S, Asleep

The narrator in Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist says that he writes poems by remembering the best moment of his day.

This would be mine from yesterday: everyone in the townhouse was napping or gone and I was alone with S, two days old and sleeping in her cradle swing. It was early afternoon, and the click of the swing’s rhythm was lost in Bob Dylan crooning "Not Dark Yet," a song I've heard many time before but hadn't really listened to the lyrics of. This one caught me:

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Funny—before I finished that last sentence she woke up from sleeping and started squawking like a startled bird. I had to stop recording my idyllic moment, pull her out of her swing, change her diaper, put her in a sleeper, and pass her to my wife. There are certain things I can't do.

So far, this is parenthood—memory replacing memory in an endless succession of repression. The labor was a nightmare, but I forgot all those long hours the moment S emerged. When she’s in my arms and her eyes scan my face, I forget that she kept me up the night before, her face bunched and red, screeching until her voice was hoarse.

Reading Louse Bogan's Blue Estuaries and Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitudue. Not finding much time for either, but both good so far.

March Books Read

Sitting on the lower L of the couch, A in the early stages of labor, laying down on the long section. We were keeping track of contractions with a free iPod app, but have decided to take a break from it for now.

Obviously, a perfect time for me to record the books that I read in March of this year.

Read the list here.

What books to bring to the hospital? Some poetry to read to baby. Wish I had a selection of Yeats, but alas, have only his collected poems and don't want to lug that tome down to the hospital, so I'm bringing Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries (Poems: 1923-1968) to read to baby in case baby wants to hear some poetry, as well as Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude to keep myself busy. It seems like a good book to bring because some of his chapters are only a page long. Lots of thoughts that work well on their own terms, and can be approached and left with much benefit to the reader.

In Starbucks

I was going to update my list of books read in March, but I forgot my notebook at home. And I’m at a Starbucks in Cincinnati, listening to the new Horse Feathers album on NPR. So far, so good.

I can tell you what books I brought down with me for the day. Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude and Franz Wright’s Entry in an Unknown Hand. I need to shift the direction of my reading back to nonfiction, and I want to, but it’s like turning a ship in rough water—very slow going, lots of random waves of fiction rocking my vessel. Whoa, look out, I just unexpectedly read The Anthologist. This is a problem because I’m starting a project that has approximately two chapters finished, and it requires reading a lot of history.

Good news: signs that precede the long awaited coming of baby are beginning to appear in the sky, and it will likely arrive within the week. Gender yet unknown. And the work that I wanted to finish, and didn’t think I would, is finished. The pilot episode of my teleplay is written, polished, and registered with the Writer’s Guild, the first draft of my essay has survived the journey of floating through space from brain to page, and that pile of books is done. A list of which will be updated tonight.

Nothing to do but keep teaching until the end of the semester and wait for baby.

Michael Czyzniejewski

I was watching Community a few minutes ago when my wife, looking at the iPad, said, "If someone says on Wednesday that they'll do something later in the week, when do you think they'll do it?"

I said, "Thursday or Friday," then waited to see who we were going to start mutually bashing. But she was reading my blog.

Here are two pictures from Wednesday' Michael Czyzniejewski reading, in Leonard Theater (Miami U of Ohio). The first photo is a signature Brett Strickland Literature Reading image, which features 1) Photos taken too far away to get anything more than a vague sense of what the author looks like, and 2) Close-ups of random body parts, in this case a bared, crossed leg. See the mop of hair from my Dana Ward photo series for more examples.

Seeing other people taking photographs in black-and-white photos reminds me of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

MC was funny. I enjoyed the reading. I didn't zone out and start making a to-do list, or a list of books to find at the library later, or work on lesson plans. I just sat and listened!

My favorite story was the first one MC read, from his collection Elephants in Our Bedroom. Funny, fast paced, a little sad but in a domestic, recognizable way. After that he read stories from his collection Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions. Basically monologues by Chicago personalities like Oprah, Mr. T, and lots of lesser knowns.

They started out funny, then went downhill. But I think 40 of anything is probably too much.

Jonathan Lohr: The Octagon House

Yesterday I received something wonderful in the mail, a free copy of my friend Jonathan Lohr’s new chapbook, The Octagon House. I tried to buy a copy of the book through his press, which you can access here to buy a copy of your own, but a few moments later I received an email from Scharmel Iris Vanity Press with a full refund of my six dollars and a note from the merchant that read, “I refuse your money!”

It’s a beautiful book, from the binding to the way the poems are arranged across the pages. I’m going to include a few pictures below so you can see for yourself.

The poems themselves are really nice. Rooted in a history both real and imagined, personal and regional—Lohr is from Watertown, Wisconsin—they’re clever in a Matthew Zapruder meets Kent Johnson kind of way, and they’re consistently suffused with very real, startling moments of emotion.

Underneath the play in the poems, at the edge of the wry voice, there’s a sense of nostalgia, of fond reminiscence for a place and time that now exists only in Lohr’s lovingly reconstructed memory. I love this untitled prose section:

Outside Watertown—my dad’s workshop where he used a table saw to make my dad with nine fingers. A hollow barn where I make my grandpa’s workshop down the road and on the wall I think an aerial photo of Watertown—the Octagon in the bottom left or somewhere there at least. Men come selling pictures of our house from the air sometimes…

The final poem in the book, which ends with the lines, “Fall in love, fall in love housing-project/ Nothing turns into a place worth leaving,” is perhaps the most poignant—a striking poem to end the book on—but I don’t want to share too much, because hopefully you’re inspired to buy a copy of the book for yourself. I do want to post a picture of another poem in the book I really enjoyed, so you can see how it appears on the page and get a sense of the book's beauty as an object . Enjoy.

