maps + poetry

hello, chicago!

2012-02-29T23:14:00.000-06:00

Our little family has arrived, not without some difficulty (oh winter, unplowed roads, oh spinny spinning car, oh thank you for not ending in the ditch, oh thank you sweet husband who coaxed me through in the gentlest of ways, oh me, a winter warrior now) and we are staying in a very peach room on Michigan Avenue.

We are listening to the wind snap around the fifteenth floor and plotting our next few days. I wouldn't mind a trip to the Field Museum.

We also have two of my best friends sharing the room with us--Opal and Meryl--so it will be a lovely slumber party. We'll fill up on panels and readings and the book fair and off-site events and receptions (and see if we survive).

on roots + wings: chicago trip, day 1

campus again

2012-02-27T13:30:00.000-06:00

I haven't been to campus since I packed up my boxes and tore the calendar from my cubicle. But I tucked Maya away at a friend's house and went, coatless in February, to Lind Hall, which seems just the same to me, turned a sharp corner, and spent an hour in my advisor's office, came away with a few new books and some good advice. It's always strange and thrilling to hear someone else talk about your work--to have them beat a good rhythm into your being.

He warned me of his standard-defense questions:
- Why is the book structured this way? / How did you arrive at this order?
- Who are your poets of influence?
- Ideas about recent books? Examples & counter-examples.
- What do you see yourself doing next?
- How did your work change or develop?
(Oh, how I'm ready to answer! Now! Which is so good. I won't mention how he said he'd sign off on me now.)

He told me the heavy carpentry was there, that I could focus on the line edits, the trimming, the clarity, the "quirking." He said the book is poised between two styles--there is the metaphysical, the dream-like, the Plath-like, the emblamatic treatment of motherhood and the body, and then there is the natural and literal. (Oh!) He spoke of the Jungian-belief in central form, dreams yielding toward central vitality, images also photographic and imagistic. So then: turn to formal tensions.

Some issues: there is the repeat of gesture--one example, corroborative example. OH! The articles and prepositions!

This manuscript is obsessive: see James McMichale with Good Things and Each in a Place Apart. See also Elizabeth Arnold in The Wreck, Civilization, Effacement. These books will help with the central, book as series. He spoke: gaze shifts but still thinking, radial shifts from the same hub.

I've spent the past week or so since our meeting sloughing away at the manuscript: I've cut six poems, let one return, combined others, added yet another, and the biggest was picking away, as one rubs away dead skin after the shower, of the excess words (the word the deeply excised, and from Josie's recommendation, the word little also shifted) and phrases.

I hope to give this manuscript the heave-ho, to start circulating it amongst publishers at the end of March, but we'll see if I can give it the polish I hope to: there's a part of me that wants to go through with a goddess-narrative, see where Hera can find company; there's a part of me that wonders if the expectations of motherhood is enough, if the introduction sets up something that isn't followed through with, so there's that too.

It's a first book, which is bound to be riddled with missteps. And as I send, I do hope it evolves. I don't want to be the sort of submitter who just leaves it be and pummels the editorial boards: rather, my pummeling should come from full presence with this manuscript and the next, which is nagging me more and more each day, should let each become fully formed, whatever that might mean.

my friend opal is brave and has a beautiful voice

2012-02-26T23:56:00.001-06:00

Last night, our little family traveled up to Minneapolis to meet at the Red Sea, where my dear friend Opal C. McCarthy, along with her friend and fellow yoga-instructor Molli Ocea, performed in their first concert together. I love it when strong women band together to create something brilliant: here, we had poetry, we had acoustic guitar and lovely voices, all with a fairy tale theme. (I think of Angela Carter and other retellings.) I wish my own voice were so strong and not prone to falling into the earplug-needing variety. But I'd listen to Molli and Opal all the time, and I hope their projects lead them to recording, because I could imagine their music being something wonderful to share with Maya at home. For now, I'm content to watch my daughter, who is heading into the fourteen-month-old territory, skitter about the bar room floor, chasing the wild lights and saying HI! to the Somali men playing pool in the next room.

(via cell phone)
Video 1: Airship
Video 2: Opal solo

Ryan asked how I was feeling on our drive home and I said, "Warm and fuzzy," and he asked if I'd had a Jack-and-Coke as well. No, no, just content, filled up with happiness at having seen the first of what I hope will be many evenings of music, happy that Maya was so curious and wild, happy that I'm lucky enough to be friends with someone whose work I admire so deeply.

So proud of you, Opal. And Molli too!

my new editor

2012-02-11T02:19:00.001-06:00

more.

Wisława Szymborska, 1923-2012

2012-02-04T16:37:00.002-06:00

photo credit

Harriet has a charming small-post here.

Szymborska came up often in my workshops with MDB, and I have several variations on her Selected in my bookshelves. This weekend, I will curl up with one, run my fingers along that spine, think of another poet the world is now without.

More Szymborska: Slate: The Szymborska Poem Above My Desk; How to (and how not to) Write Poetry; an interview with Szymborska's assistant.

dinner party for annie finch

2012-02-02T01:40:00.000-06:00

This is how I entered the house: quietly, a box of heart-shaped cookies from the local bakery, sock-footed. The steamed-up house. I wrote: "cluster of lucky students / the center circle on ranged wooden chairs." (Later that evening, I knocked one of those chairs into a paper sack of garbage, spewing spanikopita flakes onto Maria's carpet.) Later that evening, someone asked how many of those students had been to a poetry reading before and few raised their hands. What a lucky start: an intimate reading with Annie Finch in professor Maria Damon's living spaces.

She spoke of her work: her collaborations with composers and dancers and theatre. She sang a song of Aphrodite and said, "This is for Molly," and after, "That's because you have an infant." Oh!

Her poems with Celtic cross-rhymes. The troubadours. (To repeat a form was an insult, to be in love with someone new, there was a need for a fresh form.) Her book Calendars is "organized around the wheel of the year"--solstices and equinox [a shiver: my own current manuscript is divided into four sections, of which each is a kind of season, hibernation and renewal]

She had us repeating lines, chanting. She spoke of spring starting, imbulc and ewes with lamb.

Of course she discussed form, which I clumsily likened to an embrace when we spoke one-on-one. In the Q & A post-reading, Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi asked about the debates within and around form. (Annie paused, clicked on her recording device and admitted, "I'm going to record this because I realized recently that I'm going to die." Maria replied, "Well, you're not the only one." And this is where I admit that anything I put into quotes is how I wrote it down, not, perhaps, exactly how it was spoken. For this, one must consult Annie's official recording.) She spoke of how she knows she can love a poem if she can return to it over and over. Finch mentioned "viscosity or stickiness"--that her best analogy was in relation to natural birth control [oh how familiar I am with that one] and that springiness of the mucous--"forgive me if I embarrassed anyone by using such a physical metaphor, but when something like that appears in my head, I try to honor it." She spoke of how too many are using form as a physical vessel, a mere container.

Which poets draw her in? Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Sarah Teasdale's Mirror of the Heart, Hopkins, Marlowe, Spencer. She's working on Sappho in the original meters--she called it the quilted Sappho as she's filling in. Alice Notley, Rosemary Waldrop, Molly Peacock's first book, Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn.

I asked questions I thought might be helpful to the undergraduates in the room.

Advice to new writers?
- Don't be proud in your reading. That good work can be anywhere. Don't have preconceptions.
- Read aloud--it's a physical process.
- Keep a flashlight by the side of your bed.

Revision? (Chicken or egg in regarding form) [I'm always curious about revision processes]
- She spoke of how there is a range. One poem she read to us was written as she read it. Others can take twenty years.

In the margins of my notebook, I wrote of two poems I want to write, titled already, each in multi-parts. My third manuscript has been nudging like the head of a cat, the urgency of wanting milk. My second seems to be settling. It's so strange to be in this place, so hopeful at the full-length finding a home.

a day at the loft

2012-01-29T23:21:00.001-06:00

The early afternoon was spent in room 308, slick stacks of poetry books on either side of us, three judges, one moderator, quick exchanges, slurries of words, protection and suggestion. I learned much: what it means to champion a book, what it means to wish you had more than four slots, what it means to expect one thing going to bed and another as the day moves on, what other readers are looking for in a book of poems, what one can do in a concentrated three hours. A hard winnowing.

And today, the aftermath on Facebook, the authors who are linked up, the readers, the congratulations, the names "missing." The stubborn sigh of poetry.

I anticipate April more now, being a first-round judge. Last year, I knew.

This was a different kind of hard. Would I know which of the four to pick as the final winner? Maybe. Probably. There is such a gorgeous range, was just as much so if not more in the whole selection.

For the non-locals: Invisible Strings by Jim Moore, Whorled by Ed Bok Lee, Budda, Proof by Su Smallen, and Bodies of Light by Athena Kildegaard.

After, my dear friend Opal met me for tea, and we looked at the fantastic wood block prints in the coffeeshop and we talked for two-hours-that-felt-like-five-minutes. That good kind of conversation. That winter kind of conversation that is a cup of tea between two mittened hands, the fireplace blanket, the wooly reader. We spoke of: failed girls (what else?) and Adele, a haunting presence in O's recent work, we spoke of autism and white walls and yoga with the littles and stimulation, we spoke of rites of passage and women role models and raising daughters, we spoke of the cuteness of the avant-garde and adapted fairy tales. I'm loving the sort of conversation that percolates around current-projects. This, while it's just beginning, and this, while it's just ending: I'm on both sides. And talking about it, with someone who knows, is so, so intensely important--validating, invigorating, inspiring.

Also: This week I might be attending a very fantastic dinner, if all falls into place. Tingles.

best of times

2012-01-27T00:34:00.006-06:00

:: Tonight, I am reading and re-reading stacks and stacks of poetry books by Minnesota poets; Saturday is first-round judging for the MN Book Awards. I've finally come upon one I would stand behind in nomination, though I've got more to read, and I admit, I did reverse-order the reading in suspicion of ones I'd like--because of publisher, because of the poet, because of paging through. We're getting to the better ones the longer the night goes on.

