Category: san diego

Ack! Hurt back (mine).

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I’m mostly okay today, but yesterday I was lifting and twisting in the truck at the farmer’s market and my back went ping!  on the lower left side. Being hurt makes me very slow and aware of every motion, which I try to appreciate. I feel like Marguerite Duras in this photo–booted and fabulous, but with a scrunched up neck and rickety on the stairs. Also, I believe she has a little beard in this photo, which is most elegant.

 

 

photo by the amazing portraitist, richard avedon, taken in 1993. photo via FANTOMATIK, where you can find artistic photography of famous artists. (swoon.)

New mini chapbook (mine)!

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I am in the middle of making a new lil chapbook. As always, formatting and photocopying are more traumatic than expected. But it WILL be ready by Saturday. About 5 people in the world are as excited about this as I am.

 

 

If you want one you should come to Agitprop on Saturday at 7pm. Or you can knock on my sideporch door any time after Sunday. Or, I can send one to you in a sort of delicious correspondence barter (you’d have to write me back). I’d do that. I have a lot of stamps.

 

($2 each, or traded for $2 worth of what you got. Photograph & cover design by my farmer, Misha J.)

 

My Saturday (song) & next Saturday (I’m reading!).

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Listening to Fleet Foxes, working hard all day on readings & poems & projects so that when Sam & Caity arrive on Tuesday I will do nothing but be with them.

 

 

Oh and San Diegans–I’m reading next Saturday night at a gallery called Agitprop, at 7pm. It’s not happening in my yard and it’s not related to SDSU–it’s like, a real reading! Please come if you live here. I’ll be selling mini chapbooks (one of the aforementioned projects getting finished today in preparation for my visitors).

 

(And so much thanks to Lorraine for inviting me to read. Makes me feel like a real poet.)

 

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

 

 

Thursday night (mine) (poem).

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Illastep

 

Three dudes making music

on a rolled-out rug

 

Outside the table umbrellas

are lined with lights

 

One red guitar

One guitar with four shining knobs

 

Ian like a young Allen Ginsberg

on the drums

 

The lips of the man I kiss

taste like new smoke

 

People are talking and people

are nodding along

 

All my hair is safely stowed

underneath my hat

 

Good god thank you, this

is exactly what I wanted out of my twenties