moved house

to

here

same blog basically. i just like LJ sooooo much better.
so i decided to revamp the LJ i've been using since high school into the new home for this little project/experiment/puttering around of mine.

hope u like it.

:]

就算沒有人會永遠在一起

loving this album.



even with all the corny lyrics...e.g. the lyrics of the title song, "没有人比我更爱你":

從愛上你的一瞬間
我終於明白了孤單
是否愛只是片段
彷彿夢境的片段
隕落中的幸福用心碎來還
若不是眼淚落下來
我不知如何這明白
情話若只是
偶爾兌現的謊言
我寧願選擇沈默來表白

沒有人會比我更愛你
為你放棄自己也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算一天我們注定會分離
沒有人會比我更愛你
為你付出生命也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算沒有人會永遠在一起

從愛上你的一瞬間
我終於明白了孤單
是否愛只是片段
彷彿夢境的片段
隕落中的幸福用心碎來還
轉載來自
若不是眼淚落下來
我不知如何這明白
情話若只是
偶爾兌現的謊言
我寧願選擇沈默來表白

沒有人會比我更愛你
為你放棄自己也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算一天我們注定會分離
沒有人會比我更愛你
為你付出生命也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算沒有人會永遠在一起

沒有人會比我更愛你
為你放棄自己也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算一天我們注定會分離
沒有人會比我更愛你
為你付出生命也願意
沒有人能比我更愛你
就算沒有人會永遠在一起
沒有人會比我更愛你
我多想永遠和你在一起

-found here. unfortunately the site only seems to have the lyrics in traditional characters. hmm. well anyway, the chorus of this song basically goes,

there is no one who will love you more than i do
for you i give up myself and willingly
there is no one who can love you more than i do
even if we are doomed to one day separate

there is no one who will love you more than i do
for you i give my life and willingly
there is no one who can love you more than i do
even if there is no one who can stay together forever



somehow the song just doesn't sound so corny in chinese; it just feels very emotional and real.



**

watched Knowing yesterday with r.b. and r.b. is right; nicholas cage is a horrible actor. well i did like how this movie didn't have the typical "and then we were all saved" ending that many mainstream sci-fi movies have. the plot? nicholas cage has to save the earth (or just himself, really) from getting fried by a superhot solar flare, using the aid of a 50yr old prophecy a disturbed little girl named luncinda wrote. in lexington, MA! um.

well here's a poem. about the end of the world. involving the incineration by the sun? perhaps?

Kiss of the Sun

If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crown with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
as if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

-from mary ruefle's brilliantly titled collection, Indeed I Was Pleased With the World


yesterday afternoon the sun did look close/red-lipped enough to kiss.

~
一寸相思一寸灰

That is why I read: I want everything to be okay

Aubade

There was one summer
that returned many times over
there was one flower unfurling
taking many forms

Crimson of the monarda, pale gold of the late roses

There was one love
There was one love, there were many nights

Smell of the mock orange tree
Corridors of jasmine and lilies
Still the wind blew

There were many winters but I closed my eyes
The cold air white with dissolved wings

There was one garden when the snow melted
Azure and white; I couldn't tell
my solitude from love

There was one love; he had many voices
There was one dawn; sometimes
we watched it together

I was here
I was here

There was one summer returning over
and over
there was one dawn
I grew old watching

-from louise glück's The Seven Ages


**

Did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That's why I read when I was a lonely kid and that's why I read now that I'm a scared adult. It's a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things--the universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires.

-from this essay by mary ruefle.

some distinction after all

well it's tuesday. um. here. catch? hold? breathe in and slowly asphyxiate?

The Queen of Carthage

Brutal to love,

more brutal to die.

And brutal beyond the reaches of justice

to die of love.

In the end, Dido

summoned her ladies in waiting

that they might see

the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the Fates.

She said, “Aeneas

came to me over the shimmering water;

I asked the Fates

to permit him to return my passion,

even for a short time. What difference

between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments,

they are the same, they are both eternity.

I was given a great gift

which I attempted to increase, to prolong.

Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning

blinded me.

Now the Queen of Carthage

will accept suffering as she accepted favor:

to be noticed by the Fates

is some distinction after all.

Or should one say, to have honored hunger,

since the Fates go by that name also.”

*

plz listen to portishead's Third if u haven't already. im not sure why the following album art i googled is from a site called terrorism.com. this i do not know. nope.



go watch the rip. idk if ive seen the video for this song. i like the song. im not terribly big on music videos. if u are the same, u could just close yr eyes and listen? or simply download the mp3? u have free will i guess so its up to u. me, im just getting lazier with my punctuation and shit.

the lyrics on "we carry on" are prob my favorite on the album, btw:

The taste of life I can't describe
It's choking on my mind
Reaching out I can't believe
Faith it can't decide

On and on I carry on
But underneath my mind
And on and on I tell myself
It's this I can't disguise

Oh can't you see
Holding on to my heart
I bleed the taste of life

The pace, the time, I can't survive
It's grinding down the view
Breaking out which way to choose
A choice I can't renew

Holding on I carry on
But underneath my mind
And on and on I tell myself
It's this I can't disguise

Oh can't you see
Holding on to my heart
I bleed, no place is safe
Can't you see the taste of life

~
一寸相思一寸灰

off the balcony all the same

thought i'd been through this in 1919

counting the tears of ten thousand men
and gathered them all
but my feet are slipping
there's something we left on the windowsill
there's something we left yes

we'll see how brave you are
we'll see how fast you'll be running
we'll see how brave you are
yes, anastasia



i'm not a huge tori amos fan but i guess she is #5 on my last.fm profile for some reason. i say i'm not a huge fan tho bc till tonight i had never heard 2 of her best/most beloved albums (i.e. under the pink + boys for pele) in their entirety. i only had a few songs from each of those albums, including some great live performances (instead of the studio ones, in fact), thanks to friends putting them on mixes for me. that's how i got into tori to begin with, and idk...i guess i don't feel very "well-versed" in her stuff.

i haven't been to a single one of her concerts (i don't usually "follow" artists that way anyhow), i don't buy her merch, i think i've only seen like 2 of her music videos. and i don't feel like i fall into any sort of camp, one that likes only her earlier stuff or one that prefers her later work. i like to judge each album on its own. i started off with a later one, scarlet's walk, and i quite like a bunch of songs from the beekeeper. her 2 latest efforts (american doll posse + abnormally attracted to sin) sort of bore me for the most part, tho there're still individual songs i like. in general i'm pretty open when it comes to music. yet i always get kinda weirded out when i meet other ppl who are not just fans, but true fanatics. ppl who think she's some kind of genius/goddess. O.o

well. i am glad i finally listened to boys for pele bc now "caught a lite sneeze" is one of my all time favs...i really like the lyrics for some reason. not sure why.


caught a lite sneeze
caught a lite breeze
caught a lightweight lightningseed
boys on my left side
boys on my right side
boys in the middle
and you're not here
i need a big loan
from the girl zone

building
tumbling down
didn't know our love was so small
couldn't stand at all
mr. st. john just bring your son

the spire is hot
and my cells can't feed
and you still got that belle
dragging your foots
i'm hiding it well sister ernestine
but i still got that belle
dragging my foots

right on time you get closer
and closer
called my name
but there's no way in
use that fame
rent your wife and kids today
maybe she will
maybe she will caught a lite sneeze
dreamed a little dream
made my own pretty hate machine
boys on my left side

boys on my right side
boys in the middle
and you're not here
boys in their dresses
and you're not here
i need a big loan
from the girl zone


**

tori's music kinda puts me in the mood for mary ruefle's poetry...maybe bc they both seem to write in a very emotional quirkiness/absurdism? shrugshrug. also they both have red hair. tho tori, lately, has developed a penchant for wigs in a variety of bright and unbecoming colors. i suppose the key difference between these two, for me, is that i like ruefle a good deal more. maybe bc music fans are so often dicks. tho poetry "fans" can be dicks too. or maybe i'm the real pompous dick for hating the whole concept of "fandom." here's a ruefle poem i love:

