Tag Archives: book

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We have a get-together. There is a relationship with the page. We have not shown that to you yet. More to be revealed. Discovery is suspect. Discovery process is pigheaded. Nerves are jazz. Music is the instrument. Tuning is resisted, this is discordance. This is the dance of discord. This is a sort of hyperbolic naming. This is a frustrated desire to name in an overnamed environment. This is afterwords. This is the wretchedness of the beach. This is me being me, and I won’t apologize. She says “Excuse me, everybody.” She says “Sorry.” She apologizes. Her voice is a snake and hers is a frayed carpet. A stalled carpet, crumpled in the infrastructure. A plan, a cornucopia. This is disaggregated. This is a collection. This is a hard time. This is opportunity management. This is a to-do list, a task list, a watch list. This is a water path. This is a box. This is a box of books. This is enjoying my handwriting. This is an addiction to form. This is a crusty rind of moldy sentences. This is an appearance. This is a disappearance. This is an over.

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april 17, 2007

The coldness of this spring to go out with the trash and breathe a moment in the cold air. To know yourself. I can’t really tell what’s going on. I feel an awful lot like a narrator. I have no story, just to let go of that tail.

The long tail, prehensile.

Happy tail, silly tail. Tail of my dreams.

And also—toil. And toile.

Old fashioned fabrics, what has happened to you? In Girl Scouts, I made a book of fabric swatches trying to learn their names like “Dotted Swiss.”

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There’s no commotion. I have a half-page left. I take whatever happens, but do I even have to say that? Stomachache. I want connection, with Chamunda, stomach-body. I want my ugly greedy demons that befriended me. I want to stop, I want to read a book. I feel saliva in my mouth. I hear the air conditioning alive in these tall ceilings. I hear the heater ticking. Robin out there looking at the Wetland sign.

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More reading, more writing. Right now my skin is salty with dried sweat, I’m jittery with coffee. There is no torpor. I am radiant in the fragility of March. The fleeting ice, the flavors in the atmosphere, the thin glittering legs of these lake birds, hunting, hunting. Fish? Wishing for a lot of frogs around the edges of my pond, wishing for a pond. My parents’ relationship with the spring peepers in their backyard swamp. Yes, I have boredom, ill will, yes, and guess what—it is mine. I saw and felt that here just now. How latent it remains, the tendency to blame. Here I am warm and contained, my teeth are singing off the fluid line of ink. The failbetter, the magazine. Lists of objects. A book, over-sized, with heavy plastic pages, inscribed (somehow) with freewrites. I feel breathless.

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I am interested in Artist’s Books. I really don’t want to publish an ugly standard book. I designed an ugly standard book and had it produced by Thomson Shore. That’s good. I learned a lot. I made some mistakes. It was good though. No way to teach you how to do this. I don’t want to be generous, don’t trust myself. I am not that generous. Not sure you have aptitude. I do not want to work with people without aptitude.

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Here are my projects—

I write a series about rivers, it feels really forced, much less interior than I’m used to.

I’m doing book design, an anthology. I feel like curling up in shame for the uneven obstreperous (bluntly) badness of this poetry and get defensive at the awes of horror over awkward typographic dumbnesses in Duncan’s Selected oh yes it is a bad book and—well, mine probably is too.

I’m writing a gigantic Hallmark card to 365 of my closest friends, a project which I never once get brave enough to mention because it’s absolutely a faux pas in circles like this to write about real people in a dumb form like “50 words,” not to mention being 50 which is also a mistake too grave to mention, so I shut up even though I secretly admire myself, if only for the year-long discipline (its roots in stubbornness).

I have a blog. Lisa acknowledges my blog on hers, kind words; we mention it once in person, then this contact sinks again into the pool of anonymity, mutual lurking. I decide I want to put more energy into my blog, I have sort of a grip on it as an aesthetic project so I post something almost every day in November, although this is quite strenuous, and sometimes, it’s only photos/fragments.

Lisa’s interest in plants helps me acknowledge that I have a yard, a garden, even a sort of love for certain specimens. I bring two plants indoors for the winter—parsley, rosemary—and plant cilantro seeds. The sage survives outside. I think of bringing Lisa some sage bundled as a gift, maybe wrapped in some embroidery floss. No thyme at the moment.

Umm…can’t get there from here. Can’t go to Naropa, can’t spend lots of money on classes when I’m 50 and Blair’s in college, can’t generate a poetic community like the Beats or the New York School springing up from the wasted garden void around me, can’t make contact, can’t begin to get excited again about an online journal project, any opportunity to publish or be published, any sights set higher than retirement sooner hopefully rather than later after I finish paying for the college education of my favorite anarchist who would never rub elbows with an institution unless the term was paid for by a foolish parent (yup that’s me).

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I wrote so much no one would want to pick up one of my notebooks and wade into that.

Writing—sort of below par—under the surface. Aimless.
Writing without the mountains.

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I am also reading the latest BANR (Best American Nonrequired Reading). I read the introductory material. I like it. I am there, on the fringes. Essentially light and non-required. I didn’t grasp that it was high school students. I like their giddy sensibilities.