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.

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.

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. 

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.

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: 

That's a few billion years before Earth existed--and Polish astronomers caught the blast on film here. 

As a kid, I loved astronomy, so my knowledge of the way these things work isn't entirely new, but it's still exciting to contemplate. That the night sky is all artifact. That looking up, it's not merely the snapshot of a single distant moment in time that one observes, but a dizzying simultaneity of moments. 101 years into the past at the tip of the Big Dipper's handle. 81 years where handle meets bowl. 800 years, 1,300 years, and 900 years along Orion's belt. The 2.5 million year-old smudge known as the Andromeda Galaxy.

I want to know more. All those photons hurtling through the universe unimpeded for hundreds or millions or billions of years, until some of them are swallowed up by my eye, and cease to exist as photons. But what do they become? Me and the stargazer lily I bought yesterday are both sucking up sunlight. The lily is turning that energy into mass, using it to transform my breath into petals and leaves and stems. My eye, on the other hand, is translating energy into...an awareness of energy? The photons trigger an electrical impulse that excites my visual cortex. But then what? Where does that energy, which cannot be destroyed, go? Is it just body heat? If I put my warm hand on another's cold skin, am I passing along the byproduct of witnessing distant thermonuclear fusions?

Unfortunately, those couple paragraphs were way more time than I intended to spend accessing the Internet's vast stores of information. A waste of time, you might say. Process without commodifiable product. A luxury and an indulgence. Why does that seem wrong to me?

In fact, I haven't been reading enough poetry this term. It's the damn ADHD. Concerta's not helping as much as the doctor said it would, and the university health service isn't down with prescribing anything else. So I'm currently in search of an off-campus provider willing to explore other options. In the meantime, I have to schedule my days hour-by-hour in advance, and make sure I slot in poetry, because otherwise I lie in bed at night wondering where the time went. I'd like to carry around a stopwatch and total the hours I spend staring off into space "thinking," but I'm usually not aware I'm doing it until several minutes have passed. At the end of the day, all that drift-and-return adds up to a shitload of disappointment and guilt. Ugh!

Anyway, bedtime. Nothing fucks my world up worse than a bad night's sleep, and with insomniac tendencies I have to work at that too. I've tried sleep medications, but for the most part they take too long to work and leave me groggy in the morning. I read somewhere that using a booklight to read in bed helps the brain wind down, so I'm going to try that tonight.

I've spent the past few days working on an odd assortment of writings--some poetry, some fiction, and some screenwriting. That last genre was almost entirely accidental. I'm taking a class with Denis Johnson part of this term, and the scene I wrote was in response to a prompt he'd given us on Wednesday--a single line of dialogue from which our own writing was to follow. Sitting on the bus thinking about the line, this dialogue started to play itself out cinematically, so I decided to write it that way. Because I don't know the first thing about screenwriting, it was fun. I put the characters in a room. I started them talking to each other. And then things got a little auto-pilot in a way that pleased me. A similar thing seems to be happening when I dabble in fiction.

It's both thrilling and mildly disturbing, because my poetry doesn't unfold that way at all. With poetry, I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm also highly aware that I have no idea what I'm doing. And I think I know what at least part of the problem is.

Earlier I said, "I've developed a strong antipathy toward the pressures exerted by all schools and movements over the past few months." And it's true. I lack whatever it takes to be able to absorb all that shit and keep writing. I'd prefer not to think of myself as "impressionable" but lately my process looks something like this: 

ID writes a line or two. Shiva-armed SUPEREGO reaches around and puts a hand over ID's mouth. EGO yanks hand away. ID tentatively pens another line. Shiva whips out the protest signs. In one hand, "You Suck!" In another hand, "HUH?" In yet another "Boring!" "Closet Republican!" "Pinko!" "Whiner!" "Cold Fish!" Sign after sign after sign--each one the imagined rejection of a poet or group of poets whose aesthetic agenda made sense to me at some point.

They all make at least a little sense, but I've yet to hear the one thing that would compel me to get religious about a particular set of concerns and techniques. It's not that I imagine myself more enlightened than thou. Were that the case, none of this would matter much. It's that I can't imagine a sympathetic reader for the work I want--and more importantly am able--to do. (That is, even if I could decide which kinds of writing I most admire, it's possible no amount of learning and practice is going to render all approaches equally fruitful. It's possible my best writing will be a poor indication of my tastes as a reader.)

I can't remember the last time I finished a poem and thought so-and-so is going to love this. Unfortunately, that's exactly why I think I write. To quote Billy Bragg: I don't want to change the world / I'm not looking for a new England / I'm just looking for another girl. I can't change the world. I have a hard enough time changing myself. I would like to be less starkly fucking alone in it, and making something that simultaneously creates pleasure for one's self and for someone else--that's one way to feel connected. I'm not talking simple affirmation, but the multitude of pleasures reading and writing afford.

