marriage.

The Count colonizes a ship and all of its crew and then begins to colonize England after crashing the ship upon the shore. Soon afterwards the Count begins colonizing Lucy Westenra. John Seward and Abraham Van Helsing colonize the Telegraph Service. They colonize Lucy Westenra’s veins with their blood in an attempt at reverse-colonization. They further enlist Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris’s veins and the blood found in said veins. Lucy Westenra is then colonized by the Count. Lucy Westenra colonizes several small children. Lucy Westenra is colonized by a team of men.

Mina Murray is reunited with Jonathan Harker and their mutual love colonizes the institution of marriage. Jonathan Harker colonizes his memories of Dracula into a journal and gives it to his wife as a sort of safeguard against future colonization by traumatic memories. At some point Jonathan Harker sees the Count on the streets of England (which streets the count is continuing to attempt to colonize) and becomes temporarily colonized by his traumatic memories. Jonathan Harker is then colonized by his traumatic memories. His hair has been colonized by the color white.

Mina Murray’s last name has been colonized by the name Harker and now she and Abraham Van Helsing colonize the institution of friendship.

The Count has now colonized several places in England, including a large manor called Carfax Abbey, which is near the mental institution that John Seward directs. In the mental institution is a man named Renfield who hopes to colonize all kinds of life forces (and by doing so take them as his own). His notebook is colonized by figures and the figures are numerical accounts and equations of the flies which are colonized by the spiders which in turn are colonized by the birds and then Renfield colonizes the birds, thus colonizing all that was consumed by the birds (and spiders, etc.). Due to his selfishness and love of life force colonization, Renfield’s will is colonized by the Count.
Abraham Van Helsing has now colonized a portion of his vast knowledge with the knowledge of both Vampiric lore and also the probable history of Count Dracula.
Renfield periodically colonizes escapology. Each colonization attempt leads to Carfax Abbey. Soon, Harker allows everyone to colonize the knowledge that Dracula lives there. They attempt to colonize Carfax Abbey They colonize the Dracula’s containers of dirt with holy water and bits of the Eucharist. Dracula tries to colonize their lives and comfort with rats. The men colonize the rats with dogs. All is well! Meanwhile, Dracula begins slowly colonizing Mina Harker’s veins and possibly her eternal soul.

Renfield attempts to warn the team of colonization attempts. Renfield is ignored. Jonathan Harker attempts to colonize Dracula’s other houses by means of bribery and insistence with movers. Dracula continues his efforts at colonizing Mina Harker.

Through great effort, the men and Mina colonize the knowledge of Dracula’s other houses. Dracula has Mina colonize his blood with her mouth, thus fully colonizing her to him for all his undead life.

The men split up and go to all his houses and colonize the rest of his boxes of dirt with Holy Water and pieces of the Eucharist. Dracula arrives at the house the team has assembled in wait at his last safe house. He attempts to colonize them. Harker attempts to colonize him with a long knife; colonized gold spills forth from Dracula’s chest and he escapes.

Using hypnosis, Abraham Van Helsing colonizes the psychic link between Mina Harker and Dracula. Abraham Van Helsing and Mina Harker manage to secretly colonize Dracula’s mind, which is connected to his ears and eyeballs. While doing so they colonize the fact that he is on a ship. They then colonize the information regarding which ship he is and where it is bound. It is bound for Transylvania.

Using a train (and a train that runs on time, at that), they colonize the railroads to the Carpathians. Using his powers (which are many and varied), Dracula propels the ship he is stowed on to his home in the Carpathians more swiftly than generally assumed possible.

Abraham Van Helsing, in the middle of the night, sets off to colonize Dracula. He is aided and guided by Mina Harker. The Vampire Ghost Women return and attempt to colonize Van Helsing. They also attempt to further cement the colonization of Mina Harker, who is not yet fully colonized. Their colonization attempts are rebuffed, and so they colonize the horses instead. Later, Van Helsing colonizes them in the tombs where they sleep. He then colonizes Dracula’s tomb, so that he can never to it return. The whole team then reunites and attempts to colonize Dracula and his vicious band of Gypsies.

Jonathan Harker colonizes Dracula’s throat with his Kukri knife, and then Quincey Morris colonizes Dracula’s heart with his Bowie knife. The vicious band of Gypsies then colonize Quincey Morris. Dracula has now been colonized.

Later, Jonathan Harker’s sperm colonize an egg inside of Mina, and their love (both physical and emotional), colonizes a baby, who is named Qunicey Arthur Abraham John Harker (or some variation; let’s say it was alphabetical, because that is always easier, so: Abraham Arthur John Quincey Harker, which it rhymes a bit, and that’s always pleasant) and his name is quite long, so it is colonized by the nickname Quincey (in the name of expediency). The book is then colonized by the feeling of Hope.

