The Ring Cycle

So last Saturday I went for a walk, with Teddy in Bjorn. It was an overcast, slightly chilly evening, so we bundled up well. We stopped at Ace Wheelworks, a bike shop just down the street & I tried on some full fingered gloves because I need a new pair for the upcoming cooler and much much colder weather. Didn't find any I liked & me T Bone moved on. We had to make a stop at the grocery store, further down the road, for a tomato and an avocado. Also picked up some coconut water, which is my newest obsession since my cousin Andrew turned me on to it as we were chatting after our Grandfather's funeral a few weeks ago. Said items purchased and in hand, Teddy & I strolled home at a leisurely pace. When we got home I turned Teddy over to his mama & went in the bathroom to blow my nose (I'd been having a pretty severe allergy attack all weekend). After I washed my hands I discovered that my wedding band was missing. A sickening feeling came over me & I looked frantically all over the house for it. I was upset with myself for not having the ring refitted. With the weight I've recently shed, the ring easily slips off if the temperature is even slightly chilly. Still by the next day we hadn't found it, so Nikki, Teddy & I retraced the walk. Wheelworks was closed, so I couldn't check there until 1 PM. We asked at the lost & found desk at the grocery store, but they had nothing. So we returned with our heads down--not only out of despair--we were scanning the sidewalk. Later that day after Wheelworks opened, I cruised over to the shop to see what I could dig up. Rather than asking anyone I went straight to the glove rack to check the gloves I had tried on. The second glove I picked up had a heavy ring finger--and sure enough, when I stuck my hand inside, there was my ring, right where I left it!

NY Times article on unconditional love

Linh Dinh on Whitman

The New Chicago School (of poetry)

Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the New-Avant-Garde

Galvin on James Wright

Personality Type

So the 10th graders are taking Meyers'-Briggs personality tests today & I decided to take one myself just to see exactly who I am. I vaguely remember taking one of these when I was in 10th grade, though I have no recollection of the results. I have obvious issues with the psychological "boxing" that these sorts of personality assessments produce, but have to say I'm stunned by how accurately I believe the personality profile describes me. Those who know me well may disagree! Below are the results (with my comments in green):

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personality Type: INFJ



(E=extrovert, I=introvert; N=intuition, S=sensing; F=feeling, T=thinking; J=judging, P=perceiving.)

Your Personality Profile
People like you are usually imaginative, creative, and sensitive (sensitive to others? not so much. sensitive when others bug me? very much). You are a fairly private person, and take your time to get to know people and to let people get to know you. (true) You probably have a small group of close and trusted friends, and are generally cautious about jumping into new social situations. (very true) People describe you as thoughtful and empathetic, and you will try hard to please the people you care about. Outwardly quiet, you have strong feelings and opinions, especially about the way people should treat one another. You are very committed to your beliefs so you may have trouble backing down or giving up your ideals just to do what others think is best. You may even be somewhat of a perfectionist. (this made me laugh--not quite on the mark) People sometimes disappoint you and since it's hard for you to stay objective, you may be easily offended or often get your feelings hurt. (quite true; I'm always finding myself offended for stupid reasons)

You also love to fantasize about the future (absolutely; I'm quite future oriented, which is probably why death bothers me so much), and enjoy all sorts of creative activities like writing, reading, music, and art. You tend to be organized, efficient, and inventive about getting your work done, and you are a responsible and respectful person. Since you like to have a plan, and stick with it, you don't like it when plans change suddenly (Nikki can vouch for this!). And, you prefer plenty of time to adjust to, or prepare for new experiences. You like spending time alone and while you like doing things with your good friends, you are not typically the one who initiates social activities. Since you are a great listener, people trust you and are often amazed by the original insights you have about others. You naturally look below the surface to understand the deeper meaning in every experience and interaction.


Your Strengths and Blindspots

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The key to finding the best path for all people is by using their natural strengths and becoming aware of their natural blindspots.

Your strengths may include:

• Impressing people with your thoughtfulness and integrity.
• Developing and following a well laid out plan.
• Using your creativity to suggest alternative approaches.
• Being an attentive listener.
• Being able to anticipate what will impress people.

Your blindspots may include:

• Being impractical or unrealistic about your expectations.
• Not communicating concisely enough. (true--how painful!)
  
• Seeming too independent or inflexible about certain issues.
• Making decisions before you collect all the necessary information.
• Speaking in a style that doesn't accurately reflect your enthusiasm. (yep)
  

For a career to be satisfying for you, it should:

• Let you use your creativity to solve problems.
• Be in harmony with your personal values.
• Let you have control over and responsibility for your own projects.
• Recognizes and appreciates your authorship and unique contributions.
• Allow you to implement your good ideas in service to others.
• Give you enough time to think things through and do a thorough job.
• Be done in an environment that is free of tension and conflict.
• Let you express your opinions and see the result of your work.

Your Preferred Learning Style:
While ALL individuals are unique, people of the same type often learn best in similar ways. The following summarizes what you need in order to maximize learning.

• Finding ways to make lessons personally meaningful.
• Adequate time to read, reflect, and prepare before responding.
• A minimum of overwhelming facts and details.
• A friendly, supportive environment that encourages small group work.
• Enough, but not too much, structure.
• Engagement and rewards for your creativity and originality.

