Archive for November, 2010

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November 29, 2010

Blameless Mouth Poem: Snapshot of Our Father: Swap Meet

Snapshot of Our Father Swap Meet by 9to5poet

Snapshot of Our Father:  Swap Meet

His fingers
stroked the vinyl backpacks,
dented cans of generic

dog food.  He studied
stitching on socks, pulled
peeling logos off purses.

We’d trail our father,
our small footsteps
fitting his own, in aisles

and aisles of hand-me-down
T-shirts and bulk detergent.
His eyes glowed, from want

of things.  I’d find
the hollow Barbie dolls
sold without

clothes, you’d ride
the warped skateboards
with rusty wheels.  We dared

not touch what we really
wanted.  We always asked
for one treat:  a sugar

coated churro, a pack
of yellow yo-yos.  Anything
he’d say, for you.

***

This poem centers on one of my favorite memories from childhood, visiting the swap meet at the community college near our home. Since this was Los Angeles, it was outdoors. People would line up their wares on blankets and tarps, their products gleaming in the sun. Many people sold used items or handmade department store knockoffs. My father would take my brother and I there and we’d spend what felt like hours roaming the swap meet.

I’ve included this poem in Blameless Mouth because I am interested in the link between hunger for food and hunger for things. While I didn’t inherit my father’s penchant for bargain hunting, I did inherit a level of acquisitiveness that makes me uncomfortable. I may not haunt yard sales very often, but I do wander book stores, touching the spines of books I desperately want. To me, this is just as physical a hunger as buying food. In the book, there are other poems about shopping and buying, but to me this is my favorite, because it captures a memory of my dad that I hold dear.

***

If you want to stay connected to my progress with bringing Blameless Mouth to publication, I hope that you will join the Blameless Mouth Facebook page .

Posted in Audio, Blameless Mouth | 1 Comment »

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November 28, 2010

Inheriting the Family Cookbook

My husband comes from a big family, on his mom’s side. All of his mother’s family, the Livingoods, are from Postville, IA and have lived there since time immemorial. His mother has six siblings and all of her siblings have over two (and often over three) children. Many of those children, though younger than Aaron, have already started large families of their own.

This is far outside of my experience. My family is smaller and less concentrated in one area. When I first met his family, back in our (relatively) early days of dating, he tried to prepare me for how the large size of his family and the small size of their community. I couldn’t have been more underprepared. On our first trip back, we got a little lost, so we pulled over and ask a passerby for directions. She took one look at my husband and said, “Oh, you’re a Livingood, aren’t you?” He replied yes and they briefly traced their family interactions, before she gave us directions. Let me tell you, this has never happened to me or my family, at least not for a generation or two.

When Aaron and I went to Lincoln, NE (his parents’ adopted city) for Thanksgiving, I learned a little bit more of the Livingood history. In the living room, I found a small booklet entitled “The Livingood Family Cookbook.” It was professionally published in 1987 by a local historian. At the beginning of the cookbook, it detailed the Livingood family history, from my husband’s great-great-grandfather, Edwin R. Livingood and Mathilda Livingood. They were a typical Iowa farm family, in that they had 10 children and each of those children married young and had between four and thirteen children of their own. By 1942, Edwin and his wife had 105 (!) children and grandchildren. My husband’s branch of the Livingoods descended from the fourth son of Edwin, Cecil. It looks as if Aaron’s grandfather was the second son of Cecil.

Following the family history, there are a series of pictures of Aaron’s extended family. I can see great-aunts and uncles, with their families, as well as his grandfather when they were younger. I can see the resemblance of Cecil (the great-grandfather) to Gilbert (the grandfather). In person, I’ve seen the resemblance of Aaron to his grandfather. Looking at the pictures is like seeing the slow distillation of my husband’s physical qualities, over time. The only experience that I have had close to this for my own family was when, at age 19, I helped to sort my grandmother’s pictures after she passed away. I found a picture of her when she was about 19, away from home for the first time. We were identical, down to a similar haircut and a similar way we held our bodies.

