my morning girl

Yes, they closed down the highway; yes there is more than three feet of snow on the ground; where to go in all this white--to the hills of course, the fast wonderful hills.

This morning while I was trying to dig out a small path to civilization, I looked up and right over my head was a hawk, she had a chickadee in her beak and she did not move. I did not move. Ever so slowly she began showering me with chickadee’s feathers and then we both did our jobs, I made my path and she devoured everything except the small beak which now rests by the climbing rose bush.

I sometimes wonder why we need to make things beautiful—because this wasn’t beautiful, yet I wanted to wake everyone up and make them see that she had chosen me somehow, she had chosen me this morning to see her and I wanted to choose them. But I didn’t. Okay, so I made the children look and Em but I didn’t wake the whole block which was my initial reaction. The hawk was there for three hours or more without flying away until I called my best friend and asked her if she thought it was a sign.

It was.

It is truly the size that matters

We are suppose to get 16 inches of snow today and I got to call my first “snow day” at work and all the children had to stay home, which made me feel a bit like a king you shall not venture out into the weather.

On my way to have breakfast with my love, I passed a house that had a ten foot snow sculpture penis in the front yard. I know it’s a frat house but I still wanted to pull over and sculpt a dog taking a leak on their snow balls... yet I had to get to breakfast. I have the talent but I just don’t have the time. I think THAT should be printed on a T-Shirt for me to wear everyday.

At breakfast the man behind me said, “My first wife was named Joy and when she left I didn’t have any” which almost threw me into a fit of giggles, causing me to blow french toast out my nose. True Ballard fact: I'm always listening to conversations around me and not to any I am actually HAVING which makes me a horrible love most of the time but I am trying to make up for it other ways.

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sculpture out on the front lawn!

O Happy Birthday You Beautiful Maine Girl

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

“The truth in life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe he has found his place. But only the madman is truly calm.” – Antonin Artaud


Reasons I might be CrAzY……

I woke up this morning and it was twenty degrees below zero and I still went OUTDOORS.
I have not fixed the crack in my windshield.
I did not go to work.
I did not go to work and yet I answered the phone when my boss called and spent all morning discussing work.
I drank moon tea for health and one giant ass chocolate bar for breakfast.
I ONCE AGAIN prepared a packet for submitting and then missed the posting date.
I believe you are actually listening harder b/c I am using CAPITIALS!!!!
I invited 12 nine years old girls to sleep over next weekend for Bella's Birthday.
I let her pick an American Idol theme.
I ordered the playstation game.
I bought a disco ball.
I peed today on a toilet with no seat.
I replaced a hundred year old pull chain toilet (that I loved) with a brand new, fancy-ass (pun) with no seat.
I paid $680.00 for this.
I tried to hit a squrriel with a broom.
I think the toilet actually looks better in Sepia.

Before I love, I fear the dark
with its gradual strangeness, familiar burden.
How sly the light with her shadow.
How quick the eye to forget.

Yet in my own night I’m forgiven.
If I close my eyes, follow the map
on the underside of my lids, my body
will remember which way to walk.

Until a chair bites me in the hip. 

Robert Creamer 

I’m still ill. I work, I come home, I do laundry and I run the three flights of stairs but I still feel like crap.

When we were D.C. we went to this great exhibit where the artist, Robert Creamer had built a box with this huge flat bed scanner, he then hung flowers as if they were in space and created amazing images. He also collected petals for years, meticulously arranged them for months and then set them on fire for a single photograph.

He talked about how he adapted as an artist. How he changed because of the digital world, how his art became something totally different then what he believed it would be when he first started taking photos. He was not born in the digital age but it was what he was given.

So these are my questions for myself today and thus for you in some way:

How are you willing to adapt as an artist, how willing are you to let your art change from what you once believed it to be?

And what are going to set on fire?

t. ballard 

I’ve been running a fever for the last two days.

