Dear Judas

At 5 p.m. today the chill began to set in and I remembered.
The dusk clouds grew heavy. The eyes began to wander towards naps.
I ate dinner, alone, in bed, not thinking of you.

Weeks ago we saw each other
passing through the corridor, trying to move
with the walls, disappear like marble,
your eyes little lizards dashing under dead leaves
and mine, frozen
mouth barely moving
as I ducked into the feathered blue coat of the woman walking with me.

It’s been six months, at most, now,
and I’ve been afraid to count.
You gave me up like that,
left me on the living room floor
heavy with sleep & grasp & blankets
and a lingering taste, penetrative
you wrung around, thinking
If the firepit could be so beautiful,
I’d try to make it love me too

after I had waited outside the gravesite for you
someone
to come help me move
the boulder, for nights, for three of them,
only the applied visions coming to haunt me
when you came to wake me up, and I wept, and waited some more.

I am awake most nights.
I spend most my time alone, to others,
I am either a priest or a whore
which is still probably what they thought before
you came to me, wet, from a rainstorm
you invented as you watched me sleep
thinking of my dreams, of the reason
why I waited so long for him to come back
and why when it was you, you couldn’t take me,

wishing we had never moved the boulder,
that I had never waited, that you had never watched,
that we didn’t tell the stories like some god had been talking to us,
that I couldn’t be the undersigned, could be anything else,
and you could be, too, no more legends

like you were the door I was trying to open,
a slab of wood that would never know
who, exactly, had carried it on its shoulders—

I want to sleep unalone again.
I can’t until you get out of my bed.

 

 

Previously published in The Legendary. 

Filed under: Poetry, poetry

My Concerns

Someone just messaged me on facebook chat to confirm that my students are reading at his event on Friday. I responded, apologizing for not getting back to him sooner, then I glanced at my facebook profile and realized that I’d spent the past hour playing Words With Friends.

My cellphone has been losing battery all day. I have two voicemails I’ve tried to listen to, but each time I entered the passcode, it died in my hands. I came home and opened Gmail to realize I haven’t checked my email since Saturday, and I’ve had an unopened email from Eileen Myles just sitting there for at least a day.

What is wrong with me?

I am a mess. It feels like a long time since I really got to focus on myself–it’s something you can’t miss, don’t even notice, until it’s gone. The good news is, I’m not completely wasting it with Zenga-induced dream states. For example, we just got the proof of The Desperate Reader today,  and I’m almost done doing the final editorial tweaks. The question is, how is it that I never seem to be able to find the time to do everything yet still waste so much of my time?

This weekend I finally said enough with obligations and spent almost the entirety sitting in my room, working on a single poem. This is unheard of for me. Although I work on my writing often, I rarely produce new work, and when I do, it’s in short bursts; something I return to when I have the time. I think I have what the textbooks call “a breakthrough.” The problem is, it doesn’t seem to matter. Today, reading my poems coming out in The Desperate Reader, I felt incredibly dissatisfied with myself, and coming home to the large amount of correspondences that need immediately attention only made me feel more useless.

The life of a poet is one of complete masochism. The stereotype is that we’re complete fuck-ups; we’re nerds, we’re suicidally depressed, we’re alcoholics or drug addicts, or we’re just weirdos who can’t seem to get their life straight and get a real job. Realistically, a real poet never feels satisfied with their own work. Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot all spent decades working on single poems. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for a poet to look back on work they prided themselves on a year ago and completely hate it (which is exactly what happened to me today).

I often feel like Sisyphus, only I’m chain-smoking and just trying to get some sleep while rolling the fucking boulder up the hill. Not to mention there are tons of distractions. Hey, stop messing with that impossible boulder and book shows for famous poets you’ve never even met. Pay them with money you don’t have! Also, start this small press and start working 40 hours a week on the opposite side of the city. By the way, what are taxes and how do they work?

I don’t feel like my life has made sense in a while. At the same time, there is this undeniable joy I get from being this way. Being a poet is all I ever wanted since I was 14. It may not be the hardest gig in the world to get, and it may not pay the rent, but I’m doing it. If nothing else, I can say I’m living out my dream, which is not something everyone can say.