:: I just took a break from reading to write a poem I've called, in its wet-ink stages, "Offal." Earlier, I watched an episode of Top Chef in which the contestants were to cook with offal, though none used the organ I write of in the poem. I'm prodding at the middle second of my manuscript, where it sags a bit with the weight of sorrowful-medical poems. Oh woe! Oh woe are my sad little ovaries! Oh zing! Oh move. Oh stop with the willowing and wallowing and get into the woods. So I did. Have I mentioned I might have a title? I very well might.

:: This is the saddest news of all: Our beloved independent bookstore, just ten blocks away from my own house, so close that I walked the holiday season I worked there, back and forth, tromping in the lovely December snow, is closing its doors forever this Saturday. I've been invited to the wine-and-cheese honoring event, but it bumps up against the judging, so I will have to say farewell with books jutting under my arms, wave from the sidelines and hope once the economy balloons back up, we'll have a bookstore in town again, though with the e-revolution, it might not be so. Meanwhile, I make sure to bring my daughter to story hour at the library and every time she stumbles toward me with a chewed-over book in her spitty little hands, I read as far as she'll let me and a few minutes later, read as far as she'll let me in the next one she offers up in her adorable slouch-shouldered kind of way. Our house is fat with books as a bookstore is, I tell you, but it's been marred by the smells of cooking and dog-breath and the furnace-heat and damp slippers. When I worked at a bookstore, I'd come home, and my husband would lean in and tell me I smelled the smell of new books. Mmmm.

three things

2012-01-22T14:00:00.004-06:00

1/ The journal Anatomy & Etymology has accepted my poems "Axis" and "figures."

2/ Balancing the Tide's newest interview is up with novelist and young adult writer Julie Schumacher.

3/ For your amusement: the snacks of great writers.

launched.

2012-01-03T17:27:00.000-06:00

Balancing the Tide: Motherhood and the Arts | an Interview Project

Rachel Zucker is the first interviewee. ♡

Please read and share!

collective.4

2011-12-23T17:09:00.000-06:00

We met on Solstice Eve at Common Roots Cafe in Minneapolis. The sidewalks were slick with a dusting of snow. We had peanut soup, pasta, tea, puff pastry. The last time I was here, it was with Colleen too, who has since moved to the climes of Atlanta, and I was pregnant.

We spoke of: goats and vanilla and macaroons. We were more serious about surrender and water and fracture and soil systems and harvest. We winnowed closer to aubades. Ghosts as well.

We decided: a cycle of four, an orderly bit, drawing threads of poems (one word, one phrase) previous. Fifty-two in all, thirteen apiece, and a machine at the end pumping out editions: Vandercooked over chai and winter seepings.

a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

2011-12-16T18:53:00.002-06:00

I had my last cake decorating class last night. I might have failed out as a decorator, but at least I have the nerdy cake award.

ms2, ms3

2011-12-12T22:58:00.000-06:00

Three of my favorite people: Meryl holding Maya and my husband in the background.
Also, another favorite person, skating in her second roller derby bout this weekend.
Post on roots + wings: NSRG Derby Bout #2: Sailing the Seven Seas

I've got two manuscripts chugging at once: there is the (in)fertility manuscript, which is robust, with individual poems finding homes happily and rapidly. I read through it last week, for the first time in a long time, and I see places where I want to take it, alterations and trimmings. It is full-size now, but there will be poems melding and exiting stage left, there will be new poems written to fill it out in the best possible ways. This manuscript examines: (in)fertility, hope and hope and hope, mother-relationships, foundations for family, the body, the body as object, illness, incubation, hibernation, the natural world and its imprints, small things, the failures of the body, triumph, birth, nursing, dismantling dresses, corridors, star systems.

The second manuscript has only begun as a ghostly outline with a few poems written, many more in the planning stages, and those poems that have been written, surprisingly, also have already found homes. I'm thinking about wider things: women's lives, the art and fumblings of raising a daughter, the communication of bodies, women as leaders and pioneers and powerful figures, occupations, daughter-relationships, pleasure, ferns and thickets.

making my daughter's first birthday invitations

2011-12-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

Throttle and curse. Handmixed paint purpling our hands. Washing away with the garden hose. Mineral spirited. The form inking the timpin. The paper slipping, forgotten pins. The sweetest and bittiest laughing from her high chair as her mama and papa trouble shoot. Forgetting the Kelsey guide scanned onto my laptop.

Hands up. In the basement of MCBA again, the patient guidance of M. The heavy sound of rollers. Adjusting and settling. Inking the form, adjusting the height, sliding one card after another. After another. Catching prints. An overshoot (twenty-seven in the mail). Extras to wallpaper the baby book.

Enclosures: Maya at two months, Maya at ten months. A bear each time. A run of beckonings. Making by hand. A house of spirits.

five things

2011-12-07T13:29:00.000-06:00

1/ Specter's Issue 4 has come out and my poems "Prenatal Class" and "Things to do Around My Uterus" are in it. Both come from the third section of the manuscript. [note: as of right now, there are some wonky formatting issues with the poems, but I've emailed requesting a correction!]

2/ My poem "Albatross" (fourth section of the ms.) was a finalist for the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize at Harpur Palate and will appear in Issue 11.2. I got the proof today--very exciting!

3/ A set of my poems are among five finalist-sets and are moving on in the H.O.W. Journal's writing contest final round, judged by Honor Moore. Fingers and such crossed.

4/ I will participate again in judging the Minnesota Book Awards. This is my second year; last year's winner in poetry, Find the Girl by Lightsey Darst, is urgent and phenomenal. I also loved Connie Wanek's elegant book, On Speaking Terms.

5/ A friend of mine left this link on my Facebook page: poetry bombing: clothing labels with poems printed on them are sewn clandestine[ly] in local thrift stores. (Thanks, Kyrie!)

collective.3

2011-12-02T21:07:00.001-06:00

Sometimes this is all we need: kale chips, cashews, poetry. Rice in a pot, broccoli in a bowl, Alice Fulton's Culture of One and Arianna Reines' newest, with a shiny cover which acts like a mirror. We read to one another. Some of what we've written, some of what others have written.

There is discussion of trends, of false consciousness and posturing. Who knows where we slip in. We are just beginning.

We are wintering. We are cooking whole foods in big pots in small kitchens. We are pressing thumbs into our breastbones as we bow.

four things

2011-11-24T21:58:00.002-06:00

1/ My poem "Derby" has been accepted for January's all-poetry issue of Stymie Magazine.

2/ My becoming-less-secret project has a Facebook page. And a Twitter page. Please follow along! Launch is January 3.

3/ These mysterious paper sculptures are beautiful. It led me to these cards of more sculptures.

4/ "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin. Happy thanks giving.

anne carson

2011-11-18T20:18:00.001-06:00

Anne Carson spoke at the Walker Art Museum last night, but I could not go. So, in honor of her visit, I'm resurrecting an old post from a former blog, when she came to the university and blew me away:

Anne Carson visited our campus via the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture series. The website blurb explains it best:

50 Year Anniversary of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature
Sunday October 18, 2009 4:00 pm
Coffman Union Theater
Parking: See map. Plan your trip.
Admission: Free and open to the University of Minnesota community and the general public. No advanced tickets necessary.
Nothing seems more appropriate to celebrate the rich 50 year history of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature than bringing Anne Carson to the the University of Minnesota campus. Since 1959, when the series was created to honor former English professor and chair Joseph Warren Beach, the endowment has allowed Twin Cities audiences to hear from some of the brightest luminaries in literature, from critics such as Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to writers such as Mary McCarthy, Robert Pinsky, and Tony Kushner. True to both sides of this tradition, Carson is a poet and scholar, translator and essayist, Classicist and experimental artist, often within the same frame.
Recently, Carson has exhilarated East Coast audiences with live mash-ups of poetry, dance, and performance art, drawing fans such as Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. This fall Carson, along with two of Merce Cunningham’s dancers, ventures west to bring a couple of her best-known such collaborations to the Twin Cities. With dancers Rashaun Mitchell (who choreographed) and Marcie Munnerlyn accompanying, Carson will read portions of her translated Sappho text further fragmented through the use of three other readers. Of this piece, titled “Bracko,” the New York Times wrote: “Sappho’s lush, often cruel observations on love were mirrored but not mimed in Mr. Mitchell’s choreography,” leaving the critic wanting more “such complicated marriages of movement and text.”
Originally created for a Harvard conference, “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets” incorporates Carson reading, a projection of dancers with an audio track, and Mitchell and Munnerlyn. For Carson, noted Alex Dimitrov of Poets & Writers, “Poetry does not occur only on the page, nor the stage—it occurs as words flit through the mind and the body, as they engage with other bodies, dancing bodies, and the objects around them.”
Carson’s many publications include her latest translation An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides (Faber & Faber, 2009). Her written works, too, are complicated marriages of poetry and criticism, translation and fiction. She has won the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A Canadian, Carson is currently Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University.
The Joseph Warren Beach Endowment is honored to welcome Anne Carson to the University of Minnesota for the 50th anniversary of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature.
For more information, visit the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature section of this site or call 612-625-3363.

Choreographer and dancer Mitchell said during the Q&A that he was compelled by the bracket, considering things like the ties that bind us, using the silver ropes to take it away from something violent, and creating brackets with rope to interact with.

Anne Carson explained that "each time it finds its rhythm" when speaking of this complicated collaboration--not only were the Sappho poems translated (relationship between ancient and contemporary poet) but those poems were then restructured with partner Bob Currie (who spoke of the multiple voices by saying, "We do a lot by chance," and as the form becomes more complex, you have to simplify the message--focusing on the combination existing on the stage), then there is relationship of poet with dance, and finally, Carson also brings in members of the university community (in this case, the former department chair of the English Literature program, Paula Rabinowitz and a first year MFA candidate, Sarah Fox).

