Every day the world breaks a little
open

 


I had an Alexander no good, very bad, horrible, do good day today. I went in to have my back molar checked and they ended up doing a two hour root canal and not only did I have to sit in a chair with plastic wrap over my mouth, like a piece of fresh fruit under cellophane but my dentist is having her office remolded and in between hearing the drill enter my bone, I got to hear construction workers saw and hammer.

Novocain really fucks with one’s mind and I swear to god, at one a point a man named Joe was jumping around inside my head talking about his ex-wife--and they did not have the best relationship.

Sadly, the worst part of the day was ripping my favorite (hey I look like a stud, if only in my own mind) black leather jacket on my way out the door to pick up the girls. Yes it was a horrible, terrible no good, very bad day. Tomorrow I’m moving to Australia.

READING

Friday, March 14, 7:00 p.m.
MENTOR SERIES READING
Rafael Campo with Emily Freeman and Emily Lloyd.

Rafael Campo is the author of The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and most recently, The Enemy. He is also the author of a memoir, The Desire to Heal, which also received a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, GLBT people, and people with HIV infection.

Emily Freeman (fiction) is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. She recently served as the editor-in-chief for Dislocate, the program’s literary journal. She lives and works in Minneapolis.

Emily Lloyd (poetry) is a freelance writer and librarian for Hennepin County. Her work has appeared online at versedaily.org and mcsweeneys.net and in the print journals Cream City Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere.
$5/Free Loft members

I am in a pissy mood and I don’t want to be because we have company coming over so I’ve made curry, baklava, listened to Bach’s cello music, folded laundry, scrubbed the tub, went to Target and I’m restless and whinny and I’m tired of myself.

I’ve been reading Julio Cortazar (because dead poets are so cheery) and I don’t understand why I can read the same poem one day and think it’s stunning and then buy the damn book and think it’s crap. I began to feel that maybe his writing is alive and what I truly lack in my work is life. My words are flat.

My problem is I’m not trying to write my way out of anything and the sad thing is I only write half way decent when I’m doing that---a mouse in a maze.

I know this post sucks but I’ve made really good curry and you can show up at my door and collect your reward for reading.

E & I spent several hours last night talking about words that are “sexy”: heliotrope, flax, diadem---(I’m giving you all mine b/c ya know, mine were better.) It was hard for me to let this game go and at two in the morning I rolled over and said, axis really loud in her ear. She didn’t ever stir and yet claims to be my true love;)

One of her writing exercises this week is to make a list of all the words which sound good to her and then use those words in a poem that she has never used in writing before. We have a running bet that neither one of us can use the word plutonium, in a way that actually works.

My conclusion: all bug words ROCK. extroskeleton, larvae, pupis
When I get old I’m going to illustrate books on insects and live out my days in tranquility.

New Bumper Sticker for Ballard—bitch less, write more

If your idea of a perfect vacation is to walk from morning to night, eat mango stuffed chili relenos for breakfast, go in and out of bookstores, devour Dim Sum soaking wet then I had your perfect vacation. We had so much fun in San Francisco even though it poured a great deal of time and I discovered that one can actually DESTROY an umbrella by pointing it in the wrong direction.

On the way there I sat next to a professor of Islamic Literature and we spend four hours non-stop talking poets---E was ready to kill me, but this is what happens when she sits across the aisle to sleep. I wrote a great deal in my head, and planes for some reason make me want to write. Maybe because, I think I am going to die. I always freak myself out by realizing exactly where I am in space and that six inches below my feet, is just one big “fall”. Yeah I'm really fun to fly with.

 

We leave for San Francisco on Thursday and I celebrated by dying my hair red. I tried to dye it bright red but it just kind of turned out auburn which is a polite way of saying brown hair with the inability to flame;)

I keep trying to convince myself that maybe no one will recognize me at work tomorrow nor will my children be able to punish me for the desire to leave town without them but thus, I look pretty much the same. I know they’ll find me. Truly, there are days when being on America’s Most Wanted sounds appealing.

In other news, one of my artists today wanted me to help them get a life sized elephant out of the basement b/c they didn’t really consider the doors when they decide to bring “jumbo” to life. I think when Victor asked me, “hey Teresa, I want to make a realistic elephant downstairs, is that okay?", I was thinking more the pigmy variety.