I woke up several times last night believing I could speak every language in the world. I have an intense memory of being 17 in a little boat in Germany crossing a river. I was trying to concentrate hard enough to understand. I don’t speak German but I believed I could, if I taught my self to truly listen before the boat landed on the other side.

Just listen. These are words I tell myself all the time.

Other words I tell myself: Stop. Breathe. It’s a wave, only a wave. If you get up right now you can have _______ for supper. Five more minutes, I can sleep five more minutes. I will be a better mother, writer, teacher, lover in my next life. In my next life I will be more organized, creative, attentive, BETTER, able to leap small buildings…..

I understand slowly and then it seems I don’t understand at all. Listen.

Noises in the last five minutes: phone, car, a bus. A very loud garbage truck with one tire flater than the other. A chain saw. Barb next door yelling at the dog. A tree falling. Phone. "Keta come here, please come here" The door opening. Footsteps and one red beep.

Note to Carole Maso: If you write like a god, could you at least be kind?

 

I did it again!!!! I spent all my time last weekend (okay maybe four hours) working on a submission, finished it and then left it in my box to be mailed further in the week on my way to work. Now of course I’ve missed the deadline even though it seems I went to work a zillion times.

I don’t know how I keep doing this. Why is it impossible to raise two children, work a full time job and write a book----this is actually a question in my head.

On a happy note that involves no stamps. I finished a great first novel today called “Caucasia” by Senna Denzy about two children born in the sixties, in an interracial home, who were split up b/c one looked like one parent and one looked like the other. Read the book. It's written well and talks about things people never talk about in a way that’s incredibly interesting.

Another note: I am in love. His name is Robert and I met him on Tuesday while he was hiding under the art table from one of his teachers, who was trying to lure him out by asking him what the word “luminaries” meant. I then had him the next day in my mosaic class breaking dishes with hammers. “This is cool shit” he said and hugged my knee cap.

I agree.

photo- Les Krimns

Salt on the roads melts
the ice. Salt on the heart
hardens it.
That's not
How the Book
Preserves the body.

The bitten tongue
Tastes blood. The tongue
Uttering, utters love.

gregory orr

Calm down, calm down.
But why calm down?
When I'm dead and only
A poem in the Book
Read by someone
Not yet born,
Then I will be calm.
Then I will tell them
In a quiet voice
What a miracle it is
To be alive. I won't
Shout and jump around.
I'll whisper it in her ear.

gregory orr 

Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because the wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives live there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.

If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?

-gregory orr

(photo by jerry uelsmann)

 

I am the rat's star today

My friend, my friend, I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.


-anne sexton

I have been reading “Autobiography of a Face” by Lucy Grealy for the last few days. I found it in a used bookstore on Sunday along with the collected works of H.D which I had been looking for, for years. I scared the crap out of the person down the stacks when I saw her collected (made physical noises) and strapped it to my breast like a small child then like a BAD mother brought it to my house and lost it in my own stacks.

Read Grealy’s book if you have not already. She was a poet and then wrote a memoir before it was cool to do such things. She had cancer as a child which left her face disfigured and there’s no happy ending. No Oprah saying it made her better or stronger, nothing more than a brilliant book.

After I finished the book Em came in and said, “did you know she is dead?” Which really sucked b/c I didn’t KNOW and I wrote my own happy ending even if Grealy could not. I didn’t give her a drug overdose at 39. I gave her hair and better surgeries and maybe a few more lovers.

I don’t think I’m a poet. I might be a fairy tale writer.

Now I’m sad and want to go have tea.

I am reading a book about bats. A serious book about bats which explains how they hold their young, how one wing wraps around another when they are cold; the males and females switch roles at random and the bats have to be a certain temperature to reproduce.

To hunt, the bat listens to the rhythm of its prey; it hears the moth’s flutter, the grasshopper’s song and to adapt the prey changes it’s music to confuse the hunter.

I understand this.

Mating occurs by listening, to the one who bears the beats closest to your own and this is how they find each other when there is nothing else. But how do they know the difference, of what to eat or what to love?

This I’m not sure I understand. 

