Commuter Rail

Have been trying to capture the New England winter, the peace it affords me and I think I caught it on this train ride into Boston.  Early mornings make for some awkward poem writing.  There are these swans that hang out on a pond just passing Anderson/Woburn station, and these business men that get on at Wedgemere, but it was hard to capture them on camera.  Thanks to Derek Fenner for his video making skills. 

"these women are talking about some holes. are talking from parts of oakland, from female lips. these women. these women." -Michelle Puckett

Notes on a place where I want to return, on closeness with place or/and with female bodies:
An entry about longing.  An entry about place and earth; wanting both.  I am looking for home, a home near the bodies of women, as you pointed out.  Hold your arms open, there.  I am thirsty for you and your Oakland lips.  I would even leave my lover for the safety of your muscles and grip.  It is, what is it? the Spanish word for shame, yet also thrilling.  I have dried up, this far away from you.  Now give me some of that Pacific.  I saw you read, Juliana, in a Harvard room (with long green curtains), of all places.  "What are you doing here?" you asked, and I laughed and reddened in the face and teared up.  I choked tears back with laughter terrified elated.  You meeting a man on a gap of land between you.  Compass point: you (plurality). Akilah, you, you did that, in Oakland, did that, there, you, there.  Michelle, I shook and teared up, I read your words behind the labored, unproductive ducts, they are harder to shed than the profuse bitterness that comes with breakage.  There is not evidence of the hurt, no proof, it goes unfelt, dives below.  It has been too long, I am going home now.  

Language of Travel

Train to Montauk

Olson, Gloucester.

It has been half a decade, or more, since I touched my feet to the sand on a beach.  Singing beach: the humidity, the size of the grains, the wind, the shape of the sand (round) and the friction produced by walking can cause the beach to sing, to bark.  To visit Gloucester, MA.  To come to a talk at the Museum about Olson and place.  To think about the "open field" and the "everything" which is language, geology, geography.  Walking.  Taking walks with no purpose, only to listen to the sand.  The narratives in the fibers, alway together, always plural.  Human geography.

Massachusett & Wampagnoag.  Greek. Gaelic & Spanish.  No one knows about cava because poets drink beer and Jameson.  No one knows the properties of bubbles and the tartness of a liquid which tastes cheap but looks expensive.  There was a party and there were young people and grown poets.  A brown woman drinking champagne.  An Asian sister looking after her baby.  Was she a poet? Women and hosting.  Women who think about food and their children.  The poet Amanda Cook ordered pizza and brought me sushi (gluten and dairy allergies).  We talked about place and architecture.  I tried to fill her in on what the men were talking about (as if it mattered, as if we didn't have our own language and our own moments).  Space and Time, somehow.  Vertical "open field" and Umberto Eco.  It's hard to not feel gendered.  It's hard to not think of this when going to the writing.

It seems that Olson made a choice.  The choice to live in Gloucester and to write from an experience of "place" and that such writing is only possible when you are the place and you are everything.  What would Iain Sinclair or Olson say about writing when the everything is blurry or traumatic? Iain would say that the view underwater is always blurry and that in a way the point is not to evolve out of the ocean but to return.  To write by gazing, as Olson did, but inside the mother. 

1st Piece of Mail

So the first piece of mail I get at my new residence is poetry -how auspicious! I received a chapbook and a book of poetry from none other than Sophie Mayer, all the way from London.  You can visit her website (which is quirky and awesome) here. Her book, The Private Parts of Girls out by Salt Publishing, bringing you poetry and poetics since the times of Salt Magazine.

The book is gorgeous.  I insisted in reading it only while drinking coffee in Cambridge and I stuck to it.  Finished it this past weekend.  I like to describe it as follows: it's like my own chapbook got over her daddy issues, finally graduated college, had several lovers and moved to London.  In short this book is disorienting, teasing, mature and oceanic.  There is tons of water all around and inside of it.  Sophie is a mermaid on land and the language here is sonorous and ondine.  That's only half of it - the latter half.  As if the book pours into a deeper and more marine voice.  I love all the sound play in it, in a way in which only a Brit can achieve.  I read the book sometimes in an accent, and in her voice.  I was drinking coffee but kept stealing swigs off Derek Fenner's fizzy lemonade when I came across this:

And yet my favorite thing of all is reading the chapbook she sent me, which I keep by my bedside and read slowly, like the drip of a wet bathing suit on a hook.  It has this lovely bead detail on the spine which I adore and will undoubtedly try on something one of these days.  Thanks for so much loveliness, Sophie Mayer.  

Mi casa es

Lucy the Olympia De Luxe

Self-healing mat from Kozo

Bookmaking tool cases.  So colorful.

"Wolves" by Phosphorescent, translated and transcribed with text super imposed.