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.
I’m curious about your job and how you negotiate job vs. creativity–or if there’s a difference. Take my survey? I’ll post results/anonymous responses and conclusions when I get enough responses. A Job Worth Doing
1. I’m reading Gail Mazur‘s new book of poems, Figures in a Landscape. The final two couplets of the title poem, an ekphrasis of the imagination:
If no one looks at us, do we or don’t we disappear?
The landscape would survive without us.When you’re in it, it’s not landscape
any more than the horizon’s a line you can stand on.
In this book I’m encountering the melancholy of a beach in winter, a poet microscoping her life and then telescoping her life, a poet who’s so careful with every word that sometimes I’m afraid I will break them just by thinking too hard.
2. The Summer 2011 issue of Sixth Finch is up and running. I just enjoyed Leora Fridman’s “Pistons,” which begins, “I tap out my knowledge of neatness on an old machine for / sending pigeons,” and flaps out into laser beam lunacy. The issue, wholly, invokes small town, prairie view summers. Potted plants of madness and bleeding cow heads abound.
3. When you wake up in the morning, do you have a song in your head? Mine is “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins most days. This morning, though, it was “Proud to Be an American.” This is the morning after reading about TBHQ in our chicken McNuggets and how, according to the St. Pete times today, Tea Party members in Florida are tackling a new issue: manatees. “We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.” God forbid we limit our drunken boating excursions.
I went to see Midnight in Paris last night. It was silly and predictable and obvious. And I loved it. Owen Wilson played a great Woody Allen. Rachel McAdams, a truly hateful soon-to-be wife. But their story is really just a vehicle to get the actual narrative rolling. When Wilson’s character, Gil, a hack screenwriter trying to be a novelist, starts going back in time on some freak Cinderella-story midnight stroll and meets up with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, Stein, Dali, Man Ray, Cole Porter, TS Eliot–there are many more–I couldn’t help but be giddy. I’ve always wanted to see these people in action–and there they were. Hemingway talking in Hemingway sentences, Zelda Fitzgerald’s buzzing mania, Dali rambling incoherently about rhinos, Picasso a little bald, Stein the gentle aunty. Sure, Allen’s depiction was as Disney as it gets. Sure, Allen was indulging in pure fantasy, and I fell hard. I left the movie theater…dancing. This is not a movie review. I’m not generally a Woody Allen fan, even. This is a note about surprise. I went to see Midnight in Paris because there was nothing else worth watching, and I wanted to sit in the local art house theater with a very full glass of Pinot Noir, some Dots, and a handsome date. I’m surprised that make- believe can still give me joy. I’m happy that I haven’t totally given up on the fairytale. And it’s cute to see Wilson playing Cinderella.
1. When I was little, I loved for my mom to read me this poem by Elinor Wylie before bed:
SEA LULLABY
The old moon is tarnished
With smoke of the flood,
The dead leaves are varnished
With color like blood,
A treacherous smiler
With teeth white as milk,
A savage beguiler
In sheathing of silk,
The sea creeps to pillage,
She leaps on her prey;
A child of the village
Was murdered today.
She came up to meet him
In a smooth golden cloak,
She choked him and beat him
To death, for a joke.
Her bright locks were tangled,
She shouted for joy,
With one hand she strangled
A strong little boy.
Now in silence she lingers
Beside him all night
To wash her long fingers
In silvery light.
2. A wonderful essay, “Landscape and Narrative,” by Barry Lopez. Lopez writes, “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
1. Michael Rapaport in the movie Special.
2. Isak Dinesen’s short story, “The Blank Page.” Read it here.
3. The first paragraph of Winter’s Bone, a book I was given before it made the now-infamous and stupidly misguided List, which I began reading today. At least it has a female protagonist? Nice sounds:
…Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs…
Townspeople at a reading
I’ve been doing some readings lately for my new book. I’ve read at colleges, in the community, at art centers. I’ve sold a lot of books at these readings. I’ve watched people smile and cry at these readings. Sometimes people laugh at the right times, sometimes they laugh at the wrong times. Always, people seem to be hearing me. Except for the one deaf guy who told me I read too fast. People buy books for themselves, for their daughters, for their childhood best friends.
Poets talk a lot about how poetry is dead to mainstream culture. Nobody wants poems anymore. Well, I’m beginning to wonder about that. Have we, the poets, created an insular world for ourselves because we’re insecure about our words? Is it safer to keep ourselves sequestered in the academy–or even on the internet where we know the audience who reads our work will respond in a way familiar to us? Is it frightening to think that we might write something not quite as erudite as we imagined?
The first Monday in May. A strange and beautiful day. Here are three things to peruse at work today besides the news of dead terrorists and decimated towns:
The new Sixth Finch, Spring 2011
At The Offending Adam, writers from or with connections to Alabama.