It is Christmas. Em is downstairs making Christmas noises and the girls are sleeping late b/c Santa already came once EARLY so there is just us human beings left to receive gifts from and we not all that exciting.

The holidays have come in pieces for us this year which is a wonderful way to digest them. All of Em’s family will be here in a few minutes. We all laugh readily and quickly and get along exceptionally well. We spent several hours playing “would you rather” which asks such questions as “would you rather eat a brain or lick a man’s sweaty armpit completely….”

The questions are gross but offer deep insight into the psyche.

Two days ago we went to a hanger which stores all the Boeing Airplanes through out history; some had teeth, some were bright yellow like bees. It was a Rebecca Loudon wet dream and unfortunately I said those words out loud when I first entered the building. Many heads turned!

Did you ever feel like you were seeing things others were meant to see? And if you gathered them up like stones they would truly understand your gift.

 

What more could you want??????

I bought this today in a little store out side of D.C. and I am tempted to go back and buy more for all my blogger friends. It is the snot of angels and it's suppose to protect you from all the world's evils--and there's a hell of a lot of evils out there.

Oh and it smells like jasmine. 

We are in D.C. for the holidays. Yesterday we went to the air and space museum and purchased enough astronaut ice cream to last us at least one trip around the moon.

I have seen beautiful art.

Bella’s quote for the day “I wish these places (the museum) would only tell me about things I don’t know—the rest is boring.”

We haven’t seen the president. I haven’t been alone for more than five minutes at a time but we are here and my girls are happy.

Wishing you all peace or at least help in the pursuit of it—happy holiday.

Yesterday I was on a board which awarded $20,000 to writers. It was the first time I’ve ever been in a place to make those decisions. I think I learnt more in those eight hours then I have in a long time.

First off, I will never ever write a query letter the same again and that $15.00 I begrudgingly send off with my manuscript I will now send off with a new attitude. It’s a fluck of a lot of work.

But OH MY GOD THERE WAS NO COFFEE!!!!

Okay this is a boring post but I don’t want it to be.

Today Olivia taped me (without my knowledge) lying in the bed with my new pink nano singing “Halleluiah” with Katie Lang. Saying I am singing is giving me more credit than I deserve ;) it’s more like Helllllllllaaaaaaaluuuuuuuyaaaaa and then I mumble, then for some reason say “BARGE” really, really loud.

Olivia is threatening to send it to home funniest videos or post it on my blog.

I own her world---none of those things are going to happen. This is one of the reasons I never taught her to download.

What do you think of this ????

 

I should be folding laundry---why doesn’t it come out of the dryer that way. We waste so much money on stupid inventions when that one would be useful. The laundry is in the middle of the bed right now and the cat is making tunnels. Hell if I could get away with sleeping on warm, crumpled clothes I would.

Tomorrow is a BIG day. We are having our family night at work where all the students showcase their art and perform. It is my favorite night of the semester but I will probably get to work at 8 am and leave at 8 p.m. which sucks. Yet I love it!!!!

Children will be stilting, playing African drums, putting on a show with puppets they have made, felting, painting chairs, doing Spoken Word and I will look over and it will be a good thing. A very good thing indeed.

I realized tonight, I teach and write for exactly the same reasons. I want something that is more than who I am to out live me. I want something to exist of me that doesn’t have flesh or bone.

Today Cody told me he was a great writer even though he didn’t spell every word correctly. “Because,” he said “I am excellent at content. I say interesting things.”

I hope I taught him that or at least encouraged it.

I tell them, artists are born out of deep listening. I can teach anyone to paint but only you can teach yourself how to listen. I believe that with all that I have. I believe in these kids.

  

Bella and her skateboard. Dont you wish you went to my school?

Tonight I went to buy a nativity set from this wonderful store which sells original art work from all around world. The woman who owns the store says she stopped carrying them b/c ppl kept stealing the baby Jesus!!! For some reason this makes me incredibly happy.

