Postcards from the Imagination

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)

My friend and classmate Chris Kempf reviews Philip Metres's To See the Earth in Jacket 35.

Posted by Ginger at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really do love my program, so I'm going to shake pom-poms for Junot Díaz, Cornell MFA '95, who just won the Pulizter Prize in Fiction for his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Posted by Ginger at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)