Just came from dining at the Evanston branch of Joy Yee's which now has a three page yummy drinks menu and a viewing of "I Heart Huckabees" which was absolutely brilliant. I couldn't help but think that the existential investigators, Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, were not at all unlike the "dismantlement" experience of Naropa, which was confirmed by Kort when we had a conversation about it later this evening. The "method" = like meditation and the moment of crisis and Albert's relationship with Brad is like one big warrior exam and practice opportunity. Brilliant!

Blogging from the windy city where it's been much windier than I expected. Flew in to Chicago from Pittsburgh yesterday. Gave 2 lectures at the University of Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday afternoons, one on Equivalence, and the other on the development of my work over the past 5 years. Had a great time hanging out with my friend Arthur and his wife Anne, talking literature, poetry, and the culture of academia. In between lectures, squeezed in some quality time at 2 art spaces - the Mattress Factory and the Carnegie Museum. Currently at the Mattress Factory, the premiere venue in this country for installation art and performance, is a show of rarely shown Cuban artists. The Factory is in a very residential neighborhood, and was once quite literally a mattress factory which was converted by an artist who purchased the building. The highlight of the permanent collection includes 3 light works by California artist James Turrell - a glowing red cube, a wall of blue light and a 3rd installation which requires walking into a pitch black space and waiting for 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust. Outside in the garden is another Turrell piece - this one a ganzfeld or skyspace that is a trailer space with wooden spaces lining the walls of the interior. And a big square cutout in the ceiling. I sat back and raised my eyes towards the sky where I saw clouds float by and the vapor trail of an airplane bisect the space. Incredible.

Woke up early Friday morning to hit the Carnegie International, an exhibition that comes around every 4 years. The most compelling works in this year's show were by far the video pieces by Ugo Rondinone and Katarzyna Kozyra. Katarzyna presented a multi-projection video piece which showed elderly nude figures dancing to the music of the Rite of Spring. The artist took hundreds of still shots and animated them together to create the wonderful puppetlike and violent gestures of her actors. Two Asian American artists Anne Chu and Paul Chan were included in this exhibition alongside two Japanese artists (Kaoru Arima being the more interesting one) and one artist from mainland China. Another highlight of the piece was a work by biologist turned artist Carsten Holler who engineered a special greenhouse of solandra maxima, a particular species of plant that produces pheromones and simulates the emotion of being in love. I spent 10 minutes in the greenhouse and I did feel quite transformed from the temperature and the environment. Picked up a couple of leaves from the solandra lillies to press into my journals.

On the night I arrived, Arthur, Anne and I drove up to Mount Washington and watched the lunar eclipse which looked like a stain of coffee spilled across the moon or a wash of brown ink. The eclipse started out like a black, dark shadow, but as more of the moon was covered, the shadow took on a more translucent quality.

Here in Chicago went to a Project A meeting yesterday and hung out with the local visual artists and heard discussion of future sound/installation projects. Saw Laura Kina who I hadn't seen in years and got to meet some of the other artists active in the scene. A funny and irreverent group, much less serious than the poets. Their unofficial nickname is the "go mangs" a play or twist on their counterpart's name (i.e. the mangos). Spent a lot of time driving around various neighborhoods in Chicago, today lunch around Lawrence/Argyle near Sensei Nakashima's old house on Carmen - tomorrow go to first rehearsal of "recipe for paper", check out subcity projects where Ellen and I will install a piece in April, meet with Columbia folk and than do my reading at 5:30. But most importantly, tomorrow my friend Yuchia gets sworn in as a legal citizen of the United States after 9 years in this country. Congratulations, Yuchia!

Later in the week, report from the exhibition of Chinese photography at the MCA Chicago and the new artspaces - Polvo, Gardenfresh, Three Walls, etc. that have cropped up around the city - the new gallery neighborhood around UIC and Gallery 2. And a report on Millenium Park which was only a glimmer in some urban planner's eye when I left Chicago and was just completed this summer. And of course, a report on the rehearsal and progress of "recipe for paper" which will be featured in a story on NPR by Judy Valente to air before performances.

