. . . . . . .

Spent much of yesterday with Dan Beachy-Quick's Spell, which I discover now while linking to it was reviewed by Josh Corey in GutCult last year. Also, a good interview here about the process of writing the book. It's a layered textual polyphonic thing that swept me up in its obsessive fascination with its reading of its whale. That's what I appreciate about it most, why I carry it around with me on errands, while washing dishes, while watching from my window my neighbor plant vegetables in the rain. The book is relentless, an act of possession. It won't let go.

***

. . . . . .

Then I got reinvited to dinner just as I got happy about coming home to the porch, so I ate calamari with everyone and enjoyed myself and stayed out with them until they dropped me off around the time I usually hit the alarm snooze. I did sleep in. This is what it looks like.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, April 27, 2003:

Chicks, cicadas, rabbit, turtle. And at night in the black black night of the unlit yard the grownups in chairs talking in the dark. And the best magic thing happened when the fireflies came out. Stars in the grass, stars in the trees. I was missing the world when I saw them. Then vestiges in their soft green abdomens, all their millions resting on the surface of the black blank world.

***

. . . . .

Just got uninvited to tonight's event dinner. I know I offered to sit out if the table filled and the budget got tight, but I didn't think I'd find out the day of and after looking forward to it. Note: don't look forward to these things. Or if you do, don't offer to give up your place at the table so that everyone else can eat calamari with everyone else. That's the kind of stupid generosity people who eat with cats day to day think is a good idea until they're eating cold chicken breast over the sink on Friday night while the cat looks on.

***

Well maybe I'll go to a party instead. Or a play. Or maybe I'll come home after the reading and catch the last three hours of daylight on the porch and watch the sun sink down behind the houses and take a book with me and try to read or try to pen something by hand though what I'll end up doing is marveling at the pot of tulips and the chimes--and the story of the chimes--and the cat who leaps like water and the light. Someone asked me yesterday if I'm "overwhelmed" in my poems, "intoxicated by everything going on," and I thought, yeah, that's my default state of mind: overwhelmed. It's chaotic and inarticulate and stubborn and emphatic and sometimes crippling, and everything I do is nearly undone by that dumb baby awe.

***

Sick of my closet.

***

postcard: Knox College

Essayist and fiction writer Sara Levine, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will be giving a reading and talk entitled "On Liking Littleness: Essays the Size of Handkerchiefs, Novels the Length of Nosebleeds, Conclusions Detached from Tedious Arguments," on Thursday, May 4 at 4 p.m. in the Alumni Room, Old Main. The event is free and open to the public.

***

"Philosophy travels on over the grave that gapes before our feet at every step. It lets the body fall into the abyss, but the soul floats on high and away. That the fear of death knows nothing of such separation of body and soul, that it roars out, "I, I, I," and will not hear of such separation of body and soul--what does philosophy care for that? Let mortal man crawl to hide himself like a worm in the crevices of the naked earth before the hissing missiles of blind, implacable deathe, let him feel ineluctably and violently what he never feels otherwise: that his "I" is only an "It" when it dies, and let him, therefore, with every cry yet in his throat cry out his "I" against blind, implacable death that threatens him with such unthinkable annihilation--philosophy smiles its smile upon his need and with extended finger points out to this creature, as its limbs quake in fear for its worldly existence, a world beyond, which it does not want to know about.... But though philosophy denies the dark presuppostion of all life, though it refuses to consider death as something but makes it into nothing, it evokes for its own sake the semblance of presuppositionlessness. Thus, now, all knowledge of the All has for its presupposition--nothing."

Franz Rosenzweig, as quoted and translated by Geoffrey Hartman in Saving the Text.

***

. . . .

Sun through the study window, already high in the trees. A handprint on the storm window outside, unmistakable: thumb, bird, ring, pinkie. A downward streak as if slipping away. I am two floors up and the windows needed cleaning before me. Who is hand? Someone with a big ladder.

***

postcard: Knox College

Poet Kimberly Johnson will read selections from her new book, "A Metaphorical God," at 4 p.m., Friday, April 28, in the Alumni Room, Old Main. Johnson is also author of Leviathan with a Hook and translator of an edition of Virgil's Georgics. She has published poems and essays in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Arion, and Studies in Puritan American Spirituality. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Eisner Prize, a Barish Prize, and a McKay Prize for Latin Translation. A graduate of the University of Utah, Johnson has master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa, and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches writing at Brigham Young University.

***

. . .

Arriving late but I made it . You weren't already betting against me, right? Mary's honors exam was today, so I needed the morning to prepare, even as my part, as Chair, was to let the others ask questions before me. Two hours later, I left off with one question about the trajectory of the collection and let that stand. She's heard from me all year; it's enough. After so much hard work and all the doubt that comes with the honors process she landed on her own two feet. The exam went excellently. I'm very happy for her.

***

Thinking tonight as I unlocked my back door and walked up the back stairs about Trystan and Sage growing up with synthetic grass. Why this ache for grass if otherwise decorative rock, if green lawns--golf resorts--are the wastelands of the desert.

