http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/
Alexis Orgera lives in Florida. She is the author of How Like Foreign Objects, available from H_ngm_n BKS, and two chapbooks: Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). She also writes at The Blog Poetic.
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.
1. Holy hell. Antichrist, the film, might have ruined my life. And on top of that, it was one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen. Talk about content versus craft. Fuck.
2. I dreamed last night that I had a reading in front of 1,000 or so people, and I hadn’t prepared. Got up on stage and couldn’t decide which poems to read. Blake Butler offered to read one of my poems for me, but I wouldn’t let him and proceeded to babble and choke my way through something until some audience member began playing the piano…
3. A girl I like:
Artist Kendra Binney
source
My friend cowfish
I miss you!
There’s an essay about sound and syntax in Plath’s poem “Nick and the Candlestick” in the latest Writer’s Chronicle. I haven’t read it. But I will on my way to Atlanta today. “Nick and the Candlestick” is one of my favorite Plath poems. Her line breaks fuck shit up.
Here’s a taste:
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinkingIt’s first communion out of my live toes. …
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPW9YU9z5gg
What do you think about the effectiveness of this kind of dissent?
Here’s a serious question. I’m 32. I’ve been reading here and there for a few years now. When I was young I had bad, migraine-inducing stage fright. But recently I’ve been fine. I’ve read in front of hundreds of folks without an iota of sweaty palmage or trilling voice. Then, today, I read in front of 10, maybe 15, people, and I was quaking in my boots. You could freaking see me shaking. AND, I wasn’t even reading my own poetry, rather some of my favorite poems by Yusef Komunyakaa.
So, what gives?
I wasn’t intellectually nervous, but my body at that moment said, fuck you. Why? Do any of you have stage fright moments or tips to share?
I’m loving Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. What a seduction technique: Your coyness might be cute if we weren’t going to die some day, but we’re mortal so let’s fuck. Ha. Read the poem out loud and pay attention to enjambment. It’s really lovely.
"The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace."
There are some very cool poems by Sophie Klahr up at the new issue of Strange Machine, particularly pond poem and the folding bird-like poem.
It’s fitting that the author of the book that inspired my new favorite tv show should appear in this piece, particularly due to his “abiding hatred” for the blogosphere. Thanks to all who participated. in the second installment of Group Efforts!
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS [REDUX]
We are goober. We are brontosaurus. In the back of a car, we are dumb luck.
We drink our quiet through a straw and piss whispers behind the neighbor’s shed.
Sometimes, when we are sleeping, ferns the size of houses make us cry. Not because we are sad. But because they are beautiful. And we are hungry.
*They,* however, have shown no interest in us or our activities. For that we are grateful, though not a little bemused.
Was it not they who, after considerable wining and dining, sold us on moving here?
Did they not offer our sons their daughters? We must be vigilant, lest we be unmoored.
[Our parents have no idea! Even though we are so close to home! They never know we are hungry! They never think we are asleep!]
And so one night we wake, the hunger in our heads spilling out like lantern light at last.
We shake our daughters from sleep and dress them, lacing their toe shoes and lowering their tulle veils. We tiptoe down the courtyard, past our full and sleeping parents, and lead our dancing daughters to their bridal feast.
Our greed is a moonslice on the gravel.
[I saw Buzz Bissinger in Pittsburgh. He sounds a lot like Lewis Black. Called a guy who asked a dumb, confrontational question a “fuckhead.” I like Buzz Bissinger a good deal.]
“Oh, woe!” cried the sisters. The tulle-veiled, toe-shoed, whispering fern-dream sisters. “We don’t like Pittsburgh! And we don’t like Lewis Black! Please don’t make us marry him! He sprays spittle! Every time he speaks!”
*Please don’t make us…
I read that Buzz Bissinger hung himself the next day. He didn’t even leave a note.
Just a birthday card from his mother. The card was three weeks late and did not even make a joke of its own belatedness. I doubt the sisters read the newspaper. I know *they* don’t. Our parents don’t read at all.
If I have to hear the phrase pitch perfect one more time, I’m going to throw up in someone’s shoes. What does that mean? I mean, what does it really mean?
P.S. The second installment of Group Effort is coming soon!