Against Love Poetry

2011-12-17T11:42:00.000-06:00

Supposed to be nearly 30 degrees today, melting what little snow we have. I guess it won't be a white Christmas this year.

As you may know, the Paris Review has a blog and I am just enchanted their new-ish feature called The Poem Stuck In My Head. This time they are talking about Frank O'Hara's poem "To the Harbormaster".

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To the Harbormaster

By: Frank O'Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-12-08T20:26:00.000-06:00

Good evening. Got a new phone this week and can't stop playing with it. Technology is amazing!!

Have started reading The Bells at the recommendation of my mother. Will let you know how it is...

One test and a final paper due next week and I'm finished with the semester! Looking forward to a three-week break.

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Facts About the Moon

by: Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-12-06T20:54:00.001-06:00

Good evening! It is nearing the end of the semester and time is flying. I can't seem to catch my breath and thought I would do so tonight by blogging...

I organized my apartment with the help of my mom. Things are looking pretty good around here and the Christmas tree is up. I have a cute little white tree with white lights - simple and pretty. Next to the tree sits a nativity scene, which I absolutely love!

I haven't written a poem in a really long time. I am going to use my holiday vacation (Dec. 14 - January 9th) to write a bit and hopefully something lovely will come out of it. On my bookshelf sits a book of 1950's etiquette and I really want to incorporate some that into poems, especially the bits about overweight people. Interesting, no?

It seems like writing always takes the back burner when life starts to speed up. I think that is because poetry requires a slowness that modern life is seriously lacking. Simplifying life is one of my 2012 resolutions, making time for art, reading, and relaxing.

Another of my 2012 resolutions is to start a weight-loss program. My right hip is seriously deteriorating and I think losing weight would lighten the load on an already burdened joint. A hip-replacement may be in my near future, but I hope losing weight will put it off a bit longer.

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Suppose You Were a Moray Eel

by: Aimee Nezhukumatahil

when ancient Romans kept glass aquariums filled to bubbling with your
brothers and old Licinius Muraena himself loved to throw slaves in the water,
where men were stripped to bits. You cannot help it—it's in your blood.
Witches wear dresses made of your skin, sleek and gleaming. Don't you see
how they preen whenever they pass a mirror? In the Ozark mountains, I
met a man who swears cooked eels turn raw if they are left uneaten and so
everyone—even children—eat them quickly. They don't want to feel the slip
and bite under bed sheets that night. You move me. You move me anguillform
and backwards, zipping through the sea with only a quick-stop for shrimp
and other creepy crawlies. Your acorn heart sees the future—does it hold a
Valentine, Be Mine! or a glassy, spectacular car crash? I am mostly blind, like you.
Let us wait here in this coral cave and count the number of smelt that swim
by. Let them go, all of them. Wait instead for what your thin veins forecast,
what they decide to pulse for and where.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-11-23T02:49:00.000-06:00

Again, I am up in the wee hours of the morning.

I got back from Mexico at 4:30 yesterday morning and it felt so nice to sleep in my own bed and see my cat. But I must say that Mexico was absolutely wonderful! The ocean really is that clear blue you see in postcards. The staff at the resort where we stayed was very friendly and patient with my first-semester Spanish. We went on a jeep tour of the island and saw a couple of different beaches, went to a tequila factory and the Mayan ruins. Our tour guide was terribly handsome and we all had a bit of a crush on him. I bought some beautiful jewelry and other souvenirs from the lovely island of Cozumel. Look forward to some pics at a later date.

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No classes tomorrow because of Thanksgiving, so I commit to getting some serious butt-in-chair time. I want at least one solid draft out of the session and one submission. So look forward to hearing how it went on Friday! No poems were written in Cozumel, but I feel something churning...

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Cold Turkey

By: Joshua Mehigan

They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Only the moonlight, sober and real, advances
over our hills to touch my head with white.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-11-14T02:31:00.000-06:00

It is 2:00 in the morning here in Bemidji. I am having trouble sleeping due to excitement over my upcoming trip to Mexico. I leave Tuesday morning for Minneapolis and we fly out Wednesday morning for Cozumel. I will be traveling with my sister, mother, and a friend of my sister. I will be gone for five days, but expect photos when I get back!

In writing news, I haven't yet used my Mondays for writing, but I did create a submission tracker in Word and submitted to two new journals! So, I accomplished half my goals, which is better, as my dad says, than a kick in the ass. I am looking forward to writing a bit in Mexico. We plan to spend a lot of time at the beach, so writing and reading will be my life. I am hoping this small break from school will give me some needed perspective and help me to reconnect with my writing as a priority.

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My poem "This Body Was Not Made For Sex" is in the new issue of Sugar House Review! On page 46. Yippee!!!!!!!!!!!

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You Wouldn’t Know Me

by: Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

by the way I break green bottles in rain. By the way
I break green open, split aloe after I slice my finger,

fill bowls with juniper, broken glass. By the way
I couldn’t stay out of reach of his unruly hands no matter

how thin I slid beneath the couch. And I hate the desert
mostly for how it tries to teach me survival. So I head

for snow, ribs recall turnip soup and ginger tea as the veiled
body tolled. I’ve already survived. Do you want to know

how skin hung over hips like a sheet over furniture,
how breasts disappeared, or have I told you enough

by the way my blood freezes at the sound of the second
gospel, by the way this is still the one word I use to say

what happened. By the way I kept it secret, nine years,
laid motionless under stairs, counted water spots.

Onyx eyes held down what shrunk to speak through silence.
Lanced aloe prods skin to tell. It is this simple,

the hierarchy of fear: that my body is not my own, I am the one
who gave it away, will I – I will never learn to take it back.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-10-30T06:08:00.000-05:00

Good early morning to you all! I struggled to sleep last night and have spent the last couple of hours reading blogs. It made me realize that I haven't blogged for a while and that I really want to blog with more frequency about my writing life. So here I go again, promising to blog more often and I can only hope it will stick this time!

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School has been keeping me busy, so I haven't written much as of late. However, Sandy Longhorn's blog entries about her draft processes keep me inspired. She is writing a fabulous series of poems!
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Previously I tried Friday as a writing day, but my mom is off work on Fridays and we hang out alot that day, So I am going to try Mondays and see how that goes. I will write before classes and send out poems in the afternoon...

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As always, I am reading poetry whenever I get the chance and bringing poetry into my classes. I leave with a poem by Judy Grahn, who I am reading for a final project in my American Lit class. Have a wonderful Sunday!

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The most blonde woman in the world

by: Judy Grahn

The most blonde woman in the world
one day threw off her skinher hair, threw off her hair, declaring‘Whosoever chooses to love mechooses to love a bald womanwith bleeding pores.’Those who came then as her loverswere small hard-bodied spiderswith dark eyes and an excellentknowledge of weaving.They spun her blood into long strands,and altogether wove millions of redwebs, webs red in the afternoon sun.‘Now,’ she said, ‘Now I am expertly loved,and now I am beautiful.’

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-08-20T13:41:00.000-05:00

School starts Monday! My first class isn't until 11 am, so I get to sleep in a bit! I haven't been a traditional student in a very long time - 15 years to be exact. My MFA was through a Low-Residency program, where I only went to "classes" a few times a year and could create a study schedule that worked for me - even if it meant being up at 4 a.m. But now I have places to be and assignments due more frequently. I know I can do it, but am still nervous....

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Poems still elude me. I haven't had a single line of poetry come to me in over a month. I feel like struggling, like a bug on its back struggling to right itself. But I know it is pointless. My job is just to get my butt in the chair and write - whether it is crap or not. Just write.

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Rearranging my desk this weekend in preparation for studying there. Over the summer the desk has become a catchall for whatever i happen to have in my hands when I walk in the door. So basically I am removing clutter in order to get a clear workspace....

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The Hanging Man

By: Sylvia Plath

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-08-11T20:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I started a draft and have abandoned it today. It was really, really bad. Yet I have hope. I have written kick-ass poems before and will do it again. The important thing is that I had my butt in the chair and was writing.

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Reading Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband - learning a lot about the partnership between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Read it!

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Heading to Maple Grove this weekend for my cousin's wedding reception. My family is a ton of fun and I am looking forward to spending time with them. I expect there will be drinking and drama...

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11 days until the start of the semester!

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Last Words

by: Sylvia Plath

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already--the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over ---
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.
They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-07-29T14:43:00.000-05:00

I am currently reading Sharon Bryan's Sharp Stars and am in love with it. It makes me feel like a poet again, fills me with awe at the universe and her way of wrangling a solar system of words into the poems she has so wonderfully written. The book was published in 2009, but I have just discovered her as she is now a faculty member at Lesley University, my alma mater.

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I haven't written a poem in a while, so it is curious that Bryan's book should make me feel like a poet. Let me explain. Witnessing another poet do her job so well is part of the job of being a poet. Our job is to read, read, read and deconstruct how other poets build their poems. When we can look at another poet's poem and really know it, we ourselves become true poets.

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It is nearly a month until I am a student again. I will be starting work towards my MA in English at Bemidji State University. My MFA work was done in a Low-Residency program and I am excited to attend classes on a regular basis again. It will be fun to be art of the hustle and bustle of campus life and interact with my fellow students daily.

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Bass Bass

By: Sharon Bryan

Stringed fish thub
thub thubbing its way

downstream or wave-
grained instrument—

the words make a little
sizzle in my brain,

which twin is it, does it
rhyme with ace or ass,

my tongue trips over
itself when I come to

either one, am I at
the opera, jazz club,

bait shop, is something
keeping time or sifting it

through gills—you've
got the picture, here's

the quiz: striped bass,
stringed bass, sea bass

double bass, basswood—
what a difference a vowel

makes, this is the danger
you face, telling the story

of your life, if you fail
to enunciate perfectly

you could have yourself
all wrong, Bayzil not Basil,

married to Lisa not Liza,
writing for Poultry magazine—

how many close calls our
lives are made of, did

the palm reader say
You will have a long life

or the wrong wife, suppose
god has bad handwriting

or a lisp, and we've mis-
understood the messages:

In the begonia was the worm...
we mistook gardening advice

for the story of our lives—
god made lime, and separated

the lime from the bark, planted
seeds, they were fruitful and

vegetable, he looked at what he had
made and saw that it was food,

he was pleased, this was just
his first try, blessed were the leeks,

unheard of on earth until he
grew them, and the peas also,

he tasted them and found
that they were good, a god

could spend his life like that,
puttering in the garden, not

a care in the world beyond
watering his plants, growing

the only sweet fat tomatoes
in the universe—if only

he hadn't wanted to take a day
off to go fishing, so he created

fish and fishing line, and got
to looking at the line, thinking

what else it might be good for,
suppose he plucked it just like

that, and that, it sounded pretty
good, but by then he was tired,

he used almost the same names
for the stringed thing and the fish

that jerked his line just then,
he got himself all tangled up

in words, until he didn't know
his bass from his treble,

he was in trouble, he saw
he needed help, so he invented

Mingus and other people
to show him which way was up.

2011-07-19T12:56:00.000-05:00

Again I have failed to blog with any frequency. So much has happened.

1. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer nearly a month ago and had a double mastectomy. She has an appointment next week with her Oncologist to decide if further treatment is needed. The cancer has NOT spread to her lymph nodes, so our hopes are really high.

2. I received an acceptance from another literary magazine, so that makes three in the last couple of months. I feel so good! All my hard work is starting to pay off and that makes me happy.

3. I am applying for a grant from the Region 2 Arts Council to work with an editor on my book!! The application is not due until October, but I am starting to work on it. I have two friends who frequently write grants who have agreed to look at my application and give me advice. I am hopeful.

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I am currently reading Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, which is so wonderful!! I normally read a ton of poetry, so this is a bit of a departure, a reminder of my childhood when I would speed through novels with hunger and excitement. After this I plan to read Mary Biddinger's poetry collection Saint Monica...

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SAINT MONICA BURNS IT DOWN

by: Mary Biddinger

It wasn’t her house, but she would strip
it of its bricks if she could, imagining
all of the hair and sesame oil and lye
inside after she had finished. Rooms

where he slipped from pilled flannel
sheets to creep back into her window
with a warm Budweiser in each pocket,
as if he’d never even left. His two terriers

sputtering like motorbike engines through
the night, quiet in his absence, holed up
in ruts beneath the shed. She heard his
feet on the mulch outside, reflections

of his white undershirt illuminating
the window frame. He did not know
there were glass shavings on the ledge,
seeds from the Habanero she coaxed into

unimaginable lengths and heat. When he
landed in the holly bushes he was blind.
Across town, the other woman sipped
cordial by the light of a gas stove.
__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-06-21T14:02:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon, readers! So much has occurred since my last post and I can't wait to tell you about it.

