The List I Kept

I used to have a list of every boy I kissed. I stopped doing this a long time ago, but I remember feeling an urgent need to fight forgetting. I kept details about when, why, what I was thinking and how things went afterwards.  I know exactly where this need came from; I grew up listening to my mother’s stories of her early 20s, and I remember being shocked when she struggled to come up with an ex-boyfriend’s name and couldn’t find it.  I understand that much better now- there are people you want to remember, there are people you actively would like to forget, and then there are the people who are part of your life and slowly fade away.  My list stopped a long time ago.  Not every kiss is worth remembering.

But some are.

I haven’t been blogging in a long time, and I’d like to start a new project. A new list, of sorts, without names and without time markers. And without comments.  These days I feel buried beneath a flood of correspondence, from comments on pictures to email exchanges, and I’m always one step behind at replying. I’m going to disable the comments on here from now on, and I respectfully ask that any comments to the following project aren’t sent my way. Thanks for understanding.

Part 1.

A boy once brought me the red/blue disc of a faucet, handed it to me smiling. I thought of you, he said. And I took this piece of garbage like a treasure, placed it on my windowsill to watch the light through it. Opaque thing, it cast a shadow and only a small one at that. What does it say about me that a boy brought me junkyard treasures that aren’t even translucent? We used to spend evenings laying out across the hood of his car, waiting for shooting stars, separate blankets across our laps.  He kissed me once, at the end of a long evening, among other sleeping bodies and shirts turned into pillows. I had dreams of driving north with him, following the sun’s descent and waiting for the aurora borealis, but when I drove to see him it was south, not north. He forgot to show me where the towels were and I bathed in the ocean instead and drove home slightly angry.  We fell out of touch after that and I can no longer remember the names we called each other, just the foresty feel of our stories and how dark the pond was the evening we kissed.  Our flashlights swung across the rutted road but the light they gave was so small.

Writing Retreat

What wonders a weekend away from home will do.

Thus far I have: worked on the cover for Nicelle’s Circe, made significant progress on my sonnet sequence for Formal Inquiry, worked on a few other pen and ink drawings, attempted to play with cats, reread several of the essays in Stigmata and listened to the new Radiohead album entirely too many times.  Add to that mix a productive and entertaining Heroes board meeting, seeing a few good friends, climbing for a few hours and a quick walk beneath the bright cold sun… also a fireplace that turns on with the flick of a switch.  It’s been a good few days.

This weekend retreat came at a good time.  A friend recently asked me “What’s the best book you’ve ever read?” and I have to say I didn’t have a single answer.  I have favorite books, books I consider old friends and books I can always turn to for inspiration, but what do you mean by “best”? If he meant best by way of plot, I’m completely lost.  In trying to answer I found myself walking through my library, brushing my fingers against spines, my body full of want–my shelves have accumulated too much dust and it’s time to dive back in.

There’s so much coming up.  There’s Barnstorm, there’s Formal Inquiry, there’s the Heroes project that I’m starting to spearhead, there’s the journal I already have that I still have to send back to Alison.  Books to read, poems to write, walls to climb.  Have I been asleep?  I’m stretching awake again, brewing coffee and headed into morning.

 

Red Peppers

I had a few interesting conversations this weekend, and a lot of tea. I saw live music, I danced, I went for a walk around the park.

And right now I can’t help thinking about a dear friend and how inspiring a story was that she told me in graduate school. In her story there was anger, there was yelling, there were vegetables thrown into the street. Perhaps it isn’t a good model for a relationship, but as anyone who knows me these days knows, I don’t know that I’d have the courage to be like my friend. To pick up what was in front of me and in rage and passion hurl it into the street.

How does one become okay with emotion? I quell it, I dissect it into clinical terms and put it beside machines meant to test ether drift, or along the muscles of the throat. But I don’t yell.

Maybe I need to start yelling.

[Also, sometimes it's a good idea to reflect. I've forgotten about a lot of what I've written on this blog, and I've been rather negligent about updating it. So I just paged through the old entries, and I forgot how full of love and amazement they are. And so I am happy, and I am curving back into myself. I'm sorry I'd forgotten you for so long.]

