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In the big, shiny bookstore today, greedy-eyed, soaking up free words, I came across some new work by Sarah Manguso in Columbia Poetry Review. Great stuff if you get the chance. All excerpts from a longer work called "Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape" due out from McSweeney's Books in August (see here). Can't wait.
Email me for the link and password, or leave a comment with your addy and I'll email you.
by Sylvia Plath (audio)
My inbox contains a large debt of email. Apologies to anyone waiting for a response. You'll hear from me soon.
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I have a few job leads to follow-up on this week. One position pays crap, one pays well, and the other I won't know about until I talk to the agency tomorrow morning. The one that pays well was advertised on Craig's List by an agency with which I'm not yet registered. I'm going to register first thing in the morning. Keep your fingers crossed for me that the position actually exists. It's much like what I was doing in my last temp assignment (i.e. I'm qualified), but the pay is a few $$ per hour better.
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Worked on some poetry yesterday. I looked at all the unfinished poems I've written over the past 4-6 weeks and realized that they may not be failures after all. Rather, I think I've been writing a single, longer poem without knowing it. If these bits of writing work together the way I think they do, the piece comes in at about 200 lines so far, and could possibly go another 200. I've never attempted anything on this scale, but it makes sense that I'd be drawn to longer forms. It mirrors the how and what I've been reading lately.
For instance, Friday's one-day temp gig involved wo-manning a reception desk where the phone never rang and there was no other work to do. Since I belong to the Hart Crane school of poetry readers ("Thou canst read nothing except through appetite..."), I generally keep a few to five books on deck at any given time, leafing through what I've got until something absorbs me. It's all terribly undisciplined, but the upside is that I rarely tire of poetry, or hate it the way some poets and critics seem to. In any event, the poetry that hooked me Friday was James Schuyler's book A Few Days, and more specifically the 27-page title poem. After reading the first half of the collection, I spied the long piece at the end and skipped to it. While the shorter poems were not without their appeal, I got the biggest charge out of the longest one.
Then there are Anne Carson's book-length sequences, Josh Beckman's 1/4-book-length poems, Andy Mister's 5-part "Trapdoor Fucking Exit" which I re-read for maybe the sixth time yesterday (FREE & ONLINE at Reb's No Tell Motel, so what are you waiting for?). Speaking of which, I just ordered Mister's new chapbook from H_NGM_N. At $2 even I can afford to splurge. He's got to be one of the best bookless poets out there, which is a shame because I'd love to read more of his work.
I can't say why I prefer longer poems lately, because I haven't given it a great deal of thought. But my comment box is wide open to anyone with recommendations.
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Back to my own poem, I realized yesterday that I have an unfortunate tendency to...well, to get wrapped up in a certain silliness. I've never thought of myself as the sort of person who cracks a joke when things get emotionally uncomfortable, but I find myself doing just that when I'm writing poems. To date, maybe it's gone over a little too well in workshops and the like. I guess I want a teacher who's going to see through my bullshit and say, "This is mildly amusing, but what are you are avoiding here?" Because when I go back and read the poems with some remove, I often find they're less funny-poignant than plain superficial.
In any event, I'm just thinking out loud here. Thinking out loud and avoiding my dread to-do list.
UPDATE #2: I'm really grateful to those kind souls who've tried to help me out lately. I don't want my blowing off steam to obscure that. The kindness of strangers over the past few months has all but undone the bitterness I might have wallowed in otherwise. Thank you!
More resumes, more applications today. Most of the day, in fact. I'm exhausted.
UPDATE: The job for which I interviewed Tuesday went to an internal candidate. Damnit! Now I'm going to have start all over again, interviewing next week for work starting the week after that--if I'm lucky! All the agencies are giving me the same line today: Things are slow right now, but they should pick up soon. I don't get it. Each was advertising specific jobs when I signed on with them--and I scored extremely well on all their little tests. But still, no work. (By the way, just try finding a non-agency job posting on Craig's List or Monster.com or HotJobs or the like. They're virtually non-existent.)
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Because I have a great big knot in my stomach at the moment. This week's paycheck was $180, and a kind stranger helped me out with an additional $100. The only work I could get this week was a one-day receptionist gig on Friday. After childcare (since my daughter's out of school this week), I'll make about $55. Even if I start working full-time on Monday, I won't get paid until May 9th. Taking out what I spent on food today, that leaves me with $325 for the next two weeks. (I'm also $150 behind on my daughter's afterschool care, though I'm just going to have to try work something out with them.)
