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:

Tree-Shattering, Shutter-Fluttering

Just finished reading: Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Alex Lemon's memoir Happy. I was blown away by the queer and non-traditional relationships in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. There is something to be said for how Singer, Mick, Blount, Biff, and Dr. Copeland were all heart-heavy in their desire for connection, either with another or in their dream-streaming inner desire to capture music, to move people to change their situations, to move towards justice, towards letting emotions lead the way even in their most timid and awkward states. As for Happy, damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Read it.

Just starting Nurridin Farah's Links.
Eating: A blood-orange and cherries. It is a syrup fruit kind of afternoon.
Listening to: Lisa Hannigan, The Low Anthem, Sam Cooke

Weeping still because of Happy. This book made me look at myself in a way that I never had before. I remember hearing somewhere that an alcoholic/addict/self-destructive person is always strung this way, even when they are sober this inner screw of needing to feel, needing to create or feel all things in a room still grinds holes into their being. This quote got me: "I only know how to return all the love people give me with cruelty." I did have some criticism going on in my head as I was reading. For instance, he gets away with a lot of shenanigans and if he were from a lesser privileged community he would have been locked up in no time. In any case, every book, voice, piece of art functions as it is and will resonate, may even inspire some folks while at the same time putting off others. The risk of putting experience and creative works out there is where the beauty lies. I will probably re-read it as it is a quick one- still pulling out the dagger of last breath it left in my chest.

I got a new camera (digital SLR) for christmas and I think I am in love. I had an inkling that I am an image-oriented person (probably because my ears lack auditory acuity), but this new world of moment-capturing, movement-slowing art is all my fingertips can feel- they shutter-flutter even in my sleep.

It's official. Maggie, Mandi and Kara are starting an online literary journal- "The Wild Mind." What started out as a group of us meeting to free write (thanks to Natalie Goldberg) at Mayday each weekend has now turned into a full on project. Our mission statement is on our blog and we are working on an actual website so that we can have the first issue up by Spring/Summer!!!! Wholey F-Holes right!?

I have that tip of the tongue feeling going on except that it is the tip of my toes feeling...details are lodged in my un-flexed, ex-dancer foot. So much writing and music and art to explore that my body must MOVE.




Thinking about characters and how we describe relationships- streaming, turns of phrase, transition...and how, for me, dialogue holds characters.

I have been stretching and breathing a lot lately- trying to open open open and do different and new things each day rather than getting stuck into sterile habits.

I captured this with my old digital on my drive to South Dakota a couple of weeks ago when a tree-shattering frozen rain fog cloud-hazed the farmland outside Watertown:

South Dakota bound

"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
-Thoreau

Your Tambourine Lady

I missed November. I missed my bus. I miss a lot of things. Some days I don't miss anything and then my body turns into a kitchen rag, rung out and crinkly- I slept for 12 hours last night and when I got onto my bus (finally) this morning I listened to Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" and watched the snow sweep itself across the face of Bloomington Ave. The sun was just dirty orange perfect.

I finished reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, and Dorraine Laux's What We Carry, and parts of Jericho Brown's Please, and have been re-reading Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, and have been reading almost anything I can get my dry little hands on.

I am into Natalie Goldberg's approach to writing- free writing, first thoughts, writing as Zen practice, creativity as the loss of control, turning to face the world in detail... I have underlined half the book. I also dug Dorraine Laux's poems- they insired me to put down a poem about my parents while they were here for Thanksgiving- we went to Matt's bar down the street and had greasy burgers and pitcher's of Grain Belt and told stories. Am still digesting Jericho Brown's collection and am gaining new insights while re-reading Mullen's collection. I am intentionally reading Sleeping with the Dictionary while drafting/free writing all of my 8 crimes/poems in the FOIA series idea. Reading her poetry bends my thoughts and it is fun to experiment while writing in this bent-thought mode. Plus, how the heck do you tackle such institutional language/systematically political angle in our society? It's ambitious I know, but it is quite fun playing around with language in this way. I have also been thinking about a first collection of poems, not that I have enough as of now, but working towards how the poems in my manuscript will look like next to these new ones to coming is important I think. I think it would be fun to have a collection with 8 prose crimes dispersed throughout- some lose linkage between the immigration pieces feels right.

Anywhosky. Here are two writing buddies at MayDay Cafe (where we meet to free write and roll cigarettes and get belly aches from coffee):



And here is Chastity morning jamming:



Chastity's show at the Cedar opening for Toshi Reagon was bomb. The gals over at PaperDarts Lit. Mag interviewed her before the gig and are working on a new website for her new album/projects down the road. It is crazy to see someone you love grow and discover just exactly what their body holds.