***

Because tumbling in the uneven grass of our tiny front lawns and itching terribly after. Because digging up weeds, a buck for a bucket, and smelling dirt and watching bugs creep out, silver fish and leaf hoppers. Because the smell of pesticides lingering with the smell of carnations, marigolds, roses, juniper. Because clover, flowering, bringing bees and white butterflies, pushing up three leaved things, sweet, cool, pushing up a sometimes four. Because belly flat on the grass watching drops of water from the sprinkler land in front of me I. Because liking grass, loving sand, just over the wall by the river.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, April 27, 2003, 5:46 pm:

from an email from Luis Urrea:

Run! Be brave. Carry many arrows and some water. As Echo and the Bunnymen said: never stop!

Loyally,

The Old Bastard

***

. .

Cold spring rain. Hear it on the windows and roof? The rain gutters make a pretty noise as they drain. The cars splash through the street and the porch is wet. It's been the same perfect sunny day for days, so it's a surprise. I must stay inside and grade papers with tea as it is.

***

Flickr is having a hard day. So what is it about me that I insist on making it my hard day too.

***

week six

Blogger wouldn't let me post early this morning so my daily routine has gone out the window along with any hope of writing something quiet and thoughtful first thing today. Riding the teaching high now: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's Mathilda.

***

"It does not exist for you. You are here because of it." Or something like that. I don't get it.

***

Sweaty night, suddenly. The halogen beams; the laptop fans. But if I go sleeveless now my forearms will stick to the desk and I'm in no mood for that. Went to the drugstore to pick up film after watching Everything Is Illuminated and my mind was still working on the movie's thingness--second time today I've felt moved by something speaking to the fixity of obsessive imaging--so I ask the guy at the counter (who knows me by last name now) if he's seen it and he gazes at me warily and long. No, he says. He is young, about the age of my oldest students. Right this minute I wonder if anyone I know has seen it besides me, I say. He closes the drawer, hands me a receipt. I look down at the envelope of photos on the counter and remember why I'm there. No, he says. I haven't.

***

Without making a phone call, no one to ask:

***

from MWGS's Mathilda:

I clung to the memory of my parents; my mother I should never see, she was dead: but the idea of [my] unhappy, wandering father was the idol of my imagination. I bestowed on him all my affections; there was a miniature of him that I gazed on continually; I copied his last letter and read it again and again. Sometimes it made me weep; and at other [times] I repeated with transport those words,--"One day I may claim her at your hands." I was to be his consoler, his companion in after years. My favourite vision was that when I grew up I would leave my aunt, whose coldness lulled my conscience, and disguised like a boy I would seek my father through the world. My imagination hung upon the scene of recognition; his miniature, which I should continually wear exposed on my breast, would be the means and I imaged the moment to my mind a thousand and a thousand times, perpetually varying the circumstances. Sometimes it would be in a desart; in a populous city; at a ball; we should perhaps meet in a vessel; and his first words constantly were, "My daughter, I love thee"! What extactic moments have I passed in these dreams! How many tears I have shed; how often have I laughed aloud. (Chapter II, emphasis mine)

***

Repetition. Melody pointed out Mathilda would dress like a boy while exposing her breast(s)--and we all had a good laugh--the fantasy hinging on literal impossibilities. The miniature, "the means," must be made available for the gaze of the father to see itself, to recognize itself, as decorum, talisman, idol, conscience, suspended from a chain around her neck. Like a leash, yes? The fantasy, in this sense, is suspension, fixation. Hanging. Imaging, without imagining--repetition compulsion. The fantasy can only remain pleasurable and intact inasmuch as it remains suspended and repeatable. The return to the same old fix, again and again, for solace: I think we call it addiction. No matter. More important: what's all this stuff about gender coding? Could the Father's recognition--how visionary is it--see through the boy disguise?

***

Mathilda fixates on recreating her father, is a product of her father, reproduces, reiterates, and repeats her father--as much as if impregnated by her father. That's 19th century incest for you. She carries out his life sentence without recognizing him or herself. More, she is horrifically repulsed by his manic, erotic desire for her--for his displaced want for her mother. And Mathilda's repulsion drives him to suicide. How to read this: what is she a victim of? Lack of motherhood, fatherhood? What's the difference between making your father into the thing you want him to be and seeing yourself made into the thing your father wants you to be? Because there is power involved, it's a hard question to answer. Difference is an ethics question here. The simple answer is power. The difficult answer is really a question: who's got power?

***

from the Annuniciation notebook, April 25, 2003, 7:30 am:

Dream of crossing a gorge or a ravine, picking my way through cactus.

***

. . . . . . .

Uhmm. No. Basil is not allowed. If you're not staying here for the summer, you're not allowed to put more things in pots for the mites to suck dry. And I cannot imagine you'll decide against another week on a Mexican beach. Or against a poolside summer in the newly landscaped backyard. Palm trees, she said. She called from the hot tub last night. She said: we're putting in synthetic grass. AstroTurf? Why? Because we live in a desert. You can't escape it. (You do too.)

***

from the Annunciation notebook, April 23, 2003, 8:20 am:

Odd. Yesterday I remember looking for the Game-of-Bee scar & locating a small, almost invisible scar on my left hand at the base of my thumb. Most of the day I thought it was the Bee scar. But last night a scar on the back of my right hand began to itch. A hive, a single raised hive: the real Bee scar raised in protest. A memory I hold to because the scar remains as evidence, proof it happened. An accident, a babysitter's game. It didn't hurt me. But it marked me. So few things are memorable. It's snowing today. There are daffodils lining the garden & a few small red tulips. The tulips look cold.

