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Tuesday, March 30, 2004

It's Tuesday! and that means that I have only two nights left in LA before I get home for a slightly longer than brief stint.

more importantly, that means it's less than a week until louderMONDAYS celebrates our 6th ANNIVERSARY at Bar 13! Be there: 35 E. 13th St., Union Square, NYC -- 7 p.m., $7 for an amazing night of poetry and performance and dialogue and, as always, two-for-one drinks. and ME! I'll be there!

it's all coming together beautifully: the briefest of open mics, the semi-finals draw, live chats on how Poetry Moves People, Rives' feature, and a multi-voice showcase/louderJAM. it's going to be great!

Friday, March 26, 2004

back in Los Angeles. I've been incredibly productive since waking up this morning, all without leaving the hotel room. technology is scary. emails, conference calls, internet purchasing... unfortunately, this hotel doesn't have room service and therefore I'm STARVING.

...but in a grand mood because yesterday was SO miserable. I had what I believe was my first migraine ever. it was either that or a small aneurism. around 11 p.m. Wednesday I realized my head hurt, then it got worse, and by the time I got up after a night of dreams about vices grinding my temples and laser beams shooting from my eyes, I was in so much pain that I could literally not move my head without crying. this band of pain stretched from one temple to the other so viscerally I couldn't believe it wasn't visible in the mirror.

Roger convinced me over the phone that it wasn't an aneurism, and I managed to shower, dress, and pack while holding my head as still as possible (yeah, it's almost funny now) and make it down to the lobby and onto the bus so I could down a granola bar and some Advil. I made a deal with myself that if the pain didn't subside in an hour, I'd go to the emergency room and see if they could remove my brain or something. Joshua made me some licorice tea to quell the nausea (I've never before been in so much pain that it made me throw up) and I recovered sufficiently to perform and then go sleep on the bus until we left for the airport.

yeah, I'm what they call a "trooper." but I figured why did I get up, shower, and go through all this if I'm not going to do our last college show? and what compares to a double kidney infection and 103-degree fever during the 2000 nationals?

but I'm much better today, and experiencing the joy of simply not hurting. I don't know how people live with chronic pain. I'm so unbearable as it is. :)

so today's our day off, which means I need to do all my running around and calling and stuff because until I leave on Thursday (yay! back to NYC for NINE WHOLE DAYS!) we have rehearsal every day. which means I need to leave this room soon and venture out into the wilds of Los Angeles in seek of nourishment and productivity.

I've been reading Maxine Hong Kingston's "To Be The Poet" which I thought would be some sort of exploration of the theoretical intersection of prose/fiction and poetry, or some such thing -- but it's really just a rambling journal of her wanting to be a poet. interesting ideas in places, but for the most part it's primarily worthwhile to me as insight into the way one writer's mind works. in an effort to incite work based on other people's voices and lives, I've been reading more journals and journal excerpts wherever I can get them. I think it's important to be able to capture other people's rhythms if you're going to write non-autobiographical poetry. even if the rhythms aren't necessarily those of the exact person in whose voice one is writing, access to a variety of authentic cadences can only be helpful, if not absolutely necessary.

enough for now.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

wow, it's been a minute, as they say. and still so little time. writing from Pittsburgh, where we performed for two college classrooms this morning in an effort to drum up some audience for tomorrow's show(s), which will be the LAST SHOWS of this college leg of the tour. everybody's psyched about going home, except for me, because I'm not going home. sigh. I'm going to LA. sigh. BUT then I'll be in NYC, for somewhere between 6 and 11 days. then it's back to LA. sigh.

read Marisa de Los Santos' book, From the Bones Out. I'd quote from it, but I left all the books I've accumulated at home this weekend since we have to fly to LA tomorrow night. Oh, here's one I just uncovered online:

Women Watching Basketball

For us, five writers, it's partly
to do with the language, little spells,
hyphenated, elegant lingo,

words swirling like whiskey in the mouth:
pump-fake, post-up, two-guard,
pick-and-roll. We are casual.

Like Whitman--who'd have been a fan
for sure, adoring and bearded,
tossing his hat in the air

for the Knicks--we speak passwords
primeval, we enter this world
and belong. With adamant hands,

we argue calls, how best
to beat the double-team, the beauty
of an inside-outside game.

And, too, it's the players themselves
that attract us, their lives, loose-
linked fragments of story

each of us seeks and collects:
the guard's murdered father, the tranquil
center's Muslim faith,

ten-thousand winter coats
the rookie gave to children.
But, still, it's more than all

that. Oh, how to explain
why you love what you love?
Picture time-lapse photography,

the certain outward opening
of flowers, one circle of petals
at a time, a smooth unfisting

called to life by notes sounded
somewhere in the clenched heart,
the thirsty root-tips, the body

of the moist earth. Exhalation
of a long-held breath. Green
stem, delicate tendon,

twisting toward the sun.
Because it's like that,
a little, the turn-around fade-away

jumper. Though we know the ethereal
nicknames: Magic, Dream, Air,
what we want most is pure

corpus, sharp tug of tricep
and hamstring, five fingers' grip
on the ball--hard, perfect star--

back muscles singing, glorious
climb through the air. We imagine
it this way: to dunk would be life

from the bones out, would be
to declare, Divine is the flesh!
and for once to believe it, believe it.