I love this season. I am happy to be around friends and to be full of music and be ever so thankful. I am like a tambourine lady with a pocket full of jingles- maybe I feel this way because I actually sent out my applications and I have time to just enjoy writing, reading, movie watching, playing the drums (yes I have started boom-snicking around on the extra drum set).

I hope to get a new camera soon so I can capture even more pics. I have been into snapping domestic pics as we may be moving to Nashville soon unless by some miraculous act of goddess I get into school here. In any case, home is where the rock and roll is:






I was listening to "Democracy Now" on Thanksgiving Day and heard Amy Goodman interview Buffy St. Marie. I had listened to her once or twice before this, but damn. DAMN. I am going to the Electric Fetus tomorrow to get her newest album, "Running for the Drum." Her song "No No Keshagesh" gives me wicked goose bumps. I danced around the house while cooking my gluten-free pumpkin pie the whole day.

As for movies: "Precious" was fucking intense and fucking phenomenal. "The Cave of the Yellow Dog" was also breathtaking in it's raw simple beauty.

Besides indulging in these little jewels of creativity, I have also been serving on jury duty...and writing like crazy because I basically sat in the jury assembly room for 3 days straight after getting dismissed from one trial and another one settling. There is nothing like entering the beginnings of winter with a full on cannonball splash into new projects. Winter is for foundation laying. I read this article by Jeanette Winterson and it is the kind of talk that will make someone want to move to Minnesota just to experience the dark winter months and to slip into a hot steaming bath and have all the excuse in the world to slow down and reflect. Or maybe this is what I tell myself to get through the Minnesota winter....bring it on you howling, ear-ripping gusts of freezer breath!

A Jihad For Love

I have been youtubing lately. I was watching historical videos of Somalia and ended up watching a video someone posted on Al Shabab and found these particular comments interesting. To me, it is as if extremes are touching (extreme Muslims, extreme conservatives in the U.S.) on the idea that homesexuality is the ultimate sin. This is interesting because the extreme conservatives here in the U.S. are so anti-Muslim (little did they know they have some hatred in common). Saddest thing about these comments and this video is that the situation in Somalia is worsening.

This all makes me think about how complex and interconnected these issues are- yet the media does not delve into such complexities. They don't dare touch upon or bring up the ties between the U.S. and Ethiopia, they don't dare touch upon the amount of civilians killed in unnecessary U.S. wars, or U.S. greed. Capitalism's greed.

youtube Al Shabab video comments:

"Troy62486 the woman called aisha ibrahim dhuhulow she was over 18 years old and she committed adultry and she confessed and she doesnt have any mental problems she married before so they killed her for sharia rules and i can't see any problem about that, dont believe american anti islam propaganda and how many muslims do american soldiers kill daily can you find me that amount if you can my brother"

"Ever body can write what they want , but us as somalian alshabab r our heroes who protected us from ethopian when they invaded somalia in 2006 after they heard somalia r ruling in sharia law. we muslims we need our sharia law not democracy who let man can marry another man. istaqfurullah. VIVA ALSHABAB....... ALLAHU AKBAR"

Also watched the most ridiculous video news clip from Fox News that was asking why Minnesotans are not enforcing more assimilation tactics for Somalis and then they ended the clip by saying that if Somalis don't want to assimilate (which they equated with practicing Islam?) then they shouldn't have come to the U.S. As if they had said one day said, "yes, I think I'll move to America now." As if their were choice involved at all- running from bullets, living in refugee camps. One comment by a Somali woman that I couldn't find to re-post here talked about how most Americans are of European decent and the only real Americans she recognizes as American are Native Americans. I thought it was the most brilliant comment.


I am not even going to addres the part of the quote above that talks about killing a woman/women and sharia law. That is a post in and of itself.

(breathe)

I have stated a new series piece to accompany "Soo Dhawoow" and "Naturalization." The series itself will be called: FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), and there will be eight crimes/poems. I'm starting with Terroristic Threats. I have no idea how they will play out, but am just collecting language and contemplating doing them experimental persona pieces. I'm interested in backstory and how it can shed some light upon situations that are not always black or white; right or wrong.

Also watched the film/documentary, "A Jihad for Love" the other day and really found it informative. I had no idea that gay Muslims could obtain refugee status in European countries! I have not heard of that happening here within U.S. immigration law. If it hasn't, it should be. Right now the defnition of a refugee under the Immigration and Nationality Act (Sec. 101(a)(42)) states:

(A) any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or...

In any case, go rent "A Jihad for Love"