Yours in colonization,
(Alexander) Sasha Fletcher

If I could fuck a mountain Lord, I would fuck a mountain

2009-11-19T01:16:00.009-05:00

haven't done one of these in forever.
grad school is hard work.
there is a research paper i am supposed to be doing
instead of doing it i've been making massive revisions to everything here is ok which i am really excited about. i cannot remember the last time i was this excited about the book. probably when i finished it. but then i started what i thought was going to be the second book [i cannot pretend to be a ghost today] [which i ended up gutting the shit out of and turning the first third or so into a chapbook i feel pretty good about] and then i wrote the novella, and went back to ghost, and then school started.

my writing is changing a bit. which is good. i have a pretty solid idea about the book these poems are going to become.

here's the new table of contents for everything here is ok

table of contents

the great train robbery
talking about ghosts
these days i barely get by
i think i’d like to go back home
please leave the lights on
great big boat

it is gonna rain
i told you so
before the flood
oh lord how i love that wide open space
tomorrow is another day
fishbelly
here comes the chopper to chop of your head
back in the saddle
you have nothing to worry about
i was adrift
i had no way of knowing if that was right

you have nothing to worry about
can’t you hear me knocking
everything was very calm
the open road
i went to the roof with a beer and waited for the sun to set
all the tired horses
ernest hemingway
these stars like so many low flying planes
oh great something else we agree on
i got worries i got troubles
send me the money you owe me
stick to the promise that you made to me
certain bodies of water

flooding in nineteen ninety-three and its imminent return
there is a darkness on the edge of town
some facts about the flood
these waters are rising
here is another one about the water
some facts about whales

i was in the house when the house burned down and we all got out and everything was better
it’s raining
land of hope and dreams
hard times
i have been trying hard
today the sky was pink and yellow and then it wasn’t
on the good ship

the sky was like a lake it swallowed you
today will be a good day
yesterday it was warmer and also it rained
when i lay my burdens down
dinner for two
now what do you say about that
and o how that cold wind blows
out there in the wide world
as we lay awake
one bourbon in a glass please thanks
and if i die on top of the hill
when i came to i was flat on my back and it was raining out of a low sky and the tide was way out

anyway. thinking about calling the new thing i can see your bones from here. we'll see.
but the things in it seem to be:
bones [walking out of the mouth and walking around, mostly sort of dancing]
birds [oh, all sorts of things with those]
burials [digging holes in the ground mostly]
ghosts [more talked about really. thinking about trying to write a thing called an attempt at a comprehensive guide to ghosts, which would be a bunch of poems trying to do just that.]
notes [found places, set on fire, stitched to an upright arm as a mast, as a means of communicating, generally though they tend to be found. even if they are sent, they never really are directly sent from one person to another.]

also
horses
boats

but we'll see about the boats thing.
lord knows.

finally got viva last blues.
no idea what the fuck i've been doing these past 14 years.

also:
4 week fellowship to the vermont studio center in july.
gonna spend two weeks trying hanging out with gary lutz by talking about hot dogs.
other two weeks writing constantly and avoiding marilyn hacker.

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.

2009-07-17T13:20:00.007-04:00

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.

thinking seriously about cutting this from the book

2009-07-07T15:28:00.000-04:00

do not bother me when i am in my airplane suit

don’t take all night

I will fight the army and the navy. I will get rid of all the birds. I will be surrounded by all the balloons that were ever blown up and I will never go into the sky ever again. I will pull thunderclouds from out your stomach until something changes. I will break the steamboat into a million floorboards and steam clouds and we will see what happens. I will walk down the road until my feet have worn away and I will end up at our house which will have been moved overnight or all the houses were moving in one direction while I was moving in another. I will hang from the trees with all sorts of fruits and I will wait for you to come out and pluck me down. I will make a rainbow with my face. I will even clean the windows.

when i go away

There was an ache inside of me. I put it in a tree. The tree ached right open at the roots and fell in half. I planted the pieces in the steamboat. It needed a mast anyway. Or whatever. A chair and a window. That’s what I planted them to grow into. In the steamboat. I sat in the chair. The chair was like a horse. I began to ache again. I ached right open. I was carried away by countless birds. They dropped me right off the edge of the earth, where all the water goes. I came out of the bathtub. You were taking a bath. I was right in your lap. Hey I said. I am going to put you in a light socket and keep you there until you learn your place she said. I said I will place you in a drawer so that when I get back I will always know where you are. Come here she said and I did.

even the dirt was electric

I was thinking about sleeping I was thinking about eating I was thinking about feeling and how that could become electric. I was thinking about being halfway to some other land and I was. I was in a drawer. I was your old teeth. I was nailed to the wall like a memory. Like a way of remembering things. I was a memory. I was a way of remembering things. I was electric.

dollar store diamonds fr eyeballs ya hearddd

2009-07-03T18:06:00.004-04:00

finished the first draft of my story fr the dollar show tour
anyone that can't make it to national mechanics at 9pm on monday july 13 can feel free to email me fr a copy of the story.
these are two pictures of my item.

here is an excerpt

burning the air between here and there

*
I took out the garbage. Then I took out the recycling. The paper had to have a lid on it. The plastic did not. The garbage men came. I sat on the stoop waiting. What are you doing with all of that I asked. We are he said Building you a beach with it.

*
This seemed hard to believe.