1. I am now working with an editor on my manuscript, getting it ready to send out for contests and the like. I am trying to determine whether or not to break-up the manuscript into smaller chapbooks. But I am getting ahead of myself. First I must get a grant to pay the editor and decide on a "final" draft to send to her....

2. I went to many of the Bemidji Book Festival events and got a chance to hear Todd Boss and Heid E Erdrich read!! I also went to a workshop with Heid and got the chance to envision my future book and write blurbs for the other attendees. Such fun!

3. I may have found a literary journal that will allow me to write reviews for them. I have long wanted to get back into that work, but have had trouble finding a magazine that doesn't already have a ton of reviewers working for them. So wish me luck and I will reveal the magazine when I get my first review!

4. I have decided that for my foreign language requirement for school I am going to learn French. I took Spanish in high school and college, but I have long wanted to learn French and this is my opportunity.

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New Water

By: Sharon Chmielarz

All those years—almost a hundred—
the farm had hard water.
Hard orange. Buckets lined in orange.
Sink and tub and toilet, too,
once they got running water.
And now, in less than a lifetime,
just by changing the well’s location,
in the same yard, mind you,
the water’s soft, clear, delicious to drink.
All those years to shake your head over.
Look how sweet life has become;
you can see it in the couple who live here,
their calmness as they sit at their table,
the beauty as they offer you new water to drink.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-06-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

In the days since my last post I received another acceptance for my poem, "Art Lesson", and had to turn it down because Post Road Magazine is publishing it. Do you know how good that felt?   It felt amazing and I hope to repeat it again and again.

Finished reading Sandra Benitez's A Place Where the Sea Remembers. It was absolutely wonderful - full of magic!! I am now looking forward to reading Night of the Radishes. Benitez will be here for the 2011 Bemidji Book Festival next week.

Why do I buy bananas? They sound so good in the grocery store and I always forget I have them and they end up bruised and brown on my kitchen counter.

I drafted a new poem on Sunday while waiting for my parents at Itasca State Park.

What I ordered from Amazon this week: Mary Biddinger's Saint Monica and Tracy K Smith's Life on Mars.

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MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STARS

by: Tracy K Smith

         1.

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space.... Though
Maybe it's more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

         2.

Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

Charcoals out below. He'll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don't.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

Hero, survivor, God's right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

A fountain in the neighbor's yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.

         3.

Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone,
That the others have come and gone-a momentary blip-
When all along, space might be chock-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they-we-flicker in.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.

         4.

In those last scenes of Kubrick's "2001"
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint in water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night-tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on....

In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter's vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn't blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?

On the set, it's shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.

         5.

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.

He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is-

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-06-03T04:51:00.000-05:00

Some good news yesterday: I had two poems accepted by Post Road magazine!! I am so excited, as I love this journal and have subscribed off and on. This news has colored my whole day rosy. It is wonderful to have some of my hard work pay off.

I submitted some poems to another journal yesterday afternoon to keep up the momentum!

I have been working on a new poem that involves kangaroos. Apparently a mama kangaroo can delay development of the fertilized egg because of inclement weather or environment. Crazy, no? I learned that after visiting the science museum in Boston.

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Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

By: Louise Erdrich

Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.
Boxcars stumbling north in dreams
don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.
The rails, old lacerations that we love,
shoot parallel across the face and break
just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars
you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.

The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark
less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards
as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts
to be here, cold in regulation clothes.
We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun
to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.
The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums
like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts
of ancient punishments lead back and forth.

All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,
the color you would think shame was. We scrub
the sidewalks down because it's shameful work.
Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs
and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear
a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark
face before it hardened, pale, remembering
delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

_________

Peace,
Erin

2011-05-25T17:57:00.000-05:00

It took a lot of positive self-talk to get me into the emotional space to submit poems today. But I did it and there are five more of my poems out in the world. Let's hope they find a home. I just told myself that this is a necessary part of the poetry business and that it is all a numbers game. Eventually someone will accept my work.

I worked an extra two hours today at the playhouse. I am enjoying processing ticket sales and doing other box office work - it is challenging enough without my needing to take it home with me. Plus I get to see all the shows, so I really can't complain about this job - - a first for me!!

__________

The Gem is on Page Sixty-Four

By: Matthea Harvey

Ahem said the guards when anyone lingered too long
With their nose in a posy & then came the stuttered
Explanation was required if one seemed to be admiring
Anything could provoke a ticket even a certain glazing
Of the eye that seemed to signify some secret rapture
How the rupture between looking & looking had happened
Was a mystery (perhaps there had once been a sallow queen)
But it was best to wear dark sunglasses & mutter what a waste
Of marble when in the proximity of beauty even if it was
Necessary acts of loveliness such as trimming the olive trees
Were scheduled for Non-Moon nights so the silvery branches
In piles around the ladders wouldn’t have any added
Attraction between young men & women was now a case
Of smuggled petticoats & plain brown cakes that had
Icing on the inside & in the schoolyard children traded
Beauty Cards listing what page & book to look in for something
Scandalous things had happened in a town up north it was
Rumored that all the pretty girls had pranced down the cobbled
Hill holding gold picture frames around their faces & a man
With a cane began surreptitiously tracing where the sun was
Hitting the stones & then the mayor whispered that line of
Shakespeare into his wife’s ear & she looked momentarily
Sentimental outbreaks were not uncommon & there were crews
Trained in containment but they could never predict the next
One day they’d come upon a soda fountain each customer looking
At his or her fizzy drink with an expression of absolute bliss
Or two boys in a basement in ecstasy over something imaginary
Which couldn’t be taken away & poured down the sink

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-05-23T19:01:00.000-05:00

Hopefully back into the swing of things. Work is going well - selling a ton of play tickets and keeping things organized. My mom and I created a calendar for cleaning my apartment, which is also going well. I struggle sometimes to keep my apartment picked up, but I think the schedule is definitely helping. By doing one chore per day, I keep myself from becoming overwhelmed.

I got another rejection this weekend. This time it was Willow Springs. It makes me sad, as I really love that journal and thought that my stuff would fit in well. But apparently not. I will keep plugging away and sending things out on Wednesdays. I will get an acceptance eventually. Any advice on how to keep my spirits up during this time??

__________

Fairy-tale Logic

by: A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-05-19T21:19:00.000-05:00

The weather in Bemidji has been fantastic the last few days!! I have been taking the bus to work and walking home, managing to get a slight sunburn. As walking long distances has been getting harder for me, I walked with my cane and stopped once in a while to sit on a park bench to read a Sandra Benitez novel. She will be here for the 2011 Bemidji Book Festival. So things have been going at a nice pace here...

I have decided that in preparation for heading back to school this fall, I need a bit more structure to my days. So I will be getting back to my blogging schedule: three days a week. I will be starting tomorrow with drafting Friday. I have a couple of poetry friends who have agreed to let me send poems to them, so I need to start drafting new poems!

I miss my best friend, who is blogging here. She is on a cross-country road trip with another friend and it sounds like she is having a good time!

Off to get my laundry from the dryer. The cat puked on my bedding, soaking down to the mattress cover, so a whole-bed wash was in order. Let's hope the cat can puke somewhere more convenient next time!!

See you tomorrow!
__________

The Deeper the Dictionary

by: Todd Boss

The more complex the lexicon.

Take you and me.
The sheets like pages, pulled on

and torn off in a rage!
The long-dead languages! Ah--

but the core of our love
is six thousand sheets down!

And here we are, shamming
counterpanes, when

the mattress, the box spring,
coil with origins.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-05-09T21:37:00.000-05:00

I wrote two poems last week that are actually workable drafts and tinkered on a third that is still in process. It feels good to be in that space where new poems can happen and you know that you are still, in fact, a poet. One of my new poems, Mathematics For Mother, is especially exciting and think it is nearly done.

Got the lineup today for the 2011 Bemidji Library Book Festival. I am especially looking forward to hearing Heid Erdrich and Todd Boss read. Go Poets!!

__________

My House Is Small and Almost

by: Todd Boss

a hundred years old. Inside,
the oaken posts and beams
make the living room seem
like a glade. When friends
pronounce it comfortable,
it’s 1910 that comforts them,
and nothing I have done.

There must be a room
in the human heart
that’s older than the body.
And it’s good to be there
in that foursquare cathedral
where nothing has changed
since before we were made.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-05-02T13:38:00.000-05:00

Had a wonderful weekend in Minneapolis. A couple of coffee dates fell through, which gave me more time to hang by myself and work on poems. I wrote a brand new poem about a dream I have where I am riding bike (which I can't do) and worked on a couple of others. It felt so nice to be "home" for a few days and, yes, I did get my Frappuccino!

This week I am volunteering at the Paul Bunyan Playhouse in preparation for my summer job there. I like working and it feels good to back to it. But then it is back to school this fall....

Got wireless internet today, which means I can type this post while lying in bed! Plus the installation guy was pretty cute, which doesn't hurt.

Stay tuned for my submissions this Wednesday and drafting on Friday!!

__________

Take the I Out

by: Sharon Olds

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-04-21T17:44:00.000-05:00

I submitted to a fairly new MN literary journal that a friend recommended today. I feel good that I have been keeping up on submissions, even if I am a day or two off. At least I am submitting with regularity and will eventually receive an acceptance!!

Next week at this time I will be in Minneapolis happily running around with friends. I will hear Natasha Trethewey read at the U of M, visit the MIA, and watch the royal wedding with a dear friend. I look forward to visiting a Starbucks and having one of my Frappucinos and having coffee at a more independent joint with another beloved friend. I am so lucky to have the time and resources to visit Minneapolis as often as I do. . .

I have been reading Sylvia Plath's Letters Home and enjoying it immensely. You can see her deep commitment to poetry even in her early letters from Smith and how she worries incessantly. I see a lot of myself in her psychically, though certainly not in poetic talent! Thank goodness for medication and therapists...

__________

Morning Song

by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-04-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

Spending the afternoon with my niece, Piper Lynn, who is a wonderful little doll-face of a girl. She is sweet as can be and funny, too. Right now she is sleeping, but I suspect some playing with her pink kitchen will be in order when she wakes up.

Spent part of Saturday and Sunday researching poetry journals to submit to. Why do submissions have to be a necessary part of the poetry business? It feels so forced - so much like we are asking people to like us, to justify for us the creating of our art. And yet, here I am submitting and looking forward to that far off acceptance.

__________

Small Murders

By: Aimee Nezhukumatahil

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfum — one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon's neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife's grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen —
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But

by evening's end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses
on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know — each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy's cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-04-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

Such a productive day!

1. I revised the poem I wrote earlier this week and feel pretty confident about it. The second half of the poem begins with the line: Your letter finds me furious. I sent it to a writing buddy today and can't wait to receive her comments.

2. Crossed two items off my to-do list, which is better that none.

3. Submitted poems for publication to two journals:

a. A wonderful new journal that was started by an alum of my MFA program
b. A brand new online journal.

Looked back at some of my submissions and realized I haven't heard from two journals I submitted to in early January. Hello! Does it really take 4 months to reject me?

__________

Leda and the Swan
by: W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-04-10T17:28:00.001-05:00

Friday was a draft day and I am pleased with how it turned out. I started out writing about my recent break-up (or whatever it turns out to be) and, naturally, it was over-emotional and tedious. Then a line hit me out of nowhere: Your letter found me frantic. I started thinking about how texting has been my preferred mode of communication with the boy and how in the past people wrote letters. I started exploring how texting in an anxious activity and how letter writing is more thoughtful, purposeful. I used a fictional couple and went from there. I am excited to share the draft with my writing group tomorrow night and sending it to my writing buddies...

This morning I woke to a wonderful thunderstorm - the first of the season. I missed the boy right then.

Went to a graduation party last night and found myself with a volunteer to help me organize my first book of poems. I also got a free ticket to the Titian exhibit at the MIA. What a lucky night!

