Puppy Love

Meet our Sarah

MY NEW BLOG PROJECT IS A JOKE

http://whatshouldwecallpoets.tumblr.com/

What I've been up to

LA Times book fest w/ Smokin' Hot Indie Lit Lounge
LA Times book blog: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/04/festival-of-books-dice-poetry.html (nice shout out to my dice and plastic animals poetry activity)
Eohippus labs at bookfest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629518623444/

Poetry Booth Coverage from April
KCSB: http://www.kcsb.org/news/kcsb-news-friday-april-20-2012
Daily Nexus: http://www.dailynexus.com/2012-04-26/clas-celebrates-poetry/
City 2.0 http://sb.city2.org/blogs/amybou/blog_entries/3142-literary-sb-visit-the-poetry-booth-during-1st-thursday
City 2.0 http://sb.city2.org/blogs/lemonjelly/blog_entries/3150-mobile-post-make-a-poem-at-the-poetry-booth-in-front-of-marshalls
Poetry Booth at UCSB: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629861652617/with/7096977047/
Poetry Booth at First Thursday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629497156186/

Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing
Presented my paper "Notes Toward a Feral Poetics"
http://www.ucscpoetrypolitics.com/2012-conference-emergent-communities-in-contemporary-experimental-writing.html
http://ucsccommunitypoetryconf.tumblr.com/

Also participated in and attended some great readings.

Also took some lovely walks.

Chores: dishes, laundry, finish spring cleaning, mail remaining dusie chaps
Personal: find a new doctor, make more time for fresh air and exercise, try to worry less, look for new place to live
Creative: work on havens/fur birds, draft text about imprinting/ferality (how it complicates moralizing rhetoric of environmentalism and challenges romantic notions of the pastoral)

1.) Where is the book?

2.) How is a room like a womb? like a book?

OR what kind of room will this book be?

a mouse lives in my breast

or is it a bird? better to be a bird if this is to be a proper poem -- form fitting -- bird to wing-bird, like a hanger, or hinge-broke. I brokered for a clean bill

of health, I know nothing, only that it's a quiet thing that glows and sputters

the x-rays made a map; we looked at it together

a broken bolt held under

not like water but a type of fluid, pinkly clear

a body is so much of something to hold

I almost let it get away from me

it began as a dream about a group of strong, sleek men in a field. In a circle. They were passing heavy reams of canvas -- unspooled from angular bolts -- between one another. Looking out at them in the field -- the way their skin gleamed -- I felt envious. "be careful what you wish for," said the dream.

In the next scene we are walking along a narrow stone path that borders the sea. The sea is black and held back with the help of a wall. We look down into the black sea, and like a cloche the ink night descends, staining our sheets. But we are sequined and lithe. We gleam along.

Now the numerous gold lights of night light up one by one -- pop! pop! pop! in the trees and along the wires. We make our way from the stony sea path to a stony, open air banquet hall of pink marble columns and luminous chandeliers of wax and iron. On the long table, enormous silver platters are heaped with heavy piles of meat -- mostly bird. Pheasant and quail and partridge. Though the meat is cooked, feather quills cling to the skin. Black feathers with green and white and iridescent spots. Folks grab a wing, feather meat, and proceed to have warbling, slow conversations about the political conditions of the government, about freedom.

And then those who have eaten the meat begin to experience a change. They shed all their rings. They retire to the stone benches where they rest and sweat profusely, fanning themselves before they acquiesce to the overwhelming desire to remove their drenched clothing.

Soon, in all of the prettily landscaped lounge areas, they are only wet bodies and piles of steaming, sopping clothes.

Somehow, with the sun-rise, this scene melts away, evaporates into the field of men passing the reams of cloth. Their sweat and nakedness a type of interminable clock. A sort of labor that never resolves.

At this point I want to awake, but cannot.

Already, it is December. How does this happen? The trees
know some things -- things we do not know. Already, my hair
has grown long, and dark. The windows fill with gray
clouds, the absence of missed things, like two hundred
versions of your childhood-self pressing the glass cold.

I'm never paying attention.
Instead, I'm following 8 red winter coats
punctuating the snowscape.
From here, their sojourn feels
impossibly slow.

I dreamed that I was in South Carolina, and all the pine trees turned red.

I dreamed of wires, connecting us.

I dreamed that the insides were all fur, nothing but.

&now (&later)

one of the things about going places is that you never go to as many places as you want to or do as many things as you want to do. At &now I talked about women and animals and presented research into my question: are they real? Wondering now if I could/should have talked about the different ways to get to that question. I realized, listening to folks discussing metaphor, that so many things are already so deconstructed in my mind that I often have to reconstruct and/or remember them to follow the conversation. Like the thing about language and metaphor. I kept thinking...but *all* words are metaphor. The word "bench" is bound to a bench, not because the material of bench-ness emanates a particular, specific word, but because that word gets made and bound to it and conventionally associated with it and its like this semiotic conjugation as all signs are conjugations, multiples. And so, for me, asking about whether things are "real" is this very layered, multiplied question. Part of what I wish I had said has to do with the connection between "reality" and the construction of knowledge -- a critique, really, of the subject/object relationship, or empiricism. It's also a question about mutuality...not a mirror, but a "being with" that, independent of anything else, honors the manifestation of the many materials and selves that are always plastic, always changing, but may be perceived, held, engaged...and the question is how we create/enter that moment, that engagement, and whether or not this is some version of the real.

of being underwater. of error. of swimming and craft. an elastic wanting...a drift...an ink black wave or spill...tipping upwards. in our sand-buildings, our little huts. I feel like laughing, but I can't.