*
There was a cop in the back yard again. He was trying to build a deck. But he didn’t have any wood. I had no idea what he was trying to hammer together back there. Hey I said. Scoot.

*
Failing that I told him to grow me an ocean. I told him I heard they were building us a beach. What I asked Did he think of that?

i'm finna start all conversations like this from now til forever

2009-07-02T12:32:00.004-04:00

(with dan bailey)

HOW INDEED

2009-07-01T16:43:00.002-04:00

ughbooklife

2009-07-01T15:36:00.003-04:00

not sure what to do with the book right now. need to just probably sit around and think for a while. need to go through probably and isolate images and things. in my head it's all of it blurring together. should sit down and write the dollar store piece maybe clear my head a bit. need publishers to accept my poetry manuscript. dear publishers please accept my poetry manuscript please thank you.

i went through everything here is ok and removed any and all mentions of dreams that were not part of a conversation between two people. e.g. 'i dreamed abraham lincoln told me his entire life was a series of elaborate lies' became 'Abramham Lincoln came by to tell me his entire life was a series of elaborate lies.' i am much happier with this decision. ryan and i were talking a while ago and we were talking about doing that about making everything in this book a fact about removing the mention that what is occurring is a dream so that the dreaming and the action are the same thing because dreaming is an action just like eating and also like other actions so it should be that way right yes ok done win

for dinner i am going to make chicken parm for me and my brother because it is fried and he will like that. it will be great.

i think this blog post is done.

listening to the drifters while reading gary lutz is really weird and completely awesome.

john the mexican whale

2009-06-28T18:52:00.002-04:00

this is for cripple doodle

2009-06-28T15:20:00.012-04:00

so on tuesday there was my last reading before i move. my friend katie took some video and emailed said videos to me and i am going to put them up right now along with a few notes my friends took and this will tide everyone over until i move back in with my parent on tuesday while i look for a place in new york and then when i am back in with my parents i can upload the video they shot of that reading a month ago or something with ca conrad and ryan eckes.

a bunch of my friends came to the reading and everybody got drunk. at one point in a poem there was this part

*
Your stories are getting sadder and sadder every day she told me. I don’t believe you I told her. I got thirsty. I thought if I put my hand through the door that it would come out in or around or near the fridge. What are you doing she said. I kept moving my hand. She said Are you trying to get a beer? She went inside. There was a beer in my hand. There are lots of things not worth questioning.

and when that happened someone put a beer in my hand and that was great.
by someone i mean josh. who is a doctor. and awesome.

but so right a bunch of my friends came to the reading and a bunch of those friends that came got real drunk and two of them had been doing so for 8 hours prior to the reading, and but while they were there they made two lists which i am now going to show to you

here is this one of things that they were pretty sure i'd talk too much about

and here is this one of things that they felt they probably should have known i would talk about

i read a lot. at one point i kept getting text messages from john about how i needed to interact with the audience more. i was drunk. my leg kept vibrating. it wouldn't stop. so i read that note and then i interacted more. probably in the third video. i don't know. this is all i have got right now. i haven't really packed.
also, side note, was definitely kind of drunk by the second video
also, i just got a recording of the reading, and apparently i went on for like 43 minutes. what the fuck. lordy.

near win. feel good.

2009-06-13T11:46:00.003-04:00

heading to baltimore for adam robinson's publishing genius party.

don't care how anyone feels about the links.

didn't win the lamination colony contest. but feel really good about being a finalist. i feel really good about the piece. sent it to ml press. we'll see what happens.

also: google 'onedreamrush' and '42x42'

have a slammin day.

for columbia i had to write 1000 words or less on a book of poetry

2009-06-05T17:41:00.002-04:00

here is one i did not use. also i gave up halfway through.

i am not going to post this one. i changed my mind.

here is, instead, what i am going to say about ryan eckes tonight

ryan eckes has a great smile. this is true. more than one person agrees with me. ryan eckes has an m.a. from temple. he went to penn state. ryan eckes made me realize writing prose poems is an important thing. writing prose poems is an important thing. if someone tells you otherwise, they have obviously never read anything written by ryan eckes. this is easy to fix. google ‘ryan eckes.’ find his blog. most of his poems are there. there’s also a link to buy his chapbook ‘when i come here.’ reading ryan eckes’ poems makes me wish, very badly, that i knew how to do that. but i don’t. and most likely never will. ryan eckes poems are grounded in a concrete reality of everyday life, of real needs and empathy, and are executed with the sort of leaps and forward rolls and hurdling ability that most people spend their entire childhoods training to achieve. i am saying that ryan eckes is like the olympics. i am going to stop this now. ryan is going to read. i am sorry ryan if this is a lot of hype. suck it up.

for columbia i had to write 1000 words or less on a book of poetry

2009-06-05T17:39:00.002-04:00

this is one i didn't finish. also the book had to be published in the last ten years. also it was mainly about how i was writing it and not why, so it failed, because that's what fucking happens when you do that. suck a dick. alright. antagonistic sentences are done. feel like that is out of my system. ac/dc stopped playing. that's all i got.