The woman who offered to help me with my book impressed up on me the importance of getting individual poems published, how it shows publishers that your work is out there and that you already have an audience. So, back to sending out poems for publication on Wednesdays...

It is amazing how many bad movies are on TV on Sunday afternoons.

__________

Intimate Detail

By: Heid E. Erdrich

Late summer, late afternoon, my work
interrupted by bees who claim my tea,
even my pen looks flower-good to them.
I warn a delivery man that my bees,
who all summer have been tame as cows,
now grow frantic, aggressive, difficult to shoo
from the house. I blame the second blooms
come out in hot colors, defiant vibrancy—
unexpected from cottage cosmos, nicotianna,
and bean vine. But those bees know, I’m told
by the interested delivery man, they have only
so many days to go. He sighs at sweetness untasted.

Still warm in the day, we inspect the bees.
This kind stranger knows them in intimate detail.
He can name the ones I think of as shopping ladies.
Their fur coats ruffed up, yellow packages tucked
beneath their wings, so weighted with their finds
they ascend in slow circles, sometimes drop, while
other bees whirl madly, dance the blossoms, ravish
broadly so the whole bed bends and bounces alive.

He asks if I have kids, I say not yet. He has five,
all boys. He calls the honeybees his girls although
he tells me they’re ungendered workers
who never produce offspring. Some hour drops,
the bees shut off. In the long, cool slant of sun,
spent flowers fold into cups. He asks me if I’ve ever
seen a Solitary Bee where it sleeps. I say I’ve not.
The nearest bud’s a long-throated peach hollyhock.
He cradles it in his palm, holds it up so I spy
the intimacy of the sleeping bee. Little life safe in a petal,
little girl, your few furious buzzings as you stir
stay with me all winter, remind me of my work undone.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-03-31T13:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I didn't get the teaching assistantship I applied for at Bemidji State University. I am pretty disappointed, but know that something better will come along.

I did get a summer job at the Paul Bunyan Playhouse here in Bemidji. I will be doing office work and helping out in the box office if needed. It will be great spending the summer at the playhouse, surrounded by creative people.

Received another rejection today. This time there was no positive comment or a plea to send more work, so I am feeling rather low. When will my work get published? It feels like never. Maybe my work isn't good enough and it is time that I faced that. Or maybe it is good enough and I haven't found the right journal as of yet and it is time that I faced that. It may be time to face that my work is actually quite wonderful and I just need to play the numbers game that is publishing without letting it affect my ability to work...

I will be back to my blogging schedule this week - so look for more submissions and a draft or two later this week.

__________

The Stone Saint

By: Sandy Longhorn

When the foraging ants arrive to scale
her long-forgotten shrine in military columns,

she has eased her stone body into a life of moss,
tiny ferns embedded in the crook of her arm, the tilt

of her neck, between the folds of her robes.
She breathes in what is dank and dark, waits

without impatience for the winter-bare limbs
when faint sun comes to rest on her eyelids

so gently she remembers that one forbidden
kiss. A woven womb of hawthorns and wild

raspberry briars, the copse encases her,
and only the truest supplicant could trace

the once well-hewn path now wilderness lapsed
beyond even a god-given dominion.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-03-19T21:43:00.000-05:00

Wow - have been caught up the past two weeks and I apologize.

Have sent out quite a few submissions and have yet to hear back about any of them. How frustrating! But I know editors receive hundreds of submissions and it takes time to go through them, so patience is necessary here.

I realized earlier today that I haven't read any poetry for almost a month. I think it is time to pick it back up and nourish my own writing. I feel anchorless without poetry. I will start with Kelli Russell Agodon's Letters From The Emily Dickinson Room.

I purchased a lovely pink jacket this week - - a reminder that spring is nearly here. I am not normally a pink girl, but I couldn't resist after such a warm few days. Pink was just speaking to me and I had to have it...

Goodnight, gigantic moon...

__________

If I Ever Mistake You For a Poem

By: Kelli Russell Agodon

No body was ever composed
from words, not the hipsway

of verse, the iambic beat of a heart.
Yet inside you, a sestina

of arteries, the villanelle of villi,
sonnets between your shoulder blades.

If I were more obsessive I'd follow
the alliteration of age spots across

your arms. But I have exchanged
my microscope for a stethoscope

as I want to listen inside you, past
your repetition, your free verse of skin.

How easy it is to fall for your internal
organs. Your arrhythmia is charming

hidden in the ballad of body,
your gurgling stanzas, your lyric sigh.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-22T12:09:00.000-06:00

Decided to do my submission today, since I was researching journals online anyway. I submitted to Post Road magazine, which used to (briefly) be associated with Lesley University. I love that magazine and am excited to possibly be published in it!

Am doing my best to stay caught up on my reading for the class I am taking. It is hard since it is a distance learning class - easy to keep putting it off.

__________

Spring Comes to Ohio

by: Joseph Campana

The first gesture is despair
because the snowdrops
have fled and the cold
came back anyway. You
are far from your love
and you will be nothing
but the space between
the hand and what it is
accustomed to grasping.
The first gesture is cold
but the rain still comes
down and like the rain
you lean your head down
on someone's shoulder
because it is too heavy for
you to carry by yourself.
Outside the boys are like
flowers and the flowers
are like boys because they
don't give what they say.
All the evening flowers
are coffins bursting with
possibility. Why not pick
one, why not let your
sorrow sink into the dirt
where it will die? The first
gesture is the hope that it
will die before you will
or that you will learn to
read it like a book. Come
read, come to the flower
beds and the mowed-down
fields where the heads of
yellow soldiers burst in
the grass. If anyone ever
gave you something, that
gesture of fading beauty
was the first sign that
the price of generosity
is the flower that would
rather not be ripped from
its heart. Come read all
the flowers: they were
printed here just for you.
Come read your heart
which has shriveled
into a flower receding
before night. If the sun
ever will come back here
the first thing you'll do is
reach right out to touch it.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-21T14:09:00.000-06:00

Happy Monday, all!

No snow for Bemidji, but cold instead. I am awaiting Spring with a hopeful heart. I have a feeling that things will be going my way and I am excited about the possibilities. An example would be the Graduate Assistantship I applied for. I am trying not to be cocky, but I think I have a great chance at getting it!

Thinking about Spring always gets me feeling like I need to eat healthier. So I made myself a wonderful meal of salmon, brown rice, and peas last night. I had some leftovers for lunch today - so two healthy meals in a row!

I haven't been writing with any sort of regularity since before my MFA graduation. I feel sick about it. Therefore I am designating Fridays as a drafting day. I will blog about my experiences, so look forward to it!

__________

Distance Between Desires

By: Sean Hill

From the moon to the end of this poem
hums the distance between desires.
In troughs of night Jasmine slept,
numb from the consumption of rays

from the moon. Through to its end, this poem
fends off desire. A toast to the heavy
drum that pulls us daily and pushes us to

hum the distance. Between desires
men scoff at the moon hung lightly in the
plum-dark night as they measure breaths

from the moon to the end. Of our poems,
ends tossed out to hold them off, we hope
some may say they rumble on and pleasingly

hum the distance between. Desires
bend us and bend. Doff your hat, where I come
from, a show of respect. Desires plumb where we come

from. The moon to the end of this poem
lends soft light. As one desire leaves another
hums. The distance between desires

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-18T19:49:00.000-06:00

Following is a new draft. I don't usually post my own work - I feel like it somehow jinxes the work or something...

__________

A good morning

is insufficient,

for your body floats

above the morning,

high above the thermosphere,

melding with space.

You are now mainly composed

of hydrogen and helium.

I am mostly oxygen.

How we mix I do not know.

Good morning

is insufficient,

but goodnight

is where I see you

among the constellations.

__________

Peace,

Erin

2011-02-16T14:11:00.000-06:00

It is a lovely spring day here in Bemidji - 54 degrees and hardly any wind. I decided, despite being sick, to venture out and read at a coffee shop. It feels good to be out and about...

Didn't submit to any journals today, but will do so tomorrow and blog about it.

Have all my materials together for my application for a Graduate Assistantship at Bemidji State University. I feel pretty good about my chances, but don't want to get my hopes up too much. Trying to forget about it all for now so I will be surprised when I get a letter in the mail...

Yesterday's Amazon.com purchases:

Aimee Nezhukumatahil's Lucky Fish and Kelli Russell Agodon's Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room.

Living in Northern Minnesota and having graduated from my MFA program, it is difficult to keep up on new releases in poetry and who is doing what in the poetry world. Thank goodness for Facebook, which somewhat helps me stay in the loop.

__________

A Mermaid Questions God

by: Kelli Russell Agodon

As a girl, she hated the grain of anything
on her fins. Now she is part fire ant, part centipede.
Where dunes stretch into pathways, arteries appear.
Her blood pressure is temperature plus wind speed.

Where religion is a thousand miles of coastline,
she is familiar with moon size, with tide changes.
She wears the cream of waves like a vestment,
knows undertow is imaginary, not something to pray to.

Now her questions involve fairytales, begin
in a garden and lead to hands painted on a chapel's ceiling.
She wants to hold the ribbon grass, the shadow of angels
across the shore. She steals a Bible from the Seashore Inn;

she will trust it only if it floats.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-14T12:43:00.000-06:00

Happy Valentine's day to all! My love life is a little messed up right now, so I am celebrating this day by loving my family and friends to the best of my ability...

I didn't stick to my blogging schedule last week, but am back at it - so stay tuned...

__________

Love Letter with Language Barrier

By: Kelli Russell Agodon

Dear Beloved,

My mouth is empty for you.
You are the aspirin I am to take
to possess the morning,
to make the earth rotate left.
I write to you this letter
from my ventricle and mail you
my internal organs.
What you left behind
aches, interrupts me. Inspired
in paradise, we canceled
our clothing. And when we love
together, the bees groan. I give you
my mothwings, my core,
if you remember what is fragile
inside me. We will touch. Sleep.
Yes, sleep. Yes, love.

There is simply no perfect way to say this.
I have been writing this letter for days.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-06T14:37:00.000-06:00

Today is the SuperBowl - blah! I was unable to attend AWP this year - blah! Blah is apparently the theme of the day....

I am having a lazy Sunday at home and have been completely useless all day. I am now half-watching a terrible Lifetime movie starring the ever-trashy Elizabeth Berkley. Before that I was half-watching Jeopardy and the final clue had to do with T.S. Eliot - the most exciting part of my day...

__________

Cousin Nancy

by: T. S. Eliot

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-02-02T16:12:00.000-06:00

Good afternoon! Today was busy and want to share some parts of it with you:

1. I completed one journal submission today via online submission manager. I submitted four poems and feel like they are a good fit. It feels good to get back to submissions and sending my precious poems out into the world.

2. Went out to coffee with a couple of friends from my writing group that are going through Julia Cameron's book The Artists's Way. It just happened that they were starting the group just as someone recommended the book to me! Has anyone out there been through the book?

3. My writing group went together and got me a graduation present: The World In A Frame, poems by Emily Dickinson, drawings by Will Barnett. I am so thankful for such a wonderful writing group full of generous, creative, kind people.

4. I am working on organizing my apartment one room at a time. Recently went to Target and got some items to help me organize my writing desk - it looks fabulous and I can actually find everything I need when I need it. In addition to being more organized, my desk is more colorful with a lovely teal and bright yellow.

__________

Poem #507

By: Emily Dickinson

She sights a Bird - she chuckles -
She flattens - then she crawls -
She runs without the look of feet -
Her eyes increase to Balls -

Her Jaws stir - twitching - hungry -
Her Teeth can hardly stand -
She leaps, but Robin leaped the first -
Ah, Pussy, of the Sand,

The Hopes so juicy ripening -
You almost bathed your Tongue -
When Bliss disclosed a hundred Toes -
And fled with every one -

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-01-31T15:31:00.000-06:00

Good afternoon, readers! It feels good to be back on a blogging schedule (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and I will work hard to stick to it. I will be again submitting on Wednesdays and am looking forward to sharing my experiences with you all.

Today has been a lazy day here in Bemidji, partly due to the weather - it is cool, cloudy, and a light snow is falling. I can never get motivated on these types of days. But I have been reading some poetry blogs, catching up with the world outside of this apartment. One of my favorites is Sandy Longhorn's blog and I urge you all to read it!

