inly so (this is yr life) / yet this is you

MON / fresh week

2012-01-30T13:21:00.000-08:00

yesterday was lovely. up!--spring cleaning--got a washer/dryer finally, over in the neighbor's yard--ran tucson--ran the stairs at that old parking deck downtown--joe lo came over--we went to MM's for dinner--puttanesca!--DD's mom joined us, she's lovely--watching downton abbey (horrified when William died)--lo & i went out on town--there's boxcar Jesse trying to hide from my camera--to bed decent--fresh week--getting stuff done!

tomorrow i start a new class, a 14 week 102. Jake Levine is visiting ADV PO: yeeeee! i'm excited in general about life. that's always nice. good stuff coming up. Abe Smith will come to town this weekend. Joe will be leaving, which will be real hard on me. the road does beckon, it does!

SAT / feels like SUN / brunch in ALB, heading home via I-40 lovely / deal of a lifetime

2012-01-28T21:23:00.000-08:00

i got the cowboy boots for $20. whoop! lovely driving day.

FRI / ALBUQUERQUE

2012-01-27T16:10:00.000-08:00

dd had her home broken into on wed afternoon. was awful, awful, awful. later that nite we had din w/ JH. i got up thurs, taught my class, then drove dd to albuquerque to do some med school residency thinking, as she has to decide the next month where she's gonna do her 3 yrs. she had a good morning at the hospital, & we had a good afternoon shopping/eating. im going to the dubtree gym while d's napping, then we're gonna eat & do some research on the nite life.

in other news: i got a speeding ticket at the az/new mexi border. lucky i was only 13 over cause that's not too bad, barely worth a pull-over, really. i couldn't southern my way out of it...sucks. anyways.

----

BEST VINTAGE STORE EVER: REVOLVER in ALBUQUERQUE.

SONG IN MY HEAD FROM REVOLVER:

MON / fresh week! / HORSES!

2012-01-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

SAT / video for The Volta / thank you Andrew Brown and Nick Georgiou for filming, being Tucson badasses

2012-01-21T20:16:00.000-08:00

i look like a maj. goober!

Shelly Taylor from Andrew Brown on Vimeo.

FRI / I scaled this mountain-hill-thing on this day in Jan

2012-01-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

Today I climbed Tumamoc without cussing it too much. I rested at the top. Then I went to El Minuto with DD & Char & we ate a whole lot of mexi food.

wed / so far so good

2012-01-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

"Justified" returned last nite to F/X. I love Elmore Leonard. I love the character Raylan Givens. Joe & I watched it with joy even though it was quite violent.

---

I'm loving ADV PO so far. I have 11 students: 4 returning & 7 new ones. All is well.

I'm going to dinner w/ JH again tonite. We're regulars at Casa Vicente.

Then Kaia & her band, including Joe, are playing at Congress.

---

I love these chickens!!

mon / mlk jr day / running after good tucson light day w/ andrew and nick / prep nite cause tomorrow's back to school

2012-01-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

School starts tomorrow.

Packers, I love you still.

Mrs America, step off, he's mine. Aaron Rodgers, call me!

sat / FOOTBALL WEEKEND EXTRAVAGANZA / i cant stand it!! / recovery day

2012-01-14T15:38:00.000-08:00

i gave a reading last nite at antigone. i think it went well. thanks tucson folks for coming out. here are some photos afterwards. me & annie at dinner. the beautiful kristen nelson in her casa libre home. fun times.

below is what i'm stoked about. 2nd half of saints-49ers game just started. get em saints. but PACKERS will take it all.

Thurs / there is no other way to say this

2012-01-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

ive been dining the last two nights with Jim Harrison & it's always lavish & so special. after so many courses, the owner of the restaurant sent over a brilliant spanish classical guitarist & JH asks him to play "Estrella Dalva" from of course the namesake novel Dalva & JH says to me in front of the fireplace we deserve this, we are poets.

& now i get in bed with a book after last night raising the roosters. see you all tomorrow.

well dang i'm just now seeing this: thanks to Verse Daily for making [20] a 2011 favorite

2012-01-10T23:32:00.000-08:00

On January 6, Verse Daily named a poem they republished from Black Warrior Review in November as one of their favorites of 2011. Yay!

Thanks so much Verse Daily for supporting my new poetry.

This poem is going to be in my new chap Dirt City Lions & I'm real glad the new work is getting support from this prestigious journal.

tues late / xmas present to mamacita & daddy: bob segar tix / pretty sporty

2012-01-10T23:13:00.000-08:00

TUES / work day - bohemian house work day - everybody come over and work day / bc im sick-ish i drink ginger lemon cayenne hot tea / and stay in and work day

2012-01-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

yesterday i met up with maggie foree, one of my poetry students from 2006, now living in portland. she's an angel & a doll & i just adore her.

after that i had dinner with poet jamison crabtree who is just pure lovely. im trying to get him to come over & work at my house too & help me redo my cv before i send off to Visiting Writing Positions--a girl needs to look as good as she can on paper as well as in person, & i need major help on paper presenting myself. ok!

last nite i was feeling yuck so i took the time to photograph my couch sesh with my two old girlbear las (in between a lot of bravo housewives):

yes im a crazy cat lady: i wish i could have every cat in the world.

SUN / YOU CAN PRE-ORDER MY NEW CHAPBOOK! / football sun / a Tucson day of remembrance

2012-01-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

CLICK HERE TO GET MY LIL BOOK

Pre-Order Shelly Taylor’s Dirt City Lions

In Uncategorized on January 8, 2012 at 12:39 pm

Pages of Shelly Taylor’s chapbook Dirt City Lions are all spread out on the horse less work table and inciting anticipation. Read this excerpt and this excerpt at Verse Daily, and thenpre-order your copy for $7. Cover art & design by Michael Sikkema. Books will be mailed in February!

---

i'm so stoked ya'll. this thing is a 2012 gift: i just finished it last Sunday & this Sunday you can already order it. believe me, this is not how the poetry world (slow as all hell) usually works. please all of you i love & like a whole lot, order my book & support Horse Less Press. they've been super-kind & supportive to me.

---

Other Voices Women’s Reading Series, Fri, Jan 13, 2012, 7 pm

by Hot Off The Press (Release) on Dec. 21, 2011, under Press Releases

OTHER VOICES WOMEN’S READING SERIES

Friday, January 13, 2012, 7 p.m.

Antigone Books, 411 North 4th Avenue, 792-3715

Featured readers: Kim Nelson and Shelly Taylor

Calling All Writers:An Open Reading will Follow. Come read a short piece of your work:
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry. Please arrive 15 minutes early if you’d like to sign up to read.
Refreshments will be served.

Kim Nelson is an award-winning author whose published works include the non-fiction A Desert Gardener’s Companion (Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2001), the recipient of Foreword Magazine’s Book of The Year Award, and Southwest Kitchen Garden (Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2002). Under the pseudonym Kate McLaughlin, she wrote Mommy I’m Still in Here, One Family’s Journey with Bipolar Disorder, which was published by Behler Publications in 2008. Finishing Line Press released a chapbook of Nelson’s poetry,Woman’s Evolution, in May 2011. See her other work at: www.kimnelsonwrites.com

Shelly Taylor is the author of two chapbooks: Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press at YoYo Labs) and Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press). Black-Eyed Heifer, her first full-length manuscript, was published May 2010 from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Current & forthcoming work in Columbia Poetry Review, Catch Up, andBlack Warrior Review.

---

today marks one year of the tucson safeway shooting. so many lives were affected. today we remember.