Maria Damon (pictured in the second to last photo with Paula Rabinowitz and the woman we can thank for all these events running so beautifully, Terri Sutton) asked a question regarding the most interesting question asked at a Q&A, which allowed Carson to speak of the moment, which is so important to pieces such as these, and how "questions come out of the ligature of the room." Bob Currie cited an instance in the 1980s after seeing a ghost-themed piece of John Cage's, where, given blank stares from the audience, he offered to do another piece, at which point the hands went up, and Currie spoke of how a ten-year-old asked the question, "Mr. Cage, do ghosts ever get lonely?" to which Cage replied, "Your question is too beautiful to answer, and we'll end there."

This wasn't, of course, the end of their Q&A--a few more questions revealed that the first piece, "Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets" came from a request for a lecture on pronouns for Harvard, the Sappho star map worked by including yellow blobs which turned out to be from cloud formations over NYC, the stars helped choose how to plan the language, and generally, there was inclusion of a DVD that ended with 183 brackets bursting onto the screen in place of stars.

We also learned Carson sometimes includes musicians--and she was asked if there was an intentionality of pitches in voices when missing that music--to which Carson spoke of including a sound sculptor and having an attunement with the emotion of a particular sonnet which also was reflected in pace and cadence--they could stretch language to match better with the dance if need be.

dream of a perfect interface (four)

2011-11-04T22:45:00.002-05:00

Here it is: Meryl's project in all its complete glory. There's something fantastically surreal seeing one of your dearest friend's work on display in the Center for Book Arts' Gallery like that, to know you got to observe it in many stages, to feel that edgy pride in something she's accomplished.

Meryl read her poem to the crowd. She charmed us (and I crushed on her fabulous dress).

There was work on topography by a sculptor / textile artist.

And, not so long ago, there was the sprawl of September afternoon happiness, the call and answer project by video artist Amanda, who was spotting a smaller baby bump at the time, and above, the culmination at MCBA, where Sia is listening in on the video, and my own daughter Maya is touching fingers with the artist herself.

There was a project focusing on surreptitious cell phone videos taken from a metro bus.

There was a project titled Dark Matter, which was accompanied by haunting photographs.

And work by a performance artist, which invited the audience to write a message and put it into a bottle. My omission involved some narrative about the cheese and half-eaten pickle I had in my pocket, from where my daughter dropped them onto the floor, and I omit them from her mouth.

And good company. A great deal of work went into this project, much talent, much learning. The curve was steep and difficult, but in the end, I think the voices of these artists merged in a really lovely way with the book arts.

And, of course, as my family was my date, I did cull the family photos into a post on the blog I write on mamahood: maya's second art opening.

dia de los muertos

2011-11-01T23:21:00.000-05:00

A few photographs I took of the Day of the Dead exhibit at MCBA.

See also: "Ondine" by Opal McCarthy. I love: "with the veils between the worlds at their thinnest."

happy halloween!

2011-10-31T22:16:00.000-05:00

I always love what the Academy of American Poets does every Halloween. Have you been through their haunted house? When I taught high school, I always had a Poe-stravaganza with my freshmen, which included me breaking out the bobblehead and action figure, but also that Simpsons video (you know the one), and poems and poems.

three things

2011-10-29T14:45:00.001-05:00

1/ My personal essay "motherpoet" is now up on First the Egg.

2/ My poem "Garter" has been accepted by Gulf Stream and will appear in the fall edition. Those two poems accepted by Specter will show up in December. I'll post a link to those three poems once they are live.

3/ I find myself sending my poems out with some fervor. These guidelines made me laugh, and this page will now make me check and see which of the rejection forms I got.

dream of a perfect interface (three)

2011-10-23T12:58:00.000-05:00

I spent some time with Meryl in the papermaking studio in the basement of MCBA this weekend. My first time making paper was only a few weeks ago, and Meryl had only a basic introduction to it as well, so we sort of bumbled our way through the process, but I would say the piece is on its way to turn out nicely.

Her plan was to make paper using abaca and the leftover tan inserts from her book, then use that paper to insert into a mold she'd made the night before of her shoulder, leaning into her neck and chest. This delicate paper-piece would accompany her artist's book, which is about skin layers and metaphor and relationships.

The paper was beat for a long, long while, but there were still many clumps that came out in the process, which I think worked for this particular project, resembling the skin's imperfections. I told her my pieces were turning out more like a wrinkled older person's skin, and when we got air bubbles, I pronounced them cells with dendrites and whatnot. The communication of skin.

Even the ripping of the still-wet paper resembled the tearing of skin.

Her mentor was present, so he was able to help with some mechanics (which is the worst of this book-arts business--or any other creative endeavor I dabble in, to use Meryl's word--which is the math and the planning and the calculated adjustments and the cursing of the machinery) and take a look at her paper choice for the cover. It's gorgeous handmade paper that reminds me of skin blushing. The graphic in the images below is the first of two layers she will print; it's a rendition of skin layers transformed from illustration to polymer plate (art by her husband, Shawn Hebrank), and I love those delicate lines on top.

This was my last shift with Meryl, as the other days she's in the shop conflict with my own schedule, and I am sorry not to be present to its completion, as I was there from the cutting. I even know how to do the Japanese stab-stitch binding she intends to use, and my hands might have been useful, if not slow and methodical (as my first attempt was awfully sloppy after my thumbs were destroyed with the tacks). The next time I see it, it will be a finished product.

Opening reception is November 4th, and if you are nearby, I recommend attending. I will be there, provided my best friend's baby isn't in the process of being born. She is due November 6th, and I witnessed her son being born; she witnessed my daughter being born (more or less--she was outside the surgery room, as only one person was allowed in, sadly enough). So many good things clustered around this weekend--another good friend's first roller derby bout, two good poetry readings, my own birthday and my mother's. It's a wonderful feeling to have so many good things to anticipate. And when Half Nelson, as he is nicknamed, is born, I will be blogging about it on roots + wings, my motherhood blog.

Until then, I leave you with this papery skin. (It doesn't quite work in the reverse, does it? Skinny paper.)

dream of a perfect interface (two)

2011-10-17T20:13:00.002-05:00

Thursday: Meryl and I both learned this the hard way, for our very separate current projects: polymer plates are expensive. That is, if you are not incredibly clever about using space, but this is how learning occurs. Hers: A series of stretched-out stanzas and layers of skin. Mine: an invitation to my daughter's first birthday celebration, slated for one chilly January weekend. My project has sprawling amounts of time.

Saturday: The book fair gets scrapped, and when I am driving to Minneapolis, I somehow think: The Red Coats are coming! The Red Coats are coming! Something about cavalry and charging and empowerment, but I think there's more fear in that battle cry than I meant to have. Meryl didn't have the best of mornings on a press that was feisty with plates that got crinkly and a less-than-positive encounter with the powers-that-be, which resulted in an earlier thai dinner, but! Maya got to bound around the basement of MCBA hooked to my front like a little kangaroo pup and watch as I caught prints. She proved herself an incredible companion and only got fussy at the end when She Wanted To Nap Dammit And Couldn't.

Sunday: I split shifts with Meryl's husband Shawn, the greatest of tattooists, and after some energizing chai tea, we took the long way back in (lockouts do that) and began finishing her run for the day. She's made it to the backs of pages now, which, to me, is phenomenal progress, and once the rollers were adjusted, she cranked out some fantastic prints and some of my favorite pages of the poem. I loved getting the words on my fingertips--my dermis soaking in her dermis--but one must constantly wash those grubby hands while printing on such fine paper.

We talked of plans--of our love of poetry as primary, and me, I think of letterpress and book arts as a way to honor the text in a deep and loving way--of her next steps after the show that opens November 4, and we did some chatting too, of goals for Midway and its future.

This week in my intro to book arts class, we start basic letterpress work, which I hope will revive memories of my Letterpress I experience. My own project hums in the background.

opal

2011-10-15T21:57:00.001-05:00

I am inviting you in. This isn't a secret; already there are shimmers of announcement. But it isn't mine to share: it's a new name. And for me, I do not know why, I have always associated names with textures, with colors. (Sophie was a blue-glass bottle, a delicate soap and Maya is loamy, earthy, like blackberries and mushrooms.)

Maya and I spent the early afternoon in the MCBA shop with Meryl (Meryl: I think of vines) while she printed three more pages of her artist's book. Colleen (a scalloped shell) joined us, we had thai, we fed Maya tofu and cleaned up the aftermath.

We went to Colleen's apartment in the gloaming. Her living room was filled with lace, and each station was a point on the compass: north, for winter and water and minerals; east for springtime with flowers; summer where we lit a candle; high summer at the center with earth from the Badlands, which she added water to and placed clay on her third eye; and west, where I initially sat, with a metal bell, a container of autumn leaves, and a pomegranate.

We each took a leaf into which we put our intentions. Maya spent her time seeing how many elements she could cram into her mouth: the rose quartz Meryl gave me for bringing to my birthing of the bear, and later, she gathered flower petals and leaves and the shell and tugged at the lace, threatening to upend the rest.

Colleen read from an essay she wrote after her trip to the Dakotas titled Splendor. It's a gorgeous poem and as she read, the world seemed to quiet, though Maya called in a few times, particularly at the fucking hybrid bit. I loved the secret moments, the intimacy, the claiming, the stone that followed her across state lines.

I read a poem I wrote about changing Maya's name (from Sophie). Meryl read a section from Dream of a Perfect Interface. Then, Colleen brought out a drum and sang about strength and names.

Maya gladly took over the rhythm section for the evening.

And thus, Opal was born. (Opal: chipped marble, brass scrollwork.)

She took the name not as a rejection of Colleen, which shall be the C. of her publishing name--Opal C. McCarthy--but as a kind of celebration in her own unique nature, in a movement to varying colors. A kind of quiet beauty with spark, to paraphrase Meryl.

