*

Sewing garments is something like creating an extension of the body through the small labors of the body, like cooking is, also, or rather both (cooking, sewing) are of the body or for the body – protective, utilitarian, but with a certain kind of wiggle room to accommodate sensual, aesthetic pleasure.  The sugar on top of living is not just making things but making things good.  Exercise is like the garment making of the body itself.  It involves the small ripping up of everything so that one can improve oneself finally. It is not the work that does it but the work's repair.

*

Knitwear is all full of contradictions.  One can hardly make sense of its complications. A yard of vivid woven calico is two dollars, a yard of gray t-shirt jersey is ten.  Knitwear requires little shaping, but is tricky to sew  Everyone in this coffee shop is wearing it except for a table of what appear to be retired teachers, all wearing white, sometimes green, blouses.  Those blouses might even have a tinge of lyrca in them. Despite knitwear’s ubiquity, one can hardly find good patterns for it.  I face difficult decisions, sewing for the gym:  somewhere between yoga pants and leggings there  exists  a happy, stretchy pant, just like the one between sweat pants and bloomers.  But this ideal is elusive; no one else seems to even search for it.  Some days I castle build a world without knitwear.  Would a pilates class, then, even exist?

*

Although we were eating in a cafeteria, there was a bird in this dream shaped in some ways like a canary and in some ways like a dove.  It had blue feathers and orange ringed eyes, and its keeper, when asked when it was a canary, answered “It resembles a canary, and we can call it that, but its real name can't be shared.”

*

Every morning I wake up with a renewed commitment to learning to be what I am not.  This is the day in which I will sew a straight seam, cut a piece of fabric precisely, follow the directions written by the pattern maker: stay stitch, clip notches, etc.  I will not presume to know more than the experts.  I will always iron.  No more jumping ahead, rebellion, daydreaming, "self-expression," whatever.


Each morning here is that sting of self-doubt, the chances of a wearable garment slim.

*

But for those who think and guard everything they have jealously like their time and their minds it is no good at all what words can set off, more words, correspondences, all those accidental yeses, jobs, obligations, conversations, travel.

*

No one really knows if it is true that in 1840 it was the fashion for flaneurs to walk turtles, but it is nice to think about.

*

After all these years of wondering it turns out pleasure was made from the simple and the gender-specific:  romantic love, children, growing things, novels, pedestrianism, a savings account, nail polish, 2  borrowed french lop rabbits, a cat, and a bird who imitates the bathwater.

/

A sensitive, thoughtful writer should write a history of these things: nail art, strength training, and rivers.

*

It is easy to become obsessed with the idea of single shirt, one with two pieces, no facings, not even set-in sleeves.  What can be done with this idea?  How can two flat pieces joined together in four places accommodate a grown woman’s torso, not at all flat, and with arms often in motion?  It’s just the same thing over and over, like when I used to listen to music, always stuck on a track, just this time in flannel, that time in linen, so many double pointed darts around the waistline cinching it in (platonic ideal).

*

Gardens are very long things if they are to be things that are spectacular: not so long in space, but long in time. If they are too long they are rugged and more like nature than a garden.  If they are not long enough they are more like business landscaping.  

*

So much Mississippi river, giant and dingy, its last few barges lurching up and down it, one log floating upright at the pace of a human walker walking.  The birds make figure eights above it, as if each has worked it out ahead of time to stay in a space on a grid. Also, the once giant city now not so giant, a city after its hey-day as a city, everything a monument or boosterism, pedestrians carrying washcloths and wiping their heat wet faces, handing their transfers to each other, and all the heat wet faces, sweat , everywhere, no one doing much talking in the once great city now not so great, tourists here and there  on carriages and river cruises, horses stopping to piss, small high-ceilinged shops with slender people in slender jeans eating gelato and crepes and everywhere on public transportation and sidewalks the feeling that white people do not ride together here in the public buses in trains, do not sit together with others in public space, are not of the city or hold themselves apart from it where they cannot be easily seen.

on the banks of the missouri at the time of a flood

We walk to the river.  We discuss giving birth in outer space. We discuss giving birth.  We say the most important thing to be this is to do that which means to eat peaches and sit by rivers.  We eat strawberries instead. We repeat 18th century ideas about the importance of interiors.  We discuss Rousseau. We discuss the Alps. We seem to always be talking about the 18th century. We wonder about chaises made of lawn.  We call it the pedagogy of the chillaxin.   We tell ten year olds about the bathroom habits of the fine ladies of Versailles.  We make things that take a long time and prosper from warmness: yogurt, more yogurt, panne rustica, panne rustica again.  We understand about comfort.  We understand about love.  We understand about preservation and also wish to preserve lemons as they do in many places and keep them in fine looking mason jars  filled with oils.  We understand about preservation and wish to get married, to buy a canary, to write many novels, to fill jars with coins.  We wish literature were just a neat thing in the neat things people do and not such a separate thing from making breads and yogurts.  We do not like that my job involves making other sorts of promises. We think the oil spill is in everyone's dream life. We are not afraid of softness but have no rugs.