The Pedant's Discourse

Ladies, life is no dream; Gentlemen,
it's a brief folly: you wouldn't know
death's flaschcard if you saw it.
First the factories close, then the mills,
then all of the sooty towns
shrivel up and fall off from the navel.
And how should I know, just because my gramma
died in one? I was four hundred miles away,
shopping. I bought a pair of black breasts
with elastic straps that slip over the shoulder.
I'm always afraid I might die at any moment.
That night I heard a man in a movie say
I have no memories and presumably he meant it.
But surely it was an act. I remember my gramma's
housedress was covered with roses. And she
remembered it too. How many times she turned
to her lap and saw the machines: the deep folds
of red shirts endlessly unfolding while they dried.
Whose flashcard is that? So, ladies and gentlemen,
the truth distorts the truth and we are in it up
to our eyebrows. I stand here before you tonight,
old and wise: cured of vain dreams, debauched,
wayward and haggard. The mind's a killjoy, if
I may say so myself, and the sun's a star,
the red dwarf of which will finally consume us.


+2 more! (all from Apparition Hill)

Arturo's Song

No sparkles in the brain-pan.
I shall be a dazing one
all of my days.

After the olives ripen in Tuscany
there is no second sorrow.

When I am sad I have nothing to say
and when I am happy speak freely
of my sorrow.


The Queen of Constriction

"I am as lonely as...as Franz Kafka."
-Franz Kafka

Leafy outside the window. A little bird with
a mermaidish figure flies down to the rain-polished
branch and shakes. A man brings me something to eat
without disturbing me. It is a dream scene. On
Thursdays I mop. I swing the thing. Black water
results. A vile thing with far too many legs
must be escorted out. I too am removable,
especially the head parts. But who would know?
All those lashy legs chachacha across the spatula.
I might as well be in China. Where I am.
With concrete here and concrete there, here
a block, there a block, everywhere a block
block. I look at Miss Legs: poesy in the year
2000 will have offpsring like this. Oh my!
I'll chuck it off the balcony all the same:
which is what I do now and watch her fall
seven stories to the court below
where she lands without a shake and goes
on her many ways. Crackers cum laude for lunch.
Why I never shall marry is plain:
an act of constriction is needed
during these long and dumbfounded days.

也许你会陪我 看细水长流

張國榮 (leslie cheung) covering the chinese song 鄧麗君 (teresa teng) first made famous, 《月亮代表我的心》。notice how he mentions a certain "mr. tong"（唐鶴德），his "greatest friend." of course, that would be none other than his dear bf of many years, 呵呵~ hm, i wonder if this was one of his last big concerts, his 1997 one, before he committed suicide in 2003. *cries*　．．．man does he look good in a suit.



你问我爱你有多深
我爱你有几分
我的情也真 我的爱也真
月亮代表我的心

你问我爱你有多深
我爱你有几分
我的情不移 我的爱不变
月亮代表我的心

轻轻的一个吻
已经打动我的心
深深的一段情
教我思念到如今

你问我爱你有多深
我爱你有几分
你去想一想 你去看一看
月亮代表我的心


plus:
here's a great site, with teresa teng's performance, and a bunch of other covers. +pinyin & english translation if you're so inclined. let's do our own covers!　:P


**

and here's 王菲's 《红豆》, which has become quite the classic as well, though i don't think nearly as many ppl have covered this as they have the above piece. still, i love this song, and i think its lyrics are more sophisticated. haha. sweet + tender all the same, tho. just posted this on my fbook page as well, but here i'm including lyrics ♥



还没好好的感受 雪花绽放的气候
我们一起颤抖 会更明白 甚么是温柔
还没跟你牵着手 走过荒芜的沙丘
转 可能从此以后 学会珍惜 天长和地久

有时候 有时候 我会相信一切有尽头
相聚离开 都有时候 没有甚么会永垂不朽
可是我 有时候 宁愿选择留恋不放手
等到风景都看透 也许你会陪我 看细水长流

还没为你把红豆 熬成缠绵的伤口
然后一起分享 会更明白 相思的哀愁
还没好好的感受 醒着亲吻的温柔
可能在我左右 你才追求 孤独的自由


&　here's a decent line-by-line translation/interpretation. it's using the traditional character set, tho. hm. for some reason i really like writing the singers' names in traditional characters but everything else in simplified. names are kinda different, i guess. also a lot of these (somewhat) older singers didn't grow up/have their heyday when simplified characters were in vogue. also a lot of them were from taiwan or hong kong, where traditional characters are still used more frequently (well in taiwan i think that's still the standard, actually). hm. i mean i think leslie cheung might've preferred his english name; he chose it for its unisex-ness--and indeed i find that it fits him better than his chinese name. anyway. i just loooooove these lyrics (to 红豆) in chinese. so beautiful. they make me cry.

请用凉凉的雪水

i didn't know henri cole had his own website. but he does. maybe he got bored. idk how i feel about poets having their own websites. like, named after themselves. with big ass pics of themselves on the front page. or sometimes, on every page in somewhat smaller ass sizes. i think i don't like this too much. but maybe it will happen to me one day. maybe i will need something like that to promote myself/my work (not the same thing, but a lot of ppl conflate the two). or maybe i'll want something like that. because i am bored. and vain.

in any case, i really like henri cole's most recent collection, Blackbird and Wolf. i like coldfrontmag's review of the book. it's so intimate, complex yet totally direct, beautifully to the point. cole just says what he really needs to say.

e.g.

Birthday

When I was a boy, we called it punishment

to be locked up in a room. God's apparent

abdication from the affairs of the world

seemed unforgivable. This morning

climbing five stories to my apartment,

I remember my father's angry voice

mixed with anxiety and love. As always,

the possibilities of home--at best an ideal--

remains illusory, so I read Plato, for whom love

has not been punctured. I sprawl on the carpet,

like a worm composting, understanding things

about which I have no empirical knowledge.

Though the door is locked, I am free.

Like an outdated map, my borders are changing.


Self Portrait With Hornets

Hornets, two hornets, buzz over my head;

I'm napping and cannot keep my eyes open.

"Do you come from far away?" I ask, dozing off.

My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze

rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.

The two hornets are puzzling over

something sticky on my night table,

wiping their gold heads with their arms.

Ordinary things are like symbols. My eyes are watery

and blurred. Then I lose myself again.

I'm walking slowly in a heat haze,

my vision contracting to a tiny porthole,

drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.

I can feel blood draining out of my face.


I can feel my heart beating inside my heart,

the self receding from the center of the picture.

I can taste sugar under my tongue.

All the usual human plots of ascent

and triumph appear disrupted.

Crossing my ankles, I watch the day

vibrate around me, watch the geraniums

climb toward the distant mountains

where I was born, watch the black worm

wiggling out of the window box,

hiding its head from the pale sun

that lies down on everything,

purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.

Teach me to love. Lie down on me.


**

more robert hass, from Time and Materials:

After Trakl

October night, the sun going down,
Evening with its brown and blue
(Music from another room),
Evening with its blue and brown.
October night, the sun going down.


A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room.
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen's trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

"Everywhere the wasteland grows; woe
To him whose wasteland is within."

Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.
In love with the opera of Bizet.


Futures in Lilacs

"Tender little Buddha," she said
Of my least Buddha-like member.
She was probably quoting Allen Ginsberg,
Who was probably paraphrasing Walt Whitman.
After the Civil War, after the death of Lincoln,
That was a good time to own railroad stocks.
But Whitman was in the Library of Congress,
Researching alternative Americas,
Reading up on the curiosities of Hindoo philosophy,
Studying the etchings of stone carvings
Of strange couplings in a book.

