Category: swoon

Honey & elderberries (small things photo).

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

 

Here is a tiny jar of elderberries. Misha’s really into the elder tree right now (for proof click here), and I’m really into small things right now, so I took some elder berries he’d dried and put them in a tiny jar with a rubber lid that I bought at the herb store. And next to it is the honey that I get at the farmer’s market every week, which Sam loves and Kathryn also loves, in fact Kathryn made a honey pie out of that honey. Sam just eats it out of the jar with a spoon. I wish I had a tiny spoon as a part of my miniature collection. Soon, little spoon.

 

 

I like how the honey looks like it’s the proud older brother of the elder jar. Like it’s puffing out its chest a little.

 

“I want to shake out a fat broom” (poem by Alice Walker) (hand-lettered).

Published on by taylor mardis katz2 Comments

 

It’s funny to me that I don’t even know Lisa Congdon and yet I post things she’s made, like the above Alice Walker. I guess that’s what blogs do, let us be in touch with people we wouldn’t otherwise. I like it when people tell me that they read my blog–it’s always a confession. If you’re reading this, thanks for reading this. When you tell me that you read this, I get pretty joyful.

 

Things that are awesome (Sunday edition).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

 

garlic scapes are awesome

roses smell awesome

tampons are awesome

women that use diva cups are awesome

old ladies who dye their white hair purple are awesome

men with babies strapped to their fronts are awesome (so is anyone with a baby strapped to their body)

bare feet are awesome

mixed recycling is awesome

happy hour prices are awesome

bicycling feels awesome

tie dye is awesome

“Made in the USA” is awesome

having a sister is awesome

homemade hot sauce tastes awesome

grilling is awesome

finishing projects is awesome

making pancakes for yourself is awesome (so is making pancakes with anyone)

driving a tractor is awesome

getting high on coffee is awesome

artichokes are awesome

handshakes are awesome

wordplay is awesome

DJ names are awesome

blueberry season is awesome

reading is totally awesome

i think rollerblading looks awesome but i only did it once so i don’t know for sure

being taken out to lunch is awesome

feeding people is awesome

riding shotgun is awesome

James Brown will always be awesome

writing poems is for sure awesome

giving poems to people is awesome

whiskey is awesome

ginger beer is awesome

old friends are the most awesome of awesome

homemade muffins are awesome

thrift stores are awesome especially the sunglasses section

records are awesome

the word “platypus” is awesome and so is “spritz”

hip hop lyrics can be really awesome

bartering is awesome

letters in the mail are undeniably awesome

bacon is awesome why didn’t anyone make me eat it earlier it so so goddamn awesome

summer coming on is awesome

Misha is number 1 awesome

treasures are awesome (like bird bones or gemstones)

wind turbines are awesome

root beer floats are awesome

notebooks are awesome especially new notebooks

woodcuts are awesome

worms are awesome

herbs are awesome

friendship bracelets are awesome

monks are awesome and so are nuns

hats are of course awesome but we already knew that

getting an mfa is awesome and i’m almost done doing it!!!! awesome over & out.

 

 

 

“Cutting Bread” (poem by a woman I just wrote fan mail to).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

 

The poet’s name is Shannon Burns. I searched all over the internet for her and finally found her on goodreads of all places. I wrote her a message because I bought her little book in Chicago and I love it. The look of it, the size, the poems. But whoever checks their goodreads messages? I didn’t even know there was such a thing until this week. But I hope she reads it and thinks I’m crazy-in-a-good-way. I like her poems. Here’s one:

 

Cutting Bread

 

I could be cutting bread. All the sharp knives

are dirty, ragged edges, sesame seeds on my hands,

on the sticky counter, on the cool floor. They could bloom.

But I am swinging, feeling the slight curve of my back

 

against the wood, feeling my face flush and numb,

watching movement in windows. People are cutting bread.

Their sticky hands live in cabinets. Mine are hot and full

of blood, melting watermelon candy in my pockets.

 

I am making noise. People cut bread to the rhythm

of my creak and whine. Weeks ago the wind blew

a child’s pool in the shape of an elephant over the wood

fence. You can see it from the road. Some day

 

it will be warm again, I think.  I think: joints, gums, children,

knowing where to go. I remember this swing overturned

in the yard, my father painting it green. I remember standing

at the kitchen counter with my mother, cutting bread.

 

***

 

click to hear her reading her sweet little poem “What’s the Scoop?” on the jubilat site!

Ack! Hurt back (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

 

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.)

Brunch Sonnet 6: Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

Brunch Sonnet 6

Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop

 

Patti kicked the g’s off the ends of words—thinkin’,

fryin’. She had long dyed hair with undercurls of grey,

no secrets there. She arrived on time in a black beanie,

her voice skidding out of her throat like wet feet on sand.

She was amazed to have her name on a New Directions book,

she waited fifty years but it happened. Fifty years isn’t so long

for a dream. Her neighbors in Detroit used to spiff up her lawn

while she was gone on trips, she hated that, she wanted

those flowers for tea, for wine, the dandelions. The worst thing

about Detroit wasn’t the lack of a coliseum or museum, but

the lack of a café. She said she’d sit in some whitewashed

corner at the nearest 7-11 and try to read, pretending  herself

at the Café des Poètes with a mug, a watch, a bit of time,

a few sips left, a cigarette, the table wooden, stained.

 

 

Poem I’ll recite today (Schuyler).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

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.

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

 

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.

 

 

New favorite poem (Galway Kinnell).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

Last Gods

 

She sits naked on a rock

a few yards out in the water.

He stands on the shore,

also naked, picking blueberries.

She calls. He turns. She opens

her legs showing him her great beauty,

and smiles, a bow of lips

seeming to tie together

the ends of the earth.

Splashing her image

to pieces, he wades out

and stands before her, sunk

to the anklebones in leaf-mush

and bottom-slime—the intimacy

of the geographical. He puts

a berry in its shirt

of mist into her mouth.

She swallows it. He puts in another.

She swallows it. Over the lake

two swallows whim, juke jink,

and when one snatches

an insect they both whirl up

and exult. He is swollen

not with ichor but with blood.

She takes him and talks him

more swollen. He kneels, opens

the dark, vertical smile

linking heaven with the underearth

and murmurs her smoothest flesh more smooth.

On top of the rock they join.

Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.

The hair of their bodies

startles up. They cry

in the tongue of the last gods,

who refused to go,

chose death, and shuddered

in joy and shattered in pieces,

bequeathing their cries

into the human breast. Now in the lake

two faces, floating, see up

a great maternal pine whose branches

open out in all directions

explaining everything.