1000 WORDS OR LESS ON PARTS OF PLAINWATER BY ANNE CARSON

PART II: SHORT TALKS
“Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. [So] I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.” [from the Introduction]
I wish the book were formatted differently. I wish each talk had its own page. That the world could feel as if it were being constructed slowly, one thing at a time. One brick. We can refer to each talk as a brick. It would allow each brick to add up together differently than they do when stacked one after another, like in the book. But it’s put out by Vintage, which is owned by Random House. Michael Ondaatje’s THE CINNAMON PEELER was also put out by Vintage, and it has terrible margins and the text never starts on the same line, so we can probably say it’s a thing with Vintage, and not Anne Carson. But it’s part of the book, it’s how it’s presented, and I wanted to talk about it.

PART IV: THE LIFE OF TOWNS
Anne Carson is a scholar of towns. This is what a scholar is:
. A scholar is someone who takes a position.
. The position a scholar takes is one from which certain likes become visible.
. A scholar simply knows where to stand to see the lines that are already there.
. A scholar does not make this up.
. A scholar is someone who knows how to limit themselves to the matter at hand.

This is what towns are:
. Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow.
. Towns are also not empty.
. Towns are also different. Sometimes things that are the same are represented by
different things in different towns. Feel free to come up with your own
examples.

for columbia i had to write 1000 words or less on a book of poetry

2009-06-05T17:38:00.001-04:00

this is the one i used

1000 WORDS OR LESS ON THE GHOST SOLDIERS BY JAMES TATE

I like James Tate.
I like James Tate because when I read James Tate I feel like anything could happen. That my shoelace could have come untied, or a bear could be roaming the streets, or my neighbor’s house could have suddenly exploded and after everyone walked away from the scene they got into a car i never knew they owned and changed the plates and rode off into the sunset with different haircuts, that my mother could be dying of cancer, that I could go off and “pee behind my car in the darkness of my own private darkness.” I think that the ability for anything to happen at any time is important. For us to feel that we exist in a place of possibility, because we do. That is the sort of place we exist in and it is very easy to forget that, or it sometimes seems that way to me.
I like James Tate because in this book he places equal importance on everything. A better way to put that might be that I think it is important that things are presented to us. That they are not presented with judgments attached to them; that things are not emphasized; that things are simply presented. That tying a shoelace that has come untied is as important as the doings at the new mall or soldiers falling from the sky or cooking dinner or a woman being really really weird about her rooster that is named Waylon. That police officer’s are hiding in wait for us as we pee behind our cars. That the fact that we each of us see the same thing and think something completely different is talked about the same way filing a tax return is talked about. It makes me feel that getting a blow job or watching your mother get run over by a semi truck or wearing wet socks in the cold or eating oatmeal whether you like it or not can all be described using similar phrasings and simple language in order for the judgments to be carried out by the reader.
I like this book because it feels like a more sure-footed version of RETURN TO THE CITY OF WHITE DONKEYS. And I really liked that one a lot.
This book probably has more references to war and things ending and going nowhere than the other books I have read of Tate’s (WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF FLETCHERS, MEMOIR OF THE HAWK, DONKEYS, also the poem GOODTIME JESUS which i thought was great). There are a lot of poems in it. There are 94 poems and 217 numbered pages of poetry. They add up to give the collective feel of a body of work. I like the fact that every poem is written in the same voice. That none of these poems feel like they were some sort of experiment and placed next to each other to show the breadth and depth of the authors imagination and experience and originality and a sense that as a poet and human being there is little that the author could not accomplish. It is very important to me that this is a book of poems working towards a common goal.
My friend told me the other day when he gave me the book back, that he’d read probably like the first 40 or 60 pages or so before he gave it back (because I asked for it back to probably use for this essay). As an explanation for only having read 40 or 60 pages, he said that once you’d read one Tate book you’d probably read most of them. I sort of agree, but mostly not at all. Once you’ve read one James Tate poem you understand how James Tate writes a poem, and will write most and basically every poem of his you read. Or once you read the first couple poems in the book you can more or less understand how the rest of the poems are going to be written. And that the possibilities ahead are not so much boundless as with a boundary that is far off. That I am not wearing my glasses and don’t know how far it is and I don’t care. I don’t read James Tate to figure out how he wrote that poem. I read David Foster Wallace to sort of scratch my head like that. I read James Tate to see what happens next. Because something is always happening, even when it isn’t. I like that. I like that it is full of possibility. I like being reminded of that. It is very important, and we could all do to be reminded that anything could happen and it will, so there.

ughlife

2009-06-03T23:40:00.002-04:00

got home an hour ago. getting up in 6 hours to go to work. am buying myself a pie after i get there, and eating it all morning. it's going to be great.
yknow what else is great? marathons on usa. for real. i can't stop. which is not accurate. i will not stop.

i'm getting a story published in the next issue of gigantic. i am really excited about this. i think their first issue was really pretty. it was slammin.

going to make an eye appointment tomorrow. need new fucking glasses. hot damn.

been working massive amounts on a piece for the lamination colony thing.

i am going to share the first five parts right now

we are going to get paid and then we will dress for the weather

*
I was thinking of heaven or at least of the upstairs outside. I was thinking of taking a nap and just curling up on the ground and letting a good stiff breeze blow me on upstairs. I was thinking of being carried off by balloons.

