thepoetrycollaborative.org
August 31, 2008
OK, so listen. The Poetry Collaborative has moved to thepoetrycollaborative.org. Again. This is the last time, though. We promise. We wandered over to wordpress.com for a bit, mostly because I didn’t want to add another site to my hosting account, given the fact that my hosting account is obviously all hosed up. We figured wordpress.com would be as good a place as any to hang out for a while.
But then! Deb sent the most fabulous template around, and we all swooned. We felt it perfectly captured what we’re doing with the collaborative, which is opening up a communally owned journal for readers to peek into as we draft, revise and noodle over poem after poem.
So there you have it. We wanted something. We made it happen. Carolee generously got us set up with the URL, Deb let us piggyback on the Read Write Poem hosting account and I messed around with the template (and managed to not break anything).
Anyway, we’re settling into this URL for the long haul, so please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds and whatnot. We’re sorry for the inconvenience we may have caused. OK, maybe we’re not sorry. We’re too busy being excited about the new joint.
my site host (finally) admits they are the ones fucking up my sites as opposed to it being something on my end
August 30, 2008
Says my site host: “Cust called about performance issues: Was able to recreate issue, domain loading time is sub par as well as cpanel login. Notified L3 regarding issue. Response from L3 ‘everything in building D is going to be slow until we get our new line.’ Request an ETA, L3 response ‘few days.’ Cust request copy of notes.”
A few days? This has been going on for weeks. Get on it, guys. Be the company I know you are capable of being, k?
They failed to notate that the word fuck was used during the call. Yes, that was on my end.
And also, building D? That sounds ominous for some reason.
oh dear god, not a fucking list post
August 29, 2008
Hell yeah, this is a fucking list post.
Why? Because someone (who I won’t name but three guesses as to who it is) says I need to post. I do everything that someone tells me to do. So let’s do this.
1. I dislike my site host. They can take the invisible ***** hanging from my invisible **** and suck on the hairy things as if they were designer candies. I don’t mean to be graphic (OK, I do), but my site host has left me no choice. They have been completely unresponsive to my requests to fix the server that my site is hosted on, or at least force the hosed-up site or sites that are also on my server to shape up because those hosed-up sites are affecting my site as well as Postal Poetry. And that gets my invisible **** in a twist, as if I were one of those two dudes in Puppetry of the Penis.
2. I dislike this blog template. It’s proving to be inflexible and downright annoying. I thought I could make it work, but apparently not. Sometimes you just have to learn when to walk away from an unsalvageable relationship. And sometimes you have to learn how to spell the word “unsalvageable” without misspelling it seven times first.
3. I had a boil most of the week. Furuncle is a better term. If you squint hard enough, the word “furuncle” looks like “funnelcake,” and everyone knows Mrs. Funnelcake and I like the word funnelcake.
4. My hamster ran off tonight. I found her. She was acting all cute and innocent when she waddled out from behind some crap I’ve amassed in a closet near her cage. But she screwed up my planned three-day vow of silence, that she did, since I ran all over the house screaming her name like this: “Trudy!!! Trudy!!! Truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudy!!! Trudeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!”
5. About that vow of silence: I decided to have a three-day vow of silence. Vocal silence, to be precise. I wanted to resist my impulse to speak, since working against impulses is always sometimes occasionally rarely a good thing. I wanted to verbally communicate only what was necessary which, in the case of a vow of silence, is nothing at all. I wanted to settle myself down, since I’ve been feeling fragile for the past few days for various reasons. And not allowing my body to reverberate with my own voice seemed like as good a way as any. Until Trudy got loose and loused it all up.
6. Someone I used to work with closely died yesterday. He was a good man, an outstanding employee, and a true visionary when it came to technology and communication.
7. Oh no! LoveShack just came home with some weird news. Sigh. Gotta jet.
catching words
August 29, 2008
from the sprigs* archives: double my pleasure (or, ‘the one where i use a lot of clichés about the weather’)
August 28, 2008
(photo credit :: Ten foot penis by j.a. holland)
Well, crap. I wanted to post something light and funny from the Sprigs archives today so I could get away from all the death and sad that’s in the air. But then I started reading this piece and remembered that Heath Ledger is in it, which means this piece is now full of death and sad. Fine. I will post this. But then I am going to lie down and wait for tomorrow to happen.