I had an interview yesterday morning for a temp assignment *snip*, but I won't know until tomorrow or Friday whether or not I've got the job. I think the interview went well, but they're interviewing several other candidates, and I don't know what the competition's like.
Thing is, even if I get the job, which starts Monday, their office is closed May 7-11, so I'll be out of work again briefly unless one of the agencies with which I'm registered can find enough work to fill up the week.
I do have some contract work lined up for the future, and it may in fact pay very well, (enormous thanks to the person who helped me get it!) but it'll be at least another six weeks before I begin to see any profit from it.
In the meantime, I have some hefty expenses in my not-so-distant future. *snip*
At this point, I think I've done everything I can do, but things aren't happening quickly enough -- and the wait and see is depressing/nerve-wracking.
"Several critics have lamented the repose of free verse into stylistic plainness. Mary Kinzie has even coined a new literary term, 'the rhapsodic fallacy,' which speaks to the problem. Kinzie's position is too complex to summarize here, but the rhapsodic fallacy describes, in part, the equation of a prosaic style with authenticity of engagement. The observation is an important one. Have we forgotten that the plain style represents a conscious aesthetic choice, rather than a simple outpouring of pure feeling? The word style itself points to language as a selective construct. As such, flat-style poetry is no more 'sincere' or 'engaged' than are the constructs of metered verse. And when the majority of poets choose to write in a given style, one suspects it is becoming a convention, as well as an artful device. (However, free verse is not to be equated with plain style or any other calcified aesthetic. If it were, there would be nothing free about it.) Perhaps readers are bored by the plethora of poems in simple languae; perhaps they feel manipulated by the poet's guileless pose. As a solution to the monotony of flat-style poetry, Mary Kinzie calls for a return to 'those forms associated with the eighteenth century: formal satire, familiar epistle, georgic, pastoral...' Lamenting the blurring of high and low styles into the 'low lyrical shrub' that is contemporary poetry, she would have poets write in clearly delineated genres. This stance supposes that by segregating high style from low style and by restricting subject one may write 'heart-piercing' poetry, to borrow Kinzie's adjective. But hearts are subjective entities, steadfast only in their refusal to be reliably pierced by aesthetic programs--that's the great thing about them! They remain willful little blobs, despite our best efforts at persuasion." (Alice Fulton, "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic.")
I really need a chaperone, people. Anyone looking to adopt? Last night I took flakiness to a whole new level picking my daughter up from her weekend with dad.
On the way down to CT, my oil light came on, so I pulled off at a service area. The dipstick said, "You should have had an oil change thousands of miles ago," so I bought three quarts of 5W-30 and fed the beast. When I was done, I put the empties in a plastic bag, tied it up, and threw it in the nearest trash can. No problem, right?
Wrong. Approaching the Mass Pike tolls on the way back to NH, I reached into my bag for money and couldn't find my wallet. First I remembered I'd taken it out to buy the oil. Then came the sinking feeling in my gut. I have a habit of putting my wallet in the bag with my purchases so I'll have fewer things to carry, and...well, you can probably guess where this is going.
At the toll booth I briefly explained my predicament. The woman wo-manning the booth kindly let me slide on the 50 cents, and gave me directions back to the westbound side of the turnpike. At that point, about three hours had passed since I'd tossed the plastic bag, but I went right ahead hoping the trash hadn't been changed yet.
When I pulled into the service area, I parked next to said trash can, hopped out, and pulled the lid off. My daughter, as you might imagine, was mortified. Absolutely mortified. Remember when you were a kid and your mom did things that were totally humiliating, like calling you by a pet name in front of your friends, or making you try on a bra over your clothing in the middle of a department store? Last night, I was that mom, picking through rest area trash and ordering my daughter through gritted teeth to get over here and don't move.
Alas, there was little to pick through. Just some half-eaten cheeseburgers and empty soda cans, as the garbage had, in fact, been changed recently. I asked an employee, who looked as though he might know, where the bags went after they'd been removed from the cans. "Oh, you'll never find it," he said. "All that stuff goes right into the compactor out back." But without enough gas in my tank to get home, and anyone I might call for help at least three hours away, I was not about to take hopeless for answer.