I am currently behind in my own writing, which I feel awful about!! But I am taking a break from reading poetry to read a novel (Chris Cleave's Little Bee) and will be back on the poetry horse later this week. Even though reading poetry is fun for me, it also felt a little like work when I was in school. So I needed to take a break to read something different and it feels good.

Here is another picture from Boston, sent to me by the wonderful Jules Nyquist:

Me and Jules after my graduation!

See you all again for submission Wednesday!

__________

The Roll Call

By: Thomas Sayers Ellis

Any half-decent rapper
Can conjure the dead,

Can reach into graves
And accuse God

Of Indian-giving.
The trick is ancestral,

No more magic than memory’s
Hidden strings & chains.

Trust me,
We haven’t forgotten a name.

Say them. Raise your hands.
Holler at me!

__________

Peace,
Erin

2011-01-26T20:53:00.000-06:00

So sorry for the long absence! I always feel a little guilty when not blogging (semi)regularly. There is much to tell, so let's get started:

Me and Jules Nyquist at the Hennepin County History Museum

1. I participated in a poetry reading on Thursday, December 9th at the Hennepin History Museum in Minneapolis. My good friend, Jules Nyquist, set it up and was a wonderful hostess. She sent the above photo - pardon my looking like hell!

2. On Saturday, January 15, I graduated from Lesley University's Low Residency MFA Program in Boston, MA. It was an amazing day, with my family and dear friends Jules Nyquist and Robin Linn attending the readings (on Friday, the 14th) and graduation ceremony. I feel such a sense of accomplishment and closure - I am no longer a student, but a real working writer!


Me right after my graduation reading at Lesley University

Me with my Step-Dad (Kevin), Mom,(Lynn) Jules Nyqist, and Sister (Bridgett)

I received so many compliments on my reading and even had one Lesley professor ask for my e-mail so she could take a closer look at my saint poems for a book she is writing!
__________

More to come later, as I am back in the swing of things and will post more often!
__________

For the Sake of Tiger Lilies

by: C . Dale Young

In a clearing, in a swell of grasses
thick with greens and yellows, he cannot forget
the ocean miles below the jagged rift,

the afternoons not laden with orchids,
afternoons not brilliant, overwhelmed
by the croton leaves inflamed with sunlight.

The old man glares at me, his voice tremulous:
the day is underneath the day—
there is too much freewheeling,

too much banter for the sake of posture,
for the sake of tiger lilies
drooping their speckled orange heads.

"The ocean is always waiting, boy.
An islander is never far from it,
always the sound, always the salt licking the air."

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-11-26T13:21:00.000-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all! I know I am a day late, but yesterday was a whirlwind... Spent yesterday with my family at my brother Brack's house. My niece, Piper, and nephew, Killian, were so entertaining! I realize that I will miss them most when I move back to Minneapolis in the Spring...

No submissions this week, but did receive a lightning quick rejection from Beloit Poetry Journal. The letter said that my work is "vivid" and they were glad to have seen it. What a nice rejection letter - can't really feel too bad about that one.

Spent the beginning of the Christmas season shopping a bit with my mom and sister. Didn't buy much, but did get a couple of presents off the list. Bemidji doesn't have the most exciting shopping in the world, but my mom and sister still found quite a few deals...

__________

Little Red Riding Hood

By: Olga Broumas

I grow old, old
without you, Mother, landscape
of my heart.   No child, no daughter between my bones
has moved, and passed
out screaming, dressed in her mantle of blood

as I did
once through your pelvic scaffold, stretching it
like a wishbone, your tenderest skin
strung on its bow and tightened
against the pain.   I slipped out like an arrow, but not before

the midwife
plunged to her wrist and guided
my baffled head to its first mark.   High forceps
might, in that one instant, have accomplished
what you and that good woman failed
in all these years to do:      cramp
me between the temples, hobble
my baby feet.      Dressed in my red hood, howling, I went –

evading
the white clad doctor and his fancy claims:       microscope,
stethoscope, scalpel, all
the better to see with, to hear,
and to eat – straight from your hollowed basket
into the midwife’s skirts.     I grew up

good at evading, and when you said,
“Stick to the road and forget the flowers, there’s
wolves in those bushes, mind
where you got to go, mind
you get there”. I
minded. I kept

to the road, kept
the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more
secret still.   I opened
it only at night, and with other women
who might be walking the same road to their own
grandma’s house, each with their basket of gifts, her small hood
safe in the same part.    I minded well.   I have no daughter

to trace that road, back to your lap with my laden
basket of love. I’m growing
old, old
without you.    Mother, landscape
of my heart, architect of my body, what other gesture
can I conceive

to make with it
that would reach you, alone
in your house
and waiting, across this improbable forest
peopled with wolves and our lost, flower-gathering
sisters they feed on.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-11-18T14:13:00.001-06:00

Yesterday was an awful day, so I waited to do my weekly submission until today. Today I submitted five poems to the Beloit Poetry Journal, which I have had a subscription to on and off for a few years. I very much enjoy their appreciation for emerging poets! So I feel good that I got my weekly submission in and am keeping up on my Poetry Business - makes me feel like I am a part of the world, not writing alone in my apartment.

My thesis is still in the hands of my mentor, so I wait patiently for him to get back to me and try not to worry about the order of my 44 poems....

I am working furiously on the outline for my 45 minute seminar. Need to get it in next week...

My love life is a complete mess, but I am working through it and wrote a lovely poem about it earlier this morning. I know it is the plight of the artist, but why does inspiration have to come from such negative experiences? I wish I was one of those artists that wrote sunshine - happy poems, but alas I am not. It is the darkness that crawls inside me and incubates...

__________

Saint Francis and the Sow

By: Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
     them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

2010-11-15T14:58:00.000-06:00

Well, I have nearly wrapped up work on my thesis manuscript and have started scrambling to work on my seminar proposal for my last residency in Boston. I will be leading a discussion on Donald Hall's idea of the "sensual body of the poem". Sounds like fun, no?

Submissions did not happen last week, but I will be back at it this week. As a dear writing friend explained it to me, it is the business side of being a poet. Last week someone in my writing group suggested that I publish my own poems. In response I pulled out Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Miracle Fruit and announced that every book looks more lovely with "Winner of the BLAH BLAH Prize" printed on its cover. It isn't that I want to publish poems just to publish. I want to know that someone has connected with my work and has enough confidence in my abilities as a poet to take a chance on publishing them.

In terms of love: I feel it, but don't trust it.

__________

Lewis And Clark Disagree

by: Aimee Nehukumatathil

Because Merriwether ate the last berry
without consulting William. Because

the prairie dog only let William feed
it dried corn. Because the Nez Perce

gave one a necklace of purple quartz
and not the other. Because osage oranges

gave Merriwether hives. Because a grizzly
chased William into an oak tree, left him

high for hours. Because "Someone" tucked
buffalo chips into Merriwether's knapsack

when he wasn't looking. Because after walking,
rowing, swimming, climbing, trotting, pulling,

cutting, all they really wanted was a name
for a fruit one found sour, the other, so sweet.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-11-03T14:47:00.002-05:00

Welcome to Submission Wednesday! Yes, I actually followed through on my promise to use Wednesday as a fixed day to submit my work to literary journals and keep me motivated. This week I submitted to Willow Springs and dislocate, both journals I have admired. It took me a while to decide which work to send, which I think has to do with my extreme low self-esteem when it comes to my work. None of my work seemed like "enough" for these journals. It seemed as if work published in these journals was wonderful and perfect, like it was untouchable. But intellectually I know this isn't true. Any workshop could look at these poems and come up with ideas to make them better or take them in a different direction. So with extreme uncertainty I submitted three poems to each journal and we will see where it takes me...

What I am reading: Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Miracle Fruit. I am enchanted!

__________

THE CARCASS OF BEEF

by: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

after a painting with the same title by Chaim Soutine (1925)

As soon as I walk by the butcher shops with all manner of carcass in the window, I find
myself hurrying past. I have no idea why I do this. There is no pause to consider the length

of roast duck, the sweet drippy links of sausage. I can’t bring myself to look past the carcass
of beef to the young family inside. Where does the butcher’s daughter go to school? Where

is the stained sock? I know each morning she washes her hands with a steel spoon to get rid
of the garlic and penny stink. I was that girl. I washed just like her, ashamed of my father’s

cooking. Pleated skirts and grosgrain hair ribbons reeked of curry. I washed until my hands
were pink as meat. I wished so hard that I’d be lifted right out of my home, my block, up and over

all the cacti jabbed into the sky—I wished so hard this smell would vanish, and one day it did—

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-11-01T20:44:00.000-05:00

Since I will be leaving the big Bemidji in the Spring to move back to Minneapolis, I have decided to blog occasionally about my favorite Bemidji spots. Today I am blogging from The Wild Hare Bistro - - the best coffeehouse in town. The atmosphere is eclectic and the food is world class.

I finally have a title for my thesis manuscript: A Woman Cobbled. It is currently in three sections and is rocking my world! I know I will be sick to death of these poems come December, but right now I am in love with them and think they represent my best work...

Read Dracula at the cabin this weekend and freaked myself out. My uncle's dog was running through the woods at the same time I was walking to the outhouse - - yikes! I took care of my niece and nephew Saturday night and was nervous the entire time...

__________

Sea Girls
by A. E. Stallings

for Jason

"Not gulls, girls." You frown, and you insist—
Between two languages, you work at words
(R's and L's, it's hard to get them right.)
We watch the heavens' flotsam: garbage-white
Above the island dump (just out of sight),
Dirty, common, greedy—only birds.
OK, I acquiesce, too tired to banter.

Somehow they're not the same, though. See, they rise
As though we glimpsed them through a torn disguise—
Spellbound maidens, wild in flight, forsaken—
Some metamorphosis that Ovid missed,
With their pale breasts, their almost human cries.
So maybe it is I who am mistaken;
But you have changed them. You are the enchanter.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-10-28T17:50:00.000-05:00

Spent today cleaning the apartment, organizing my books from last semester, and listening to MPR. My mom took me out to lunch at Erberts & Gerberts for a tuna sub sandwich - yum! Will water the much neglected plants tonight and begin reading Bram Stoker's Dracula - how wonderful for the days before Halloween!

I have been struggling with getting up the courage to make literary journal submissions over the last few months. I know this is a necessary part of the poetry-business, but I feel so unworthy and talentless that submissions feel futile. I know many writers struggle with self-esteem and their writing, but how do I overcome it? I feel like the way to deal with this fear is to face it over and over again, until it stops feeling like torture. So, I will commit over the next 4 weeks to submit at least one packet every Wednesday. I will blog on Wednesday to let you all know how it is going...

__________

Aanabhrandhanmar Means 'Mad About Elephants'

by: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Forget trying to pronounce it. What matters
is that in southern India, thousands are afflicted.
And who wouldn't be? Children play with them
in courtyards, slap their gray skin with cupfuls
of water, shoo flies with paper pompoms.
When the head of the household leaves

for business, his elephant weeps fat tears
of joy when he returns. Their baths of husk
and stone last four hours, every wrinkle
rubbed and patted with cinnamon oil.
At festival, silk caps and gold tassels drape
their broad heads. Brides still wear

rings of its stiff tail hair, part of their dowry
to avoid evil eye. A man with blue sandals
told me that elephants are cousins to the clouds—
that they belonged to Lord Indra, king
of the gods, that elephants were his carriage
in the wind—that they once had wings.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-10-21T14:38:00.000-05:00

Today I wrote a poem that I absolutely hated. I was ready to throw it away and never give it another thought. Then I decided to take it to my lunch with writing friends and see what they thought. My two lovely Bemidji writing friends loved the poem and, when asked, helped me to see what was working and I learned to appreciate the poem for what it was: a first draft of a really kick-ass poem! I often dismiss my own work far too quickly... Do others writers do this? Do you have more faith in your work than I do?