Kort, I miss you!

Hitting the road for 2 weeks tomorrow for gigs in Pittsburgh and Chicago. Thanks to Kort for holding down the fort here and holding vigil. I spent my last day in town not relaxing with my honey pie but filing police reports and affidavits of fraudery at my new bank in South Dallas. Yessir, I have been the victim of identity fraud on my first batch of checks from the local credit union where K has been a client for at least 4 years. So what do you do when you have been a victim of identity fraud you say?

- First you have your bank investigate. Pronto.
- Have a stop payment placed on the full range of checks in question.
- File an affidavit of fraud - the blanket affidavit will best cover you, although individual affidavits may be required by your bank.
- You should also close out your existing account and open a new account (if desired) to protect your security.
- Than you file a police report. (or in my case, I went straight to police headquarters which is across the street and made friends with the local fuzz - thanks Detective Tanney!)
- Than you call the 3 credit bureaus (Experian, Transunion, and another which escapes me right now - 1 call will do it as they share info, but better to cover your bases) and have a "security"/fraud alert put you your credit.
- Than the bank pursues the merchants.
- Than you wait 4-6 weeks for your hard earned money to be refunded to you.
- Than you have a couple of tear-fraught breakdowns and swear like a sailor because it s-u-c-k-s.
- Than you have a discussion with your realty office and concierge staff about improving mail delivery.
- And than if you're lucky you nail the motherfucker's ass to the wall.
- And than you go out for a well-deserved dinner out with your loving sweetheart who makes this world 100% better.

Expect a more cheerful report from the windy city. Everybody who reads this blog for the LOVE OF POETRY vs. for the love of Shin Yu should please read and comment on JB Bryan's essay below. There has been many a boring, nauseatingly careerist conversation in the blog world regarding poetry of late, let's start a conversation about, I don't, say, community and the gift economy? On another subject, I have been contemplating the difference between the phrase "be nice to everyone" and "be grateful to everyone". A few of you readers will know the context of which I am speaking, but seriously, let's contemplate the intent behind those two statements. Adieu.

Spoke tonight to Josh Weber's Introduction to Creative Writing course (who meets in the building! tres convenient..) and gave a brief introduction to poetry - his students had been working on fiction for the last 6 weeks or so, so I discussed poetry in terms of how it is similar and dissimilar from poetry. I took a poll of the 10 (?) or so students and only 3 out of 10 write and read poetry, though their tastes were eclectic ranging from traditional folk/ethnic poetry to Rexroth and modern American poets. The rest of the 7 hadn't really read poetry since high school citing "not as accessible as prose" and "difficult". Hmmmm. I talked about writers who have a foot in both worlds - Michael Ondaatje, Li Young Lee, Julia Alvaraz and than moved towards talking in brief about some of the considerations in writing poetry. We looked at examples of contemporary poetry by living writers including work from RISE by A. Van Jordan, Andrew Schelling's ROAD TO OCOSINGO, Arthur Sze's ARCHIPELAGO, and my own EQUIVALENCE. Than I brought them downstairs to look at visual and concrete poetry on the walls of my gallery. Not too many folks read the artist's statement, even though I blew it up to a 16 point font and it is very readable now. Folks lingered over Ferenc's photos and got very excited about my word pieces "last one picked", "dodgeball" and "offensive play". Two of the women in the class got hung up on offensive play and started looking for graphic representations hidden in the work. I hope that in the end, I gave the students a sense of the diversity of poetry out there and what's possible - it ain't all Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and you don't have to be a self-identifying "poet" to brave the poetic form - what's up with the whole fiction/poetry division which dates back to grad school - as long as you have a love for language, there is hope for poetry! I watched several visitors picked up freebie publications on the floor of my gallery and a couple lingered over the publications that were marked with prices. Selling publications in the gallery is a little bit of a thought experiment. On one hand, I definitely want to be able to and do give things away, and often - the whole gift economy and here's a sample of my work please enjoy it and thank you for your interest- but on the other hand - people like to walk away with something free in most situations (I am reminded of a story my friend Lucy's husband told me about free bus transfers in New York and how people took them if they didn't need a transfer, and there was this one street corner where people would dispose of these transfers and if you were looking for a transfer, short on change, you could just go check out this corner and find one inevitably....), and I want people who are genuinely interested in the work to pick it up and read it, so I came up with a price list for various publications/pieces and am testing it out. Well it went better than I thought it would - one student's eye fell upon American Zen: A Gathering of Poets and he snapped it up at the $15.00 cover price. "What's that?" he pointed. We had just been having a conversation about Rexroth too. It was quite exciting. It's a weird feeling, selling and pricing one's work. I'm hoping to move some copies of Equivalence thru the gallery as well. It will be VERY interesting if I ever get my act together to mount a show of my photographs in this space. The first time I showed a piece, "Chozubachi" (the frontispiece for EQUIVALENCE) in Chicago, I purposely priced the work high, not really wanting to let it go, and than there are artists who mark things "NFS" - not for sale. But it would be interesting to see what sort of interest is aroused by my photographic work... another aside on the business of selling books - I've noticed that when reading venues charge admission, the audience is much less inclined to purchase books. I'm not sure I believe in charging admission or "suggested donations" for poetry events, unless they are specific fundraisers that go to benefit a press or some other worthwhile cause. When I used to go to Blacksmith House events or Grolier events in Cambridge, I often felt they had low numbers due to their admission price. You could go down the street to Harvard University or Wordsworth and catch a reading by any number of fabulous writers. Hmmm, the life of the poet, stimulating stuff.