FEARS THAT EXIST ON THIS RIVER

falling into the river

drowning in the river

swimming across the river

not being able to swim across the river

rape

babies falling into the river

children falling into the river

small animals falling into the river

our stuff falling into the river

too much trash in the river

the oil spill

heat stroke

bug bites

falling into a coal car

strangers

people taking off their clothes

going to work in the morning

death

THINGS THE RIVER SHOULD HAVE MORE OF

small animals floating on the uprooted trees

shade

a way to cross the rail yard

canoes and rafts

a wedding in the abandoned building

packs of cigarettes

On one side of the river we see trees up to their mid-level branches with rushing brown waters and on the others side of the river we see thistles, a shirtless man, sumac, a coal train, a great number of swallows, a smoking man, and bees. On one side of the river there is a racist part of the city where black people were told not cross the bridge and on the other side of the river there is the site of the great mafia wars. On both sides of where we sit on the river there are bridges, one big, one small. We think there are casinos on the river but cannot see them. Where we sit involves stairs that lead into the flood waters but once led into a platform, a mulberry tree, and a frayed metal rope.

exit interview 3: the culture artist

There would be no army of clay soldiers in the tomb, just this: an army of dress forms.   There is no superiority in making things or in re-making things.   It's like everything else, like old men who go fishing: hair extensions, nail art, individual false eyelashes glued on with semi-permanent glue, sewing clothes and re-sewing clothes,  sketching, sketching animals, sketching human faces, sketching flowers, growing flowers, flowers, flowers that might even be marigolds and petunias, perfume that smells like party girls, perfume that smells like dowagers, perfume that does not smell like flowers more like flowers mixed with the urine of jungle animals and some tobacco smoke, perfume that does not smell like men,  one faux-chanel earring, sunglasses resembling those of red army faction leader ulrike meinhof, hair pinned up on one side, purses that are not real, pockets on dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, blouses without buttons, limiting each type of possession to one old suitcase full of that type of possession, track suits with rhinestones, zip up onesie track suits, plump women, fat women, fat girls, fat children, fat dogs, fat behinds, slender men, skinny men, skinny boys, skinny skinny  boys, photos of Angelica Houston, the cracked dirty swimming pools of low-rent apartment complexes bleach-haired mexican boys smoking dope against the chainlink fence,  the workers walking to their strip mall jobs, the strip malls, the dumpsters behind the strip malls, the karaoke nights in the bars in the strip malls, physique training, hypertrophy, very heavy weights, juicy stacey, toy selectah, every apartment complex having its own ducks, waking each spring morning to those ducks, the stateless state of contract labor,  the invisible iv also the invisible catheter, everyone hugging the duct tape replica like starving little rhesus monkeys, everything in the everything like "there is no world but the world!"

exit interview 2. it is not like dance music

Poetry is the wrong art for people who love justice.  It is not like dance music.  Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice.  It is not like science fiction.  Epics are good for people who love war.  Movies are good for people who love war.   Information is the poetry of the people who love war.  Poetry is the information of the people who love war but are shy about this.  You should know something:  that feed is your poem.  One has only little slivers of the self-directed life.  At first,a pie chart, then something else:  there is a brute in these rooms and apartments and duplexes and trailers and shared houses and single-family houses and estates.  The brute is not human, but like a bear, if a bear were a shadow, and ten times bigger than a bear.  This brute like a shadow and a bear not a human is named survival-life. The brute is always saying something, is always paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, all-like give me the labor of your body, not the work of your hands.  At first I was going to suggest he grows bigger as one gets older, but this might only suggests the relative luxury of my initial circumstance. There are children who fall asleep every night in that bear's arms.  My favorite arts are the ones that can a.  move your body or b. propose a new world.  What at first kept me enthralled wasn't justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like aestheticizing and the limitations of reading lists before the digital age. .

