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.
“This is not a new set of tricks but a new poetic personality.”
–Edmund Wilson
(blurb on the back of Berryman’s Sonnets)
1. 
I’ve just been road-tripping and hiking for a week around parts of the South I somehow missed as a kid growing up…in the freaking South. I was struck by the shards of interesting (inter-sting) language I came across. There was the odd sign that read “Paches” instead of “Peaches,” and the randomly hyphenated “To-day” along winding country roads, but also the above wonderfully descriptive poster from Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, TN (and also online here). They have great stuff, and their shop is 90% letterpress studio with only a storefront sliver of retail space.
2. The Knoxville Museum of Art had a fabulous exhibition called Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South by Baldwin Lee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty. Great stuff. Some photos from the now-closed exhibition are here. I didn’t know Welty was also a photographer, but I discovered in her photos a wonderful sense of composition, a writerly eye, if you will, creating character and mood and narrative in one shot. The dean of the library I work in uses the phrase One Stop Shopping. I like that for the feeling of completeness I get from her photos.
Here’s one that I loved:
3. Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, TN? What a redneck Disney World. Some t-shirts from a storefront in Gatlinburg:
It’s Saturday morning. I have missed capoeira practice because of last night’s asinine behavior. I’m sitting in front of the tv watching the VH1 Top 20 Countdown. Adam Lambert is doing his Mad Hatter / Mad Max / wood nymph thing.
My friend says to me, “Is this the video that makes us suspect that music itself might have dementia?” Then he says something about the structuralist utterance out of the void. Fuck, this music really is bad. It’s not just that I’m getting old, is it?
This same house guest, I just discovered, was responsible for this bathroom poetics when it originally read “SUCK IT.”
Are the enemies of God welcome here at the Bay Shore Mennonite church? Verse 11 of Matthew 5 reads, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” But, seriously, what if the enemies of God (whatever that means) walked into church one Sunday morning screaming obscenities or staging a hunger strike in front of the podium? I seriously doubt the Mennonites would be down. Not to mention, this sign is probably not saying what it means (or meaning what it says for that matter). Does it mean, “Praise and worship the enemies of God” or “The enemies of God are welcome here” or “Praise and worship. The enemies of God, with reference to the Beatitudes. Welcome” ?
Look at this (bathroom poetics No. 3):
I believe that someone in the bathroom stall at Smokin’ Joes was tired after a few beers, a few missed opportunities, too much inhaled smoke. I believe it because it’s a likely scenario. But welcoming the enemies of God into your place of worship is not as likely on a number of levels, the most obvious being that “enemies of God” is the dumbest phrase in the world. Not that I am a realist, by a long shot. I like unlikely scenarios when the writer gives me the freedom (leeway, wiggle room) to not believe them literally.
A good article titled “The Second ‘Second Sex'” about translation, specifically of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Have you translated? What are your problems/concerns with translating?
Another interesting one in The Chronicle about vampires and dead people in general: “All the Dead Are Vampires.”
A + B = C. de Beauvoir plus dead people = A Very Easy Death. I haven’t read this memoir of de Beauvoir’s mother’s death in a long time, but I remember it being a powerful meditation on death. Describing her mother’s fears after a fall in the bathroom that breaks her femur, de Beauvoir writes, READ MORE >
1. In grad school I took a wonderful course on the poetry (and lives) of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell taught by the poet Gail Mazur. I was fascinated, in particular, with Robert Lowell’s mental illness and how it affected his artistic life. Lowell’s poem “Eye and Tooth” is ostensibly about a cut cornea (“My whole eye was sunset red,” it begins), but in the end it’s about manic depression and how, duh, it tinges the way he sees the world:
I’m sitting in that new office I told you about. The one with the blue farmhouse table and the big picture window. It rocks! There are little pink flowers outside—too delicate, it seems, for the Florida summer, but there they are. I’m trying to write the editor’s note for the latest issue of New CollAge and coming up disastrously short on coherent sentences.
So here are two procrastination links in honor of, well, procrastination.
1. John Wooden wrote this for Poetry magazine just before he died. I always wondered where Bill Walton got his poetical commentating prowess. Looks like I have found my answer. Great line from the piece, “The rules of poetry are and should be flexible; good words in good order is good enough for me.” What if the same were true for basketball? The rules of basketball should be flexible; good ball movement in good order is enough for me. Actually, I think a lot about the similarities between poetry and basketball—I’ve probably even written about them here—the most poignant of which are movement and flow and the necessity to break out of the fundamentals and find that space where real creativity can exist.
2. Neil Gaiman and some other dude have edited an anthology of stories. Here’s Nick Owchar in the L.A. Times gushing about it. He writes, “It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman has been on a crusade, throughout his career, to break fantasy out of the genre ghetto—to get people to focus on the power of the storytelling, regardless of the gothic atmospherics.” Hmm. I love me some Gaiman, so I’ll check it out.
Okay, back to the business of being…
In three hours I will own a house. There will be a room to write in. A word space of my own. There will be books in this room and a big blue French farmhouse table. There will be a comfortable chair and sunlight. The sounds of birds outside the window. A big hawk’s nest in the tree above. There will be college students next door, and sometimes I will think about how new their lives are as I write, how unformed creatures begin to take form and find shape. There will be coffee. I will make lamps out of the glass jars I’ve been collecting for a year. I will live alone with my pets in this house. At night, it will be quiet, and sometimes I will cherish the silence.
Sometimes I’ll wonder what I’m doing there in my new writing room, all the luxury of selfhood skating away.
Sometimes I’ll be afraid.
What scares you about writing?
Are there cool poems and/or stories about motherhood? This is a serious, not sarcastic, question.