Ultraversed

How exciting for bird lovers! My poem “The birds on the streets in the trees” is in the new (as in just launched yesterday) issue of Sixth Finch. Along with another poem, “An economy,” which is about gear–not birding gear exactly, but close. It’s also about being polite. Also at the Finch, you’ll find poems by Mike Young, Martin Rock, and others, along with some cool art. And when I say cool, I mean cool.

And, in case you hadn’t had the chance, yet, to pick up a copy of everyone’s favorite tall literary magazine, I also have a new poem (“The box”) in Conduit #21, “Bodies in Motion.” And it also features naked pictures of athletes, plus poems by Noah Gershman, Ben Kopel, and Amanda Nadelberg, which are kind of the same thing. Not that the poems are the same as each other–that they’re all similar to naked athletes. In the way where you just want to keep looking at them.

I’ve got a new house on East Eighteenth Street. Its supply and arrangement have been my main occupation (some might say obsession) these last weeks, and now I’m settled here, and the rabbits are here, and there’s a runner carpet for the hall coming in the mail, and everything is shaking out just gorgeously. I walk to the Greenmarket in Union Square for big bunches of kale and peaches. I take long afternoon naps. (Thanks to the high ceilings, there’s lots of room to dream, which is good, because summer is the season for dreaming.) I fetched my Matt Neiderhauser photo from its foster home (for three years!) in Williamsburg. I drink lots of jasmine tea, and the bunnies chew on the willow branches I bought them, which they like but not as much as the last branch of apple tree branches. No matter. They like them.

We all like everything deliriously.

Excuse me while I clear my throat. Obviously I’m a bit rusty. Sorry for the long silence.

I break it with two bits of news!

First, for those of you in the Pioneer Valley–I’ll be reading at Live Lit on Friday night. And I’m delighted to be reading with Christy Crutchfield, Katie Hoffman, and Gustavo Llarull. It’s at 8 pm, at Amherst Books as usual. Come, and be delighted!

Second, for those of you on the internet. There is a prize to be won, a prize-winning prize. You’re witty. Visit this delightful blog, write some witty captions, and if you win (over the forces of darkness), they will send you a copy of Jedediah Berry’s THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL. You lucky god, you.

The Poetry Society of America has a gorgeous new website up–congratulations to Brett, Rob, et al, for what I know must have been a lot of work. Among lots of other terrific content that I’ll encourage you to browse independently, there’s a little interview with me, wherein I confess that, as with so much else in my life, I first came to poetry as a means to avoid homework. Many thanks to Hannah for taking the photo that appears there!

I am in among the leaves (in several senses, one depending whether the photo of leaves is the one that randomly loads) over at Absent. Issue number four is live! And very pretty. They recommend a “modern” browser, which I guess means that you should accept that update you’ve been putting off. If you use a PC, I hear Google Chrome is real neat.

Also, the LSAT score is back, and it is good. It definitely puts me within shooting range of all my target schools. Now, it’s on to applications: blam! blam! blam!

… to Seth Landman’s new project, Divine Magnet. You’ll find videos of poets reading, poets you either already love or poets you should love, the kind of poets you can’t help but love. And alongside the videos, there are short essays about their work. By other poets, as it happens.

It was my pleasure to be asked to write about Lewis Freedman’s poems, which are–as I say in the essay–necessary toys, a great challenge and a great pleasure at once. I think you’ll enjoy them, and the sight of Lewis’s face, which, unsurprisingly, is blinding in its beauty. Or is that the sun?

One of the many reasons I was so glad to write this essay is that I’ve been laboring, lately, over my personal statement for my law school applications. Last week I was desperately stressed about my LSAT scores, which I’ll get next week or the week after. Then I decided to put all that energy into the personal statement. I made some revisions that had the effect of making a not-very-good first draft even worse, then sent around the new and terrible draft for comment, feeling like, well, at least I had accomplished something. I got some constructive, but negative, feedback–I’m not yet very good with criticism, as much as I want to be–and nearly gave up writing sentences forever. But thinking and writing about Lewis’s poems helped me to remember myself, regarding words and the act of putting them together. It’s not that it’s always fun, or easy, although it sometimes is. It’s not that it saves the world, or that you necessarily get to write yourself into the future of your dreams. It’s simpler than that: for me, and maybe for many of you as well, there just isn’t any better way to be in the world. Words are our pickaxes and our anchors, the best tools at our disposal for the work we want to do. Go listen to Lewis read and see if you don’t agree.

…to most of you, I think.

Check out the new FOU! Featuring pandas, and some poems by me if you can find them. (Hint: they are here.) My panda is mid-panda-collapse, which seems appropriate.

Also, look forward to April, 2010, when my chapbook THE TIDE will be published in Pilot Books‘ new Meddling Kids series. Pilot is awesome and I am so excited to be working with them. Congrats also to Martin & Phillip (authors of JAWING THROUGH THE EARTH), my “siblings” in the series.

The LSAT is on Saturday. My brain is firing on all logical cylinders… I hope.

Yesterday our social calendar as full to bursting–activities from dawn to dusk. Actually, well past dusk. It pretty much wrapped around to the next dawn. In the morning Ben and I worked the Superhero store (about which see previous blogging) with my most excellent old colleagues: Elaine, Lucas, and Jason, the latter accompanied by beautiful, blond, two-year-old Lucien. I think Ben caught the BSSCo. bug: I overheard him explaining to a dubious customer that what was in the jar of Chaos was actually just Chaos.

After the store, we had a yummy Latin brunch at Playa in the Slope–on another day we will take advantage of the $4 all-you-can-drink sangria–and walked back up Fifth Ave. to the Pacific St. station in what has to be some of the best weather of the year. Then we met up with Honora, her sister Delia, and the usual suspects (Hello Mike, hello Kate, hello Rob Blake Jeffie) and did a lightning tour of the Met. I’ll have to go back at some point to check out the renovated American Wing. Rob can’t look at displays of furniture without complaining, and can’t complain sotto voce. So after a tour through the Modern Wing–they have a ton of Balthus hanging at the moment, and I hadn’t ever really noticed before that he is super awesome–we went up to the roof. Right now the installation there is by Roxy Paine, and it’s in a similar vein to the silver trees he inserted among the living ones in Madison Square Park in 2007: a big, ranging, branchy silver thing with occasional tumerous growths called Maelstrom. Touching is allowed, and it’s fun to shake bits of the structure and watch the movement resonate through the branches all the way on the other side of the roof.

But maybe you’ll have noticed that the title of this post is “Happy birthday, Rita!,” and that seems a little inexplicable to you. I’m about to explain–ne t’inquiete pas. This post is, admittedly, about the events of our day, and I’ve gotten a little caught up in the chronological narrative. I had wanted to write particularly about a marvelous bit of cross-pollination that the day’s events triggered.

After the Met, we walked up to Square Meal, a restaurant that deserves a blog post of its own and is marked by, shall we say briefly, a setting and a menu somehow elegant and homey at the same moment, for Ben’s grandmother Rita’s 80th birthday celebrations. Rita is a real treat, and it was great fun to see the rest of the family too, sitting out on the back patio enjoying a yummy summer meal.

And we brought presents from the Superhero store! A gallon can chock-full of Immortality (see above) and a cape and mask. The cape, of course, was sparkly–if you meet Rita you’ll understand that that was a necessity. She’s a dancer, and a charmer, and full of great energy. She wore the cape all night.

There are only a couple of things that make me really gushy inside–okay, there are a lot, if you count all the puppies and bunnies and sweet furry things individually, but let’s put that aside–but one of those things is the example set by the long lives of strong, happy women.