you really must read

"Bones" by Bronwen Wallace

Though on an X-ray, even the bones show up
as light, a translucence that belies their strength
or renders it immeasurable,
like the distances we count on them to carry us,
right ot the ed of our lives and back again,
and again.

language / l/anguish / anguish

Treat yourself to some amazing feminist poetics:

M. NourbeSe Philip's "Discourse on the Logic of Language"

An orator of such set trash prhase / Ineffably, legitimately vile

"Although the letters were written to a clergyman, they were -- in keeping with Lord Byron's reputation -- somewhat scandalous."

Lord Byron letters sell for a record $459,000

you should read . . .

"Taken Over By The Fear: Lily Allen Quits the Internet." Forget for a moment whether you care a fig about Lily Allen (you should, she's adorable), or whether you have an inkling of respect for the publication Bitch (you should, it's angry and cutting-edge and intelligent). Just click on the following link (or read the most important bit, as quoted below): Even if she's silent, now, in ways that she never used to be, she's also a a bit more free.

Humanity's a harsh sort of thing, you know?

That's the end goal of it, all of it: we want each other to get to that point (have you been to this point?) where you are just about to respond, you have something to say that you believe to be true, and then it just dries up in your mouth. And you think, why bother? You think, it doesn't matter whether I'm right. You think, being right won't help me in the long run. You think, silence is easier. It's a permanent fear we're working toward - every time that person dares to disagree with you, you want your voice ringing in her head, stilling her tongue, making her doubt herself too much to try anything. Or, if she speaks, you want your voice to come out of her mouth. Your voice, or a very good imitation.

Some mornings are made specifically for Looney Tunes cartoons and nonsense MSN conversations.

Observation 13/10/2009

Walking in the direction of my apartment, early yesterday afternoon, my gaze was directed upwards, head lifted by the resonating sound of breaking glass. A window pane had shattered outwards and large sheets of glass were falling from the eighth story of a neighbouring building. Behind the window was standing a woman wearing a surgical mask.

Moi, je parle Francais! (Lies)

I am taking French Lessons in the top floor of the Graduate Student Association in a cramped and easily overheated room with too few desks. The students are mostly Middle Eastern males, but there are several females, Asians, and obvious Anglophones. I am one of the two scared white girls.

The class had multiple starts, the majority of its students arriving twenty minutes into the start time. The lessons was at times patronizing ("Do you know what a noun is?" "This is a consonant. Understand?"), at times complex ("Well, no, this is an irregular verb."), but deeply informative (To the bus driver, in the late evening, I know to say "Bonsoir!") and rich with character.

My peers are fascinating. An adorable Chinese couple that were endlessly thankful; several obnoxious men blithely ignoring the instructor's requests; a fellow smoker named Dave, originally from California, who speaks German and speaks fondly of his time in Germany; a peculiarly accented young man in beret, originally from Chicago but speaking of Russia, New York, and many other locations.

I look forward to Wednesday's class, perhaps not as much for lesson as for the promise of interacting with these strange new . . . friends.

Maybe Obama once passed him a joint, changing his life perspective forever.

Evidence that reality has been left behind: Prime Minister Stephen Harper in an open collar shirt, at the piano, singing "With a Little Help From My Friends" accompanied by a brass band and soloist Yo-Yo Ma.

I now have no choice but to accept this is an altered universe in which anything is possible. In light of this discovery, this blog post will have to end so I may lean far out my window and catch the falling golden leaves in my mouth. Surely they will turn to ecstasy and draw inspired blue birds from my ears.

note to self:

Avoid browsing through facebook photo albums of high school acquaintances' weddings. Especially at 3 AM, emotions piqued by school related stress and the junk food/alcohol combinations engineered to combat said stress.

in short, a reccomendation.

Between the margins of Romanticism, ecocritical infringements on postcolonialism, and feminist poetics, I make sure to be reading something else and to make sure that reading is done without a critical eye, but for pure enjoyment.