Reluctantly, he showed me where the compactor/dumpster was. When I explained in greater detail what I'd done, he said he remembered seeing a white plastic bag with three red containers of motor oil in it. Because he collects bottles and cans for the deposit money, he tears the big bags open before he throws them in the compactor. He thought he knew the general area in which I might begin to search, but insisted again on the needle-in-a-haystackishness of the endeavor. Once he realized I was not going to give it up, however, he kindly brought me a flashlight and some milk crates to stand on. He also helped me sift through the surface-level trash.
After about fifteen minutes of that if became obvious that some more drastic effort was required. There was just so much garbage, and I wasn't getting anywhere simply pushing things aside. I had no choice but to climb into the dumpster, hip deep in the foulest-smelling trash and start re-bagging it all. Though it makes me queasy remembering, I was so focused, at the time, on finding my wallet that I didn't feel anything at all. I just worked. Periodically the gentlemen who'd brought me the flashlight came back and helped. I guess my determination was infectious, because once I was wading around in three feet of garbage, he resolved to stay on after his shift to help.
Forty-five minutes and a dozen industrial-sized trash bags later, I uncovered the little white bag with the three red motor oil containers still tied up neatly at the bottom of the dumpster! And guess what? No wallet.
After all that, it turns out I'd hadn't accidentally thrown it in the trash. I'd placed it on the passenger's seat where it slid off and landed in the door's side pocket.
Exhausted, I put all the trash back in the dumpster, washed up as best I could, and drove home with the windows open. I still didn't have enough money for tolls since both the ATMs at the service area were out of cash. But the man at the toll booth kindly accepted the 30 stray pennies I'd dug out of the bottom of my bag. After he waived me through, my daughter rolled her eyes, shook her head at me, and said, "You're so lucky you're pretty." Yeah. Just the lesson I'd hoped she'd glean from our little adventure.
Here is a gorgeous spring Saturday evening. Here also is a not unattractive, single woman sitting home alone because, well, here is here and not elsewhere. *Sigh* At least I have my books. I drove down to the library at BC today and put together the following spring reading list (in no particular order):
Did I mention having picked up used copies of Fulton and Szporluk cheap the last time I traveled, and then forgetting them on the plane? I don't think I did. Somewhere in the sky not far from Seattle, I read the following with no little wonder:
One Thousand Bullfrogs Rejoice
It is dark inside the body, and wet,
and double-hearted. There are so many ways
to go, and not see, and lose
the feeling of the thread, which was alleged
to be invisible, and lose the man,
the fast Athenian, to someone with less rootage,
and never reach the fabled center,
afraid that if you did, you would find the hybrid,
not the hero, beautiful.
If you want to jump ahead,
Chapter Two just tells you how you erred
in Chapter One, taking his hand first
and being honest. Chapter Three says never mind,
you won't get another chance
to guide him. No one loves a volunteer.
No one loves a savior.
Chapter Four is set along the shore
where you are hiding, where life outside you
changes surface hourly.
Chapter Five: A skeleton is tangled
in a hyacinth. Their intimate clutch,
only for a minute, weirds you.
Tide is always bringing those reminders.
But here you keep in tune with rhythmic raging.
You open like a mussel made of gold
to anything in want of shelter,
anything with devious or laudable intentions.
Chapter Six. You open like a song
and bellow in the ear of second guessing.
(Larissa Szporluk)
This AP article immediately called to mind a Laurie Sheck poem I was so excited about a few months ago. When I went back and re-read it, I was struck by the formal similarities between the two. In "Notes on the Earth Seen from Space," a prose poem, Sheck employes heavy doses of quotation and reportage. The effect, to my mind, is a narrative style that achieves a certain authenticity by wearing the limitations of its perspective on its sleeve. I've copied the poem, which appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of A Public Space, into the extended post. Though it's a bit lengthy by cyberstandards, I recommended sticking with it through the end. The slow build in the beginning may run counter to Bill Collins's hook me in the first line style of reading, but personally I don't mind being asked to read poetry like an adult. My inner ADD child gets fed plenty on news clips and blog posts.