I just keep telling myself that one of these days, it will settle down. I’ll be able to read all the good books I’ve been meaning to read. I’ll write a poem every day. I might even delete my facebook, if I can get into the habit of checking my email and charging my cellphone. But for now, let’s just hope that the other side is glorious, because it’s the only lie that keeps me feeding.

Filed under: Blog, poet

Three Awesome Things I Discovered This Week

I know I’ve been slacking in the regular updates department lately and it’s shameful. The truth is, I was busy spending time with these three awesome people:

1. Lisa Robertson 

Last week at work I had the pleasure of creating a literary anthology section and came across dozens of copies of the Chicago Review that’d been sitting around the bookstore for years, probably. My boss let me have a copy of their Spring 2006 issue, a large portion of which is devoted to Lisa Robertson. Little did he know that I had already combed through her 20-page poem, “Palinodes,” and was primed to consume every piece of literature written and about her in the issue. One of the first lines in her poem is “Though my object is history, not neutrality/I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme,” which made me do the bookworm equivalent of a fistpump in my brain. I’ve read the whole poem through a couple times now and keep finding more and more to get excited about. Not to mention her statement on the art form is pretty intriguing, too (emphasis added):

I need a detailed account of passivity so I’m trying to make one. I have never completed an act of passivity. I built nothing. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I memorize in my bed at night and loose the words in my sleep. I record that loss. I started thinking about passivity by studying furniture. I picture here the sociality of cinema, but with no image–Derek Jarman’s Blue perhaps. I thought of a bed. I thought of a chair. I thought of a cupboard. I want to think about the shapeliness of reception, about expectancy recumbent. I wanted to participate in change. I was lucky and I was wrong. I’m not sure it’s identity.

She also has a great poetic essay on the history of clouds in that issue, an interview that explores her relationship with feminism and DIY art scenes, and a whole lot of other stuff that got me excited. At the risk of going on too long, I encourage you all to pick up a copy of Chicago Review Spring 2006 (we have a few copies at Powell’s in our amazing anthology section too!).
2. Britney Spears

My friend Megan Burbank read a hilarious and so-damn-true essay on Britney Spears circa 2007 at Bad News Bible Church on Saturday which had me knee-slapping for the entire eight minutes she was on stage (and every once in while quietly confiding in Julia, “I relate to that SO MUCH.”). Today her piece was posted on Pank Magazine, one of my favorite online publications. Despite the essay being pretty specific to Megan’s experience at Smith College, I think it capture the essence of what it was like to be a college-aged woman with ironic tastes in 2007, and the sudden awareness of that situation that Britney Spears evoked.

For better or for worse, Britney Spears was a mentally ill woman living out her nightmare in the pages of Us Weekly. She had also become human to us in a way that was identifiable. And if anyone could relate to a woman who was going a little crazy, it was surely the women of Smith College. We were a rare mix of estrogen and neuroses. Most of us were on antidepressants. We went to our six free counseling sessions every semester like it was our job. After about two days at Smith, you learned that if you saw a girl bawling on the steps of the library, you let her do her crying in peace. It wasn’t so much that we were unhappy as that we were swimming in age-appropriate confusion, and trying to be proactive in the face of our anxieties. And we were beginning to suspect that Britney Spears was one of us.

(Read the whole piece here! It’s worth it, I promise!)
3. Vermin Supreme

This whole Republican caucus thing has me really stressed out. Mitt Romney might be okay, but both Gingrinch and Ron Paul scare the shit out of me, and all of them are vocal opponents of women’s rights (and, let’s be real, human rights in general). Therefore it’s really comforting to me that I’ve finally discovered a Republican candidate who represents my best interests: Vermin Supreme, a self-proclaimed “friendly fascist — a tyrant you can trust.” Imagine a country where we work on a pony-based economy, adhere to a mandatory toothbrushing law, and the “awesome power of zombies” is harnessed by giant turbines. This video pretty much tells you everything you need to know:

And remember, kids, a vote of Vermin Supreme is a vote completely thrown away.