Pascal, Pensee 373

"I shall here write my thoughts without order, and not perhaps in unintentional confusion; that is true order, which will always indicate my object by its very disorder. I should do too much honor to my subject if I treated it with order, since I want to show that it is incapable of it."

Poetry Reading @ Weeks Footbridge, Cambridge, 8/31/09

Pictures from the celebratory reading capping off Your Best Beach Body, the 100 day poetry challenge my friend Sarah Green put together. Readers were: me, Leora Silverman, Sarah, and Thom McCaffrey. We read on the Eliot Foot Bridge crossing the Charles in Cambridge on a lovely late summer evening as the sun set in the background. There was a crowd of maybe 30 or so -- & a few curious passersby who stopped to check it out, as well.

“What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were, and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.”
-Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Smugglers' Notch

Got back Saturday from a week at a cottage on Vermont's Champlain Islands. With grandparents eagerly taking care of Teddy, Nikki & I got to spend a lot of time kayaking & cycling. I did a climb in the Green Mountains on Wednesday--the Smugglers' Notch loop around Mount Mansfield & through the ski town Stowe. At almost 70 miles & with over 5000 total feet of climbing, this was both the longest & steepest ride I had ever attempted. I was very pleased because I managed to complete the first 40 miles, including the climb & part of the decent, in 2.5 hours. During the last leg of the ride, long after the climbs, I hit a nasty bunch of headwinds on a road the ran parallel to a highway for about 5 miles. This wind was almost as tough as the climb! But I felt very strong all the way to the finish & felt like I could have kept going.

Mt. Mansfield

Near the summit.

The summit of Smugglers' Notch.

Nikki, Teddy & my Mom met me at a deli about 5 miles after the summit. I had a corn beef hash, cheddar & BBQ sauce sandwich & it was delicious!

We really needed this vacation as life has gotten infinitely more complicated in the last month. We found out our lease would not be renewed, so had to scramble to find an apartment. We're in the middle of a hunt for a nanny--and just found out today that the family we thought we'd do a nanny-share with may be backing out! Maddening. I thought summer was supposed to be relaxing.

soon to be a life of boxes

The rhythm of the dishwasher

The laugh track is on repeat.

Poetry aims to escape the logic of discourse.

Excellent Video Poem

Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off in a Farm Accident from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

The New Things

In his newest essay in the Boston Review Stephen Burt describes what he sees as a new enclave in American poetry. I like his attempt to carve out a third way, and I really like a lot of the poets he groups together under these common features:

The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s “demand,” as the critic Douglas Mao put it, “both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself.”

However, I don't think any of these features are all that "new," and what I really object to is this ridiculous outmoded turn to objective representation. I'm not sure it's fair to unite the poets he reviews (or any poets) under this banner of fidelity "to the thing in itself." First, all poets as artists necessarily treat the poem as a thing--this stance is implied in any craft, so it should be a foregone conclusion. But then what's the deal with this turn toward naive mimesis*? I distrust the notions of "thingness," documentary accuracy and objectivity in poetry and in language in general. Faith in the representational function of language seems to entirely overlook the rift between language and the so-called objects in the world (our knowledge of which is highly problematic to begin with--i.e. how can we know the thing itself?--or are we all reverting to naive empiricism?). A sentence is not a moving picture. A noun is not a thing. Syntax does not convey the sense of being there. A verb does not perform a historical action. Language is a system overlaid on reality. Yes, it influences perception. Yes, it can provide reference points to the objective world--but as a poet and as a frequently confounded human, I for one find the "objective" world an utter mystery. This yellow wall in front of me: how its shade of yellow depends on the lamp I turn on or the time of day. How I can't look at it if I'm slightly nauseous. I can't impose a system as arbitrary as language over my experience with the wall and expect it to accurately communicate its existence in any phenomenological way. And the expectation that poetry should do such a thing is completely absurd. The existence of apparently "accurate" imagery in a poem does not make the poem any more faithful to material or social reality than surrealist juxtaposition. Imagery and accuracy are rhetorical & tonal devices just like sarcasm, irony, metaphor, etc. They just mask themselves in the invisible cloak of immediacy.

This rant has nothing to do with the poets themselves. I admire much of Armentrout's work. I absolutely love Graham Foust's books. Woodward, Massey and Johnston are all excellent poets. The thing in itself just strikes a nerve in me in myself.

*By the way, this simplification of WCW as the poet of things in themselves drives me crazy. Sure, he had a dictum about imagery (which is probably more in line with the workshop craft cliché "show don't tell"), but let's not let a slogan stand for an entire body of work that is is so diverse in tone and manner. "To Elsie" anyone? "Kora in Hell"? Even Patterson is more complicated than things in themselves...

I just found out that a poem I contributed to an Ars Poetica web project (not pictured) will be included in the print anthology Paper Kite Press is publishing.

Tour de France Pénitentiaire

So the French have a Tour de France for prisoners. Giving a convict four months of endurance training and a bicycle: Brilliant! If only Kafka were around to write this penal colony.