A Week of Unbelievability

Chastity is playing First Avenue's Mainroom tomorrow night.

I got a call from the director at Warren Wilson's MFA program.

And this.

Sweet Summer & Flying Snakes Farm

Guerilla yoga. Superior swims. Goat-nuzzling. Birthday shoes. Thunderous laughter. This summer has been grand. I'm 27. TWENTY SEVEN. When I was thirteen I thought I'd be rounding out the end of my free years by 27. How is it that I feel more rebellious and free than I did when I was 13?

Oh yes, and cheers! to the overturn of Prop 8!!!!







I've been busy booking gigs for Chastity and working on sending out my applications for Hamline and Warren Wilson's MFA programs for Spring 2011. I hope one of them comes through! I was a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series for Poetry this year so that is uplifting. If all goes as planned, I will start working part time in January while attending school and writing. I also plan to keep at this booking business side of Chastity's music as it is another area in which to grow and learn new skills. I feel stunted if I don't try new things. Chastity has this non-stop way of constantly creating soul-wrenching songs. She is a wild one. I love her guts. She is excited to hit the road and I am excited for her to experience this new realm of folk-singer lifestyle. I'm trying out my camera in low-light settings and I need more experience, but here is an 80 degree songwriting evening:



Herbs Chas and I got from Flying Snakes Farm in Bayfield, WI:
*Burdock
*Comfry
*Lemon Balm (nerve relaxer -cold infusion with Brandy)
*apple-mint (for tea)
*Evening Primrose
*Horehound
*Horseradish

I need to study how to make cold infusion tinctures. Also just bought "Nourishing Traditions" and I'm excited to try my ideas out by using this cook book as a guide.

Favorite new green: Persling.

New poet discovery: Kevin Young. Am reading Black Maria.

Studying: Oliver de la Paz's writing process and collections. I've started a new long poem involving eruption as a theme, tornado-from-the-gut music scenes, and an exploration in tonality. And I'm trying out repetition of an image (reconfigured) and sound-meaning as structural skeletons in the piece.

Influences and skeleton texts: An overdose of James Baldwin (Going to Meet the Man). Lightnin' Hopkins. Emmy-Lou Harris. New Orleans Treme. High Noon Teeth.

I'm most definitely procrastinating getting my applications out...must. focus.

This Weekend!

Both Chastity and I's mamas are here. It is going to be an eventful weekend:




Check out info on their High Noon Teeth CD Release this Saturday, June 12 @ The Cedar in the City Pages Feature or the Twin City's Daily Planet interview

...will post more on what I've been reading and working on after this weekend. Exciting garden pictures coming soon!

Just this.

At the seedstore we thought a pic was necessary as my fellow apartment mates and Chas and I might be starting a garden blog called "3518 Blooming." We planted our starter seedlings in the garden on Sunday and celebrated by drinking wine and sitting around the fire.



Chastity backstage at the Dakota Jazz Club right before she went on stage.



Chastity killing it at the packed Dakota.






An exhausted Mama after her retirement party!



South Dakota snapshot.


I've been listening to EmmyLou Harris' ablum, "The Wrecking Ball" and reading some Virgina Woolf - trying to get my lit on this Spring has proved challenging as I have been helping Chas with press kits and promo. All in all, this spring has been gorgeous. Biking my legs into knots, hitting up the farmer's market, making life decisions, putting down some seeds, and sitting in the sun...with nothing to do, but sit. And I love it.

Fever

I saw a black butterfly in the yard this morning. It's wingtips, burning into the spring air, fluttered something in my chest: the hooker in my dreams wasn't real...and she didn't mean to knock me out...a dream is a dream is a dream.

"Sat there down, once, a thing on Henry's heart so heavy, if he had a hundred years and more, and weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good."
-from 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman

Days go by where my body is a liquid sack of relaxation. Days stick when my body is wound so tightly, so absolutely feverish that my mind becomes brittle, the smallest interaction blasts me to pieces. This much sadness turns in on itself. It punches in sleep. Blows out my front tooth- a hot look, I know.


Days when I am able to talk with and see those I love:




Tickle my bones.

Tennessee Come Down

Travelling rearranges my senses. Or was it the Norwegian shag I pretended not to smoke? The sunset started it. It lit me up, and before I knew it I was blowing smoke rings, secretly wishin they'd reach the people near me, lasso them in- close to me as I could get em.'

February has never been an easy month. I seem to run into this question: "what am I doing with my life?" The gray days. The snow that will never melt. My own meltdowns. I'm reading some Jeanette Winterson to get through the days.

While on vacation I finished reading Adrienne Rich's What is Found There.

"The moment a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political."

She delves into many literary and political ideas, which I am thankful for because I now have a text to reference when I am struggling to grasp this arena. She articulates the ways in which sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for life and how that sensuality is inseparable from politics. The collection is mind-blowing.

Points that resonated with me the most:

*writers weave the fictions of many lives and they are truest when most imagined
*never stop responding to new passions and new forces- never oversimplify, as believers and activists are often tempted and pressured to do.
*casual storytelling, music making: people used their human equipment- memory, image making, narrative, voice, hand, eye- unself-consciously to engage with other people not as specialists or "artistes"
*communal art has never been co-optable for commercial ends
*nonassimilating in spirit and therefore living amid contradictions, a constant act of self-creation
*craft: control of tone and image allow the wild and desperate quality of experience to be heard
*the refusal to segregate art from daily life and work
*...might be pondered by all poets who too fluently find language for what they have not yet absorbed
*...a tough and searching empathy-observant and participant: totally unsentimental consciousness, rather a being who instinctively responds to growth, deprivation, persistence, wildness, tameness
*poems live amid complex tensions even when its texture may appear transparent
*to act on a criminalized sensuality demands many kinds of decriminalization- not only of sexual acts, but of poverty, skin, difference
*no sentimental haze- an energy that is restless and impatient of resolution
*the communication of poetry takes place beyond frameworks of explanation
*speak for continuum, spectrum, inclusion as laws of life
*in each case the poet refuses to let form become format, pushes at it, stretches the web, rejects imposed materials, claims a personal space and time & voice
*on avant garde/experimental poetics: what is significance in a society of immigrants and survivors of genocide, the meeting place of many colonized cultures, whose emerging artists, far from being disgusted with their people's traditions and styles, are trying to repossess and revalue them? -not abandoning meaning; the artistic imperative to make it as clear as possible
*the economy of the nation, the empire of business w/in the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare
*images that burn true outside of the emotional theme park/commoditized spirituality
*poetry, like bread, is for everyone

I agreed with her arguments for the most part, but was left with several questions and would love nothing more than to get into a conversation with someone about this book and the literary landscape now (and musical landscape for that matter).

Tonight we are having a fundraiser for Wild Mind Magazine at the MayDay Cafe. We have a lot of work to do: build the website, choose/solicit first issue content, figure out how to maintain literary and communal integrity when choosing what to include- how to provide essential information not available in the mainstream press?




Some Tennessee lovin for ya: