36. A song heard } through the ceiling.

At the end of winter, I dream of an ice-buried, primeval landscape.

Freshman year of college a storm came through Boston that shut down the trains and stranded me in the city. Geoff, a German who sat next to me in sociology, offered me a couch for the night. His place was “a couple miles” from campus. Snow whipped across my face. The walk across the Mass. Ave. bridge was brutal, but the view of the frozen river and the city lights—ample recompense. Geoff turned occasionally to shout encouragement. We stopped in a bar Geoff knew. The bartender didn’t card either of us, Geoff was a regular, the Irish bartender a pal who liked to give Geoff shit. Except to ask questions, I kept my mouth shut.

Geoff worked on an off-shore oil rig and a cook’s assistant. He told us about the time the cook cut off all his fingers, how he was ordered to pick them up, pack them in ice, and bring them to the infirmary. He told us about an accident with a pipe, it swung loose, crushed a crewman’s head.

The walk from the bar to Geoff’s—a large, empty apartment behind Central Sq.—took a drunk minute. I flopped onto a couch by the window. He brought me a glass of water and a bottle of Tylenol. Boston was a dream. I woke. I reached for the army-green blanket kicked to the end of the couch and saw out the window a man, standing in the tiny yard, dressed head to foot in fur. He roared, and rushed the glass—I shouted and tumbled off the couch. Geoff staggered out of his room, clad only in bright tighty-whities, cursed at me and staggered back to bed.

Numbness the aftereffect of my fright, a fine hangover cure, I stood in that stranger’s living room and stared out the big window. The yard was lit by a flood, mounted on a blank of gray plywood. Snow fell, blurred then erased the man’s tracks.

Next morning, classes canceled, we at omelets Geoff made. 

35. Built on a walk } thru (a bar of green soap).

First “a field of colors” by Charles Lennox, sent to me 4 June 2009, in a cream envelope, by someone who lets their commas hang low. Dialogue in this story is written in ALL CAP, yet remarkably doesn’t read shouting. “a field of colors” is a place where a divorced father goes with his daughters and sometimes alone. The field is of colors, dismembered body parts (human and otherwise, less revolting than an opportunity to make new bodies), chairs, paper, etc. His daughters do what they do, they are bored, they are with their mother, they make origami. It’s a lonely little piece, and I was immediately attracted to the writing and to the presentation Mud Luscious Press (MLP) gave: a little chapbook, with a pale blue paper cover, stamped MLP. MLP was new to me but by goodness gracious not new to anyone else, I guess. J.A. Tyler published the first of these chapbooks in 2008, “a field of colors” no. 33 or thereabouts if y’r counting.

Another envelope, manila, arrived shortly after the first, no commas, no date (the $1 stamp hand-canceled with a sharpie), with three more chapbooks enclosed. Of the three, Elizabeth Ellen’s “a thousand & one others, yes” shocks the most, about a boy, the son of a garbage collector, and a girl, his nearby neighbor, and violence. Unexpected and brutal.

So I don’t know a whole lot about MLP or J.A. Tyler, but for the four chapbooks I’ve read. My editors emailed to tell me he reviewed Color Plates today. My first thought was to read those chapbooks again and maybe say a word or two about them. All are out of print. Maybe a lot of the stories can be found elsewhere? On the MLP site C. is announced, an anthology of MLP “Stamp Stories.” They’re not the chapbooks, see for yourself. However, as part of the announcement for C. are two stories from C. and one is “from Charles Lennox.” I won’t quote it here but here it is and it has origami: “My girls come to me & say THIS IS BORING. CAN WE GO BACK HOME NOW? When we reach the truck they say NO. OUR OTHER HOME.”

I know very much less about Spencer Drew except he also reviewed Color Plates. Thank you Mr. Drew and Mr. Tyler.

34. Live past } the wrong house.

Ron Goba now hosts, with Tom Daley, a poetry salon in his home just south of Boston. Tom invited me to read as feature, so last week I read. I asked Sarah G., the screenwriter/traveler, to join me. She and I used to attend the open at the Cantab Lounge, where Ron was the doorman/last reader for decades. Rain turned to snow at 6:30, when I picked Sarah up at the train station. Look up into the snow it’s dizzying. Sarah wore a white coat. I drove a black sedan.