__________

First Anniversary, With Monkeys

By: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Periyar Nature Preserve

There is no crumbly frozen cake to thaw.
Today, we are in the jungle. I mean mosquito. I mean

tigers and elephants sludging their way
to the lake for a drink and Don't make sudden moves

or snakes startled from an afternoon nap
will greet you fang first. I think we are lost. Too hot

for any cold confection to survive. Even my tube
of sunblock is as warm as a baby's bottle. You get

to those places I can't reach, those places I dared
not even whisper before I walked down the aisle

in white. You never worried if our families
would clash, if they would clang, like the clutch

of pale monkeys clanging the thin branches of the treetops,
begging for our trail mix. You never worried

about my relatives staring at your pale, muscled calves—
things not usually seen outside of the bedroom. You wore

hiking shorts anyway. And still, they lavished ladle-fuls
of food on your plate. I think we are lost. My eyes are dark

and wet as that wild deer that walked right past us,
a little off the trail. I think we are lost, but for once

I don't mind. Eventually you turn us back to a place
not on any map, but I know I can trace it back with my finger

if we ever need it again. We made it one year
without a compass and we're not about to start now.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-10-20T15:53:00.000-05:00

Life is so funny sometimes! I came to Bemidji in a state of complete disarray and saw this place as the end of life as I knew it. But now my life is going so well and I am so much stronger that I have begun making plans for moving back to Minneapolis in the Spring!

The thesis manuscript is coming along nicely - spending a lot of time writing new poems and will begin assembling the project next week. No title as of yet, but I feel something brewing and hope to announce it soon. There are so many body poems in the running, that I am pretty sure some of my favorites might not make the cut... Who was it who said that sometimes you must "kill your little darlings"?

Still find myself in love...

__________

The Envoy

By: Jane Hirshfield

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-10-13T21:04:00.000-05:00

Tonight I find myself in love...

__________

Possible Answers to Prayer

By: Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-10-09T19:54:00.001-05:00

Sitting here watching a stupid movie on Hallmark Channel. Not sure why, but I feel a bit sad today and thought I would write about it here. Nothing in particular is wrong and nothing in particular happened. It is the kind of sadness that just creeps up on you and lands in your lap for no reason at all. I know the sadness will be gone in the morning, but tonight it snuggles into me. Like anxiety, sometimes it is good to just sit with the sadness. Fighting it only makes it worse. So just for tonight, I will settle in with my sadness, have a good cry at the end of this silly movie and rest up for tomorrow. Goodnight to anyone still reading this blog...

__________

God's Ode to Creation

by: Maura Stanton

Now there shall be tum-tiddly-um, and tum-tiddly-um,
hey—presto! scarlet geranium!
—D.H. Lawrence

Today's the kind of day when I feel good
about that dazzling stuff I've made down there,
everything so mixed up that even lies
turn out to be the truth. The legendary
amaranth, for example, somebody insists
they saw it growing down in Hell, and presto!
not only does it have a genus, and seeds,
but a real chemical formula so everyone
can dye their underwear dark purplish red.
You give me credit for the natural,
flame trees, tansy, sleek dangerous leopards,
and even tiny mites like the golden neotode
worming down into the rich potato plant,
the jerboa, the noon, and the stargazer perch,
but I'm the author of the artificial, too,
those bolts of homespun Khaddar cloth, and guns,
concertos by Mozart, and tiny micro chips.
I've always loved the way the invisible
gets to be visible, my big winds measured
by the Beaufort Scale, so that a sailor
blown off course by Force 11 knows
the velocity of the storm that downed his ship
and understands, as he slowly starves to death
on a rocky desert island without coconut palms,
that the time between new moons, lunation,
is divided into 29 days, 12 hours,
44 minutes and 2.8 seconds.
What glorious precision!
It's too bad, I know you're thinking, that my rules
don't allow me to help that sunburned sailor
and I do regret that a Java sparrow didn't drop
some seeds from the mainland two centuries ago
so that a bunch of fruit trees could take root.
No need to impute malevolence to me,
or even indifference, for I feel bad
about what happens most days, looking down
at another execution in Huntsville,
sighing over another quake in Turkey.
But today the blue planet, wreathed in clouds,
looks extra lovely as it spins through space,
and I want a little praise for my handiwork,
my fleecy altocumulus, my silvery mists,
even that fancy stuff you built for me,
pagodas, skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower.
Prayers are rare these days—instead I get
millions of poems constructed out of words
that sizzle in three thousand languages,
a few of them paeans, but most ironic jabs.
But do I zap the ones who mock? I don't.
At night I see them sweat and yearn, dreaming
of that one thing I never made, and won't.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-09-25T13:40:00.000-05:00

Spent the morning at a lecture and discussion by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins titled "Poetry Maneuvers". I am not the biggest fan of his poetry, but the lecture was great and he said some interesting things about teaching poetry and poetry in general.

Firstly, he said that it is not our job as teachers to ask our students what a poem means or what the poet meant, but to ask how the poem moves from A to Z or how the poet gets from one place to another within the space of the poem. Students find this vastly more interesting and less intimidating. I find this interesting because the first professor I student taught for told me that it is important to ask students open ended questions, not merely yes or no questions. What all this boils down to for me is that my students don't want to know my interpretation of the poem, but want to sink deeply into the mechanics of the poem to see how the poet operates and controls the beast it is creating.

Secondly, Mr. Collins mentioned that poetry is really a lonely art. We write alone, read alone, become inspired on our own. Even though teaching is what he does to pay the rent, he doesn't find a ton of value in workshops or poetry as a "group sport". We learn our art and "find our voices" by looking at the poetry of others and imitating them. As a student in a low-residency MFA program, I find that I get to have the best of both worlds. I spend much of my time reading and writing all on my own, but twice a year I get to meet with my peers and look at the work we created during the semester. By spending so much time of my own, I have learned to trust myself as an editor and reader of my own work. I value others' opinions, but not at the sake of my own.

So, tonight is Mr. Collins reading at 7 p.m., followed by a reception. It will be a great day all around for poetry in this little city I call home. I feel thankful and inspired.

_________

The Four Moon Planet
by: Billy Collins

"I have envied the four moon planet." (The Notebooks of Robert Frost)

Maybe he was thinking of the song
"What A Little Moonlight Can Do"
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn't this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn't tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.

_________

Peace,
Erin

2010-09-15T15:39:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon! Life is moving along swimmingly, but I am a little behind in school and am trying to remedy this situation. I wrote an exciting poem yesterday about my dad. The reason that it is exciting is that up until now, I have not written a poem about my dad in my more mature poetic style. I have written many poems about my dad, but most are maudlin and blaming. So I am really excited to have this poem that led me to a new place poetically and in my relationship with my dad.

I am currently reading Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats: Poems right now and am really moved by these painful and elegiac poems. It is a collection of poems exploring the AIDS epidemic and Gunn handles the subject matter is a masterful way. Read Read Read this collection!

__________

The Hug

by Thom Gunn

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
    Half of the night with our old friend
        Who'd showed us in the end
    To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
        Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
        Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
        Your instep to my heel,
    My shoulder-blades against your chest.
    It was not sex, but I could feel
    The whole strength of your body set,
           Or braced, to mine,
        And locking me to you
    As if we were still twenty-two
    When our grand passion had not yet
        Become familial.
    My quick sleep had deleted all
    Of intervening time and place.
        I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-09-04T13:07:00.000-05:00

Ahhh, it is the end of summer and life is moving along fairly well! Today I attend my step-brother's wedding to his high school sweetheart and am looking forward to the long-time lovers uniting for life.

Not much work on the thesis this weekend, but last week I finished up a reasonably usable draft of my first Villanelle. I also wrote another poem which I feel confident about and am looking forward to seeing my mentor's comments. That is one thing I really will miss about grad school - - the mentor/student relationship. It is wonderful to have a set audience for your work! I feel as though I have many poet friends to share work with when my MFA is over in January, but I don't have one person whose judgment I trust above all others. I will continue to hold out hope.

I am currently reading Olga Broumas' Beginning with O and am loving it! Her work is so rich, fertile, and alive. She is erotic without being dirty about it. She captures the erotic elements in the familiar Greek myths and popular fairy tales. I will share one of her poems below and let you see for yourself.

This summer's activities have really kept me from this blog, but I promise to update it at least once a week for those of you who still read it!

__________

Cinderella

. . .the joy that isn't shared
I heard, dies young.
--Anne Sexton, 1928-1974

Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in

to the royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was glad

of the chance to use it, even alone
in a strange castle doing overtime on my own, cracking
the royal code. The princes spoke
in their father's language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone

as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure
of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced
to bear witness, falsely
against my own kind, as each
other sister was judge inadequate, bitchy, incompetent,
jealous, too thin, too fat. I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make

for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut. Or I swear

I'll die young
like those favored before me, hand-picked each one
For her joyful heart.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-08-19T16:31:00.000-05:00

Some pics taken by Jules Nyquist of the 8/13/10 Bemidji reading:


Moi!


The lovely Jules Nyquist reading from her new chapbook titled Appetites

The also lovely Paula Cisewski reading from her new collection Ghost Fargo

Me, again, at the local Ben Franklin

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-08-11T12:10:00.000-05:00

Sorry it has been so long since I have posted. Life is happening, rest assured! But my writing life has settled into a boring rut, with no new work being produced. But, I am hoping to get inspired this week with readings all week long due to the first annual Bemidji Book Festival.

This afternoon I will listen to Susan Carol Hauser, who gave a wonderful talk in my classroom this Spring. This evening is a reception and reading for excellent poet Sean Hill at the Bemidji Community Art Center!

Later this week are readings for poets Larry Schug and CarolAnn Russell Schlemper.

Most exciting of all is a reading for me and friends Jules Nyquist and Paula Cisewski on Friday night.

Whew! A busy but inspiring week, which is rare in Bemidji. I promise to post pics of Friday's reading!

Peace,
Erin

2010-07-22T15:38:00.000-05:00

In moving back to my home town nearly three years ago, I have thought a lot about place and how we function within our place/places. For instance, I often feel as if I live three very distinct lives. My first life is here in Bemidji with my family. My second life is here in Bemidji with my writing friends. My third life is in Minneapolis. I feel and act slightly differently in each of these worlds and the result is feelings of disunity and instability. It is like I am in the middle of one big balancing act & am unsure how to integrate these parts of myself. Anyway, here is a poem that depicts my exact feelings on the subject in a much more eloquent way:

ALTOONA TO MARIN

by: Rebecca Foust

Go ahead, aspire to transcend
your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap
the life you dream on,
escape the small-minded tyranny
of your small-minded Midwestern
coalmining town.

But when you’ve left it behind, you
may find it still there, in your dreams,
your syntax, the smell of your hair,
its real smell, under the shampoo.
Beware DNA; it will out or be outed,
and you’ll find yourself back
where you started, back home,
unable to refute the logic of blood and bone
you’ll slip, and pick up Velveeta
instead of brie. It’s inexorable.
Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz
and Oz Kansas,

with the same back porch weeping,
the same husbands sleeping around,
addiction, cancer, babies born wrong;
the same siren nights pierced
with stars seeping light, all that
gorgeous, pitiless song.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-07-14T17:23:00.001-05:00

Working hard on a first draft of my MFA thesis! It seems as if every poem I have ever written still needs revision. But right now I will focus on the thesis and leave the other poems for a rainy day. I can't believe that by December I will have a collection of poetry and can start sending it out for contests!

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Recently bought a few new things for my office, so I am now surrounded by a lovely bright yellow when working on this thesis of mine.

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In a month (Friday, August 13th) I will be reading at 5:00 p.m. with Paula Cisewski & Jules Nyquist at the Wild Rose Theater in Bemidji, MN. Come hear poems from Paula's new collection, Ghost Fargo. and new poems from Jules & I.

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I am not teaching at all this semester and I really miss it! Nothing like such sweet confirmation of my career plans. I have never not written poetry. I am pretty sure I would also miss that, but I hope to never find out.

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Facts About the Moon
by: Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-07-05T18:23:00.000-05:00

Wow! Busy times and life is ever moving forward. Been hanging out with my family and watching my nieces and nephews grow up. As much as I want to live in Minneapolis again, I really have enjoyed those kids and would miss them greatly.

It has been a long time since I've written a poem, but I feel like poetry is starting to creep back in. During my brief visit to Minneapolis I visited Magers & Quinn and acquired the following booty:

Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan

Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan

Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner

The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White

And my non-poetry booty:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Love of Impermanent Things (A Threshold Ecology) by Mary Rose O'Reilly

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Peace,
Erin

2010-06-17T21:28:00.000-05:00

Infrequent posts mean that life has taken over, which is good news I guess!

1. Finished my bookmaking class today. It was me and three kids under the age of 12 - what fun! Our instructor, Malissa, had us make an accordion book today, which was surprisingly easy. I will try to get some photos soon.