We took our leaves to the lake and released them, a blessing on our intentions. Opal released the remaining leaves, the night sky pinking and deep.

introduction to book arts: bookbinding (two)

2011-10-13T22:45:00.000-05:00

We made our first humbling attempts at Japanese stab-stitch binding, and since the awls were cattywampus, as the instructor said, and my thumbs were destroyed before I realized I was trying to press-and-wiggle them into the protective book board underneath. The stark red cover was also unforgiving; a patterned one might hide a little of the stray lines.

Meryl's artists book will use this binding, which is appropriate, not only for the convenience of the paper orientation and printing, but also because this binding will allow for a sexy drape, which will not only invite touch but will evoke the line of the body at rest.

Our second book was The Big Project: tape binding. We used a punching jig, or punching cradle, and a template for the punches, which made the task seem smoother than it perhaps was. Of what we've learned thus far, I have developed a shy crush on the unassuming pamphlet stitch. Please, please ignore my five-year-old technique in cutting the cover above.

We also made a charmingly small dos-a-dos book at the close of the evening, and while cutting, I discovered someone had printed on the back of my ruler. The poem--Alice--

four things

2011-10-11T10:30:00.000-05:00

This chip of bark reminds me of some quiet communication--Morse code, musical notations, poetry scansion.

1/ I've become assistant poetry editor at Midway Journal. Send us some poems! I've already read through a stack of submissions; I feel so good returning to that process, the discussion and conversation.

2/ Two poems of mine, "Things To Do Around My Uterus" and "Prenatal Class" will appear in Specter Magazine. I'll post a link when they're up.

3/ I've started the MCBA Core Certificate Program. I've always felt energized after the courses there, so this seems a logical step. Of course, reigning in that buzzing brain will be the real trick, as I've got pinging ideas for projects galore.

4/ Karen's book, which is gorgeous (have I mentioned that yet? that it's gorgeous? because it is), is coming out in January, and I wrote the reading group guide questions. Perhaps you have a book club, looking for a selection that might electrify, or, at the very least, give a little tingle.

dream of a perfect interface (one)

2011-10-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

This afternoon was spent in the basement of the MCBA, which, I've announced, would be just as eerie and creepy as our own basement (which has its very own dirt floored vortex of hell, as our friend has named it), if it weren't for all the good company and whirring of presses. Alone, with the lights flickering off--no, thank you.

Meryl began that first essential step of editioning her book. She has put together her final book dummy, using overhead sheets to indicate how the text will look on her layered paper, and she's done practice runs on the Vandercook to test the bleed. She's noted the trip and ink measurements and has started moving toward that final object. She brought in a hard copy of the long poem she's been tinkering with over the summer and into autumn and hopes to send out PDFs tonight or tomorrow for final plates.

Her mentor in this program stopped down to discuss margins, and Regula, who was my instructor in a the weekend version of Letterpress I also came and discussed the gripper margin. My brain whirred at the precise nature of book arts, the ways in which one must measure down to the pica when approaching a more professional product.

The book itself will be 6 x 12 and Japanese stab stitch binding. The paper will be doubly layered--an internal tan center and the outer layer a cotton textured paper, which will be the paper the poem is pressed upon. When I tried to describe it after first seeing it a little over a week ago, I described it as a mix between a doily and snakeskin.

The paper had a cellular feel to it, which is ideal, given the topic of her long poem--she uses the skin's layers as the guiding organization and returned-to topic. I love it. I've read it as it has transformed, and I can appreciate the shifts and strengths.

Meryl's husband Shawn, who is a tattoo artist and is responsible for this, will do the design work for the inside--an adaptation of those dermis-layers, and Meryl will order polymer plates from Boxcar (I ordered my first last week, which I will share once the project is more underway).

The day was spent on the bad cutter; one knows which equipment is finicky in the studio and that particular one was being used by a bookbinding class upstairs. The press pulls when locked and this paper has a fabric-type stretch. I contributed a little bone folder action, which was meticulous and tricky, as the ends didn't always line up and the grain fought me a bit.

Colleen joined us, telling us about her experiences with Occupy MN and her reiki healing. She read through the hard copy, where we discussed such intricacies as single word choice, italics, and the shifts in meaning therein.

I'm glad to be present for this project--not only present for a dear friend but also observing the practice for when I delve into my own work, which might not be as elegant or ambitious, but celebrated and better for the shadowing.

M. made a little post about it on her blog, hinting at what is to come.

introduction to book arts: bookbinding (part one)

2011-10-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

The essential, the kind. Book board, paper, scissors, bone folder, steel ruler, snap-tip knife. Also: awl, linen thread, needles. Ephemera etcetera.

Begin with the pamphlet stitch. You'll turn to it when you need to punch a needle through something. There is no easy way to draw it, so you'll simply spin through, watch and repeat.

But before all of this, there is the measuring, the cutting. Knocking the paper up, which gives a little giggle.

Test the grain by bouncing. Other ways: wetting the paper, tearing with or without ease. Fold the paper, use a thumb and spread lightly. Use the bone folder on the flat to create a sharp crease. Best not to fold one by one; folding together creates a nest.

The top of the book is the head; the bottom is the tail. There is the spine and the headband, where you might expect. There are the front covers / boards, the back covers / boards. The end paper, the foredge, the text block. There is the square, she points--which protects the book block, which can be an eighth of an inch, whatever you want, or flush. Single signature, for now. Or: single quire.

Before threading the linen (three times the length of the book), run your fingernail along the curl, pull away excess wax. Punching the holes can be the most difficult; sharing an awl with ghosts of classmates can be wonky--cockeyed and harder thrust. Weave, then: square knot. Just as a square dance, right over left, left over right, consider the ways in which strangers meet.

This binding: ribbon. Another, later on, a tri-fold. A folder. A lip and insert.

We use the papers we marbled for end papers. I imagine them differently. I love them just the same.

We accordion and measure: we create a simple pop-up, and I imagine the decorative books Maya can dissolve in her mouth. We concertina. We book board.

We are like children watching the clown fiddle a balloon into a creature. This one, there are papers folded, nipped at the corners, then inserted to create a bound book without thread, without glue, covered bookboards and all.

The first time I took introduction to binding, I made miniature versions with printer paper at my desk when my students were taking a test, were creating posters for presentations. I wouldn't write a word on the books I made, just put them on a shelf, forgot about them. Now, I will write a letter, will write a poem, will keep them for something, for a life outside of the craft, and will practice, still, with printer paper, with delicate paper, with pieces so I progress and settle.

a sliver of literary boston

2011-10-05T11:57:00.000-05:00

We had a great afternoon-span to fill before returning to the wilds of Minnesota, so we spent that time wandering the great wooden floors of the Old South Meeting House, where Phillis Wheatley stood in statue, ready to greet us.

The exhibits stretched beyond the Boston Tea Party and gave its legacy new contours: censorship, quieted voices. Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner. A few display cases down, Louisa May Alcott and her own family's work.

I asked David if he wanted to stop at the used bookshop down the alley and he asked if this were a rhetorical question. I forget what it's like to be in the company of others who pull toward the printed word. In one display, a signed print of M.C. Escher, which I wish I could have bought for my husband, given as a holiday gift. In another, a gorgeous signed edition (look at that marbled cover! I can appreciate the patient talent in making this design now--) of Virginia Woolf.

My mother grew up in Massachusetts, and her own mother lived there until she eventually settled in Chattanooga (after we moved away, I might add), where my aunt and (new!) aunt live. But until she moved, we'd spend summers there, beach-brushing, as I'd call it, and as I grew older, we added trips to Walden Pond and the Alcott House, Emerson's home as well as Salem and the House of the Seven Gables to our tour. Mine was a charmingly literary childhood, enough to fascinate me, and when I plug in these strictly historical tours into my travels, I get a little thrill. And now my own daughter has entered that fray, coming home with her own books to draw her back to those experiences.

two poets wed

2011-10-03T12:59:00.000-05:00

The three of us flew out to Maine (via Boston) with non-fiction writer David LeGault and his wife and brother-in-law for a fellow (former) MFAer's wedding. Maine and its furrowed shoreline is new to this little threesome, though if one were to unfold the family wings just one generation upwards, we would find that Maine has one of those inked hearts over it in my parents' album--it was the state of their honeymoon.

The ceremony was at a charming art museum with a view of the ocean. The wedding was to be outdoors, but with a weekend of alternating mist, fog, and drizzle, the couple instead said I do amongst statues and sketches, sending rehearsal memories slightly off-kilter. All went smoothly; I suppose some of that was the custom of classroom adaptation and quick-thinking; the lesson plan was changing.

This was supposed to be my wedding cake, by the way. I kept photographs I'd found in a document on my desktop of book-cakes. Ryan and I discussed which book titles we might have chosen (Colleen and Bart did well: I love The Taming of the Shrew, and, of course, To the Lighthouse was incredibly fitting with the landscape, and a nice, fat book of poetry as the base), though we opted for a plain cake, which Ryan used as an opportunity for surprise adornments. This cake, vegan spice and vegan lemon, was delicious and Maya's first cake. She didn't even miss the eggs.

And, for the record, I've since gotten my book cake.

Colleen and Bart sent me on an Easter egg hunt of sorts--poems about love and companionship on book stands throughout the museum. Colleen's thesis lingered in the crumbling graveyards, so these little stones, tablets of sorts, were nice totems, though not beyond till death do us part to connect her macabre theme to this day.

The ceremony was charming and sweet and incredibly family-oriented. Bart's brother officiated and another brother read his own translation of Ovid; there was also a reading of Whitman and cummings. The couple read their own vows and Colleen misted to match the panorama.

The next morning we slept a bit while the LeGaults hot-tubbed, then we walked in shallow puddles to collect coffee and hot chocolate and one last glimpse of the shore with its white-caps and the fade between water and sky.