I’m here to tell you---life size is friggen HUGE!

as promised the link to my front yard

 

There’s something about winter that makes me hunger for color. I want to paint everything orange. Olena Kalytiak Davis wrote, I am in love with a certain kind of cloud which makes me jealous b/c I wish I had written that line though I did read a line similar in some obscure Russian poetry book a few years ago which I’m sure Davis somewhere in her subconscious read or heard thus producing her poem.

I’m a firm believer in no original thought and rather sadly, I understand I have this idea, that the human race is like this big soup pot, you pour in the ingredients out comes soup, slightly varied, but basically the same damn chicken noodle.

It sucks to be a cynic and an idealist. It is kind of like being ambidextrous with no hands.

Coffee House Press seems to be putting out some really good books lately. I just finished Sun Yung Shin’s Skirt Full Of Black which was very good, though it always freaks me out to read local writers who I might run into at the coffee shop who turn out to be assholes thus ruining the whole literary experience for me.

I told E last night, that I like all my authors dead. Selfish I know, but if you write a really good book, just put in your will for me. Mediocrity is okay to mail.

The big sled rally was yesterday which meant that we made giant puppets out of cardboard, attached them to sleds, then sent them down the hill with children inside. Seriously, one had to sign a release form! I have photos of a life size woolly mammoth, a black bear, and a star wars thing that exploded into the crowd and took down at least three people. My friend Mark always has to use pyrotechnics whenever he creates. One does not dress flammable when teaching next to him.

Ohhhh the beauty of art in Minneapolis!

I’m trying to form language
with my hands but when I open my mouth
out flies a cathedral of birds.

I crush wingbones brittle from flight,
brittle from wind, because I need to breathe. Constantly
I’m reminded of my limitations. Growing

large to the eye, like a flock of crows
black coming to land, and if I spoke a name
would wings enter my throat-

land on the wire rib, peck out my heart?

if you live in New York

check out this link

come to my house, drink beer

we will build a fire

nine more days before I put my head in the mouth of the dragon

today I ordered my garden

 

crooked necks, everlastings and cut&come again

Yes darling I did remember the moon flowers.

I keep checking on-line to look at the photos filled with all the possibilties of what the seeds may become. Planning a garden is a marvelous thing in the winter--it is like hope all wrapped up in an UPS box!

 


Anyone who has ever written a brilliant book has had



a)A house keeper
b)No children
c)Great blocks of time
d)Someone or something that supports them while they write
e)Cabin
f)Clear ideas
g)Have found themselves neither boring, self portentous nor empty headed
h)Great shoes

 


Happy 10th Birthday our darling pirate girl---we love you!

We’ve all been at a hotel for five days, which seemed like this splendid idea in the middle of February, while our house was being worked on and we as a family could sit in the hot tub and swim laps in the morning in the heated pool.

Of course we hardly did any of that and ended up driving hours out of way just to get to work and school and life but it was also oddly peaceful, in my heart I am much more transient than I allow myself to be. I am home now. The house seems lonely & empty. We have new windows. All the shades have been torn down, rugs rolled up. Furniture gathered to the side. And because we have new windows, the wind doesn't blow in and out of the rooms. It seems as if the house has stopped breathing. Everything is too quiet.

So many times in my life I have felt this odd sensation of walking in on death. The chairs are moved—everything out of place, I want myself to find the order but I cannot. I sometimes feel, as if I don’t remember the simple procedure of putting one foot in front of the other.

I am temporal. While others, it seems walk around with the permanency of planets.

 

I love language. I love the way it smells and taste. It reminds me of earth, of dirt. I want to gather it up and swallow, let it grow into all that I am. It is tied into my essential humanness.

I read this article recently about how words become less used as one grows older; we tend to simplify our talk. Even our ability to create interesting combination of words lessens. I think this sucks if you’re a writer.

The article talked about when people die they tend to use vulgar words, b/c there is hierarchy of where language is stored in the brain. Even people, who never use vulgarity in daily life, find themselves using their last breath for that.

I find this so interesting. How the body will degrade into just sounds. How we universally as people, share the same sound, even if we speak in different tongues, the last monosyllable will be the same.

There’s only one thing which robs us of language. It is not sleep, or famine, or even the end of life—what robs us is pain, true pain. When the body passes it threshold of tolerance, it is the first thing to leave us. Our speech. Our sound. We are abandoned by even our animal utterance.

who says

there isn't a santa

The New Yorker and The Sun both came in the mail today.....

my dealer (mail carrier) really should learn to space these things out.