I’m back.

& here are some other historic overstatements.

John F. Kennedy: “I’m a doughnut.”

John Lennon: “I’m a God.”

Kanye West: “I’mma let you finish.”

Lady Gaga: “I’m wearing a dress.”

 

 

Words that rhyme with ‘Slacker.’

“Smack her.”  Ok, that’s two words.  But it’s what your errant blahh-gger deserves for her negligence.

Just a quick maintainance note to assure y’all that I haven’t died, that I’m not on the Mars Life pilot program (the rumors are true!  You heard it here first), that I haven’t even been tragically paralyzed from the wrists down in an accident involving a 3-foot high stack of comp. papers & a blowtorch.

Nope, in the words of my favorite puppet Waffles, I’m stiiiiiill aliiiiiiiive.  But with the rise of end-of-term work, I’m declaring an informal hiatus until early December, when my papers are in, my students are branded, & I’ve gotten through Houston airport security to begin my trip home to Virginny.

If you’re bored & want more of my chocolatey goodness, please feel free to peruse a new blog B. & I are trying out, called Track Marks.  We haven’t really gone “public” with it, but we’d love a trial audience, & tag, you’re it!  So hit it up, & email us with track suggestions if you have them: trackmarked@gmail.com.

I miss you folks, I miss your comments, & I’m thinking of you all (in between shallow, panicked breaths)!

Goodnight, H(y)ouston-town!

 

The Morning After.

Dems & liberals, all: It’s like waking up, rolling over, & seeing a beautiful woman or man in bed with you with whom you know you want to spend the rest of your life (or at least, the next four years).  Republicans & conservatives: Enjoy your walk of shame.

A day for race, religion, & sexuality, for sure, with some things pro(position 8)gressing more slowly than others.  & what of the poets?

Last night’s election watching party harkened back to the days of yore, when election results were called by 10pm Central Time & the country went to bed sans visions of lawsuits dancing in its collective head.  We had pizza, chicken wings, laptops, & discussions about “Barack Hussein Obama” being the first US president with an iambic name.  It was like Hurricane Ike, plus electricity!

When Obama won, we celebrated P.’s birthday with cake, threw on Al Green & Bob Dylan, popped some champagne & toasted to hope, to pushing 30, to our comp. kids writing better papers now that their president is a better rhetorician.  We went to the Harp at 12:30am, where some kids saw C.’s Obama t-shirt & yelled, good-naturedly, “How’s that taste?”

It tastes good, folks.  It tastes like wings & beer & writers.  It tastes like phone calls streaming in from family.  It tastes like sweat & champagne.  It tastes like a blue Virginia, a blue Harris County, TX.  It tastes like a new dance.

Word from the Gulf.

 

Book Marks.

Taking some time to consider the books (of poetry) I’ve read recently, both as mental inventory & as recommendation list.  So, here goes…

Poetry I’ve Eaten

Different Hours by Stephen Dunn

Sensual Math by Alice Fulton

The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido

Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Babel by Barbara Hamby

Calenture by Kent Shaw

The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds

shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Brenda Is In the Room and Other Poems by Craig Morgan Teicher

***

Mmm-mmm, finger-lickin’ good.

 

Track Marks.

Hoostown is proud to present a new semi-spontaneous moment in its blah-gging endeavors: Track of the Day!  In which I try to pressure as many of you as possible to dig what I’m digging, tucked away amid the Southern urban sprawl.

Today’s gem comes from Captain Obvious, a fabulous music blog that, in addition to indie reviews & revisitings, posts a monthly mix tape & a regular-ish covers mix tape, & keeps me entertained.

The track: Justin Vernon – Hazelton.

Justin Vernon is the heart & guts of the tragically mispronounced Bon Iver, & its single soul-splitting record For Emma, Forever Ago.  I have Captain Obvious to thank for my initial introduction to the record, & I’ve since not been able to stop listening to this guy.

“Hazelton” is all the things I like about Bon Iver — the subdued, melodic momentum & heartfelt, layered vocals — with a softer acoustic element to the instrumentation, a little Mark Kozelek-esque (a la What’s Next to the Moon) in its guitar arrangement.  It’s a beautiful, wintery listen, & enough of a reminder that there’s snow somewhere coming up, even if not in Houston.

 

I’ll Get You A Satanic Mechanic.

Ease up, Tim Curry; the Mountain Goats have a new EP!  I just downloaded Satanic Messiah this morning, which, a la Radiohead, is available in the posh-&-getting-posh-er download ‘n donate form.  (John Darnielle has kicked it up a notch by listing a suggested donation, $6.66, which slides you in at “devotee” level.  I’ve always wanted to be a minion of the arts.)

