archives for June 2007
from an email to miss bovary
Tuesday 19 June 2007 | 4 cookies in the jar
That you tell your story so well is precisely why it bothers him so much. If you told it badly, it wouldn’t threaten his version. When you tell it well, it seems like it might possibly even contain truth; and I am sure this scares the bejeebus out of his overriding complex, in its (so […]
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let us now praise famous men, part one
Monday 18 June 2007 | I like a cookie
The suggested corrections to the Dying Book, emailed to me on Friday, appear overwhelming in number and kind. Worst of all is the repeated phrase “permissions alert,” which appears every few pages. It would seem, in the days since your Unnarrator was an East Coast editor herself, that it’s no longer allowable to cite even […]
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chosen
Friday 15 June 2007 | I like a cookie
CD Wright said to me: There are a lot of hard things about being a poet. But it’s a chosen life. And not many people get to choose their lives.
friday refrain · recreance
Friday 15 June 2007 | I like a cookie
The corrections arrive from Boston, but I don’t even open them. I read Agee until at noon I shower, Pyewacket offended and retreating to the duvet for her own much more sensible tongue-bath. Shave (new vanilla gel) and wash (vanilla sugar scrub) and dry and put on lotion (goat milk and honey, handmade in Pie […]
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dirt-road morning
Friday 15 June 2007 | I like a cookie
When will I next fall asleep with windows open to crickets and coyote yelps, wake to the liquid tangles and warbles of birdsong? Cries of birds, the poet wrote, hung on the air like jewels. On the other hand, maybe once departed from rural life, THE FREAKING DSL WILL WORK AGAIN.
• call landlord’s office about […]
confessional perspective
Friday 15 June 2007 | I like a cookie
When composing, I feel free to tap into any literal and emotional experience I’ve had; I don’t let myself worry about whether people in my life might recognize themselves in poems I have written. I trust the language of poetry, its rhetoric and its figures, to distort the literal and remove it from the realm […]
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privacy, intimacy and isolation
Thursday 14 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
Is in fact the title of a book, written by a professor I once considered a very close friend. Junior faculty, fresh doctorate, not that much older than I was at the time. My intended thesis advisor. Untenured. Lonely, as I was too, in the wake of the Republican. It’s an ironic title, considering that […]
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melville’s ambiguities
Wednesday 13 June 2007 | I like a cookie
When woken at 5:30 by the cat’s breathing intently upon me, I finish Pierre, Or the Ambiguities, reeling from its florid conclusion, body count exceeding that of Hamlet, yet won over by Melville’s original hysterical-realist prose. On the last page is tacked a bright yellow post-it: “THANKS—Cormac.” So the Librarian must’ve loaned it out to […]
rainy day cat
Tuesday 12 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
So leaden I can hardly hold up my widdle head. It rains and rains, in cold silver sheets. I drive slumped over to my appointment with the DBT (four more left), looking through the steering wheel rather than over the top of it. I can barely be bothered to care that the Brujo’s ex will […]
impossible to summarize
Monday 11 June 2007 | I like a cookie
The Brujo takes me out for Central American food, we watch the goofy, stylized Hitchcock Spellbound (alternately bemused by its silver-screen loveliness and laughing our asses off) and he leaves around ten. I’m immediately plunged into an intense, thrumming isolation only heightened by the rain outside. (Sometimes I see me dead in it. —No, sorry; […]
