Questions of Comets

Hello everybody, I have a new home over at SOLDIER ON: https://gale.jellyfishmagazine.org.....




Come say hello to me there! It's got everything...Recipes, Poetry, Joseph Cornell, you name it.

Not sure if any of this is worthwhile, but what the heck. No one's reading this, because no one read it in the first place, and then I quit writing in it, and started back without making it well known. So I am probably the only person seeing this. Which I don't mind at all.



So, got some good news (isn't this what poets blog about? I don't know...) the other day--The Denver Quarterly has accepted (at least one of) my poem(s)! I'm really excited. I love them muchly.

Such good readings as of late. I was mostly enchanted by Saturday night's reading at Flying Object. For weeks I had been jumping around excited at the fact that one of my favorite new(ish, it's always ish) poets, Julia Story, was coming to read. Her book, Post Moxie is one of those books that change the way you think about poetry. In the best way possible. Just one more possibility, one more opening for poetry. She's one of those people, like Juliana Leslie and so many others, that I want to see do very very well. But I digress. I went because of Julia Story, and was so happy to see 2 other wonderful poets read as well! Sampson Starkweather and Paige Taggart were phenomenal! And all three of the readers fit in so well with each other. Also we got to see some of Ryan Macdonald's videos, which were amazing in their own right. So so happy. And Julia Story talked about how she is ashamed at how much she likes Sylvia Plath, and read a few of her (out of so many, I think!) poems written either to or for Sylvia. And that just about sealed the deal. Made me so happy.

There's one coming up tomorrow too which I will probably freak out about as well-- Michael Earl Craig and Natalie Lyalin. WOOOT. Natalie's book is also one that changed my life/the way I think about poems, possibilities. And my students are in love with her as well.



Been really interested in pulsars, in space, in possibilities for energy in space--black holes, pulsars, stellar nurseries, dark matter, dark energy...there's so much that we don't know. How did animals become so magical? How did humans start to shed tears for emotional purposes? Or laugh? Or smile? Or create art? How strange it is to be anything at all.

Wrote a poem called about Pulsars. Called Pulsars.



Still writing Anne Frank poems. Put them into blocks of text. Got weird. In love. Her anxieties are my anxieties. By which I mean to say, my anxieties are very slight in comparison to hers.

Another reason I am excited about tomorrow:

BARBRA ON OPRAH. A "The Way We Were" interview with Robert Redford, apparently the first they've ever done together. And Mandy Patinkin and Kris Kristofferson talk about her. Which I am just so pleased to see.

Love love love, so much love.

Did I do this right?

HEAR YE, HEAR YE

JELLYFISH MAGAZINE HAS A NEW ISSUE OUT!

Featuring such crazy awesome people such as: Nate Pritts, C.S. Ward, Emily Kendal Frey, Matt L. Rohrer, David Bartone, Zach Savich, and many more!

(also features a shocking shade of purple!)




And, I shall end with one of my two favorite Schuyler poems. What's the other? You'll just have to wonder.

February

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can't see
making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can't remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They're just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can't get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She's so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other.

First of all, thanks to The Review Review for writing a review last year of Issue 6 of the Los Angeles Review that I just came across after a little bit of detective work! I am beyond grateful for the nod. The review is here!

Second, the Third Year LIVE LIT is tomorrow night! Featuring all wonderful writers, without a doubt. Miranda Dennis, Adam Cogbill, Nick Sansone, and Jessica Miele. 8 pm, Amherst Books. Be there or be square.




Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

"Oread," H.D.

Woods, sea, city. Where to live?

A house made entirely of wood, in the woods.





want to sit in one with a cup of tea and a book.


Speaking of books, we've read 6 books in our "Time and the Novel" class so far. Only one book has ended on a positive note, but without a doubt the writing is superb. So far we have read:
1. Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine"
2. SB's "Of Mice and Men"
3. Glenway Westcott's The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
4. Saul Bellow's Seize the Day
5. Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters
6. Jill Ciment's Heroic Measures <---the positive one. And it was pretty good, I'll say.