My mother-in-law was so pleased that I was interested in the cookbook that she let me take it home. I’m interested to review the recipes, just to see how the family marks their culinary history. The food is simple and basic, a remnant of times when you cooked with what you have. (After reading the amazing United States of Arugula by David Kamp, I can place this type of food into the some of the same American foodways that James beard was intent on preserving.) I don’t know if I’ll ever cook any of these recipes. I am more thankful for the photographic evidence of at least a part of my husband’s family.

Posted in Food, Knowing Myself | 2 Comments »

November 22, 2010

Blameless Mouth Poem: Echolalia

“Echolalia” is part of one of several series in Blameless Mouth. This series traces the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis, from Eve’s perspective. What is unique about the series is that it is a crown of single and double sonnets. Echolalia is a double sonnet. I didn’t use the typical sonnet stanza lengths, so that the sonnet form wasn’t too overt.

My process for this series was, in some ways, similar to my work on my mermaid poems from earlier this year. I began this crown of sonnets from a single poem. I wrote the poem “Learning to Love the Taste of Apple,” first. This poem describes the moment when Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge and information rushes at her all at once. Once I had that poem out, I realized that Eve had a lot more to say. Knowing this, I researched the Book of Genesis and began writing her story, in her voice, from the moment that God created the universe through Adam and Eve’s eviction from Eden.

Out of all of the poems in the series, Echolalia is my favorite. I feel it’s where I really found Eve’s voice, from the root of her frustration to her hunger for freedom from her assigned role. Once I had this poem in place, I was able to revise the rest of the poems with this emergent voice in mind.

As a side note, the word echolalia is a psychiatric term for a disorder where patients uncontrollably repeat words spoken by someone else in their presence. It also describes how a baby repeats sounds vocally until they learn to talk.  I thought it a fitting title for what Eve is experiencing with Adam at this point in her life.

Please read below for the poem’s text and for the specific image credits from the video.

Echolalia

The blank shapes blurred before the perfect man:
a photo out of focus, a world obscured

beneath blue waves. He began to babble words,
gold light became sun, brown lines became land,

gray fluttering hearts turned into birds, now
forever after. All his Father made,

he named, erased their easy edges, traced
straight lines. Then, something new, an undertow

of need devoured him, wants he couldn’t name.
The perfect man moaned new words, words not based

in God’s idyllic world. I need this space
inside me filled. Lord, feed this empty pain.

He curled, a tight knot, rocked himself to sleep.
He dreamt of falling down holes, black and deep.

He dreamt of falling as the Lord reached deep
inside him, finding me, submerged

below his skin, awake and purple faced from no
clean air. He ripped me out of Adam, feet,

then curled arms, flattened head. Now, it’s been said
that I was made from his rib. This is wrong.

No, I was made from that initial song
of emptiness, the first words that he said

that were not names, were not repetitions
of His words. He spoke me into being,

with words of complete sorrow, freeing
his body from their weight. I was the one

made to free him, not made to be his mate.
Though, in my telling, I still came too late.

***

Image credits, in order of appearance:

***

If you want to stay connected to my progress with bringing Blameless Mouth to publication, I hope that you will join the Blameless Mouth Facebook page.

Posted in Blameless Mouth, Poetry, Video | 1 Comment »

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November 16, 2010

Press Release

Poet writes own press release, feels uncomfortable writing about self in third person.

Minneapolis, MN – November 16, 2010

The poet is not uncomfortable with words. She prefers them to most other things in life. But today, she has to dig through dictionaries and thesauruses, to pluck out the words she never wants to use. She has to learn to use words like purchase, discount, and buy. She is gritting her teeth. She is doing her best.

The poet gets nauseous around numbers. She can tick syllables off her fingers faster than most can count to one hundred. Put a dollar sign in front of them, and it’s all over. But that’s not exactly right. She has no qualms with the dollar signs in front of her expenditures. She doesn’t mind the thousands she’s invested in books, pens, notebooks, degrees, and even the project. These are taken out of her with no remorse. It’s the figure she asks for: the dollar sign, numerals and decimal point that make her sick. The numbers swim in front of her, float past her reach.

The poet prefers anonymity, but she still wants you to buy her book. She wants you to buy it without having to ask, like the wife who wants her husband to do the dishes because he wants to do the dishes. (In real life, the poet rarely does dishes. She writes instead.) She wants her work out in the world, but really she wants to release them. She wants them to be someone else’s problems now. The poet wants the poems to live lives of their own, outside of her head. She wants to see them someday, on someone else’s reading list, and barely recognize them.

