Flickering cowboy

Quickmuse shows how thinking can happen in poems. How it gets shortcutted into a footbridge over the chasm. How editing is circuitry. It plays back the poem as written at the time. Richard Siken, already my favorite poet, does it in Unhappy Hour. Look for how he gets from pumpkins to flickering cowboy.

Stop Go Stop Go

Working on a new book has its disadvantages. It tends to take advantage of my guilt. Any moment I am standing still a thought comes into my head and if I do not add it to the accumulating pile of information that lives in the new book landfill then it is gone, gone forever.

This morning, I remembered one:

She was sure she had been an Indian in a past life. She didn't feel like explaining it, she told him. But when she was in the woods she just had that feeling.

She imagined telling that to her grandmother, who would just shake her beehive and ask if she wanted more rotisserie chicken. Those giant poultry shears looked like they could cut through a finger. She couldn't get that out of her mind. She shook her head.

What? he said. He thought she was paying attention to him paying attention.

No, she said. I was just remembering something.

From this life, or the one before? he said. Or the one before that? At some point maybe you were, like, a teletype machine. Click click click.

A what? she said. My grandmother had these poultry shears.

[Tara Jane O'Neil]

Has she made herself very clear

Remember: A handpainted Mexican chair hurling across the room. A palomino running across the ring, saddle empty, stirrups flying, seen from the dirt. A black and tan longhaired dog arrowing across the sand. The hermit crabs nipping at her toes.

Tara Jane O'Neil a sweet selfmotor.

Ida was a revelation of harmonies.

Luc read the same smoking section of the smoking piece but it smoked.

The Rosendale Cafe was packed. I had to leave, get back to my dog.

It was a great night.

Fast is Slow

Operative metaphors learned while running through the woods in the dark: fast is slow. If you run too fast, you'll snag your hat on a branch. If you walk instead of run, you can avoid the branches to begin with. But sometimes you just have to run.

Mijami book fair

At the Miami International Book Fair we ate arepas (corn cakes with mozarella). On Sunday I read and therefore fell in love with 2 writers I hadn't known, T. Cooper (Lipshitz 6 or Two Angry Blondes) and Felicia Luna Lemus (Like Son). In the author's lounge we sat around wondering why we'd been put together. They, it was clear, have long been in love with each other. They're a tight pack of alpha two. I sat on the edge of the campfire, edging closer in as we talked.

Some of my book takes place in Russia, and your book is called Russian Lover, T. Cooper speculated. Hm, we all said. But in that way that confluence happens accidentally and is recognized as closer kin than happenstance, we all read sections of our books dealing with assimilation in one way or another. We all push the edge, though differently. We all have dark hair. We all think of photographs as diving boards, as stories. In Felicia's case she's got the subject of the Edward Weston photo on her book cover tattooed on her wrist.

That must be it. The photos, the dark hair.

Whatever it was the audience thought the trio made perfect sense. Book fairs are wonderful. The writers are like the chocolate, the audiences hungry, the end of them--back to the world--can be bittersweet.

Bios of The Ulster Country Three

We are reading this Friday, 11/2 at 7 pm at the American
General Store in West Shokan, New York


Luc Sante's books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and has written about books, movies, art, photography, and music for many other periodicals. Sante has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes). He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard. His new book, KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, is just out with YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press.


Jana Martin's new volume of her short stories, RUSSIAN LOVER AND OTHER STORIES was published by the great small press YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press. The book has received much critical acclaim. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in The Mississippi Review, Five Points, Spork, Yeti, the Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, Chronogram and Willow Springs, among others. She also writes regularly about design, architecture, the decorative arts and fashion, most recently on moli.com. Her fiction column, is mink hollow, appeared regularly on sporkpress.com, an awardwinning magazine and website. Her story "Hope" won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona, she lives in Ulster County and is working on another book. What you can't see here is that she is wearing those sunglasses over her eyeglasses.


Frank Boyer tends to undercut his own brilliance. He has published poems in a number of little (changing that to small) magazines and anthologies in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New York. He is a master of the prose poem. He also writes fiction and drama, and does performance work, directing plays and doing his own solo performance/installation works. He teaches art, literature and performance-related subjects at SUNY-New Paltz and at SUNY-Ulster, and lives in Ulster County.