SAT / oh man i needed a rest/couch/wildcard football day / but i attended Eli's first birthday at Peter Piper Pizza...yeh, i totally went there

2012-01-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

this author will be here soon! that's tom's new book & heifer side-by-side. tom's reading was spectacular by the way. i'm so glad i'm a poet & not a non-fiction writer w/ irrate liberal/cranky snowbird audience.

it's baby E's first bday. this place is peter piper pizza...which is as close to hell as anything in my mind. i even went to toys r us before the party for squishy dinosaurs for kids...i am SUCH a good auntie.

fri / soup day! / TUCSON peeps: TOM ZOELLNER IS READING TONITE AT 7PM AT ANTIGONE ON 4TH AVE

2012-01-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

i adore tom & his writing. i will be attending his reading at Antigone Books at 7pm tonite. hope some of you Tucson guys can make it. here's the info:

CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO TOM ZOELLNER READING

here's the new book he's reading from:

THURS (FRI morn) / no matter how fast we are running, somehow we keep up with each other / war horse waaaaaa put me under / a lil bryan adams oomph to end the nite / thinking ab great kisses - in film and in real life

2012-01-06T01:43:00.000-08:00

which also got me to thinking ab dawson's creek somehow, which prompted me to watch the season finale...the whole bloody thing (even Jen's death video--geez...) that then got me thinking ab peacock, my high school dawson--we lived for the show every wednesday--such excitement, were/are true besties. all this got me thinking about music. that old school dave matthews song (yes, i know) "i'll back you up" which is really pretty great--it stretches from like 10th grade to now for me & peacock. so i listened to that song awhile. & then somehow i got to thinking ab bryan adams (i know). we'll blame this nostalgic mood on War Horse. see below.

in other news,
joe & i went to the theater tonite, we took in a lil theater by way of the tucson el con mall, if you will. we saw War Horse & i was a major crybaby. thanks Spielberg.

joe wrote me a lullaby today but i can't upload it on my own--yes, i am not technologically savvy--so i'll get him to do it tomorrow. it's real purty.

i've thought a lot about why lions tonight & i got an answer from an old memory. of course...lions. i'll put it in a poem & post it here soon, once the thing is written out a little better.

in other news: i got a MAJOR nice kiss last nite. which got me to thinking about great kisses.

my favorite face in the world is below:

just in case if you don't know this ab me...i have a major guilty pleasure love-fest with bryan adams (and roxette...and ab million more cringe-worthy musics...).

tues / a million errands day / got myself a printer / rode horses / lo & i are debating a backyard fire

2012-01-03T21:52:00.000-08:00

This is tomorrow night at Congress. Everyone come out! It's gonna be fun.

MON / gettin it done in 2012

2012-01-02T22:27:00.000-08:00

2012 Tucson sunset by Joe Novelli.

Today was a major new year organization day being that I got the book out yesterday. Yeeeee! I did manage to do a lil shopping up in the foothills with Annie.

I also donated to my favorite online journal & now press, EOAGH. CLICK HERE to donate as well. 2012 will be a major year for this journal & Tim Peterson (Trace) is one of my favorite people, poets, & editors. Support!

Tomorrow I go to ride horses!--yes, yes, yes!

SUN / NYE DAY / never go against southern tradition: get your black-eyed pea luck on! / it's so good to be a PACKER!

2012-01-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

i had a backyard party last nite. it was so lovely. i grilled peel n eat shrimp. joe made a spread of dips: the best hummus & bruschetta ever. a cheese plate with a maple glazed balsamic reduction. was wonderful. ab twenty lovelies passing through to hang out in the backyard which was so pretty--candles & a big ole chiminea fire. i love hosting lil get togethers in the backyard--it fills my lil house up with love. mm did a smudging ceremony that was meaningful. then we went to the bars for the countdown & a lil celebrating. around about 215 i started questioning where the universe placed my feet...a peculiar start to the new year. i shall not divulge but oddnesses. then i walked home in my heels & my feet still hurt today.

today ive been cleaning & then working on my resolutions & of course watching the Pack go 15-1. allllright allllright allllllright allllllright.

i'm going to send this book off soon. it's hard to say done & give it up. that's what i'm going through right now.

happy New Years everybody. best wishes in 2012!

fri / STOKED to be ab done w/ my lil book

2011-12-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

these two bunnies played a show last nite at plush. it was stellar. afterwards joe & i came back here & had a backyard fire in the chiminea where i read the almost finished book from start to finish. i learned a lot of things by doing so, so all the thanks in the world to lolo for his ears. thanks to mija mara for also helping me out with thorough notes. i have some interior peace today that everything is going to be just fine.

tonite is puttanesca nite at MMs. nice!

LAURA SIMS WHOM I LOVE HAS NEW WORK AT OMNIVERSE

What stood in our yard were like demons
outside of time. One had a rock in his mouth,
another a tree branch

And “each man became what he was”

We gave our meat to the meat plant

& the garden, town, village

Lifted from the mind

*

From above we saw:

A ruined shape

We turned to [colorless]

The sea was like the sky a long, long chain that tethered everything

At last, at last

To hunger and terror

Salami and buckwheat

We’ll stand between death and its shining ideals

We’ll fatten from hunger and light the whole earth

With our comrades’ debris

We’ll be grim set on living

We’ll bury the headquarters schools and the baths

And the water main

Oh strange person

Oh person in a vacuum

We with our canons and spaceships were children

Man is simply frightening

(Instead of fields) the forest rises again

THURS / it sounds like winter / winter / winter // take care of your

2011-12-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

peacock says bon iver sounds like snow, 'i can barely listen it sounds like snow, like winter, it's painful/beautiful.

king of the everglades, population 1, i write poetry for myself, i write poetry for myself.

me & the las woke happy. back settled in tucson & life is good. got a jan 1 book deadline. work!

grits & eggs breakfast of champs. run to gym. go, go!

it's official the neighbors are gone. miss you gio!--but that would be it. there's a silence now to rubio. i watch jose my gaybor walk to the mailbox. no high-pitched voice next door, nothing breaking, just silence. i can write.

kaia and joe are playing the early set tonight at plush. it's gonna be nice, i'll be there, happy.

WED / more pics from XMAS

2011-12-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

WED / back in tucson / some pics from HOLIDAYS 2011

2011-12-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

sat / dolly christmas montage / me? i'll bounce right back. lord it's like a hard candy christmas.

2011-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

been writing all day over in my little cottage on the smaller pond. and reading 2666: christmas eve superb. came down to mama & daddy's house for a snack, back down in a min to dress & get ready to go to granny's for veg soup & spend the nite, then xmas celebrations & hopefully dad will give me some pool tips. tomorrow nite i somehow gotta watch the packers bounce back & stomp the stank bears while also driving to tifton to have xmas festivities with my grlbear, ladybear LL.

mon / fresh week / continues to be cold/wet desert holiday season / the new Trickhouse is out

2011-12-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

Noah Saterstrom has put out a new issue of Trickhouse: TRICKHOUSE vol 14

Tenny Nathanson has work in it:

I love how Yeats in “Meru” has several wildly irregular lines mixed in with the regular ones. The opening’s metrical unruliness gives a sense of the cultural-historical phase (Yeats’s “unwinding of the gyre”) that is the poem’s subject:

every moment sitting in the ten kalpas
every moment
sitting just right now

sun-face Buddha
moon-face Buddha

where is Mazu (Basso) (Great Master Ma)

“ever since Ma kicked me in the chest I have not stopped laughing”

(An Lushan rebellion)

I hope that's not where we're going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies

---

yesterday was not a good packer day. joe-lo took this pic of sunday ritual. look how sad i look. abe & i were blue. [understatement.]

SAT / grading / christmas shopping / big mexi-dinner with lolo / DESSA was on NPR today

2011-12-17T22:46:00.000-08:00

in the interview, Dessa speaks of her literary/philosophy background. i have her book Doomtree (MN hip hop collective) put out--Spiral Bound (thanks Nick)--& i love it. Minneapolis hip hop is rad. esp Dessa & POS...see below. POS started music as a lover of hardcore punk...his other project, building better bombs, is a definite nod to that genre. i dig how he articulates process. how he is an artist, & he's humble while being straight about who he is & what he does.

great POS song:

FRI / ADV PO ROCKED CASA LIBRE LAST NITE / magical nite / im a proud mother hen / GRADING / RECOVERY FRI

2011-12-16T20:06:00.000-08:00

love to my adv po class at pima nw. they rocked the house...so much heart, such devotion to writing--i got all emotional & overwhelmed by such po love. relish it. it dont happen enuf. joe lo novelli played the astral slide whilst we mixed & mingled--thanks lolo. thanks to kristen nelson for allowing us to use casa libre. bout 50 folks showed up & adv po melted faces. looking forward to spring with these guys. bring it.

