{things & Things}

so there are good things in possible progress that I will not jinx by broadcasting but let us just say that SOMEbody's holding some poems for highly likely publication and somebody ELSE has others in final consideration for publication (all fingers crossed) and someBODYBODY else just might might champion a whole certain manuscript for publication... fingers and toes crossed, though that makes it hard to type or walk.

one good thing for sure: Monday's anniversary show. added to the previous line-up: Suheir Hammad, Regie Cabico, Staceyann Chin... now for the important question: what am I going to read?

must get back on a writing schedule. must get on a schedule of any kind! here's a revision of something I'm not sure I posted before:

what would charisma do in the back of a pickup truck?

what a drag to be a man
in a drab man jacket, blue
black blue, tie a splash, pastel
or red / what a shame, the weatherman
’s a eunuch, cold front moving, mouth
of rough marbles, full stop. tonight smiles
ride with no shocks, the truckbed
slick with saliva, something; oil, extra
rain, the teeth wriggle orgasmically, a junkie widow
in her husband’s blood, baby’s first piss, grins
sweeter than a president shot
during sweeps week, hotter
than molasses on fire.

{in our time}

On March 25, 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchersto the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial ofvoting rights to blacks.

http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/al4.htm

{anniversaries and whatnot}

so I'm not a big anniversary person. everything in my life tends to start-stop-stutter-start too much for me to lock in on dates, which I'm bad at remembering anyway. too many numbers involved.

however, Monday, April 4 is the 7-year anniversary of the now-legendary and soon-to-be-legendarier louderMONDAYS at Bar 13, and it's going to be a whoo-ee whizbang bring a new pen a blank notebook and your best drinking shoes kind of night.

our features: Patrick Rosal and Ishle Yi Park. Our invited readers have begun to reply to their invitations, and it's a glorious and growing list.

in addition to the fabulous louderARTISTS (Roger Bonair-Agard, Lynne Procope, Rachel McKibbens, Oscar Bermeo, Rich Villar, Matthew Charles Siegel, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Jessica Torres, Raymond Daniel Medina, Abena Koomson, Mara Jebsen, Fish Vargas, Elana Bell, Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani, Syreeta McFadden, and me!), we have amazing supporters reading, including:
Hal Sirowitz!
Michael Cirelli!
Dawn Saylor!
Edwin Torres!
Rob Neill!
Samantha Raheem!
Shelley Stenhouse!

and I just invited folks today. stay tuned for further commitments.

for those of you just tuning into the fabulous world of Bar 13, here are the details:

www.louderARTS.com
louderMONDAYS
every Monday at 13 Bar/Lounge
35 E. 13th St., Union Square, NYC
7 p.m.
$5 ($4 for students)
2-for-1 drinks all night

and on April 4, get there early if you want a seat.

notes to the unborn (ostara)

though it’s the vernal we’re wearing fall (this too
a symptom) what’s underneath is meaning’s
dictator (palimpsest, topography giving rise to
definition

the way ghosts give fever

a terrible reliance on the gaps
in syntax, the abandoned, that
look in your eyes

holy. a misuse of candles . the way
the mattress dips in the middle
after years, a cradle after so long

destroy the linear, hand
over hand, a ribbon (time) folded
now touching 1977, warp
and weft of a god’s loom

(this) is not a commentary on religion

no more yeast! no more frankincense!
the boy will grow into a ram
with or without our starred intervention.

{queen to... something}

Vandana started teaching me to play chess last night. and I wasn't awful! I think it's a good game, and good practice for me, in that it requires my seven-places-at-once brain to be focused on one thing, and that it indulges my love for contingency plans. Roger's thrilled that I'll have a new outlet for my "but what if" and "and what if" and "then what if" tendencies.

of course my poetry-obsessed brain immediately leaps to the writing implications for learning chess; once I have the basics down, I want to learn all the fancy terminology. then we'll see if it's an individual poem or a series (please let it be a series. that would be great.) Rita Dove has ballroom dancing, Brenda Hillman has alchemy and gnosticism, I've got chess. sure.

in any case, it's a relatively inexpensive hobby, and moved around sections of my brain that haven't been exercised in a while. excellent.

no blogging of late, life is extremely full. if I owe you a phone call or email, I will try to make amends this weekend.

so I did finish and submit an application to the Creative Capital Foundation (under spoken word) for the show that Lynne and Rachel and I are working on whenever we can rope off an hour or two. the questions they ask are actually quite interesting. here are highlights of my responses:

Spoken word is becoming pop music: predictable, entertaining, non-essential. To thwart this trend, Damage transcends the individual poem/individual voice, pushing spoken word into previously unimagined places with complex ideas, space for abstraction alongside narrative, use of visuals and sound, deep synthesis of word and experience such that the poets disappear and a tapestry of authentic voices and moments emerges. At once ancient and very Now, spoken word needs its artists to refuse the easy forms, to collaborate to carry poetry, spoken, to a place none of us can yet see.

