Consider yourself tagged?
Andrea would like to know what you want from poetry.

Me too. (& I will also answer, but gimme a day or two. Busssssssy.)

Labels: meme

  12:34 PM Comment |

  When I made that list . . .
. . . I totally didn't put any Ashbery on there.

But really I could have easily put Some Trees or that multibook (which is how I read it) The Mooring of Starting Out, that includes the first five, or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, even later books. I agree with Ron today that he doesn't get old for me, even when he's not getting new.

Labels: meme

  11:06 AM Comment |

  Top* 10** Poetry*** Books**** That Most***** Influenced Me******
Yes, so, first, let's dispense with the matter of the asterisks, which I rebelliously am gonna give the key for at the top, not the bottom like some factitious hangers-on.

* Top in the sense of top of mind, top of bookshelf, or top as in "that's tops, pop" because my preferred lingo (and I do love lingo) is much older than me.

** I cannot count. Apparently. Watch. I routinely go over on these things or come up short.

*** You'll see.

**** Again, you'll see. The effect of these things I can equate to booklike.

***** An evanescence.

****** Ditto.

Without further, & oh yeah, also dispensing with hierarchy, so no numbers.

Anything, but first "Melanctha," technically a short story or possibly a novella, that reviled term, but POETRY for sure, then oh, well, let's see, everything else, but you can't go wrong beginning with (or revisiting) The Selected Writings by [one] Gertrude Stein & yes, I'm counting that as one bullet whaddaya gonna do.

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, more recently than you might think or I might admit except this once & anyway it seems like forever, first read it, in a period of solid days in 2000ish, twice & a half. Exclaiming aloud. Angry that nobody'd shown it to me before. That sounds practically slow-witted & isolated, I don't care. I'd even been in NYC 5 years at that point. I didn't know. Know I know & I am very very glad. & influenced.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Let's go back in time to oh say spring of 1988. I was awkward, stoopid, making many mistakes, but mostly, I credit myself now, because I was so busy LOOKING for something my tinyass little Texas town didn't have readily available. Aw yeah. Found it. Or a piece of it. (Shout out to Mr. Ray Langford.)

Is that ten yet? The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. A hair, timelinewise, before WS, overlapping, but a much deeper obsession. At first. (A shout out to Linda Post, who wore a miniskirt to her wedding as documented in the pages of Seventeen & just happened to be my 11th grade English teacher. Bless ya.)

Kenneth Koch. I'm not even going to explain this one again, and if you'll allow "poetry" to include the books he wrote re: teaching poetry to children, lucky lucky lucky me. That & your indulgence, I'll make me some.

Now here I'll get way off-the-beaten, but Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Circa 1985. I was a strict vegetarian for about 10 years, & still am about half so. Mebbe I should read it again, but I'm, um, chicken. Not poetry, well so what. You are what you eat, & I'm a poet.

Crap, I'm only down six. I've already started mentally revising & I've got a very late dinner in the oven, probably burning. So, lessee, really, I'd have to say that I feel like I'm choking on a test. Am I passing? Oh, wait, no grades. (& if I fail there's always the lake . . . for swimming & fireworks. Don't be so gloomy.) So, another "book" that influenced me/my life would have to be a short story called "A Jar for Yellow Jackets" by my husband, in a long-defunct literary mag, which you never read or heard of. He was 19 when he wrote it. I was 21 when I read it. But trust me, wow, was was it influential. & also poetry.

So, that's 7. The Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda. I don't really feel like explaining this one either, but suffice to say, I was in Mexico for longer than I should have been (oops, forgot to go back and finish that semester), relatively heartbroken (tho that seems silly now), & very soothed & bubbled up by these poems, their music and deceptive simplicity. I am still a sucker for them, 'specially in Spanish.

Uh, this one's a tie. A three-way tie. & again not poetry per se, nor can I limit myself to single books because, at this point, come on, you see it--I do this in GIANT GULPS: Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf & Edgar Allen Poe. Beckett placed me outta two years of college English. More time for elective poetry classes. Woolf & Poe gave me plenty to read, in the vast amount of time I had before I had the opportunity (literally) to branch out from the well-worn. An orangutan in a wardrobe--that still gets me. And The Waves. If I could do that, dying = happy.

Lastly, & also firstly, Leaves of Grass by Father Walt. Saint of the DIY & shameless self-promotion, the virtues of exuberance & expansiveness in a small, miserable sphere.

& a bonus, because I've already gone way over 10 & have 10 more to replace them with: The Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews & A. Brotchie. & also In the American Tree, editor Ron Silliman. & also My Life by Lyn Hejinian (rethinking: no, not really, not so much. I like it lots tho, which would be a different list, I guess.) & also Alice Notley except I'm still in absorption stage & not yet quite to influence. & also The Complete Poems of Lorinne Niedecker. & also. & also.