---- i was googling travis nichols the poet cause i like his naked book cover for iowa & i wanted more details & instead i found travis nichols the bklyn comic-strip badass & think thanks google, for hooking me up. i mean, look at this dude's dance after he received his first book in the mail. wow. i know what im doing next time i open my new book box. ----

im kinda in love with this guy...travis nichols.

TOMORROW! MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOLKS!

2011-12-14T19:12:00.000-08:00

PIMA NW

ADVANCED POETRY

READING
AT
CASA LIBRE

DECEMBER 15TH, 2011
7PM

Readings by Andrew Becerra, Elizabeth Brown, Clarissa Bueno, Steven Cates, Kaia Chesney, Ian Hudick, Eric Jackson, and Rachel Mindell.

wed / last day being on campus / EXCITED EXCITED

2011-12-14T14:48:00.000-08:00

THIS BOO WANTS A BARBIE!

I WANT A PONY!

CLICK ON THIS LINK TO SEE MY BEAUTIFUL SISTER ROUCH & THE BIO THAT I (ALONG WITH KAIA CHESNEY) WROTE FOR HER:

http://la.blocagency.com/talent/dance/mandy-coulton

tues / imitation / ARTIFICE / this shit ain't rocket science the scene changes with beats / my obsession with 50 Ways to...

2011-12-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

more stuff im thinking about by way of writing head space. kid cudi it took years but i get it now.

mon / last day of full classes at pima / went to the loft for melancholia

2011-12-12T23:41:00.000-08:00

now that school is about over i can get back to the writer's life. i decided to throw myself in it tonite.

i got a vanilla porter & a bag of popcorn. sat in the back row & automatic wrote for five or so minutes eye-squinting til the dark hurt my eyes.

genet / women or killed themselves for love or the earth

the rich sculpt trees call

a bird loose in dreams, still-shot

scythes on the hillside, the backwards black

horse, a marriage from the hands loves

everyone affluent to vines grasp it's

lyric fascination these oaks grew

what if five seconds? bad taste

Ophelia head-on

collision he sharpens she

head forward entrusted cue

strings, it happens first then we backtrack

Justine they're always arch

a white limo the ugly winter

grass wedding attire already filthy

unhappy nothing lasts. the red one

you can see that, me, i

hate marriage come with

me against appropriate becomes

a drama for the back nine

this to the stars happy? happy?

a noose, head-cocked you've

no business here

i'm never one to impress my opinion, however, i will say i did like & did not like this film. only a film w/ such affluence can have apocalyptic measures on such a lush lawn. had the family been middle class the narrative wouldve been raw tragedy so one couldn't concentrate on the inevitable death. empathy would've shot you down. von trier wanted this plasticity. i get bored by the sun dial in the yard & all the plush rhetoric & malaise that everything becomes a symbol of white privilege/intellect/culture focused on self-indulgence/heavy narcissism, etc.

this is where my head is at in terms of books i need/thought processes in order to write this thing i now want to write: zizek's violence, for some reason carlyle's sartor resartus, the practice of sati, burton's the anatomy of melancholy (only for lang.), ontology via aquinas (esp on essence & being), taylor from the bev hills housewives, the idea of deliberately touching the electric fence, suicide/alcoholism, francis 'two gun' crowley's on death: 'you sons of bitches. give my love to mother.'

sun / PACKERS 46 - THUG RAIDERS 16 (13-0 BABY) / recovery sunday

2011-12-11T21:44:00.000-08:00

grading journals. getting ready for the last week of school. excited about that. am/have been pretty tired, psychically tired. tired, tired. i always said i'd never be one of those people, those perpetually 'tired' people. we'll see.

went out last nite & determined not to go out again for a long time. just too much mentally/emotionally. thinking on throwin it in a bag again. will weigh options. we'll see.

----

i like these poems from fence.

Under the Influence of Ideals

The extra fine ingredients sift down on you
or stir at your feet and cover your shoes
with the dust of it. The back of your hands,
dusted. Some fine glass particles stick.
The long bath only removes the thin layer
that can be removed. Everything else
is taken in and kept. You stand up
when you can to the curled lip,
some dogface raking back the curtain
to expose the starving. Who isn’t on edge?
Always the look that says don’t. And then,
the strategic repetition of the threat.
Death in the performance foreground,
some long-past allegory in back.
“Zero” plays on low while you look back
over your shoulder in a three-way mirror;
look up—there’s the glass chandelier
that substitutes for a people on the edge
of their seats. The natural birthright
position. Every last scene lasts for no more
than a second; some ceramic panther
stands in for the extinct. Is it today yet?
On stage, in a moment of everyday realism,
an accordion folds and unfolds while
we pretend we forget we said we ’d be kind.

-mary jo bang

The Horse Declares

Conversation between me and my horse—the horse declares you enter into the world of time. How long have you known me? I thought. Reading lions of france for the lords of finance. Toast qua toast, whole taken for parts. The haystack—it figures. Me and my horse, we are delicately bound to one another by the resistant air. I came, I saw, I want to go home.

-norma cole

sat / curling my hair to go out / thinking on my most favorite paragraph ever written / i want to share with you

2011-12-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

from Jim Harrison's Dalva, pg. 13

Dear Son! I am being honest but not honest enough. Once up in Minnesota I saw a three-legged bobcat, a not quite whole bobcat with one leg lost to a trap. There is the saw about cutting the horse's leg off to get him in a box. The year it happened to me the moon was never quite full. Is the story always how we tried to continue our lives as if we had once lived in Eden? Eden is the childhood still in the garden, or at least the part of it we try to keep there. Maybe childhood is a myth of survival for us. I was a child until fifteen, but most others are far more truncated.

---

Next most fav paragraph is as follows...[& also deals with animal traps/amputation. Maybe in a past life something like this happened to me.]

Baldwin, from "Sonny's Blues"

So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most most the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn't lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face, it came to me that what we were both seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

sat / slept best sleep in forever / just put my u of a grades in / pics from the week

2011-12-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

G Bear goes to Christmas Disneyland

Backyard fire chiminea

Joe Lo & Soulgee

My bed - there's a string of elephants on the far side that one of my favorite students this semester gifted me.

Jimmy Choos in the mail from Rouch for my 30th. LOOOOOVE.

wed/thurs / my sweetheart he's a rambler

2011-12-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

it's 2am & i'm coffee-wired but done with the majority of my grading for the U class. relief! today i was a work horse. i did step out for a brief minuto to see kaia chesney's show at solar culture. below is eric, clarissa, & kaia, all students/amazing folks that comprise some of adv po! angels.

tues / when i hit the brick new whip

2011-12-06T13:01:00.000-08:00

nose to grindstone week. grading. joe lo came over to help last nite with journals, thank goodness. i have like 90 of those to grade. i took up 23 essays yesterday from U kids that i have to get done by fri morn. then i take up final exams. fun. next week 50 something research essays.

it's cold in tucson. all my plants are inside or either snugged up in old sheets. bitter cold last nite. righteously bitter. i got takeout soup post-gym from el minuto.

i just got back from steve salmoni's intro to poetry class at nw. recruiting for adv po--hoping to make numbers! what a great class!

here's a poem i reread in the sauna last nite at the gym that i had read years ago & dog-eared & refound again:

sawako nakayasu's nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she
(Quale, 2006)

finds an urgent need to get away from

people who look familiar: familiar gait,

familiar smile, familiar expression of

disappointment when losing the lottery.

After finding such a place, where the be-

havior of people is sufficiently unfamil-

iar, slightly disengaged, somewhat off of

her normal expectations, how much long-

er this can last before the need to move,

again and again, each time hopefully less

urgently, more slowly, in peace, with the

space in her heart to even carry along a

few regrets.

IRON AND WINE sun eve (church) / all dead white boys say God is good. white tongues hang out. God is good.