***

I don't remember writing that.

***

Thus, the photographs. So I know which way is back.

***

. . . . . .

Woman resorts to despicable substances: if they killed the lemon verbena they might kill the sweet red-yellow begonia too. And the waggling tulip. It looks bad, she thinks, and reads that Bayer Advanced Garden Rose & Flower Insect Killer--concentrate--might be powerless against the might of mites. She needs a miticide, and those things might kill plants, too, if you're not careful. She thinks she cannot save the sweet yellow-red begonia. Days ago it made happy; today it drops its mottled leaves into the pot. Brown flowers: saddest of all. She is afraid of walking into Lowe's. She almost cannot get out again.

***

Then she reads an article recommending cyfluthrin--the active despicable substance in Bayer Advanced Garden Rose & Flower Insect Killer--as the most effective remedy against the might of mights. Er, mites. Don't waste your time with other despicable substances, it says. Cyfluthrin is the one for you. She looks at the blue bottle with the yellow label where the Rose and the June Bug thrive beside the word "concentrate." Which is funny because she can't concentrate, can't stomach the smell of pesticides. She thinks of mites: they suck the undersides of the leaves: leave welts. She sweeps the porch and oils the Appalachian chairs. The blue bottle sits in the kitchen. She avoids it.

***

She had this dream last night. A maggot infestation in her mattress. The mites are on her mind this way. Detail from a bad dream.

***

. . . . .

Woke with a lot of noise in my head, the sort that produces noise here, so I'll resist putting it down and head for the tub instead where I might read something clarifying in today's class prep.Though I love them, the poems look too familiar this morning, wearisome--Shelley's veil of familiarity, I'm reminded--that which poetry would slice through. So let's see what poetry can do when I am tired of it.

***

. . . .

Artist: Beth Jonsberg. Yeah, I know her in person. Yeah, she likes me. Mostly.

***

...to be stunningly, heart-floodingly beautiful, hilarious, and true. Is that so much to ask?

But I wonder, those of us who edited for Little Emerson, might we finally break our code of silence to speak on behalf of the experiment? Don't call it a representative example if you'd rather not. Just that of the poems I thought beautiful and/or hiliarious and true, only four others, at most, thought so too, of us nine. We didn't manage to publish under the pressure to publish; we didn't manage to get a majority vote in favor of a single poem--much less three or four. I believed at the outset something "true" in the work would bring us to a (coincidental) consensus, but the project has only confirmed my inability--as yet--to see what You see. Well, and Yours too--as yet.

***

I kinda like the world that way.

***

. . .

Slept right through the alarm and couldn't remember a thing about what needs to be done today. And being that it's Wednesday, there is plenty to forget. My knees hurt a little too. It's the swimming bringing on sleep and soreness. Insomnia cured; then I miss it: since when am I a person who sleeps in, forgetting? Someone told me those treated for hypertension miss their hypertension. It's also the middle of the term--where things begin to unravel. I'd like to have one term that didn't look that way. Just as I wanted one term in which the daily record remained intact. Of course it's still doable. I'm not saying it's not doable.

***

from Geoffrey Hartman's "'Was it for this...?' Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods":

"It was fear," Vico remarks, "which created gods in the world, not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves." That fear, interpreted as self-astonishment, is then connected with figurative language, or with the idiom of our ancestors the giants. Blake also linked fear to figuration, though of a distorted kind. His visionary poems show a continual theogony whose 'big bang' is the self-astonishment of an imagination that shrinks from its own power and then abdicates it to the priests. By this recession it also produces the void described in the first lines of Genesis, and a God who has to create something from that nothing. Our present religiously reduced imagination continues to exnihilate creation, that is, to understand created nature as the product of a creator who has raised it from nothing (ex nihilo). The result is a flawed image of power that has inscribed itself in domestic, political, and religious institutions--it has become a second nature, and frozen the hierarchy of human and divine. (15-6)

and this is how he arrives here:

...poets have never lost sight of the exceptional character of their occupation in the greater world. I cannot say the same about recent commentators, who insist that the political content of literature has been neglected or must be our first if not exclusive concern. No pronouncement of this kind will change the fact that our own occupation as literary scholars working within a university context is as exceptional as poetry itself. The privilege that causes our concern will not be cancelled by mimic wars against the "aesthetic" element in art or art theory. Such attacks deny what is strong and peculiar about both art and art education, and so may be self-scuttling and politically the worst thing to do. (emphasis mine 19)

***

Well, what of it: something from nothing?

***

. .

So I've joined Flickr but using it to post photos to this blog has created problems I don't know how to resolve. I love the size of the photo, but it's too big for my current template. It was eating my sidebar content at first. So I started tinkering with the width of the page's content in my template and shrank the margins to accommodate the photo, which is an appealing look only so long as I don't view the blog from an older browser, such as those I have at the office. From there, much of the page--too much--isn't viewable. I know you know more than I do, that you've got some advice for me, right?

***

Such as how to shrink the photo once it's posted? AHA! But it looks so much better full sized...