* I wrote this piece Nov. 18, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
Today, I was with an acquaintance of mine at a bookstore. We were perusing the magazine section when he turned to me and said, out of the blue, Let me ask you this. Does the thought of two men together turn you on? This is not a typical question for this acquaintance to ask (after all, he is only an acquaintance), so I was a little taken aback. Until he explained that he was asking because the movie Brokeback Mountain (which he’d seen featured on a magazine cover) was being marketed to women.
Now, I don’t know what rock I’ve been under for the last, well, however long people have been talking about this particular flick. But I have clearly been under one. It is simply unconscionable for me not to know one of my favorite actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, will be getting hot under the buckle with fellow hottie Heath Ledger. I think my grabbing the magazine off the rack and tearing through it to get to the article on the movie answered my friend’s question: Yes, I am turned on by guy-on-guy action.
I didn’t always know this about myself, though there had been some signs. For example, I owned a couple of gay-and-lesbian poetry anthologies in the early ’90s, and I would sometimes become a little flushed when reading the poems written by gay men. But I didn’t realize I was attracted to images of men getting busy until …
Hold up. Let me set the scene for you. It was 1995, Kansas City, the dead heat of summer. The temperature was hovering at around 110 degrees, which, thankfully, included the heat index. It was so hot, you could have fried an egg on the sidewalk.* However, it was also so hot that nobody in their right mind would have entertained the thought of actually walking out into the blistering sun, finding a suitable patch of sidewalk and dropping an egg on it. Instead, people were sensible. They remained in the air-conditioned goodness of the indoors. Kansas Citians aren’t dummies.
I was living in a third-floor apartment with my friend/roommate, a gay man. We were not fortunate enough to have air-conditioning. My roommate was out of town, so I had the stale, festeringly hot place all to myself. But I couldn’t enjoy my solitude because of the oppressive heat.
I had to take my clothes off, not because I was feeling sexy but because they made me feel like I was wrapped in electric blankets. I got a bath towel and soaked it in cold water. That was a trick my roommate had taught me a week or so earlier. Poor man’s air-conditioning, he’d called it. I laid down on the faux-leather sofa in the living room and covered myself with the wet towel. It felt great. For about 10 minutes. At which point the towel was dryish and warmish, so I had to repeat the entire process. I would be trapped in this endless cycle all day: wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa, wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa.
I needed something to do, but without cable TV, my options were limited. I didn’t even have the energy to read a book. (Plus, holding my arm up to read would be work, which would produce heat, which would be completely counterproductive to my goal of cooling off.) My gaze fell upon my roommate’s gay-porn collection. What the hell? The TV was right there, and I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I popped in a tape.
You might think this sounds pretty pathetic: naked girl covered in wet towel watching gay porn. But it wasn’t pathetic at all. Nope, I wasn’t pathetic watching that first tape. Or the second. Or the entire collection. Twice.
At first, I told myself I was just watching for research purposes. But that story doesn’t really hold up when you are on your ninth or tenth tape, although I did come away with some new moves I could try out on LoveShack. (Yes, I was dating LoveShack way back then. I wonder where he was that day. Lying on the sofa at his place watching lesbian-porn videos? Probably.)
I know what you might be thinking: I just watched all those videos because I was loopy from the heat. Not so. I was, in a word, turned on. (OK, that’s two words. But I wanted to avoid the word “horny” because I have an aversion to it. The word, that is. Not the state of being horny.)
Sadly, I was also literally too hot to do much of anything about it, an irony that was not lost on me at the time. (I think LoveShack got more than a spoonful of lovin’ from me later that night, though, once the temperatures dropped a smidge.)
Now, don’t start drawing any weird conclusions about this post, like thinking I am really a gay man trapped in a bisexual woman’s body. That’s just ridiculous. And please don’t leave here with the impression that I go seeking out gay porn. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I haven’t seen a gay-porn film since then. Watching a whole gay-porn video library in one day is enough to sate my desire for a good long while.
