Mileage from Titles
I know last week I said I’d tell you about Bad Stories, and I will soon. That post is waiting patiently in my drafts, but this weekend is a bit loaded and warrants something else. Yesterday my mom arrived back in town and her hair has gotten long and she casually mentioned that she wrote…
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Making Sense of Sorrow
Saturday before last, a wonder-friend sent me this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. So many times, as we navigated the crowds and listened to the children speak and watched little kids holding signs that said, “I don’t want to be next,”at the March For Our Lives, I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude and sorrow and…
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no doubt about where I’m going
This morning I stumbled from bed at 5 am in search of a book that I must have dreamed about, a collection of essays by V.S. Naipaul called Literary Occasions, which I read more than a decade ago. My conscious mind can’t remember even things I wrote myself, but in my sleep I remember literary criticism and theory…
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A Tough Language
I’m reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, Jeanette Winterson’s memoir. It arrived as a gift, straight to my door because someone lovely really gets where I am right now. Winterson writes: So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be…
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Writing a Love Story
I’m reading at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe this Friday at 10 pm, which is pretty thrilling/I’m nauseous. I’m planning to read some of the body poems, poems that were liberating to write and are uncomfortable to read. One of my favorite books about love and sensuality is Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson. I lent it…
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Insisting Upon Delight
It was a crying-in-the-emergency-room/on-the-phone-with-the-pediatrician kind of week. And simultaneously, it was a friends & PBR on the balcony, snorting laughter, visiting babies on the couch, hike in the rain with people I love more all the time, and reading National Geographic aloud to my littlest homie. It all coexists, it is all simultaneous. It was also my…
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10 tomato soup + other things to love about Sunday
I had the perfect Sunday. I mean perfect perfect perfect. An insanely hard yoga class (the kind that makes me wonder if the teacher is trying to kill me), a long lone grocery store wandering (where I ran into a lovely old friend) from which I returned with 10 beautiful tomatoes per the instructions of my…
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Pi Day (was yesterday, I know…)
There has been so much great art and writing and magic this past week. Last night I saw the preview of a play with a friend who is so incredibly thoughtful and insightful and a really good influence on me. The play had lots of things happening in it–clown make-up and domestic violence and an…
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OMG OMG OMG AWP
Monday I heard 4 spectacular poems in response to Brendan Constantine’s “The Needs of the Many,” and Brendan himself will join my groups Tuesday and Wednesday. And then AWP, the best/worst annual conference where all these people I love on the page and in person are in one place and there are so many books…
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