Hiatus

Winter approaches quietly

I can mark Seattle snow events by holidays.  When I moved out here the first storm hit on solstice, and the solstice party we had planned ended up myself, my aunt and uncle, their two friends and my friend.  We had plenty of food, a cozy fireplace, an eventful trek through snow (complete with bus-delay and truck-rescue).  The next year was mild and uneventful.  This year, as we made our way towards Thanksgiving the snow began to fall again.  Monday I stayed at work longer than I should have, keeping my fingers crossed for the Seattle Arts and Lectures event that evening, but as it grew dark I started to get worried and I grabbed my stuff to head home.  What’s a twenty-minute commute in the snow?  Try three hours and a mile walk home.  I was cold, hungry and grouchy by the time I stamped my feet into our foyer, but there was my housemate, with a warm kitchen and a bottle of wine.  Since then I have no complaints.  The next morning as the snow took hold my office closed down and I bundled up and walked to the grocery store as the sun rose.  Colorful delicious breakfast, working from home, Thanksgiving, movies, yarn projects, art projects, reading books I’d put down a while ago, a concert that blew my mind…. and the snow’s already melted away. 

I won’t pretend everything is going the way I want it to right now, but there’s enough that keeps me falling in love that I don’t know how I could complain.  Seattle, you beautiful thing.  Keep shining that smile across the water at me.

Top Things Learned This Week So Far

I love Bond’s lists in City Arts, so I’m stealing her idea, because I can only think in short bursts these days.

Top Things I’ve Learned This Week So Far

1. It is incredibly difficult to put my hair in a ponytail. That is, if you’re a hair stylist, you set it in curlers first, use lots of hairspray and go for the “slicked back” look.  Much easier when I grab a rubber band and just wing it.

2. Taking action does not require discussion. It’s a free-for-all at the co op these days.

3. Rain has the best Whiskey Smash. But if you go dolled up after a fashion show, it’s as good as disguise and it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been there before, you’re anonymous.

4. Writers are wonderful company regardless of what strange place you’ve found yourself. Penthouse apartment, I’m looking at you.

5. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are true.  Three cheers for my metal-dude and his desk change. I saw you leading those interns on Tuesday, and they were rapt.  You really did get that promotion I made up for you.

6.Steel cut oats are amazing. Take the time. You will thank yourself.

7.Never underestimate the power of a funny tv show.  Or the habits we find ourselves in that make us smile.  There’s a reason you keep doing it.

Sort of an incoherent list, but it’ll do for now.

Galleys!

Oh, it’s so almost here! Well, a lot is almost here. I don’t even know what I’m most excited about.  Kristy, from Dancing Girl Press, sent me the galleys for Experiments in Light and Ether and can I just say, again, how excited I am to be part of her selection?  I love what she does, and I was a little nervous about the page breaks but she’s done a beautiful job and I completely trust her with my words.

Then there’s Versus.  Feel like seeing me walk my stuff across the bar at Chapel? Then come out this Saturday to our event.  It’s at the Chapel up in Capital Hill, and starts at 7:30.  You can get tickets from Brown Paper Tickets or at the door, but there’s been quite a spike in sales over the past week, and we’re thinking it’ll sell out.  The photo below is from a promo fashion shoot that we did a few weeks back with Althea, who made everyone comfortable in front of the camera despite our very non-model experience.  I’m wearing a dress that Paige designed for our show, though I’ll be wearing clothing by Angel of Kombat Glamour in the show.

Then (because, of course, it doesn’t end) we’re gearing up for the Poetry Northwest release.  It’s going to be at the Blue Moon on November 9th, and we’ll have a film screening and live music, with a little poetry thrown in there.

Oh October. What a month you have turned out to be.

Oh it’s been a while

Sorry dear followers (ahem, Nicole? Anyone else?).  It’s been a while.

Most recently I’ve helped to build a raised bed for garlic, made soap, helped to orchestrate a fashion show (Oct 23rd, I strut my stuff) and did a reading at the Hugo House with Jeff Encke.  Moravian’s Alumni Magazine published both my art and my poetry, and I was asked to be a “notable alumni” from the English Department.  So yes, I’ve been keeping busy.

I’m tending to household duties, chiefly my disaster area room, this evening, but I wanted to post something.  It’s been a long time, and my blogging has been mostly in the tech sphere, thanks to work. 

Here’s the introduction that I read on the 23rd at the Hugo House.  It’s a work in progress, but it’s something.