Also, in the Comparative Lit class I'm taking, on Modern Poetry and Poetics, we are getting really far into Pound. We're reading the Cantos, and it's good to know that books like this exist: . The class does make me want to know every language possible. I get this nagging feeling that I should have known about comp lit when I was in undergrad, because THEN I wouldn't have had such anxiety and fretting over WHICH LANGUAGE to pursue. I could have just pursued them all! I took 101s in so many languages, I started and had potential in so many languages, but had a moment like the legend in The Bell Jar: the man sitting in the crotch of the fig tree, starving to death because he couldn't decide which part of the tree to take from. So I didn't get fluent in any language.

CURRENT GOAL: Writing poems while also keeping one's class schedule, assignments completed, and lesson plans under control.

I will end this post with pictures of my latest cooking adventure: making and canning apple butter!











SUCCESS!



I used This Recipe.

As far as Readings go:

___________________________

Sunday, 9/26 -- Jones/jubilat reading featuring Lucy Ives and Steve Healy. 3 pm, Jones Library, Amherst

Wednesday, 9/29 -- Green Street Cafe Reading, 7:30, Green Street Cafe, Northampton

Thursday, 9/30 -- Bernadette Mayer Reading, Alumni Memorial Hall, University of Massachusetts, 8pm

___________________________


At first I thought to myself: "I will never write another blog post. 95 percent of them out in the world make me cringe." And that worked for about a year. And then somehow I decided to keep that opinion alive and also restart this blog. The human mind is a mysterious thing.
Also, after setting up this new layout, I spent a good 4 days thinking that I wouldn't write another blog post, mainly because I had nothing to say. And then Saturday came. And I had a day's worth of work to do. So of course, procrastination directly leads to blog posts. And I vow to try and stay true to what I like about blogs.

So here it is: A post where I write about the Today Show.





I love it. I would ask, "Who doesn't?" but history always tells me there's someone that breaks my heart by telling me how much they hate it. It was always a signal in my school years that I should start getting ready because the bus would be there in 10 minutes. And now, being the relatively new early riser that I am, I spend most of my mornings with my eyes glued to first: Meredith, Matt, Al and Ann (and Natalie), then straight onto Kathie Lee and Hoda.

I'm nosy. I want to know what people are doing. I love to humanize celebrities, learn about high school quarterback heroes, watch a farm town revive itself after the recession. I love happy endings. I love humanism. I love to get involved in other people's stories. I don't think there's a simpler way to say that.

Why not be silly? Why not care about things? Why not watch a story where a dog fosters a piglet, or where a Colombian woman is free after being trapped in the jungle for years?

So much for a good first blog post. I may be rusty.

My students are reading Dorothea Lasky's Awe. We are discussing "voice" in detail on Monday. "I! LOVED! IT!" was what many of the happy readers said in class on Friday. And I think that's about as good as it gets, don't you?

The moon is drifting away from Earth

Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.



I like to make resolutions. Everything always lies in the potential in something, and then when it involves follow-through, it's lost. I wanted to be 100 different things when I was little. I love everything and want to do everything, but never really delve into it.

I've had conversations with people who understand what I'm talking about, so I'll write a post about this. There are poems I see that, although may not be *good* poems, or stir any emotional core in me, I see poems that are *written* in a way I would like to write. The...equation is there, I would just like to make the substitutions my own and create a whole new poem. The logic is there. The steps from a to b are there. But the whole poem may not succeed. I like those poems. I like to keep these poems around, work with them. Wrestle them apart and see how I can get them to tick. This is one of those poems, I think:

Highway Barns, the Children of the Road, by Kenneth Koch

Amaryllis, is this paved highway a
Coincidence? There we were
On top of the fuel bin. In the autos
Dusk moved silently, like pine-needle mice.
Often I throw hay upon you,
She said. The painted horse had good news.
Yes, I really miss him, she waves,
She pants. In the dusk bin the fuel reasoned silently.
Amaryllis, is this paved highway a
Coincidence? My ears were glad. Aren't you?
Aren't you healthy in sight of the strawberries,
Which like pine-needle lace fight for dawn fuel?
The white mile was lighted up. We shortened
Our day by two whole tusks. The wind rang.
Where is the elephant graveyard? She missed the pavement.
A load of hay went within speaking distance of the raspberries.
Overture to the tone-deaf evening! I don't see its home.
Prawns fell from that sparkling blue sphere.
The land is coughing, "Joy!" Hey, pavements, you charmers,
When are you going to bring me good news?