Woke. Heard something in the house before hearing the rain in the dark and the coyotes whimpering outside. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. Lightning. Warm street, smell of dust and water and I will myself to wait. It is here.

Another thing skulks in the rocks below me. I can't see what it is. I am alone with it.

Am changing my name to Ginza,

courtesy of Radish King on really sharp knives and a pyramid.

And Gin.

Any questions?

On the Authority of Poets

"The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it, whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them.... Between them, there has opened up a field of knowledge in which, because of an essential rupture in the Western world, what has become important is no longer resemblances but identities and differences." ~~Foucault

Isn't that a good story?

Once upon a time, there was a Madman and a Poet living on a spectrum of the Sovereign of Sameness, when suddenly, one day, because of--well, we don't really know why--a Science of Otherness is born between them, a form of knowledge whose first words are the signs of Modernity. Modernity: where identity takes on a life of its own.

But wait. What happened to the Poet?

*

Have been living with an unreliable internet connection. Have been poking around again in things I've been thinking about for some time: this thing about poetry and sympathy I've been trying to put my finger on, and this other thing about poetry and epistemology, a related thing, both collusions of a pre-Enlightenment sort that elude me precisely because I think of them (superstitious romantic sentimental me) as felicitously conspiring, probably in tandem, against things I actually believe.

Like: rather the associative-syncretic loony than a guy with a pack of pencils drawing lines, but I'm convinced the guy with the pencils is in the know because he's the one putting down lines that make the world. Like: these two are not mutually exclusive--that's a bunch of useful baloney--but I tend to line them up that way. Still.

As I said, categories, mythologies, identities, histories, stories: they are not only convenient, but powerful.

Can't trust the story tellers, but I do love a good story.

So just for fun, here's Pierre Bayle from Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, 1682, on the mad poet with a pencil.



"On the Authority of Poets

It is not possible to have a more miserable foundation. For, to begin with the poets, you are not unaware, Monsier, that they are so intent on strewing their works with a number of pompous descriptions, like those of prodigies, and on giving something of the marvelous to the adventures of their heroes, that to achieve their ends they imagine a thousand astounding things. So far from believing, on the basis of their word, that the overturning of the Roman Republic was the effect of two or three comets, I would not even believe that any appeared at that time, if there were none other than they to assert it. For in the end, one has to imagine that a man who put himself into the spirit of making a poem has at that moment grasped the whole of nature. Heaven and Earth no longer act except by his order; eclipses and shipwrecks happen if it seems good to him; all the elements are moved as he finds appropriate. One sees armies in mid-air and monsters on land to the extent he wishes it; angels and demons appear every time he orders it; the very gods, mounted on machines, keep themselves at the ready to meet his needs; and since, above all else, he needs comets because of the prejudice we have concerning them, if he finds some for himself from among all the facts in history, he seizes on them appropriately; if he does not find any, he makes them up himself and gives them the color and shape most conducive to making it appear that Heaven is interested, in a most distinguished way, in the affair in question."

from Karen Anderson's Punish Honey

(I'm having a lot of trouble with my internet connection--apologies if I owe you a note. This post took some doing, so I hope you love these poems. I do. Though they are decidedly not summer poems.)

FUR COATS

Red Coat with Black Fur Trim

So everyone’s got a red coat with black fur trim.
Blood on the inside’s blue, hair the thin thought
of some cells leftover from the last onslaught of wind
and sun, mutant squirrels whose bare tails shiver and sit up
in the brain thinking: grow, grow, grow. Who knows
what parts are leaving me now, an eternal bad market
that ought to have made its bid, bought and sold
whatever it needed that I stay whole. Or at least
that’s what I said to grandmother in line
at the bank, bag quivering full of her faithless money,
hands enviable angora gloves, cupping the cold
between their thin fibers. Couldn’t you say just
it was cold? I don’t like losing my hair
to an internal cause? Wish for something
else: that money never cared for me,
I found a coat that used me to warm and move
its satin innards, made me a proud, poor blue-blood, another
ruddy unproductive cup, a shame, a sham, a hole.

Blue Fur Collar Coat

Dear blue animal, we thank you for
The fur that lays around our necks. And yet,
the sun that rims the clouds is just a cavity
in the making, so we cannot say with truth
we know your blueness gamboling near a frosted
lake, or taking a furtive leak in a tropical alley.
Are we getting closer? The evidence says
against; the light says your hair is old and clumped,
from some dumb dim place I can’t remember,
some long-ago tearing of you from your muscles
and you lay there poured, done on the snow.
We only have the skin to keep warm.
Or I’ve got it: I bet you slipped the noose, and
it is just your faux hair, the way my eyes are rimmed
with bone and therefore look only ahead:
I’m sorry. The cold tore down. I needed to get
in front of me, and I needed a way to go.