2011-12-04T19:53:00.000-08:00

38 PACKERS - 35 GIANTS

2011-12-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

abe: this time / rodgers: sniff them / smellin salts brett was / always nose quaffin afore / kick offff
st: YEAH!
st: Ballet!
as: yeeeeee jord dee
st: haahee i just yelled at / people fer 4 mins bout / how that were ballet
as: driiiiiiiiiiiiiverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
st: Bing!
as: Holy effin helllllll
st: Callin Jesus
as: Yank him by the beaard
as: no drops / no drops / no drops
st: YES!!
as: awwwesome
st: rough on my heart / but all ends well / thank you God
as: weee smoked em! my / rosary is all embery!

football sunday / packers in progression: get it! / max sympathy in nairobi / me & possum in tubac / last day before i take up essays at the U / ew

2011-12-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

one: buy cowboy hat.
two: tubac flowery, cold.
three: smores by a fire, luminaire fest.
four: always lite candles for loved ones.

---

renegade poetics, max sympathy:

---

sat / almost a ROADTRIP W/ POSSUM / LO comes to town today / pics from the other nite

2011-12-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Grannny, for the pool skills. I need another lesson though!

fri / it's rainy, cold, & just gross in tucson / couch weather / book weather / movie weather

2011-12-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

THANKS SO MUCH TO POET KRISTI MAXWELL FOR ROCKING ADV PO LAST NITE! Kristi's new book Re- was just released from Ahsahta Press. After she left, the class was like she's so smart! And she is.

wed / UNCLE / ANGEL / MONTANA / NEED FRESH AIR

2011-11-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

the first couple mins & then around 8 mins JH again. makes me miss him.

---

i got to thinking about this 'no reservations' clip when having a toast with Ms DD now that she's back in town from med school residency tryouts in cali. Nick, who is now bartending at Scott & Co used to be my fav barback at Congress, is from montana. he rebuilds old custom harleys & stuff. after bear hugs or either before, i did agree to jump on the back of his motorcycle for a roadtrip to montana end of may. this is one trip i definitely hope to keep. i adore nick. and his philos. of keeping the overhead low, one i could never quite manage myself among others.

mon / thanks so much verse daily! / mine is the day's poem up at verse daily.org / twice in one week: wow!

2011-11-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

another one of my poems from Black Warrior Review is up at versedaily.org. can't believe it--how cool!

[20] is a poem from Dirt City Lions, a chapbook that will drop AWP 2012.

thank you for your support, verse daily. mirth to you!

sun / love this book / California by Jennifer Denrow

2011-11-27T16:44:00.000-08:00

i had so much fun hanging with the girls yesterday. Jen gave me this book of hers & i'm in love with it & her.

(from Thermos mag)

California

Forget your life.

Okay I have.

Lay something down that is unlike you:

Sold boat, Italian song.

I’m losing my head over this:

this is what the doll said when you pulled its head
from its body;

all the girls laughed.

I’ll move to California. I should
go alone. I’ll go

with the knowledge of fake
snow. I’ll ask my father to bring me.

~

When I went to the backyard,

I said to myself,

this doesn’t look like California

and nothing in my life does

and my husband says he’ll have to deal with this forever.

I want to go so bad I clench my fist
hard in the air, I push my finger into
his chin and cry: it feels like this, I say.
I need it this bad.

~

I realize now that I’m a woman.

I go to the store.

I buy California style pizza and beer. I drop my ID when the woman asks to see it.

No one in the store looks like they could be from California.

A baby eats some keys.

I buy a magazine with people from California in it; they are all very beautiful.

I come out of the store and the sky

is filled with many white clouds

that could be stand-ins for California clouds.

I don’t even have a tan.

I know this is the only time I’ll leave the house today.

~

Instead of going to California I make my husband a ham and cheese sandwich to take to
work. He doesn’t like the way I place the cheese on the bread.
When he leaves for work I sit in a quiet house.

I told him I couldn’t have this life.

This wasn’t me living here.

I was living in California.

He said cruel things that he knew would scare me.

He brought the ring from the cabinet and tried to put it on my finger.

I said no.

I said I can’t be married right now.

He said this happens every year.

He may be right.

sun / put it in your calendar! / ADV PO does Casa Libre / stoked!!

2011-11-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

PIMA NW

ADVANCED POETRY

sat / Bohemia/Casa Libre celebration w/ Jennifer Denrow, Selah Saterstrom, Kristi Maxwell, & musician Leila Lopez

2011-11-26T13:38:00.000-08:00

Last nite at Plush was a full out Tucson gathering of writers. we sorta threw it in the ditch, if you know what i mean. i pay for me funs today & look here again, more funs to get ready for. below is where i'll be.

---

Bohemia Day of Giving
a fundraiser for Casa Libre

Saturday, November 26
Event at Bohemia
Sales 10a.m.-8p.m./Reception 5-8 p.m.
Beer, Sangria, and Snacks

Bohemia, a funky and eclectic emporium that offers gifts, goods, furniture, and art created by artists in Tucson, AZ, is hosting a day of giving to benefit Casa Libre. A percentage of all sales made at Bohemia on Saturday November 26, will be donated to Casa Libre. Bohemia offers a unique shopping experience with over 200 different local and regional artists and crafts people for unique, locally made holiday gifts. A reception at Bohemia will feature the music of Leila Lopez and the poetry of Kristi Maxwell, Selah Saterstrom, and Jennifer Denrow. Please come on out to support local artists, shop for your holiday gifts, and enjoy refreshments, music, and poetry.

This event will be held at Bohemia:
2920 E. Broadway
Tucson, AZ 85716
520.882.0800
For directions and more information about Bohemia please visit: http://www.bohemiatucson.com

from Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

2011-11-24T23:07:00.001-08:00

HOW POEMS ARE MADE / A DISCREDITED VIEW

Letting go
In order to hold one
I gradually understand
How poems are made.
There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
The leftover love.
The love that spills out
Of the too full cup
And runs and hides
Its too full self
In shame.

I gradually comprehend
How poems are made.
To the upbeat flight of memories.
The flagged beats of the running
Heart.

I understand how poems are made.
They are the tears
That season the smile.
The stiff-neck laughter
That crowds the throat.
The leftover love.
I know how poems are made.

There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.

Alice Walker

thurs / Happy Thanksgiving Day ya'll

2011-11-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

major marg. celebrating being done with wednesday. i was 'observed' at the U. it was actually fun, a great class. and so i took myself out. but was home early, am always thankful for sleep, two lalas, health, family, friends, & so much more. miss my family today.

here's a manic pilgrim turkey spreading cheer.

tues / just when i think the end of the semester cringe is gonna put me under / good news

2011-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

Hey ya'll. Mine is today's poem up at Verse Daily. versedaily.org.

They chose a poem from my new chap, Dirt City Lions, forthcoming Horse Less Press round AWP time in Chicago, end of February.

A lot is misspelled in their rendering of poem, so I'm just gonna repost the poem here for all those being directed to my "website"--cause though I love slang, I too am not totally inarticulate. The lines are too long to format to blogspot, that's the weird line breaks, you know...bygones.

Thanks so much to versedaily.org. Yay for Tuesday.

[7]

The beach gives onlookers, men with poles. I am just trying to jog
this beach, if I yelled you fucking voyeur it would not be got. I liken myself
to Faulkner’s going on about nature while being sharp with the two
characters of this working—you know, & God always God, let’s call him
Higher Power the way the Al-Anon book says. In the past you were shot at,
mid-hand dealt as if shuffle inward yet leave it alone. I
drink a Mich Ultra, that’s what in the fridge. And slow to the gunny,
the time spent I drug myself by belly, slept when the sun came up, my hands
back again. A picture of you, ain’t it funny, in the bar forever, my good tap
tap, fingers & feet now I’ve no speedrack, five hundred bottles a night, two in
each hand & this is Heaven. But your hands in my hair, a periodic
newness for remembrance which like a shrug duly evokes the winter
surely coming. I have my graces from which I carry the sun to violence
all my mistakes, born into thick hands, cruelty & choose so.
If I curl my hair I’m taking on the town, the real of the town,
everyone with their beer whiskey hands all sad behind their beer whiskey
hands, you cannot run it down—plié & shade from any ray that looks you
step right because right cannot tell the difference between a marsh &
a swamp: we kill both. I thought go home again & it was murky,
the sea unfledged, myself in the backyard watching closely
the cats don’t jump the fence & get out there on the road.