I am going to share that information at my art school tomorrow with my kids. I think it will also make my students happy. Maybe we will make her hundreds of little baby jesuses to fill her shelves. Tis the season.

And b/c it is the season I am posting some photos of all the glorious art I’ve making with my kids while I haven’t been blogging. It is a good life and a good job. 

E and T's first tree

It may be a little crooked but it's ours!!!! 

E and I have been playing the title game for the last two days. You get extra points if you use a unique image from the book corresponding with that famous poet’s name. For example:

“I Wish I Had a Crimson Snatch Like Yours Jean Nordhaus.”

Jean gets fifty points for actually using SNATCH in a poem and making it work. You may doubt me now but READ her new book—it is brilliant.

I wonder if we could market it as a board game????

In other news, we are off to D.C. in nine days. I am insanely busy and giving up showering just to write this. But I’m an artist so no one notices. The great thing about being an artist is that truly lazy behavior can be chalked up to creativity.

Mid American is having their annual James Wright Contest. Go enter.

I love that journal. It is one of the few small journals that prints amazing poems each and every issue, almost cover to cover. It is my standard wine—the one I can pick up and read each time and it doesn’t leave a funny taste in my mouth. I’m not even in it and they are not paying me.

Happy 11 days into advent!!!! It is my magic number and I have chocolate.

this is the dog I want for christmas 

I have become boring. I have become boring and old and I think it has something to do with Olivia almost surpassing me in height but I’m not sure.

Next week I am on a panel to decide grant money for writers, which is always fun; it is Santa like, and hell there’s a catered lunch. Problem is I have read all the proposals and there are some poetry book titles I know I won’t be able to keep a straight face through.

(Em says I CANT post them here.)

But for example:
I Wish I Had Eyes Like Yours Van Gogh

Would you keep a straight face?

I’m not being vain or mean but I dont think the general public understands what horrible things you can call both children and books. I once had a kid in my class named Mister. Imagine that poor boy’s life.

Side note: I thought “Asleep Inside an Old Guitar” was a brilliant title and if Eduardo doesn’t take it back I might be tempted to give it to the Van Gogh dude.

Well at least in my head I’ve been blogging ;)

Today Jean Nordhaus’s new book Innocence came and I’m very excited!!! Last week I found her title poem in the pushcart award anthology while listening to an incredibly annoying woman train people at Starbucks. I was at the mall. I was a chain book store at the mall. I was trapped—the only wonderful thing was the poem.

Side note: don’t take me to the mall.

Another side note: If you do I will hide in the nearest book store.

I am wondering about the order of progression, if it is better to go with a smaller press that treats you well, to build up your audience. Is there ideal growth as a poet? An ideal place?

Or do we spend too much time talking about this crap when we should be writing?

The Innocent

Alone and together, we stand on the platform
a mob of strangers awaiting the train. There may be
among us a wife-beater; surely, a thief. That man
in the blue dolphin tie; that frazzled woman,
gathering in her scattered girls; each of us caught
in the swill of our being; none of us blameless,
not one of us pure. Greedy, covetous,
selfish, vain, we have trafficked in lies; we
have practiced small cruelties. Even the baby
asleep in a sling on his mother’s breast,
has been willful, has shaken with rage.

Yet, if fate arrives, as a wind, in a bullet,
a bomb, at the instant of shock, in the silent
heart of conflagration, we will all
be transformed into innocents, cleansed
in the fires of violence, punished not for any sins
committed—but for standing where we stand,
together in the soft, vulnerable flesh.

Jean Nordhaus

This came last week from the Writer’s Almanac. I thought it was brilliant for those of you who did not get to read it. Oh may god grant me a publisher like this!!!!


It's the birthday of the publisher and editor of The Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson , born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1886). She grew up in the small town of Columbus, Indiana, but early on she decided that she didn't fit into small-town life at all. So she moved to Chicago, which was the artistic capital of the Midwest at the time. In order to create a circle of artistic friends, she decided to start a magazine devoted to the avant-garde. She said that her plan was to fill the magazine with "the best conversation the world has to offer."