Vintage Black Coat with Fox Fur Buttons

So when some old-time vixen slim says so
the camera winks its awful shattering light and life
is over: liquid and stiff we are forever
caught like 1929 cats, blind and angry, bodies
blurred and eyes revealed as naked, see-through
organs, odd and ugly cups of water
shined on, dipped in, unsaved except for in
some fading box of photographs, the slick-haired
fox fur buttons on the attic’s dim
impoverished tea party, condoms shoved into
the pockets, impossible to imagine grandmother’s
slippery body, svelte, then wrecked, then gone
between the clothes: her teeth were fixed. Her laugh
was happy. Hair was thin. Like some pelt hung
on the fence, I can tell you nothing but inquire within:
the black wool, furred, and baggy bodied soul.


published in Indiana Review

it arrived yesterday

We filled it with water and now everybody wants a shot at it. Good indoor fun in the summer. Great for getting the depressives out of bed. Nothing brings a family together like Wavemaster.

winter my secret

"A depressive moment: everything is dying, God is dying, I am dying." --Kristeva

View from my porch in fall on a day when the sun warms the floor boards on the south side of the house and I think of lying down in the light with my eyes closed, the last of summer showing pink through my eyelids to my eyes where the overcast days, the godawful lonely days spent in this house and on this porch, are stored with the old panic and despair. My lot: the church and its parking lot across the street in plain view, the church-goers leaving their cars loading their cars, they believe. The leaves are changing they are dying, and I will watch it happen again from here, this year, from the chair by the door where I feel least agitated by emptiness--inside if I am out, outside if I am in--for the house is most empty when I am wandering the rooms, all my rooms, arranging and rearranging the smallest things, and find no one living there.

"And I also want to be remembered for my killer legs."

Eduardo Corral's killer chapbook and interview at Web Del Sol.

from Karen Anderson's manuscript collection, Punish Honey

Karen sends me her book, and I'm sure I'm not meant to share it, but her poems are knock-out beautiful and I marvel at them, so I'll post some here over the next few days, for me to have, for you to read, and she won't know until I tell her. Later.


HORSEFLESH

Like the stone spoon eyes of a man whose casket
bought and built says no I'm going down
to the track and will be long as I can go
and lucky bornite cracked and ribmeat red
inside his pocket he goes--or pushy elders
telling mothers horseflesh eaten from the bone,
between month one and two of eating flesh,
will make your child's conscience clean--this is how selfish
I have been, how ballerina and bloody toed
I've minced through what I got, ridden high
inside my pocket, uh-huh I used my knees
and a metal bit to push the best flesh hard
through sharp rocked shoals and then forgot. Not
that I know any better. No I bored
to death expensive pros with every part
of myself I could butcher and scale and scold. So
I'd say I never gained a thing, even less than
the bloody old gambler pushing his luck or
the white bones spooned in the charnel house gravel
and cleaned by the meat bees in six days cold.


published in Verse

sole

There is a logic here, some reason that explains the recurring tenderness along my shin bones--some days nagging, some nearly debilitating--when I start training to run distance. Some physics-bound reason contained in an arch. Whatever it is, I don't have it, or them: I have no arches. My footprint is wide, fully fleshed on the inside, flat, or fallen, as they say. I wore "special shoes" as a kid, thick-soled corrective saddles that made the center of my foot ache and my ankles turn, as if the bridge in the shoe would impress my sole with a curve, after all. I've turned a lot of ankles in my life and I've worn down a lot of heels along the outside edge, "pronating," as the doctor says, to compensate for the missing arch.

I am not built to run, so I must do it very slowly for many months with a mind towards strengthening every muscle in each foot, and in my ankles and calves, and around my knees. I can do it, but there's a price. My feet and ankles swell, have been swollen now for several weeks, and I wrap them, and stretch them, and soak them, and ice them, and practice toe raises while balancing on on a foot rocker that brings back the familiar ache in the center of my sole where the arch should be. Right about now, I want to give up, my five morning miles, my three. I want to kick my feet up and read in the tub. A week now without that slow long run, even the walk, and it is hard to look at these bones, the tendons, the muscle along the front of my shin that bulges larger than most--probably larger than yours--when I flex my foot. I don't have a name for it as I do for the pain (medial tibial stress syndrome), but I know it is my grace, my way back home the way runners say when they get out too far and must still get back: I have my feet and we can walk if we need to. It is more compensation for the arch, this one band of muscle, a strength I can build against my fallenness if I need to.

a boy and his skateboard

What to write about today?

Some academics have all the fun:


CFP: The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse (SC2), Gordon College, Barnesville, Georgia, USA, May 26-28, 2006

Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery, coeditors of Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies (www.slayage.tv), solicit your proposal for the second Slayage Conference: The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse (SC2), sponsored by Gordon College and Middle Tennessee State University. This conference dedicated to the imaginative universe of Joss Whedon—the Jossverse or Whedonverse—will be held on the campus of Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia, May 26-28, 2006. Roz Kaveney will deliver a keynote lecture.