[was written summer 2010, on amelia island]

mon / trouper / went raging temper, baldwin, not butler, freakout, david foster wallace / sauna / chinese food / bloody hell

2011-11-21T18:57:00.000-08:00

I met Ida Stewart in Athens a couple weeks ago. She sent me her first collection, Gloss, which arrived in the mail today. Excited to read!

Ginseng

Wild sarsaparilla is the fool’s sang.
Follow jack-in-the-pulpit, goldenseal,
cohoshes black and blue. To find true heal-all,
fall head-over, get brave, get fangled up
in bobcat mouths or caves, and wrangle twang
and drawl from fiddleheads into a single
clear-cut note. Then forage through the leaf-
like chiming, sundried light. Hear me, stranger?
Feel it pull you underground, elide
you—forest-body, heart, and mind—to root,
moving through the dirt, a shape like a person.
You are wherewithal and you are wild.
—jack-in-the-pulpit, goldenseal,
cohoshes black and blue—
You are real and dream and dissolute.
I mean you are a tangle and a song.

---
Ms LOVELY Kaia Chesney: click below!

Without You

football sun / geez / Packers off their game but stay undefeated: 35 PACK - 26 BUCS

2011-11-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

the PACK scared us two PACKER POETS (yrs truly & abraham smith smith smithy) today. but, here's to 10 - 0, it's so good bein a Packer.

st: yes hell!

as: kuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

as: i can put my friggin rosary away now

st: i should put this nail file down my fingers are close to bleedin

st: our ball. sing pack!

as: eff eff eff eff eff eff eff

st: i'm pure fraught

st: yes my god

as: waiit they tackle him but here we gooooo again

st: this is a lot to handle on the lords day

as: ho hum another snoozer of a game / heehee / yayayayayayyy / rainin here but the rain / tastes like sugarr!

oh my i am addicted to southern women personality in designing women / makes me miss home

2011-11-19T23:01:00.000-08:00

smart, smart, smart. the nite that the lights went out in Ga.

sat / SICK day / missing steven salmoni's POG reading though...sad face / repercussions of throwing it in the ditch, a sign of the times

2011-11-19T18:10:00.000-08:00

as in what below the surface pulls you, never explain. come sit next to me. this best place to feel the wind, change your ways.

i like this interview: (from Omnidamn's blog)

Alissa Nutting is the current fiction editor of Witness and author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. At present, she is guest editing The Grey Issue of Fairy Tale Review, a theme issue focusing on Lost Boys & Girls. This fall, she will be an assistant professor of creative writing at John Carroll University.

Juliana Paslay is a features writer and bookstore liaison for Omnidawn. She is currently seeking her Creative Writing MFA at California College of the Arts.

Juliana Paslay: Your short story collection, Unclean Jobs For Women and Girls, is very unified in its theme of women hiding themselves within roles but opens to many variations. How did the collection evolve? Did an individual story come first or the overall theme?

Alissa Nutting: It began with a voice that emerged in several stories where the roles and situations were radically different. Soon, it was very clear to me that the book would be a dress-up party of sorts, with that voice taking on a variety of different jobs and duties, each one being a different chapter.

JP: Your stories have this beautiful tension between humor and sadness. How do you balance that in your writing? Do have an inclination towards one side or the other?

AN: All humor is born out of sadness…when the sad egg cracks, humor is the palatable part of the muck that drizzles out. To me, humor is the only honest way to write about sad things. Straight drama only looks at half of the picture. It ignores whatever might be laughing in the corner during the situation, whether that’s another person, the character itself, or something more sinister, like fate or apathy. There is always something ironic, or unwieldy, or physically disgusting, or paradoxical about a tragedy. I think it’s important to include the whole picture when writing fiction.

JP: Has winning the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction changed your approach to publishing? Has it increased your opportunities?

AN: I’ve been so very fortunate with the book and its reception; I truly feel grateful for that. But no matter what happens in my career, I think that publishing will always be something that’s hard for me to not feel all-glass and delicate about. Putting yourself out there is hard. It’s undoubtedly the most difficult thing I have to do in my life—giving my work over to others to judge. I try to think about it as a testament to my devotion for writing, in an S&M sort of way. Writing is the master that I take pain for. Lots and lots of pain as part of an expression of my love. It has always been like that. Writing has always had a collar on me. I cannot tell it no.

JP: The women of your stories have “unclean jobs” ranging from “Porn Star” to “Alcoholic”. What inspired you to use titles and labels in this way?

AN: My general disgust and hatred of titles and labels, actually. These stories hopefully subvert those labels, because readers get to see the characters in a different light than others (usually the same “others” who would apply these titles or labels) see them. For example, I love the general title “Teenager” and then the depiction of the character’s warped, complicated social life that is anything but general. I also wanted to use titles and labels in conjunction with jobs to drive home the point of how, as a woman, living up to different aspects of societal roles and standards can be a job in itself. At the grocery store I’ll often glance over the magazines during checkout; the ones targeted to women mainly are instructional. As if I should be reading them and taking notes.

JP: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?

AN: I’m mainly finishing up my novel draft, but I have a lot of projects going. I like this though. That’s the chorus that gets me out of bed each morning, and keeps me up at night way later than I should stay up…all of my projects’ needy, wailing mouths, all begging for my attention. Every piece of writing that I start immediately feels like something submerged that I have to pull out from below the water and save.

songs before bedtime

2011-11-17T23:40:00.000-08:00

thurs / poet Mara Vahratian rocked ADV PO nite / i made a casserole

2011-11-17T22:10:00.000-08:00

i love these old pics of me & my mija Mara V. these were 07 & we were werkin it, as you can see below. thanks to Mara for coming to class tonite & staying to wskp. was such a magical nite.

Mara Vahratian's Soaptrees is out at Dancing Girl Press.

wed / good day / minot, joyce, & danah boyd's facebook privacy: huge debate, HUGE. / Benetton is at it again: get it!

2011-11-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

i pretty much love Benetton advertising. Benetton canned controversial photog Toscani in the late 00s due to the outrage of the "We on Death Row" campaign, which spotlighted American prisoners on death row (Benetton is an Italian clothing company, yes...) & made, perhaps, its audience identify even empathize with these prisoners. American outrage: yes. am I a bit horrified by these ads: yes.

Toscani did brilliant work for Benetton in the 80s, 90s, & 00s: mostly positive messages supporting equality throughout the world--yes, sometimes embodying borderline shock tactics. i think the David Kirby AIDS (Theresa Frere) campaign is just pure brilliance. how significant the change post-Kirby ad was to the world highlighting the controversy surrounding AIDS at this specific time (early 90s) in America: who knows. brought a lot of attention & humanized AIDS; the remarkable parallel of Kirby to Christ is mind-blowing. bless, Benetton, you Italian clothing company.

i teach visual analysis & rhetoric in WRT 101--i always teach a whole class session just on Benetton's advertising campaigns, specifically the Isabelle Caro "No Anorexia" campaign, the "We on Death Row" one, & the AIDS campaign, esp the David Kirby photos which shocks the hell out of my students. we all have mixed feelings about Benetton. i think this is fabulous. we're thinking critically. that's superb.

well, Benetton is at it again. world leaders are making out. Obama is kissing Chavez & China's prez. North Korea is kissin on South Korea. Israel & Palestine...in a lip-lock...wtf? the ad of the Pope making out w/ Egyptian Imam is already pulled--even though today was its first public day. i'm not surprised. Benetton, Italian clothing company took such a hit after "We on Death Row" that i'm shocked they're back it--ruffling feathers & acting out politically when their aim should be to sell clothes, right? i say WORK IT, Benetton. your ethics could be debatable, but thank goodness you get people thinking. the message with their new campaing: UNHATE. get it, B!

tues / i'm so anti-academy it's ridiculous / but i love students & teaching / i'm thinking on gender roles / obsession with red light districts & how working girls are portrayed in film, etc