****

See what I mean? The poems are so muscular (even the ones not about bodies, if any poem can really escape the body), so certain in their rhythms, like the way dancers walk -- they way dancers entirely inhabit their bodies, every movement seeming purposeful, these poems inhabit their space on the page. I want to write like this, so full of intent and ease simultaneously.

more later. must take care of unfun tasks during daylight and business hours.

Friday, March 12, 2004

OK, so we are staying on the road for two more weeks. We are cancelling the last set of shows in Iowa. What we don't know is whether we're going to LA for that week or home, and what happens after that. Sigh.

I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's snowing here. We were in Columbus Ohio this morning. It was also snowing there. Very confusing. Gina had to go back to LA for a funeral, and Robyn has the weekend off, so the bus is very testosterone-heavy right now. Shiver.

More later. Now I must eat. Hotel food, here I come! Please let there be vegetables...

Thursday, March 11, 2004

late late, and a long day: one conference call at 3 p.m. with Norman saying: come back to LA, focus your energies on the creative stuff, you don't need to be performing to such small audiences at these college shows when such Big Things are upcoming in the spring/summer, another conference call once we arrive in Columbus, this one involving more people saying we're essential and actually succeeding, some thousands of people are registering each time we're in a school newspaper, so... we may or may not be on the road for the next month. I may or may not be spending a bunch of time in NYC in April and May. I may or may not jump out this fifth-floor window with the madness of it all.

anyway, happy birthday to Steve, and it's onward and upward as we perform at Ohio State tomorrow. Howdy to mom and dad who drove three hours to Champaign-Urbana and three hours back all in one day to re-live Morrigan-day memories of being the primary audience for our show at U of I...

if I were in NYC I'd be writing more. bought books at the Strand (reports soon, two are already read) and wrote some stuff on the way out of town. I might post them after fixing them per GK's edits. but here's a quick one. they all seem to revolve around missing, missing...

when distance is distilled, what matters are atoms

the way if a car is moving faster than a bird
the bird appears simply to be levitating
I leave, though it only seems so --

the damp purse of my mouth
still kissing you goodnight, night and night,

the scent of lilacs everywhere breaking.

****

sigh. must sleep now. show in the a.m. arg.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

when I moved from Cincinnati back to Chicago and was looking for a job in PR, it came down to two job offers: one that I took, the other from a firm that REQUIRED that I take a personality test. the test took an entire afternoon. it included a creativity section that I'm still convinced included questions that had no answers, just to see if I'd run screaming from the room. the test gave you two or three seemingly unrelated words, and you had to supply the word that connected all the others -- like, feather, bulb, and the connector word is "light." but on and on.

so the firm wouldn't give me my results unless I took the job (run away! run away!) but they did say that I scored incredibly high on creativity (a good sign) but that I have trouble following through on tasks I dislike.

you need a personality test to tell you this? that I have trouble following through on tasks I dislike? who doesn't have trouble with that?

anyway, I don't usually do these online test things, but it's raining in LA, I've been up since the proverbial crack of dawn doing shows and rehearsing, I don't feel like writing about the tour at the moment. and there's not a damn thing on TV except "Panic Room" on HBO and that's freaking me out. I watch these movies and decide that I need to learn how to do more things. like electrical work, and shooting. you know, survival skills.

so here it is:
Cattell's 16 Factor Test Results
Warmth ||||||||||||||||||||| 66%
Intellect |||||||||||||||||||||||| 78%
Emotional Stability ||||||||||||||| 42%
Aggressiveness |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 82%
Liveliness ||||||||||||||||||||| 62%
Dutifulness ||||||||||||||| 46%
Social Assertiveness ||||||||||||||||||||| 62%
Artistic Interests |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 86%
Paranoia ||||||||||||||| 46%
Abstractness |||||||||||||||||||||||| 74%
Introversion |||||||||||||||||| 54%
Anxiety |||||||||||||||||||||||| 74%
Openmindedness |||||||||||||||||| 58%
Independence |||||||||||||||||||||||| 78%
Perfectionism |||||||||||||||||||||||| 74%
Tension ||||||||||||||||||||| 70%
Take Free 16pf based Personality Test


tomorrow we have most of the day off, then a party with lots of famous people. of course, since we're performing, it's sort of less of a party and more like work, but so it goes. between shows today, I went shopping with our beatboxer Joshua and bought a new pair of shoes (Fluevogs rock! especially on sale) for the event. life is consistently entertaining.

maybe I'll write something moderately intelligent tomorrow. for now, sleep. Jodie Foster has defeated the Panic Room bad guys and all is right with the world again.