She called her magazine The Little Review , and the first issue came out inMarch 1914. The magazine had a motto printed on the cover that said, "A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste."

In 1918, thepoet Ezra Pound showed Anderson the manuscript for a new novel called Ulysses by a man named James Joyce. When she read it, she wrote to Pound, "This is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have! We'll print it if it's the last effort of our lives."

It took three years to serialize the whole novel, during which four complete issues of the magazine were confiscated and burned by the U.S. PostOffice. She was eventually convicted of obscenity charges for printing the novel. At the trial, the judge wouldn't let the offending material be read in herpresence, because she was a woman, even though she had published it. But she said that the worst part of the experience was just the fact that all those issues of her magazine had been burned.

She said, "The care we had taken to preserve Joyce's text intact. ... The addressing,wrapping, stamping, mailing; the excitement of anticipating the world's responseto the literary masterpiece of our generation ... and then a notice from the Post Office: BURNED."

She kept publishing The Little Review after that, but the issues appeared lessand less frequently. Her last issue came out in 1929.

Margaret Anderson said, "I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable”in other words, in an art of life."

I think we should all go off into the woods and make art here

The Best New Poets came a few days ago and it is truly a beautiful book. I love books that feel good in the hands, where someone actually took time to listen to the flow. Generally I HATE anthologies b/c the sound is off. The poems seem like bad dates that keep bumping into each other. It is almost painful to watch.

At the big conference last week, the speaker said that a good non profit knows what it is good at, doesn’t try to save the world, recognizes its strength, and identifies weakness.

Of course I relate everything to poetry. Last Saturday I went to a reading where the poet wrote BIG poems about bombs, the holocaust. I began to wonder if it is possible to make a big poem successful. Carolyn Forche’s few lines say more about war than this poor man did in two hours and I wonder if it is b/c she never says anything about war.

I began wondering in this reading, if by trying to be too much we loose the beauty of elements, of what is essential. I thought about the poems I love and why I love them. How I will remember Brigit Pegeen Kelly eyes of a peach until the day I die.

Little Things

After she's gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl's breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son's sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have -
as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

- Sharon Olds

Isabel drew this for me yesterday and it is EXACTLY how my day has been!!! 

my day

Today I attended a conference with all the youth development directors in the Midwest. My workshops were intergrading diversity into curriculum and creating safe spaces for children. What I’m most proud of is not spending time with adults but when I returned to school deciding to create an ezine with the kids so they can show case their art. The internet may never be the same!!!!

Artist Residencies

Deborah Ager had this on her blog which I thought was brilliant--I am now making plans to go to Brazil in my imaginary world without my very real children.

I am tempted to delete my long ass post b/c yesterday was one of those days when you want to write down everything, the time you wake, the texture of the apple against your teeth and when I feel like this, it is almost as if I am incased in something I don’t understand—a bird flying into plexi glass, it bends a little but does not break.

Notes came from a publisher yesterday about the first manuscript, so close and yet not. I am too busy thinking about the prose book to worry about the poems but I should. I know I should. When does a book grow up enough to take care of itself?

I am scheduling a reading for the Best New Poets Anthology in Minneapolis so if you are in the book and want to read please email me, if you’re not in the anthology and want to drink lots of wine and come hear us read, email me.

today's notes

There was a woman at the grocery store today who looked like Hazel, a woman I worked with when I was 14. My father believed in the development of moral character so he was always dumping his daughters off at the worst possible jobs. We never worked retail or in restaurants or the thousand other jobs one can get in a tourist town by the ocean but we found ourselves in the backs of trucks with migrant workers, in garages or greenhouses in all the places which smelled of people and labor.

And I think we were happy, my sister and I—we have different stories, my sister met her husband when she was 14 and I never dated until I was 16 but there was this boy/man named Little Aaron who believed b/c his father owned the greenhouse he was free to pull us under the growing tables by our ankles and feel our breasts.