Filed under: Blog, britney spears, lisa robertson, poetry, politics, pop-culture, vermin supreme

Happy Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade & Blog For Choice Day

Me and my friend Amelia are a lot alike. She’s the one who got me into Blog for Choice Day the past two years. But this year, we have similar sentiments:

I’ve spent the past week or so trying to figure out what to write in honor of Roe vs. Wade‘s 39th anniversary today.  As anyone who knows me is already aware, it’s incredibly important to me.  And it wouldn’t take long for those who didn’t know that to figure it out.  … So I’m not about to pass up the opportunity to commemorate something so significant.  But I’m still unsure of what to say.  There are two reasons for this:

• I feel like we’re still trying to solve the same problems we were dealing with a year ago.  [...]
• This issue has hit particularly close to home for me this year, and I have a lot to say about it  (someone really important to me had an abortion just last week).  But I can’t talk about it publicly, because she has asked me not to.  [...]  She’s keeping quiet about it because society makes it really hard on women who speak up.

I love Amelia for being so poignant on this issue, and I feel the exact same way.  I think most people have a complicated relationship with abortion, which is why it’s such a hot-button issue.  Everyone knows someone who has experienced unwanted pregnancies, resulting in abortion or live birth.  The decision to have or not have children is such an intensely personal decision, yet there’s so much judgment in this society on either side.  Like Amelia, the issue of abortion hits very close to home for me–for a lot of people.

In a lot of ways, I think I’m in denial.  Abortion is such a safe and common surgical procedure.  Roe vs. Wade has remained for almost 40 years.  The conservative rhetoric scares the shit out of me, especially during a presidential election, but I have a hard time believing that abortion will ever actually become illegal.  I think we’re far beyond that point as a society… at least in theory, right?

Filed under: Blog, abortion, blog for choice day

Blue, the Color Blue

She left the painted leaf
between the covers of naked lunch
and her name inked on your skin, pinned
into you with basement-light clarity

By the time she called you only to hang right back up
she had become buried under the black permanent line
traced with insistency

The breath of pages dropped into my lap, pressed blue
like the ocean.
I asked: what’s the Puerto Rican word for ocean?

he said: she would have kept it in her hair
(if she pulled her hair back)
instead she left it in the pages of your favorite book
you gave to her

perhaps so that it could fall into your lap
as if she had whispers, as if she had
fallen cold
& asleep
so that you would touch
what was not given

shutter, instead
at the dead air that comes
after hearing the voice
you never wanted again:

what’s the Puerto Rican word for betrayal?

Blue, the color blue
ninety-five percent of the surface of the world,
most of the sky; blue—
what she left
for you, to find, in finding
with the dead dying leaf
in the turning pages
I watched him keep

what she put in place
for the hindsight, blue,
the foreigner, blú,
the backwash, the stab back, the whiplash
traded in for a skinny blond to be
so sweet
so
all
black
and
blue

The water: blue.
Her bloodlines: blue.
Silver bullets: blue.
Page turned: blue. Paper cuts,
blue. Glue on acrylics, also blue.
The skin under the line over her name

blue, blue, blue.

Blue like the ocean.
Blue like the word for
forget. Blue
like the color
like the collar
like the eyes
of someone new.

 

 

Previously published in The Legendary. 

Filed under: Poetry, poetry

Slam Theory 101: One Poet’s Take on the Competition Today

Last night, my work as a coordinator for Louder Than A Bomb culminated in the West Side Regional Invitational, a competition me and my commune-mate/brother-in-arms Nate organized because we’re absolutely insane. We got involved in the first place because I asked Young Chicago Authors’ performance director, Robbie Q. Telfer, quite pointedly, “What can I do to get involved?” He responded that he needed a West Side regional slam, since there were regional slams for every other area of Chicago proper. So, in September 2011, Nate and I set forth, with literally nothing — no budget, no volunteers, no backing administrations, no teams, no funding, no venue, and no nothing else other than our whiteboards and creative writing educations– to put on this slam.

