Category Archives: poetry

Baltimore, poetry, theater

Slampoonedicidecyclopsitalfringe

Yesterday, I took care of lots of business (mmm, health insurance!) and found out that I have been officially approved for my new apartment, near 30th and St. Paul in Charles Village, in the form of a lease in my email. HuzzaH.

I then went to see Single Carrot’s SLAMPOONED the second time, followed by a “slamback” where Baltimore slam poets, many of whom were associated with Baltimore’s long-running Slamicide poetry event, performed after the show.

Baltimore’s individual champion poet was there – they are trying to raise money to send him to the worlds in Berkeley. He performed a hilarious boy-meets-girl, boy-screws-girl, boy-breaks-up-with-girl-because-she-gave-him-an STD crowd-pleaser, entirely written in references to computer and Internet technology. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but it was like, “Baby, you cheated on me with a Mac?? And you didn’t use a firewall??” It was really good. I’m not conveying it adequately.

Slamicide is seeking a new venue – many of the folks at the show last night suggested the newly opened Cyclops Books down the street. Cyclops is a music, poetry, and bookselling venue at Maryland and North.

I stood outside their front door with a Louisiana musician who said his name was Traveler for about an hour before SLAMPOONED last night. He held the door for a stream of men with amplifiers, while, one hundred feet to our left, a sixteen-year-old girl was getting arrested. Traveler is on his way to Florida for awhile, to record a new album. We exchanged road woes stories and hoped the girl would get let go.

My favorite Cyclops dialogue:

A (to a large man wearing an undershirt): Are you with the band?
B: No, I’m with the strippers.

All this is to say that I think it’d be a great place for a Baltimore poetry slam…and conveniently located ten blocks or so from my new Appartement.

This Morning, someone outside my window is honking like they are getting paid for it. In a few hours, after the obligatory watering of the plants, I and friends are going to see Harry Potter (which Anthony Lane didn’t like, but I’m not going to let that stop me) and then road-tripping to DC for two Capital Fringe shows. It’s my first time in the nation’s capital. I do think it’s appropriate that all I’m doing is seeing theater. (I’m trying to send a message.)

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F&F, poetry

you must count yourself lucky

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.

– Matthew Dickman, from his poem GRIEF. It is worth it to read the whole thing.

I have been thinking about his other famous poem, TROUBLE, too, of course – for obvious reasons – but I can’t bring myself to read it right now. You should read it too – it is an extraordinary poem, I may have even posted it here before – but you’ll have to find it yourself.

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poetry, writing

there is no meaning without form, there is no meaning without form…

I am not being very formal these days, not by my old standards. But I am using a lot of seven and nine-line stanzas. That’s something.

Hey, maybe it would be useful to make a list of poetic/formal things I like and don’t like.

This is an exercise that R, a friend from Poland, told us he performed with his NYC experimental theater company. They were worried that their style was getting too repetitive. So they made a list of everything they hated – it included things like musicals, one-man shows, and Shakespeare – and they decided to do productions including everything from the list they hated. It really stretched them. I think it’s a great idea.

Maybe I can have my students do this? I suppose the problem with it as an introductory exercise is people who are approaching poetry writing for the first time, or who have never really thought about technique, might not have any formal preferences. I wouldn’t want them to feel bad about that.

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poetry

Dear Chair of the Alumni Committee of the Stanford University Board of Trustees,

Virtual high fives: I wrote my first Baltimore poem today. I’ve been writing a little since I got here but it’s very much of the spinwheel – automatic “I am writing a poem because I have nothing to write a poem about” variety. This one actually has a concept, and a voice, or something.

So I received an invitation, via email, from the Stanford Board of Trustees, to apply for membership. Yes, me! Really! I can only assume that they send it to all alums, or else that they confused me with Dara Weinberg, the venture capitalist. Dara Weinberg, the lunchbox!* Dara Weinberg, the tax auditor! Dara Weinberg, the T-shirt!** But there was something about the formality of the letter that I really liked. So I first organized the lines of their email into stanzas (inspired by the Flarf/Conceptual Writing issue of POETRY), and then composed a response to them, explaining why I would be declining their offer.

It’s fun.

J says the gift of this program is time: time to do the work. I’m not even in it yet, but I already feel that. This may not be any good, but it is the best thing I have written since I wrote my grad school portfolio. I know that being here is going to really help me.

Now, if there was a Poetry Board of Trustees, that would be another thing.

* I think I am going to call my poetic movement Lunchbox Realism.

** Spaceballs, of course. Come on.

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Baltimore, poetry

Why does the gun you are mugging me with have an orange plastic tip?

Yesterday I went to a campus information session and tour aimed at prospective Hopkins undergraduates. I was the only person there who wasn’t either 16 or a mom. I then went to the program offices and met G, the graduate coordinator – she had two enormous Nortons for me with a Post-It with my name on it. We talked Poland for a long time – she and her family have background in Austria and the Ukraine.

I looked at one apartment, looked at another apartment, and met up with some people who may have a third apartment. It has now been explained to me that there is a safe and short way to get from campus to Hampden on foot.