I was a smart girl and knew the word harassment but there are things stronger than education, unwritten things like when a boy is 14 and you are15, how he is always younger than you and how you may have to explain to your father that there are some boys you like touching your breasts and some you do not.

I am thinking all this b/c I have been reading books about Nigeria, two young authors who are writing about class and I am always frighten how familiar all this is. How there can be a war and people can kill others who look just like them b/c they were not born with the correct ancestry and this makes sense to me b/c in Maine where I am from it matters what your last name is.

It does not matter if you have money or a good job or an education. You may come back a doctor or famous writer but you will always be someone’s son or daughter—the name no matter how many times you change it will always be with you.

We are so use to the wrong name being one of oppression but what if the wrong name is one of entitlement, one that leads you to the front of the line or the head of the classroom. When I went to interview at a private art school when I was 16 I was in love with the way the paint smelt, all the beautiful white buildings and I thought I could be safe there—fall into my art and as I expressed my fear of getting in, of being good enough the dean laughed and said, we know who you are.

But I didn’t and I ran to a state school. I ran to England, Haiti and then the Midwest and I am still not sure what my last name is. I long to exist in a culture where it does not matter, where people are not judge on skin color or by class and I try to create that culture for my children.

Is it possible? I will wonder this tomorrow when I go to vote. If the people who are voting represent my society. I will remember that when I lived in England my senator grandfather mailed me an absentee ballot with all the boxes checked and a detail letter of my rights and responsibilities.

I still wonder what this is, where it is. Are we all responsible for the life we have created or it is merely doing the best we can with what we are given. Hazel had seven children and one good eye. She always smelt of mums b/c we were both assigned to the funeral plants in the greenhouse. Hazel said I read TOO MUCH and no one would marry me b/c of the way I talked or if they did marry me they would not stay.

I wonder how much we tell children becomes true. There is a whole theory in Gestalt Therapy that a sentence uttered gives energy to its being not so unlike Voodoo which believes language is power, curses are weapons. What did the young Nigerian mother tell her son before she died, what curses or truth did she plant in his head, were these curses or blessings?

We have a mouse in the house which I am convinced is several b/c I am a painter and I swear the bastard is a different shade of gray every time he flies across the kitchen floor. He never comes out when the girls are there or even Em but I swear he knows it is I who buys the traps and seeks his revenge.

Yes I am the same girl who carries bugs out by cups but this my friend is a RODENT!!!

Odd phenomenon—it seems various bloggers all stopped writing on the 31^st of October not to be heard from again and being a mother I am pretty sure the little trick or treaters ate my dear friends.

I, Teresa Ballard being of some what sound mind pledge to blog every day this week due to that fact that the moon is full and the fundraiser which has consumed my life is now over. I will submit my book to Yale and I will bow at Gluck’s feet so you people who took me off your blog roll (you know who you are) due to my lack of personal expression please have pity on my soul I have been bringing art to the youth of America and god knows we all need it.

I want to write that I’ve been traveling which is true. I’ve been to the ocean and back, up and down stairs, around the block and back to same house I lived in when I was twenty. My boss tells me I am a good closer. She says this b/c I am good at getting donations, hiring teachers, finding art benefactors. But I don’t believe this is true. I believe I am a good path jumper. I like shorts visits, short tasks. If it involves 15 min of my time I am really good at it.

If I met a bear in the woods (always the test of one’s moral character) I would not face the bear nor would I fear the bear I would simply change my direction thus the travels in my life look a little bit like Ms. Packman on speed--all the beautiful yellow lines but no direct course.

I think a better person would have closed her blog—left ya with a bit of mystery, desire to wonder instead of simply leaving the room with the lights on. Oh well I apologize but there’s a bear in the cupboard and a moose in the foyer.

I realized today I am not writing b/c I am blocked or busy but b/c simply I have forgotten how one approaches such things. I don’t remember at all how it begins. I know it was me. I was here and I listened.