Labels: meme

  9:24 PM Comment |

  Thinking
& ok, stalling, but mostly thinking. I will attempt to make a neat pile.

My trouble is I don't like lists. (That's my trouble?!)

I want EVERYTHING. ALL THE TIME. TWICE.

& part of me is 100% convinced that those books that will influence me the most are some I haven't yet read.

Which is what I've been doing.

That, & going OUTSIDE.

& to my new favorite place in the whole world: the steamroom.

Labels: meme

  7:21 PM Comment |

  Duck, Duck, Goose
I've been tagged twice to tell 5 things that are little known about me. (But I ain't givin' away 10.)

Lessee. This is actually kind of hard. Most of what I keep private is gonna stay that way.

1. Between kindergarten and sixth grade, I attended 5 different schools in two different towns. Though I have always been naturally shy, I think the experience made me more socially flexible by forcibly expanding my comfort zones. By the time I got to high school (our town had only one, which also served the surrounding farming towns), I knew pretty much all the kids in my class of 500, and moved easily between cliques. That flexibility notwithstanding, I usually only have 1-3 close friends at a time. I feel immense affection for many friends, but find it intense/difficult to be really close. My husband is my best friend & the only person in the world who knows everything that could really be interesting on a list like this.

2. In the summer before first grade, one of those moves was from our apartment in Temple to a farm in a teeny town called Moffat. Moffat was so small it had only a few houses, a church, and a rarely used community center--not even a store or gas station, and certainly not a school. (The landmark for directions to our house was a turkey farm and a dirt road.) So I was bussed to Belton for school, the closest city. On my first day at my new school, as the teacher went down the roll calling names, I spontaneously told her I preferred to be called by my middle name (which nobody ever called me), and all that year I was known as Dawn. (I guess I figured: new town, new name.) Several weeks into the semester when my teacher (the only teacher whose name I can't remember) called to give a progress report to my mother, she'd talked for several minutes before my mom stopped her and said, "Wait, I think you must have the wrong parent. My daughter's name is Shanna." The next year, when we moved back to Temple and I went to a new school, I switched back.

3. In high school I dated a "weird" guy (about whom I was teased) who grew up to be the singer in a fairly successful band. You've probably heard of them. One of our first dates was an all-ages Ramones show. We were roommates for a while in college, during the time he started the band (his third or fourth). He once called my husband (when I'd first started dating him) a "buttmunch." That didn't go over so well. Now it's just funny. We're not in touch anymore, but I've always been really pleased he's done well. He's a talented dude.

4. The woman who watched me after school and taught me to cook (at the Girl's Club) was murdered by her boyfriend when I was in the third grade. A few years later, when I was in seventh grade, one of her sons was shot at a high school football game. It was half-time and my friends and I were going to get sodas at the concession stand. I saw the gunman as he ran past me and grabbed both of my friends by the hand and whirled them around in the opposite direction saying gun, gun, he has a gun. Then we heard the shot.

5. I was born with a hole in my heart that miraculously closed itself a few days before I was meant to have major surgery that I might not have survived (because I was only a few weeks old). It's a slight murmur now, but not at all dangerous. Actually, I think I've mentioned that before, maybe. I'm just not feeling all that confessional.

It's taken me 2.5 hours to complete this meme, including several complete erasures. If you would like to be tagged, consider yourself so.

Labels: meme

  10:04 AM Comment |

  (Me)me
Still packing, or will be after I've had my coffee. It's my mom's birthday. She doesn't read this blog, but I called her. Maybe another random reading later, but first:

The first poem I remember reading was... this one. Not the first poem I remember, but the first thing I remember reading to myself, realizing that though I had it memorized from hearing it so many times, I was reading not just reciting it. The words on the page previously seemed less interesting than the pictures, but suddenly were the most interesting thing ever. I was 4. There was no turning back. I also loved (still do) Dr. Seuss. And Ogden Nash's poems like "Fleas" and "Further Reflections on Parsley." (Delighted again, right now.) And those Mr. Silly books. And the children's illustrated Bible (strongly preferring the Old Testament) and Greek mythology (also in a children's version). And I did like Shel Silverstein. (I still have those.) And Edward Gorey (ditto). And Edward Lear. (Urg(e), now I need to go Xmas shopping some more, for the nieces & nephew. Surely they don't have all of these yet.)