2011-11-15T19:04:00.000-08:00

if you know me you know i love the film the best little whorehouse in texas starring dolly parton & burt reynolds. i watched it as a kid on one of those slide discs at granny's house with all my other cousins. we loved it. i particularly loved it.

i live in the barrio viejo, which is part of gay alley, tucson's old red light district in territorial times. i'm obsessed.

recently i've watched louie malle's pretty baby which is so great. susan sarandon is just superb.

i'm still thinking of writing my book of soiled doves. think i'm going to do it. need the voices though.

mon fun day / carver, tan, rodriguez / takeout tortilla soup / PACKERS: off to the races

2011-11-14T21:13:00.000-08:00

we're 9-0. Game score vs the VIKINGS: 45-7. it's so good to be a PACKER.

grita the squirrel is a good couch football buddy.

me: 4 is a damn beast to be around right now you know it. Bless his xtian wife's heart.

abe smith: he's in the garage throwin horseshoes with pals in his heated airconditioned horseshoe pit.

me: heehee. yep.

me: one fer the books.

as: rewritin the bible with rodgers as gabriel awwwwwwmennnnn

sat / just getting home from a roadtrip

2011-11-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

i dragged myself off the bathroom floor & went to the Canyon! i took my book & went for a drive! lovely, yes?

while i was taking this pic of myself, a huge ass charter of asian tourists disembarked & each filed past me giving me the international sign for work it (or hell yeah!): thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up, & on & on. it was a top moment.

navajo nation land across 64 to Cameron is just so beautiful to me.

i love leaving & coming back. big sweater, windows down, lucero on blast, hello my grit ass dirt city! tucson! im feeling much better.

thurs / ADV PO day / been communicating w/ Turquoise Balloon which makes me heart warm on coldish Tus day

2011-11-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

back before i became an upstanding citizen i was known as "magenta moon" & in a pack of wild hippies in georgia. i had hair down my back, constant face paint, wore handmade clothes by myself & i could never sew, lived in a camper called 'dolpin' that i drove to bonnaroo, etc, & i was the best dancer by way of spinning in the southeast, or so i proclaim now upon looking back.

whitney was "silver pine" & our friend josh klemons was "turquoise balloon." i left athens after a short time & turq. balloon wrote me a song. he reminded me of this song in an email & here it is: ('throw it in a bag' was my mantra then. i had a constant fire lit under my ass.)

Movin' Again by Josh Klemons

wed / went yip! / oates, carver, & kingsolver / bout to go to dinner w/ mija mara v / seriously want to dye my now short hair blue

2011-11-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

i seriously think i'm meant to have blue hair in this world. i miss it. i wonder what my jobs would say.

---

i got some good good news today. Horse Less Press will publish my new chapbook tentatively titled 'dirt city lions.' hoping it will be ready by feb for awp. i'll be at awp in feb. i'm very, very, very excited as i LOVE Horse Less Press and Jen Tynes. thought no one would take the work as it's so content-heavy. they're essentially war poems & then some. my only reader said she felt bludgeoned after reading the poems. doesn't that sound fun? they're poems started in apr 2010 to now. they got a lot of dirty sweat in them.

tues / i'm done grading 87 essays! / life is back good again / look at this me gremlin g bear

2011-11-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

tues / last big day of grading / waffle house here i come

2011-11-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

for whitney (& lil snicky):

mon / rainy & cold in tus / bloody hell / wrong side of bed / pot pie / pics from last nite / the PACK are 8-0

2011-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

my new black silk jumpsuit is all i need in this world.

sweet dead.

scary dead.

not dead.

sunday music & grading & football = im in heaven / still dranking coffee & in me pjs at 215pm

2011-11-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

Athens poetry reading pt 2

2011-11-06T12:23:00.000-08:00

the one & only gordon massman whom i love.

peacock is here too! peacock is my best friend since 14 yrs old.

LL is laughing real hard which makes me laugh. at the globe.

'dawgbones bbq' at 130am. pulled pork sandwiches you'd sell your body for.

i got lyla g bear some old school finger puppets at a vintage store.

football Sun in Tucson / good to be home / All Souls Parade is tonite / then Calexico at the Rialto

2011-11-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

rocking out hard to georgia old school rap faces aka we look super-white faces

finally in athens. rocking a lil pinot in those zaxby's cups, oh yeh, at the holiday inn

this is my 'im at the airport at 4am face'

im dressed! LL live at the holiday inn. such belly laughs & fun.

wed / i got some asymmetrical bangs / athens i'm a-coming! / automatic ya'll!

2011-11-02T19:13:00.000-07:00

whit is picking me up. meeting LL in athens. gonna see adrian & peacock. fun fun! photos a-coming!

mon / happy halloween ya'll / day went ouch it's morning, then gluck, oates, sedaris / marana to ride new gray pony at ralph's / must get ready to go out now!

2011-10-31T19:27:00.000-07:00

the new BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW is out. i have 4 poems in there that i had to re-line-break just for this issue. paaaaain. AB Gorham is lovely though. and a legit poet.

Issue 38.1, Interruption
is now available! The Fall 2011 issue features work from Sarah Rose Etter, Brandon Davis Jennings, Kathleen Rooney, Derek Gromadzki, Leon Baham, Esvie Coemish, Shelly Taylor, Zachary Schomburg, Brandon Shimoda, Karen Volkman, dawn lonsinger, Christina Manweller, Afton Wilky, Joelle Biele, JP Gritton, Joy Wood, Lee Milena Goodman, JA Tyler, Elizabeth Hall, Dan George, Farid Matuk, and Allison Titus, with comics from Edgar R. McHerly and Nick St. John, and featured art by Helen Pynor.

football sun / the Pack are off / Athens, Ga get ready!

2011-10-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

in the words of georgia's own andre 3000 of outkast fame: alrightalrightalrightalright!

faulkner / tenn / hem / patti smith

2011-10-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

fri / note to Pete Dexter: Uncle JH can put as many girl bottoms in a narrative as he wants / he would intrinsically not be JH without these beloved gestures / plus, as you say, he can do whatever the hell he wants / he's earned it

2011-10-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

(JH at the Arizona Inn, March 2011)

(JH's new book)

The critic glances at the clock and realizes that pretty soon he has to say something bad about Jim Harrison. Yes, he’s established that he’s read the book; now something to prove he isn’t being paid off.

Under duress, then, he ventures that there may be one buttock too many in Harrison’s story — although it could just as easily be argued that there is a sunset every evening in Key West, and nobody complains about that.

Also, the critic doesn’t trust references to popular culture even if he can’t say why (Sunderson is said to resemble the actor Robert Duvall), and as a rule when he — the critic, not Sunderson — reads a novel he skips the parts about dreams.

Taken one by one, these complaints may seem trivial, but together they add up to exactly nothing, maybe a little less. Jim Harrison can break all the rules he wants and come out smelling like a rose, and if you will excuse my mixing aromas — fish and flowers — I would mention that for me, Harrison set the hook deep and early, in a novella called “Revenge.”

There is a scene in that story of almost incomprehensible savagery — Harrison by the way is as good at writing violence as anybody, and particularly gets the weirdness of the incubation period — and he accomplished this particular violence by interrupting himself and manually moving readers to the fireplace mantel, where they could watch without getting hurt.

It was one of Harrison’s moments of instinctive genius, I think, perhaps the only way to bring off the scene without changing the mesmeric sound coming off the pages to something more ordinary, and I mean it as no disrespect to speculate that these moments are in some way out of Harrison’s hands, and very close to magic.

thurs / who you are, who you are not / notes towards reconciling one's self in the big ole / grading

2011-10-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

Big thanks to brilliant poet LAURA MAHER for rocking tonite's ADV POETRY.

