A HYBRID NOTEBOOK OF POETICS AND PORNOGRAPHIES

Pornography Disclaimer

This is a an imaginary diary of facts, confessions, or messages. This is a notebook of working but broken ideas, lines, images, notes on books I'm reading, writers I admire, and brief fantasies of language. Here unfiltered  all mannerings pseudo-private, publicized, ur-. Here I am art and unrevealed: poetic, political and pop. These are my moonlit rough beginnings and should not be taken literally, directly, truthfully, reliably, and none of it is legally binding. These lies are all choreographed, but only haphazardly. Beware.

12.7.07

GOAT SUMMER



Friends and Strangers, I don't know what's going on with me, as I haven't been here in over a month! I wrote a wedding. And then I agonized over it. And then I sucked it up and performed it. I'm envious and glowing like some green jewel at 4amSonnets for his June poems, but mostly I spent my early summer working on this wedding. Now my head's full of HAMLET and summer essays to grade, a couple of reviews and a new essay I'm working on, but the real work is in a current just peripheral and intense enough to make me both depressed and crazed--

Here is what one of my colleagues at school wrote me about my wedding to assuage my panic:

"Your poem is intensely romantic. It is also, as you
wondered, morbid in that its backdrop seems like
sunset more than sunrise. In other words, your poem
is a cabernet more than a pinot."

That made me feel great! I'll take that any day--Basically it's a pagan vision of marriage, something Prufrock worries is impossible--and I think my sister had a couple of ultra-conservative midwestern republican in-laws none too happy about it, but in the end we were happy.




"The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful . . . and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.

I go from bedside to bedside. . . I sleep close with the other sleepers, each in turn;
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.

I am a dance. . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast.

I am the everlaughing. . ."

WHITMAN

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you're such a handsome billy goat.

i miss you.

p.s. you left out the best part of this posting--the words from your wedding play?!

Anonymous said...

I have a terrible crush on you...what is one to do?

Anonymous said...

ooof. what a hot picture of you miguel...

My photo
I've got one foot in the grave and the other's in my mouth.

Poetry Disclaimer

My work has been awarded the Katherine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Swarthout Award, and has twice been nominated and shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize. My first book, A Book Called Rats, was selected for the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry (Eastern Washington University Press 2007). I'm curating editor for the online journal of poetry: PISTOLA and my poems and reviews most recently appear in Massachusetts Review, Beloit, Ploughshares and RAIN TAXI. I currently teach writing and literature at Santa Monica College in southern California.
bookcalledrats