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and... I don't remember ever being asked to memorize a poem for school. I do remember reciting poems in front of the class though, so well maybe I was. The first teacher to talk seriously about poetry was my 3rd grade Language Arts teacher. We read Blake ("The Tyger") and Stevens ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird") and Williams ("This Is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow") and Dickinson (several, which we learned could be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas") and some haiku. (A few years ago, when I scored a first edition of Kenneth Koch's Rose, Where Did You Get That Red I realized she'd been using that and also Wishes, Lies & Dreams. Lucky me!) We wrote poems and published them in a chapbook called "Poems from the Unicorn's Kingdom." I've talked about that before and I've even read my poem from the book at readings a few times. It's funny to me that never having been on a sailboat in my life, I nevertheless put one in a poem.

I read poetry because... I need it. There's a feeling (or lack of feeling?) that can only be allayed by poetry. I can't do without it. If too much time goes by and I can't sit down with some I get pissy.

A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem... The first poem I remember obsessing over was Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." For a while I was really really into Poe, and I loved "Annabel Lee" to the point that I dressed like Poe (mustache, white shirt, string tie) and shot slides of my mom in her wedding gown in the cemetary for a class project. (I should transfer those slides.) Then I committed myself to Emily, reading everything, over and over. Walt too, natch. Then it was Stevens again, all Stevens all the time, but that was before I met Frank. I don't like to pick favorites, but I really love "Today" and "Poem (The eager note on my door said 'Call me,)" and "Autobiographia Literaria" and "Meditations in an Emergency" and "To the Film Industry in Crisis" and . . . this could go on awhile. Next month may be different. My favorite poems/poets don't tend to be contemporary, though obviously there's much to love here too. But it's easier to grasp what's bestest from a body of work in which the sendiment has already settled. Less extrapoetic bullshit to get in the way. (Anxiety of influence? Try anxieties of confluence.)

I write poetry, but... I used to write short stories (for which I was upbraided in workshops because they were "too poetic" and "didn't make logical sense" or "have a clear narrative." I love prose, sentences, paragraphs. I will write at least one novel. And longer poems, very long poems, the long poem. The problem so far has been too many other obligations mucking up the desk. Once I'm in, I really need to stay there and not take my head out. Cultivating a situation now (personal, professional, financial) so that I should get the chance.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature... in that it's slower and more repetitive (I wrote "repeptive," maybe that too). When I want to be completely overwhelmed/absorbed/distracted/entertained/carried away, I read novels. Or biographies, mostly of writers & visual artists. When I want to learn something about how things work, I read expert nonfiction (like this one, which I'm reading now). And foodie porn & cookbooks. When I want to think or find out what I think, I read poems.

I find poetry... vital, essential, everywhere, effective for busting through lifejunk.

The last time I heard poetry... was at the MiPoesias series at Stain bar, Kate, Justin and Janet. I've been missing lots and lots of readings lately. I have to.

Update! Actually that's not the last time I heard poetry. I watched these awesomey Flarf vids as Mike put them up. Not to be missed, especially, is Nada Gordon's "I Love Men." OK, also, that poem/performance comes pretty close to favorite status right now, not least because/in spite of the fact that I myself wanted to write a poem called "I Love Men" a month or so ago, but Nada beat me, and hers stomps.

I think poetry is like... laughter. When it's faked, everybody can tell. And when it's real, nothing feels better. And it's contagious.

You can tag yourself, if you like.

Labels: meme

  9:58 AM Comment |

  I'm going to have to think about these.
1. One book that changed your life?

Huh. The first book of grown-up poems I owned was The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, which I found in one of the stepdad's boxes in the garage, a holdover from his grad school days I guess. I got rid of it later. Then bought another one just like it. When my thuggy little skater punk boyfriend stole The Waste Land and Other Poems for me from Walden Books in the mall in 1986 or so it was the first time anybody recognized that poetry was "my thing." I still have it. The somewhat-successful-indie-rocker boyfriend also nicked a book for me as a birthday gift: The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss. (Always liked Seuss's rhymes and silliness (though that one's not so silly, admittedly), including my favorite as a kid, Oh the Thinks You Can Think.) Looking back at college I felt like I was alone with books most of the time, though that's not true, actually. Read diaries & biographies, trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do. I bought a beat-to-hell copy of The Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda at a library sale in San Miguel de Allende that I saw as a kind of emblem for what/how, as dorky as that sounds. Still have it. It's been repaired with tape several times. It looks like shit. Couple years later, when S and I first got together, we drove from Austin to DFW and from DFW to southeast TX to introduce our couplehood to the parents. That's 12 hours in the car, easy. He read to me while I drove because we had no stereo: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, a used paperback copy I'd found at Half-Price Books. After we moved to NYC that first year we had to sell most of our books when we were broke (which was always) but then I got the job at Big Coporate Publishers and that came with pretty great fringe benefit: I could order review copies of anything I wanted. That chunky-ass paperback of collected Auden found itself in the street after some teen thugs on Ludlow street (1995) shot out our bedroom window with a pellet gun. The glass was already broken, and it was the biggest heavable thing I could find to retaliate with. The gesture was ridiculous. It had glass embedded in the pages. I replaced that one with a hardcover. Oh I'm totally cheating, I know. One--I can't do it. I'm not even talking about influence here, which would be one way to come at this question. In all of these cases, the importance of each book derived more from its context than its content, from the fact that each was Other than what I had before, Better than what I had without, and each deepened the significance of moments or periods that were already significant for me. This still happens with me & books. That makes me lucky.