The EP itself is simple & intimate, which I’ve come to expect of the Mountain Goats — it’s the loveliest feeling of listening-in — & largely piano-driven.  Makes me feel like I’m perched on the coucharm of a deeply worn basement couch next to some thoughtful, poetry-devouring piano-tinkerer, singing: “We take aim at the dawning day, and we shoot / Starving to death, starving to death for the low-hanging fruit.”  Then my heart breaks in his direction, we smoke cigarettes, & slowly destroy each other for years.

Man, I’ve got to stop making up friends.

But go download the record.  It’s an intimate, pensive experience, & at only four songs (& cheap as free!), it’s a place you can afford to visit.

 

While My Guitar Gently Raps.

In honor of the Jay-Z show in Charlottesville tonight, & last night’s foray into the world of old school hip-hop, I bring you the following Sean Carter turned Shel Silverstein freestylin’ action:

Really, I just love that The Boyfriend gets paid to do this shit.

 

Review: The Honey Guide.

I keep forgetting to do this — I’m way too distracted by Dickinson!

My review of Shannon Worrell’s The Honey Guide is up!  So, honey, guide yo’self on over to the C-VILLE website & have a look.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

Dispatches ‘n Dashes.

Spent the morning reading Olena Kalytiak Davis’s shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, which I have trouble even remembering the title of, & maybe it was last night’s Emily Dickinson extravaganza, but the gal’s got a shitload of Dickinson shout-outs in this little volume.

So, I spent some time reading a week-long blog she banged out from her home in Anchorage, & checking to see whether or not anyone’s done any Google-able writing about Ms. Davis & Ms. Dickinson, & thus far, I haven’t turned anything up.

I feel like I’ve discovered something, something that could easily turn into a paper topic for my Dickinson seminar, & it occurred to me, reading Davis’s blog, how, like Dickinson’s letters, blogging itself is somehow outside of genre.  Embedded poems, streams-of-consciousness, a form that allows for (encourages?  demands?) disorganization & openness, or at least, manipulates plays with revision.  See what I just did?  Emily would’ve done it — did it — because she didn’t have an eraser, not because she wanted to leave something metatextual extra for the reader — or did she have something else altogether in mind?

Does blogging allow us to use the digital page like a field, as Susan Howe suggested Dickinson does?  Are our blog entries really more like drawings than they are like pieces of writing?  When I first learned basic HTML — left & right justification, scrolling marquees, colors, sub- & super-text! — back in the ’00s, when Livejournal was the sweetest thing since sliced bread & there was no other, easier way to implement those tricks, I remember thinking so.  I began to literally structure the content of my entries around the way I wanted them to appear on the page.  I wanted to play with my new tags.  & who’s to say Dickinson wasn’t 150 years ahead of the game?

What do you folks think?

(This paper topic is Copyright LEE 2008, punks!)

 

Emily Dickinson Day:

In honor of today’s events, which include a talk by Martha Nell Smith & Eliza Richards this afternoon, & a reading by Mark Doty, Alice Fulton & Susan Howe at the Rothko Chapel this evening, I’ve done a little reading ‘n linking for y’all’s hypertextual pleasure.

First, an essay on Slate tries to out Emily Dickinson as a gal who’s (gasp) been in love a time or two, since it’s totally post-mod to play Mythbusters.  Which elicits an eloquent & brief response from Travis Nichols on the Poetry Foundation’s blog.

Why is it that we’re so apt to think the poetry’s lost its mystery if the poet has lost some of hers?

I think the happy medium can be found in Lucie Brock-Broido’s exultation of Thomas James’s recently republished Letters to a Stranger.  She’s tenacious — almost downright frightening — in her pursuit of the still-living people on whom Thomas James’s brief physical life left a mark, but when it comes down to The Word of it, she seems to be saying that his poems have taken residence so deeply in her that no matter how many talks she gives on the subject, how many students she shares them with, that effect remains mysterious in the same way that we are, sometimes, mysterious even to ourselves.

“I want to be a shepherd to this book, and not one of its lambs, grazing and inevitable, eventual, along the way of so many vanishings. Thomas writes: The lambs are not aware of me. I do not want to lose myself along the way of losing everyone and everything that surrounds this book, except the text itself.”

& so we’ll make our way over to the Rothko Chapel to hear Emily Dickinson’s words, & words generated in response to them, resounding in a sacred — created — space.