------

[10.27.11] from Kaia's automatic exercise titled Las Palmas (w/ a drunk baby). Homage to old Jay Z & all the street names from Orange Grove to Ina on Shannon, & a nod to Eric Jackson's hookers. And something of the Beebs. It's all a bit much, yes.

blue eye in the crack of my table tomorrow--positano
veronica! greenridge interloper--baby baby, coat of yellow,
her rooster face shock--when I hit the brick new whip
latin on the hip shake fringe--money aint a--ice cream
cone abrasive, the stones of my jilting lullaby, every
flag a country punchline, I got drunk in it; cue
the spaghetti western alarma! reverb como estas, oh!
muy. te anoro! bones every cordial broken on the floor
wurlitzer organ ambassador, my floyd cramer records,
granny's fav, save the last dance for baby
baby yes--money aint a--2 cent hookers deft
angels the street wrackline, scarcely
a pivot loosed the world--positano!

---

yeh we're super-busy. grading.

wed / one long wedded to the grindstone / pandemic sleeplessness / my day went: forche, oates, cisneros / panna water / pound

2011-10-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

Portrait d'une Femme
by Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion:
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.

tues / sweatpants-grading day / try not to kill anyone, my solider

2011-10-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

Very proud of Noah Saterstrom. His exhibit, a collaboration with poet Anne Waldman, is up at the U of A Poetry Center. It pretty much gutted me.

MM & I took in a lil art tonite via one brilliant southern painter. We both agreed it was good for the ole soul.

mon / fodder in her wings breaks it / notes towards grade grade grade

2011-10-24T21:44:00.000-07:00

just got back from mm's office grading. coffee'd up. been thinking hard on nina simone. skin bleaching techniques. family. men. tucson. bought new sharpies in diverse colors to make grading a better sitch.

sun / notes towards pure exhaustion / health / back in my lil adobe / missin my ma, rouch, g / it's good to be a Packer!

2011-10-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

sat / birthday party / lyla's two / rouch's friends are really nice / mom & i saw channing tatum's hotttness in gelson's / im knee deep in the rioja, am tired, we're gonna do a lil taroh here in a min

2011-10-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

sat / notes toward joy / lyla g bear's bday is today / hangin w/ cita & rouch (& willow, the now fangless michi)

2011-10-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

LA is typically LA. boobs, leggings, lil yorkies. yes, but we're having a pumpkin party birthday today!

thurs / notes towards love / having a coke with you

2011-10-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

---

[10.20.11]--from Rachel's automatic "The Apple" (musical)

This is a Holiday Inn tragedy, the world
moves lions sequined the shrinking treeline: pan out
make them stop. Do your mouths say open/close
for the men do you jin yourself Rita, fine
long legs or din din din, flee this sad hotel.
Star Search your great nation, she-bitch, home of the
def Leopard staged I coulda run the whole bartop
saddle shoed, no, she requires a girth of glitter, move
over grl it's 1994, cue the smoke machine Aqua Net, me &
sister tap dancing the Rattle Snake Roundup in Guysie
she's all girl. Milk venom, tap tap.

wed / 3 classes / longing / music / dinner w/ deanne at b-line / writing / unit 3 planning / getting ready for LA

2011-10-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

so good, don't want it to be over. almost over. sad sad sad face.

---

[10.19.11]

Now get me away from lions laid up in
the depths of storehouses. Psalm 33: a horse is a vain thing
for safety. There it is: never shall he deliver any
by his great strength. Don’t go believing him. Clipped
in the front yard, yellow flowers sneeze the life out of.

tues / up & happy

2011-10-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

today was nice from the start. dawdled & then headed to the U for a full day of office hours. so many smart young women in my 101--i enjoy working them one-on-one--such bright-eyed intelligence.

headed to mms for afternoon tea. then grocerying, then a long jog w/ mija mara-v around the U, & now i sit & recollect & push forward; tuesday is nice. "sons of anarchy" tues. f/x is killin it by way of quality drama. started watching the new f/x show 'american horror story.' it has connie britton (of "friday nite lights" fame) which is always a good sign. it's pretty stellar thus far.

football sun / good to be a PACK 24 - 3 / we're now 6-0 / good thinking

2011-10-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

i love the packers throwback acme packers uniform from the 20s. rodgers looks good in blue too. i couldve guessed that though...

lions lost. i was rooting for them to go 6-0 too.

---
Good strong quotes from Ntozake Shange for a football sun:

• I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground. - i feel you ntozake shange

also:

• When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves. (i take this seriously too. it's my number 1: to grow up strong woman when able.)

• i was cold / i was burnin up / a child
& endlessly weavin garments for the moon wit my tears

i found god in myself
& i loved her / i loved her fiercely.

• Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

• Where there is woman there is magic.

i pretty much love ntozake shange. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem / is so startlingly beautiful. makes me want to write a play.

sat / it's 145 degrees in tucson / braved tucson meet yourself festival / lunch at la concina with dani

2011-10-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

you cant tell that we're both sweating out asses off. it's bloody hot in tucs. ms dani got a sitter for baby eli, we lunched & cocktailed. was lovely cept day drinking makes me muy tired at 4pm. lots of lots of grading to do.

fri / loooong nap / new tires / more good news from dancing girl press

2011-10-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

my grl arianne zwartjes' chap is out today! go get it! ari is one amaaaaazing poet & woman.

disem(body): a tracing
Arianne Zwartjes
dancing girl press, 2011
$7.00

Arianne Zwartjes is an EMT, wilderness educator, and poet living in Tucson, Arizona, and teaching in the English department at the University of Arizona. She is the author of (Stitched) A Surface Opens (2008) and The Surfacing of Excess (2010).

---

we don’t speak or speak only of butter & eggs

you carry hangers and hangers of clothes.
each one empty a body.
the dogs are distraught at your already absence.
the missing furniture, the cold. the cursive of
this narrative, the scriptedness.
the house is half-empty. your truck
keeps getting fuller. each time it drives away, fuller.
goodbye, red truck. goodbye couch.
goodbye lamp stereo table.

somewhere there must be a bottom. a seawall
of some sort, a boundedness.
the helicoptering of each thing we’ve ever said
we wanted. icicles fall off your voice.
each body empty of the other. the hands
and the way they are empty.
i can’t breathe because of the missing couch.
goodbye, couch.

nothing could be more absurd than one’s shoe thrown
across the room. than it light as foam
and landing without a noise. we have entered
the realm of the absurd. you are taking the dog.
we’ll call this a breakup poem. we’ll call this the
quiet disintegration of a longer ride.
what we once called home.
the house gets emptier and emptier.
in the end you’re not here.

thurs / too late / stuff to do / the dangers of having bill wetzel as a friend

2011-10-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

country music.

thurs / gotta love thurs / happiness is one great bed / thanks granny!

2011-10-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

as per typical of cancerians, im always seeking ways to make my humble home even better than it is. yes, it's a tiny home. but my home has style & feels good. i get that all the time from friends & such & love it hear it. i myself love a good bed & if you know me, you know i cherish (LOVE) to sleep. so thanks, Granny, for my christmas comforter which arrived duly in oct. i just love it. slept so good last nite.

wed / good long day / my rouch was esp into photo today / this baby grl gremlin has a birthday soon

2011-10-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

tues / office hours / an email from mara telling me the best news in the world which is this

2011-10-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

my grl, my mija's chapbook is out from dancing girl press. few things can make me as happy as i am about this. mara vahratian is one of my favorite poets. she will become one of yours as well.

for mere $7 you can get your fav new collection of poems. go!

mon / it's good to be a Packer

2011-10-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

oh my god it's been a monday. im going to long jog then watch kardash pt 2 w/ annie later. joy.

last nite the packers had me on my toes there for awhile.
25 Pack - 14 Falcon

football sun / pics from last nite

2011-10-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

yes, it was cold last nite. i love big ole hugs. joe came through town w/ st bernadette & only living boy. was fun.

love & the astroslide.

me & annie. we hardly ever get to go out, what with both of us so busy teaching & whatnot. so this pic is special. we had some fun.

fri / i don't think ive ever wanted to go to sleep at 9pm before tonite

2011-10-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

long day, looooong day. quick nap, then i went to see one of my po students--ms lovely kaia chesney--play a set at plush. she's something else. meaning i adore her. i got takeout soup & removed my general exhausted grouchy self away from mankind & am about to take long bath & promptly go to bed & awake tomorrow bushy tailed.