First open studio: October 29 as part of the Art & Antiques auction which benefits the Housing Crisis Center. To be held in the artist's quarter at S. Side on Lamar. 7-9 p.m. I'll be in Pittsburgh lecturing for U Pitt, but Kort will be holding down the fort and taking questions. Come on by to Studio 103! Next open studio, November 10, from 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

A week ago my friend JB wrote me a very long email in response to my "arbiters of style" posting. JB mentored me thru the process of bringing out my first book last year - I am blessed to have a publisher who is so closely aligned with the Buddhist path. Here's what JB has to say on the publishing industry and po biz. This essay was given as lecture at the Southwest Writers Conference in 1996. What JB has to say is as relevant now as it was then.

Poetry and the Magic Energy of Community

J.B. Bryan


"Good poetry neeeds good audiences."  Walt Whitman

   
My college days were turbulent, bouncing from fine arts to creative writing in a search for the use of my imagination. Strangely, out of sense of political engagement, I ended up with a journalism degree in public relations. I had a nebulous vision to reconcile my uncertain gifts in art, writing and cultural activism. The difference between a career in the
marketplace and an activist in a community rocked me with a constant diaelctic as to how to be an artist.

Working my way through college, I got a part-time job in an independent bookstore. Lo and behold it became my vocation for over fifteen years I was a bookseller, mostly with Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque. Personally I regard my true vocation as a painter, currently I am a freelance graphic designer. I also felt called to start a small press. One friend remarked that I was born to do be a small press, in looking back I see how every odd passion led me toward developing skills which led me on toward this odd enterprise of publishing.

These days I feel like the Wizard of Oz, people approach me to give them a heart, a brain, their courage. Meanwhile I feel like Elmer Fudd behind the curtain, simply doing my best to keep my own dream alive. There remains too much mystification about gatekeepers and too much yearning for approval.

When people ask me how they can get published, the weisenheimer that I am replies "write a good book." Though this may sound facetious, the truth remains that only by pursuing the craft you deeply desire will you create a book worth the effort. Craft and passion and perseverance are the only means to "a good book". Having it published depends on your own interaction with the realities of the book business and the health of the literary community.

Books don't appear on shelves without effort. There is a confluence of many dreams all pursued with sincerity and craft. Books have lives of their own which develop beyond the author¹s original ideas, from writing to editing to designing to printing to marketing to selling to audience to nerve endings‹ all with input along the way and dependent upon the intentions of each and every participant.

