Postcards from the Imagination

The second-years are giving their final reading today. They must be even more shocked than I am at how quickly the MFA goes by. Most will stay on to finish their thesis this summer and teach next year, so it's largely a good excuse to celebrate, rather than a farewell. My fridge is packed with beer, wine, soda, and water to haul over to the old mansion for the reception afterward, which will likely be the antithesis of the stuffy nonsense I mentioned below.

Unfortunately, I'm going to miss the post-reception party, as parental duty calls. I have to drive down to PA to pick my daughter up. But even if I wasn't on the road, babysitters are hard to find this time of year--and expensive. At $10/hr, I was bound to miss the most interesting parts of the evening anyway.

That one-foot-in/one-foot-out is sort of characteristic of my experience here. Spring tends to throw a spotlight on it, I guess.

Even more than Eliot, I'm reminded of a line by Sarah Manguso: "The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave."  

I've been longing to be around other people more than I'm able, and longing to get out of this dull little apartment. Reluctantly, I just renewed my lease. It's a good deal, close to campus, etc. But I've been tempted to throw caution, convenience, and saving money to the wind in favor of a small country house with a private yard. Next year, perhaps.

As compared to last year, there's so much to be grateful for. So take that, longing! And though I still have some work to finish up before the term's officially over, I'm damn close. Then I'll have about a month off before I start teaching. Take that too.

Posted by Ginger at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But the fact that some aspects of Graham’s work are more fully realized than others seems, while not uninteresting, oddly beside the point. What matters, as with Ashbery and Glück, other poets who perpetually challenge the terms of their own achievement, is the shape of the career — not only what she has done but what she will inevitably do next. (New York Times)

Bullshit. What Jorie Graham, or any of us, might do next is get hit by a bus. I'm not sure whether this eye toward the future is merely a facile way of ending the review, or indicative of a more profound cluelessness. Either way, 'next' is bound to be at least a couple years down the line, which makes the expectation here seem poorly feigned. Just go ahead and say you didn't really like the book all that much. Less embarrassing for the reviewer, and less condescending toward the poet.

For some reason, talk like this makes me want to smash pretty teacups and upset the reception goers. I have a ton of respect for what Ashbery and Graham are able to do, but they're POETS for fuck's sake, and it diminishes my experience of their work to hear them discussed as Very Important Persons. Though I'm all for the sloppy gusto of fandom, this gentile genteel crap annoys me (whoops! blogged post-Ritalin, pre-bed last night).

I don't know why people like Longenbach read, but I often do it to experience something more authentic than the neat little packages we're expected to be out in the world. Has this reviewer never sat in a room sharing poems with other people and felt a veil lift, and felt really alive, and felt like all the awkwardness & fucking up & despair in his life were a little less devastating, if only for an hour or two? Perhaps not.

And perhaps that's why I can't relate to him and others like him at all. What they're doing is peddling in exactly the opposite direction of everything I love about poetry.

Posted by Ginger at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It wasn't a poem every day, but it was better than I did last year, and it definitely showed me something about the value of daily writing practice. Namely, it's easier to get started on a poem when you don't have to warm up first, and it's easier to live with sucking one day if there's a chance you might not suck as bad the next. I'm told Ammons--who is an ever-present spirit here at Cornell--took a walk and wrote a poem every day for something like forty years. And if the New Yorker is to be believed, John Ashbery writes every morning too. So bah! to the view that one should only put precious ink to precious paper when one has something Very Important to say. The world isn't going to be saved from bad writing through lack of practice. 

Posted by Ginger at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Squashes! And it's not just a headline, it's a t-shirt (see below). In other words, ridicule for profit.

I weigh about 170 lbs., and I'm sick to death of living in a culture that notices--sick of seeing other people emotionally hobbled by a steady stream of messages telling them they're ugly or ridiculous, and of having to remain vigilant in order to avoid being hobbled myself.

One of my favorite lines in cinema comes from a film called Cléo de 5 à 7. A woman asks her friend, who models nude for a group of art students, how she finds the courage for it. Her friend replies, "My body makes me happy, not proud." I'll try to keep remembering that. My body is for my pleasure. My body is for my pleasure.

Posted by Ginger at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Time for a new profile pic since the other one was about a year old. Also I've been struggling with today's poem and thought a break might help. I need to turn the piece in to my classmates before I go to sleep tonight, which is probably why I can't write it. How silly.

The photo is a still from a video I did recently for NYC's Poem in Your Pocket Day (see also chap above.) The clip is mostly painful to watch. I'm just not comfortable reading my own work for an audience unless there's drinking, camaraderie, and diminished light. In this case, I had to read the poem multiple times in succession in a quiet room with a director, sound guy, cameraman, and obnoxious lights. After being told how to stand and where to look, it was all nervousness and zero charisma.

I don't know how I land myself in these absurd situations. A few years ago, when I was younger and somewhat thinner, I modeled wedding gowns at bridal shows for Priscilla of Boston. It was sorely-needed, easy money--but also intensely strange. I did my best to make stage fright and clumsiness look like fun as I pivoted, smiled, and tossed the heavy silk trains out of my way. But driving home with my scalp on fire from the stylist's hairpins, I became viscerally convinced that life is better behind the page.

There's no transcending the awkwardness with which I tumbled out of my mother's womb, and any attempt to do so only results in more awkwardness, if not outright disaster. See, for example, 1988: Year of the Satellite Dish Hair.

If I wanted to be anything like accurate, this would be my permanent author photo: 

Posted by Ginger at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)