She was taking off a blouse,
Almost transparent, the color of a silky tangerine.
From Capitol Hill Walt Whitman must have been able to see
Willows gathering the river haze
In the cooling and still-humid twilight.
He was in love with a trolley conductor
In the summer of--what was it?--1867? 1868?


Three Dawn Songs in Summer

1.

The first long shadows in the fields
Are like mortal difficulty.
The first birdsong is not like that at all.

2.

The light in summer is very young and wholly unsupervised.
No one has made it sit down to breakfast.
It's the first one up, the first one out.

3.

Because he has opened his eyes, he must be light
And she, sleeping beside him, must be the visible,
One ringlet of hair curled about her ear.
Into which he whispers, "Wake up!"
"Wake up!" he whispers.


**

z.h. lent me Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng (顾城). unfortunately this edition does not have chinese/english side-by-side, as i would like. but...just found some of 顾城's poetry online, in the original chinese/translated into english by aaron crippen: rite here. i quite like the 1st one there, esp the 2nd stanza:

from "回归 （一）"...

请用凉凉的雪水
把地址写在手上
或是靠着我的肩膀
度过朦胧的晨光

and i quite like mr. crippen's translation:

write the address
in snowmelt on your hand
or lean on my shoulder
as we pass the hazy morning

i like how he turns what's literally "cool cool snow water" into "snowmelt," although i think something is also lost there, as "snowmelt" seems somewhat more sophisticated and clever, whereas "cool cool snow water" has this wonderful childlike/dreamlike quality to it. mr. crippen dropped the "请" at the beginning of the stanza, too. i'm not sure why he made this choice. "请" often translates to "please" in imperative statements, and it has a pleasant, inviting/welcoming feeling to it. and 凉凉的雪水, being longer, has more of a cadence to it..."please use cool cool snow water." the line in chinese is kind of funny, and sweet--feelings that i think aren't conveyed in "write the address/in snowmelt..." at the same time, i do like the swift directness in mr. crippen's interpretation; there's more of an urgency in his lines.

apparently 顾城 had an interesting life, and a controversial death. he was cute, too~





呵呵 :P

i think i articulated this better somewhere else on the internet

my 4th of july was pretty okay. i watched some pretty fireworks and do not feel any more or less "american." i quite like the word "pretty" sometimes, btw. came across the following poem in a blog with beautiful men on it, can't find it on there again because it updates too often, and many of the beautiful men are very distracting. but um, here it is from this somewhat informative site:

Pretty

Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks.

He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater flash
But not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey,

And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty
His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between
The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind.

The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty
The lake water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist
All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.

Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes,
It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier
A field in the evening, tilting up.

The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late
The sky is lighter than the hill field
All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty,

And it is careless, and that is always pretty
This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless
As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps means nothing, and this is pretty.

So a person can come along like a thief – pretty! –
Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.

Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity,
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

-Stevie Smith


**


i like some of what tao lin says about his own writing and other people's writing and something one might call the "writing process" for lack of a better term (but i don't like most of what tao lin actually writes). here is something he says in an interview at Cruelest Month.

TL: I don't feel excited or good or amused or anything when hearing interpretations of my poetry. Because when I read the poems myself I don't interpret them, I just read them and feel emotions. When I read other people's poems I don't interpret them. If I read a poem and it says, "the sky was orange with satellites. / And satellites know everything," (Matthew Rohrer) I don't think, "What does orange symbolize? What does that line mean? What does it mean that satellites know everything? Is he talking about God?" I just read the words and then feel amused or a little excited. Then I use that excitement to go answer an email that I haven't felt like answering for a while, due to feeling unexcited about life or something, or I go do something for someone, or I go write something, or I go outside and look at a tree. I do something in concrete reality.

But if I thought, "The satellite symbolizes God because God sees everything and people think he is in the sky like satellites are in the sky but you can't see them," I do not feel excitement. I feel bored. I feel inhuman, because I am using my time and energy not to do things in concrete reality that have to do with other human beings, or trees, but to do things having to do with abstractions and concepts, which do not exist in concrete reality but in a metaphysical place, or something. That is not life-affirming, it is the opposite. It is denying that conscious beings feel emotions, denying that pain and suffering exists, and focusing on things that do not exist in concrete reality and that do not therefore feel pain and suffering. I could only do that sarcastically I think. I feel very bored and very unexcited when I hear or read people "interpreting" fiction or poetry in a non-sarcastic way. I feel nervous about this paragraph. I hope it makes sense. I think I articulated this better somewhere else on the internet.

i also like this bit on aesthetic affinities/choices from an essay he did in promotion of his book, Bed, on largeheartedboy:

While writing these stories I studied stories by Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams. I created charts for some of these stories. I made charts. I stared at the charts. I printed the stories in single-spaced, size-6 font to "gain perspective." I wrote notes on the paper. I wrote things like, "Insert something for flow," "Make this a lot tighter," "Edit this part tonight you piece of shit," or "Terrible shit [arrows pointing at circled parts]." I submitted these stories to undergraduate writing workshops at New York University. I like writing workshops. Whenever a person criticized my stories I lectured them until they stopped talking. In one class someone attacked me for being "postmodern." I just stared at my computer screen for about 3 minutes trying to remember another instance of someone "attacking" me in workshop but could not think of anything. I don't remember specifics. I almost never criticized anyone else's stories. I always found something I liked in every story. I am nice. I worked many hours on the stories in Bed. Maybe an average of 175 hours per story. That is how many hours it takes me to write a professional, 20-page short story with themes on the language level. Lorrie Moore is the only writer I have read that is consistently "thematic" on the language level. I don't know what that means. I think it means she repeats the same words or images or ideas or else variations of those words or images or ideas throughout the story. Yes. That is what it means. I think I lectured people in class about that. I wanted them to understand that Lorrie Moore is the only writer I have read that is consistently "thematic" on the language level. I am impressed by stories that are "thematic on the language level." When I lectured my classmates they listened politely then talked about something else.

**

i've re-listened to the 2nd cut copy album (i.e. In Ghost Colours) again. i do this fairly regularly. it's such a good album. it just makes me feel so nice inside. it makes me feel like i'm made of the perfectly delicious, perfectly aesthetically pleasing combination of blue and pink cotton candy. it makes me feel like cotton candy and i want to eat myself and i want to get fat and take myself out on a date to an excessively fancy pizza hut in china and really treat myself and feel just 110% great about that.

the 2nd track on the album, "out there on the ice" probably has some of my favorite lyrics ever. they're so simple. direct. sweet. and sad.

Out There On the Ice

yes, no, maybe is all i need to hear from you
if things go crazy, she's lost herself and lost to you
now that nothings spoken, she's out there on the ice again
she's breaking down slowly, colliding as she holds your hand

you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you
you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you

yes, no, maybe is all i need to hear from you
if things go crazy, she's lost herself and lost to you
now that nothings spoken, she's out there on the ice again
she's take me down slowly, she's holding on to what she can

you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you
you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you
you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you
you don't know what to do
there's a guy you know, who'll be there for you

if thats what it takes, then don't let it tear us apart
even if it breaks your heart
if thats what it takes, then don't let it tear us apart
even if it breaks your heart

even if it breaks your heart
even if it breaks your heart


**

i like this picture of bat for lashes (just came across it on last.fm). i like her new album a lot. i like telescopes.



Telescope

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

-Louise Glück


**

starting to read frank bidart's new collection, Watching the Spring Festival...

Valentine

How those now dead used the word love bewildered
and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt
love until he understood love

Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found
within his chest

something intolerable for which the word
because no other word was right

must be love
must be love

Love craved and despised and necessary
the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft
father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain
wild regret


~
一寸相思一寸灰

out to the end of the rope

rereading robert hass bc z.h. reminded me of the following poem by him (from Sun Under Wood). yep.