Well, we did it. After several months of putting on our business pants and talking to professionals, applying for grants, sending emails, corralling volunteers and opening bank accounts, we did it. Most importantly, we partnered with a school, not only to provide us a venue, but a team to coach. So not only were we dark overlords of the arts organizing corner of the world, we were able to get directly involved with the young people we were trying to serve. It ultimately became the most important part of organizing for us, calling off our day jobs and sacrificing important rent money every week in order to teach these young kids everything we know about poetry and the art of performing it.

A little bit of backstory: Louder Than A Bomb is the world’s largest youth poetry festival, with roughly a hundred different Chicago-area schools participating each year, thousands of high school students, and dozens of poetry-related events. Louder Than A Bomb–LTAB for short–has spread across the country in recent years from Tulsa to Kalamazoo. It’s primarily a slam poetry competition–the word “slam” is known for sending poets and poetry appreciators across the world into a cringing hissy-fit. However, LTAB does an excellent job at building camaraderie, not just among youth teams, but among competing students. There’s an excellent documentary about Louder Than A Bomb that recently aired on OWN and will soon be available for purchase (educator copies have been available for a few years but cost a couple hundred dollars).

A little about me: I’m the same age as the kids in the documentary. I didn’t grow up in Chicago, but the youth poetry slam was a huge part of my life while I was in high school in Michigan. I loved writing poetry, and with my fledging background in theater and performance arts, the art form was perfect for me. I have little doubt that if it hadn’t been for slam poetry when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have a degree in poetry, nor doing something as crazy as organizing a massive regional poetry slam from the ground up.

A confession: I’ve never won a poetry slam.

Filed under: Blog, Misc. Prose, louder than a bomb, poetry, slam

Good Grief by Stevie Edwards: A New Myth

“Let’s write a new myth, one without fire.”

–Stevie Edwards, Good Grief

I met Stevie Edwards at an open mic a few years ago and since then I’ve been entranced by both her mind-blowing poetry and her undiluted spirit. Needless to say, I was totally amped when she gave me the okay to do a review of her forthcoming, first full-length book, Good Grief, which you can pre-order from Write Bloody now (it’s coming out in March!). Although I personally know Stevie, I’m going to put that aside so that you can understand just how badass this book is:

Stevie Edwards was one of a handful to win the Write Bloody Manuscript Contest this past summer, which in the poetry world, is the equivalent to being signed to Matador or Kill Rock Stars circa 1990. For those of you who aren’t nerdy enough to understand my indie music reference: basically, your career is set, because Write Bloody not only has an emphasis on publishing some of the best living poets today, but also on touring, requiring its artists to do 20 shows a year, which usually includes a round or two of well-paying colleges dying to get a WB Artist in its auditorium. Write Bloody has a reputation for publishing some of the most successful and iconic slam poets of the past 10 years (Buddy Wakefield, Anis Mojani, Beau Sia, Taylor Mali, among many others), which makes Good Grief all that more exciting to me–Edwards doesn’t give a shit about being a slam poet. Never has, and probably never will. Okay, okay–so admittedly, she’s actually terrified of slam poetry, but it’s pretty obvious the career boost that comes with being a successful competitive poet isn’t necessary for Edwards. Between being the editor-in-chief of Muzzle Magazine, and being one of four first-year Poetry MFA students at Cornell, she doesn’t need any sort of gimmick to promote her already fledging career.

Filed under: Book Reviews, Writing, forthcoming, poetry, stevie edwards, write bloody

How I Met Dean Wareham

I came across this memoir at the bookstore one day, and I’m not sure what, exactly, made me want to pick it up. Maybe it was the front-cover blurb by Liz Phair, one of my all-time favorite singers. Or maybe it was Wareham’s sultry stare and slightly agape mouth. I certainly didn’t recognize him, or realize that the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna (whom I both enjoy) were related, but I bought it that day on impulse, and read through it rather quickly.

I often found myself at odds with Wareham throughout this book. He’s kind of a dick, which seems to be the only brand band frontmen come in. A good fraction of this book details his personal life, including his privileged upbringing and his years of cheating on his wife. Plus, I think he could have been helped a bit by a ghostwriter or a good editor, as there were a lot of very self-indulgent details that I didn’t care for… Really, dude? I don’t care about the relative dryness of the paella you ate in Spain. This isn’t too surprising to me, since Wareham also talks a lot about his process as a lyricist, and I’ve always found him to be a little lacking in that department (and which he seems to hold himself in very high regard to). But by the end of it, I felt like I “got it” a little bit more–the mundane repetition of details about touring and band member squabbles make so much of the book in such a cyclical sense because that’s so much of what being part of a band means.