Mea Culpa

Why has it been so long? Isn't that the question you never want to have to publish? Because I was hired to write a blog, and although it's not about books and it's not about Russian Lover or Luc Sante or Vanessa Veselka or what Valerie Martin said today on the Bookshow on WAMC, which I listened to while driving south from Albany after meeting with the ear doctor who performed a tympanoplasty on my ear (and said we had a good result, which from a doctor is like a war whoop of joy, isn't it), and although it's not even about bookcovers or design, or about the wonderful painter Steven Schwartz, aka SAS, whose home and family the fires in Southern Cali missed by the geographic, ember-strewn, ashen equivalent of inches, or about why sometimes I don't want to read fiction and then suddenly run into it somewhere, and sit down and have the longest most delicious conversation ever anyway and wonder why the heck I ever thought of keeping myself hermetically sealed away from all those words, all that craft, all that wild writer's brain stewing and tangling and untangling the messy data of our hearts, it still requires a certain kind of writerly discipline and impulse.

That is why.


[technoviking]

But the wordy world keeps turning.

Darlin Neal curated the latest issue of The Mississippi Review online: The Hyperextended Family. There are great stories here, including a story by Claudia Smith, "Jennies," that has this great line: "She likes me to make the dolls alive." My story, "Painter," really a trio, a 3-part blue fugue of before and after, is in there too. Honored to be in such good company. Kind of a way of closing a long and wobbly circle that started in about 1984, when I worked with Mary Robison, who counted among her best friends "Rickle," who turned out to be Richard Barthelme, who is the editor of the Mississippi Review.

Mike McGonigal in the Green Room at Bumbershoot

I'm Making a List

On the eve of surgery I have this urge to make a list of all the outstanding things I have left to do and all the people I have left outstanding. Lately, it's the ones from years ago coming back into the fore. It's like a trip on the merry-go-round--there's that wonderful prancing horse again, there's the yellow steeds pulling the winged chariot, there's the dapple gray. Or maybe the cycles are comforting because however many changes I've undergone, there they are, my old friends, still willing to listen and still willing to talk.

I can almost hear you

Having lived with a perforated eardrum for a few years now I am finally scheduled for surgery. What they do is called a tympanoplasty. Do not hit that link if you are squeamish.

During a tympanoplasty, they make a patch. It may or may not become part of the body, but if it does—if the body accepts it—then I will suddenly be thrust into a very different kind of world. For all the time the eardrum has been absent, there have been so many sounds rushing in: air, ringing, hissing, clicks; I hear worse according to the audio tests but far better in terms of what's in the atmosphere. I hear everything and the air around everything. I say "What" a lot. I am looking forward to saying "What" a lot less. It has never been a favorite word of mine, though it is a favored concept: the what of everything matters a whole lot more than the why at times, and when you really get the what, you'll get a better why.

Portland, Seattle, NYC

Joan Wasser of Joan as Policewoman at Bumbershoot




































Stacey Levine, author, at Bumbershoot in the green room.

Come and Set a Piece: NYC Reading

Sept 18th: Reading in NYC with Luc Sante at 6:30. Here's the blurb from the New Yorker:

knitting factory
Luc Sante reads from his essay collection "Kill All Your Darlings:
Pieces 1990-2005" and Jana Martin reads from her short-story
collection, "Russian Lover." The two books are newly published by
Yeti, an underground arts magazine from Portland. (74 Leonard St.,
between Broadway and Church St. No tickets necessary. Sept. 18 at
6:30.)

Heading to Bumbershoot

I'm writing from Holocene, the 3nd night of the Halleluwah Festival, listening to a group hum. Tomorrow it's up to Bumbershoot, where everyone from Steve Earle to Joan as Policewoman are playing, and I'm reading:


Seattle. Sept. 3rd. 12:30-1:45

Have been thinking, all this time, of the amazing Grace Paley. RIP. Something tells me even to say that with her is to start a conversation, so — I'll hold up my end when it quiets down —

Portland

No better way to return to life than listening to Califone do a soundcheck at a club in Portland, Oregon. I'm reading here today. Part of the Halleluwah Festival.


The past 2 months have been all about raising $ and hacking away. And so here the guitar wails and here the girl types and here the air swirls happily around the lively room.






Luc Sante's book, Kill All Your Darlings, is out on YetiBooks/VerseChorus: disparate essays from recent years bound together. But disparate in a great way. A luc way, which is to say they all work together; they all make sense as one.



Brother Luc, kudos. The Yeti children are growing up.

Went to the Ulster County Fair. Ate a corn dog, walked through the 4H poultry house.

New beloved writer: Sonia Rivera-Valdés. Beautiful stories.

And new question: what is acceptable risk? In any field? In any realm?