*
I was carried off by a string of balloons.

*
I went on down the road. The sky was a picture of a lake. I put it in a glass and drank it. It was the best water I’d ever had. This is, I decided, the big deal about heaven. A choir of angels swooped in. They had trumpets.

*
When I came to, I was sitting in a chair in the yard.

*
Where is this going she asked me. I folded her into an airplane and sent her on her way. Then I missed her. Then I built a fire in my belly and when it came out it came out as something else, and it galloped and it brayed and it shook itself loose of me and of everything.

feel really good about this. feel really weird about this. have always felt really clear about whether or not i am writing a story or a poem. not so much. i think it started to rain. i am really glad i am getting a ride to work tomorrow. going to gril some mahi mahi and do a little pomegranate reduction. it better not rain while i'm grilling. please.

there's a reading at my house with ca conrad and ryan eckes. and me. friday night. i am really excited for this. i am going to try to film it and then post it on the internet, where most things are free.

on saturday i am going to see "up" and i am pretty stoked. people flying off with balloons? ed asner? fuck yes.

been reading vera & linus by jesse ball. it's great. been periodically reading poems from ron padgett's how to be perfect. which has been good. there is a longer poem in it called "method" that was really helpful for linking longer things. for leaps.

i've been working really hard at finding ways to surprise myself. which isn't exactly it. that was shane's way of saying it i think. i've been trying to find ways to work so that i don't get bored. i used to not be able to finish things. i just couldn't keep up giving a shit. and nowssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

whoops. dramatic point in burn notice. lost track of my finger that. and now i do. it's harder than it was. i don't know. i don't know how much anyone cares, but i am reassured by the fact that most people probably don't read this. so. it's been more about finding ways to stay invested. making it so that i have to figure out how to do it all over again each time. i don't know. i'm tired now.

good night!
good luck!

we will work on it together

2009-06-02T13:35:00.002-04:00

i swept for the first time in a year. there is dust everywhere and my nose will not stop running. it's in my lungs i think. that is how it feels. i have considered swallowing a fire to burn the dust. everything is piled up around me. everything is piling up. once i stop sneezing i will feel great. i will lift cabinets. and place them gently down. i will buy several boxes of tissues. and some charcoal. right now.

bein a tool in a toolbox that i'm packin up

2009-05-28T17:39:00.001-04:00

this is a contest that blake butler is having. you should enter it

have you read this?

2009-05-24T13:41:00.001-04:00

it's great.

poems that were cut from the final version of my book

2009-05-22T16:49:00.006-04:00

there is one more poem that got cut, but adam robinson is going to publish and excerpt from the book on This PDF Chapbook and i want that poem to be like a bonus track thing.

here are the cut poems

so long

we were driving down columbus ave to oregon ave and we were next to the train tracks and there was a single train only the engine and it was just sort of moving just ambling on down the tracks and i thought that would be a pretty great job to drive a single train engine down columbus all day and then further down there were these three cargo beds or whatever they're called and then we passed all of that and i didn't forget to look back on it i just didn't.

at night i wake up with the sheets soaking wet

“what are you talking about?” “what?” “just now. what were you saying? “saying?” “yes. saying.” “nothing. i wasn’t saying anything.” “oh. was i dreaming?” “yes. go back to sleep.” i tell myself it is time to go to sleep it is time to go to sleep it is time to go to sleep i am now asleep. the radiator is asleep the bed is asleep the dresser and all the clothes are asleep the stairs are asleep go to sleep she says. oh my god. right now.

brown ’n serve

in the morning i made waffles and sausages from the freezer. i re-heated them and made coffee. i was in my underwear and wanted to pull on my junk until it was a mile long. i had jeans over my shoulder and put them on. the sun should have been out, but it wasn’t. also the blinds were closed. i zipped my pants up, which was satisfying. a bird was whistling as i opened the blinds. while the coffee dripped i did several very deep stretches and then ate an apple.

your eyes are flashing like airplane lights

“i am at times terrified of you. of a rising violence in you, or your eyes growing large and you chasing me around the house with your arms stretched like the wings of a plane. and this terrible bleating sound coming from your mouth.” i was watching her sleep in the morning. i thought, my heart will break at any moment. i planned the escape route out with window with a sheet. or maybe like tapping her at several point on her face causing confusion and maybe momentary paralysis. i wouldn’t want to shoot her or do something that could not be undid. or rile her up any more. in theory. i feel like if you’re going to bring a gun into things then you’d better make sure they don’t ever get up, because i imagine that being shot would hurt, and make a person very angry and far less likely to have sex with you.

this outfit cannot possibly contain me

what do you mean she said. look i said look come on. outside. now we went out the front door me dragging her by the wrist as overhead several planes dropped a very large object directly in the street, destroying the young tree our landlord had planted and also some cars and a grill someone chained to their stoop she was very scared. she wanted me to hold her close. i was not expecting this although i made room for it in my plans i had made plans for this. for something like this. in my plans a whale is eaten by a bandit whole and then the bandit assumes the shape of a whale and it’s sort of gross and very stretchy and he lumbers down the street knocking over trees and cars, just swaying like when you eat way too much and have no real gyroscope inside you because a whale you ate just ate it and i would set the thing on fire and give it directions to the delaware river it just heads east. right now though i close the door.