Spent the evening watching IRON MAN for the 5th time on a outdoor screen, projected at Broadway Pier, with water all around us. After the Forever Cemetery in LA, I was expecting a really large and unwieldy crowd, but this was so nice. Only 200 people or so.

At the pier, I met up with J, who graduated from Hopkins last year, and his friends C and T, and their dog. J is the first poet from the program I’ve gotten to talk to in person.

We liberated an abandoned sign on the way home, talked poetry and visual arts (C, who works with textile arts, is moving to Chicago in November) and ended the night at the Charles Village Pub- my first time there.

C also shared her favorite Baltimore mugging stories, including being held up by a man with a BB gun in a parking garage. And I saw my first Baltimore rat last night, in a pile of recycling on 31st.

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Baltimore, poetry

24 hours of Charm

Yesterday, I had lunch with a recently graduated social worker and friend-of-friend, featuring the best piece of berry pie I or you or anyone has ever eaten, at the Hon Cafe in Hampden. You will just have to come visit me and eat it. I can’t explain it. Whatever you have had before that has masqueraded as berry pie was not berry pie. THIS is berry pie.

She clarified something for me about social work that I have never understood. Once you are licensed and graduated and have all your supervision completed, you can be an independent contractor, just like a therapist can. Not all social workers are employees of the government.

It was a good conversation, but serious – we talked about neglect, parenting, about learning skills, about what social workers can reasonably do to help parents and kids and what they can’t do. She’s only been on the job a week.

I ran home for a few minutes and met my next-door neighbor, who is a city attorney who works on homicides. Really.

That was followed by drinks in Fells Point with two civil engineers working on harbor and freeway construction projects, over locally brewed beers, at the DuClaw Brewing Company, home of Venom.

I was pleasantly surprised by all the strong associations the engineers had with poetry: we ended up talking about Casey at the Bat, John Updike, Carl Sandburg. We also shared horror stories of the first-and-only times each of us has tried to write a poem for a boyfriend or girlfriend. That’s a mistake I think every teenager makes, but only once. You never do it again, or if you do, you expect to get laughed at.

Writing a poem about someone is quite different.

I ventured that more people have some kind of association with poetry, or with a particular poem, than with theater. They agreed.

Today, I’ve been up since 7 watering. Met a bunch of basketball players at Druid Hill Park while watering K’s okra. (I have to point out that the engineers had never heard of okra, and thought I was making the vegetable up.)

Continued on to my first Baltimore yoga class, at Charm City Yoga, the midtown branch. They offer a $20 unlimited class pass for a week for new students! And then I saw Single Carrot’s new show, SLAMPOONED, which takes off Chicago slam poetry, among other things. B and G of the Carrots (the Carrot?) are having dinner with me later. I met them in Poland, but we all live in Baltimore.

The Apartment-Of-My-Dreams just posted itself on Craigslist.

I’ve got to admit, it’s getting better…
It’s getting better all the time…

I said to Engineer #1 yesterday, “This is really easy, living here.” He made me knock on wood.

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poetry, quotes

it is to poetry we must turn

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.

– Stanley Kunitz, “Speaking Of Poetry,” from his 1994 commencement address at St. Mary’s college, Maryland, from the back of the Jan/Feb 09 APR

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poetry, quotes

he certainly should have done

Someone else said that he died of cirrhosis of the liver, the condition all poets kid one another about but never develop. I thought of checking that out, and then thought again. It seemed too apt, too poetic, to research into error. So let’s just say that, and leave it there. Let’s say he died of cirrhosis of the liver, and that if he didn’t he certainly should have done.

– “Youre Not The Outlaw You Think You Are,” Conor O’Callaghan eulogizing Michael Hartnett in the July/August 09 POETRY

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criticism, poetry, workstyle

bibiliotext

I actually have a post to share, for once, about “workstyle,” the subject this blog is supposed to be about.

There is something different about being in the library this time, as opposed to when I used to be there at Stanford. I used to feel that every second I spent in the library was a second deprived from the more important work of making my theories live and breathe on the stage. My time was a zero-sum game and theater was the dying person, or the baby, to whom you cannot possibly give enough attention. Really, none of these metaphors are appropriate. I felt, always have, that I had a purpose with regards to the chorus which was not mine to disregard. A vocation. A command.

Except, now, I have, of course, given it so much – and I am free to read poetry criticism for a few hours without being struck by lightning. I think I was afraid, on this return to grad school, that I wouldn’t be able to focus, just like I couldn’t in undergrad – and that, three hours after walking onto the Hopkins campus for the first time, I’d be starting rehearsals for something.

Well, not yet, at least. I read for a long time, and I experienced that feeling which I have heard scholars talk about, but never, actually, known – the sense that theorizing might be more important than praxis. I found myself skipping past the poems to read the criticism. (Eep.) There was fun stuff – like actor headshots being metonymy for the person. The kind of observation that has no application to your life or work, but is so clever. (I don’t have the citation for that, I’ll get it.)

Creepy, huh?

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