Notes on the Earth Seen from Space
Over and over the word fragile.
"It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart." This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.
Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it "contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere."
To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the earth looked "touchingly alone."
And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, "Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small."
Neil Armstrong said, "I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out of the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
And Ulf Merbold: "For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light. I was terrified by its fragile appearance."
(Is this what frightened you, is this what you sought to combat and flee? This fragility, this somehow-knowledge even then before anyone had ever left the earth or seen it from a distance, of how small it is and delicate, as we are too, how finite, how beside-the-point, how fleeting.)
(Might this account partly for my monstrous proportions, as if you were building a shield, a fortress of flesh, as if the vertiginous wings of blood in us could somehow be made to tremble less. But I am a blunt and narrow piece of materiality. Imprinting and imprinted. As were you. Footprints, strands of broken hair dropped here and there.)
On March 18, 1965, Alexi Leonov exited the main capsule of Voskhod2 by pushing himself head-first out of the opening. A 16-foot lifeline held him to the ship. If it broke he would drift off forever. Although the space-craft traveled at great speed, there was no air rushing past to let him feel it. He spun slowly for ten minutes. But when the co-pilot Belyayaev told him to come back he didn't want to return.
(He didn't want to return...And yet it seems a lonely thing--that feeling of nothing pushing back.)
Several months later, Edward White walked in space for 20 minutes, though the term's deceptive as the motion is of free-fall or floating. Seen from 120 miles away, earth was nearly featureless. When he returned to the space ship he had lost 5 kg of body mass and 2 kg of perspiration had collected in his boots.
But he, too, didn't want to return to the capsule.
When told to come back to the spacecraft he said, "This is the saddest moment of my life."
His co-pilot pulled him back in.
(And you will work in sorrow the fields...As if your laboratory were that field, a wound always to be worked, a not-quiteness, a rivenness of mind needing to be healed. But when he floated there, in that region without weight or mass or shadow, all fields fell away, all shattering gone soft and pliant, as if there were no need anymore either to build or to destroy--)
(But how my mind builds and destroys you over and over--)
On January 27, 1967, two years after his space walk, Edward White died in a fire at Launch Complex 34 on the Cape Canaveral Air Station. He had entered Apollo 1 for a simulated countdown, along with Command Pilot Grisson and Pilot Roger Chaffee when the fire broke out.
Years later White's wife took her own life.
(How strange to see the earth from the sky and then come back...to float in space like that, barely tethered, earth a modest uncrowned thing. "So peaceful and so fragile," one called it; the size of a marble or a pearl "hanging delicately," said another. And another: "But I did not see the Great Wall.")
Still, there are many practicalities to be addressed (as you would have known even from your rudimentary laboratory.) "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract," the astronaut Alan Shepherd pointed out.
And Neil Armstrong spoke of a feeling that was "complex, unforgiving."
Lyndon Johnson said, "It's too bad, but the way the American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it away."
(But what would it mean to take advantage?)
(And what of how small, and of how fragile...)
(Over and over the word fragile describing this world that has taught me such resistance, the hard of it and brutal, and yet, still--)
Numerous inventions made for space have been adapted by private industry resulting in such things as studless snow tires, scratch proof eyeglasses (White needed to shield his eyes from the extreme glare of sunlight), the 5-year flashlight, and cordless power hand tools.
The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation was formed in the 1990s as a "major component of a redevlopment master plan designed for Titusville's urban waterfront." There you can "visit the gift shop at the museum and treat yourself, a friend, or a relative to a a truly unique space-related gift.
When Leonov and White floated in space they didn't want to come back...They couldn't have known this beforehand. And what is a footstep then, after that, and the feeling of earth (so fragile, so small) beneath a shoe, or the thin tether of breath, or a name, or a day, a boundary, a theory, a bond--
For the past few weeks it's been making a godawful squealing noise that gets worse when I brake. The only thing like it I've ever heard was a bad caliper that effed up the rotor and cost $500+ to replace. I shouldn't even be driving the car, but it's been my only transportation back and forth to work. Tonight, however, I have to drive down to Connecticut to drop my daughter off with her dad. I considered renting a car, and might still if at day's end it's the only option. But first I'm going to take the car into the shop and see if by some miracle it's a problem I can afford to fix. So if you'd all join with me in thinking worn brake pad, worn brake pad or pebble caught between pad and rotor, I'd really appreciate it. ;-)
UPDATE: Horray for the power of positive thinking! All she needed was pads and rotors in the front. Only set me back $133 after the $25 off coupon I received in yesterday's mail. And while that $133 is going to hurt pretty bad if someone doesn't call me back with a job in the next day or two, it's truly the best case scenario. Such happy silence we drove home in today!
