... and here's how you know: Yankees are down by one, two guys on base, and Jason Giambi and his ridiculous mustache are at bat. Ye Olde Boyfriend has ABBA on the iTunes, hooked up through the tv speakers, and, as Giambi hits a double that scores the two guys on base, is singing "Fernando." But, get this, he has replaced the word "Fernando" in the lyrics with "Giambi."
There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Giambi!
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Giambi!
Hearing this, I hied myself off to blogland to record the moment for posterity, and as I typed this up, I heard from the living room: "IT'S A FAIR BALL! POSADA FOR A DOUBLE! HE'S GONNA SCORE GIAMBI! AND GIAMBI SCORES! 9-7 YANKEES!"
And now Jukebox Hero is playing on the stereo.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
Very into books about place right now...reading The Maximus Poems and The California Poem. I am very much a "project" writer...I don't generally get inspired to write a lone poem, and when I do, it usually comes with a suitcase labeled "Now write 25 more all with the same Elizabethan collar and Flock of Seagulls hair-do." Projects start out for me much the same as tension headeaches: a dim and nagging sense of something needing to get done. They don't usually take off into actual writing until I find some kind of book that guides me -- not directly, but in more of a funhouse mirror kind of way -- toward the form that the project needs to take. Then the ideas stop being ideas and start being notes on paper.
Earlier this spring, I was interested in pursuing a project relating to moving (both moving in the sense of moving into a new house and moving in with somebody), and the project didn't find its shape and rhythm until I attacked it with a triple whammy of Rae Armentrout, Barbara Guest, and Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. These texts gave me a form and a method that has now led to 85 pages of work.
Now I am ready for the next thing (just in time for the Dusie chapbook project!), and poems of place are providing the impetus. Place not just as geography, but history (natural and social), culture, people, economy. The Maximus poems and The California Poem are really great stuff for this, and the fact that both are very "open field," a type of form that I am just coming to, is also very inspiring for me. Going forward, I am interested in a "poetry of everything," but in the past, I think my work has gotten its momentum from being very focused in ideas and forms. I need to expand my ideas and lines outward outward -- get them bigger -- without getting slower or more ponderous. So far, that's having me write fairly short, discreet poems, but with an open-field form and reliance on open-ended, elliptical phrasings. There are asterisks everywhere. Watch out!
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