***

And I'm not harping on this (at least I seem not to able to help it) but my father keeps dying in my dream and I keep finding out on accident. I was in the pool yesterday looking up at the ceiling and thinking that the color of the paint--pale industrial green, faded seafoam, bleached turquoise--is the same color as the lit windows of the plant at night. Glowing slightly green in the dark. Like the windows of the old Greyhound buses. I might be misremembering. And I say "plant," but it might've been "mill." Or the building where they housed the concentrators, I'm not sure now. The mine has words of it's own and I've tried to learn them but it's an exclusive language. You can't look up words for the ruins above the Old Morenci swimming pool. Neither exist anymore. You have to find someone who remembers, who knows, to ask.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, April 19, 2003

Losing trust in the Stargo years. I talked to my mother yesterday and asked her if she remembers me washing dishes on a stool. Well, you used to hang around me--don't you remember shaking out the orange rugs? No. But: I think I do remember now.

***

week five

When Rebecca Loudon says so over strong tea with milk, believe her. The police rang the doorbell in what for me is the middle of the night so I was startled out of sleep but almost expecting them to show. And how strange, this visit on Easter night without so much as a phone call. I wandered around yesterday thinking well and what now?--replace it? wait for it? search for it?--and how long will I walk around seeing things without it? Can I go back to walking around seeing things without it? And that was a dark thought.

I had other dark thoughts, the ones about failure, for I hadn't been watchful enough, had I, and all that rhetoric about getting what you deserve (what a tyrant, that one). I wouldn't listen, but it was pretty damned loud anyway. I went to bed especially early to get my head straight for teaching and the week ahead. It was still light out when I drifted off and dreamt of J, which I haven't done in what? Months? A year or more? Maybe Suzanne and I spoke of him yesterday; maybe he shows up when I've lost something--that old pressure again--like a good barometer.

But then there it was. My camera and the film inside it, intact.

***

See the honey bees?

***

Easter, and these pages have taken on the concentration of my former hand-kept notebooks, the hand-painted hand-written mosaics I carried everywhere with me and filled with daily intermittent entries in an effort to keep presence of mind within reach. To watch days unfold their obsessive contingencies. To hope for something, almost from without, revealed in the tracing of monuments. Annunciation.

Over time, a matter of weeks, pages, a whole book (almost the tree from its leaves), though those old closed pages are filled with the fictions of the closed mind, so pained, so transparently the said of what one wants to say aloud but doesn't, out of anxiety, yes, but more so out of self-indulgence. I wouldn't let you read that crap. And so for someone like me--so often self-encapsulated--there is a futility to those closed pages, the same circling futility of subject. The subjecting of self to one's loneliest self. Subjectivity. So this open notebook: what am I saying? I cannot tell you everything. Which is part of what you require of me: our agreement. Which is why this work is more useful, at least.

***

And the angel answered and said unto her, the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. --Luke 1:35

***

from the Annunciation notebook, April 17, 2003:

How the creation story is negated by fantasy; how it becomes the contemptuous voice of God. How one wound leads to the desire to defend against more more wounds--and the shields of choice are all those of gratification. And fantasy. The aestheticized thing. Oh poem.

***

Fantasy: as much as the camera I think of the photos lying in wait inside it, half a roll, black and white. I remember some of what I saw. An evil yellow chick Easter cookie on a paper lace doily, that especially. I imagine the film being torn from the camera and discarded. I imagine someone snapping the rest of the roll, but not developing it, or developing it and discarding my half of the photos after shuffling through them quickly. I imagine walking into the nearest pawn shop and finding the camera and film intact.

***

Land Camera

After
The self-regarding religiosity
Of music-critics shuts itself
Lilting in a mirrored box
If I thought anything was endless
---------------------------- and the cloud
A fixture, as breathing twenty dollars
Meet and hold ourselves aloft
On a fine breeze, a jet
Distraction we agree on but if
The intellectual future depends
On essays
----------------- below this line we are
Having a parallel experience again
An evening of stars and kids
A pasty and probably anti-semitic vocabulary
Impatience having led in this case to
A desk in Euclid, IL
Office where no one anticipates
The onslaught of radical decency
But they're happy to join when it comes

Jordan Davis

***

Book V of The Prelude tomorrow. The book of Books. Rereading the Arab dream sequence tonight:

While this was uttering, strange as it may seem, --------------- 110
I wondered not, although I plainly saw
The one to be a stone, the other a shell;
Nor doubted once but that they both were books,
Having a perfect faith in all that passed.

***

My camera was stolen last night. Heartbroken.

***

It was so warm and lovely yesterday, I walked to school and back which I only don't do daily because of shoes and books--too little shoe--and started reading Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids along the way, walking and reading as kids do, as I did when a kid and was scolded for not paying attention to where I was going. It took a long time to get to school, just as long getting back. I went to a job candidate's art talk before leaving, so I had pencil lines and fabric textures in my head and I took a few photos and read David Bromwich on the way back. I cooked some chicken, ate on the porch, and admired the begonias. I went to bed just as it got dark. It was hot, humid. Still. Until 10 or so when I woke to the tornado sirens and hail crashing against the house in a huge storm. Lightning on all sides of the house at once. On the porch, the heavy Appalachian chairs had blown 10 feet into the far corner. The begonias? Gone. I wandered around the house for hours, watching. I don't yet know my place in this place: I could not surrender to the basement, nor could I sleep. I didn't know what to do with myself, was somewhere between scared and bored. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes, alone. This morning, all calm. I stepped out on the porch, dragged the chairs back to their places. Took a picture of the moon.