But today, a decade later, when I heard Jake and Heath were going to make out in Brokeback Mountain, well I knew it was time for another gay-movie fix. Even if I will be fully dressed in an air-conditioned movie theater. And even if it isn’t exactly gay porn.
*It wasn’t really hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Apparently, pavement has to be at least 144 degrees for that. Even at a sweltering 110 degrees, the pavement wouldn’t have been quite that hot. But the image worked in the post, so I used it. I’m a liar like that.
what can i say now that’s not as indistinguishable as two instruments hitting the same note at the same time with the same vibrato?
August 27, 2008
Dear Dave,
Since we’re being honest, I’ll offer this:
Vibrato has always made me sad.
Manipulating air, bending
a perfectly serviceable tone
for no reason other than to inject
something uniquely human.
Why must we put on such displays,
approach our music as if every piece
were a dirge that we should heave
and huff our way through, taking up
and expelling oxygen in bursts,
the way our mothers breathed
when they pushed us into the world,
begged to be rid of us and, once they were,
relaxed back into natural respiration.
Because vibrato is impossible on the clarinet,
it comes closest to the squawk of a goose.
And if you blow into the nose holes
of a goose that’s been felled, or so I am told,
you can play it’s clean brittle song.
* * *
Lirone has joined in on this conversation here. Dave and I encourage others to do so as well. What we’ve been doing is linking back to the poem we’re responding to in our salutation. If others join in, please do the same for the poem or poems you are responding to in your salutation. That way, everyone can follow the trail of the conversation.
word to the motha
August 27, 2008
A few words, actually. More like an entire site full of words, many of them good ones.
What I mean is, The Poetry Collaborative has moved. We are taking up residence over at thepoetrycollaborative.wordpress.com. You can now search our site in a number of ways, including works in progress, various writing prompts and authors. How spiffy is that?
And! You can leave comments. So go leave a comment. (If you are so inclined.)
We’ll be adding more stuff to the site soon, like bios* and mini-essays from each of us about why we are collaborating. So, get us in your RSS feed, swing by often and check out what we’re doing.
* * *
*I almost spelled bios “b-o-i-l-s,” since I apparently have a small boil** on my nose right now. How neat-o is that? I’ll tell you how neat-o it is: not at all neat-o.
**I prefer the term “furuncle.” It sounds way cuter, like something small and bouncy you might bring home from the pet store.***
*** I almost spelled store “s-o-r-e,” since my furuncle is indeed sore.
sustaining the paralysis
August 26, 2008
Dear Dave,
Blame it on neural inhibitors.
Blame it on too much Prince
and the Revolution right before bed.
Blame it on threadcount.
Blame whatever I thought about
as I nodded off (most likely
myself in a man’s form,
but you already know that).
I don’t know what to blame, Dave,
when my right arm can’t move
so it slips out of itself,
then the rest of me follows
as if under strict orders
I have not given.
What I want to know is
why I look back at my body
lying there, supple and oblivious,
and why I always hope the windows
are closed so I can’t pass through,
but then worry that I can.
* * *
I am so stoked! Dave Bonta and I are embarking on a correspondence in poems together. I have no idea if I am doing it right, but this is my first poem to Dave.
for, and a thank you to, erena
August 24, 2008
(photo credit :: Trees (vs urban sprawl) by Erena Rae :: used with her family’s permission)
Over the next few weeks, members of The Poetry Collaborative will be writing poetry responses to artwork by Erena Rae. This is not the only stuff we’re writing, of course, but it’s one of the many undertakings we have our 16 hands in.
This project is close to my heart. I don’t use corny phrases like close to my heart often, but in this case it applies. Erena was my first boyfriend’s mother. For the five years he and I dated, I had the pleasure of getting to know her. She is one of the strongest, most articulate, most passionate and most gracious women I have ever known.
Erena was the counterpoint to my own mother and a stabilizing force in my life. She showed me what was possible – the conviction and courage with which I might someday move through the world. She showed me what I, what all of us, had the potential to become.