We welcome a proposal of 200-300 words (or an abstract of a completed paper) on any aspect of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly or the forthcoming movie Serenity, his comics (e.g. Fray), or any element of the work of Joss Whedon and collaborating creators such as writer Jane Espenson, composer Christophe Beck, production designer Carey Meyer, actor Alexis Denisof, or director of photography Michael Gershman. We invite presentations from the perspective of any discipline: literature, history, communications, film and television studies, women’s studies, philosophy, religion, linguistics, music, cultural studies, and others. We invite discussions of the text, the social context, the audience, the producers, the production, and more. For a lengthy but not exhaustive list of possible topics, see www.slayage.tv; consider also consulting the work-in-progress Encyclopedia of Buffy Studies, also at the Slayage journal. All proposals/abstracts should demonstrate familiarity with already-published scholarship in the field—in Fighting the Forces, in Reading the Vampire Slayer (both editions), in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, in Slayer Slang, in Slayage, etc. Papers are limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes.

Send title, proposal/abstract of 200-300 words, and requests for AV (VCR/monitor, DVD player, overhead projector, and slide projector only) along with contact information: (1) name, (2) institutional affiliation (or notation that you are an independent scholar), (3) email address typed within the body of the message, (4) snail mail address, (5) telephone number. Submissions by undergraduates and graduate students are welcome; however, undergraduate students should provide the name, email, and phone number of a faculty member willing to consult with them (the faculty member does not need to attend). Both the proposal/abstract and the contact information must be included in the body of an email message; also include both the proposal/abstract and contact information in a Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format attachment. (The attachment is optional; the inclusion of the proposal/abstract and contact information in the body of the email is required.) Please submit your proposals to wilcox.rhonda@gmail.com. (Please note that another person possesses the email address with the surname second. Please also note that this email is for conference business only.) If you wish to propose a prearranged, complete session of multiple presenters, make sure to include the contact information for all presenters. Proposals must be submitted by October 31, 2005.

Slayage Editorial Board Members:

David Lavery, Ph.D., editor; Professor of English, Middle Tennessee State University; coeditor of Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rhonda Wilcox, Ph.D., coeditor; Professor of English, Gordon College (Georgia); author of Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tauris, 2005, forthcoming) and coeditor of Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Michael Adams, Ph.D., Professor of English, North Carolina State University,; author of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon
Stacey Abbott, Ph.D., Lecturer, Film and Television Studies, University of Surrey Roehampton; editor of Reading Angel
Gerry Bloustien, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Media Production, University of South Australia, Adelaide; author of Girl Making: A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of Growing up Female
Lynne Edwards, Ph.D., Chair, Communications, Ursinus College, Pennsylvania; author of The Other Sunnydale: Representations of Blackness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming); coeditor, Watcher Junior (soon-to-be-launched journal for undergraduate-level work)
Greg Erickson, Ph.D., Director of Classical Music, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music (New York) Roz Kaveney, editor of Reading the Vampire Slayer (revised edition)
Don Keller, editor of The Horns of Elfland
Tanya Krzywinska, Ph.D., Reader, Film and Television Studies, Brunel University (London); author of A Skin for Dancing in: Possession, Witchcraft, and Voodoo in Film
Elizabeth L. Rambo, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Campbell University (North Carolina) Jana Riess, Ph.D., author of What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide
James South, Ph.D., chair, Philosophy, Marquette University; editor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale
Sue Turnbull, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, LaTrobe University (Australia); author of Bite Me: Narrative Structures and Buffy the Vampire Slayer

six happens

all things The White Stripes

sage

She mocks me. She put three gummi jacks and a piece of chalk in her mouth then came over, mouth gaping, to show me. We'd already had this conversation--"get those out of your mouth"--she nods--I'd already, I'd thought, put them out of reach--and spits them out on the floor with buckets of obliging slobber. And while I think about cleaning it up she steals a sponge brush from her brother's work table and puts one end in her mouth, licking it slowly like a popsicle, looking in my direction to make sure I'm looking, and when I start in her direction, she takes off running with the brush handle sticking out of her head, round and round the couch, both of us--how is this possible?--before Trystan catches her and she delivers a few mean slaps to his head and grabs a fistful of his hair. Top of his lungs, he screams "Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow" and grabs her by the knees while she hangs on, yanking and slapping, until I peel them apart, he from she, one pissed as hell but the other impassive and pleased with her triumph over us. "No no no. No hitting, no pulling hair, no putting things in your mouth, you understand?" She nods. "Nina," she says pointing at me. "Yes, that's me." "Nina." "Yes." "Nina." "Yes." "Nina." Yes." "Nina." "Yes." "Nina." "Nina." "Nina." "Nina." "Nina." "Yes."

We lock the bathroom doors to keep her out of the toilets. I haven't learned how to pick the locks yet. We have this in common.