The poet wonders about the provenance of the words: publish, press and release. She traces publish back to public, populous, and people. Words that she knows only in the abstract. She links press to pressure, feels the weight of it on her skin. And then, she thinks about release and feels that weight dissipate in the air. She feels it alight on someone else, carrying the eighty-seven pages of poems that she just wants that someone else to take home.

***

This post was inspired, of course, by my gross attempts at writing a press release for Blameless Mouth yesterday. In my frustration, I tweeted the title line and Dave Bonta encouraged me to use it as a blog post. Of course, I had to agree.

It’s strange to me that poets have to be involved in the publicity of their own work, whether the poet publishes with a press or becomes her own press. I feel like this isn’t a skill that anyone taught me, in my two writing degrees. (In fact, there was a good post yesterday about the dangers of young writers getting involved in the publication process without knowing more about the process.) But I also think, as a poet, that it’s my responsibility to toughen up and do the work.

So, I did some research yesterday and received some sample press releases from two generous friends. And now, today or the next day, I have to grit my teeth and write it. Because that’s the only way that it’s going to get done.

Posted in Publication, Shifting Boundaries | 4 Comments »

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November 15, 2010

The Story of Blameless Mouth, Part 2

In case you missed it, you can read the first part of the story here.

Uncovering (Discovering) My Subject

I was at the point in my process where I was just beginning to sense the shape of a larger idea. Through dozens of poems, I was writing about hunger in as many ways that I could imagine.  But I couldn’t yet find a way to distill the poems, so that each could stand alone as a single piece of work.

Pretty soon, I found myself characterizing poems as either “hungry” or “full”. I used the idea of either HUNGER or SATIETY as my means of editing. A poem could either describe a hungry experience, a memory or a cultural story about not having and not being fulfilled, or a satiated experience, a time in which I or another was fulfilled either emotionally or physically. As I was writing these hungry or full poems, I realized that there was a third part of this relationship: the act of CONSUMPTION. I began to write a third type of poems, in which I used personal or cultural stories to describe the act of eating.

Before I knew it, I was intentionally exploring the cycle of hunger, consumption and satiety, in all the ways that it was evidenced in my personal life, the lives of women, and in Western culture. I started to research hunger and eating, using poetry, essays, and mythology as my source material. (Some interesting books I read while writing this manuscript include: Gluttony by Francine Prose and Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp.)

While this all sounds very intellectual, the theme of hunger is a very personal one for me. As a child, I was raised by parents with their own conflicted relationships with eating and material consumption.  I could see the very real and devastating effects of wanting and not having in my life, and the lives of those I love. As an adult woman, I still struggle daily with maintaining a healthy relationship with food and body, with all the hypocritical cultural pressures to want (and be) less but have (and take) more. Moreover, I resonate with the conflict of benefitting from a materially wealthy culture but remaining spiritually and emotionally unfed.

The more I wrote about my childhood memories and my adult experiences, the more I realized that all of this was connected. I could trace my personal legacy of hunger through my family, as well as our cultural legacy of hunger, through our fairy tales, myths, and religious stories. But it wasn’t a clear line. Like all of my inheritances, I could see the faint outline of a narrative about hunger and satiety, but it was barely perceptible. While writing this book, I felt like I was unearthing a fossil, and finding more and more pieces of the whole body, the longer I dug. It was only through the final act of editing and ordering the manuscript that I began to see the full shape of the work, for what it was. It was a book that took a circuitous route through my personal history and our cultural stories, just to find a path to physical and spiritual fulfillment.

***

If you want to stay connected to my progress with bringing Blameless Mouth to publication, I hope that you will join the Blameless Mouth Facebook page .