Spent two hours at second temp agency today. Typing tests. Software tests. And this one made me film myself speaking directly into a webcam using the following prompts:
My name is ___________ and I'm applying for positions as...
The job I liked most was...
The reasons I liked it were...
My primary strengths are...
An example of a time I was recognized for going above and beyond with a customer or co-worker is...
It must have taken me an hour to get through the thing without tripping over my words or getting stuck. Ephemeral public speaking I can do. Reading poems I can do. Making a commercial of myself is so patently absurd I barely managed it. And after all that they offered me a job as....oh, wait, no job.
If there's an upside it's that they offer medical, dental, and prescription benefits for about $27/week. Good news since the 7-day refills I got on two (generic!) prescriptions today cost me $43. Who knew keeping one's head out of an oven could cost so much. But in order to get said benefits, I need to work. They've got plenty of jobs out on the West Coast, but they're just starting to 'build a presence' here, so it's wait wait wait.
More of the same tomorrow, but at a third agency.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
Go congratulate Tony on his good news. Last weekend I read more than 100 of this man's poems, in two unpublished manuscripts, and if the Best New Poet shoe fits anyone, it's him. Seriously. I don't merely admire his work. I'm blown away by it.
In 15 minutes or so I am officially unemployed. I'd panic, except that would mean admitting defeat, so fuck that. I'm a little screwed to be sure. My daughter is on vacation next week, and unless I have something solid, I don't think I can afford to put up $150 in advance for childcare. I didn't get the waitress gig. The agency's still got nothin'. Appointments with two other agencies tomorrow and Thursday. We'll see. At least it adds some danger and suspense to the old blog! (yeah right)
Forgot to check the mail yesterday, and on the way to the store this morning found a love note from the kind folks at Third Coast. They're going to print "Biding, Paris de Gaulle" in an upcoming issue.
Today's conference call was cancelled. No sitting on the phone taking minutes for two hours! I am dancing on the inside.
I have an interview for a waitress gig at the brewpub around the corner this afternoon--and boy do I need the work. This morning I was informed that Tuesday will be my last day on this job. They wanted to keep me another 3-4 weeks, but there's no budget. Nothing available through the temp agency either.
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If you'd like to come throw tomatoes I'll be reading tomorrow night tonight @8pm at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, 58 Lowell Street. In fact, I thoroughly endorse the exchange of produce at poetry readings and may bring some blackberries to fling back at the audience. Noise and booze are the only things that alleviate my massive stagefright, and since I'm reading in a church, well...
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I'm also going to be giving a poetry reading/presentation of some sort at my daughter's elementary school Monday night. Not sure my own work is exactly appropriate for the venue, so any suggestions are most welcome. You'd think that as the poet-mother of a ten year-old I wouldn't need guidance, but alas, my child prefers algebra to poems. Fortunately children love to yell, so I should be able to elicit their participation without the projectiles.
Say hello! Talk amongst yourselves. Things here are looking up, I think, but work is slooooww today. Though a siesta would be nice, I'll have to settle for coffee instead. How are you?
I just finished reading Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, and as a study in vulnerability it might to seem to contrast Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnet I." However, vigilance and victimization are merely flip sides of the same coin, no? Anyone care to share examples of poems in which the female gaze contemplates male beauty without the looming threat? I'm curious.
II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES - IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE
You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my
notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter
he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: ’εντρπαλιζομένη is how
Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor--"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp this--hush, let's pass
to natural situations...
____________________________________
from The Beauty of the Husband (2000).
Sonnet I
Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,—I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.
______________________________________
from Renascence and Other Poems (1917).
And back to the unbearable again:
STANZAS, SEXES, SEDUCTIONS
It's good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.
The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.
Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.
I tempt you.
I blush.
There are things unbearable.
Legs alas.
Legs die.