exit interview 1. the artaudless islands

The anarchist popstar had a baby with the billionaire's son.  It's a green gray blur of guns and money.  It was a sly proof for those who needed it that she didn't really mean what she said.  The syntactical evidence of poetry without the frame of poetry is like a crime that is much more criminal.  Or rather, if it is not in the frame of poetry poetry is evidence, mostly, of a lack of sense.  This is the poet-critic, that proof for the academy and its attendant institutions  that the disjunction and schizoid form of contemporary verse is aesthetic, not organic. There'd be no Artaud here. Or rather, there is only maybe Artaud, but not on these islands. There were seas (these were, though it sounds impossible, rabid seas).  There were islands (these were, though it sounds impossible, islands devoted to elaborate architectures of rationality whose residents also ritualized the rabid seas). There were certain conventions at these times: to fly, to conference, to panel, to anthologize.  In other circles it was to contest, submit, or award.   I'd never been granted anything.  I was perfectly willing to assign to my own refusal some sort of pathology. What would I retrieve? 

I am going to tell you everything

James Wagner wrote a little review of The Two Thousands.

books I have written that I am giving away for free

MA VIE EN BLING, poems (2006-2008)

48 pages. mostly poems from chapbooks w/ a few poems from magazines.  some poems written for computers with voices.  melancholy, remixed & electro-sparse.

THE TWO THOUSANDS, a history of the future in advance of itself (2009)

61 pages. visionary prose with lyric breakdowns.  once featured links. includes a collaborative play "Das Kapital" & a postscript about the terrible animal always feeding itself. might already exist in some form as a free chapbook by "free chapbooks," but I can't verify this.  was rejected once for being "not political."

hello author photo:

physical culture

I had made the decision to get as many jobs as I could and to work these jobs all that I could in between sleeping and eating and caring for my child. 

I wanted to build muscle and then more muscle, eat lean protein, lose all intrusions of language or imagination or whatever it was that distinguished a poet from anyone else.  With all of these jobs I could eventually begin to see my hamstrings.  I learned to do the reverse prone jacknife The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess and to find a way to be paid for two and a half of my jobs at once.  Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary

Later I understood it was a question of "how much poetry can I remove from me?" but at the time it was strictly about numbers, each hour accounted for in a notebook devoted to the accounting of hours.  

In that my life consisted of working many jobs and taking care of a child and eating protein without any reading or writing my life was not that different from the lives of many other people except that sometimes traces of an earlier life would appear in the form of people wanting things from me. I learned to do the deadlifts with one leg behind me straight high in the air.  Anatomy For Women For Strength and Fitness Training I was always wanting balance challenges, like the 20 pound bicep curls with one leg curled, the foot tucked above my knee. 

There were a few nights I would feel sorry for myself and cry about capitalism and what it had done to us, but not too many nights. Some nights we would go to the strip mall bars of the old suburbs and in these bars the people who worked and took care of their children and did not read too many books sang songs by Shania Twain and Destiny's Child. Shania Twain - Greatest Hits

I could not even stand in the bruised world yelling "it's a bruised world."  Was this some kind of macronutrient imbalance? The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat Who knew?

physical culture

Keep forgetting what I was gonna do: not spend money, not forget.  I was gonna turn that dress into another sort of dress.  I was gonna bake egg whites.  I was gonna work (some more) (then more) (find more jobs) & everyone can feel the ticking of the clock against everything else, but the sun's out, Ulysses is basking in it, my hair is growing out and my quads are still dominant despite month's worth of focus on the posterior chain. They can only see their front sides.  Also those parts that poke up out of the flesh. There are many different theories of hypertrophy.  There are different numbers for this, percentages and variations, splitscompoundsisolations. It comes down to what you eat and if you hurt after all you have done.

THE USE OF THE WORLD

ate too much listen

LITTLE LANDSCAPES WITH HORSES

>

my spirit animal is bill gates

It was an amateur tennis tournament in Kabul.  Although the courts were surrounded by manicured grape vines, I felt a little exposed.  Everyone else had their Smart Cars, dust, guns, people in white shorts, people with money, slender attractive women posing for photos, well-heeled men watching approvingly. Many of us were on our way to to a Communism conference which was to be roughly the size of the AWP.  I mentioned some danger; a mob turned against me. A middle-aged  matron read my journal over my shoulder:  how can you stand it, all that being alone and writing books?