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.