***

My blogroll is in dire need of some affectionate updates. Well, my desk needs clearing too, but I'm crabby about it and would rather just find some place else to work. Or something more sociable to work on. Would you let me know if you'd like me to add you to my sidebar please--in case I missed you? Which is apparently likely. Apparently empathizers can make for poor systemizers. If I weren't against thinking that way, I'd gladly call it a categorical answer to my problem. Though doesn't it sound just a little like Cult of Sensibility all over again? Without the 18th century constructivists--Hume--suggesting that the fair sex might be educated to cultivate a delicacy of taste over a delicacy of passion? Nobody is suggesting that anymore.

***

"Unfortuantely," my colleague said yesterday, "women artists are still perceived as being intellectually flabby." The conversation had nothing to do with poetry or blogging.

***

Slept with the windows open. Trains and birds woke me. Yesterday when I left the porch door open a cardinal flew into the house and banged around the six living room windows. She knocked herself out twice but was off again before I could get to her, both of us panicking and unable to see what to do. In a daze, finally, she landed on the easel by the porch door, beak open, panting, eyeing me. She looked defiant, a bit fierce, and so it was: just as I closed my hands around her she flew out the door into the day.

***

postcard: Knox College

We're bringing Jordan Davis's Million Poems Show to Knox for the Fall 2006 Homecoming celebration. The show will feature poets Karen Anderson, Jasper Bernes, Anne Boyer, and Karl Parker, as well as starring musician and houseband, JJ Appleton. Look for us in Studio Theatre on Friday, October 13, at 4 o'clock.

Want a sneak preview? See this variation on the show's theme song from last night's performance.

***

My mother sent it to me in a shoebox--when it fit inside a shoebox--when I lived in Ithaca. It thrives. I do nothing and it thrives. She dug it out of her front yard from a patch of it growing beneath the fig tree, wrapped it in a paper towel, taped the box closed, addressed it from Texas to New York and put it in the mail. I unwrapped it in my kitchen and put it in a pot. I don't think you can do that sort of thing unless you have vegetable love touch. I don't mean green thumb. I mean medicine woman growing her daughter's garden: wherever she goes there is aloe from home. It has nearly outgrown the dining room table.

***

Thank you Anne Boyer, you of the most exquisite Odalisqued--

"When Teicher argues that Josh’s blog is the most prominent, and its prominence explains the exclusion of women in his article, he is also arguing that the sexism lies in “an unequal distribution of influence of the blogosphere”, not in his choice of focus. I do not buy it. I do not think blogs even function in terms of influence hierarchies; I think they are mostly a collaborative project, a use of social software to build community – not a set of individual, isolated platforms that can be ranked according to dominance..."

***

And Nada:

"NOT TO BE PETULANT OR ANYTHING, but...."

***

And Josh:

"it may be the women who are pushing most insistently against the residual "print-think" that I would be the first to admit has a hold on my consciousness: bloggers like Anne, Robin, Alli, and many if not most of the writers linked to at ~*~W_O_M_B~*~ are taking fuller advantage of the medium's polyphonic possibilities than male bloggers like myself whose practice is easier to recognize from the perspective of print culture."

***

And Jordan:

"-- I wish for his sake it wasn't the big story of 2003, and I also wish he hadn't pissed off half the population."

***

And Reb:

"And on a slightly different note, are blog stats the new penis size?"

***

And Shanna:

"Pointing to another article in the same issue that does feature a woman (who is also not participating in the online scene which the article in question characterizes as the new vital space) is lame. And implying including a woman poet-blogger would be taking the 'opportunity to portray the blogosphere as a space for dialogue on all sorts of issues between and about women and men in poetry and literary culture in general, to show that men and women are equal contributors to the blog scene,' is way lame."

***

And Tony:

"His is a positive outlook that it is the abundance of a feminine tendency and the narrowness of a masculine one that results in the gendering in the PW article. But a gendering of tendencies--does that ever go well?

What I mean: the positive argument could be made the flip-side of an argument that I could imagine certain commentors in Silliman's blog might make, "Well, ladies, if you'd dust off your criticism chops and get down to some real poetry blogging, then you'd get included in the conversation." The fault doesn't lay with the articles author, or notions of legitimacy, etc., but with the women bloggers: if more of you blogged the way I think you should, I'd recognize it."

***

And Jessica quoting Carroll to weigh in on girls being "more visual":

"'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

***

And Stephanie:

"Because I have a lot of questions, like is it only female bloggers, or female writers in general who are ‘more visual’? Is ‘visual’ really code for ‘photography’? Or do female bloggers interact more with visual culture in general, i.e. advertising, film? Or with the visual arts? Are there more female bloggers who are also visual artists? Or is the The Image central to their writing? Do they make more collages than men? Or perhaps it refers to higher design and production values? Do lady bloggers have prettier blogs in general?"

***

And Seth?

