Category: literary

Poem I’ll recite today (Schuyler).

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Today is my last day of classes. Most significantly, today is the last day of the intro to creative writing class I’ve been teaching this semester. I will miss my class; they made me laugh & taught me about the Fibonacci sequence. They worked hard and wrote risky poems. We all have to recite a poem in honor of the last day, and then they will hand in their portfolios, and then I will want to hug them all, but I will not. And I will begin by reciting this, by James Schuyler:

 

Letter Poem #3

 

The night is quiet

as a kettle drum

the bullfrog basses

tuning up. After

swimming, after sup-

per, a Tarzan movie,

dishes, a smoke. One

planet and I

wish. No need

of words. Just

you, or rather,

us. The stars tonight

in pale dark space

are clover flowers

in a lawn the expanding

universe in which

we love it is

our home. So many

galaxies and you my

bright particular,

my star, my sun, my

other self, my bet-

ter half, my one

 

 

Joe Brainard loved pansies.

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Joe Brainard (painter, collagist, writer) loved pansies so much. He cut them out of everywhere. He collaged them onto pages, in to entire books, which he kept and gave as presents to people like James Schuyler (I’ve seen them in the archives at UCSD–they’re beautiful; they’re shiny and layered, dozens and dozens of PANSIES).

 

 

 

His love of pansies (and flowers in general) reminds me of how I’ve always wanted to love football. Or the “Twilight” books. Or skateboarding. I want so badly to love something so simple, something that other people love so much. It’s incredibly appealing, the idea that there’s some new thing out there to get all excited about–I want to love these things; they are so available and other people love them and I would like to join in on that. But I can’t tell where the goddamn ball is on that huge field, even with the camera telling me where to look. And Bella is SO boring to read about. And I’m afraid of falling off a skateboard and hurting my knees.

 

 

Joe Brainard got something right with his love of flowers. He was a normal, human person like the rest of us, and by that, I mean that he was self-conscious and sensitive and he wasn’t sure he was ever doing the right thing. He made art and he tried his best to do days well. He wanted to be loved and he wanted to be known, and not as a celebrity. He loved flowers, especially pansies, and he found them everywhere. He collected and saved them. He saved them for himself, but also portioned them out to people he loved. People learned this about him and so sent him stationery with pansies on it. People learned what he loved and then there was more of pansies in his life, and voila: more of love.

 

 

Damn it feels good to have a sideyard.

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The sideyard was better than ever before

The sideyard, according  to a new neighbor-friend named Neil “felt like the 60s again.”

The sideyard had around 70 people attend which is record-breaking for the sideyard

The sideyard had a tiki torch

The sideyard had such good loud music that the police came

The sideyard thanks “Tendrils,” the new house band, who will perform acoustically from here on out so that we don’t get evicted

According to a girl I met, the sideyard was “the most fun event I’ve ever been to.” EVER!

Neighbor and friend Jed said about the sideyard, “Don’t ever let me miss this again.”

The sideyard offered free wine and decaffeinated coffee

The morning after the sideyard I had both a real hangover as well as a happiness hangover

 

Thank you to everyone who came to the sideyard

Thank you to everyone who let themselves enjoy something so analog

Thank you to everyone for coming out to hear poetry; we poets need you, we poets are you, we are all poets

 

(photos by misha marston johnson)

I agree with you, James Schuyler (quotations, photo).

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from Schuyler’s dairies, which I spent last Thursday rifling through at the UCSD archives. Each day a new page in the typewriter.

 

“Most people don’t know how much time even a very short poem takes, even one just dashed down–trying to get it right. And the rest of us forget.” -January 4, 1968

 

“The visit to Darragh and Bridgehampton awakened a great longing for country living: I like the city, but I like to see things growing, to see blue and trembling skies, walk on the winter shore: the whole bag of tricks.” -October 15, 1984

Live from the east (photographs & swoons).

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At Tim’s New & Used Books in Provincetown today, I found this (“Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler, hardcover, first edition, a very rare and very exciting book to find and get to hold). I grabbed at it and threw myself on the wood floor of this tiny bookstore, set back from busy Commercial street (you have to walk down a sort of rickety boardwalk covered in vines to get there). It costs $150 and I want it very, very badly. “Does this really say one hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked the dude at the tiny desk with the cash register. The dude came over, looked at the number over my shoulder, and said, “Yes.” It’s not often that books worth so much are found on a physical shelf–mostly they’re squirreled away on some boring internet bookshelf where no one can touch them or faint over them or swoon over their very small and well-chosen fonts and the thickness of their paper and the now historical significance of their existences.

To console myself I bought “Other Flowers,” the uncollected works of Schuyler, edited by none other than JAMES MEETZE of the Summer Sideyard. I also bought the tiniest deck chair ever, because, you know, small things. They really get me.

the after-sideyard:

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mostly just this

mixed in with this

(thanks kaz)

and frankie’s feeling it too

and misha sold four prints

and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk

and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks

and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many  good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…