2. Signed up for another class in August with local poet, Sean Hill - "Containing Your Obsessions: Writing the Villanelle". Sean is also giving a reading on August 11th at the Bemidji Community Art Center. Sean's book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, is still on my "to read" list, but I will hopefully get to it before August.

3. Made plans today to visit Minneapolis next weekend (June 25 - 28). I will stay with my previous roommate and spend the weekend pretending I live there! I am looking forward to perusing Magers & Quinn, getting my hair cut at Aveda and spending time with my friend, Jan.

4. Currently reading Louise Erdrich's Tracks for fun and Maura Stanton's Snow on Snow for school.

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Bemidji In Spring

by: Sean Hill

In the first city
                                                            on the eventually
                              Mighty Mississippi
ice fishing
                              is
                                                            day-to-day,
                              the ice darkening,
          green
                              like a bruise,
                                                            according to the locals
          —speaking to something
          deeper
                                             than the lake. Why not
          money or envy or leaves in deep summer
or my fancy
                              far away
                                                            from this middle place,
          a bit of glass,
          broken wine bottle say,
                              cast overboard at sea
                                                                                          green against blue
                                                            tumbling
                              back
to shore
          a frosted shard
          because I don’t
bruise that way.
          At any rate it shrinks,
                                                            melting from the edges, becoming
                              an island to which the gulls
          return, shrieking with spring.

__

* "Bemidji in Spring" grew from a moment of perspective or alienation, which I often faced as a black man from Georgia going through my first winter in Bemidji, a small town in Northern Minnesota. It’s similar to how we might talk about the glass when the liquid and the unoccupied volume of said glass are equal, or how one refers to the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression or the War for Freedom. Or for that matter any number of "conflicts" or "wars" or "operations." Each of these reflects a reality. The poem grew out of a difference of opinion.

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Peace,
Erin

2010-06-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

Isn't that why I'd majored in English to begin with, without knowing it? Not to teach, not be be a librarian, not for a job. To be left alone to read an endless novel, looking up from time to time for whole minutes out the window, letting the story impress itself not only on my mind, but on the world out there, letting the words and world get all mixed up together. To gaze at the world and make sentences from its passing images. That was eternity, it was time as it should be, moving like clouds, the forms changing into story.

(from Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, page 7)

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Peace,
Erin

2010-06-11T21:45:00.000-05:00

I was just reading the Harvard Review Online and came across this poem, which is oh so lovely and I just had to post it:

Overjoyed

by: Ada Limón

What’s the drunk waxwing supposed to do
when all day’s been an orgy of red buds
on the winery’s archway off Gehricke Road
and it’s too far to make it home, too long
to fly, even as the sober crow goes. What’s
the point of passion when the pyracantha
berries keep the blood turned toward
obsess, obsess. Don’t you know those birds
are going to toss themselves to the streets
for some minor song of happiness? And
who can blame them? This life is hard.
And let me be the first to admit, when I
come across some jewel of pleasure, I too want
to squeeze that thing until even its seedy heart
evaporates like ethanol, want to throw my
bird-bones into the brush-fire until,
half-blind, all I can hear is the sound
of wings in the relentlessly delighted air.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-06-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

So much going on, but nothing overly important. However, I feel like an update is in order and I will bore you with the mundane details of my life:

1. It looks like the writing workshop I was supposed to teach this weekend is no longer going to happen. Literally NO ONE signed up - WTF?

2. I had my first of two bookmaking classes yesterday. I decoupaged the cover of my book with these lovely leftover, non-matching Asian prints and look forward to sewing it together next week. Malissa, the instructor, is wonderful and I am enjoying working with her.

3. I may be garage saleing with my sister-in-law tomorrow morning.

4. I am reading a novel right now, titled The Virgin Blue, by Tracy Chevalier of Girl With A Peal Earring fame. It is pretty good, with interesting imagery and a decent plot. I occasionally need to read fiction to clear my mind of poetry. It is sort of like when you a trying out perfumes and you occasionally need to sniff some coffee beans to clear your system out so you can accurately judge scents.

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A Way of Being

By Barbara Guest

There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?
Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers,
apt at the essential such as rearranging
languages. They occur from route to route
like savages who wear shells.

“I cannot place him.” Yet I do.
He must ascend indefinitely as airs
he must regard his image as plastic,
adhering to the easeful carpet that needs
footprints and cares for them
as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by.

Such a day/or such a night
reeling from cabin to cabin
looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing.
These adventures in broad/or slim
lamplight,

                                     Yet the cars
do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm.
We never feel the scratch, they do.
When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride
on rubber going down a mountain,
safer than trees, or sand, more preventive
to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering

The old manse and robins. One tear,
a salty one knowing we have escaped
the charm of being native. Even as your glance
through the windshield tells me you’ve seen
another mishap of nature

                                     you would willingly forget,
prefer to be like him near the hearth
where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs
where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake.

                                     The plateau, excursionist,
is ahead. After that twenty volumes
of farmland. Then I must guide us
to the wood garage someone has whitened
where the light enters through one window
like a novel. You must peer at it
without weakening, without feeling
hero, or heroine,

                                     Understanding the distances
between characters, their wakeful
or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring
the slow sunset, the quick dark.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-06-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

Had a wonderful day so far. I had lunch with two dear friends at Tutto Bene, then we went to the opening of the exhibit of the late Eugene Dalzotto, titled "This Is What It Is", at the BSU Talley Gallery. Dalzotto was a master printmaker and Fulbright Scholar. I particularly loved a print of three blue tinted nests...

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Made $60 at this past weekend's garage sale with sister, sister-in-law, and mom! I am using the money the buy a Blackberry. It's not the super-expensive kind, just a low-end version that I can afford because it is an upgrade of my current phone. However, I am still excited to receive my new bright red phone...

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I am slightly addicted to watching All In The Family reruns on TV Land...

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I am reading James Wright.

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To the Muse

By: James Wright

It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn’t
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue
Of that frightened garter snake we caught
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny
So long ago.

I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:

You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back to this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don’t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn’t, I can’t bear it
Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don’t blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-06-03T17:54:00.001-05:00

Hello all! I have been absent for a while, but rest assured that I am alive and well. There is much going on, so let me begin at the beginning....

1. The kitty, Emma Marie, may have cancer. The biopsy of the lumps that have resisted antibiotics would cost around $200, which I don't have. And then, if she does indeed have cancer, there would be nothing I could do about it, as I am a poor student right now. So, I have decided to let the kitty live her life in peace and if she starts going down hill... well, let's cross that bridge when we get there...

2. I handed in my 3rd grad submission extremely late, so the 4th submission will be even later. I feel awful. My anxiety has been getting the best of me where grad school is concerned. I am scheduled to graduate in January, so I think a little self sabotage is happening. But, I will get through this. I just need to keep my eye on graduation and work toward it like mad!

3. I am preparing to teach a class on Zen in poetry with Dr. CarolAnn Russell Schlemper at the Headwaters School of Music and Art. I am super excited and am gathering poems to discuss with the class. We will be spending our lunch hour down by the lake, writing our own nature-inspired poems.

4. I am signed up to take a class in bookmaking.

5. I am reading Harryette Mullen.

6. My mom, sister, sister-in-law and I are having a garage sale this weekend. There are some really great clothes (mostly my sister's), books, and good junk!

So, that is what is going on. Busy, busy, busy - - but happy to have things to do.

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All She Wrote

by Harryette Mullen

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter.
I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope.
The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were
defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to
reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m
unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent.
By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I
suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you
get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to
say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know
how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never
have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news
in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read
the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to
bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch
up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging
her best selling book.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-24T19:48:00.000-05:00

I went with my nieces and nephew to Lake Bemidji State Park for a picnic yesterday. We walked down by the lake, played on the playground, and roasted marshmallows. My mom bought these gigantic marshmallows specifically for roasting - awesome!

__________

Why do I watch Intervention when it makes me so incredibly sad?

__________

I have decided to reread Jane Eyre over my two-week school break. I love that story and can't wait to immerse myself in the world of Jane, Mr. Rochester, and Thornfield Manor. *sigh*

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I am co-teaching a workshop this summer and can't seem to get a hold of my co-teacher to organize our lesson plan and poem packets. I have left her a few messages and sent two e-mails. I hope she is okay...

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The Children's Museum

By: Ange Mlinko

1.

It's hard to know whether today or yesterday was the full moon;
excitement isn't rigorous. It's just river-silvering

blent with the odor of silt where the roofs spike
along a repurposed waterfront.

A beach ball floats above the pressurized stream;
it is disequilibrium that keeps it there. Soap's expressed

as blisters when even gravity works backwards
at the limit of the ball held upside down inside the loop.

Rewards in a game they play against themselves
—"Fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air"—

the shade breaks up beneath the oaks
tithing their gifts against the curriculum

of an armed galaxy. It slides into focus for the instant
I'm brrr, blurred.

2.

Rocks grown sagacious wigs along embankments
and then verandas rounded to embroidered iron,

boarded windows, clothing drops. The dive bell
lacks eels out its portholes, but "double-hulled"

nests two U's as it sounds. Nearby, a first draft
of the helicopter, patterned on a Chinese children's toy.

("I make you a present of everything I've said as yet.")
The ice wigs' molecules vibrate, but in a gas state

they're distracted, and at their most congenial, this:
—at the thickness of its muscle I recoil—the river cuffs

full of self-healing tears or self-buttoning froth
(like the governor vaned with goosefeathers)

stranding me among inventions,
with myself decked. Even mirrors are painted on.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-21T15:44:00.000-05:00

Completely immersed in Ange Mlinko right now for the 3rd semester craft essay. I feel like I am dreaming her work...

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Got my first sunburn of the year yesterday. Ouch. At age 36, I should know better...

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Treatment

By: Ange Mlinko

It's a little spa for the mind—seeing butterflies
set themselves down by the dozen like easels

on bromeliads, when out on the street the boutiques
are dilapidated, construction can't be told from ruin.

A single taste bud magnified resembles an orchid
but what that one's drinking from is a woman's eye

which must be brineless. I wonder what she consumes
that her tears taste like fructose. For minutes she's all its.

Then the moon rises and the river flows backwards.
Composed of millions of tiny north poles, iron's

punched out of the environment, hammered into railways.
Pubs serve shepherd's pies with marcelled mashed-potato crusts

and each tree casts its shade in the form of its summary leaf.
Is a woman's eye a single taste bud magnified?

Yet construction can't be told from ruin.
Out on the street the boutiques are dilapidated

by the dozen like easels. But the mind—it's a little spa.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-17T18:38:00.000-05:00

Today is a lovely day here in Bemidji - in the 70's, sunshine, and a nice breeze. I took a walk this morning, did a bit of laundry, picked up the apartment and watered the plants. It is so nice to relax in a clean space.

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Emma, the kitty, is feeling a bit better. Her butt is less swollen, but she still isn't eating her normal amount. I called the vet and he told me that the shot he gave her can exist in her body for up to 4 - 6 weeks. WTF? Now I won't know if the swelling is down because of the antibiotics, meaning that whatever infection is afflicting her is being taken care of, or because of the shot.....

__________

Wrote a bit today and am on my way to another fine body poem. I feel like I am in a good space right now when it comes to my disability, allowing me to write with an honesty I don't think was possible before. And yet, not all of these body poems are necessarily about me. There is definitely a bit of a character forming that shares some of my qualities, but is certainly a separate entity.

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A Blessing

by: James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-12T18:41:00.001-05:00

I am having one of those days where you look at your past with some regret and shame, but know that you are now a different person. The person you are now would never act like that, do those things, hurt those people. I must forgive myself.

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Took Emma, the kitty, to the vet today with a swollen butt. Poor little kitty can hardly sit down without wincing. The vet doesn't know what is wrong, but gave us antibiotics and hopefully that will take care of it...

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I am finally writing poems regularly again! I was writing Saint poems for so long that I think boredom set in and I started feeling like I wasn't relevant anymore. But these amazing body poems have begun living inside me and it feels so much more than relevant - it feels more than necessary. It feels vital.

People have asked me why I don't write more about my disability. I didn't want to be known as that "disabled poet". But the writing I am doing now is not so much about disability as it is about feeling as though your body is foreign, is alien, is separate from the self. I am not sure how "normal" people feel, but I imagine they feel more integrated with their body. So this is an exciting time for me and I will keep you posted!