"Jessica Smith is a virulent and hateful chauvinist, as her comments on her site attest, and I don't treat with those--ever--male or female. Since I've been blogging, roughly 50,000 unique visitors have visited my blog, and not one has accused me of "seeking a safe space to insult women." That you have said so, in the act of fascistically deleting posts on your blog, disgraces you. You should be ashamed of yourself, and the women you claim to so compassionately defend should be ashamed of you, too. I bet they are, whether they'll admit it publicly or not."

***

And Craig:

"I was trying to offer the best representation of the blogging scene I could given my limitations—some of which are personal (my knowledge, perspective, biases, preferences) and some of which are imposed from outside (word count, etc.)--and I had criteria for choosing who and what to write about--one of which was certainly the prominence of a particular blog or web (as I understood it), and another of which was figuring out how to tell the story so it could be understood by the audience I felt I was writing for. This wasn't the conversation I thought the piece would spark, but it's important that it did—the issue and feelings that provoked this response were out there, and if my article brought them to the fore, I’m glad the blogosphere provides a place for those thoughts to be heard. I certainly expected to be criticized."

***

And Jim:

"Girls blog? EW!!"

***

You can guess where I'm going in a couple of hours. It's not the same as swimming in the sun, but something needs to be done about it. I've got water on the brain. I'm way past spring fever. I'm ready to put my cat in a bag and drive. Three days of road from here summer is about to begin, and I am missing it. --But the guy who does my hair, what was he thinking? He said, your hair is very porous. He said, wet it and run conditioner through it before getting in the pool. Okay, just did that and I don't know what I pictured, but not a whole 15 minutes of my dark early morning. Should've said: do you know what you're asking? Look at my hair, are you looking at my hair? I can't do this everytime I dunk my head in pool water. Almost as tedious as sunblock.

***

Architecture: the windows where they are make the rooms seem impossible.

***

Oh no. Just got a note from the Dean's Office. It's Flunk Day. Which means every kid I know is in the mud pit right now. I don't know what that means about pool hours--can't imagine who to ask--but I know what it means about tulips. Maybe. I had other plans today.

***

postcard: Knox College

from Dean Xavier Romano:

Good morning you happy campers and welcome to Flunk Day 2006! Attached is the schedule of events that I hope will either bring you to or keep you on campus this Tuesday, April 11, 2006. Please pay particular note to the schedule of activities this afternoon...some of the highlights for the entire Knox community:

* Softball game............................4.00 p.m.
* Kid's Carnival............................4.00 - 6.00 p.m.
* Dinner with the Band!..............4.00 - 7.00 p.m.
* Polynesian Fire Dancers...........7.00 p.m.
* Feature film on the lawn - 8 BELOW...........8.00 p.m.
* And of course, your Knox College students available all day long!

Welcome to Flunk Day 2006...have a fantastic day!

Yours,

Xavier
5.16 a.m. Tuesday...Flunk Day 2006

***

Nope. I arrived at the Fieldhouse with my goggles and a towel and tried every door. Locked tight. Nobody is going swimming. My mind is too dark for tulips.

***

So woman went to Lowe's to resolve the lamps with mysterious bulbs issue which has left her in the dark for weeks, and if you've ever tried to buy light at Lowe's you know what I'm talking about. She was there a long time. She carried her $5.99 blue halogen in one hand by the neck and put other lamps in the cart--outside lamps and floor lamps and hanging lamps--trying them on, until a Lowe's man stopped her, pointed to the lamp in her hand and offered her bulbs from a bin at $4.99 apiece. She took three and left the cart of light behind. She turned the corner toward the registers and Lo! before her the garden center waved with tulips.

***

Lowe's epiphany: the universe has laws. Gardens (like cemeteries) are one of them. You must plant tulips on Flunk Day.

***

But I didn't tell you. Locked out of the Fieldhouse in my flippies and swimsuit it dawned on me: it is damned cold out here. So I drove around with the heat on and looked at the houses and the buildings in the neighborhoods behind the college while my bare toes warmed and the sun rose higher and that's when I found it.

***

No see, I can't explain it. You'll have to see it for yourself.

***

Not just tulips--my mother and I planted tulips in my father's beds and there they grow--but geraniums. Because when I start putting things in pots I call my mother to tell her I am planting again. And I tell her I've bought geraniums and she tells me she's never been able to grow them--though my mother can put a stick in the ground and bring up buds--and I say they do okay here until I bring them inside and forget to water and she says that'll do it Gina Lynn, that'll do it. Then she tells me the story of her mother's geranium, a great blooming bush by the side of the house with green and white leaves and blood red flowers. When we didn't have enough money to buy food, she says, your grandmother would take clippings and sell them door to door for 50 cents and that's how we ate sometimes and though we did it often enough the geranium kept on growing.

***

week four

Quotation walk, from the stepping stones circling Sandburg's ashes in the garden behind the tiny house he was born in. The poet's walk, one guide told me. I feel morbid noticing the shadow of my own two legs; it brings me some pleasure. Not unlike Smith's Elegiac Sonnets full of graveyard consolation, the sort where you've got to envy the dead their bones rasping away at the bottom of the sea among the seaweed because, I realize just now--garden as cemetery, not as post-Edenic lapse--what's wrong with an underwater garden? My mind's not right.