I credit Erena, her husband, Gus, and their son, Bruce, with saving my life. I don’t think I would have made it through my teen years — those dark, dark years after my father’s death — without them.
(Erena died May 19, 2006, of lung cancer. She had not smoked in more than 30 years and was evangelical in her anti-smoking sentiments.)
from the sprigs* archives: topped off
August 22, 2008
(photo credit :: Fish by Jannie-Jan)
*I thought I should follow up my last Sprigs archives post, in which I allude to the bar my father built in the back of our van, with the actual post about the bar my father built in the back of our van. I wrote this piece Nov. 9, 2005.
So about that bar my father built in the back of the family van. I’ve already established that we were a drinking family. The adults in the family, anyway. And a little thing like driving wasn’t going to get in the way of that. Shortly after he purchased the GMC Explorer from the dealership, my father went to work tearing out the clothes-hanging-and-storage area at the back. He replaced it with a custom oak bar he built in his workshop.
On the left was a stainless-steel sink that drained into a 5-gallon plastic bucket. The idea was to fill the sink with ice upon departing for a road trip. You could stash small containers of alcohol in the ice. You could also use the ice for mixed drinks. On the left side was a compartment for the larger liquor bottles and glasses. The entire bar was accessible from inside the van if you knelt on the back couch, and a wooden cover could be thrown over the top in case the cops pulled you over.
Most of our road trips were only a couple hours each way. We’d drive to the same lake over and over again for weekends and vacations. My father loved to fish on that lake; my mother put up with it because my father loved it; and I didn’t know there was any better way to spend my time.
I did like the feel of being on the water. I’d sit at the front of the boat in my two-piece swimsuit until my skin turned a funky color, kind of a suntan-meets-sunburn thing. (This is the color my entire family turns when exposed to ultraviolet rays. Amongst ourselves, we look golden tan. But among other people, we look like burnt-orange crayons.)
As an aside, I fished only once. The catch made me so sad — writhing and staring blankly with a hook in its mouth — that I cried and cried until my father removed the hook and set the fish free.
The cops never did pull us over on the way to the lake, not with my father on the CB the entire drive. Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, he’d say in a southern drawl. Then he’d identify himself by his handle, The Cracker Jack, and ask if there were any pigs he needed to look out for.
The first time I heard that term, I didn’t understand why there would be animals on the highway or why it took a number of middle-aged men with crackling voices to keep tabs on these animals. But that was none of my business. My sole responsibility during those road trips was to mix drinks. I would travel from the front of the van to the back and from the back to the front, serving drinks like highballs to my father.
I would hand him the drink. He would thank me. Then he’d let me talk on the CB. I had come up with a handle, too. I can’t remember what it was, but it had the fluff-and-tickle ring of something a young girl or a hippie porn star would craft.
As my father sipped at his drink, pleased to know there were men on his tail keeping their eyes peeled for coppertops, I talked to the men and held their attention. Their voices would change when they spoke to me: Their pitch would rise, their drawl settling into an almost melodic rhythm. Most of them were professional truckers, and I wonder now how many had children at home that they didn’t see for days and weeks on end.
At my father’s side, I felt as if I was in the presence of a minor god. He would surf from one frequency to another on that CB, assembling a ragtag team of truckers to watch his back, front and sides the entire drive. He was a persuasive orator capable of making a man do something that just a moment before he had no intention of doing. He could have talked those men into turning around and driving the wrong way down the highway if he’d had the notion to do so.
And he was smart: Putting a little girl on the air really clinched the deal. These truckers didn’t want any harm to come to such a sweet thing.
Where the rubber met the road, he ruled, and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. But for the time being, I was content simply to be in his company and learn from him as we inched along the interstate. I picked up the CB lingo, which I learned to use with authority. (That really made the men chuckle.) And I kept my father’s drink topped off, just like he liked it.
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Be disturbing and seductive and your poetry will follow. — Richard Siken
-
beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
-
flick, flick, flick
-
i cannot be bought