Maybe that's why the idea of compromise is so thorny. If I give you pleasure at the expense of my own, or please myself but no one else, I haven't achieved anything different than everyday social relations. I haven't managed that rare coincidence of interests and desires which I might go so far as to call part of my personal definition of beauty. Beauty = Pleasure, when pleasure is neither wholly masturbatory nor achieved at another's expense (?)

I'm not aiming at some sort of Keatsian pronouncement. Just trying to figure out what drives my engine. For better or worse, the pursuit of beauty as I idiosyncratically define and experience it, as something more than just decadence, is the closest thing to an organizing principal that I can detect in my life. Even justice is subordinate to it in that justice seems to be required but not in itself sufficient. And love? Nice if it finds you. Nicer if it sticks around. But totally untenable as an axis around which to spin one's subjectivity.

(None of this, by the way, has anything to do with Cornell--or else it does, but not in the most obvious way. No one here has pushed an agenda on me, or asked me to be anything but my own writer. That freedom at the local level makes the factionalism "out there" seem all the more strange and oppressive.)

I wish I had the bravada to say Fuck your aesthetic agenda! And yours! And yours! And yours! Flashy. Strong. Passionate. And kinda bullshit. Instead, my manifesto of one goes something like this: Thank you. You make some good points, but unfortunately, I can't hear myself over them, so I'm going to turn your volume down now. Good luck with your work!

Cultural Studies

From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. This course is built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. We will analyze and write about cultural forms as texts to be read for what they tell us about men and women, wealth and power, race, nation, and technology. Readings may include fiction, films, advertisements, television shows, and essays on the theory of cultural studies.

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Question: Is it finally time to nuke my archives, or is it okay to be a messy, complicated human in the eyes of one's students? I've heard from people currently teaching that students regularly use Google, Facebook, etc. to check up on their teachers. Nonetheless, I have this nagging sense that I need a good justification to consciously self-censor.

* * * * * * * * * * 

One of the nails in that coffin is having recently learned that I have Attention Deficit Disorder. Cornell's counseling office referred me to someone who specializes in this sort of thing, and after extensive testing he determined that my issues with concentration, organization, memory, etc. are not--as I was told for years by other doctors--emotional, but neurological. I've been taking Concerta for a couple weeks now, and it does seem to be helping more than anything else I've tried, but I'm still trying to sort out what the medication can and can't do.

* * * * * * * * * *

There are a few conversations in the air about the economy of poetry, and I suddenly find myself really annoyed at the idea that trying to scrounge a few dollars for one's work is a bad thing. Maybe it's because I've been hanging out with fiction writers this term--people who use words like "advance," and can look forward to multiplying page rates. Or maybe it's because I actually do get paid for non-creative writing that's relatively insignificant to me as a human being.

Funny how opposing views on the matter lead to exactly the same disdain for putting a price on one's work. That is, both those who accept the minimal value established by the free market and those who believe poems are quasi-sacred (and therefore priceless) tend to support the idea that poetry not only is, but should be a "gift economy."

The problem, as I see it playing out in my own life, is having anything left to give after the bills are paid and food is on the table. While the gift economy model may work well for some people, it's a hard life for others. Every hour I spend earning money elsewhere is an hour during which I'm actively suppressing the creative impulse in order to get shit done. And given the extent of my responsibilities, those hours add up fast.

I can hear the arguments now: But so-and-so does x and y and z, and still manages to write good poems in his/her free time. That's great for people who can manage it, but as a universal model it reduces poetry to a hobby.

That's not to say I don't respect poets who want nothing to do with the current system of contests, grants, awards, etc. and are finding other ways to make their poetry happen. Nor is it to deny that there are people in the biz whose primary talent is their capacity for relentless self-promotion. But I do think that when the issue is raised, the complexities of individual creative processes, motivations, and resources are sometimes disregarded in favor of arguments for a single most dignified way to do publishing.

As a struggling single mother working on her first book, I have to admit that by the time I have a manuscript in hand, my first impulse will probably be to see whether I can buy myself some additional writing time and a comfortable reading chair with it before I explore the gift route. Is that going to influence the way I write? Hell no. I already write for money and it's not nearly as fulfilling as sitting down to create something. In fact, I've developed a strong antipathy toward the pressures exerted by all schools and movements over the past few months, and as I see it, writing for editorial affirmation--mainstream or otherwise--is just another form of drudgery.

* * * * * * * * * *

Final note: One of my poems is going to appear in a chapbook printed by Cornell and distributed free to NYC high school students during National Poetry Month. My contribution is gratis, of course. :-)