***

POOL HOURS:

Monday/Wednesday 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Tuesday/Thursday 6:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.,
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Friday 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Saturday/Sunday 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

***

postcard: Knox College

The Caxton Club presents a public reading by Visiting Writer Chad Simpson on Friday, April 14 at 4 p.m. in the Alumni Room. Simpson has been published in McSweeney's, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream, and Georgetown Review, among others. Recently he was the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Cheese will be provided.

[I swear I didn't write this blurb. Cheese will be provided?]

***

Well, no, I didn't do anything with the pots on the porch yesterday. The porch is the best room in the house, but it's 30 degrees out there now and the wind is nippy. Anyway I usually wait until Flunk Day to plant, whenever it strikes, which is usually in the latter half of the term. Anyway, I haven't watered anything indoors in over a week, am an undeserving gardener. Anyway the fevery stuff persists, Netflix languished in the mail pile, and I needed to do much of nothing yesterday. So I started work on Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and watched The Dreamers.

***

from Smith's The Emigrants

These Exiles tell--How Hope impell'd them on,
Reckless of tempest, hunger, or the sword,
Till order'd to retreat, they knew not why,
From all their flattering prospects, they became
The prey of dark suspicion and regret :
Then, in despondence, sunk the unnerv'd arm
Of gallant Loyalty--At every turn
Shame and disgrace appear'd, and seem'd to mock
Their scatter'd squadrons;

***

No more messing around with the Spring 2006 English 344: Romantic Literature syllabus. It's over, hear me? Over. Get on with your life.

***

"Poets are like creepier versions of teddy bears."

***

Laundry epiphany: didn't you know? You sound just like all the other evangelists.

***

Hallelujah. It's pretty enough to buy dirt. And it's Saturday.

***

Let me tell you something about Daylight Saving Time. Arizona doesn't do it. So now I've lived through eleven years of it--I left Arizona in '95--and I still think you people are all crazy. It's like self-imposed jetlag. Can't get up in the morning, can't get to bed at night. And now I'm sleeping late, missing my dark early mornings, getting sick, and remembering my dreams. And now I'm dreaming of bloggers too: last night J's James and I went swimming. At the old pool in Morenci, Arizona, no less. Which is buried under the mine now. And I kept thinking--because I was babysitting--when Trystan gets here we'll go to the river until their parents get back. We were going to look for spring minnows. Maybe even some tadpoles.

***

Swim. Clearly.

***

That's what days do when they let up, when you let up, after everybody I mean everybody's gone swimming. Taught two classes this morning filled with prospective students, a few parents. I vow to only do what I usually do in class on visiting days, but the whole experience is intensified in any case. Then a scramble to get Mary's honors committee together on Monday for one last push. Then a luncheon with visiting students and parents. Then a meeting with prospective students. Then two hours to settle rooms and venues for the Million Poems Show in October, dates and place for the Campus Diversity Committee meetings this term, a reminder that Off Knox is tonight, a few articles to dig up for the Romantics course, a glance at N's tenure narratives, another look at Mary's preface, a print out of the Dean's agenda for the next faculty meeting, Evan's story, N's essays, Jasper's manuscript, and the thus far still tweakable Romantics syllabus. Then coffee at Innkeeper's with the usual Friday crowd. Then dinner and drinks with the Metz's. Then the Off Knox open mic event, nine-thirty by now. Then?

***

Oh and just to say, Blake kicks ass.

***

Rain, some thunder. Very dark. And the sort of day I imagine will look exactly the same this afternoon as it does this morning. A day when the light doesn't change. Doesn't help that I'm coming down with something, sore throat, chills. Went to bed thinking about generosity again--that old thing--wanting to parse it once more, for myself. For them. Well when you demand it of a group of people, what're you asking? And are you sure?

***

In the basement, an old crematorium. The ovens coated in ash, the floors also. Then we found the bodies in the drawers above the ovens, twenty eight people who fled--what? something--and hid in the suffocating heat, some with babies in their arms. We started the work of clearing them out, we were covered in ash. The little bones got shoeboxed, numbered, and I began seeing how they died. Furious fast visions of blistering skin, screaming. One took a metal rod through the mouth when someone ran it through the drawer knowing he was there and he watched it come at him. It took a long time to die. In my bed I could hear the ones we stirred opening and closing cabinets, playing music. I couldn't wake up. The dream would not be put down.

***

Gallery window of an otherwise empty gallery and I'm surprised not to find my reflection in the glass with the cars parked on the street. I was sure I saw myself feeling buried alive by whatever process left the body cast off for me like this. "I am inside it," I try not to think.

***

from The First Book of Urizen:

7. From the caverns of his jointed Spine,
Down sunk with fright a red
Round globe hot burning deep
Deep down into the Abyss:
Panting: Conglobing, Trembling
Shooting out ten thousand branches
Around his solid bones.
And a second Age passed over,
And a state of dismal woe.

8. In harrowing fear rolling round;
His nervous brain shot branches
Round the branches of his heart.
On high into two little orbs
And fixed in two little caves
Hiding carefully from the wind,
His Eyes beheld the deep,
And a third Age passed over:
And a state of dismal woe.

***

Los in a panic makes form, forms body, while Urizen sleeps. Skull first, then spine, heart, veins, nerves (from the nervous brain), and finally eyes gazing out from caves in a cave.

**

Six of disks, C. After crisis, milk and honey.

