For background, see here.
Bindings
When I was a child did you bend back my little toes
and my big toes, then wrap them in a linen bandage
for years? asks my second daughter, frustrated
that there are fewer grown up styles for size 5 feet.
*
A signature may consist of a folio or an octavo.
Sewing through the fold makes a nice journal or book—
you have to take care that the binding tape is nicely
aligned on both sides of sewing, on the spine.
*
A friend chafes at wearing his wedding band in
public; or not at all. I think I’ve only seen it once
or twice: a plain ring with a raised rim in yellow
gold. He and his wife have arguments about that.
*
The gossip of goldfinches makes a single bright thread
in the day. For a change, how nice it is to have warmth
without shadows, quiet talk, no rancor, no regret. I like
that the mull is mesh material glued to the signature set.
*
Here is the bone that burnishes smooth, that lays the papers down
with their marbled leaves. Did you know the word volume comes from
volvere, which is related to scroll, thin sheet of parchment wound
like a blind about its staff? As desire returns to its beginnings.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Barbaric AWP
This videopoem happened in the usual way: I had some footage (of the Bean in Chicago), plus some other found footage in the back of my mind, and the text grew from that. This video took all of three hours to pull together.
At the academic writers conference I was pulled in many directions, talking and listening, buying and trading, mingling with 10,000 other writers at the world’s largest hotel. I watched my esteemed colleagues preen in the hallways and at the book fair, beautiful in their dark and denim plumage and expensive boots. Conscious of waste, I kept my plastic water cup and carried it from session to session until it developed a crack, and began to drip onto my hand like a squat penis.
Punctuation
“…in which each letter is signified by a random mark.” ~ D. Bonta
If a spiked flare from the sun is a petal
and the petal breaks off from the crown—
If the crown is a wheel run amok
so the road blooms with rusted metal
and bad mojo— Then the firebird will hide
in plain view: tufts of flame trees, glimpsed
as you make your way from afar. Shake open
your map, walk steady along the arrow’s sight.
In response to How to take notes.
How to take notes
Note-taking is a sacred duty. The first secretaries recorded the mandates of heaven, as divined from entrails or the cracks on tortoise shells.
Stay in character. Wear surgical gloves and carry a mute parrot under your hat.
Apprentice yourself to an earthworm, whose assiduous note-taking turns dirt into soil.
Don’t write what you hear—what good is that?—but how you hear it.
Never lift a pen from the page, even to dot an i, lest it become lost in lust for the flange of an ear.
Use unlined stationary and let your letters imbricate to better shed the sweat of your brow.
Staple your tongue to the moonlight until you learn how to shine with borrowed radiance.
The goal is become invisible, like a street photographer in the mountains.
Type rhythmically, in 4/4 time. Improvise a work song to make it go faster.
Have your way with semiquaver and crotchet, but beware the Franciscan Minims of the Perpetual Help of Mary.
Domesticate the hortatory: speak off a freshly laundered cuff, blank of ink.
Get speech recognition software and use it to transcribe whatever you babble in your sleep or in moments of ecstasy.
Invent the world’s most offhand shorthand, in which each letter is signified by a random mark.
There are certain sentences that can only be heard by note-takers. They lurk like puns, disguised as slips of the tongue, stammerings and clearings of the throat.
Notice everything.
Marry the slate to the chalk with a long claw’s screech.
How to Flinch
“It’s emblematic of our societal discomfort with poetry that so many blurbs for poetry books use the word ‘unflinching.’ Actually, I think poets should flinch. We need to get better at flinching.” ~ Lia Purpura
Yes, I have eaten ants’ eggs. Faintly sweet little clusters whose honey
clicked a little between your teeth. Sometimes, parts of bodies
still clinging fiercely by a thread.
The tech on duty explained about the suction created in the vein
when pulling back against the plunger of the syringe. Let me try
again, he said, gently swabbing with alcohol.
Old wives’ remedies for warts: drops of muriatic
acid. Frog piss. A razor blade cutting
clean and across from the base.
Swarms of winged ants— thin waists, bent antennae—
after days of heavy rain. Gleam from basins of water on the porch:
I cried to see the drowned ones sheathed in their gossamer.