Congratulations to Colleen and Bart. I hope for a poetry field trip to Atlanta, bringing "the other" Colleen and Meryl with me. This Colleen is one of the collective working at collaborative poetry, the one that was born a few weeks ago when we talked about permission over bowls of ginger-carrot soup.

On roots + wings, to get your Maya-fill: day 1, day 2, day 3.

introduction to book arts: marbling

2011-09-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

The day has been windy, the sort that bends the trees, limbs and leaves like hair on a woman in a convertible'd car. There's something freeing about this point past the equinox, where the leaves are just flashing colors, brief head-craning as something brilliant slips by.

Winter will be long here. It always is.

Show and tell: silk worm cocoons. The creatures rattled inside; gifts inside an egg. Sorrow at knowing they'd boil to unskein.

We discuss the questions that have arisen since last week: Would autumn leaves make vibrant paper? Likely to turn brown. But using some slurry to affix an undivided leaf might maintain its color. One instructor of the instructor used lilies--the flowers, the stalks, the pollen still clinging--and developed an allergy so strong, she could not even touch the paper when it was done. How does one make paper in one's own home? Buckets and supplies from a hardware store. A solid drill. I'm thinking of collecting, setting up a mobile studio.

Tonight: sheets of paper and paint in a pan.

One must wake the paint. Acrylic dries so fast. Drop color into water, watch it unravel. It grows and reaches; a second layer and you are gazing at an x-ray film, organs on varicose display. [Recommended: Golden Fluid Acrylic.]

image source: jacquard

Alum the paper, let it dry while you work. Each color holds the paint differently--the darker the paper, the darker the hold. We use white to start; my purple print is pinked.

There is: the stone. It's beautiful alone, untouched. One uses a dropper to plunk the paint onto the size. One uses a whisk for smaller splotches. The magic number--four to six colors mingle. Consider the product; consider the book binding, the wrapping paper, the box cover.

There is: Spanish wave. One wave is a mistake, a distortion. One can also start on one side of the paper and galumph it down, rocking the paint, creating an illusion of fabric folding.

There is: Gel get. Get gel. (Get pronounced the same as one might expect; gel with the guh-sound, as opposed to the juh.) Turkish: back and forth. These gel-gets are feathered; one can also keep a straight arm and find chevrons arising.

There are ghost prints. Sometimes more lovely than the initial. There is a space in the center where a paper once was. And the paint circles that have sunk to the bottom of the tray won't change the tenor of your print.

There is: snail. Small singular loops with a dowel or use the comb. My own hands spasmed, the snails a confused, crushed shell.

There is also: non-pareil, peacock. There is try and fail and try and find some other unique meeting of ink on paper.

Most of the night, there is attempting color combinations that might appeal to those I love--and left on my fingers, there is a stubborn royal gold-and-purple, on another the red I do not care for but know belongs in the pages of a beloved's scrapbook.

There is the evening bath you take with your daughter, the soapy residue from last night's bubble bath rising up, swirling and spinning beneath the tap, and there is imaging drifting a sheet of paper on top and slipping it away, coming up with the imprint of bodies from before, of patterns upon patterns.

introduction to book arts: papermaking

2011-09-23T02:15:00.000-05:00

Stop. Reverse. Begin again, from the beginning. The fifth in a string of pearls, but this is the one that lives in the sky. An overview of it all, an introduction.

[I've taken classes at MCBA before: binding to letterpress to platen press to layout. I've decided to restart, with the idea of a core certificate in mind. Maybe one day a mentorship. Right now, their poet is my girl M.]

These twin mounds of cotton remind me of lungs. So soft, like little lambs. Sarah passes them around: abaca, flax, cotton, papers made at various lengths of beater times.

We apron. We rubber boot. I fantasize about Wellies. I think of puddles and yellow ducks.

We watch the abaca get beat. An open-top funnel. A fiber in rotational pull.

We learn the discarded has a home here: peanut butter jars let us examine the density of fiber. She holds it to the light and the abaca worms there.

What makes a good fiber? Cotton, linen, bamboo. Sarah tells us of how she blistered her fingers cutting jeans into appropriate pieces. These are pancakes. I will show you three more.

What does not make a good fiber? Wool. Wool, when agitated, becomes felt. It does not sift but binds to itself. Plants can be integrated. Cellulose is key.

The pulp must be pinched slowly, dropped into the water. One pound of dry weight; add water to the fill line. (Imagine it.) Drain with a bucket and strainer.

The yogurt cup is another essential throw-away. Scoop two cups slurry into the vat. Stir with your hands. Reminds you of: high school art class, pottery unit. (I couldn't keep my hands out of the ice cream pails of slip.) All night, you could trail your hands in this water.

There is the mould and the deckle. One sweeps the matching components into the slurry, into the vat, and shimmies, as if panning for gold. I twitch; my hands stutter. My paper is smoother, the twitchier I get. I shake before rising. I learn the warp of the mould can crumple the paper on the felt. I learn to not shift so violently, or the paper can warp on the mould. I envy the mistakes of my classmates--the hills that are declared cells, the lines that resemble veins. I think of my (in)fertility poems, my patient-on-an-examining-table poems, my definition-of-a-cyst poems. I would press them right next to those throbbing, pulsing failures.

The paper loses its shine as it dries. Here it is: wettest in its form. I cannot help but make, over and over, the smaller size, the one that is closest to the trade paperback. Others make the larger sheets, varying according to whim. I am looking ahead, though to what, I do not know.

There is also pigmentation. Sarah tests the water; the water should run clear when the dye has been absorbed (one uses the slippery retention agent for aid), but this dye is the pigment of her pigment. Declared close enough, the cotton is called: salmon, dusty rose, insulation-pink. I add: tangerine. I think of palms.

The paper is pressed, boards and water. And after all of this, the best system, besides the drying racks or the window pressings, is the restraint dryer, which is little more than corrugated cardboard, blotters, and a linted fan.

They are there, sleeping. Peeled away from felt. In the basement of the center for book arts, the security guard leaning over a newspaper. Traffic has slowed outside; the sun is setting earlier and earlier every day. Equinox has passed.

I promised three pancakes. And there they are, free for students to slurry again. Blue cotton, red cotton, white abaca. Patriotic.

Linger at the installation. Think of the moon. Your thoughts will batter tonight; you've been energized.

{ cross posted on paper tattoo press }

two-things-at-once

2011-09-20T12:39:00.000-05:00

I was in several writing groups as an undergraduate, but one, which met a few scant times, touched and untouched, was my favorite. Karen was an MFA student, I was planning to become one myself, and we wrote together, read together, had pasta and bread together, watched Neruda-inspired interpretive dance. (Remember, E?)

Karen's been bathed in good news lately. Her book, Chinoiserie, will arrive in the world this January, published by Ahsahta Press, winner of the Sawtooth (of which my friend Colleen McCarthy was a finalist for her book Siren, which is no small feat--congratulations, congratulations!).

And two days ago, Karen and her husband welcomed a baby boy into this world. Healthy and handsome and so much hair!

(from Karen's announcement email)
"Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival."
- Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

It's all I can do to keep myself rooted, to not hop onto a plane to embrace this new little soul. What a wonderful, proud thing, what a two-things-at-once, what an overwhelming collection of happiness. And what a well-deserving poetmama. Welcome to the tribe: congratulations.

per mis sion

2011-09-17T17:18:00.002-05:00

This is my first semester where I am not a student, not a teacher, not threaded into the intricacies of syllabus-scheduling, not lining up books from someone else's requirements. Technically speaking, I am still an MFA student, though I am done with my coursework, and my situation is unique. I've simply deferred my defense to next May so that my double-surgeries of the spring, my hugely difficult pregnancy can fade a bit and my focus can return to that file that waves hello at me every day, that manuscript I hope will one day be bound into an Actual Book. I will happily report to (new) thesis advisers (I will miss my previous ones though; this was the worst bit of deferring) throughout the year.

This means, though, that I feel compelled to keep my brain from atrophy. My days are filled with diapers and blocks and baby-proofing, and my bear is the absolute best companion on this planet, but she certainly cannot participate in poetry exegesis as I might desire.

Last night, the three of us got together at my home, over cashew-ginger-carrot soup and kale chips, and had our first discussion of what I hope grows into a very engaging project over this next year. We've formed a small collective, with another friend participating in Atlanta, something that has grown and changed and is in its fourth year, and this year, we plan to buckle down and produce something at the close. Each month, we hope to get together (next month, the coffee shop at MCBA) and putter about some topic. Initially, I believed it would rotate each month, though the topic was interesting enough for the others that we'll see how it organically changes, rather than force it into shifts.

I began my little packet by including definitions and thesaurus entries for "permission," hoping, perhaps, some close-but-not-quite linguistics would spark. It's all connected. I gave a string of writing exercises and we decided to write together on #2:

1/ Freewrite on the word “permission” or“permit.” Create your owndefinition.

2/ Theold childhood memory prompt. Lookback on a time when you wished you were given permission to do something. Write about that. Imagine what might have happened if youwere given that permission. Maybeit’s something you never worked up the nerve to ask for. Maybe it was something you only wantedwithout giving it words. Give itwords now.

3/ Takethis moment now to write something secret. Maybe it’s an incident in your private life that you’vealways thought: No, if I write this, someone will get hurt. Or, No,if I write this, I will have told, and-- maybe there’s something small andshameful about that. Give yourselfpermission to tell that story, even if that story ends up being burned in asink later.

4/ There are narratives around us that we are fascinated by. There are stories across the globe, inthe news, the ones we can only imagine but aren’t a part of our own life’sexperiences. But you held back,maybe because you didn’t know enough, or maybe because you felt it wasn’t yourplace to give voice to this particular situation. And again that sink, even if—give yourself permission rightnow to write it. See where ittakes you.