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Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther

By: A.E. Stallings

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-06T15:36:00.000-05:00

Currently listening to today's Write On Radio via KFAI's website. Excellent poet, Paula Cisewski is on the second half and is doing a wonderful job! The title poem is lovely. Paula will be reading here in Bemidji in August (look to the right under "Future Readings") and I am excited both to see a dear friend and skilled poet. If you get a chance, pick up her new book, Ghost Fargo, which is the 2010 Nightboat Poetry Prize winner. Yeah Paula!

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Peace,
Erin

2010-05-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

Quote from Yusef Komunyakaa's essay Kit & Caboodle:

Revision. Re-see. Re-invent. I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said, “we have to learn to kill our little darlings.” For the beginning writer, often the most difficult task is to re-dream the poem’s new shape and form. Many young poets attempt to argue that revision undermines the poem’s inspired rhythm and content. But I suggest that inspiration isn’t an intellectual blood letting, that instead, a poem develops by one successive act after another and, because of this process, reaches fulfillment.

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Peace,
Erin

2010-05-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

Today is the fourth cold and rainy day in a row here in Bemidji. I feel all cozy and warm writing in a local cafe called The Wild Hare Bistro. It would be a good day to stay in bed with a book, but alas I have homework to do and was forced from my bed!

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Quote from Carol Muske's essay titled What is a Poem:

Generally, a poem requires at least two silences: the silence that precedes it and the silence following it. If a poem is bordered by silence then what is in between those silences insists on momentousness, makes us attend. After all, a poem (as D.H. Lawrence said) is an act of attention.

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The Invention of Cuisine

By: Carol Muske-Dukes

Imagine for a moment
the still life of our meals,
meat followed by yellow cheese,
grapes pale against the blue armor of fish.

Imagine a thin woman
before bread was invented,
playing a harp of wheat in the field.
There is a stone, and behind her
the bones of the last killed,
the black bird on her shoulder
that a century later
will fly with trained and murderous intent.

They are not very hungry
because cuisine has not yet been invented.
Nor has falconry,
nor the science of imagination.

All they have is the pure impulse to eat,
which is not enough to keep them alive
and this little moment
before the woman redeems
the sprouted seeds at her feet
and gathers the olives falling from the trees
for her recipes.

Imagine. Out in the fields
this very moment
they are rolling the apples to press,
the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke.

See, the woman looks once behind her
before picking up the stone,
looks back once at the beasts,
the trees,
that sky
above the white stream
where small creatures live and die
looking upon each other
as food.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-05-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

I feel like I need to explain: the reason I don't publish my poems on my blog is that I am working hard to get them published in literary magazines - both print and online - and some consider having them on a blog as being "previously published". Basically, I don't want to jeopardize any legitimate publishing opportunities for my beloved poems. So that's it. That's why. Mystery solved...

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I enjoyed sleeping in my new bed last night. Waking up with literally NO back pain was amazing! I love my new bed, and I mean LOVE.

__________

It is the last day of National Poetry Month and I managed to not write not very many poems. oh well. I didn't even manage to blog as much as I wanted. But I think this is somehow a metaphor for how poetry is perceived in this country. Poetry is a nice hobby, a part-time pursuit - but you don't bet your life on it. But I intend to bet my life on it - whether it is practical or not. Anybody else?

__________

Visibility

By: Maura Stanton

I have no illusions.
When I roll towards you at dawn,
I can’t see you in the fog.
We’ve simply memorized each other.
I read a story about a giant
who couldn’t see his tiny wife
for all the clouds
drifting around his huge, sad head.
He’d stroke the tops of fir trees
thinking he’d found her hair.
In another version, his wife
turned into an egret,
her strong wings
brushing her husband’s face;
then she fell into the sea
weighted down by his immense tear.
Let me tell you this:
I miss your shadow, too,
but I know it waits above the fog
black as the shadow of the oak
you saw in your dream
when you woke up, almost happy.
I know our town’s invisible.
The pilots on the way to Alaska
think they’re over the sea.
Even if they glimpsed a light
through a rift in the clouds
they’d call it a ship
loaded with timber for the south.
Still, I hear those planes.
Last night on the satellite map
I saw land without clouds.
Remember, I groped for you hand.
Suppose the men go barefoot?
Suppose the women own fans?

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-28T20:21:00.000-05:00

This is the quilt I bought for my new bed! My room will now have a nice Shabby Chic look...

__________

I have gotten all my letters of recommendation in order to apply for a Graduate Assistantship in BSU's English program. Now I just need to finish my admission cover letter - wish me luck with that. I have always had a difficult time bragging myself up...

__________

Win-Win

By Ange Mlinko

If an orchidophage’s tastebud magniﬁed
resembles an orchid
so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones.

Love, little by little it dawned on us the artisanal
ice cream, especially the prizewinning caramel,
would be out of our reach,
like the previous Friday of a Sunday leaving the beach,
in the meltdown.

When you gasp at the soundﬁle of cymbals
—“that knitting needle sound”—through your headphones it kindles
an inkling that in the bongo-playing
you can hear the wedding ring,
ting ting in the liquescence.

When you hear the sound you may smile
to think of the ones and zeros of that soundﬁle
resembling sticks and drumheads,
or knitting needles and drumheads
as the beat gets molten.

When things get molten you may think of a ﬁre
made up of a million little matchﬁres
rendering a house on the Sound
—belonging to ex-employers—a bit of char on the ground
as the regrettable outcome of a meltdown.

A thousand hotheads make a Sarkozy:
at the sight of their BMW in a car cozy
a thousand swans make a Sigolène
purring win-win.
The Sound is statistical, like the meltdown.

The holes in your socks and the follicles in your leg
are pixelated as a JPEG.
My tastebuds resemble microscopic glasses of gin now, now’s
the time to shake and shiver like a maraca in this house.
The many kinds of dissolution.

Well, birds happen forth from feeders like swinging pagodas
against snow, as
the meltdown goes on, a dump of rock salt.
We’ll soon be signatories by default.
Crystals of sodium chloride

are made of smaller crystals of sodium chloride.
Let them know their House
is made up of many other people’s houses, magniﬁed.

2010-04-24T16:20:00.000-05:00

Tonight I am going to see Man Of La Mancha at BSU with a good friend. One of my students is in the production. I will be sure to let you know what I think of it.

__________

I ordered this bed from Slumberland on Friday. This will be the first bed I have ever owned that did not belong to someone else first. It is also the first queen-sized bed I have ever owned.

__________

Favorite poem #4

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116)

by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-23T20:21:00.000-05:00

I have finally decided on a topic for my 3rd semester craft essay: the poet Ange Mlinko! Wish me luck, my darlings. And I apologize in advance for talking incessantly about her....

__________

I am deeply in love with Real Simple's line of desk organization stuff at Target. It makes me want to be an organized person, which I am inherently not. How do I reconcile this?

__________

This is the Latest

By: Ange Mlinko

Lobster in the bathtub. Christmas Eve.
Scrub the tub first. Hand off cleanser.
Rinse well. We don’t want Comet
in our lobster.
He’s clicking
against the porcelain. Everyone leery
              of going to the bathroom.

Bubbles had risen when we lowered him in,
now he’s limp.
Stare into the water
that wears a similar gooseflesh.
The lobster is dispatched.

                      *     *     *

Wrapping an oversized box
(a coffee maker),
can’t find a swathe of paper big enough.
Start to cobble bits together
with tape (ah—chitinous)

and the joints look like repeated segments
of a carapace.
A pilot blue glows. Haemocyanin—
a blood based in copper not iron

while the broth of something Provençal
sings from the pot, a little tomatoey,
a little stigma (not stamen) of crocus sativus
under the Star of
Bethlehem

                      *     *     *

If the universe is—this is the latest—
bouncing between inflation
and shrinkage, as if on a trillion-year
pendulum, why wouldn’t
an infant’s sobbing, on the exhale,
have a prosody
as on the inhale have the chemistry
of tears and seas

or our bouillabaisse,
indeed,
a primal soup contain
—besides babbling
and nonspeech and raspberries—
in the briny speech stream

a scuttling underwriter?

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-18T17:58:00.000-05:00

Today I am in Park Rapids to attend a couple of films as part of the 2010 Red Bridge Film Festival. This afternoon my aunt Nancy and I saw Sita Sings the Blues - - a wonderful, vibrant, irreverent film juxtaposing the story of Sita and Rama with the story of a modern day couple. The stories are interspersed with musical interludes voiced by Annette Hanshaw.

Tonight we are going to see An Education, which I have wanted to see for a very long time. I almost rented it a couple of weeks ago, but am glad I waited to see it on the big screen...

__________

I found Alex Lemon's new collection, Fancy Beasts, at Beagle Books and just had to have it! Yesterday I ordered Paula Cisewski's new collection, Ghost Fargo. She will be reading in Bemidji with the always fabulous Jules Nyquist and me on August 13th. For further information, just look to the right under "future readings".

__________

All the Way Home

By: Paula Cisewski

The apron pocket in me.
The broken car horn in me.
The greenfinch in me flying straight into
the cracked mirror in me.
And the front porch light in me
calling to the midnight in me.
The harvest: the amaranth, the wheat.
The natural bridge in me.
The calculus. The birthday cake.
The Walt Whitman in me finds me scrumptious.
Including the smokestack and leftover dinosaur in me.
The emperor in me placed himself in charge
of the olive branch in me. The waitress in me
sneezes in his glass of hundred-year-old port.
The story I read in me.
The you-already-said-that in me.
The fire-walk: the glow, the blistered faith.
When the god in me is
good, it scrambles to pick up
the waitress’s dropped napkins. And
when it is bad it is horrid. It’s the leftyou-
at-the-altar in me, crying me
mee meee all the way home.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-17T13:15:00.001-05:00

Today's post is simple: one of my poems! I am a bit nervous, as I don't make a habit out of posting my own work, but my best friend has convinced me to do it. So enjoy!

__________

*Poof*

2010-04-15T21:06:00.000-05:00

Tuesday the professor I am assistant teaching for, Dr. CarolAnn Russell Schlemper, decided to give the class a little talk about her take on the writing life. She talked about her mentor, Richard Hugo, and read a few poems from her first book that were influenced by him. It made me think about my own mentors and how they have influenced my work. I think my current mentor, Thomas Sayers Ellis, has perhaps influenced me the most, changed my poems the most. My lines have become much more fragmented and painting like. I feel like my poems are taking more risks.

__________

Today I gave a little presentation to my class about my writing life and read them a few of my poems. I read some of my older, less polished poems so the students could see my progression from inward facing to outward facing poems. The students asked many interesting questions and I feel like I answered them in a thoughtful, educated, and understanding way.

__________

Gypsy Taxi

By: CarolAnn Russell Schlemper

When you arrive, it is waiting, the door
Held open like Cinderella's coach.
In your best bad Italian tell the driver
The address, gasping
As he whirls you past the Coliseum
Stopping for no one--
Man or machine and everywhere
Read the signs: Cambio
Cambio, his eyes caressing your face
Your neck, your breasts
His coral shirt throbbing, his smile
A photograph catching you
Like water moving
Inside the body of your dream--
Beneath a canopy of laundry,
Da lucia waiting for you
At dusk in Vicolo di Mattonato
Lounging on the steps of the fountain
In the piazza of Santa Maria en Trastevere
Veiled in spray, nameless, touching
The loneliness that wanders
Like a gypsy through the world.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-12T10:15:00.000-05:00

I had a wonderful time in Minneapolis this weekend! There were no poetry events going on, but I did buy Lightsey Darst's Find The Girl.

My previous roommate, Jan, and I went to see The Last Station, which was wonderful. Movie like this never come to Bemidji...

I am invited to a poetry soiree this weekend in celebration of Billy Collins' upcoming trip to Bemidji in September. The party is at a place called "The bee-loud glade"!

__________

Favorite poem #3

The Secret in the Cat

by: May Swenson

I took my cat apart
to see what made him purr.
Like an electric clock
or like the snore

of a warming kettle,
something fizzed and sizzled in him.
Was he a soft car,
the engine bubbling sound?

Was there a wire beneath his fur,
or humming throttle?
I undid his throat.
Within was no stir.