Dragonflies Mating

1.

The people who lived here before us
also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.
They made their way up here in easy stages
when heat began to dry the valleys out,
following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:
climbing and making camp and gathering,
then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.
A few miles a day. They sent out the children
to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast
at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year
was different from last year. Told stories,
knew where they were on earth from the names,
owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.

2.

Jaime de Angulo (1934) was talking to a Channel Island Indian
in a Santa Barbara bar. You tell me how your people said
the world was made. Well, the guy said, Coyote was on the mountain
and he had to pee. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
I was talking to a Pomo the other day and he said
Red Fox made the world. They say Red Fox, the guy shrugged,
we say Coyote. So, he had to pee
and he didn't want to drown anybody so he turned toward the place
where the ocean would be. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
if there were no people yet, how could he drown anybody?
The Channelleño got a funny look on his face. You know,
he said, when I was a kid, I wondered about that,
and I asked my father. We were living up toward Santa Ynez.
He was sitting on a bench in the yard shaving down fence posts
with an ax, and I said, how come Coyote was worried about people
when he had to pee and there were no people? The guy laughed.
And my old man looked up at me with this funny smile
and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that.

3.

Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat,
first day in the mountains, I remembered stories about sick Indians
and--in the same thought--standing on the free throw line.

St. Raphael's parish, where the northern-most of the missions
had been, was founded as a hospital, was named for the angel
in the scriptures who healed the blind man with a fish

he laid across his eyes.--I wouldn't mind being that age again,
hearing those stories, eyes turned upward toward the young nun
in her white, fresh-smelling, immaculately laundered robes.--

The Franciscan priests who brought their faith in God
across the Atlantic, brought with the baroque statues and metalwork crosses
and elaborately embroidered cloaks, influenza and syphilis and the coughing disease.

Which is why we settled an almost empty California.
There were drawings in the mission museum of the long, dark wards
full of small brown people, wasted, coughing into blankets,

the saintly Franciscan fathers moving patiently among them.
It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it.
They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it
after school--because I loved basketball practice more than anything
on earth--that I never knew if my mother was going to show up

well into one of those weeks of drinking she disappeared into,
and humiliate me in front of my classmates with her bright, confident eyes
and slurred, though carefully pronounced words, and the appalling

impromptu sets of mismatched clothes she was given to
when she had the dim idea of making a good impression in that state.
Sometimes from he gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish

I'd see her in the entryway looking for me, and I'd bounce
the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,
which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

the power in my hands could summon. I'd bounce the ball
once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.
It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.

4.

When we say "mother" in poems,
we usually mean some woman in her late twenties
or early thirties trying to raise a child.

We use this particular noun
to secure the pathos of the child's point of view
and to hold her responsible.

5.

If you're afraid now?
Fear is a teacher.
Sometimes you thought that
Nothing could reach her,
Nothing can reach you.
Wouldn't you rather
Sit by the river, sit
On the dead bank,
Deader than winter,
Where all the roots gape?

6.

This morning in the early sun,
steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,
a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects
are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy
just outside your door. The green flowerheads look like wombs
or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.
The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other
by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.
That they mate and are done with mating.
They don't carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood
and then go looking for it everywhere.
And so, I think, they can't wound each other the way we do.
They don't go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,
kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true
that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us
when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond
and the pond's green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment
in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope
it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers
from every color the morning has risen into.

My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together
in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing
evolution worked out to suck the last juice of the world
into the receiver body. They can't separate probably
until it is done.


*

and here's an older oldie (from Praise)...

(couldn't get the line breaks/indentations on this exactly right--sorry!)

Weed

Horse is Lorca's word, fierce as wind,
or melancholy, gorgeous, Andalusian:
white horse grazing near the river dust;
and parsnip is hopeless,
second cousin to the rhubarb
which is already second cousin
to an apple pie. Marrying the words
to the coarse white umbels sprouting
on the first of May is history
but conveys nothing; it is not the veined
body of Queen Anne's lace
I found, bored, in a spring classroom
from which I walked hands tingling
for the breasts that are meadows in New Jersey
in 1933; it is thick, shaggier, and the name
is absurd. It speaks of durable
unimaginable pleasures: reading Balzac,
fixing the window sash, rising
to a clean kitchen, the fact
that the car starts & driving to work
through hills where the roadside thickens
with the green ungainly stalks,
the bracts and bright white flowerets
of horse-parsnips.


*

& a poem from his latest collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. on the fear of losing inspiration/not being up to snuff + carrying mulch, as one summer job z.h. was telling me about goes...

Envy of Other People's Poems

In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn't hear--plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds--
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.

**

got a bunch of books today at the library with z.h.
need to check that summer reading list i made not too long ago.
hm.


**
一
寸
相
思
一
寸
灰

reading poems to friends // 对朋友读诗

last night i read (on the phone) some old favorites to z.h. and j.d. ...

to z.h. i read some more recent favs (within the past year):

~prose poems by ben lerner, from his 2nd book, Angle of Yaw

The detective pushes red tacks into the map to indicate where bodies have been found. The shooter is aware of this practice and begins to arrange the bodies, and thus the tacks, into a pattern that resembles a smiley face. The shooter intends to mock the detective, who he knows will be forced to confront this pattern daily on the precinct wall. However, the formal demands of he smiley face increasingly limit the shooter's area of operation. The detective knows, and the shooter knows the detective knows, that the shooter must complete the upward curving of the mouth. The detective patrols the area of the town in which bodies must be found if the shooter is to realize his project. The plane on which the killings are represented, and the plane on which the killings take place, have merged in the minds of the detective and the shooter. The shooter dreams of pushing a red tack into the map, not of putting a bullet into a body. The detective begins to conceive of the town as a representation of the map. He drives metal stakes into the ground to indicate the tacks.



Hideaway beds were not invented to maximize space, but to conceal the unseemly reality of prostration. Thomas Jefferson, who held the first United States patent on a hideaway bed, devised a system of elevating and securing the bed to the ceiling. Each night the bed would be lowered slowly, and with great ceremony, thereby associating the animal fact of sleep with the plane of the divine. The contemporary hideaway bed, which is stored vertically, has snapped shut and killed at least ten businessmen. Most people can be trained to sleep standing up, to sleep with their eyes open, to somniloquize, to somnambulate. Mobilizing this tremendous dormant workforce is an ancient dream. Astronauts sleep strapped to their beds, like lunatics, like the lunatics they are.



Reading is important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame. When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child. We say that texts displayed vertically are addressed to the public, while in fact, by failing to teach us the humility a common life requires, they convene a narcissistic mass. When you window-shop, when you shatter a store window, you see your own image in the glass.

this last one seems to be a riff on the walter benjamin quote (from "One-way Street") lerner uses as an epigraph to the book:

Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street...If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.

**

to j.d. i read some older favs (stretching back to my ol' high school days i guess):

~louise glück, of course (from her fifth book, Ararat)

A Fantasy

I'll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that's just the beginning.
Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born,
new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,
trying to decide about this new life.

Then they're in the cemetary, some of them
for the first time. They're frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.

And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, very stately,
so people line up to approach her,
sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.
She finds something to say to everybody,
thanks them, thanks them for coming.

In her heart, she wants them to go away.
She wants to be back in the cemetery,
back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows
it isn't possible. But it's her only hope,
the wish to move backward. And just a little,
not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.

~jane hirshfield (from her 6th book, After)

The Bell Zygmunt

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,
or possibly kiss it.
The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.

At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.

If you stand near during thunder, she said,
you will hear a reply.

Six weeks and six days from the phone's small ringing,
replying was over.

She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild-mushroom pastas.
She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,
a ventilator's clapper between her dry lips.

Because I could, I spoke. She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.
And soon again, to say it was time to leave.