We found emotional charges, and Meryl had a line connecting two acts of crossing that both Colleen and I murmured to. [This takes me back to a reading at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, where Kim Addonizio linked that happy ah-sound to gerbils orgasming. She didn't take credit for this simile, but I cannot remember the source.]

I am all-but-one-hundred-pages done with The Grand Permission: New Writings on Motherhood and Poetics and gleaned several quotes that felt relevant, each containing an ability to strike sparks:

Sometimes,as you “await the birth-hour of new clarity,” as Rilke advised Mr. Kappus, apath around the emotional obstacle will appear.
- Maxine Kumin, “Motherhood and Poetics”

I sat [my children] down in my poems, to crawl, torun, to smash a dozen eggs. Iopened the page to them.
- Maureen Owen, “When as a Girl on the Plains ofMinnesota”

But neither writing nor motherhood is mereattitude. Each performance is ahard-won process, an action selected freeze-framed from a sequence of failedattempts to match an aesthetic or emotional ideal. Each act of writing or mothering stuns by the immensity ofits hidden archaeology of failure, riddled origins, hidden clauses, minutepleasures achieved through tactical approximations. Poetry and mothering have this in common with other humanactivities that manage to be part of the real, and in doing so they can transformour sense of the real, even as they are incomplete, imperfect, or impartial.
-       Eric Hunt, “The World IsNot Precisely Round”

Aleksandro Solzhenitsyn, when he was in prison, hadno paper or pen, so each day he took a match and put it to the side. Each match signified a page of hiswriting. When he was released, hewrote the five hundred pages of The GulagArchipelago from these “notes.” I always remembered this story, for it illustrated to me the mind’spower to preserve significant experience until it can be told.
-       Toi Derricotte, “Writing Natural Birth”

One writes inescapably out of one’sobsessions—linguistic, philosophical, formal, cosmological. During my formative years as a poet(and in my educational milieu), “form” was regarded as a container rather thana force, examined for its features and flaws rather than the consequences ofits use. The poem was, as CharlesSimic once put it, “an antique pinball machine with metaphors instead ofballs.” It was to be read asexpressive of the sensibility of the poet, whose “voice” it conjured, and as anunparaphrasable utterance of complex figural interplay and patternedsound. The reader installedherself in this poem, reading analytically or “closely,” so as to discern theintricacies of its making, rather as a watchmaker approaches the works withspring-pin tool and dust-brush. Thus machined, the poem was regarded as a species of discourse, to bevalued for itself and for its utility as communicator of feeling and thought.
-       Carolyn Forché,“Emergence”

A person seeks models whether that model is used assomeone to emulate or resist. Forwomen, models are problematic because so few have been allowed to succeed. And to use the male as a model is alsoproblematic because their experience—even if one could argue that their work is“universal” in symbolizing birth or loss—cannot accurately reflect what a girllearns about her body from that body and from culture. In fact, that is a problem with personapieces that cross gender—how can a woman write from the body of a man, from abody that experiences erections? Or a man write from a woman’s, one who conceives and gives birth? Who suckles? Is it possible? And how is the body contained in one’s work apart from the subjectmatter?
-       Kimiko Hahn, “Pulse andImpulse”

That the poem must not holdback. That the poem must not beashamed of itself.
- Alicia Ostriker, “Notes on ‘Listen’”

For me, there was a kind of division. Initially, permission came from this book and made me think of how we sometimes have to give ourselves permission to write about a particular topic, about how we might think something is poetically unworthy of address; this was something surprising to me when I realized motherhood has been one such topic for many talented writers.

Then--"I Go Back to May 1937." Then--"Infidelity." Permission divided to me. It cleaved into two simple and distinct categories: permission you give yourself (to write a family secret, to be a poet, to be a stay-at-home mother) and permission you seek from the world around you (to write from another experience, to address something so big and vibrating).

Such as this: Nicole Cooley's essay "Poetry of Disaster." The packet grows richer. It's hardened my reading list resolve (Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead has floated to the top), has touched me and made me feel strange [shame? no. regret? perhaps] at choosing to stay-at-home-and-watch-the-news on 9/11 when she and her students, breathing the same air as the towers discussed those words, what was missing. It's a good piece.

And it compels me. Particularly since the famine has haunted me so. What is a writer to do but write about what distracts us? But what right do I have to write about those things?

Then--"The Colonel." Then--discussion on "The Colonel."

Both Meryl and Colleen attended Naropa this summer, and Meryl described the most successful exquisite corpse activity, where the workshop leaders filled the well, so to speak, with images and videos and discussion so that already the imagination was piqued and on similar sources. Our wells are beginning to fill.

It's all connected.

We meet again in a month, just after the Twin Cities Book Festival, and another discussion. In the meantime, we'll see what from these pages (and here, these links and pastings) prompts a poem, a fragment, and we'll exchange and circulate and see how that builds. I hope, when a year has passed, or a little less, depending, we can put together a letterpressed project, a kind of souvenir of this companionship, maybe something broader.

two things

2011-09-13T01:04:00.003-05:00

1/ My chapbook, The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake, will soon no longer be available. If you are interested in a copy, let me know, or purchase one from the press's etsy shop. ***

2/ My poem, "Section," has just been published in Issue Six of Spilt Milk. It's a very new poem from my recent manuscript, and I'm happy to see these parts of the work begin to emerge in the world.

*** 10/10/11 Edit to add: I was mistaken; the chapbook will continue to be in print. I'll announce if and when that changes.

the looking-back post

2011-09-11T08:25:00.000-05:00

Dear Molly-of-ten-years-ago:

You will be in the shower when you get the news. You will brush it off; a week or so ago you were in the shower too when a false alarm was set off in the apartment complex and you stood dripping on the lawn with your cats in your arms. You will think as others thought, immediately, that a prop plane, a hobbyist, flew into the tower, and you will think what a terrible accident for that person, that he was alone, that it was a he, for sure, a man wearing khaki, have sandy hair and glasses, he will be forty-ish, and will be mourned and the hole will be patched and you'll have forgotten it as you delved farther into your undergraduate project.

Poetry that morning. Seminar with Michael Dennis Browne, only your second class with him thus far. You've had him for a fleeting week in the May session course titled The Discovery of Poetry, and he will eventually encourage us to put in an application to take his spring course called The Poet in the World, and you will accept this challenge and get in and fall in love with Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhmatova. He will remember you for a small piece you did on June Jordan, who was good, but Annie was the one who loved her and not you.

But this morning you'll go to class, shocked after the shower, after wrapping a towel about your head and joining your boyfriend (who will one day become your husband, can you believe it? And ten years later, you will maybe be surprised at the journey, but you will have gotten there, you will have gone through the MFA-ropes, more or less, you'll have a humble chapbook and a baby and that will surprise you in only the best of ways) at the television and seeing what was really meant by plane. You will go to class, because that is what you do, and your husband will drive you in because he's decided not to go to work himself, downtown Minneapolis, because the world isn't certain it isn't just snowballing deeper into the country, four planes down, the possibility of more, or other ways of exploding. MDB will give the class a choice: we can go out onto campus and write, come back and share, or we can go home, be with our families, and all but one, all including the girl who drives down from Duluth every week, will want to go home, turn back to the television and watch. And this is what you'll do.

You'll remember sitting on one of the benches on campus, smoking a cigarette, and thinking, hurt, of how the entire world will change and what if they shut down the universities and everyone has to go to war and sleep in the basement and collect gas masks. And in some ways, the world does panic for a while in the ways you fear the most, with envelopes threatening anthrax and something about collecting duct tape from the hardware stores. There will be a continual hum about the Middle East, and two of your favorite people will go there, one knowing Arabic and meeting his wife and having beautiful sons and no longer writing poetry, and the other will come back earlier than anticipated, losing one foot and decorating the other with shrapnel and that phone call will change you too. A childhood cat will die that day too and your boyfriend (same one) will drive up from Winona, where he is in graduate school, and he will hold you and sleep over and leave before the sun comes up.

You'll also quit smoking that winter after the planes because you'll have your first pregnancy scare, which will later turn out to be infertility, but don't worry about that now, just be glad you were able to quit the first time and make it permanent and your boyfriend will follow suit a few months later, but not after thinking he was hilarious by testing you in various ways, like pushing your buttons in a very teasing sort of way.

You will think you'll watch the news more and become more in tune with the world news, but you won't. You'll watch Bush the younger's announcement of going to war in your boyfriend's (same one) dorm room, his first year of graduate school, and you'll sit while he's in the lab, cross-legged on his narrow cot, the snow thick outside, and you're tired of it--it's March in Minnesota and it's been a long winter--and your boyfriend is turning a year older and now you're afraid because you don't want there to be a draft, you want graduate school to secure him-and-her tight enough, lock us all into safety. (And what does this have to do with 9/11 again? You'll be confused, but get used to this, as your brain is about to start fogging more and more every day and faster, once you give birth to that babe. You won't mind so much though.)

You know about Poets Against the War because MDB has told you about it, and you submit a poem and check every morning to see if it made poem of the day but it doesn't, which is just as well, because it's a "you were there and we won't" sort of poem (this is what MDB often says in workshop when the poet is being too obscure for his tastes) and one night you drive into St Paul at night and listen to Robert Bly read "Call and Answer" at a little coffee shop and other poets joining other events across the country, poets reading poems they wrote against this war. You want to let this make you feel better, being a small student, a small voice that is a part of it, but it's not enough.

Ten years later you will watch news reports for the day, or plan to anyway, though you'll also plan laundry (you'll do a lot of it these days) and you'll write out a grocery list and you'll wonder about those babies who were stretched out in their mama's bellies when their papas passed away.

You'll feel safe. You'll write poems. You'll look at this day from the outside of the fishbowl and continue on. You'll wish maybe you could write more coherently about ten years ago, but you know this story isn't yours to tell. Your story came from a different sort of fishbowl, and you'll be glad for certain minnows who tug at your socks, pull themselves up to the laptop, ask to be heard too.