First we walked to the wrong house—knocked on the wrong door, peered into the brightly lit and comfortable home of Ron’s neighbor. When we were invited in, we hadn’t yet realized our mistake. Not much of an audience, I thought, just an elderly couple. I looked at the old man, thought, Ron has changed he’s unrecognizable. Sarah asked to use the bathroom. She came back, like, in a minute and said, “This is the wrong house.” No one spoke: we left. Sarah said to me, when I asked how she’d figured out we were in the wrong place, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Ron’s house is well-stocked with single malts and decorated with clowns. After a warm welcome from Ron and Tom—the only people at the salon who knew me—I was offered a seat. Twenty-five people came. Before the feature, everyone there is offered a chance to read in what’s called a “round robin”; two more round robins follow a break after the feature. During the round robins, it was suggested I read poems by other poets. I read “The Yellow Bicycle” by Czeslaw Milosz, “Psalm” by George Oppen, and “Why Trees Weep” by John Taggart. The introductions Ron and Tom gave me were most generous. Interesting for me to hear about the impression I made as a young poet, reading with the likes of John Cotter, Jeff Paris, and Matthew Klane. Sarah and I shared an excellent red donated by my father. I read from my unpublished ms. The Rescue: I read the poems about “our daughter,” the Metamorphosis (Ovid’s) poems, “St. Emma,” the entire Dante series, and ended with “[The Forest by the River is Never Empty]” (“Beowulf is ashes. / So bury ashes.”). What a pleasure to read for so long and to be heard. After, for about fifteen minutes, I was asked questions and kindly enthused over. I enjoyed hearing, too. Good to hear Ron and Tom again. Sarah and I were both especially interested in Carol’s poetry—I didn’t catch her last name. We guessed her to be in her sixties. She carried a fossil with her. An ammonite. At the end of the evening, I was offered two features (dates to be announced), one at an art gallery named for the place where I once weekly met with The Blue Poets, the other at The Boston Conservatory. (I wonder if Nina J. would choreograph something and join me on stage?) My thanks to Ron and Sue for hosting me, to Tom for the invite; I am grateful.

Sarah and I found the car covered in snow. We drove north to Boston.

33. AWP } Paul Dry on a park bench.

Suffering from a bout of angst, I found myself a bench a little ways away from the conference hotels and took out Mandelbaum's Iliad. A gentleman, waiting for his lunch companion on the next bench, asked what I was reading and when I told him he and I had a brief conversation about the translations of Greek and Roman classics that we preferred. In about a minute all I knew on the subject was exhausted. The gentlemen, Paul Dry, told me that he is the namesake of a small press that mainly does reprints, and that if I stopped by his table at the book fair he’d give me a copy of the Arthur Golding translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Thus he unwittingly but ably cheered me.

And his Metamorphosis is a fine edition, based on the edition edited by John Frederick Nims. The cover, designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden is striking—an elegant grid transforming patterns. Also included is an essay by Jonathan Bate that discusses the influence of the Golding Metamorphosis on Shakespeare.

Much later that night found me in a café called Luna (for the second time) with poets Kristin Kostick and Andrea Henchey. Matthew Klane, by this time, had called it a night. Andrea was in her own world, possessed by a series of lyric poems she conceived over a gin fizz and had to write down immediately. As text messages. I’m eager to read them/hear them read at the next Inescapable Rhythms.

This left me and Kristin to entertain each other. We talked civilization. What is it, and just how civilized are we? We talked Mumbai: the extreme proximity of its wealth and poverty. Civilization is peace, or freedom from fear, I figure. When we called it a night, I put Kristin and Andrea in a cab and returned to my hotel, where I talked with C.S. Carrier for a while about typewriters. Better than laptops for dictating epistles from the dead. For writing “shapes transformed to bodies straunge.”

32. Weird AWP } the glass mannequin.

Kristin Kostick sent me a text, told me I had to go to the Book 12 reading down near Eastern Market. I read the text, then deleted the text, and flipped the numbers in my head: instead of 1337 St. George I walked to 1373. Since the street entrance to 1373 was dark, I ventured down the cobblestone alley that ran alongside. There was a velvet rope and a sign (an illuminated human heart), so I figured I’d found the place. There was no line. I was late. I asked the bouncer, “Is the reading in here?” He nodded, shone a little light on my ID and waved me in.

Nothing was going on inside. It was an empty bar. No bartender. No bottles of anything on the shelves behind the bar. But: I heard voices and applause. Coming from above. I found the stairs and climbed them. There I found a big open room, a stage with drawn curtains at one end, and dozens of round tables on the floor and lo! a bar with a bartender and booze. The only lights on in the space were strands of green lights, webbed across the ceiling. Many of the tables were occupied and a poet was on the stage. I couldn’t understand what she said. I went to the bar, leaned against it and ordered a drink, scanning the room for Kristin. A number of women in skirts and with thick black hair were seated among the crowd, but I wasn’t sure if any of the women were her. I turned to the bartender to ask about her gin selection—the low light made it impossible for me to read the bottles.

The bartender didn’t reply, didn’t even move. I figured she was listening and I was loathe to interrupt but she was the bartender so I said, a little louder, “Excuse me. What gins do you have?” Again, no response. I moved down the bar a little, as close to the bartender as I could (odd, I thought, that no one else is at the bar) and that was when I realized the bartender was a mannequin.

I admit I recoiled from it, and backed clumsily away from the bar. I looked around, to see if someone was watching me, maybe laughing at me? I looked around and the stillness of everyone in the room—even the poet—became horribly apparent to me. There was no actual person in the room but me.