***

[full of woe]

Wednesday's child. Not as they say. Full, yes, but of good reasons to let go of details that otherwise keep me up at night. Responded to four emails if that and made a phone call between sessions no one answered. The rest, full of books--Blake, O'Hara, The Four Quartets--and conversation, all day. Howard and I sat in the sun to talk about student poems. Mary took part of the office squeeze toy with her--part of its pretty yellow insides--which was like sending her off with a creation story of some sort. The one where the poet lets go of long work and makes something else. Or looks at the sun. Urizen perplexed all of us but I love the poem and loved attempting to give it to them. And they showed up, and showed up ready for anything. Even to say "I'm lost" or "why are you looking at me, I don't know." They are unafraid, they laugh a lot, and from that point I almost believe I can show them anything. I can say I don't know either.

***

The Drummer

Baraban! baraban! this is a quick
stiletto bounced tight in tin casket!
The devil you say! Wicked the way
my aunt had to tell me after uncle
rolled over and over inside the locomotive
bellowing like a walrus's guffaw!

Baraban! Tighten till it pricks through
keen as a blonde feather, the saint!
the rib-tickler! oh!oh! the dromedary
sharp-tooth, swaying its all-muscle belly,
has all the luck. What a whale! it careens
over the tracks, dropping bison cakes.
That's the way it was on the prairies,
with a baraban! every two minutes and
the red man knocking us off like turkeys.

Oh uncle, you died in a roadster coupe
fighting the Pawnees and Banshees, you did,
and I'll drum you over the hill, bumpily,
my drum strongly galumphing, kangaroos
on all sides yelping baraban! for you.

~Frank O'Hara

***

A student sent this. My father goes by Charlie.

WATCH THIS MOVIE

***

And did you take care of your taxes before now like I asked you to? No, you did not.

***

week three

Wind bringing rain in. I forget about wind in this place. Second-floor apartment. All night the storm windows rattling in the walls, bits of tree blowing on the roof, in the yard and street, the chimes on the porch--this is no time for chimes--in a frenzy. Every bit wind-hindrance in a season where wind is frothing at the mouth.

So the sound of it woke me all night in the middle of things. I dreamt Karl moved his art into my river house. I dreamt of running up and down hills in new shoes, pain free. That ten guests arrive in October, every room in town booked. That I find a review of Keepsake by someone I don't know but respect, saying: "... as we have said, that Franco, under the mentorship of women who wish to remain beneath themselves in the safety of the master's house, writes in the Name-of-the-Father as if in the pathetic, near-solipsistic hope of entering the Father's Kingdom."

I don't read and recall text in my dreams, ah Firsts. The truth in it stings this morning where Blake is also at work in my head conflating his prophet and poet. Of course I don't know what a river house is, not really. Something to do with sand and flood.

***

from Marriage of Heaven and Hell

... in it were a [Plate 20] number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chain'd by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains; however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devour'd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour'd too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoy'd us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.

So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.

***

Something to do with the fantasy being hungry enough to rape and devour anything standing by. And because we're in a printing house, the inscription is a fantasy, the engraver's symbols, all fantasy. Words, characters, corpus, all fantasy. The prophets and the fathers, all monkey skulls, small caves. Poor evidence of any body, the corpse. Sense, for Blake, is with the senses. I hardly remember my father.

***

bard=barred

***

There was a camera spell, a Nikon slung on his shoulder or niched on the dash of the truck, though not casually. I held it once holding my breath with my brother in the viewfinder pitching ball and my father's finger over my finger. I remember. The dust of the tailings fields collected on the lens, my eyelashes and hands, most photos a melt of pee wee yellow shirts in the chainlink dugout, the only monuments in the fields the high black backdrops. I don't know what it cost him to buy the used camera from a man he envied, I don't know why he taught me how to keep score, fastidiously. Fondly. What a view, the tailings dams. The page of diamonds, my father's house, the photos, the fields. I remember. Nothing stood out but my father standing by.

***

"Oh, get off it, people." Thank you. Am delighted also.

***

Because one can say mother Bishop against father Blake when there are so few mothers to claim? And even then the precarious scrutiny your mother's art is asked to endure in reticence, as mothers tend to their inscrutable houses?

***

My mother in a house of diamonds, all day testing diamonds. Gold, silver chains, other gems in the pawn shop where she works. This is no prison house, be not deceived.

***

And yet. Today in the poetry class: "At length the sucking jewels freeze."

***

The Octopus

There are many monsters that a glassen surface
Restrains. And none more sinister
Than vision asleep in the eye's tight translucence.
Rarely it seeks now to unloose
It's diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison
The purest mortal tissue is,
Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters
Extraordinary, like the octopus
From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting
Toward anything fair, a handkerchief
Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher
Advances in a godlike wreath
Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling
A hundred blows of a boot-heel
Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers.
Percussive pulses, drum or gong,
Build in his skull their loud entrancement,
Volutions of a Hindu dance.
His hands move clumsily in the first conventional
Gestures of assent.
He is willing to undergo the volition and fervor
Of many fleshlike arms, observe
These in their holiness of indirection
Destroy, adore, evolve, reject--
Till on glass rigid with his own seizure
At length the sucking jewels freeze.

--James Merrill

***

postcard: Appleton, Wisconsin to Galesburg, Illinois

postcard: Appleton, Wisconsin