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?}

Ultimate Geekery

It's Tournament of Books time again! Well, it has been for a week or two now, which I realize is pretty much the equivalent of the internet Paleozoic. But I'm guessing if you're reading this, it's not for hyper-connectivity or insta-blogging (apparently this is what Twitter is for. I'm trying to Twitter. I've avoided it for almost a year, and then curiosity got the better of me. That or the fact that it provides another reason to avoid grading essays.)

Boy, do I love the ToB. Mostly because it's ridiculous and mostly because it being ridiculous makes it amazing. For example: today's final judgment came down in the form of a dialogue between the judge and his therapist. Example 2: the winner wins this:

That's right. A rooster. What writer wouldn't want a rooster as a prize? It's not like there's money in this business anyway, unless your last name begins with "Rowling."

Last year, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life... won The Rooster, and I was over the moon. I haven't read many of this year's contenders, but I think I will be majorly put out if 2666 wins. Because then I will attempt to read it and probably hate every second.

I wonder what the poetry version of ToB would look like? Maybe the winner could receive a brick stolen from Tintern Abbey, or a lead daffodil. Of course, Zachary Schomburg would stomp all over Billy Collins in the Zombie Round...

(image via The Morning News)

I can't believe we got warm by a fire / fed with my manuscript

There's a spate of new articles (okay, two that I've found) floating around the web about David Foster Wallace's unfinished manuscript, "The Pale King," supposedly to be published by Little, Brown, & Co. in spring 2010. I accidentally read The New Yorker article, which goes into depth about DFW's suicide, while listening to Margot and the Nuclear So & Sos's "Broadripple is Burning." I do not recommend this combination.

I still haven't finished Infinite Jest, though I've stuck with it over the course of three years. Every so often I come up against a section I just can't work through and set it down. When I finally slog through the passage some time later, muttering about footnotes and circuitous sentences, dragging my feet the whole time, he will surprise me with something simple and beautiful and clever and he wins me over again.

I've never worked so hard for a fiction writer before, and I can't think of any other writer--even amongst the Modernists I study, with all their deliberate obfuscations and esoteric obsessions--with whom I've had such a long-standing, grudging, awestruck relationship. DFW was a big thinker, taking wild leaps across subject matter and storylines, and his work evoked a certain charm and candor that convinced me to come along despite myself. Even now, I find this persistence impressive and annoying and wonderful, the fuel behind my reading experiment, what keeps me from closing the covers of Infinite Jest at page 737 with any sense of finality.

(links via Maud Newton and Bookninja, personal favorites)

Those who can't write, edit--

Okay, so I don't actually believe this. But right now I don't have the space to create--my current mental capacity is full: of theory, half-baked research ideas, response papers, books read and unread (these unread books cause massive amounts of anxiety. Like Anne Lamott's fear of being run over by a truck before she can fix that shitty first draft. All the books peering down at me from my carrel shelf represent, by proxy, some unfinished opus. I don't even know which direction the pickup truck is coming from.)

To help calm anxieties of non-productivity (both creative and academic), I've been trying to lend a helping hand to some small, and fledgling, presses here. Despite all my worry-wort talk, I am very happy and very excited to be helping with two (two!) exciting projects:

Pocket Myths is a zine series dedicated to exploring and re-writing mythological characters. Perspectives and narratives are queered, cool art is made. And I get to help my friend Andrea make these very beautiful publications. The next one is "Dionysus," and it's coming out maybe in late April or early May. I think we still need submissions, so don't be shy.

Jellyfish Magazine is a new online poetry publication founded by my friend Gale. And guess what? I am an editor! Oh, boy am I psyched. I am completely humbled by Gale's generosity and incredibly pleased to be part of this team. So run to your computers! Send us your poems!

**

In completely unrelated news, you can now stream the entirety of Neko Case's new album, Middle Cyclone, at NPR. It's fantastic and will help you create poems to send to Pocket Myths and Jellyfish. And if you send poems, I promise to cut back on the self-aggrandizing posts with Neko Case references. At least a little.

(don't you just love her?)