Advice to Myself
Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

All the choices
and the boys
in the world
couldn’t get you off.

Haines has the unique talent of making you mourn all the bad decisions you’ve ever made while dancing your motherfucking pants off. My all-time favorites:

The Police & the Private

Combat Baby

Meditation at Lagunitas
by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

My blog has suffered during the weeks in transit to Chicago- but I’m back! I just moved into a beautiful(and cheap!) third-floor apartment in Logan Square(rapidly gentrifying Cuban neighborhood…our first coffee shop just opened!) My roommates are charming young ladies with grown-up jobs and an extremely fat and torpid long-haired cat named Sabine(that’s right, like the “Rape of”). Pictures soon.

This one worked on me.

This Year’s Valentine
Philip Appleman

They could
pump frenzy into air ducts
and rage into reservoirs,
dynamite dams
and drown the cities,
cry fire in theaters
as the victims are burning,

but
I will find my way through blackened streets
and kneel down at your side.

They could
jump the median, head-on,
and obliterate the future,
fit .45’s to the hands of kids
and skate them off to school,
flip live butts into tinderbox forests
and hellfire half the heavens,

but
in the rubble of smoking cottages
I will hold you in my arms.

They could
send kidnappers to kindergartens
and pedophiles to playgrounds,
wrap themselves in Old Glory
and gut the Bill of Rights,
pound at the door with holy screed
and put an end to reason,

but
I will cut through their curtains of cunning
and find you somewhere in moonlight.

Whatever they do with their anthrax or chainsaws, however they strip-search or brainwash or blackmail, they cannot prevent me from sending you robins,
all of them singing: I’ll be there.

This is pretty self-explanatory.

A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention
by Yehuda Amichai

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplace made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Donne’s body of work is wildly erratic, swinging from surprisingly graphic early erotic poetry to his famous Holy Sonnets to satires, translations, sermons, etc. This week I did a quick dip; the first 12 holy sonnets, a couple of the erotic poems, one of the sermons, and a breeze through Meditations Upon Emergent Occasions(of “do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” fame).

Hilariously, Donne had this portrait commissioned a few months before he died. It was intended to function as Memento Mori- Donne looked at it every day to remind himself that he was gonna kick the bucket.

The most striking thing about Donne’s work is the way he plays with generic conventions: conflating sex and God in single meditations.

Most of the poems end without a neat conclusion; there are always pieces missing, intellectual doors tantalizingly left ajar. Of course, this can be frustrating- it’s almost as if Donne’s elaborate and endless poetic corridors of paradox and wit are a defense against an answer, period. Of course, the beauty and pointed imagery of the sonnets may be answer enough.

A final note: Donne is featured prominently in Margaret Edson’s recent Pulitzer-winning play W;t. My favorite scene is excerpted below[also, someone has (illegally, obvs.) put the whole thing on YouTube, if you're interested.]

I am moving to Chicago in a few weeks, mostly for Adventure. I figure I won’t be as unattached as I am now for a long time, if ever(mobile job, no possessions of value, semi-obliging boyfriend). I’m buying a one-way bus ticket, giving away all my shit, and sleeping on my sister’s couch until I find a place.

I have a sneaking feeling that life only gets heavier from here on out(graduate school, job interviews, tenure, houses, children). Fuck that shit! Updates soon.

I’ve been out of school and practice for nine(9) months now and am getting rusty. To prepare for my (hopeful) entry to a FancyPants™ graduate program next fall, I’m making a list (and completing it!) of Things I Should Probably Read(Graduate Student Edition). Thus, I give you…….Early Modern Extravaganza! If you’re not interested in witnessing me whinging about obscure/ancient texts, go away.

Each week I’ll be reporting on my progress, including salient observations and occasional recaps of criticism(which I will also be reading).

Schedule:

Week 1: John Donne: Major Poems(4-6ish) & Sermons

Week 2: Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

Week 3: The Faerie Queen Books 1-3

Week 4: The Faerie Queen Books 4-6

Week 5: Herbert & Herrick, Major Poems

Week 6: Carew & Jonson, Major Poems

Week 7: Lyly, Endymion & Midas

Week 8: Marvell, Major Poems

Week 9: Dryden, Essay on Dramatic Poesy, All For Love, and Poems

I will celebrate by (strangely but appropriately) reproducing a short sonnet Milton composed about Shakespeare, because Milton most clearly reveals his own anxieties regarding fame, legacy, and the endurance of art when talking about OTHER writers. He wouldn’t be disappointed: it’s been 400 years and scrawny students(ahem yours truly) are still applying to graduate school to study his work.

On Shakespeare
John Milton

What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones,
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hollowed relics should be hid
Under a stary-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath, from the leaves of thy unvalued book,
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took;
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble, with too much conceiving;
And, so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.