when you finally broke my legs

the bandits are crying they have come out of hiding. but their tears dry instantly for they are a vast dessert. today it is cold and i am baking a pie. making the crust is certainly more work than i thought it would be. i hear a sound and turn. she is approaching me with a kerchief over her face and no pants. i do not know what to make of this. but she is approaching. her hands look like guns like cannons like a destructive force that is barely being contained. hey she said. hey i said. i am trying to bake a pie. she says nothing. i can hear her breathing. i want to make her cry to see if she is a desert. i cannot think of what to do. i just stand there.

used to be

i shot into the sky at the stars. i knew they weren't stars that they were planes and that i didn't really have a gun but it felt like something i had to do. as i walked back things seemed to lighten the less i thought about them. there was a long time to get things done. the planes were in the sky. fish were in their tanks, baseball was the national past time but i had little more to say on this. warm and cold fronts were moving right at each other.

on duty at the ammunition factory

“i had a dream that we were holed up in this old building made of stone, and that there were soldiers everywhere, and it all felt like chewing gum for way too long. it ended with you telling me you were not a fucking dead horse and i was not riding you any where any time, not in the marital bed, not into town, not no fucking way fucking how.” she gave me a look that i decided meant she'd had the same dream, and it too had touched her deeply, and in ways we couldn't yet talk about.

i saw god's shadow on this world

the sun came through the window and you could feel it. i was sitting in a wicker chair and that is how it felt. i was trying to hear the plants grow. i was making a face that reflected all of this and more. she said “stop that.” i wanted to tear her clothes off and leave it at that. my penis felt like it had frozen. overhead was the ceiling. downstairs the dryer was rumbling.

the great train robbery was over

what, she said. i said i thought all my fillings fell out and i was terrified. why, what did you dream about? she said she dreamed about the day when everybody understood everything, and how it was a lot like today except the news channels were all different. she said in this dream she saw wide open spaces with careful grass she saw clean bodies of water with pretty yellow ducks she saw tall buildings that weren’t too tall she saw friendly faces and horses everywhere. i said how were the dentists there. she said they were fantastic. i said that sounded pretty great. she said yes.

cold feet

“my feet are cold” i said. but she was watching the tv and off thinking her own private thoughts. i thought how i would like to climb a tall mountain. i knew how i would like the take-out delivery man to get here faster. to get here more faster. more better. i would have liked more better insulation for my feet. my feet that were cold because i was not wearing shoes. she had slippers on. her feet were probably very warm. they were probably sweating. we were separated by a common distance, and that distance is represented here by one single couch cushion. hello and thank you.

ooph

sandbag the levies she said i said yes the levies. no i got the levy bit. ok i said. sandbag them. are there even any levies in philadelphia she said. i said there is the delaware. oh she said. yeah i said. i see she said. i know i said. the waffles popped from the toaster. i punched her right in the mouth. in my head. i thought about it. i seriously thought about it. i've never done it before. she looked at me funny. i could tell she knew i was repeating myself. i winced a little. oh come on she said. i said my tooth hurts. i thought about the last time i swept the kitchen, and decided against it.

i forgot about some of these poems completely.

when i wake up i am going to bury you in a parking lot

2009-05-15T12:50:00.001-04:00

Philthy Blog Presents: Sasha Fletcher from Philthy Blog on Vimeo.

serious thanks to conrad benner for getting excited enough to do this.

frank stanford wants you to know that it wasn't a dream it was a flood

2009-04-18T20:00:00.008-04:00

the long poem may not be a long poem i don't know. it feels like a chapbook maybe. what with the page breaks. it's one thing. one solid thing. i don't understand it one bit. which is more than likely fine. that's probably pretty accurate about all sorts of things.
i'm editing. it's good. i like editing and rewrites. there's something real great about just cutting lines. boner city is what it is.
have you read dad says he saw you at the mall? you should.

um. this blog post will be updated tomorrow with more of what follows.

tally of shit written since june 08

everything here is ok (full length prose poems, 67 pages w/ 8 titled sections. 59 poems.) (6.08-4.09)*
everybody wins (fiction chapbook. 13 pages. 13 stories.) (11.08-2.09)*
i ain't asked any pardon for anything i done (poetry chapbook. 28 pages. 28 poems.) (1.09-4.09)
-when i wake up i am going to bury you in a parking lot (poem. like 26 or 27 sections each one is a page? something like that.) (3.09-4.09)

so i guess my page count is like 113 pages of poetry? something like that. obviously i gave up on precision. i think i am going to tally the mention of things in poems. floods. things being swallowed by other things. whales. living inside something else. shooting things. shooting things full of holes and placing things inside the holes. unspoken loneliness. people feeling affectionate in ways that are probably not going to maybe be viewed as affectionate but you should know that they are affectionate. birds descending from the sky. bandits. the weather. being on a roof. being buried. people talking. people deciding to not pay attention to certain things they'd rather not acknowledge. things being set on fire. bones. ghosts.