Rocking themselves down,
crazy slow,
some ballet term for it--
fragment of foil, little
spin,
little drunk,
little do,
little oh,
alas.
___________________________________
Anne Carson, from Decreation (2005).
Oh, goddamn, that was good!
I have never, in all my life, seen an emergency school closing for religious reasons, but today the district did just that. Apparently, so many of the teachers and staff asked for personal days in observation of Good Friday, that the school had no choice but to cancel. Reeks of gross mismanagement to me. There must have been grumblings, resistance, bad decisions. With a little heads-up maybe working parents could have made alternate childcare arrangements, but this morning it's a little too late. In fact, I'm lucky my daughter is such an unrealistic child, because I never would have checked the school closings. It's sunny and the roads are completely clear. I argued with her for five minutes before finally going online and finding out she was right.
Yesterday, I offered to bring my daughter with me and go in to work for a few hours. They told me not to bother. We'll see what they say today.
Needless to say, the temp agency is not going to be eager to put me in any job where reliability is a must. I applied yesterday for a job waiting tables at a local restaurant/microbrewery. Hopefully the manager is there today so I can talk my way into an interview. They seem to be the only place in town looking for someone to cover lunch shifts. Everyone else wants nights and weekends, which for me makes no sense given what I'd have to pay a babysitter. On a slow night, I could end up spending more than I earned.
Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud here. And documenting I suppose. My struggles aren't unique, but I have a voice and vehicle to talk about them, so I do. At the same time, I realize how lucky I am to have the Cornell thing on the horizon. I haven't forgotten.
Addendum: HAHAHAHAHA!!!! "The extra day off means the end of the school year is now pushed back to Monday, June 18" (Nashua Telegraph). I lose my apartment on the 17th. Fabulous!
I spent all day looking for work, didn't make a penny, and generated no serious leads. A handful of other temp agencies would like me to give them 2-4 unpaid hours a piece to take assessment tests, watch videos, read handbooks, etc. And all with no guarantee of any actual work. Everything's temp-to-perm, part-time, or a scam. The agency I'm currently with told me not to hold my breath. Call back next week. I have 2.5 paychecks left, and then who knows. I only have 8 weeks (daytime only b/c no childcare) to offer between the time my current assignment ends and my lease runs out. But for the next 2.5 weeks I'm also working full-time and can't imagine when I'm going to pound the pavement looking for a job. I never should have moved to this shitty little town for him. In Boston at least I could have found work.
The school district has either decided to take advantage of an unused snow day, or there is weather I can't see from my apartment window. Everything is covered in white, to be sure, but as far as I can tell, it's no longer precipitating. I wish I could be more excited, but I'm going to take a substantial hit in my next paycheck for staying home with my daughter today. And for now at least, the only work I have lined up ends April 17th.
I wish I could bypass my pimp, I mean agency, and find temp work directly, but so far I have't been able to locate a single legitimate opening anywhere. When I started working in January, I decided to go through an agency because I knew I'd be leaving for grad school and didn't want to screw anyone by taking a permanent job. Now I'm the one getting screwed it seems. Had I taken a more business-like approach, perhaps I'd have health benefits and paid time off and been able to keep a larger percentage of my pay.
In any event, I could rant all morning, but it's probably not the best use of my time. I have poems to write and classified ads to read and a chapbook to put together for one very kind soul who took me up on my offer.
For instance, these.
No poetry yesterday either. It was so cold and damp that I headed straight for a hot bath after dinner, which made me drowsy. Before I knew what happened it was morning and Anne Carson was lying on the bed next to me.
I've been stealing bits of time today for Glass, Irony and God. I'd like to say something intelligent about why I'm enjoying it so much, but I'm not really supposed to think here at the office. Unintelligently I'll remark that Carson's formal pyrotechnics in this book are minimal, but goddamn does she have something to say. I'll risk getting busted by quoting you this, from "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide":
VII.
Who I am doesn't matter.
As you see me
fighting to survive,
fighting to be esteemed and honoured
(so that my past vanishes),
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific.
Fair enough
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Anna Xenia.
I need another hot bath just as soon as I can get out of here. It's snowing. SNOWING! and heavily this afternoon. April. Lilacs. Dead land. Sigh.
Was a bit of a no-go for me today. Nonetheless, I scribbled a few words down.