I put my lips near the place a tube went into
the back of one hand.
The kiss--as if it knew what I did not yet--both full and formal.

As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim
of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean "Great joy,"
or--equally--"The city is burning. Come."



The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead

The dead do not want us dead;
such petty errors are left for the living.
Nor do they want our mourning.
No gift to them--not rage, not weeping.
Return one of them, any one of them, to the earth,
and look: such foolish skipping,
such telling of bad jokes, such feasting!
Even a cucumber, even a single anise seed: feasting.

September 15, 2001

~margaret atwood

(the only weak bit in the following would be the phrase, "a flame/in two cupped hands," which i find lazily cliched and unnecessary in an otherwise fairly direct, unadorned meditation on intimacy and tenderness)

Variations on the Word "Sleep"

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.



**
一
寸
相
思
一
寸
灰

庄生晓梦迷蝴蝶

back in the states, after a month in 合肥 exploring the city and studying chinese at 合肥农业大学。(some of my classmates and i were also briefly in 苏州 and 上海 after the program ended.) here's a poem that one of our teachers in the program at the university taught us, on our last day of class. it's by 李商隱, of the tang dynasty. i've first transcribed it in simplified characters, which is the version she taught us (with punctuation!). and then i've provoided some english translations (the first one side-by-side with the original in traditional characters) that i've managed to find online. i'm not big fans of any of these translations, because i think the poem seem rather flowery, when it's so simple, clear, to the point. the poem--in chinese--i find incredibly, almost painfully beautiful.

as our teacher in 合肥 commented, "it's sort of about...the way life passes so quickly. and then when you're old, when you look back on your life, and think, couldn't i have done some of these things better? what if i had?" much of the poem is built on elegantly wrought references to very famous events, mythological and historical, in tang dynasty chinese imagination. each line of the poem illustrates the brevity and transience of living, in a personal as well as universal way. while 李商隱 mentions famous events, he does so through specific figures like the daoist poet-philosopher Chuang-Tzu.

锦瑟

锦瑟无端五十弦，
一弦一柱思华年。
庄生晓梦迷蝴蝶，
望帝春心托杜鹃。
沧海月明珠有泪，
蓝田日暖玉生烟。
此情可待成追忆，
只是当时已惘然。

side-by-side chinese/english from this site, which also features some of the author's interesting musings on the art of translation...


錦瑟無端五十絃 For no reason the brocade zither’s fifty strings.
一絃一柱思華年 Each bridge, each fret, recalls a flowering year.
莊生曉夢迷蝴蝶 Dawn dreams of a butterfly dazed Master Zhuang.
望帝春心託杜鵑 Prince Wang to the nightjar entrusted spring longings.
滄海月明珠有淚 Through sapphire seas a moonlit pearl sheds a tear.
藍田日暖玉生煙 From indigo fields jade makes smoke in warm sun.
此情可待成追憶 A mood, in time, awaiting recollection?
只是當時已惘然 Yet even then already lost and done.




another english translation, from here...

The Brocade Zither

Mere chance that the patterned lute has fifty strings.
String and fret, one by one, recall the blossoming years.
Chuang-tzu dreams at sunrise that a butterfly lost its way,
Wang-ti bequeathed his spring passion to the nightjar.
The moon is full on the vast sea, a tear on the pearl.
On Blue Mountain the sun warms, a smoke issues from the jade.
Did it wait, this mood, to mature with hindsight?
In a trance from the beginning, then as now.


and another translation of this poem (on this wonderful site), which takes quite a few creative liberties...but i kinda like the interpretation overall...

The Inland Harp

I wonder why my inlaid harp has fifty strings,
Each with its flower-like fret an interval of youth.
...The sage Chuangzi is day-dreaming, bewitched by butterflies,
The spring-heart of Emperor Wang is crying in a cuckoo,
Mermen weep their pearly tears down a moon-green sea,
Blue fields are breathing their jade to the sun....
And a moment that ought to have lasted for ever
Has come and gone before I knew.


*

another beautiful one by 李商隱, with a stunningly haunting last line... (though our teacher said that there are several 李商隱 poems that chinese ppl know completely by heart because every line is very famous.)

無題 其二

颯颯東風細雨來
芙蓉塘外有輕雷
芙蓉塘外有輕雷
金蟾嚙鎖燒香入
玉虎牽絲汲井回
賈氏窺簾韓掾少
宓妃留枕魏王才
春心莫共花爭發
一寸相思一寸灰

Untitled II

The east wind sighs, the fine rains come:
Beyond the pool of water-lilies, the noise of faint thunder.
A gold toad gnaws the lock. Open it, burn the incense.
A tiger of jade pulls the rope. Draw from the well and escape.
Chia's daughter peeped through the screen when Han the clerk was young,
The goddess of the River left her pillow for the great Prince of Wei.
Never let your heart open with the spring flowers:
One inch of love is an inch of ashes.

(found on this highly informative site - i'd definitely recommend a visit!)

李商隱's work truly is lyric poetry at some of its best. i feel that he understands that yes, lyric poetry is emotional and personal, but for the poetry to have any real lasting power, those emotions have to tap into something greater and deeper than just what any individual felt on any particular day--and yet, paradoxically, the lyric is in its simplest definition, just that (what a person felt at a certain time). well, 李商隱 melds the specific and the universal so skillfully; it's refreshing to read his work (in sharp contrast to much of what passes as the "lyric" today, a.k.a. i-wrote-in-my-journal-today-and-then-submitted-it-to-the-new-yorker crap), with its strong images, its witty and elegantly phrased allusions to chinese history and mythology (iconic scenes that illuminate personal, national, and ultimately timeless moods), and--maybe most importantly of all--its written form on the page, and its read-aloud sound. i wish i could include an audio clip of someone with a nice voice (and a knowledge of classical chinese!) reading these poems. hmm. perhaps i will stumble upon something like that as i continue to dig around :]


**

and because since i've been back in massachusetts, the weather has been persistently, stubbornly rainy and somewhat chilly...

although it's technically already summer...

春雨

倀臥新春百袷衣
白門寥落意多違
紅樓隔雨相望冷
珠箔飄燈獨自歸
遠路應悲春晼晚
殘宵猶得夢依稀
玉璫緘札何由達
萬里雲蘿一雁飛

Spring Rain

I am lying in a white-lined coat while the spring approaches,
But am thinking only of the White Gate City where I cannot be.
...There are two red chambers fronting the cold, hidden by the rain,
And a lantern on a pearl screen swaying my lone heart homeward.
...The long road ahead will be full of new hardship,
With, late in the nights, brief intervals of dream.
Oh, to send you this message, this pair of jade earrings! –
I watch a lonely wildgoose in three thousand miles of cloud.