Dear Fyodor, how old will I be when old grief passes gradually
into quiet tender joy? For hives, sometimes I’m tempted to pass
the back of a heated spoon on raised, feverish skin.
In response to Heard at AWP.
Trail of Crumbs
“Learn to love silence and the taste of water.” ~ Dave Bonta
There is only a column of stones
where the fireplace used to be.
What was the thunk in the night of a green body
falling from the tree? Jackfruit, or avocado?
The heady smell from the garden is strongest
at noon: red-streaked tongues of ginger lilies.
If you take a candle and look in the mirror at midnight,
the gaunt face of your future bridegroom will appear.
No one around: waking from groggy sleep after giving birth,
finding the bathroom; jellied spiral of blood on the floor.
One memory of moonlight: my mother patiently filled spaces
between large, flat stones on the walk with smaller pebbles.
The furl of a fish fin in pond water: scallop
of vanishing rouge, tip of a mossy hieroglyph.
Dry bread, still sweet, softens in a cup of amber-
colored tea. This you can drink, and eat.
In response to How to lose.
Heard at AWP
“Electronic literature might also be called born-direct literature.”
“I love the messiness of digital space.”
“Blogs and online magazines with comments best embody the literary anarchy of the web — a literature without gatekeepers.”
“I’m sorry, I like gatekeepers. I don’t have the time to decide what to read.”
“A kind of hypertextual tunneling.”
“It’s emblematic of our societal discomfort with poetry that so many blurbs for poetry books use the word ‘unflinching.’ Actually, I think poets should flinch. We need to get better at flinching.”
“I practice a pedagogy of emergency.”
“The Seminary Bookstore at Hyde Park is the best bookstore in the world. I was jilted by Powell’s.”
“To give a poetry reading is to feel the phantom limb of the musician’s audience.”
“I make 40 to 50 thousand dollars a year traveling around playing the fiddle and reading poetry.”
“If you funk up a cliché, it becomes genius.”
“I was a whore at the poetry bordello.”
“She ripped the cigarette out of his mouth, broke it in half, and jabbed the lit end into his cheek.”
“Not many parks, but lots of feral space.”
“Just because you know how to write doesn’t mean you know how to read.”
With poet and Chicago native Susan Elbe
Penultimates
“Send the dew of blessing, the dew of grace;
renew my dispensation, and grant me length of days.”
– from “Prayers for the Protection and Opening of the Heart”
by Ya’akov Hakohen, trans. Peter Cole
Intuit, lean in, listen: the world’s too much. Who’s left
that knows to comprehend words that don’t get spoken?
A finger traces a vein along the chipped Formica counter.
Behind it, the cashier’s chalking in prices on the menu board:
Banh mi, buckwheat crepes, waffles, sausage and gravy. Outside fog,
windows clouded with steam. Appetite not meaning to obscure the view.
A woman’s knitting a blanket for a child soon born. The tips of fingers
where they press to work against the metal needles, blue-heathered as yarn.
How long, I wonder, will I have the strength to keep sprinting? I barely made
the last flight out. And no one cares to look through manifests for missing names.
Rain now, snowfall tonight. Unharmed, the baby they found in a field.
A town raked through and through by tornado winds around her.
We sit with charts and tables: worry times need calculating cost. Ring it up
once, twice, thrice. Was everything all right? Come back again soon.
In response to How to Burn.
Mosaic
“The song badly sung. The incomplete preparation. The careless remark. The unexpected and breathtaking disappointment, which we try to hide.” ~ Seon Joon
The rows of sausages looped like necklaces of marbled beads at the butcher’s.
The layer of fat congealed on the surface of stew.
The limp caused by gout.
The bare light bulb and its coated wire, suspended from the ceiling.
The fingers bloated with fluid, the morning after (not rounds of drinking, just soy sauce from last night’s Chinese takeout).
The letters on the mantel, addressed but still unsent.
The seeds that never sprouted in the flower pot.
The flammable heart, equipped with its miniature fire extinguisher in matching red.
In response to errata & corrigenda.