i played matchmaker this week & hooked MM up with Rog, the astrophysicist who taught his class right after mine before i moved my class to Mines & Metallurgy--a room w/ more than a chalkboard. i think Roger is cool, am hoping tomorrow's a good blind date. love in the cooling tucson air. heehee.

joe lo comes back through tucson tomorrow. a & i are gonna 'dress up' & eat & go hear lo & st b play at the red room. what else? a bath.

thurs / great rainy cool tucson / lurve adv poetry / lurve this me gremlin lyla-g

2011-10-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

wed / floating about / 3 classes / a lot of folks back home don't believe there's cotton in this desert

2011-10-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

but here you go. here is the AZ cotton over my shoulder. short cotton but beautiful white cotton about to be picked.

you may not know this, but my first job ever was in cotton. I was 14 or 15 & it was during the hot Ga summer. Daddy would drop me off at Drew's early early morning & we'd get in her old mail jeep & traipse field to field checking bolls.

namely, my job was called 'scouter'--pretty much means i checked the cotton for bugs: aphids & army worms, specifically. This was back before the cotton was injected with pesticide prevention stuffs, when one had to crop dust a field. i prob got some sort of poisoning from all the fields. there was nothing glamorous about it, it was hard work.

i went to ride horses today. it was the injection of bliss it always is.

well damn, my soul was already shining because im finally done grading / but / my day just got a whole lot better thanks to poet GEOFF OLSEN

2011-10-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW OF HEIFER IN EOAGH'S NEW ISSUE. WHUT! THANKS SO MUCH, GEOFF. ONLY A POET COULD WRITE A REVIEW LIKE THIS: IT BLOWS MY MIND SO MUCH I JUST LOVE IT. LOTS OF LOVE TO YOU IN NYC, MR OLSEN--ONE DAY SOON I WILL BUY YOU PITCHERS OF BEER! AND TEQUILA!

ALSO CONGRATS TO MY FRIEND TIM PETERSON FOR THE GORG. NEW ISSUE & WEBSITE. LOVE IT!

WWW.EOAGH.COM

---

Review by Geoffrey Olsen

Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010

Opening myself to these poems in Shelly Taylor’s Black-Eyed Heifer, I feel the hinterland of inside. Movement into place, feeling the erasure of discrete and safe. The feeling that this work is exposed, that the land is wild, allowed fallow but alert to so much life. It feels pastoral in that one is here in this wild, but there isn’t the safety of distance. Its romanticism isn’t projected on the landscape. The landscape folds in out. It’s not stationary enough for mapping. It doesn’t want it. It bucks.

There’s an enactment here of memoir, memory as multiform, shifting open structures. Imagination interacts with the form of memory. Is it a political happening? Remembering body’s place in the structure, it’s enacted social. Sifting through memory – situating mind and imagination. The mind is all through the situated space, both in the south and in New York City. The presence is rich colors, flavor, scent, touch—sensory everywhere.

“If there was a road it did not symmetry” this is this farmland form-land. Open, this figure (Shelly?) meeting city/country. Language touching this or furrowing this field. This refusal of symmetry. Brooklyn, the south overgrown, density of language to growing into this geography. The self in these poems not mapped onto surface. Surfaces surges, life so animate wild. Poem foal foaming feral.

Docility as opposed core. It’s always opposed. The writer and writing and being not to be domestic.

Figures morphing. The man-pony hybrid sprints through it—all poem musculature. Bodied being flips between man animal. Who is the man? Man appears here. Erotics flux in and out. There’s a “he” that’s defining the terrain somehow, makes it “fine for walking”. Defines all, leaves no exit:
“The man chooses not to see outside of, says my moods this, whisks the eggs.” Inside/ outside divide assessed, sealing off blooming. How male is closed to these shifts and transformations. Man: “One day I’ll count on you to get a job and be comforted.”

The horse that shows up throughout the book. Shot on the race-track, we read it bleeding out it’s too much. Though you can’t look away, you are there too with the red-haired woman who wants to buy the horse. The market appears. Is this America? They try to buy it but it’s too late; the horse is dying. They have to shoot it. This is so painful.

“What got situated.” Writing the poem to be situated, but not. “this come here now (the desire to kneel, call the thing until it returns whole & unbothered) or back sans of it, away.”

“Sister/ I fear I nurse everything I’ve been told not to: all dark musculature of a two-sided outside face, mouth & jawline sculpting a bust protocol—even you, who are not.”

This showing the way, fearlessly. Fearless though feeling the local root structure. Not letting that go. I respond in these poems to the generation of the state that is called-up, situated, localized throughout this work. These states are momentary. The poem does not exist as a withdrawal, a return giving fullness. Possession is impossible. “On a lam through the woods there is never a safety net/ The briars! The briars!”

Taylor’s local as form. Local as place but also experience of language as localized. Points of the body where the language is enacted and engaged with so that Brooklyn and the South are spatial ranges experienced through Taylor’s personal idiom, but they are also localized language perceptions. They are through Taylor’s language.

The roads too of Brooklyn. It’s cold here in the winter. Taylor is exposed to the vulnerabilities of this climate, the words are open to that coldness –take it inward. A poem as relation to place is old old but ever language innovates when present with words as local. Surface, skin and body breathe into words and poems. There’s a warmth to this presentedness. The gestures are friendly “& since I’m country I smile at everyone.” Poem as open warmth but that’s vulnerable. Dangerous to be sincere in a city poem. There are aches the words can’t withdraw from the poem’s bones.

Constant bodily movement. The language is physical. It’s tough, stringy with muscles. You feel the language, but it’s physicality is also feeling you. The mind responds to the physical tactility. Haptic.

Horses tear out breakneck & moon-eyed
dark exposed carousel circling corewood horses
teeth-gnashed bodies reared against impalement

Dense: one seeks in then moves their way out.

Subterranean structure here: narrative skin, surface movement textures underlying deep musculature. Narrative massages thought form underneath. What does that look like? It’s building something under burgeoning depth. This is the response to the locale, it’s not its presented surface, but the mood, structure, life, love of there. One responds to that form, underneath, and gets glimpses. Though money, work, and all city/country entails intervene in the form, poem gets at the thing deeper. It’s something like the personal idiom of the locale, the form revealing gradually. Melancholic but celebration. Eerie how it slides between expectation, memory and desire.

It’s uncontrollable. The pony/poem not tameable.

____________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Olsen lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He is the author of the chapbook End Notebook (petrichord press, 2008). His chapbook, Not of Distends * Address Panicked, is available from Minutes Books at http://notofdistends.blogspot.com/.

sun / coulda slept all day / more rain / long jog / grading / it's a good day to be a packer

2011-10-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Packers 4-0. Packers 49 - Broncos 23.

It's good to be myself & Abraham Smith as well. Future good news abounds: news soon.

tucson sat / grading still / it rains / congrats to whitney & shane / newlyweds

2011-10-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

i always knew whitney would be the first of all of us girls to marry. so happy for my sister & her shane. congrats!

---

im loving the pioneer woman on food network. makes me hungry for meat & ranch dressing.

grita chills

fri / la la la la / yo! it's friday & i'm grading away

2011-09-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

kristen e nelson rocked my adv poetry class last nite. her automatic writing / meditation / first memory retrieval exercise was superb. mediation on writing about parents / family resonated with the students. thanks so much kristen!

miss LL. im gonna go to the canyon next weekend. won't you come with LKL?

taking a break grading for photo op. grading's boring on a fri nite. my soul shrinks.

what im listening to

hey max sympathy / if you're out there / im showing my adv poetry class your renegade chapbooks tonite

2011-09-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

i met max sympathy back in 2008 while bartending the ole lobby bar at Hotel Congress. he is/was a librarian in prescott if memory serves me & was in town on something business/library stuff at the u of a. he gave me two copies of his chapbook. i love them. he goes around to bookstores & slides them in the stacks. i love that. clarissa, last week in adv poetry, spoke of finding a poem in a tree. i love that too. i am thinking about different ways to avenue poetry into the world--love that max sympathy makes such beautiful home chaps & yes the work is reminiscent of Whitman aesthetic & is oftentimes just superb--& renegades them into your hands by proxy.

maxsympathy.net. send him love. poets need love.