 Any watermarks are from my camera lens, not the chapbook.

Signed by the author! 

                   
You don't get to read individual words. Just appreciate the layout.

This is how I know I can post anything I want!

Like I said, you can purchase the book here. Don't be a philistine. Do it.

I also went and heard Michael Czyzniejewski (wow, I had to look that up) read tonight, and he was really entertaining, and as proof of his entertainment I offer up the fact that no undergraduates rudely stood up and gathered their bags and walked out before he was finished, but I'm all finished blogging for now so I'll post pictures later this week.

Sandra Beasley

Today is the second weekday in a row that I’ve written over a thousand words, so I’m pleased. I’d like to say the trend will continue tomorrow, but I’m not sure this essay is going to take another raw thousand words. The word tank will start overflowing and spilling all over my shoes like gasoline and cleanup will become the new priority. I think more like five-hundred words, and then I’ll start polishing. Right now the essay is titled, “In the Bedroom,” but it’s saved on my computer as “Guns in the Bedroom,” and neither one will be the title of the actual essay. The first because it’s the title of a pretty good movie based on a great short story (“Killings” by Andre Dubus), and the second because it has very little to do with the essay.

I started reading Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling today. I’m really surprised at how good it is, considering I’m honestly driven to read one out of every five books of poetry I read. The rest I just get through to stay in the conversation, pausing over a few nice lines, wondering why the book was published. There’s something really honest and compelling about Beasley voice, and she has a mastery over the poetic line I appreciate. Check out this poem, “You”, which I found here.

You
You are the whole building on fire.
You are the voice of sirens. You are
the dumb crowd milling, the capture
of Weegee’s lens. You are flames
licking up the escape. You're the hovering
of a mother at the cliff of her window ledge.
You are the choice to drop her baby.
You're the chance of a beckoning crowd,
six hands gripping a sooty raincoat. You
are the only option. You're a simple drop.
Ten stories below they pray you're like a cloud,
soft floating. You are like a cloud. Grey
and you don't hold anything. You are
that moment before a falling, the falling,
a whir of falling, wail of falling, the sweet
thud. You are black blood flaring
across the concrete. You are a needle
to the groove of a very sad song.
The whole building burns with you.

Besides simply enjoying the poem, I couldn't help but track the placement of her “you are.” After the repetition of beginning the first two lines with it, she keeps moving the construction around to keep the reader on their toes. Or she turns it into a contraction. It’s just impressive how she summons music with the repetition of the phrase but keeps the poem fresh. Control of syntax did that. Imagination run like clockwork.

I’m excited to finish the book and check out more work by Sandra Beasley. And I'm excited to work from a coffee shop tomorrow since I don't teach or have office hours.

Dana Ward Essay Fail (with pics)

I started an essay about the Cincinnati poet Dana Ward that I was really pleased with. The essay is easy to be pleased with because it’s only about four paragraphs long. It’s still a baby. It could grow up to be serial killer. The essay started with my memory of seeing Ward read for the first time at a professor’s house a few years ago, unknown to me, lanky in a sport-coat and pausing every few moments to take poised sips from a bottle of Stella Artois. Then the essay moved to his new book, This Can’t Be Life (brilliant) and it was going to end with seeing him read again, in the more formal setting of Miami University where Ward had been teaching a sprint workshop for grad students in late February of 2012.

I’m abandoning my essay. 

I’m going to have a real life baby in approximately thirty days, and in that time I need to finish a teleplay that should have been done a week ago (it’s for a contest, I’m not a professional screenwriter), polish and submit it, then finish another essay that’s more important to me and has been brewing for longer, submit it, then submit some new poems and a short story to various journals. And I have a pile of books I want to get through. (Almost finished with Vivian Gornik's The Situation and The Story.)

The Dana Ward essay is too much right now, and while I sometimes move projects to the backburner, I have a feeling this time it’s goodbye. The cultural moment of This Can’t be Life will pass, and my impressions of the book and excitement over seeing Ward read again will fade. Au revoir, essay I planned on submitting to The Rumpus.

I will not be writing about the rare intimacy of both Ward’s readings. I will not be writing about the aesthetics Ward’s work bridges, its broad appeal, or the generous way it encompasses culture from Alice Notley to Reese Witherspoon in Election to Joy Division. The book begins with an epigraph from Jay-Z!

What I will do, In Memoriam my incipient essay, is post some crappy pictures I took with my iPod at Ward’s absolutely packed February reading. Enjoy.

                                               cris cheek introducing Dana Ward while
                                               more people slip in late.

                                             This is a really interesting mop of hair in the corner
                                              of the pics. I was shooting from the hip, and said hair
                                              takes on new textures and personality with every frame.

                                              Dana Ward reading. He was a little sideways
                                               to the audience the majority of the reading.
                                              The hair is suddenly curly.

                                                 Nothing new here!

                                                 Clapping. Ward dodging a painful Q & A.