Andre Alexis visited UNB's Fredericton campus the year before last to read from his second novel (Asylum--a feast of broken individuals and their sad but comical pyschologies in a tumultuous time for Canadian [!] politics). I bought his first novel, Childhood, at the time, but had not picked it up until this evening. I was searching for something to go along with my rotini, mushrooms, and baked tomatoes. (Red wine would have been my first choice.)

I was immediately charmed, and it was the following passage that ensured a romance that will (I am sure) wreak havoc and all the dreadful sorts of things I'm meant to be reading:

I wrote my first entry that very day, and from the first words

7 O'clock: Wake up.

I felt a wave of relief.

Of course, things didn't fall into place right away. After

7 O'clock: Wake up.

I wrote

7:01: Feet on floor. Out of bed.
7:02: To the bathroom. Urinate.
7:03: Brush teeth.
7:04: Floss teeth, rinse.
7:05: Walk leisurely from bathroom to kitchen.
7:06: Pause to remember a voice.
7:07: Emotional interlude: longing.
7:08: Think about breakfast on way to kitchen.
7:09: Reject preceding thought. Leave kitchen.


[. . .]

(I remember staring at a cup for three hours one day, wondering why it was yellow. It's difficult to schedule an episode like that.)

The read is made, if possible, even better by imagining the writer's large personality saying aloud the poignantly written words. His fresh comedy was comparable to George Elliot Clark (though I've never been so lucky as to personally witness one of his readings).

room for [pause]

Every so often, I simply cannot get a hold of myself. My blood is molten, and ceases to run. My body demands [ ]. Nothing short of infinity can fill those brackets.

Rather than sort out the particulars of a poem-in-progress, hash out a critical response to Gail Scott, or pursue the margins of Romanticism, I've just finished watching Party Monster. Movies have become my drug of choice.

until it passes, this.

some days, life refuses the grandiose philosophizing

clutches you by your weakest point (be that your collapsing ankles, your thin wrists, the sore redness at the nape of your neck)

reminds you that the hierarchy
tastes of the inside of a stranger's mouth, upturned in a rainstorm of falsely advertised fertility drugs

and this aged yellow, sour taste
will always be just behind your straining eyes

reminds you of your knees clinging to the foundation
provided by infinite numbers of
shards of
glass

(once a drinking glass, containing ice cubes that have since bled into a pool of mottled pink sewage)

sincerely, the pro-woman line

In reading Lyn Hejinian's A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking*, I found myself considering my own poetics, whether they are, as Hejinian argues they by virtue must be, political. (I also found myself considering my own view of "reality": whether our thoughts are necessarily bound up in it, or one of its multiple portrayals, and whether it exists in any way at all. My answer, for the present moment, lies in the negative.)

The poetry I write seldom sees the light of day. It burrows from my fingers to lead and page, sometimes catching the eye of a student or professor in a workshop, sometimes catching the eye of a very dear friend. I write to expel vast black bodies from my mind, my visceral insides; and to gather strange externals that land on my temples. I sometimes include subjects of oppression, and of privilege, but I do not set them in anyone's hands. (Once upon a time, I do suppose I submitted a poem to a pro-choice zine. That would count as political.)

The poetry I write, hidden within myself and several coconspirators, is (almost) never public, and so (almost) never political.

But then a mindful feminist emerges from the nape of my neck and scribbles down "The personal is political." I stared for a moment at this familiar phrase and realized I've never fully grasped its meaning. How could I, having never paid so much attention to Carol Hanisch's original 1969 essay as the repeated and misused line?

Once more, however, I am convinced my poetry can only ever be political when exposed to a community, a collective of like-minded and distinctly not like-minded feminists--for debate, distribution, and (most importantly, most catastrophically important) revision.

In case I'm not the only terribly negligent feminist, here is a link to the essay and its most recent (2006) introduction: http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2259 **

*The Language of Inquiry (2000). 7-21
**Feminism 101, http://mindthegapuk.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/the-personal-is-political/