2. One book you have read more than once?

I feel too anxious about all I am never going to have time to read to repeat many novels or nonfiction books, unless I'm writing on them or doing some kind of research. But I read practically every poetry collection I like two or three times. Isn't that some kind of rule? On repeat: the collecteds of Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens, and everything Gertrude Stein. That list might be boring, but they're not. Ashbery too, early more than late. I'm sure the collected Koch will become shabby with thumbing.

That said, I never want to read The Scarlet Letter again. I was assigned that book no less than 6 times between 9th grade and college graduation.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

I guess I can't take the internet? Crap.

Wait, are there any of these left? Haven't the melting glaciers submerged them all?

Could write in sand. Repurpose island as giant dry-erase board.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Don Quixote (Modern Library Smollet trans.)

There are others. I laugh lots. Laughing is my favorite. It feels so good. (The pure stuff. Schadenfreude causes indigestion. Eventually.)

But this book makes me guffaw. Wide mouth. All the teeth. Belly laughs. Oh, the don he is a poet and his delusions relevance.

Also, (some of) Jennifer Knox's poems make me laugh. I'm obviously inflating my own reputation as an editor by saying that because that's just how I am.

5. One book that made you cry?

Hmm. This happens rarely with poetry. Biographies make me cry, well, because of how they end. I bawled like a baby when I read Elizabeth Bishop's final letter, written just hours before she wilted. Anna Karenina. Too many novels to count.

6. One book you wish had been written?

Anne Boyer's first book. Katie Degentesh's first book. Oh nevermind. . . yay!

There are several yet-to-be-written books between us in this house. Hoping for those.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

I will be sent straight to a hell I don't believe in for saying it. So I'll come up with something more controversial.

I haven't yet come up with anything. There's plenty of crap, but you know, whatevs. Even the worst book is instructive.

8. One book you are currently reading?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I'm in the center narrative, about to move into the russian-dolled endings.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

I'm a fraud! This question gives me palpitations! I've read nothing!

Currently I've got more to-be-read piles than I know how to approach. Right now I'm tired & distracting myself with fiction, which is more fun in that I don't automatically want to take it all apart to see how it works.

10. To whom would you pose these questions?

you

Labels: meme

  9:46 AM Comment |

  I'm afraid this won't be very interesting

1. Person who passed this meme to me: Laurel Snyder & Michael Schiavo (in an email)

2. 29369 songs, 78.9 days, 138.41 GB on this computer. The one in S's office has lots too. I also carry a 20GB iPod. I think our entire collection has been ripped--or almost the entire collection.

3. I can't remember the last time I personally purchased a CD. S buys/swaps most of the music and in such volume I cannot honestly keep up. The last time I was at Tower Records for the purpose of buying a CD (a few years ago) I purched Don Walser, a Texan yodeller. He's fantastic. Also I remember buying emergency copies of The Joshua Tree, some Tortoise, and a Travis album (which I regretted) from a Virgin in San Francisco in the days before our iPods when once we forgot to take a batch of CDs for the rental car. I worked in a record store for 4 yrs in Texas and saw live shows practically every night in Austin--my social life revolved around music then--but now find that I can tolerate neither most record stores nor most live shows. Go figure. I do still find music essential, of course. But have come to rely on a different system of discovery and delivery, a slow drip filter, so I am always behind. There was a time I could tell you the name, artist, and album name of everything on the charts, but now I am lucky if I can tell you the name of my favorite track on any given CD thanks to iTunes and the flipbook storage system because while I usually know the individual songs the lines between the albums are blurred, the album as a unit has been diminished. I regret the loss (they're tossed) of album art and liner notes. I cannot abide music with idiotic lyrics, of any stripe. I don't like showoffy manipulative singers. Ugh vocal noodling and all kinds of squeaks and purring. If you want to get on my nerves, play the Beach Boys for more than three or four songs in a row; I can't help it. There is a purity to old-style country that I savor and I still like metal for nostalgic reasons. Pedal steel always cheers me up even when it makes me weepy. I dig a twang.

4. Nothing. In the mornings I prefer no music. I usually put it on after lunch. On the mental soundtrack this morning: KRS-One's li'l rap from REM's "Radio Song" and the "what can you do with a drunken sailor" refrain, for which I blame Reen.

Labels: meme

  9:25 AM Comment |