At the reading Ms. Gallagher said to me it is good to have a book again and I said yes, it is good to remember the hunger, the hunger to be read. For as much as we may try to convince ourselves otherwise we write for one person alone and it IS ourselves and even when they bound and wrap the book, send it to millions of people it is still only for us—the writer. Funny thing that, a very funny thing indeed.

 

Last night I went to hear Tess Gallagher read at the new library which doesn’t look like a library at all but more of a big museum which is storing every book just in case mankind is suddenly obliterated.

I went b/c I was suppose to be her student last August but her mother was dying and b/c honestly I felt like if I did not do something literary soon my head would implode. Note: not explode, implode—there's a difference.

Gallagher was quiet and lovely and now I want to be quiet and lovely. She gave the best answers EVER during the very horrid part of a reading when people can ask questions like how do you “craft” a poem and what made you decide on the title of your book.

Note: this is generally when I want to start rampant poet killing.

Honestly I just wanted to know if she desired to strangle the man in front of me who wanted her to sign a Ray Carver’s book instead of her own. What are people thinking????

All that said we share the same name, even though she is Teresa with an “H” and we both have poems about head shaving and a hunger to be read. I tried to pull off being called "Tess" in 7th grade (it is in my middle school yearbook) yet no one but me seemed to pick up on the change.

But I did send off three submissions today due to older women poet guilt which is a disease all its own.

Best News from Best New Poets 2006

Teresa Ballard and Vincent Zompa were selected as the Best New Poets Open Competition Winners by Eric Pankey and Jeb Livingood.

the beer is on me!!!!

 

It took me three hours to walk through the Diane Arbus exhibit. It felt like I had been there a half an hour when I came out the elevator door. I checked the clock three times.

” I used sometimes to wish not to notice the difference between things and people as if that would constitute enlightenment.

I understand this…I’m trying to forget.

I read all the little scrawls in note books, all the letters. Remind me to burn my journals before I die. I don’t mind manuscripts under glass. It’s the things I draw on napkins that terrify me.

I am applying for a Guggenheim even though I have no degree or formal training. I do speak a little French but I don’t think they are going ask me that.

Top of the Guggenheim application: I am a single mother of two small daughters and I want time to create art.

How many times have I written that?

Because there is a photo in the exhibit where she is pregnant and looking into the mirror, b/c I have that same photo of myself at twenty four and because I know what it’s like to leave my husband, to use my art as a way out and because honestly I had forgotten how she died, when the suicide came under glass with the date, I made a sound inside myself that frighten the man next to me and I wanted to not understand so well.

Diane Arbus

 

If I have not written you—I’m an ass, if I have not called you back it is b/c my phone is not hooked up (and I’m enjoying it) and if I did not respond when you said my name I think I am sorry.

Reclusive is a lovely word.

Today I am going to see the Diane Arbus exhibit b/c it is the last day and it will be amazing. I hope. If not, I know it will be crowed and I can say reclusive, reclusive a thousand times in my head.

The sewer exploded last night again downstairs and now I need to pay someone to run cameras under my house to look at shit. Photos of shit. For some reason I find that incredibly funny—I hear humor takes over right before you go mad.

It takes too much time to be a writer. I, the keeper of all time especially mine, have decided this. In a perfect world there is enough time to do the things you love or maybe that is too loose a definition, I mean the things which let you breathe easier. In my ideal world I’d write without the guilt of motherhood, financial responsibility or stress, I’d write b/c it helps me breathe. But I don’t live in my ideal world

I live here.

I have just finished my third 50 hour week and I have to get a non profit art program off the ground by next week. I have a giant dragon in my front yard made out of cardboard that Isabel made in go-cart class and its raining. I am debating how much I love my daughter and if I should try to push the giant red dragon into the trees so it doesn’t get ruin---it is way too big for my garage.

This week I read to my students from Da Vinci’s notebooks. I talked to them about light, the human form and inventions. I told them this man was brilliant not just b/c of everything he thought but b/c he wrote everything down. He valued his mind--great people are made when they allow themselves to be great people.

Please remember to write it down.