13 May 2010 with 1 comment
Once I wrote a smutty story and left it on a park bench. Three-thousand dollars is the most money I have ever made in one month. I am overwhelmed with nostalgia when I think of the tiny, overpriced room I lived in at 282 Broadway in Brooklyn. I believe that most accidents happen near home. Last night I told a stranger a lie. I cannot speak any language but English with fluency; this frustrates me and it is my own fault. I think using the internet has reduced my ability to concentrate for long periods of time. I have started smoking again. I believe gender is relative and subjective. I am uninsurable. I have a scar on my right hand from punching a clock when I was 20. If I ever write you a poem it means I am madly in love with you. I make excellent fish tacos. I abhor inconsistency. I was engaged for two months; that was also my own fault.
10 May 2010 with 2 comments
I cannot throw a punch, though I have tried. I think I am a decent writer, but I think I am a better poet. I hate love poems. Dinner tonight is rigatoni and sauce from a jar. There was no dinner last night. I do not mind romantic comedies. I can be a bit of a drama-butchqueen. I stole the term “butchqueen” from an impossibly beautiful 20-year-old who I am just a little bit in love with. I can take a punch, sort of. Lying disgusts me. I believe I am living in the wrong time, in the wrong place. I value good penmanship. I prefer pencils. I worry about money always but try hard to seem as though I don’t. I am currently covered with bruises. There are many red, painful pricks on my left hand from where I accidently leaned on a cactus last night. I am not graceful. I think I have subtly pretty eyes. Losing friends and lovers unsettles me deeply. I am occasionally arrogant; I am more often uncertain. Robert Frost is my archenemy. Blood makes me nervous.
8 May 2010 with no comments
“Going Back to China” by Willis Barnstone (From 5 a.m. in Beijing: Poems of China). A perfect companion to today’s suddenly cool weather and the view from my bookshop’s wingback chair, where I watch for people who never come in.
Outside, the full moon is memory light
knifing those of us who look up and remember.
People drive from blue house to blue house,
and I go back out there with them,
out of my own icestorm I’m sick of. Enough.
In a few weeks I”ll return to China,
to Tu Fu wandering from exile to exile,
from childhood with a horse at dawn
to now with a few white hairs on his head,
still alive by scribbling out his poems,
his talking paintings.
I feel peaceful already.
I’ve not tried to conceal the weak eyes
of indecision
and soon will camp out in new drab rooms
in an empire city of red dust and rice,
alleys looming with white shirts and urine,
a shabby mansion jammed with Ming tables
where Wang Shixiang, back from work camps,
brushpens his unique scholarly books.
Already I wander frontiers of sleeping houses
on my one-gear bike; I smell mounds
of cabbage outside dank cement entryways;
am back to a half moon in Beijing,
to odd books with difficult characters
and a man unwillingly older
whom I wear without disdain and lightly.
6 April 2010 with no comments
Over the weekend I pulled a muscle in my neck, or pinched a nerve, or something. Maybe it happened while I was riding through the Texas hill country, craning my neck around at every curve to see the bluebonnets and redbonnets and yellowbonnets, which I know aren’t their real names, but this is what I call them. Maybe I did the damage later, while awkwardly crouched over an old motorcycle tank with a can of spray paint in one hand and a beer in the other. At one point I confused the two, and shook the can of beer instead of the spray paint. You can imagine the mess.
I have been thinking a lot about writing, and travel, and displacement, and memory — as I do. Paul Theroux wrote “It was as a solitary traveler that I began to discover who I was and what I stood for.” He also wrote, “I often think I became a writer because I have a good memory.” He differentiates between an accurate memory and a rich memory. He is in possession of the latter, as am I. I am constantly getting myself into trouble for not remembering names and faces — one too many times approaching a person to introduce myself, only to be told “We did this already.”
But ask me about eating catfish at the kitchen table in Sugarland, Texas, when I was five. Ask me about leaping fully-clothed into a pool after accidentally kneeling down in a pile of fire ants. Ask me about the every bedroom I have ever spent the night in — I could sketch them out with surprising accuracy, and, I feel, probably capture each one’s unique warmth. I have been told I have something of a photographic memory, but evidently these photographs don’t record details such as who you are, where you are from, how I know you. Thus my renown as “occasional asshole.”
Ironically, my notoriety as a “more than occasional asshole” comes from other behavior that is also linked to my memory. I fixate on the past — worry over it, rub it between my hands until my palms are hot. The past overwhelms me at the most inopportune moments — lounging at the bar of a dance hall, for instance — and I find I must physically react in order to cope: I rant, I weep, I flee.
Theroux also wrote this: “You know how much friendship matters to memory when, for whatever reason, a friend leaves the orbit of your existence. Losing a friend to death or absence or misunderstanding is not only a blow to self-esteem but a stun to memory. The sad reflection that we are losing a part of ourselves is true: part of our memory has departed with the lost friend.”
