An Excerpt from Valzhyna Mort's "for a. b."

I searched for this in Iceland and did not find it.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems

Hannah loaned me this book months ago and I finally had time to read it this week. I have always felt indifferent to Dickinson but this may change my mind. The Gorgeous Nothings is the most elegantly printed monograph of worn paper and text that I have ever seen. Who wouldn't be enthralled with a page that reproduces aged paper resembling shark's teeth or an arrowhead flake?

The excerpts below focus on Dickinson's interest in birds as their migrations away from the Midwest in the fall are often on my mind. Beside each torn fragment printed to scale, there is a diagram that translates the handwriting into type.

In some cases, I was more enamored with the condition of the paper than Dickinson's text: particles floating on a white expanse, saved from further decay, memorialized in print.

I will leave you with one that was not scanned as the words were more important than the visual representation:

"There are those that are shallow intentionally and only profound by accident."

"Migration" by Jacqueline Suskin

A few months ago, I struggled with how much money one gives Poem Store's Jacqueline Suskin when she states, "your subject your price." I agonized over this for weeks despite the best intention of requesting a poem quickly. One Sunday afternoon, I devised a plan: empty my wallet of all paper money (no matter what it is) and send it with the accompanying (inarticulate) text:

"This is something I think about all the time and would love to know what you would write: That intense longing and sadness that comes from seeing birds migrate through, knowing you can't follow them to the warm in the winter and the cool in the summer (but someday you will die trying)."

Last week, Jacqueline sent the far more eloquent poem below:

It now resides in my wallet next to the found $2 from Clemson, South Carolina, a Metro card with Nick Cave's Sound Suits, and a "ticket out of Indiana" from my father.

Jacqueline Suskin's "Poem Store"

[All images are from Jacqueline's website]

Watching the evolution of Jacqueline's Poem Store on twitter is another inspiration behind my desire to own a typewriter. She camps out at farmer's markets on the West Coast, transporting her machine, chair, table and umbrella on her bicycle. She types a poem in response to any requested subject on small, random sheets of paper in exchange for whatever price one is willing to pay. These actions happen quickly and spontaneously; the opportunity to live with her words is fleeting.

Sometimes people send her copies of the poems she writes. Many are available to view on her website and here are four that caught my eye:

If you are not in the vicinity of Los Angeles, Jacqueline offers the rest of us an opportunity to participate here. After spending nearly an hour with the Purchase page open on her website, struggling with how much to pay, I hereby resolve to complete the transaction before the week is over. I have a subject in mind but the price continues to evade me.

"Brown Stone" - Richard Hugo

Umberto Eco - "The Infinity of Lists"

I packed Eco's illustrated book on the history of art and literature in relationship to the list to once and for all read and conquer during my residency. Mission accomplished!

Eco differentiates between "practical" and "poetic" lists, an area I found fascinating. From page 374: "A restaurant menu is a practical list. But in a book on culinary matters, a list of the diverse menues of the most renowned restaurants would already acquire a poetic value. In the same way, one might daydream about an abundance of an exotic cuisine on reading (not with a view to ordering, but for aesthetic reasons) the menu of a Chinese restaurant with its pages and pages of numbered dishes."

Rosa Klein (André Rogi), Bonnard's Palette, 1930 (from Coherent Excess)

Eco included Wislawa Szymborska's Possibilities (1985) in the section on "The Rhetoric of Enumeration":

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

He breaks down the list into 21 categories including the visual, collections and treasures, mass-media, coherent excess, and the "ineffable." I was reacquainted with my love of the wunderkammer and know that I will probably make art about that subject matter again (hello site specific installation).

"Hour of the Cardinals" by Tina Barr

A judge from Tupelo tells me tankers
piss dioxin past the shotgun shacks.
Done eat the asphalt white.
‘Drive til it’s empty’ is what they told.

Sparrows come through portals
in the chain link windows. Colic
means inconsolable, my sister tells me.
The Pope knew about the gassing of the Jews.

He turned like an eggplant when he died,
all black. In my dining room, a horse
comes through the wall, pastels scratched
against the surface of white-washed feed sacks.

At five, in the winter, they come
six or seven, red-feathered in the boxwood,
for sunflower seeds, a heat’s compression
soaked into the cobbled face of a flower.

Abuse travels inside like the shadow of a ricochet.
Lawanda left with her girlfriend
for one of the Carolinas. She emailed
to tell me she’d seen the sea.


                                                                                    -  Tina Barr