more to follow.

everything here is ok tally
poems 59
sections 8

-things being set on fire: 4
-guns: 12
-bandits: 7
-ghosts: 2
-talking about dreams: 7
-actual dreams: 7 (this is going to need a recount i have a headache)
-the weather (nonspecific): 6
-eating: 7
-waking up: 4
-waking up while dreaming: 2
-bodies of water: 4
-being on the roof: 4
-floods: 7
-being swallowed by a whale: 4
-whales (not swallowing people): 2
-being buried: 3
-going to sleep: 5
-keeping things to yourself: 5
-explosions: 3
-cowboys: 5
-being eaten alive: 2
-talking about something other than the matter at hand (changing or ignoring the subject): 6
-clouds: 4
-shooting things full of holes and filling the holes with things: 2
-shooting things in the face: 2
-existing inside of something or someone else: 2
-pretending not to hear things: 3
-people feeling affectionate in ways that are probably not going to maybe be viewed as affectionate but you should know that they are affectionate: 5
-thunder: 3
-snow: 4
-trains: 2
-rain: 10
-bones: 3

so i am a big fan of guns, dreams, floods, rain, eating, and people deciding to not pay attention to certain things they'd rather not acknowledge

STAT COUNT
-word count: 6784
-paragraph count: 245
-sentence count: 541
-sentences per paragraph: 9.8
-words per sentence: 10.8
-letters per word: 4.0
-passive sentences: 2%
-reading ease: 89.5 (not sure what that means?)
-grade level: 3.4

let's bury shit and set it on fire and be fucking done with it forever until we need it again

2009-03-17T17:04:00.003-04:00

i am working on a long poem with page breaks.
i am calling it

when i wake up
i will bury you
in a parking lot.

things that are going to happen in this poem

* i go to sleep
* i am covered in sheets. hundreds of small shitty birds carry me a great distance and drop me down a chimney into a fire.
* i wake up in a house on a river.
* there are people in this house and they all sleep in bunk beds.
* no one can swim but they can all sink and also hold their breath very well.
* they probably don't have gills.
* in the kitchen of this house there is a smaller river and in this river are fish.
* things catch on fire that do not usually catch on fire.
* somehow and at some point everyone in the house dies and i rip up all the floorboards and nail them to the bunk beds and watch as everything sinks into the ocean.
* i probably catch a train and it takes me somewhere. the train is running across the water and i have to run to catch it. this is a dream everyone in the house shares.
* before that happens i think there will be a canoe trip. possibly some sex.
* i wake up in the city and all sorts of things come out of my mouth.
* at some point i float up into the sky and i become the moon and i give you a blanket and tuck you in at night.
* something else will happen. there will be elaborate fireworks displays. and lots of burials. in all sorts of places.

tonight i am going to read an entire chapbook. a small book. i think i am just going to call them small books. little books. mini books.
i feel like tonight when i read i will make everyone in the bars balls drop. through sheer power. i am saying i feel powerful. which is nice.

there was more to this post. i wrote it while i was in the bathroom. poop was exploding out of me. it was great. great may not be the right word. i hope that you understand me.

i think i am done with sadness. in writing.

but then again i also think i don't understand how sadness is supposed to work. or that i don't properly understand sadness correctly.

also this movie looks amazing. i am really excited for it.

well shit

2009-03-11T16:51:00.004-04:00

so i got into columbia.

and also got rejected from brown, ut austin, uc san diego and also the iowa writer's workshop.

i am not afraid. i am going to wrestle the idea of debt to the ground i am going to make it eat dirt until it think dirt tastes like a piece of roasted sockeye salmon.

together we will scale mountains and conquer everything that can be conquered and then we will kill each other and eat each other and step out of each others mouths as if nothing had changed, but everything has changed.

also i have two pieces up. they are linked in the basically the collected works section.

in a day or two i will edit this post and link things i really like in the new willows wept. there are lots of things i really like in the new willows wept. did you read darby larson's octopus piece? i think about it almost every day probably.

also here are some drawings from the show i had

i was adrift.

outside the show was higher than the windows and things were circling overhead

and we all got drowned.

it is gonna rain.

i was lost once.

show teaser

2009-02-15T19:37:00.007-05:00

all the tired horses. cardboard, hot glue, marker, masking tape

(detail) marker, masking tape, cardboard, hot glue on wall

also new piece on elimae.
also there are cardboard electrical sockets throughout the gallery.
also i have to go thaw some meat.

i am an internet celebrity

2009-02-05T23:58:00.002-05:00

c-list.
ryan manning interviewed me at thunk
i have no idea why.
but i felt really important when i was answering the questions.
that was nice.
things are getting published soon.
i am apparently now treating this like a real blog.
lord knows how this'll turn out.

you the living is great. i don't care what blake butler says.