***

… isn’t every uterus a prophet though / and every screamer a target …

We know where the silence lives, and how it festers. How its mouth feels under the duct tape, the plastic, the hand. How the hand changes his to hers to your own. We bite down. We spit back. We unlock jaws, and this is what comes out: broken IS whole, and no whole woman has not mended.

We women are handed false options: virgin/slut, doormat/bitch, waif/amazon. Damage refutes these acid nametags, defies that brokennesss necessarily begets frailty or bitterness. In poems, we voice women dead, unborn, mythical, fictional and present, dragging scars out of sleeves and calling them proof of life.

More than a show that strings together characters telling their various stories, Damage uses multi-voice poetry to address the porous nature of the self, the dichotomous truth that all experience is at once absolutely unique and infinitely repeated. The voices of Damage overlap and interweave, defying linear definitions of time and constrained notions of identity. Each woman who populates Damage is simultaneously a fragmented aspect of the overarching female Self, and a being unto herself, complete.

Damage is a text-based theatrical experience that will incorporate live original music and film composition in service of the spoken poetry. Debut performance is scheduled for July 2006. The women who populate Damage live in our bones and our books and sit next to us on the subway. It’s at their noisy insistence that we speak.

***

by the way, 900 characters is NOTHING to a verbose typist like me. answering the questions wasn't even the hard part. cutting the answers down to fit the character limitations left blood all over my new desk.

{dear weekend}

these made me laugh so hard I spit out my tea.

happy Friday!

{REM deprivation?}

on days I'm awakened by an alarm, I rarely remember my dreams. but for three days straight I've remembered them. day one highlight: in a subway station, small children keep climbing down on the tracks and I'm the only one worried enough to pull them back up. day two highlight: I'm somehow in charge of getting Princes William and Harry to safety. fortunately I have the correct key to the house. day three highlight: Bill Clinton is dead. I feel terrible for Hillary, but secretly think this might help her run for the presidency.

I blame Roger's insomnia.

{every day in every way becoming a better and better}
          
          
          
          
you know when you're rollercoastering so much that you can see the light shift with your mood?
          
yeah, like that.
          
          
          

{strange weight of names}

I work with someone with the same name as someone I with whom I was romantically if briefly but intensely involved. I’m becoming friends with someone with the same name as my first love. and it’s odd, I’ve not come across this before, that the names roll with such weight in my mouth, heavy and sweet, so freighted like each name’s a pomegranate but each of its seeds is the size and fullness of a berry, threatening to spill. in spite of my wild affection for these people these new faces that turn at the noise of these old names it’s strange, the overtaking of meaning, palimpsest: parchment on which the original writing has been effaced, and something else has been written. (Greek, palin, again; psao, I rub or efface.) or, palmimpsest: a landscape in which most of the topographic features are not related to the materials at the land surface but are inherited from a buried surface at depth. or, a block of memory(2) that has been allocated, freed (or reclaimed), and then allocated again. Such memory may contain data from the previous use if portions of it remain uninitialised. This commonly occurs on the stack, especially if the compiler allocates large stack frames in anticipation of allocating data structures on the stack. If the palimpsest is being scanned conservatively, such left-over data may cause unreachable objects to appear reachable and thus become floating garbage. If it is scanned precisely, such left-over data, if treated as pointers, is a bug.

which, ironically, is why my work computer keeps crashing.

          
          

I know they used to make purple uni-ball pens. why have they disappeared? why? I can live with the green one, but I miss the purple.

          
          
          

{whimper}

I hate this poem. help?
oh, and ignore the almost-invisible x's -- I can't figure out how to make the spaces work any other way in blogger. my tabs and multiple spaces disappear on screen. sigh.

return of the Evil Queen

the body’s a burglarized mirror
first the face, then a rib, now a hip
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxlocate the self as a solid
are you animal, mineral, salt or snow
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI said solid, marked, singing
undone?
xxxxx the jaw is an axe, sharp tooth
xxxxx unkissed, kissless, altogether yours (honed)

xxxxx location: the body. a mirror, not yours
xxxxx(not anymore)

hands unfisted in pockets, so much meat
one belly, atonal chorus of fluids. a constellation of scars

none of this is new.
whom did you scar in return?

apple, apple, apple, apple

replace: to be or to furnish an equivalent or substitute, especially for one that has been lost, depleted, worn out, or discharged

a communion of hysterics

if the body is bread, break me down