Posted in Blameless Mouth, Knowing Myself | 4 Comments »

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November 10, 2010

How to Say No

  1. Recognize that you have a problem.
  2. The problem is that you always say yes.
  3. You say yes to the new responsibilities that you don’t really want.
  4. You say yes to duties that you don’t trust others to do well.
  5. You say yes because they flatter you by asking.
  6. (You say yes because you’re afraid that they may never ask you again.)
  7. Learn that yes feels like the easier word to say.
  8. Envision the word yes as it sounds, like a subtle snake winding around your throat.
  9. Choose to say no instead.
  10. Start with the first phoneme. Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Vibrate your vocal cords.
  11. Continue with the next phoneme. Feel your mouth form a circle. Drop your tongue. Push air through the hole.
  12. Imagine the air traveling across the room, hitting a target far away from you.
  13. Once you know how to say no, say it often. Say it like a two-year old.
  14. Say it answer to questions that are not “yes” or “no” questions.
  15. Realize that no is powerful, no is protective.
  16. No is the word that prevents you from sleepless nights. No is the word that prevents you from working late, bringing work home, and talking about work over dinner.
  17. No does not mean that you are any less valued, any less responsible.
  18. No means that you take care of yourself.
  19. Saying no is whispering the password to your captors, securing your release.
  20. No is your freedom.

Posted in Work-Life Balance | 5 Comments »

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November 8, 2010

The Story of Blameless Mouth, Part 1

Failure

Blameless Mouth began as a failed poem.

While in graduate school, I tried to write a poem in which I explored my childhood relationship with consuming media with my adult desire for consuming precious and disposable objects. I was inspired, oddly enough, by my frequent trips to the Mall of America, where I often pressed my nose against the store windows, but never felt that I could fully satisfy my needs by buying more things. The poem failed, because I had found a topic much larger than the confines of a single poem.

In my creative mind, I knew that my childhood experience and my adult behaviors were connected by a single root cause. I began to name it hunger. Hunger felt like the right word, a heavy enough word, with enough personal and cultural connotations to serve as a touchstone for this vague sense of rapacity that I was trying to capture in a single poem.

After drafting and redrafting this poem dozens of times, I realized that I needed more space so I wrote more poems about the same theme. I pulled in my own memories around food and eating with my family, and tried to connect it to my consumption of media as a kid. That didn’t quite work. Then, I tried to tackle the ideas by writing about my adult relationship with food and eating, and connected that to my desire for owning more things. That almost worked, but not quite. The longer that I wrote, I pulled in the stories I remember reading as a child about starving children and hungry women, like Hansel and Gretel, Perspehone, Eve and others.  I started to explore my childhood experiences with loss and wanting, despite having a relatively safe and affluent upbringing. It was then that the poems started to feel interconnected.

At this point, I felt like I was on to something big. I had the sense that I had an interconnected theme that I was exploring, but I didn’t quite know how it would turn out. Little did I know that I would spend the next two years trying to write and rewrite this one failed poem into a larger manuscript.

***

Next Monday, I’ll continue my thoughts on how Blameless Mouth became a manuscript. Stay tuned!

If you want to stay connected to my progress with bringing Blameless Mouth to publication, I hope that you will join the Blameless Mouth Facebook page.

Posted in Blameless Mouth, Knowing Myself | 4 Comments »

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November 6, 2010

Opening My Mouth

This afternoon, while cleaning the condo, I listened to The Dresden Dolls’ song “Sing.” In case you aren’t familiar with the song, here’s a brief snippet:

Sing for the bartender sing for the janitor sing
Sing for the cameras sing for the animals sing
Sing for the children shooting the children sing
Sing for the teachers who told you that you couldn’t sing
Just sing

And then here’s the full length video, which is worth a watch.

I thought that my iPod gave me such an apropos song for the day, because today, I am beginning to sing. Don’t worry, I’m not going to torture you with my actual singing. Instead, I am going to be using my voice in a new way (for me). I am starting the scary and treacherous part of self-publishing: publicizing my own work. As you know, I’ve been working on readying Blameless Mouth for publication and I am now relatively sure of my timeline. Barring any misfortune (knock on wood), I’m anticipating a December release date. Since that is just around the corner, I now have to invite people into the process.

This is a terrifying experiment for me. I’ve prepped and prepped so much that I’m ready to share my work with the world, but it means that I must actually open my mouth. It’s so scary because I don’t know what the response will be and how this work will be received. I also don’t know how to do this “marketing” gracefully, so I hope that you’ll bear with me.

