A DREAM BIRTH WILL END IN A REAL LOSS

Friends and Strangers,

If you're at AWP, go see WOLFMOTHER give a reading.

The epigraph to Beckian Fritz Goldberg's latest book, THE BOOK OF ACCIDENT, is from Charlie Baudelaire:

"My friend, we suffer from the disease / we have not yet contracted."

What is the disease? Adulthood? Forgetfulness? Longing? For a child we only imagine will love us before he's hunted by the Torture and Burn Boys of the last century? The speech that creates and kills in our own stories?

In this book, absence is the storybook opened in the dark. Childhood with its fears: mothers cooking their children up, children lost or abducted, children as the creatures of otherness we have forgotten we are.

In an interview with Blackbird online, she's called this book a meta-narrative, meaning there is storywork happening here, intimations of a beginning, a middle, and an end. . . The wolf child is born in a dream, meets the world, is tortured and mummified. I think--and the inventions of the book are many--that this book is as much about reading itself as it is about childhood imagination. Helene Cixous has stated that we have to become children when we read, we have to "steal the key to the library" and "kill the family"--Fritz Goldberg does both things here, reminding us how much fun it is to read fairy tales, and how dangerous. This poetry reminds us that the act of Imagining horrors is not so far off from witnessing them in the real world.

The difference between memory and dream is the psychic night of language that creates and destroys our loved ones in our own image. More on this book soon, but for now, listen:

Amnesia (2)

Past, what's wrong with you?

I would have disappeared earlier,
thrown a handful of wicked-self-dust,

but somehow that sadness
from years ago wanted to have
an anniversary--

a candle. Reflection
walked all over the fountain's pond,
upside-down-lantern-green

with wingmeal in it.
It's the nature of now

the gleam where you look is not where it came from.
All that now

is good for
is beginning another story
like the old ones

that began, Let's take the children out to the woods
and leave them.


The past, Friends and Strangers, is as much our own creation as it is the mirror-source of longing. We are the blurred refraction of our dreams.

RUMOR IS THE NEW PORNOGRAPHY

What is the difference between the imagination and crime? Writing is an act, but how much of it can we hold accountable, true, valid--especially here on the internet?

When do our journals and notebooks and even our books in print implicate us in the courts of rumor? Of course, as soon as someone reads them like good gossip. The bigger implication, considering the current administration's Homeland Security policies, and our country's political paranoias in the past, make this question dangerous. You don't even have to look at politics, just watch the tabloid shows one night and watch the stalkerazzi fuel us like a mob for blood, sin, and the salacious failures of character.

I'm thinking about these questions because I've recently had the unfortunate experience of being severely misread and misinterpreted. Someone I was intimately interested in has read these entries and made assumptions about the writing as obsession, as evidence of stalking.

What? ?

This is not a 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.

I began this blog unsure about how to approach it, wanting to take part in a community online, but not necessarily wanting to become that hyper-confessional kind of site. Let me say it again--this is not my diary.

I've been concerned about being too personal here, as well as too academic. Not that sites that focus their space in these ways don't interest me, it's just I've been trying to make this into a space that is my own: a notebook of language. My real world community, on the other hand, is very small, and it worries me that a strange gossip has caught metaphysical fire around me, without me even knowing about it! What's worse is that some of my local neighbors are also students at my school, and this is particularly upsetting.

I think I've tried naively to maintain this site anonymously, but I see now the dangers inherent to online writing. This, even if it's not formal, is a place of publication. . . semi-private. . . I'm still trying to understand what this means. I think my intuition to reference pornography has to do with this idea: that we are on display in intimate ways, even if these intimacies are choreographed, and that there is a kind of persona this creates for each of us. Sometimes our site becomes a mask that readers, Friends and Strangers, begin to expect of us.

So I've decided to be a bit more professional about this site, update my profile, acknowledge the fact that this will ultimately be a resource for students as well as a way to maintain a kind of dialogue with the web community. It sort of pisses me off. I'm not sure whether this will be a useful place for me. . . If I don't have the same kinds of freedom as I do in a hand-written notebook, then what's the point? I guess I'm still trying to figure out what it is I want from this kind of space.

What I do know is that I very much appreciate reading your sites, Friends and Strangers, and that they've been important, sometimes even invaluable, to my sense of being a writer--which is something realized in complete isolation. So I thank you.

As for my real life, I feel like I've been walking around my neighborhood, my coffee shops, my bar, seen by a number of people who I know who are wondering whether I am this "stalker"--the rumor has indicted me. Its the revenge of mediocrity, since people are sheep.

And for the record, a few kisses one afternoon do not constitute enough emotion for self-destruction, obsession, mad love, or more than a line or two of real poetry. I betchu think this song is about you. . . .but it ain't.

SLEEP AND DESPAIR OVER A BLAMELESS LIFE OF POEMS

. . . . .

The moon, likewise, returns
a blundering light not
to my bones but to
my bare breath. Body, I am Night.

I'm reading two manuscripts: one from a friend, the other
Jay Hopler's Green Squall. Struck

as ever with the green dart of envy. How is it
we are all writing this book
of the Self in the necessary
garden of predatory silences--

I'm struck by how difficult it is, the fact that we're mostly failing ourselves and our poems all the time.
How the work of being alone with oneself, trying to listen
is itself a serious enthusiasm. One we're not often rewarded for. Poetry,

I'm 32 and I'm poor. Too poor to see you at AWP.
And here I am on a Friday night alone
with a foolish attempt to listen instead to some distance
in the faltering waves, leaves
fixed and uncertain, the edges blown by a merciless
blurry

call,
lit up with my own luminous attention.

. . . . . .