A friend or a lover, it is the same. A friend is a lover. We fall in love with our friends, don’t we? New friends are suddenly bright stars; we orbit around them, in rapt reverie. Build whole worlds out of their light. When the light is extinguished, for whatever reason, we may panic: What is this loss? Why this empty sky? The mind floods with memories and alternate endings and perplexed fury. Dylan Thomas, who you never gave a fuck about before, now rings too true: “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!”
It’s embarrassing, this sentimentality. I twist violently around like a cat on a leash to get away from it. The collar tightens. I twist and bolt and leap some more. Finally I am exhausted and panting, and raw around the neck, and I’ve probably attracted an audience — “Look at that, look at that, why do that, don’t they know?”
Of course I do! But I have this memory problem, you see — I’ll either forget you in a second or I will never be able to let you go. Fortunately I also have this backup plan where I am a writer; maybe the thrashing about will make for a good story.
27 March 2010 with 1 comment
Last night I attended an open mic at Monkey Wrench Books hosted by Queer Sol, an arts collective based here in Austin. I read three poems: “Girl dies in Arizona,” “An afternoon at the museum,” and “Monologue of a mystery writer.” I haven’t read in years — I think the last time was in New York or maybe at a reading in Brooklyn. I vaguely recall holding a shaking piece of paper at the front of a dark bar and reading a vignette about Bonnie and Clyde, which I now recognize as an overly dramatic analogy for my abrupt move to (and from) Portland, Oregon, with a lover back in 2000. God only knows where that piece is now.
I stopped going to open mics and poetry events when slam poetry became the de facto genre. I don’t have any issues with slam poetry per se, but I think its current market dominance makes it difficult for smaller voices to be heard. “Smaller” is not a pejorative. I simply mean there is a difference between writing for an largely invisible audience — writing for reading — and writing for performance. Slam poetry is raucous, intense performance; poetry “readings” less so — but no less affecting. My preference is obviously for the latter; I feel more comfortable reading in a literary, not performative, context. The readings I enjoy aren’t competitive, but there is still enough expectation of good prose that it keeps you on your toes.
I won’t delve any deeper into the issue. There’s a bitter divide between the two camps and I think it is enough to acknowledge that divide, briefly explain my preference, and move on. Last night’s reading was wonderful because the larger umbrella of queer made “slam” versus “traditional”* irrelevant. We were a roomful of writers, each doing our thing in a safe space. I cannot overstate the importance of safe spaces for writers. If we could craft a series of weekly non-competitive open mics for queer writers in Austin it’d be a real boon to the writing community, which is currently (in my opinion) in atrophy unless you participate in slam events. A corollary weekly writers’ group is another idea — I used to belong to a small poetry group when I lived in Dallas, and if nothing else it trained me to write every day. Also there was a lot of free booze. We held our meetings in a bar, true to form.
Last night’s reading also reinforced my conviction that writing is an art form that requires complete immersion and dedication, potentially to the exclusion of conventional concepts of success or wealth or stability. (At dinner after the reading, my little group excitedly drew parallels between face tattoos and artistic integrity. I’m not sure how that argument holds up the morning after.)
Though not as dramatic as a face tattoo, when I left my job in publishing and entered grad school I did make myself a promise: I would not under any circumstances return to publishing. A risky move, as it’s the only industry I’ve consistently worked in that pays a living wage, and publishing experience comprises the entirety of my CV. But I’m sticking to it, and what’s more, I’ve alloted myself two solid years post-grad during which I will beg, borrow, and steal in order to keep writing the priority**. Minimum wage job? Sure! Part-time bookstore gig? Bring it. Cramped, cheap apartment ruled with an iron fist by a paranoid landlady? I’ll take it! Commitment to the cause is now.
Part and parcel to this type of commitment, as it turns out, is reading your work aloud. It’s too easy to tuck those manuscripts away and forget about them until the night you drink too much at dinner and paw frantically through your sock drawer looking for a poem you wrote that your dinner guests just have to hear. A monthly or weekly reading date, however, brings all that chicken scratch to the light of day. It reminds you why you do what you do. Why you lay awake at night obsessing over the last two lines of a poem written six years ago, and why you spend hours at the office (also known as the cafe down the street) on a brilliantly sunny Saturday in March hunting and pecking out an essay about the writing/reading process that only a handful of people will ever see.*** A handful is better than none, and handfuls lead to other handfuls, and eventually you are feeding a whole crowd, not just on the blogosphere but in public spaces, and aloud. And aloud is so crucial when technology and circumstance conspire to force us physically further apart. We may be more connected, but we are exponentially more alone. Standing in front of two dozen or more blinking eyes and reading lines off of a shaking piece of paper is real, and it is scary. Confronting that reality and that fear propels. Keeps you honest. Keeps you working.
* There is nothing conventional or conservative about poetry. Whether performed in a concert hall or scribbled silently in the dead of night, good poetry — good writing, period — has revolutionary potential.
** I’ll probably end up with an adjunct teaching position, which is basically the same thing as begging, borrowing, and stealing.
*** Also because you should be writing the first chapter of your master’s thesis, but why do that when you can do this instead?