It can be easy to argue that poetry is unnecessary - a luxury plaything of wordsmiths and bibliophiles.  What does poetry do?  It isn’t anything but words on a page and it changes nothing.  But what does language do?  It is not inert - it is essential.  Our system of gesture, tone, vocalization, visualization; I don’t think it’s completely inaccurate to call it an attempt at immortality.  We convey ourselves outward, into the world-at-large.  We strive to be known and remembered.  To write and publish is an extreme form of egotism.  I have something to say, and you should read it.  You need to know me, to remember me.  Oh please, do not forget me!  And in trying to remain we destroy; a single page cannot hold the shifting syntax and structure of the very three-dimensional world and we are forced to break what we experience into pieces that fit into text.  This is a broken system, but it is the only one available to us. 

Our very attempt at permanence is in a way a joke- release something into the world and the world will claim it away and we have no (or at least, very little) control over where it goes.  Much of my recent work has utilized text from the turn of the 19^th century.  Did Sir Oliver Lodge intend his treaty on ether to be collaged into poetry in the 21^st century? Did John Tyndall expect his lectures on light to move away from the Royal Society and into my hands?  I doubt it.  I feel no guilt in appropriating their language, but in doing so I am forced to recognize my own inability to control my text.  I speak it (I show it) and it is beyond me.  It is hard to both be able to claim ownership and to release but I am forced to do both simultaneously. 

This is a circular way of saying- the most painful thing I have heard in response to my writing is “how could you?”  And my response, much later, is: I own these broken pieces, but there is so much more.  I am incapable of the full image, because you would have to live each moment with me, through my body, to have the entirety.  It is my responsibility as a writer to give you what I can.  It is my responsibility to understand that what I give you may not come back to me as I had intended but with your life jammed into it and I have asked for that through the act of creation. 

Of course, that’s what I hope.  I see poetry as another form of gesture, another facet of language.  Here it is: my stolen, borrowed, created thing.

And thus we enter August

Pardon the lack of updates.  I’ve been busy.  Really busy.

July meant two nights of GoudouGoudou, a fundraiser for HopeH thrown by The Heroes.  It meant a fourth of July party that had me grilling in a drizzle and laying in the middle of Wallingford Ave (blocked off, of course) watching fireworks with some already good friends and some people I’d only started to get to know.  It meant meeting for poetry, meeting for coffee, scurrying out of my new office to watch the sound from Pike Market for lunch.  There was the Block Party, there was dancing at The Seamonster, there was four square in the street and fire dancing in the yard and crafts for friends.  And oh yeah, a new job. 

As we enter August I’ve been mired in wonderful home renovations.  We repainted, we replumbed, we refloored.  In the spaces I’ve been writing again, I’ve been reading Nicelle’s manuscript and I am absolutely positive September will be here before I even realize.  I’m excited to send my sister a wonderful birthday present this year.  So much to be happy about, so much to be looking forward to.  Yet another I-Love-Seattle post, I guess.  But I do.

Collections that work (and those that don’t)

Have I mentioned how much I adore book club?  We read work that I love, work that I have difficulty with, and sometimes work that just isn’t up to par.  I have to say I’m not too thrilled with my selection this time around.  Still, after talking with Carrie this morning (sipping coffee, feeling the way-too-cool breeze off of Green Lake) I again realized how important it is to read both the good and the bad.  It’s all well and good to fall in love with books, but I think it’s the ones that don’t quite work that are almost more helpful.  If you can see into a book and watch its moving parts as it stumbles along it’s a bit easier to see how to fix it.  Or at least, how the errors of the book can be avoided in our own collections.  A flawless book works so smoothly it’s difficult to remember that it is still working.

My own progression on projects is going in starts and stops, but after a very encouraging Heroes meeting last night, talking to more amazing people at the Hugo House and helping a handful of third graders write poems yesterday I’m feeling all sorts of excited.  I’m already making plans to go climbing on Sunday and the weather seems to finally be taking a warmer turn.

On a personal note, I had my final day in the classroom up at Olympic Hills Elementary. Waving goodbye to class I’ve been helping tutor was a little sad.  Girls came up to hug me and ask me to stay, and as I walked toward the bus stop, past the playground, a few jogged along waving and shouting goodbye.  I’ll miss them, even though I was only there for a few weeks.  It’s hard to not feel like I abandoned them to the summer, and I don’t know if I’ll see any of them again, or if they’ll even remember me if I do.  I feel like I was really helping a few of them, and I was even able to dazzle the boys with my X-Men knowledge.  I wish them all the best.