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.

10.10.08

FRIDAY NIGHT CONSTELLATION


. . . . . . . .

Tonight I'm staying in with a book. Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl. I've loved him since his first novel, The Borderliners, about a boarding school in Iceland and the young boys who survived it. I think I even tried to write something about the boy sneaking out to the shed to steal gasoline and set the school aflame. . .  swans on fire, swans of ash, or some such nonsense. 

Haven't been able to put away my September Reads. They're littering my desk. I guess I'm not finished. Or they're not finished with me. 

Re-read Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Thom Gunn's Boss Cupid
Frank Bidart's Watching the Spring Festival
Yusef Komunyakaa's Warhorses
Antonio Lobo Antunes' What Can I Do When Everything's Burning
Jenn Currin's Hagiography
Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles
Adam Zagajewski's Eternal Enemies
Jaime Sabines' Tarumba
Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears
A chapter from Georges Batailles' The Absence of Myth
and one from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror

They're a pretty noisy crowd here. Maybe in the next few nights I'll take on a few of them so I can put them away. Constellation of poems, lines, feelings. . .   "This is how dead men haunt their murderers dreams."

Windy here, off the beach. 
Up in the leaves, a storm. Not really, 

just the eucalyptus acting like the sea.

. . . . . . .

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I loved Peter Hoeg's Borderliners as well. I even started writing a novel with a similar theme--though I was only eighteen or nineteen I think when I started writing it, and didn't know what the hell I was doing (do I now?).

Sorry I didn't get in touch with you when we were in LA- I thought about you when were were at Roosterfish, wondering if you ever hung out there. Next time, I promise, to make a plan to see you.
It's been too long my friend!

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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