&

凉思

客去波平檻
蟬休露滿枝
永懷當此節
倚立自移時
北斗兼春遠
南陵寓使遲
天涯占夢數
疑誤有新知

Thoughts in the Cold

You are gone. The river is high at my door.
Cicadas are mute on dew-laden boughs.
This is a moment when thoughts enter deep.
I stand alone for a long while.
...The North Star is nearer to me now than spring,
And couriers from your southland never arrive –
Yet I doubt my dream on the far horizon
That you have found another friend.


the line "the river is high at my door" reminds me of fiona apple's cover of "River, Stay Away From My Door." listen here :] also, these poems have got me in the mood to listen to marissa nadler's new album, Little Hells. the mood and some of the lyrics in nadler's music goes along quite well with the mood and lyrical wordplay of 李商隱.

and i think i just have to make one of 李商隱's an end-of-posts motto or mantra of sorts, i.e. the last line of 無題 其二:

一寸相思一寸灰

but baby love doesn't change anything at all

so e.m. and i started a blog together. for no good reason, really. *yay blogging*

i've been listening (A LOT) to aimee mann's latest album @#%&*! Smilers, apparently pronounced Fucking Smilers. i did not know that. until i looked it up on wikipedia the other day when i started listening to the album again in its entirety. i dunno if i *love* the album in its entirety. my favorites are still (in order): 1) Phoenix, 2) Thirty One Today, 3) Looking for Nothing, 4) Freeway, 5) Columbus Avenue, 6) Ballantines. hmm. i guess having 6 favorites out of 13 track album ain't too bad. and i think i've listened to each one of these favorite tracks at least over 40 times. "Phoenix" and "Thirty One Today" i know i've listened to over 100 times by this point. it's an album i like to fall asleep to, and i almost always fall asleep to music, so no wonder the play counts are so high :]

here's aimee performing my top favorite, "Phoenix" on Qtv. she messes up a bit at the beginning - it's cute. hehe.

main reason why i love this song so much? the lyrics! oh aimee mann lyrics. i think they can count for today's poem:

Got out of Phoenix, just in time
a box of kleenex, for the ride
the tumbleweeds said, their goodbyes
to javelinas and DUIs

I don't want to abandon you but baby I've had my fill
you love me like a dollar bill
you roll me up and trade me in
and if you had the chance you will
and if you get the chance again

it's hard to know when to cut and run
you balance heartache with your fun
and when the scales tip, you know you're done

I don't want to abandon you but baby I've had my fill
you love me like a dollar bill
you roll me up and trade me in
and if you had the chance you will
and if you get the chance again

cos I know love doesn't change anything at all
I know love doesn't change a thing

I wanted to believe in you and baby I believe it still
baby I've just had my fill
you love me like a dollar bill
you roll me up and trade me in
and if you have the chance you will
and if you get the chance again
I know you'll do the best you can

but baby love doesn't change anything at all
I know love doesn't change a thing

i love that aimee can say, in such a pretty song, "I know love doesn't change a thing." because sometimes - i don't know about you but i certainly do - i feel that. that no matter how much i'm into a person, no matter how much i feel that i do love them, the relationship can't work, because of circumstance, because maybe that person isn't actually right for me after all. aimee just says it so well, so simply and bittersweetly.

*

plus:
~check out this hilarious series of the 'behind-the scenes' story of aimee mann's christmas show. this 1st part features john krasinski (who is, btw, from boston/raised in newton)!! :) "wow. that is...my new favorite song of yours. wise up. save me. ...and that."

~also. i'm not sure if this is the same series but broken up into different parts or a different series altogether. but i love this clip of aimee mann and michael cera. aimee mann's christmas carol! and i love ppl's comments on this video. like. how they basically all quote the same line. you'll see why.

crunchtime

i think my favorite part about div3 will be the invites. every one i've received so far as been so cute/cool/neat-o! maybe i should make a div3 out of that - collecting these invitation cards to ppl's galleries/showings/look-i'm-awesome-i'm-finally-graduatings. maybe i should finish this semester first.

eating my 1st real(ish) meal of the day (i.e. other than some overly sugary oatmeal) in the bridge right now. heading over to some sound sculpture in the library gallery by henry (i don't really know him but we have moments).

and then it's back to: finals/portfolios.


p.s. listening to noise floor crew's remix of "Machine Gun." pretty sweet.

colors // because I want to rise into today

HOLI!!!!

ah yes hampshire celebrates the hindu festival of color about 2 months late. hampshire time. hampshire time.

strange though, as much as i anticipated doing this again (did it last year), i had a little dream while sleeping in this morning...some friends of mine were in the dream and telling me how my participation would be 'exotifying' and a kind of cultural appropriation. obviously hamptheory has gotten to me. i'm even dreaming in this language. dreaming in hamptheory! but then, since i am identified as a SOURCE member/a person of color on this campus, does that make me participating in Holi ok? this didn't occur to me in the dream, but it did occur to me at the actual event, when the friends (who had been in the dream) commented on "white people's" behavior.

am i not included in "white people" because i am also of an 'underpresented culture and ethnicity" like the friends of mine who have some real connection to hindu festivals/rituals? and now that Holi, especially in hindu diaspora communities, has become somewhat secularized...what does that "real connection" mean? is it any more real in the "diaspora" as in the "homeland"? what is the use of such distinctions? who's using them?

(i think of white parents with their adopted chinese daughters, so eager to celebrate the chinese new year. more eager than my own parents. i think of white girls wearing 旗袍 to "chinese culture nights" when i've never seen anyone in my family wear one. who's more "authentically" chinese?)

context is so important. i have to remember that i'm at hampshire, and that a campus politics of white/POC exists, as foolish as that politics is sometimes (a politics so dependent on "color"). at the same time, it is not simply that i am counted as POC or at times do identify in that way...it's that i am friends with people from India and Pakistan...i have no idea how they would prefer to identify or if they even know themselves...but i know that we have shared spaces in which we shared with each other the confusions, the questions. is that "solidarity"?

i'm more comfortable calling it a working friendship. after all, i'm going to be living with some of these fellow students next semester. does that automatically make us all the closest of friends? no. but it means that we are trying to build some kind of shared understanding, shared space.

**

and...3 more poems by olena kalytiak davis (from And Her Soul Out of Nothing).

Who Cares About Aperture

She may be a lover, may not.
It's like walking into a church.
Who cares about aperture, about crawlspace?
I sat on the front steps with my arms
turned up. Such a small bird, with such a long beak.
As if that wasn't my life behind me, inside that house.
As if those logs were something other
than trees. The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish. She may be a lover, may not.
It's like walking into a church.
I sat on the front steps with my arms
turned up. Who cares about aperture,
about crawlspace? As if that wasn't my life. Such a small bird
with a such a long beak. Behind me, inside that house.
The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish. As if those logs
were something other than trees. She may be
a lover, may not. It's like walking
into a church. Inside that house. Who cares
about aperture, about crawlspace?
Such a small bird with such a long beak.
The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish.

When it's this windy doesn't it seem impossible
to grow old?

*

from The Outline I Inhabit

1. Imagine What Pain Says

In the ghost-making fog the phone rings.

Sure, I'm unnerved, but I listen.
I strain for meaning. So when I hang up
everything's sore. When I hang up
I have to write down everything
that hurts.

Imagine what Pain says:
I'll keep in touch.

*

Something More Fragile Than This

Quick,
before our bodies turn themselves in,
with a reverence reserved for the dead touch me
because I want to remember how beautiful I still am.
While Spring snows around us, cracking her eggs
on our windows, in her meager dress of yellowing-white,
because I want to rise into today.

So why the urge to render something
more fragile than this?
Why, always, the soul blowing glass?
The soul, once again, filling the lungs
with smoke because a memory of regret sweats
in the plastic sleeve of a family
album. Because there's a snapshot caught
between the pages of some thick book:
my heavy 20 year old frame setting off
the 60lb weight of a dying mother. Because
somewhere, there's a negative slide
of my heart. Because and because and because
I'm sure there's a photo
in some drawer that shows me dressed in black.

But I want to devote myself to the mystery
of this afternoon. I want to honor this
falling night, worship the hour vanishing
between six and seven. This moment
where I'm standing against myself and against
you with a taste in my mouth
that's yolk.

With Bob Marley taking that one long drag
on the refrigerator door.