Filed under: Book Reviews, Writing, book reviews, britta phillips, dean wareham, galaxie 500, indie music, luna

I’m so young, I’m so goddamn young.

I’ve recently come across a post on a stranger’s blog on how to improve your drawing skills, which I don’t give a shit about. What I did notice was a debate unfolding between him and rebloggers on his tip about art school:

The Million Dollar Question: “Should I go art school?”

Speaking from experience and graduating from a horrible HORRIBLE school, I say if you INSIST on going to an art school only go if you’ve done your research on the school of your choice. Art Schools do have benefits to them I won’t lie, but truth be told the negative HEAVILY outweighs the positive in this day and age with more useless art schools that look nice but don’t have the quality info you need. … If you must take college courses then PLEASE do research and don’t make the same mistake I made by diving into debt and neglecting to look for other schools that have better information. Don’t be fooled by schools that say “THIS FAMOUS ANIMATOR WENT HERE!” because chances are the quality in the classes have dwindled since then. 1 Step forward and 2 steps back and falling down a flight of stairs. Unless you’re loaded then go for whatever school you want, I guess. …

I was immediately kind of incensed by this, as someone who went to art school and got a whole lot out of it. Art school is probably a waste for people like the OP, who apparently makes money off of doing anime commissions and mentions in his bio that he’s obsessed with “red pandas, squirrels, owls, sheep, racoons, foxes and crows.” Besides the point, I worked my ass off when I was in school and got a lot out of it. I graduated from Columbia College, which is notorious for its high drop-out rates–after my first semester, almost all of the friends I’d made out of the incoming freshmen pool had dropped out, and all that remained were a few friends I had who were upper-classmen. But also, a lot of them had good reasons, and one friend I’ve kept in touch with has gone on to be a successful comedian while I was toiling away over essays and portfolios.

I was mulling over things a bit working my real job at the bookstore. I have my college degree, and I am doing a lot–living in an art collective, teaching, starting a small press–but I’m not making a living off of it. Once school was over I made my living off of writing for a few months–as a freelance/ghostwriter, mostly writing for rich businessmen who wouldn’t even have cared to take a creative writing class in high school–and then one day I realized that I couldn’t afford the luxury of taking a client to court over rent money, and got myself saddled up at a sweet used bookstore. It’s nice, but I’m not using my degree in more than superficial ways to earn my income, and meanwhile I’ve watched my stress go through the roof and my social life dwindle as my time not at work is consumed by my “career” as a poet.

Filed under: Blog, Misc. Prose, Writing, art school

Malort

Some days you can muster up enough confidence to pick your own songs on the jukebox. Take a shot of malort no more than three years late. It’s been almost a week since Easter and you haven’t had any chocolate, have consumed more cigarettes than calories, Arnold Palmer like your Moses in the desert, and many things have come to pass. Pick White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and The Divynles in that order. Dip out after the eighth “I Touch Myself” and head back to your brainspots, speckled all over the face you forgot to powder, uncomfortable on the unwiped toilet seat, the smell of tequila and shit holding up your nostrils in the beer light. Today, a pigeon will try to land on your hair. You tried to part yourself a different way. Get stuck with twenty minutes of a parade of bikes and wish you could pedal with them, behind the Lounge Guy with a speaker strapped to his back, and think of the good karaoke songs from last night. Think, “This is my statue.” Think, “These roads follow the patterns of pedestrians and glaciers.” At some point, the pronouns don’t seem to matter that much anymore. All have taken their keys out during the passing, the white t-shirts and darkened coats and the faces hidden under hats, the brown paper bags containing discretion, the mud still stuck on the bottom of the shoe. Empty feet and mp3′s waiting at the foot of the bed. Turn up the audio. Make the neighbors crazy. Make them ears not be so alone.

Previously published in The Legendary. 

Filed under: Poetry, poetry