Sincerely, You-of-today

call + answer project

2011-09-05T19:32:00.001-05:00

I have to back up a bit to tell the whole story: I went to Bread Loaf, came back wanting a tattoo. Shawn Hebrank, super-talented tattoo artist, who happens to be married to one of my top most favorite people in the entire world, offered a trade of press time on my Kelsey for the tattoo. Fastforward: he and his talented wife have started four-letterpress, and she is currently a mentee at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts.

(Some day, the backstory will spool out a bit more clearly, but I wanted a few blips to get us where we are today.)

Meryl, who is featured many, many times in these above photos, along with our friend Colleen, met Amanda Lovelee through this mentorship. Amanda is a visual artist, focusing on film, and she is attracted to subjects of the scientific and social variety. In this particular project, she has taken a look at the community and culture of square dance, and in particular, she is interested in the ways in which square dance can bring together a group of strangers and they, by the rules of the dance, are forced to touch. (See her blog on this: Call and Answer Project.)

Each mentee must put together a project at the end of the program, and part of Amanda's is a series of small books, which focus on information or instruction regarding the dance. Earlier in the summer, she had an overnight party at MCBA, in which there was square dancing on the main floor of the galleries and in the basement, on the Vandercooks, there was print shifts, which is where you could find Meryl and Shawn. (In hindsight, I wish I had gone when Meryl threw the Facebook invite my way, though it would have been difficult leaving Maya in the night, as she still nurses and the three of us co-sleep. Still. Today reminds me of that kind of freeing, arts-community feeling that I often struggle with in being a mother and all its inherent obligations. I will find balance, but it's most difficult right now, when she needs me the most.)

The day was really a lovely one, save a small smattering of rain, which swamped a bit of the field. We slogged through it nonetheless, and the sky cleared and there was much hand-holding by strangers. There are days like these that I know will come to me in the depths of winter and I will think, "Yes, that was perfect." Sitting on the lawn: some of us barefoot, grass clinging to our fingers and toes, watermelon in a paper basket, Maya with her first bits of orange dribbling down her front, a video on a loop near the entryway to the museum that makes the heart hum with warmth, the transition from eyebrow-raised confusion (a project on square dancing? really?) to getting it, thinking of how few opportunities we have in life to come together as a community, both this small one, the three poetesses along with my partner and our baby, and the larger one, the one that had me run into someone I knew from an activist community nearly a decade ago, of friends making new friends, of hula hoops and future possibilities.

Oh thank you, Meryl, for bringing us together in this way, and a big thank you and congratulations to Amanda (who is expecting her own first minnow in February--that's her in the first picture and later on too) for a successful afternoon. I'm sure it must feel delightful to be at the other side, looking back on a project well-launched.

And I am dumbfounded at myself for forgetting to hold hands with a stranger and get a free booklet of my own, but I am sure Meryl will let me peruse her booty, as I believe she gets the collector's set for her time at MCBA, keeping that press rolling.

Full photoset here: call and answer project on Flickr (and a sequence of cute photos and a few words about Maya on this day via this post on roots + wings).

PS: If this photo, which seems to be iconic of this Minnesota project, became a print, I so would purchase one to frame and put in my home. It would happily remind me of this day.

failed girls

2011-09-01T23:36:00.001-05:00

Two months ago, it was me and my humble poems, singing into the Rogue Buddha Gallery air. The Pocket Lab Reading Series is charming and I'm so grateful to MC for these two years, and look forward to many more.

And tonight, Maya and I made a reprise visit (and will again in two months, when Becky Lehmann reads, a high school classmate of my husband's and friend of ours--though when did we see her last? Some New Year's Eve at Palm Gardens, certainly, years and years ago), especially for a certain someone we both hold very dear.

And as I stood in the back of the room, swaying with my bear, closing my eyes and thinking of someone I miss and wishing it upon the flower petal I left in the front of the room, obediently chanting return as the mother-and-daughter moved about the room, I realized: Wow. Because that's what you think when a woman you deeply admire, whose project with failed girls is brilliant, just so happens to also be one of your good friends.

It's a little startling.

I would feel blessed with or without the poetry. Colleen's just that kind of girl, with a big heart that could sink a ship. The poetry, the words, the performance, the vision--all of that is such a precious extension

new minnesota state poet laureate

2011-08-26T15:03:00.005-05:00

I met Joyce Sutphen in May of 2000, when I was taking a course titled The Discovery of Poetry, named for the book of the same title. MDB was teaching the course (and his instructorship would later inspire me to focus on poetry in the creative writing field) but his sister in England passed away and he had to return home, leaving two others to take his place in the three-week May session course. Joyce Sutphen took the middle week, guiding us through the steps, delighting in our memorized poetry (I loved Anne Sexton's "The Kiss" and this was the first time I heard that ee cummings poem used often in weddings).

After she taught at the university, in one of those sweaty rooms in Lind Hall, I read one book after another by this quiet-spoken poet and fell in love.

So when Scott King, editor of Red Dragonfly Press, published her most recent book, and she had a reading during one of the Anderson Center's open studio celebrations, I was pleased to sit shyly in the back of a small room and listen to her quietly read gorgeous poems of farmland, home and landscape. (See above photo.) I lingered after, wanting her to sign my copy of her chapbook Red Dragonfly did five years previous, and she recognized me--not likely from the week-long stint she did a decade before, but perhaps at our faces surfacing at the same literary events. We spoke--she, encouraging and warm--about MFA programs, about the small circle of poets she is a part of and I admire. She's gracious and humble and truly talented.

---

I remember when I was student teaching in 2005 and I would clip articles from the newspaper about the battle for a state poet laureate. Pawlenty resisted for a time, but in 2008, he named Robert Bly as the first laureate. Before this though, I remember reading:

"Even though we have a state 'folklorist,' I also have concern this will lead to calls for other similar positions. We could also see requests for a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter."

And I remember promptly rolling my eyes. (I was not saddened when I heard Pawlenty was stepping out of the race for Republican nomination for president.)

Bly was an obvious choice, with his bluster, his shock of white hair, his Iron John-ness, his morning poems, and his prolific volumes of translation. I enjoy many of his poems. And from what I understand of the post, a laureate is meant to promote poetry within the state, more or less. Bly fit this bill properly, being a commonly read poet, one who could bring poetry back to the familiar and the comforting.

I remember his coming to MDB's class once (this one titled The Poet in the World, which I adored). I remember learning MDB's wife was Carol Bly's niece. I would have loved to sit at that table in Madison, Minnesota. I remember seeing him at the Poets Against the War events that cropped up not long after 9/11.

---

They're a study in contrasts in the social realm of mannerisms, but their poetry* glows with rich imagery and quiet observations (*or rather, my favorite Bly poems along with all Sutphen poems). There's fantastic comfort in reading a book of Sutphen's poems. There's something about them that makes me want to return to those pages again and again and live in that world.

I also will puff out my own chest and say that Joyce was kind enough to blurb (and swiftly so) my humble chapbook. (Thank you, thank you!)

---

What makes me happiest about reading this announcement is knowing just how much she truly, truly deserves it. Congratulations, Joyce. I am happy to live in this state, proud to be a poet in a landscape you represent.

the famine

2011-08-16T23:35:00.004-05:00

I am haunted these days, by what I read and see, by what is going on in the Horn of Africa. So much so that it seeps into my everyday, that so many moments are seen with the hum of these images. The one that has sent a crack down the whole of me comes at minute 2:55-3:03 in the above video.

I think it's because he's six months old--nearly the same age as Maya. They could have been born in the same month. They could have switched places; we have nothing to do with the circumstances we are born into.

It could be us, one day, if our own country beat against itself, bullied itself into a civil war and families had to flee from fertile land to safety. Safety from man-made destruction, that is--the fleeing leads to environmental instability. It could be us, our land could dry up from five years without rain. Parts of our own country are already suffering from this blue-sky persistence, this wet-earth lack.

Perhaps my ache is because I recognize the movement of that jaw. That rhythmic up-and-down, that pump of tongue, that's something I know as I've known my own breathing these past few seasons. So much of me cries out when I see that little boy drinking and I want to know if his mother is right, if he is gone now too, like too many other children in that region.

I think of how people say: People are starving in Africa. Because they want to cajole their children to finish their vegetables. I think of how I'll never say that again.

And there's this video too, paired with an article I read in the newspaper: "We met women and children who walked for weeks, often barefoot and with nothing but the clothes on their backs, desperate to find food and medical care. We heard the story of one mother who was too weak to carry both of her children, and made the wrenching choice to leave behind one behind in hopes of saving the other. We learned of families who had arrived too late whose children became part of a devastating statistic: In the past three months alone, 29,000 children younger than 5 have died of starvation."

The scope of this has put me in a place I cannot think my way out of.

I have this odd frustration--my milk is bountiful, but I cannot donate it locally (medication). I wish I could soar over the ocean, feed my daughter, then feed others.

I can nourish my daughter. Beyond that familiarity of an infant consuming is the luck of capacity. I read this blog post on Oxfam, and I think of the deep pleasure I have gotten from being able to feed Maya. My body has proved itself less-than-ideal, has given qualms in the journey to motherhood and continues to edge me out, but the one thing I have found my body can do is keep Maya healthy. This gift, this right has been taken away from these mothers.

I feel crushed; I feel blessed.

There are ways you can help. Donate. Raise awareness. Little things, like daily clicks on the hunger site or playing knowledge games on free rice or taking an awareness quiz. Sponsors donate in your stead. I've been giving gifts that relate in some way--such as bottles of Sadia's sauce, which supports a local Somali woman (who is then donating 10% of her proceeds to relief efforts). Heifer International is another fun way to give a gift--you can purchase a whole animal or a share of one that is given to children and families to help them become to be self-reliant. Shop fair trade. And be aware, be kind, be thankful for your own life and the lives of those you love. I know I am.

sorry!