I’ve been thinking through the ways that I want to do this and I’m convinced that the best way to share my work is to build on the relationships I already have. The miracle of the internet is that I am in contact with lots of talented poet-friends; people who knew me when I was writing in grad school, college and high school; various and sundry acquaintances, as well as the people I see in real life on a regular basis. All of these kind people are connected to my writing, or at least they are aware that I write poetry, because they’ve plugged in with me via Facebook, Twitter or this blog. (Or you know, from real life.) Certainly, these people would want to keep track of my progress as I publish this book. And if I’m lucky and they’re interested, they’ll tell their friends who will also get connected.

I also want to be conscious of the fact that I don’t want to turn into an infomercial. I don’t want to turn off all those folks who stay connected with me via these various networks because they just want to know what 80′s movie heart-throb I would be or they know me outside of my writing practice. So, I think I’ve developed a structure that will allow me to sing, but also allow me to be myself.

Here it is:

  • First, I’ve opened up the Blameless Mouth page on this blog. This is a static page that will allow me to archive the posts I write about the book and my publication process. I wondered whether I should open my own Blameless Mouth site, and I decided to err on the side of caution. I think this blog has the most potential for reaching folks.
  • Second, I’ve started a Blameless Mouth Facebook page. There are so many wonderful poets and journals who use Facebook as a successful means of connecting readers, so I really hope that this takes off. If you’re on Facebook, I hope that you’ll join the party over there. I plan on posting discussion questions about the themes in the book, as well as updates on the publication.
  • Third, I will post one weekly post about Blameless Mouth, starting on Monday. I’ll alternate between telling the story of the book and my writing process and sharing excerpts from the book. These excerpts will be audio as well as visual.
  • Fourth, for my rare friends and family who are not Facebook or blog savvy, I’ll be sending out a few brief group emails via an email list, which I’ll launch shortly. I’ll post a sign up link in my sidebar and on the Blameless Mouth static page when it’s ready.

So, if you’re interested in my work on Blameless Mouth, I hope that you’ll join me in one or more of these avenues. As I delve further into the marketing aspect of self-publishing, it is my hope that this structure balances the publicity with the regular work of this blog and my creative practice.

It’s all singing, after all, just different types.

Posted in Blameless Mouth, Publication | 6 Comments »

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November 4, 2010

Another Unaccompanied Street Photograph


One of these days, I’ll write a poem for this photograph. But not today.

This photo was in response to Week 4 of the Street Photography Now Project. The prompt, from photographer Michael Wolf, was incredibly challenging. “Document some evidence of human ingenuity that would otherwise go unnoticed. Do it without including any humans in the picture.”

On the Flickr group discussion board, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over what is considered ingenuity and what is considered unnoticed. I had a hard time with both of these concepts as well. After all, what is the difference between exceptional ingenuity and just everyday cleverness? How do we know if something is noticed by others, if we see it ourselves?

I ended up picking this picture because it took me by surprise. I was walking very near my home and just looked up at the right time. I found that someone had taken a dried branch of leaves and stuck it in the street signs, creating a simple sculpture. Since I almost passed by it myself, I considered it unnoticed. Since it created a little bit of beauty out of utility, I considered it ingenious. Hopefully, I got close to answering the prompt.

Posted in Photography | 2 Comments »

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November 2, 2010

Ten Creative Things

“Luck is not a business model.” — Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

Over on the Facebook, a friend of mine posted a great meme: Ten Creative Things I Want To Do Before I Die.”  When I read through her very impressive list (cookbooks and video games abounded), I realized that I had been holding a list like this inside of me. Now that I’m on the verge of completing one of my main goals, I thought it would be smart to declare the rest of my intentions here.

  1. Publish Blameless Mouth. (Getting there!)
  2. Write a book about balancing creative pursuits with real life.
  3. Make money off my writing. I know it doesn’t sound creative, but it would mean that my creativity has value. This shouldn’t be underestimated.
  4. Blend collage and poetry to create poems as objects.
  5. Expand my “Favoring the Good Leg” manuscript to book length.
  6. Write a book of poetry that can stand as a clear, narrative story.
  7. Participate, as an author, in the Twin Cities Book Festival.
  8. Become good at video poems.
  9. Learn how to bind books on my own.
  10. Learn how to use a letterpress on my own.

Looks like I have my work cut out for me, at least for the next few years. Of course, I love having these goals to work towards.

What are your ten creative things?

Posted in Accountability | 6 Comments »

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