With the smell of spring.

until blinding splendor exceeds the anxiety of wings

thinking about the "language" performances in Hybrid Ids, and how at one point j.k. was presenting her div3 and talked of poetry as being her language. poetry as a language. as complicated and complete, fragmentary and direct as french or chinese. what does it mean - to say, "poetry is my language" and also, "poems are my conversation"?

well i like these statements very much, because it never feels fully "authentic" for me to say that "english is my language" or "chinese is my language." poetry makes so much more sense as a language i feel a part of...ever since i fell in love with works by louise glück and margaret atwood, i have been a native speaker of this tongue. native, and yet utterly other as well. it is the language of strangeness and exile. it is the language of making and at the same time, unmaking.

and yet. is poetry truly my language? does it belong to me? do i belong to it? i have no idea. the point i want to make here, though, is that we need to stop thinking of "foreign/world languages" as "other languages" that we can just pick up/take/study. "language" can mean the many ways of using, say, english alone. so poetry in english is a different sort of language from ethnography in english. the most common example is perhaps when people speak of "literature" and "science" being two very different (polar opposite) languages. and different kinds of english can be brought into dialogue with one another. "literature" can speak to "science," "poetry" can speak to "ethnography," etc. is "poetry," then, a dialect of english?

another way to think of this is that "poetry" is a language that is not bound by any one "dialect" - english poetry can speak to french and finnish poetry. historically, one could make the case for poets being amongst the most promiscuous of thieves, most multi-tongued of speakers. but i have to be careful, looking at these histories of poetic border-crossing, because of how tricky it can be to distinguish between radical transgression and cultural appropriation. what kind of power relations might poems reproduce? who speaks, to whom, and when become very important issues.

on the one hand, rethinking "poetry" as its own language offers an alternative or way to break out of "self/other" dichotomies that place one's "own" language in the center. can anyone be a "native" speaker of poetry, or is it always a language that has to be learned, over and over, learned as well as remade? poetry, in this sense then, is a language-always-in-invention. on the other hand, rethinking poetry in this manner could blind me to histories of language-as-oppression (e.g. english only education policies), language-as-system-of-power (e.g. according to a mix of legend & history, standardizing chinese was a way for china's "first emperor" to gain complete control of a 'unified' chinese territory).

*

thinking about prose poetry.

been talking to e.m. about baudelaire's prose poetry, of which i haven't read all that much. i've read more of rimbaud's. but here's one by baudelaire that i like (fitting for a friday night, eh?):

Enivrez vous

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là : c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre,il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé , dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront : "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; Enivrez-vous sans cesse ! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."

here's an english translation. and another, which curiously enough, renders the prose poem form back into enjambed verse. hmmm.

found this little article on the history of prose poetry. i like this more in-depth article better, though. i especially like these 2 paragraphs toward the end:

The prose poem lends itself unusually well to reinvention because it is itself a reinvention of traditional verse. The prose poem came into existence through reinvention. Because of this, it reinvents well.

...

Although prose poems have come to be relatively accepted in the literary world today, the form still retains something of its original oppositional nature. The words "prose" (that which is not poetry) and "poem" (that which is not prose) add up to a paradox. Perhaps there is something dialectical about the form's success: the contradiction of "prose" and "poem" provides a writer with an impetus and an opportunity to synthesize something that transcends the boundaries implicit in the name.

and i love what ben lerner, himself a up-and-rising contemporary practictioner of the prose poem form, says about the form. e.g. what he says about another contemporary prose-poet, rosmarie waldrop. lerner explicates the importance of the prose poem form for waldrop:

Waldrop’s poetry explores and explodes the governing dichotomies of Western thought: subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, etc. The prose poem — itself a collapsed binary — formalizes the instability of such oppositions. Logic and lyric plot a collision course.

and here's a glorious, gorgeous prose poem by waldrop:

The Matter of Light
for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

A swallow cuts an arc along the roofs, cuts it again, as if to move the horizon inward. Light spills through my chest, stirring up armies of pigment. The gulls cry like babies, and clouds cut the distance with splendid, unnecessary profusion. The movements that my body is afraid of, your shirt on the line does in perfect harmony with the elements.


The depth of the river is measured in drowned bodies, but the laws of nature copulate madly, in moth frenzy. I remember the pines and poplars, their reflections, too, drowned, and the white handkerchief waving and waving to cut the distance. I meant to tell my troubles and sail on to a wholly new identity. This curve was headed for the high turbulence of moist dreams.


The years we've lived together are piled on the path to the shore. In splendid profusion. We can walk on them now, with the air cooling. Turning a "No" mask slightly downward is known as "clouding" because the mask takes on a melancholy aspect. The way my eyes had the run of the sky, but were defeated by its blinding excess. Bands of white foam ripple out into the Bay where the river comes undone. The contour of the rocks, like the mask, is meant to be looked at from a distance, yet is most alive close up, in light rain.


We had leaned out the window and found night early. Hugged the bed in alarm and dived below the skin. To move the horizon inward, makes clouds drift through our bones. The swallows had drowned in their reflection, along with the pines and poplars. And the handkerchief waving and waving. If there is enough deep red in the landscape will even an old woman's embrace spill light?


Words stuck in the throat, unable to take the shape of love or sorrow will tomorrow smear sentimental. Your shirt on the line dries from one identity to another while above our heads clouds cut the distance with, yes, splendid, unnecessary profusion. Though a body of water both reflects light and eats it too, I know its depth is measured in drowned bodies. I circle like a moth until blinding splendor exceeds the anxiety of wings.

found another essay on prose poetry; it also mentions waldrop. and i love the mention of mei-mei berssenbrugge there, another incredible practitioner of prose poem forms; berssenbrugge, like waldrop but in her own fashion, completely reinvents the prose poem with her long, long, philosophically dense, aesthestically eye-and-ear-bending lines. and surprise surprise, ben lerner has also reviewed berssenbrugge. i've posted some work by berssenbrugge at my old journal, but i'll have to read more of her and post some new stuff on here.

for now...berssenbrugge has said some fascinating things on form:

That particular conjunction of events which includes the history of your body, your experience, and your art vertically, and the time and circumstances you are in horizontally, seeks an expression, that is inevitably unique, or new.

A formal problem or limit represents a limit of what you can make or say or see, at a particular moment. You might make a new form by following a desire or an intuition into a further, more contemporary part of you, such as varying the line length according to the horizon, embedding scientific terms into an equivocal or into a lyric context, using thought imagistically.

I find the idea of newness interesting, during a time when there is no recognized critical aesthetic. The criticism is at the edge of what it can discern or say, and so it's interesting to seek emerging form in fashion, in the margins of the arts, on the street, in experimental physics.

bang bang bang

OMG LAST DAY OF CLASSES JUST FINISHED. AHHHH. w0000t.

was so so nervous about my Hybrid Ids performance, but i think it went super. i'm glad i got to go last. i've been going last all day, presenting my final paper in rachel and lise's class last, bringing up Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech as a final say in mckinley's course...and to cap it all off, performing "The Amerasian Blues: Shout OUT Call OUT Remix" for everyone in Hybrid Identities, Authentic Selves. man. so much fun. and l.m. did a bomb job with her beat-boxing.

i'd post the poem on here, but i think it's really meant to be experienced as a performance piece first and foremost. indeed i think i'd be more comfortable to post a video of the performance -- unfortunately i did not plan ahead enough to make that possible. ooooh well.

still an incredible incredible day. i want to write more, practice performing more. i'm realizing that this is something i can do. didn't feel like it was "my thing" when i was attending slam collective open mics here but somehow now...maybe through finding other spaces (AiR, CISA, Hybrid Ids) that i feel like are more conducive to my sort of project...i feel like i can. i can do "spoken word" or "slam" in a way that makes sense to me. in a way that i don't feel like i necessarily need to categorize or name. is it "poetry"? "performance art"? i don't know, and what's important is that i keep writing/performing. reflecting on form is important, too, but i don't want to feel like i have to keep doing a form, keep identifying with one form...when i'm at my most creative when i can mash up forms, integrate and break through...

moving
moving
moving



P.S. kim chang wants me to possibly be a t.a./research assistant for a janterm bilingual course on 1st person narratives. 1st person narratives written by chinese people in china, written by chinese people in america, written by chinese americans, written by expats in all directions...memoirs, poems, blogs...taking into deep critical consideration what these various identities, heritages, and histories mean. taking into account different writers' different subjectivities and positionalities. e.g. what might it mean for a white american to study/write about china? what might it mean for someone like me, who was born in china, whose entire extended family lives in china but who has spent most of his life in the u.s.?

