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.
(Sam, The World’s Ugliest Dog, chupacabra stand-in)
Dear Self,
It’s 10:30 on New Year’s Eve. You won’t make it until midnight. You’re tired and achy and your head’s swimming. You feel like throwing up.
The moon’s bright, and clouds sling tracks across the sky.
You’ve been thinking tonight, which is ever-dangerous, about why you sit down to write every day. Why do you do this thing that has very little return in the free market? That few people will ever read? That some will hate?
Self, you are too sincere, not nearly ironic enough. You are way too un-cool: hipster-with-a-fannypack-for-a-purse-uncool. Self, I know what you’re thinking—you’ve got books strewn around you on New Year’s Eve, you look drunk—but you’re thinking about urgency, the deep and monstrously incoherent need to believe in something against a backdrop of post-postmodern self-conscious irony, gluttony, and emotional vacancy.
Self, I’ve been reading over your shoulder. You think you do it because READ MORE >
This week AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room is featuring the Teach Your Chicken to Fly Training Manual. For those cities trying to legalize chicken-cooping within city limits, this book could be dangerous.
Or, what I did over Christmas Weekend.
1. Liked a photo called “Sawhorse Buddha” from an upcoming series by Josh Grigsby:
2. Read A poem from Lana Turner Journal called “Market Forces Are Brighter Than The Sun” by Cathy Park Hong, which is crunchy and smudgy and full of errant exclamation points.
3. Read Less Than Zero and felt wonderfully wretched afterward. This excerpt encapsulates the book for me:
While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was “so hot, too hot.” I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They’re still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins get to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that’s playing on the Walkman I’m wearing. The Go-Go’s are singing “I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away.” Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing “Vacation” and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.
Plus One:
Watched The Lakers get spanked by the Cavs. This made my Christmas, especially when they got whiny and pouty about it. Phil Jackson, I love you, but you can be a spoiled brat.
Urban Perspective with Self-Portrait, Federico Garcia Lorca from graphicwitness.org
1. …and I just spilled coffee all over García Lorca’s “Dance of Death” from Poet in New York. Just listen to these lines (read them aloud, I mean):
They are gone, the pepper trees,
the tiny buds of phosphorous.
They are gone, the camels with torn flesh,
and the valleys of light the swan lifted in its beak.It was the time of parched things,
the wheat spear in the eye, the laminated cat,
the time of tremendous, rusting bridges
and the deathly silence of cork.
Now imagine those lines swimming in Starbucks Christmas blend. What is a laminated cat? WHAT IS A LAMINATED CAT? (Other than the band or the song.) I don’t care–I’m a believer in Keats’ negative capability argument:
when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Which could be a handy way of getting out of analysis, but I don’t think so.
If you buy any book with that holiday gift card from Aunt Mitzy, go out and get García Lorca’s Selected Verse, Revised Bilingual Edition, edited by Christopher Maurer. With cover art by the poet. I don’t actually understand very much Spanish, but I think it’s important to read the Spanish aloud anyway to get the rhythm and lilt into my bones.
2. On a more ridiculous note, I reread The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett this weekend. Yes, that’s The Secret Garden, the book many of you (girls?) read when you were nine or ten. I was at my parents’ house and forgot to bring a book. Dickon was one of my first literary crushes. He went around with a pet raven on his shoulder (those of you who know me will recall my only tattoo).
Remember the books that made you fall in love with reading? And the characters you first fell in love with? What were they? Sometimes I think we all get so caught up in what’s going on now, what’s cool now, that we forget the importance of our formative literary experiences…
3. Interesting article about female sexuality as portrayed in the media (New York Times).
Duke Basketball 1991-92, the year they beat the Fab Five.
1. I go back to Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s apocalyptic/environmental art-photography often. The Architect’s Brother pretty much inspired all of the poetry I wrote in my early twenties. In book form, there’s an essay by W.S. Merwin called “Unchopping a Tree.” It begins:
Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places.
Maybe this dude is old news, but I just found out about NYC Garbage by Justin Gignac via a newish blog called polis I’ve been reading. Here’s what the polis folks say about themselves:
polis is a collaborative blog on urbanism with a global focus. It is a space for our regular contributors and readers to share ideas and information about anything and everything urban from multiple lenses.
But back to the garbage: from the outset I wanted to hate the guy who figured out how to market crushed cans and mangled plastic spoons from the streets of NYC. But I don’t know. The collecting part, more than the academic arguments about the irony of preserving and profiting from the very stuff that’s creating environmental havoc, etc., is what I can’t shake. Here’s maybe why: