The rest of my school book-list that has arrived sporadically:

Madame Deluxe by Tenaya Darlington
The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
Coming to Writing and Other Essays by Helene Cixous
Eye Like A Strange Balloon by Mary Jo Bang
Bride of E:  Poems by Mary Jo Bang
Navigable Waterways by Pamela Alexander
Muriel Rukeyser Reader by Jan Heller Levi

__________

The kitty is feeling much better, but we are still dealing with the cone.  She found a way to get it off and I am really at my wit's end.  I just want her to let her poor cheek heal...

__________

I taught a class today on a Scott Cairns' poem titled Interval with Erato - - the students were a bit uncomfortable at first by the sexual content, but they loosened up and we had a wonderful conversation about the Poet/Muse relationship.

__________

To Taste

by:  Tenaya Darlington


It should really have its own set of legs.
If not legs, then cilia.
There should be some sort of sheath or a thin piece of paper
To keep it from touching the roof of the mouth.
It should sit like a leaf on its bed of teeth or be a decorative
     beetle pinned to bluish tissue.
It should not look like the inner tube of a plum.
When it turns blue, it should be removed like a petal.
In the mirror, it should not try to touch the nose, or pose as
     an unborn thumb.
It should not have the caption, "pluck me, pluck me."
When it licks a stamp, it should not move like a slug pining
     for dew.
When used as an implement for licking the lip, it should not
     repeat itself.
Delis should not serve them.
Vegetarians should be exempt from having them at all.
It should fold up like a bath mat stored in the corner.
It should come in other colors and thinner thicknesses.
It should keep to the other cheek during literary references,
And only come out at night.

__________

Peace,
Erin

Book from my school book-list that arrived today:

The Book of Faces by Joseph Campana

__________

Emma went back to the vet today and was put on antibiotics (both oral and topical) and anti-itch medication.  Her sore now nearly covers the entire right side of her face.  The vet thinks that her tooth is abscessed and that is why she keeps nipping and scratching at that spot.  My poor baby.

__________

First Job


by: Joseph Campana

All evening I hunted
the bird that wanted
a cage of glass,
here where cemetery
slides into creek, fronting
what was once the largest
indoor leather mill in the world.
There the skins gathered
for cleansing, coloring,
scraping, shipping off.

It closed three years after
a lone sparrow set up camp
behind the only desk
in the only full-serve
service station left in town
where, from four to seven
nightly one summer,
I blackened the pages
of books with my thumbs.

Whatever it sought there—
thumping its frightened body
against glass, into cabinets
or out to the bays
scrubbed raw with gasoline
where the broken waited
to be raised up, hosed off,
fastened together in hope
of coughing to life again—
whatever it sought was not a dollar
slipped through a window cracked
because patronage was right
for the aging ladies of August to provide
from Chryslers cool in the sun.

There was nothing to be found
in books or boxes of parts.
And the tools hanging from pegs
were as useless as my hands,
which could not patch together
those straggling conveyances
any more than I could
with a tattered broom
batter the bird to freedom
as I swung at fluttering terror
as I sought with useless devices
some fortune reposed
in corners of grease and dust.

__________

Peace,
Erin

Books from my school book-list that arrived today:

Forces of Imagination:  Writing on Writing by Barbara Guest
The Green Wall by James Wright
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz

__________

My teaching assistantship is going just wonderfully!  I will teach my first class of the semester next Thursday, February 4th.  It seems like the professor and I are on the same wavelength in terms of teaching philosophy, so it should be a groovy semester...

__________

Red Lilies     
by: Barbara Guest

Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
the lines in front of the window
are rubbed on the table of stone

The paper flies up
then down as the wind
repeats. repeats its birdsong.

Those arms under the pillow
the burrowing arms they cleave
as night as the tug kneads water
calling themselves branches

The tree is you
the blanket is what warms it
snow erupts from thistle;
the snow pours out of you.

A cold hand on the dishes
placing a saucer inside

her who undressed for supper
gliding that hair to the snow

The pilot light
went out on the stove

The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.

__________

Peace,
Erin

Books from my school book-list that arrived today:

Isolato by Larissa Szporluk
Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey
Recylclopedia: Trimmings, S*Perm**K*T, and Muse & Drudge by Harryette Mullen
Crush by Richard Siken
Dream Barker by Jean Valentine
Snow on Snow by Maura Stanton
Vice: New and Selected Poems by Ai
After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography by Kate Sontag and David Graham

__________

Once
by: Jean Valentine

Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First love!
When we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor.
        This world is everywhere! The woman said,
        You won’t go unsampled!

__________

Peace,
Erin 

Emma is back in her cone.  I took it off last week (her sore was completely healed) and within an hour she had scratched it open again...

__________

Peace,

Erin

1.  I made it home late Sunday night and am already missing Boston.  It is such a lovely city - - full of history and ghosts. 

2.  My mentor this semester is the one and only Thomas Sayers Ellis.  He took us on a little field trip through Harvard Square and we ended up workshopping poems in the lobby of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

3.  Emma, my cat, has re-opened the sore on her face again! 

__________

When the Body


by:  Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

When the body
promises itself
and fulfills its promise
desiring with voices
that spill into the garden and stick to the branches
like resin
when the body in its exaltation announces
"In chaos I exist absolutely"
and under the bare light of the bulb
splits in two
so that one half sinks into
the other half
when its word becomes
a perpendicular line
connecting it to the heavens
when the body
poisoned by juices
swaddled by touches
reveals itself to be all alone
and bedazzled
when it swallows what it gives out
when it gives in to what presses in
when its measured surface
has been measured countless times
by the eye, the mouth
the exacting lens of time
down to the last pimple, pore
when the beautiful proportions
curl up out of breath
and the argument
I am in love therefore I exist
is exhausted
the voices come back to the roots of the kidney
and a bird hidden
untouched by all the saliva and kisses
flies away, flies over
the desert space
sown with the teeth and hair
left behind by the body
when the body ...
__________



Peace,
Erin

Spent today hanging around Harvard Square  - going to the Harvard Book Store and Grolier Poetry Bookshop.  Didn't buy anything, but sure as hell wanted to!

Tonight the residency gets a jump-start with a reading and reception.  I am looking forward to spending an entire eight days talking about poetry!

__________

Peace,

Erin

Today is my 36th birthday!  I am so thankful to my mom for having had me.  Love, E

Theories of Falling



by:  Sandra Beasley

After years of research, I can only guarantee
that if you go over Niagara in a kayak, you will die.
A ball of chicken wire and quilts? You might make it.
Oak barrel? You'll walk away,
though just to die in a poor house ten years later.

The odds drop above the eighth floor window yet
even from 30,000 feet, a canopy of trees may catch you.
Luck comes to fighter pilots and Czech stewardesses.

Rotoscope cameras have captured the cat as he swivels
first head, then spine, aligns his hind legs, arches
for impact. He turns this helix over and over
until the ground rises to meet him. He bounces.

We do not bounce.

Not that we don't have a knack for certain kinds of falling:
bringing a man home after five rounds of bourbon
because the snow piled up, and he has no coat.
Leaving three friends to try hailing a taxi to Virginia
while he burrows for warmth and says

You're so good, you're so good to me—
hands diagramming every curve, a kind
of sleepy, lustful mathematics. Swivel your head,

align your legs. See if you can land on your feet.

Sometimes an elevator cable does snap—
there is an immediate heat,
the squeal of atoms torn away.
As you hurtle toward bottom you may think
If I time this right, I can be in the air when it hits.

From the outside we see this makes no difference—
what matters is speed relative to the earth, not
the floor of the elevator. But you are not outside.
You're in the cage, bracing your knees,
blood coiling in your heels. So go ahead—

Jump, for God's sake.
Jump like your life depends on it.

__________

Peace,
Erin

This week I realized that I have lived here in Bemidji for exactly two years and will graduate from my MFA program in one year.  My life has completly changed and is continuing to change - such a lovely feeling!  I am blessed...

__________



__________

Peace,
Erin