green leaves open their fists

Almost all of the work is in. The MFA band, Steven! and the MFA hip hop group, Funk Attack, played their final shows, in a raucous revel. Then I got sick. I've still got 35 finals to grade, but after that I'm officially transitioning. Next week I'll be on the road to Oklahoma for a wedding. I plan on stopping through Graceland. However, I will not be visiting Elvis Jumpsuits All Access. There's a lilac bush blooming near my house. I typed the word "lilacs" into a word pronunciation tool, but it would not pronounce it. I still don't know whether "lilux" warrants teasing but "bar-rette" is apparently a-ok. Last spring in Bloomington!

Tiny poem from Aracelis Girmay's Teeth:

FIEL

Love me, love me with two hands & no rearview.

half buried, half free

The visitors have come and gone, the Breakfast at Tiffany's shower has been thrown, the thesis readings have been executed with great success, and I'm left mired in papers (queering primitivism in Wallace Thurman's Fire!!) and exams (French!) and syllabi (my own version of a graduate Intro to Cultural Studies course). So expect a little less of me for a short while.

In the meantime, send your prose poems and short shorts to Indiana Review's 1/2K Prize. The illustrious, hilarious and unsettling Russell Edson is judging. Yee-haw.

private publics (public privates?)

Fascinating photo essay on latrine graffiti in Kuwait and Afghanistan. Apparently photographer Steve Featherstone has another essay on the same subject in A Public Space 5, if you want to go out and get a print version.

who knew indiana could be such a funky state?

Check out the audio from the funk reading over at the IR Blog and you can pretend you were there getting funkified for yourself. It was a pretty amazing night and the earlier panel, which addressed themes of history, memory, race, music, and much more, really demonstrated for me how coming up with new rubrics can jog floating ideas into place or dislodge the stale ones. There are some photos up on the blog too. My little summary of the four readers:

Aracelis Girmay is a wise and attentive woman, and I'm digging her book, Teeth.

Tyehimba Jess among other talents, plays a mean harmonica.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a delicate, but hilarious, bird.

Patrick Rosal is my new literary crush. Man can rock a mike with joy.

Up there's Abdel Shakur, master of ceremonies, mad genius behind IR's forthcoming Funk Issue. Photo credit: Ben Weller. I hope he doesn't mind.

save the date

I have two collaborative poems with the incomparable Tracy Truels coming out in Subtropics in May. They're from a series of Accidental Death poems we've been working on; collaborating with Tracy has been a complex, provocative and restorative experience. If you haven't seen Subtropics yet, you should check it out. They're relatively new, out of The University of Florida and edited by phenomenal writer in his own right, David Leavitt, and they've already published some amazing people. I'm honored to be in their pages!

Here's the plug for the issue from their website:

Subtropics 6 will be out in May—a double issue with two covers! Featuring stories by Jacob M. Appel, John Brandon, Nadia Kalman, and Celeste Ng; an essay by Timothy Cook; a novella by Peter Wells; and 41 poets, including Peter Cooley, Averill Curdy, Richard Kenney, John Kinsella, Kathleen Rooney, Reginald Shepherd, A. E. Stallings, G. C. Waldrep, and Suzanne Zweizig. In translation: poems by Tomaz Salamun and Hai Zi, and a story by Ricardo Silva Romero.

a small observation

The hyacinths are out, perfuming the streets of Bloomington.

why words matter

This is so depressing. Do a little search on thesaurus.com for "man" and for "woman" and these come up as the first results:

MAN
Homo sapiens, being, body, character, creature, earthling, fellow creature, flesh, folk, human, human being, humanity, humankind, individual, mankind, mortal, mortality, person, personage, populace, somebody, soul, species

WOMAN
Mrs., babe, bird, bride, broad, chick, chicken, companion, dame, debutante, doll, gal, gentlewoman, girl, girlfriend, inamorata, kitten, lady, lass, love, lover, maid, maiden, mama, mate, matron, miss, mistress, moll, nymph, old lady, paramour, partner, pigeon, rib, she, skirt, spinster, spouse, squaw, sweetheart, tomato, tootsie, virgin, wife

Aside from the obvious ways these sorts of reference points construct our understanding of gender, there's some real muddiness going on here. Seriously, since when is a "mistress" the same as a woman? A "virgin"? Someone needs to get re-educated on the definition of synonym.

EDIT: The folks in my Harlem Renaissance/Black Arts/Negritude class laughed at me for getting all up in arms about this. They said I'd been listening to Black Power talk all semester and now this was my moment to get riled. It was pretty funny.

blackberry, blackberry, blackberry

I would like to hire Robert Hass to read to me every night, and it wouldn't matter whether good dreams resulted or nightmares. He could even talk about environmental stewardship. That would be ok. Today he read my old-time favorite poem of his, "Meditation at Lagunitas." It was fun having him in Bloomington the day he won the Pulitzer, and it was fun hearing him talk like my LA roommate about being a Californian living in the Midwest, delighting in seasons in silly ways like having fun scraping ice off windshields.

I also saw Okkervil River tonight (whose singer was way more Wiley Wiggins and way less Northern Exposure John Corbett [Chris Stevens] than I'd expected), and while they did not play my favorite song ("Red"), they did kick some ass. Howlin Rain was good too - they brought out my inner hitchhiker. And I got to have one of those fun cross-generational moments where you exchange eye rolls with a sixteen-year-old girl because the asshole drunk skeezy superfan dude who's shaking his fist wildly and bopping like crazy is about to take one of you out. I'd been rolling my eyes at -her- all night for her cell phone recording/photography, so it was nice to have a moment of feminist companionship.

Also, since I haven't yet posted about the Funk Reading, I now owe you three posts. Tattoo, sex worker's art show, funk reading. And a promotional post soon to come.

i don't sleep i dream

In unstable times in my life my psyche always decides to turn itself up a notch and provide me with the strangest, most unsettling dreams. The kind of dreams it's hard to wrench yourself out of, whether they're good or bad, because they're so consuming. Lately I've had a spate of these dreams, and it's hard to know whether to be grateful for their vividness or to be frustrated by their disruptiveness. The other night I was climbing a cliff away from a beach, when the cliff turned to sand and I was grappling with the root systems of wildflowers trying to climb it. I was also explaining to someone the story of JFK rescuing the crew of his PT boat with a coconut. A couple of nights ago I was in some fascist country that was a mixture of Nazi Germany, Japan and North Korea. I was breaking into a militarized building with a few friends in order to dig up the graves of people we'd once known. For some reason, I had to go through this process several times in order to clutch the decomposing body of a loved one in my arms. Last night I was being accosted by someone in scuba gear. I'd really like to wake up feeling well rested for once.