I opened up his chest
as though it were a door:
no whisk or rattle there.
I lifted off his skull:

no hiss or murmur.
I halved his little belly
but found no gear,
no cause for static.

So I replaced his lid,
laced up his little gut.
His heart into his vest I slid
and buttoned up his throat.

His tail rose to a rod
and beckoned to the air.
Some voltage made him vibrate
warmer than before.

Whiskers and a tail:
perhaps they caught
some radar code
emitted as a pip, a dot-and-dash

of woolen sound.
My cat a kind of tuning fork?--
amplifier?--telegraph?--
doing secret signal work?

His eyes elliptic tubes:
there's a message in his stare.
I stroke him
but cannot find the dial.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-08T20:22:00.000-05:00

I am leaving for Minneapolis tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. I will be enjoying the big city and may not blog again until Sunday - please forgive me. In addition to a visit to my most beloved independent bookstore, Magers & Quinn, I plan to see my favorite ex-roommate and make time for my favorite man. Should be a good trip!

__________

Today the class I teach at BSU hosted another visiting writer, poet/dentist/flight instructor Marsh Muirhead. He talked a lot about the modern Haiku.

__________

between fence rails
a little boy explains cows
to the cows

by: Marsh Muirhead

2010-04-07T19:36:00.000-05:00

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must take a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your inner contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."

From Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (page 260)

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-06T20:53:00.000-05:00

In the class that I am teaching at Bemidji State University, we had a visiting writer come to talk about her work and life today. I felt very inspired by her, as she is 67 right now and is rededicating her life to her poetry. She is retiring from her position as head of the English Department and has decided to work solely on her poetry for the foreseeable future. How great is that? It definitely reminds me that no matter how old and used up I feel, poetry is my life and I can dedicate myself to her again and again and again...

__________

Guests at the Table

by: Susan Carol Hauser

Pickled beets; deviled eggs.

Sweet potato soup.
French bread.

Blueberry pie with ice cream.

Coffee: hot, black, strong.

After, a walk down the country road
in a starless dark so thorough
we lose our balance, put our arms
out like oars and, one to the next,
touch at our fingertips, proceed,
as always, in a ragged line
into the deepened night.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-05T21:02:00.000-05:00

Today I painted my fingernails robin's egg blue to match my toenails.

I spent the morning reading more of Helene Cixous and Ai's, vice. I will be visiting Minneapolis this upcoming weekend and am hoping there will be some poetry events happening.    If you know of anything, let me know!

__________

Cuba, 1962

By: Ai

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill
and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
and call Juanita, hearing her answer,
but only in my mind.
I know she is already outside,
breaking the cane off at ground level,
using only her big hands.
I get the machete and walk among the cane,
until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt.

Juanita, dead in the morning like this.
I raise the machete—
what I take from the earth, I give back—
and cut off her feet.
I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,
where I load the cane to sell in the village.
Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-04T15:25:00.001-05:00

Happy Easter!

This morning I went to church with my mom and stepdad, where we had to sit in overflow seating and watch mass on a large screen.

This afternoon I am looking forward to a fish fry and a second Easter egg hunt at my dad's house with all my nieces and nephews. I am also looking forward to seeing my Grandma and step-Grandpa. I feel bad leaving Emma alone all day...

__________

The Biography of a Tree

by: Pamela Alexander

is not like that of a building which
is structure on crutches. The sails of the woods
were awake.
Deeper than rivers forgotten
dearer than trees and bushes
clear like the music of the birds
of the forest of light,
bright like the fur of bees or of foxes in the snow
and like the deer that come and go,
not falling not holding on we steadily
meet.
Coming and going is neither perfect nor poor, the sails
of the forest are open and

green. A frond a friend
a fern uncurls.
Pleased to be pleased.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-03T09:55:00.001-05:00

Good morning! I didn't get a chance to blog yesterday and feel bad about it. However, I will just start over again with my commitment to blog everyday this month from now on.

In the mail yesterday: Ange Mlinko's brand new Shoulder Season. Can't wait to sit down with it this afternoon...

Later today I will have Easter with my mom and Sunday will have Easter with my dad. I am looking forward to watching the kids hunting for eggs and Easter baskets full of chocolate!

__________

Favorite poem #2 (these are in no particular order, by the way)

The ache of marriage

by: Denise Levertov

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-04-01T12:49:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon and welcome to National Poetry Month! I am going to try and write here everyday of the month, featuring some of my favorite poems and maybe a poem or two of my own.

This morning brought housecleaning, watering the plants, and reading some of Ange Mlinko's Starred Wire. This afternoon I must create a lesson plan and finish an essay by Billy Collins. He isn't my favorite poet in the world, but he does offer up some cool ideas regarding poetics. For instance, from his essay titled "Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader":

"Thus, to read a poem is to indulge in self-forgetting. In accepting the poem's language, we move from the realm of our own daily speech sounds and allow ourselves to be lifted into a higher, more self-contained, deliberate version of the language we are used to speaking and hearing everyday. Finally, we immerse ourselves in the mind that has so deliberately fashioned the language."

__________

Favorite poem #1

wishes for sons
by: Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-03-31T12:48:00.000-05:00

Yet another gorgeous day in Bemidji! Emma is sitting in the window enjoying the breeze. This morning I took a little walk, got an iced tea with my mom, and read some of Helene Cixous' Coming To Writing And Other Essays.

__________

Here is a link to an interesting article on Ted Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill.

_________

Eros of Heroines

By: Ange Mlinko

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge
and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch,
no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange
drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch.
                               Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan

As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated.
He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin
the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto
while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings
are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument
of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings,
subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green.
                              Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst

I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking
swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem
when a small daughter disappears with a wife,
morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori.
                              Jacqueline Lamba + Andre Breton

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-03-23T14:38:00.001-05:00

Another beautiful day spent with the windows wide open! My African Violets are blooming lovely white flowers with lavender edges. Even the silk roses that sit atop my bookshelf look more vibrant today.

As I edit poems for my upcoming grad school submission, I find myself wondering about sensuality in poetry. I have read a good many poems that use sensuality as an excuse to be crass or porn-tastic. The sensuality seems like an add-on. Sensuality should seem so utterly and completely natural in the world of the poem, and the poem should be sorely lacking without it. So follows a terrific example of what I am talking about:
__________

The lover

By: Sina Queyras

He still manages to paint. At least he shows up at dinner with splotches on his
pants and cap, though never, she notices, on his face. His shoulders touch his
ears and are curved, like wings, she thinks, his head always about to go under.
When she stands behind him in the dinner line she wants to put her head
between his blades and pull. She is afraid his heart might crack. He keeps busy,
the lover. He walks to the bar in town where he has heard they have fights. He
plays pool badly, and loses. Afternoons he tosses a baseball, always only at first
base. The one he loves has red hair and is firm. He will not have her, and
perhaps he knows this already. Still, at midnight he finds her yellow room and
slips under the door. He believes in everything about her. But the best thing is
how she fits him: how she lies on top of him like a cat in a bowl.

_______

Peace,
Erin

2010-03-21T18:13:00.000-05:00

Good evening, readers! Today the sun was out and it was in the 40's. There was a birthday party, a long walk and reading Matthea Harvey.

I am going through a period of intense healing - the kind of healing where everything else in your life shuts down and you are left to truly deal with yourself. I know this will lead to a happier and less anxious life, but it hurts and there are days when I feel tender to the touch...

__________

Toe the Line with Me

by: Matthea Harvey

We needed water & frozen water

for the party. I chose you to two-step

with but the downstairs chandelier

stayed still, its prisms prim.

Consider this: if sunfish

& ducks compete for the same bit

of bread, at any moment their mouths

might meet. That's how my mother

explained the Other, told me to hedge

my bets, furl wish-scrolls into

the topiary. Still I had questions

about Life & the Afterlife. You

looked in through the screendoor.

I sat next to my ex.

__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-03-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

An Irish blessing for everyone:

May the love and protection St. Patrick can give - Be yours in abundance as long as you live.

__________

Leda and the Swan

By William Butler Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

__________

Peace and Love,

Erin

2010-02-25T20:44:00.002-06:00

Still super-busy, but wanted to post. I am feeling really overwhelmed with both school and teaching - feeling as if the scales are tipping. My anxiety is up. My tolerance is down. Yet hope is oddly alive. I know I will make it through this semester. Right?

__________

All She Wrote

by Harryette Mullen

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter.
I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope.
The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were
defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to
reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m
unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent.
By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I
suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you
get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to
say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know
how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never
have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news
in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read
the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to
bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch
up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging
her best selling book.
__________

Peace,
Erin

2010-02-22T13:37:00.001-06:00

Things have been super-busy! It feels as if I have gone back to my undergraduate days: running around trying to get everything done and trying to have a social life on top of it. But it all gets done, doesn't it?

__________

What I've been up to:

1. Working on papers and lessons for teaching assistantship

2. Work for grad school

3. a fledgling relationship

4. putting a grant proposal together

__________

Thanks to my best friend, Christy, for the care package!

_________

First Poem for You

By: Kim Addonizio

I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

_________

Peace,
Erin

2010-02-21T13:01:00.000-06:00

Movie Recommendation: Whip It!

__________

Peace and Love,

Erin

2010-02-06T12:43:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-27T21:10:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-26T18:43:00.001-06:00

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

2010-01-25T15:48:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-25T09:18:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-20T10:32:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-08T15:51:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-04T16:08:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-30T13:44:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-29T20:49:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-22T21:31:00.000-06:00

Flickering Mind
by: Denise Levertov

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away -- and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

__________

Peace,
Erin

2009-12-17T19:20:00.000-06:00

Advent 1966

By: Denise Levertov

Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe
is multiplied, multiplied,
the flesh on fire
not Christ’s, as Southwell saw it, prefiguring
the Passion upon the Eve of Christmas,

but wholly human and repeated, repeated,
infant after infant, their names forgotten,
their sex unknown in the ashes,
set alight, flaming but not vanishing,
not vanishing as his vision but lingering,

cinders upon the earth or living on
moaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;

because of this my strong sight,
my clear caressive sight, my poet’s sight I was given
that it might stir me to song,
is blurred.
There is a cataract filming over
my inner eyes. Or else a monstrous insect
has entered my head, and looks out
from my sockets with multiple vision,

seeing not the unique Holy Infant
burning sublimely, an imagination of redemption,
furnace in which souls are wrought into new life,
but, as off a beltline, more, more senseless figures aflame.

And this insect (who is not there—
it is my own eyes do my seeing, the insect
is not there, what I see is there)
will not permit me to look elsewhere,

or if I look, to see except dulled and unfocused
the delicate, firm, whole flesh of the still unburned.

2009-12-16T21:21:00.000-06:00

My adorable mom down at the waterfront:

2009-12-14T19:30:00.001-06:00

Some Things:

1. I find myself home alone tonight - the cat insisting she occupy my left shoulder at all times. I suppose that means I am not truly alone.

2. It is amazing how anxiety and Christmas seem to go together in my world.

3. I have started submitting poems for publication in earnest. I will keep you updated.

4. My Christmas Cactus is blooming. I will try to get pictures soon.

5. Tonight my nieces and nephews saw Santa Claus. My older nephew was scared of him. Why do we think small children enjoy sitting in a red-clad, bearded stranger's lap?

6. I cannot wait to fly to Boston on January 7th.

__________

I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed
by: Cate Marvin

at my head and my heart, knife-tips green
in a gasoline-doused garden. From the tire
store behind the house, leering mechanics
glaze my window with saliva. I sit at the end
of the couch and point my finger angrily,
wag it in the face of forever. I sit back on
my haunches and sniff the air. Please note:
the earth is no less sulfur than usual. It’s not
nothing I’m waiting for, not as if there’s no
reason I’ve done my hair at last. If I weren’t
waiting, why would I be so impatient?
I don’t drink whiskey to relax.
And there is someone I wouldn’t mind seeing
dead. But when I comb my hair and stay
up all night, it’s not as if I’m trying to meet
someone. The days can travel without me.
The landlord can mow the lawn in shifts,
his pink face an obscene balloon caught
by the noose of his collar—I’ll sleep through
the motor. And you can bet my dreams bloom
stranger than hallucination. I take my life
like this. Poems grow from my skull while
vines creep the tire store wall: slowly, certainly.
When they made soap, they had me in mind.
__________

Peace,
Erin