2011-08-05T10:24:00.059-05:00

My midline was basketball-shaped last August at Bread Loaf when I first learned of VIDA, formerly WILA (Women in Literary Arts). Their t-shirt, which I'm wearing as I write this (and my itty-bit is wearing her vday shirt, so we were V's together but not on purpose, just what happened to rise to the top of the wicked laundry pile) even has the tagline across the back: Women in Literary Arts / Sorry!

Sorry?!

Most certainly not! I thought.

I felt the cheekiness of it, the snarky sarcasm, but I still bristled.

And promptly bought an extra-large to fit around my growing trunk.

I was a Women's Studies minor as an undergraduate. The requirements were loose, so I loaded up on the literature-based courses: LGBT lit (where we read Stone Butch Blues and Herculin Barbin), a minority women's literature that focused on mysteries, the rhythmically titled Women and Madness in History and Literature (a particular favorite of mine).

And then I got my M.Ed and taught high school. And then I got a mortgage and a husband. And then I went to school for an MFA.

And then I had a baby girl.

And since then, I've been trying to figure out who I am as a feminist. What my new definition is. How my reshaping has reshaped my vocabulary. It's important to me, not only as a reader and writer, but also as a mother of a growing girl. A mother who is working on a manuscript that examines (in)fertility, women's bodies, the societal pressures of gestation, ideality versus actuality, language and expectations.

There's something about reappropriation. I gleefully chanted Cunt! in the many Februarys of producing The Vagina Monologues. I can reclaim sorry too.

I remember violin lessons as a teenager and how I'd apologize to my instructor every time I flubbed. He'd scold me for this, and for not meeting his eye when he spoke to me. It was deference, but I didn't know how to explain that to him. Not disrespect, not teenage insolence. A humbling.

I'm not ready to shout sorry! into the island air, as the protagonists of my escape reading have been doing. I'm not sure what that would mean yet. But I know I don't want my itty bit to apologize for ambition or passion.

So I'm not sorry about wanting to write poems. Or stay at home with her. And that's a start.

Cross-posted on roots + wings.

you do not do

2011-08-03T09:36:00.050-05:00

When I was an undergraduate, I took a course called The Composition of Comedy taught by Garrison Keillor, graduate of the University of Minnesota himself. My husband has slowly tapered off in his bragging that Keillor read aloud a piece of mine I wrote, a beer-keg parody of Adam and Eve, complete with illicit backseat romping and a cop's glass eye. My first assignment for the prairie home compatriot was, however, incredibly unsuccessful. I wrote a parody of "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, which was returned by his co-teacher, Shannon Olson, proclaiming it "not funny" to riff on the Holocaust. I bristled at her lack of recognition at this poetic great, but, of course, it wasn't funny, not one iota, and my snobbishness meakly turned to what is supposed to be funny about college. Keg stands. And the like. I left the class knowing I couldn't "do" funny, which was fine by me, but I was humbled, which was what was important. Funny is hard. I hadn't realized that before and now I can fully appreciate it. And when I snort at dooce, I can do it with academic admiration as well as a deep-seated I know how that feels.

Our little family took its first plane ride across the country to attend my aunt's wedding. Oh my, I haven't felt so moved by a wedding, perhaps ever, and my wobbly tears were triggered by my aunt who gave her wife that look before they walked down the aisle, the one that says I love you and everything we've been through and everything we're going to go through and here we go, partner and love of my life, let's get married. I've never known my aunt to give that look of deep rooted love before. It was something special.

Post-wedding, we took a four-beach tour of Cape Cod, and while Nauset was perhaps the last beach I'd write a poem about, unless said poem was about tanned bodies and the repeated surf, I was glad my own daddy prompted us to go. There was nothing terrible or dark, no ravens, as my husband joked (That was Poe, I told my computer-geek partner, and he said he knew, that wasn't the point, and I appreciated his charming efforts), just an overbearing sunshine and my daughter's protests at the cold ocean water. She'd later plunk herself into it, our final beach of the trip, and my favorite, Skaket, which was a bit like the Magic School Bus, in that the tide pools boasted live crabs scrabbling away from my slow motion chase and hermit crabs and minnows and all sorts of other creatures desperate to get away from me and my menacing aqua socks.

I can now claim Nauset on my literary map, though it wasn't like visiting the Alcott house or Walden, as I did in my childhood in Massachusetts. There was no marker, no significant breath of womanly written air. Just sun beats and the press of sand against pores.

Cape Cod on roots + wings: day 1, wedding, day 2, day 3, day 4.

a crown

2011-07-27T11:56:00.032-05:00

There would be a thunderstorm later, dogs would creep up the stairs, as if we were awake the catch them and scold, and then a muzzle on the mattress, a begging to make it stop. But for now, in the lowing evening, just a breeze that would kick up the silver underbellies of summer leaves.

We spent the evening at Powderhorn Park, home of holiday fireworks and pagan parades, celebrating the birth of a certain Colleen McCarthy, one of my favorite things to come out of my study of poetry. And what a beautiful evening it was! Maya explored the earth-world with her mouth, patted a toad, and our small group enjoyed Colleen's rice and beans and avocado, stuffed grape leaves, currants and blueberries and mango juice. We spoke of reality television jargon, Derrida and Oslo, gender neutrality and other divisive parental topics, Amy Winehouse and the age twenty-seven.

It was also our last evening with Colleen Coyne (two Colleens in one bunch!), who is moving with her husband-to-be, Bart, to Atlanta, where he has a post-Ph.D job awaiting. It's sad to think of our little group splitting, though we knew it would happen, and already we lost Amanda to Iowa last summer. And now we are three. We spoke of writing projects, perhaps even a crown of sonnets, and a winter road trip close to the land of my childhood.

After a night of thunderstorms, Maya is in her swing, crying towards a nap, and the dogs are less disturbed at this upset, and we gear up for our first flight with a baby. I am trying to decide which poet to bring with me to Cape Cod. I will share the poems with Maya as bedtime stories, read to her quietly as the plane rises and falls, slow breathing in the sky.

the art of naming

2011-07-21T12:46:00.000-05:00

I'm compulsive. I want to get started on something before the dust settles on consideration. I've learned to hold back the shouts, and a name often gets slapped on.

This is why nine months gestation is a good thing. The name can percolate. And that little one up there? She was Sophie for her fall and winter term in my belly and in fact, for a few hours and even that whole night after she was born. But after forty-two hours of labor, a forty-five minute contraction from hell, a botched and bloody and unwanted epidural, and a much-undesired cesarean, my belly split open like a fish-gut, and my husband leaned over me, rubbing my shoulder, quiet with pride at what I did with my body, and told me, "You can change the name if you want. You've earned it." And thus, Maya became Maya, a name he'd already rejected, partly for the alliterative qualities with her middle name, Marjorie, a name belonging to her great-grandma, a woman I deeply admire.

This blog's name has sat with the company of dust-bunnies for years. When we went on our honeymoon, nearly four years ago, I created an email that could be reached by both of us; the slow internet connection on the ship ticked many pennies from our savings and I wanted something our parents and friends could reach quickly, something I could send brief photos from quickly. When we reached shore and home, I saved the blogger name, thinking I might use it for updates about us and our home-life, but that task never moved beyond naming. The blog stagnated.

And I'm glad it did because I am not in love with the new blog templates, and this clings to the old-school simplicity.

I could re-reserve a name, and I did, for a day: mapsofpoetry. But the name sounds nicer with the "and" even though it forever links the two things I thought represented us: maps, for his career in GIS, and poetry, for my hope to get an MFA and eventually make poetry dominate my incarnation as a high school teacher. Four years later. He's still programming and I've finished the coursework for an MFA and have a chapbook in the world. The name of that, the book, was much more certain than any other naming.

Though I can say, with Maya, I knew "Sophie" wasn't her name. We picked it after an Autumn Brew Review--I was designated driver, Ryan was well-flavored--and he proclaimed it the one that stuck in his mind the most, an already rejected name from my list. And so Sophie, that glass-bottle name, that light-at-the-bottom-of-a-pool echoed. Her cousin Jimmy, in Skype sessions after, would say, "Yeahyeahyeah, Maya is great, but where's Sophie?" I think of the poems I wrote about the infertility and the difficult pregnancy, the tears rent in my body, the bile and push. She was someone else to me then. Now, in this incarnation, she's earthy, a baby who is considered "easy" or "good," one who doesn't wake in the middle of the night wailing and needing her paces, one who grins easily and fills my heart like I'm falling in love, that sudden jolt where it fills up and knocks you to your knees. This is the girl I write about now. The successes of the body, the product that glows warm and near.

two worlds today

2011-07-20T22:07:00.000-05:00

When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a poem that continually repeated the phrase I live in two worlds today. I was referring to that of Minneapolis, the studio apartment of mine with tapestries adorning the walls and cigarette smoke curling out the windows; the second world was Milwaukee, where my boyfriend lived in a railroad apartment, his bedroom smaller than the smallest room in our house now. Twelve years ago. Almost twelve years ago just now. We had our first date July 16. We moved to our respective undergraduate cities a month and a half later.

I live in two worlds, and I am not certain how to fuse them. I'm not certain how to find balance between the two. I don't know how they converse.

I'm a new mother. I'm a poet. I don't feel as if I'm attempting to reconcile the two. There isn't a conflict to ease. But there is a clumsiness. So much so that I did not graduate this past May, as expected, but deferred to next spring and with a new thesis committee (as the original one consists of one professor on sabbatical and another was a one-year appointment and the department's budget-crunch doesn't allow funding for her to return to scrutinize my changes).

My heart is big enough for both, for all. I live in one world today, and it is a big one. It is a beautiful one. I write poems about my baby, about how she came to be, about (in)fertility. I write about the body and its failings and how language can damage the surface. I write about sounds in the night, wet snow, kneeling in the grass in the summertime.