i am going to write a blog now

2009-01-25T23:01:00.004-05:00

"i read about frank stanford on i think blake’s blog.
some girl i liked gave me in watermelon sugar to read.
i learned about bukowski from reading about tom waits
i learned about tom waits because my dad hates the ramones and came into my room one day and took the cd out and put in mule variations and told me to “grow the fuck up” "

i learned about amy hempel from a chuck palahniuck book the nonfiction one and after that i never read chuck palahniuck again because i thought his sentences were great and then i realized every sentence he ever wrote he got from the story in reasons to live about the girl that keeps moving.

i learned about online literature through bear parade. i learned about bear parade by googling michael earl craig because i'd just read can you relax in my house four times in a row and was pissed off there weren't more poems in it.

i read michael earl craig because this girl gave it to me. she also gave me actual air.

i read james tate because he blurbed both of those books.

i read catch 22 because my dad made me

i read the tin drum because my dad made me

i read kavalier and clay because my dad made me

i read infinite jest because my ex girlfriend made me. we'd broken up. i thought he used too many words. she told me it was probably the best thing she'd ever read. it was ten bucks at a borders, so i got it. i called her during the first chapter and told her there were too many fucking words and if the whole fucking book had this many fucking words in it than i was fucking done. she told me to quit being a pussy and read the fucking book. i did. i still do. all the time. it is incredible.

i learned about donald barthelme because my friend joe murphy told me i should read 40 stories and i did because he said 60 stories but 40 seemed like a more reasonable number.
i forget how i learned about grace paley but it wasNO it was in the introduction to Amy Hempel's collected. Rick Moody's introduction.

i read shane jones on pineapple war.

i learned about pineapple war because gene told me he couldn't publish any of the chapbooks i'd sent him but i think at that point i'd sent him like 3 in 6 months or something and he said that they were a good site and new and i should give it a shot and i did. pineapple war is great and everyone should read it.

i learned about ondaatje i don't know. i watched the english patient with the ex girlfriend who made me read infinite jest. i worked at the pennsylvania governor's school for the arts as the sculpture assistant and the fiction teacher gave me a reading list that had the collected works of billy the kid on it. that book is amazing.

i learned about pindeldyboz because the 2003 nonrequired reading had this awesome story called the lost boys in it and that was from i think pindeldyboz.

i started talking to blake because i sent him some stories for lamination colony.

i started talking to shane jones because he face book friended me, out of the blue, and it made my fucking day. let me tell you. it was great.

this is getting less about books and things and more about people. also i got up at 5 to gut fish. so i'm stopping this now. maybe i'll go back and do another i think.

you were in a dream i had last night

2009-01-24T16:22:00.002-05:00

“Last night I dreamed that I dug a big hole in the backyard and I sat down inside it. I think it was gonna be a well. Or something. Or an underground cabin. With a periscope. I could have built one of those too. I lay down.
I looked up and there were all these deer upside down and moving. The hole had turned into a well, or something. I was looking down a tunnel. Or not. I don’t know. Sometimes you start to remember something and there were fireflies except they had light bulbs for asses and it wasn’t like they were light bulbs it was that they were.”
“Where was I,” she said.
“You are right here. You were right here. You were I don’t know. I made bricks using my spit. I had to pee very badly but I didn’t. It was cold. I was worried my penis would freeze. Or the pee would freeze and the ice would make its way back up into my body and I would freeze to death from the inside out and the deer would make popsicles out of my insides.”
“You are very strange,” she said.

i am making donations today

2009-01-20T16:20:00.004-05:00

we were sailing through the flood on a ship. i don't remember what it looked like. blankets were dropping. they looked heavy. everything seemed very heavy. i could not see you. i could not see anything at some point after the blankets fell. i closed my eyes tightly and rimmed the thick heavy things with lights. something opened up from the inside. i felt swallowed whole. i was swallowed whole. i existed inside something very small and became very small in order to do this. i expanded. everything changed. i woke up covered in sweat. i woke up again and i wasn't. i came down to the kitchen. you bit my head off and gently put it back. it was one of the nicest things you'd ever done. thanks i said. you smiled at me and it was nice.

ooph

2009-01-13T18:03:00.002-05:00

sandbag the levies she said i said yes the levies. no i got the levy bit. ok i said. sandbag them. are there even any levies in philadelphia she said. i said there is the delaware. oh she said. yeah i said. i see she said. i know i said. the waffles popped from the toaster. i punched her right in the mouth. in my head. i thought about it. i seriously thought about it. i've never done it before. she looked at me funny. i could tell she knew i was repeating myself. i winced a little. oh come on she said. i said my tooth hurts. i thought about the last time i swept the kitchen, and decided against it.

one bourbon in a glass please thanks

2009-01-13T17:54:00.004-05:00

i came home from work and i broke every bone in her body and set it on fire. i used the bones that didn’t burn, there were a bunch of them, and i made a chair that i used to sit in and rock back and forth while reading a very good book. at first i was not convinced i would miss her, and later i gave it serious consideration. a bird flew into the window. although i was sure that things around me were imbued with meaning in ways i could not understand, i set the bird on fire. it helped me to ignore it. i have decided to build a ship out of her bones and use it to sail away when the floods come.