The sight of bridges and balloons

makes calm canaries irritable / and they caw and claw all afternoon / catenaries and dirigibles...


I just realized that the same reason I love Shannon Burns is quite possibly the same reason I love Joanna Newsom. Breadfruit.

And this is kind of what I feel like right now. Archive. Palimpsest. Paper! Except my clothes aren't as nice.


And I'd much rather be here, on the water.

(I promise to make more sense in a month, after a massage and a bubble bath and a pot of chocolate fondue.)

Remember that $20/month on books rule?

Now I won't be able to get my hands on G.C. Waldrep's new book Archicembalo (Tupelo Press) until 2012, at the earliest. Clearly, I have a problem that is not strictly monetary. But I do have a birthday...in four months...


{Edit, 5 May: Totally caved and bought a $10 copy at the Juniper Festival. Worth every penny.}

Fly me to the moon...

So, I've been thinking about a writing strategy Caroline explained to me over spring break--that is, writing a line (or so) every day and at the end of the week putting all the fragments together into one joyous poem (style copyright Dean Young, or something).

I've started trying to write this way, and it's going fairly well. Except I didn't do it yesterday or today (yet). But the line from Thursday was great!

One of my writing/image obsessions is with the backs of things. Fire escapes. Behind old buildings and train stations. Water stains. Crumbling brick. Dumpsters. The things that people don't want you to see. I used to try and take pictures of these things with my old film camera.

In other news, in other words, I've been a bad phone correspondent these days. I needed time to do work and to catch up, since I was behind on everything, so I was hermiting. I feel more on track now (despite spending an inordinate amount of time looking at photos online and writing blog posts about random things today). I will call soon soon.

Dear Jalapeño. It's springtime.

I tend to make playlists when the seasons change, though mainly during winter and spring. This winter I was obsessed with every single Bon Iver song I could get my hands on. And with Nina Kinert, who gave me some alternatives for my need to listen to "Peach Plum Pear" at moments of transition.

Now that the weather is crazy, wavering between late fall and early summer and wreaking havoc on my sinuses, I'm pulling out songs that always always remind me of springtime: Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go," as cheesy as it may seem, is a big spring song for me--I first heard the EP version several years ago while I was living in England, and I listened to it on my long walks into town from my flat, everything shrouded in mist and drizzle. I prefer the momentum in the newer version, though I don't know if it will fit into "Dear Jalapeño." Arcade Fire tends to overpower everything else in mixes.

The Most Serene Republic's song "Phages," is pretty much the song I put on as soon as the sun comes out. Renewal! New beginnings! I am pretty much desperate to see them again in concert.

All this talk of playlists and music because I'm going to the Margot & the Nuclear So & Sos show next week with Gale and Jess--I'm excited for the first taste of live music since last semester. I like Margot, I do, despite the fact that I think they milk the melancholy in their songs. I think I am more looking forward to being against the stage and trying to hear what the person next to me is saying.

"Dear Jalapeño" because I went to a Zach Schomburg and Emily Kendall Frey reading last week, and Emily read a slew of her "Dear Jalapeño" poems. I like the idea of tying poems together through the repeated use of one phrase, with the aim of changing the meaning of the phrase itself and how we think about it in relation to other lines (at least I think this is what's going on here). Gale and I talked about how "jalapeño" becomes an endearment: her word was "tender." You can read some poems with tender "Dear Jalapeños" in them at La Petite Zine here.

Zach Schomburg read new poems from his MS "Scary, No Scary," and I liked them, of course. I almost liked my friend Ben's introduction of Zach Schomburg even better, though. A kind of amazement about the brain that gave us The Man Suit, which made me realize I could be writing very different kinds of poems. You can read some new Zach Schomburg over at Typo.

And now...a bad spring playlist:

***

Dear Jalapeño--it's springtime (in the works)
1. The Changeling (Get Guilty) / A.C. Newman / Get Guilty
2. Fitz and the Dizzyspells / Andrew Bird / Noble Beast
3. Nightlife / The Muslims / The Muslims
4. Blindness / Metric / Fantasies
5. Zero / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / It's Blitz!
6. Take Me to the Riot / Stars / In Our Bedroom After the War
7. LES Artistes (XXXchange Remix) / Santogold
8. Phages / The Most Serene Republic / Phages
9. Swimming Pools / Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down / We Brave Beestings & All
10. Only Pieces / Here We Go Magic / Here We Go Magic
11. Dance Dance Dance / Lykke Li / Little Bit EP
12. Take on Me / A.C. Newman / Cheesy Starbucks compilation

{Edit: also, apparently I can't spell but I do know how to use a tilda. Who let me into grad school, anyway?}