That there was the sound of speaking and then—it happened while I was in the room—applause—tipped the balance from interesting-weird to freaky-weird and I got downstairs right quick, worrying a little that the bouncer was not only in on the gag but that he was in on the gag and the gag wasn’t funny. Indeed, by the door, stood a man.

As I approached him, I asked dumb questions, trying to keep my cool, “Is that an installation? Where’d you get all the mannequins? Was the whole event the poem?” until I saw that, like the bartender, he was a mannequin. I cursed and brushed past. Doing so, I knocked it over, and it fell and shattered. I didn’t look for someone to apologize to, I just took off. Once I was a good distance from 1373 I texted Kristin who was like, “Where have you been?” and gave me the correct address.

I don’t remember much about the Book 12 reading.

[I should mention that John Cotter and I are reading in the Yes! Reading Series this Sunday. The reading starts at 4pm in the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Avenue. More information about the reading can be found here.]

31. Autographing books, readings, } & where to when.

Immediately following: a few happenings tied to the upcoming Association of Writers & Publishers (AWP) conference in Washington DC next week.

Wednesday, Feb. 2nd. I will read poetry at Busboys & Poets with James Capozzi, Geoffrey Gatza, Matthew Klane, Adam Liszkiewicz, Marjorie Maddox, Brittany Perham, Sarah Sarai, Jon Thompson, Daniel Tiffany, Sam Truitt, and Bryan Walpert; we’re hosted by the journals Free Verse, Reconfigurations, and Word For/Word.

Thursday, Feb. 3rd. I’ll be hosting with Flim Forum Press (and quite a few others) a reading with Jennifer Karmin, Charles Alexander, Amy Allara, Andrea Bates, Joe Elliot, Laura Moriarty, Hoa Nguyen, Sarah Suzor, and James Belflower,. [James Belflower, by the way, will host (with Anna Eyre) me and John Cotter in Albany on the 13th as part of the Yes! Reading Series.]

Friday, Feb. 4th. At the Rose Metal Press table in the AWP book fair, I will be available to autograph copies of Color Plates (or whatever) from 10:30am until it ceases to be reasonable for me to sit at the RMP table with an uncapped pen.

Saturday, Feb. 5th. The AWP book fair is open to the public from 8:30am until 5:30 pm, and there are three tables I would like for you to visit: the aforementioned Rose Metal Press table, the Flim Forum Press table, and the Open Letters Monthly table. The Flim table, by the way, will be a nexus of the new, sure to be graced by poets your children and grandchildren will one day ask about. “Dad, did you ever meet Jessica Smith?” they might ask. And won’t you feel lame if the answer is, “Uh, nope.” Open Letters Monthly will be selling copies of their anthology, which includes an essay of mine about the poet Paul Hannigan.


[photo: Jennifer Karmin reading from Aaaaaaaaaaalice (with Jessica Leigh) at last year's AWP book fair.]

30. Books that aren’t } and books that do.

After Christmas John Cotter asked me if I’d heard of Lance Olsen and I thought THAT name rings a bell but why say so? I said, “I’m not sure,” so John told me all about Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets (SEE John’s review at OLM). What I wish I’d said when John asked if I’d heard of Lance Olsen was, Uh, yeah. I’m in a book with Lance Olsen.

That is, ahem, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager.

Ben and Erinrose pitched it so: “The Catalog is to consist of a series of blurbs/short descriptions of books that do not exist. In order to compile that Catalog, we have asked many of the writers, theorists, and text-makers we most admire to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered and then write a brief blurb about the imagined text.”

An advanced e-copy was sent to me so I might splendor on its grass before the actual encounter (the Catalog will be at the AWP conference). I’ve been doing. Let me mention a few I especially liked. Matt Bell’s “The Big Book of Infinitely Possible Timetables,” which sounds like the Catalog’s cousin and is similarly interested in the impossible, specifically, the wish to be in all of our possible lives. There are a number of impossible books described—my contribution is such a one; the Catalog lends itself to the improbable. Such as “The Slow Book,” by Shelly Jackson, which imagines a book that is written over the course of centuries (her blurb reminded me of John Cage’s “ORGAN2/ASLSP,” currently being performed as slowly as possible—for 639 years—in the church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt), or Ben Mirov’s “Inadequate Pillow,” about a book that’s literally all things and nothing. Then there are books more possible. Mallory Rice’s “Hugging in the Kitchen” describes a novel made of the moments after the protagonist cries. I noticed frequent furniture moving in these blurbs. There are a few the-book-as-me blurbs, including Diane Williams’. There’s a lot of language that can’t be read. Lots of incredible cities, too, like the beautiful “Haven” by Evelyn Hampton I’m sure other patterns will becomes apparent to careful readers.

The blurb most unlike all the others: “The Gardens of Krakov” by Brian Reed. I like it most of all the blurbs.

By now you’re suitably interested.