and actually prof. chang really wants this course to address problems with "china studies" at hampshire, a loosely organized program that so far does not seem to be aware of its own history and position -- as if somehow "china studies" could just be an "objective" field studied by anyone and everyone (tabula rasa) from the same starting point. when in fact everyone has a different starting point, a different purpose and stake in the learning.

this course would be right up my alley. prof. chang wants to co-teach this course with a colleague who used to be at hampshire, and who i think might be at umass now. and ahhhh kim chang wants to do a course with me!!! **so excited**


ok. back to earth. need to focus on the rest of this semester first. not quite over just yet! FINAL PAPERS. PORTFOLIOS. PREP FOR CHINA SUMMER TRIP.

the sound of their manifold munching

今天天气好凉快，真舒服　:D

mary ruefle has some brand spankin' NEW poetry in the latest volume of the kenyon review. yay! =) here are 2 of the poems:

A Custom of Mourning

I wore blood on my clothes for three days.
I used my initials, never my name.
I would not cut the grass
nor make repairs
no matter an outbuilding
or mechanical failure.
I did not eat eggs
as they are a sign of life
yet grew the border on my stationery
to three inches wide,
vastly restricting the space to write in.
I read not the news
nor old books
nor the backs of cans.
Everything was heated haphazardly.
As I had vowed,
the mirrors were covered with beautiful cloth.
My hair grew to fathoms
and the soles of my shoes
were made of leaves.
And when at last the thirty years did pass,
I too hated the end of summer,
and bitterly.

Metaphysical Blight

I think it was Saturday my mother was
pregnant with me she could not find
a place to eat the restaurants were crowded
it was the Saturday before Christmas
so she bought a meatpie some fries
a carton of milk from a kiosk
and I became a person.
What if all the cows ate all the grass
and there were no grass?
What if the women were ground
to a Turkish grind for some worthy cause
and there were no women? Without grass
and without women, what could be made?
What could be added to the world?
And the many cows munching in it,
the sound of their manifold munching,
would be as pervasive as a stream
in the not-too-distant.
I am nailed fast by little bolts like these.
A world of worried babies without grass,
without women, what would that mean?
You can guess the rest of the story,
how this dear foolish little bit of
Christmas shopping made me lonely,
so lonely even the carton of milk
failed to cause my cracked heart
to sprout a little wheat.


Hmm. I feel like I already should've had a Mary Ruefle tag/label. Apparently not!

P.S. I have a new links list in the sidebar! =]

the con

my top played song =]

gotta love the neurotic/hopelessly romantic/funny-desperate/tenderness.


I listened in, yes I'm guilty of this
You should know this
I broke down and wrote you back before you had a chance to

Forget forgotten, I am moving past this, giving notice
I have to go, yes I know that feeling, know you're leaving
Calm down, I'm calling you to say I'm capsized
Erring on the edge of safe

Calm down, I'm calling back to say I'm home now
And coming around, I'm coming around

Nobody likes to but I really like to cry
Nobody likes me, maybe if I cry

Spelled out your name and list the reasons
Faint of heart don't call me back
I imagine you
And I was distant not insistent

I follow suit and laid out on my back, imagine that
A million hours left to think of you and think of that

Encircle me
I need to be taken down

first 100 days...some thoughts on 'asian american' and 'diversity'

so. somewhat different topic. i'd really like to make time to write on politics/media/cultural representations. and i'm sure that there is poetry that engages with these things - as i am starting to in my own work - but i have yet to explore that realm more in depth. anyway, for now...

is Obama the first Asian American president? some people seem to think so, citing his cabinet picks and his "asia" connection through his childhood in Jakarta, and his sister's part-asian heritage. (it's also interesting to look at some of the pre-election writing that on the one hand questions Obama's appeal to asian american communities and on the other hand - and maybe this has to do with how Obama's campaign progressed - shows some asian american organization's overwhelming support.

and yet what does all this perception/identifying mean, when Obama has publicly self-identified as black or african american? What does it mean when in his 2004 memoir Dreams from My Father, he wrote of struggling with a sense of mixedness - where are the voices claiming Obama as "my/our first biracial president? mixed heritage president?" what would that claim mean, in comparison to these other claims - to blackness, to asianness? certainly there is that claim to mixedness too, but i'm not seeing or hearing that as much. i'm still seeing this language of clear-cut 'demographics' and 'communities,' rather than a language of opening up across color and cultural lines.

there's talk of obama's cabinet as one of the 'most diverse' ever, with african americans and asian americans...yet there's still this idea that the asian american members will simply represent/be links to 'asian american communities' while the african american members will represent and support their populations. amidst all the praise for 'diversity,' there's little critical conversation on how these roles can be tokenizing, and fix or center certain people as representative of actually hugely diverse 'communities.' for instance, if gary locke, a chinese american (see below), is representative of asian america, then that perpetuates a particular image of asian american as primarily of chinese descent. it also makes it seem like 'asian american' is easily identifiable - oh you have chinese parents, but you've lived in the states for this long, you're asian american. this use of 'asian american' fails to account for individuals of all kinds of 'mixedness,' people who come from other parts of 'asia,' etc.

and what's more, there's a huge amount of cultural amnesia in the air; people seem to forget both the histories of opposition and cooperation between african american and asian americans...as well as the histories of all sorts of 'mixing' between people of color in this country. this 'diversity' discourse also erases the political histories of these terms themselves. briefly put, for example, "asian american" was an invention of the 1970s, born out of a specific sociopolitical moment (the civil rights era, then black power, new women's movements, etc). 'diversity,' in this multiculturalist framework, essentializes or a bit more mildly, tokenizes difference.

yes we can. progress. hope. that's great. but in recovering from the hemorrhaging headache of the last 8 (bush) years, let's not get too ahead of ourselves. remember history. think. just because obama has been doing some wonderful things in his first 100 days doesn't mean we should stop asking questions.



interesting bit from the yahoo.com article:

Obama has a deep personal connection with Asia, having spent part of his childhood in Jakarta. His sister is partly of Indonesian descent; her husband in turn is of Chinese heritage.

"Sometimes I jokingly say that this is the most Asian-American president that we will have," said Helen Zia, a prominent Asian-American scholar and activist.

"He recognizes what it means to be bicultural or bilingual -- that it's something we can contribute to America rather than being seen as a potential enemy or alien," she said.

She said there was "poetic justice" that one of the Asian-American members of the Obama cabinet, Steven Chu, heads the Department of Energy.

In 1999, the then energy secretary, Bill Richardson, accused Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee of stealing secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory -- the birthplace of the atomic bomb -- to give to communist China.

Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement before the government dropped all charges against him other than carelessness with sensitive documents.

To the dismay of some Asian-Americans, Obama initially named Richardson to be commerce secretary. Richardson bowed out due to an unrelated controversy and Obama replaced him with Gary Locke, a Chinese-American.

& much much more on Obama's first 100 days here.

**

p.s. am i, too, playing into this label game of 'diversity' with my post labels? i like calling them 'tags' better, from my LJ experience, but i guess blogger likes to call them labels. which makes it all the more jarring to think about this whole act of categorization...for practical purposes i do it so i can easily hunt down old entries for future reference/self deprecation/"good times" nods to myself. i want to persist in awareness, however, the uses of these terms. "african american." "asian american." by using these terms, i want to explore their histories (past & present), always calling attention to who is using them, and for what reasons.

p.p.s. cheeeck out my new label cloud widget!! i love those things.

p.p.p.s. i love that blogger automatically saves drafts. i've had to come back to this post 3 times now, because my poor dell laptop keeps dying in this wacko heat.