What remains most important are one's intentions. Why do any of this work? What's the payoff? As a bookseller I was continually disappointed by large publishing houses hyping product‹ you can smell gimmick, greed and egotism. All too often books have a concept but no substance, no lasting quality. Selling books offers satisfaction if a clientele develops who appreciate an effort to providing a selection of quality. Quality bookselling depends on hunting for books to fit the identity of the store and customers, there can be no store otherwise‹attract the customers who are looking for you, then really know your customers, and provide them with service. If you have a favorite independent bookstore, you know what I'm saying, that's why you go there.

Few get rich in the book business, I believe most who are in the book business do it out of a passion for books, one way or the other. Enjoyment is the reward, not profit. Somehow the book as a tangible object of beauty and intelligence inspires "book people" to keep at it, to do all the boring grunt work involved, and there is a lot, believe me. Hopefully, no writer lacks for passion about books.

My concern lies with illusions about fame and glory and industry. Our modern society thrives on celebrity recognition at all sorts of levels. What drives many is a thirst for stardom‹not following a dream, or cultivating passion, or developing craft, or connecting with a community. I know that my own path has been fueled by a desire to be part of an artistic tradition which I admire. Or maybe by moments of epiphany, a magic energy I experience by either holding a book, reading a book, or hearing a writer read, or an event presented and attended by an enthusiastic audience and a dynamic performance.

This magic energy is the culture I work for‹connection that raises oneself into a larger context. Often these magic experiences are small, if not downright intimate, perhaps to some they are insignificant but I count myself lucky to know the many I have witnessed and participated. This magic energy is what I champion. I know it to be a tradition of both literature and community health. Again let me say that it doesn¹t happen without effort. This range of efforts I believe to be an ecology where we rely on each other's talents.

The poet Jane Hirshfield in an essay called "Poetry, Zazen, and the Net of Connection" describes the multiplicity at the heart of poetry and consequent manifestations of well-made poems extending into the shared web of community. "Indra's Net" is a Buddhist image where "all things are joined by a wide mesh in which every knot is a jewel , each jewel a universe, all of them glimmer in the reflected light of one another's existence" this is an image of inherent cohesion bound by delicate filigree, yet strong enough to hold the infinite.

Each poem is a jewel, a thread. But the poem first begins with observation, concentration, opening up,perseverance, generosity, and honed skills of emotion, language, meter, and realization. One poem leads to other poems, & leads to other poets and books and magazines and then on and on into a larger web of connection. Just the fact that we are all here together points out this inevitable transfer of energy. One poem¹s flame becomes a constellation of lights.

This metaphor explains a process of interaction, and interaction is the passing of energy within interdependence. Interdependence being the reliance of one thing on another for survival which in turn needs something else and causes another action which lends itself to another and on and on and around and around until a larger entity forms out of all the shared needs and contributions. As this works in biological life we call it a community, in terms of money we call it economy, in social life we know it as a network. As a small press I see myself embedded within the intricacies of this web with all the benefits as well as dangers.

Let's look at our current environment: we are in the days of callous political maneuvering, vitriol, blame and scapegoats to bolster hidden agendas and careerism. The National Endowment for the Arts has been gutted, the cynicism created in the attacks seems about to ruin appreciation for creativity at large. Art seems either a dirty word or a fraud.
   
Corporate-run television looms as the paradigm. We continually witness corporate mergers in the book business, publishing houses swallow up smaller companies to form grandiose operations run purely for bottom line. These megapublishers want big sales from best sellers, which leads to favoritism for larger bookstore chains which need big products. We are not in optimistic times for "small is beautiful" philosophies. Yet our beautiful smallness may lead to unforeseen health by breaking the spell of our cravings for fame.

Alas, poetry is not a big product. No one makes a living off of poetry sales‹livelihoods are from universities, workshops, occasional grants, and endurable dayjobs. Though big publishers and many college presses do produce poetry books, the majority of books come from a strange, but wonderful, menangerie of small presses. Poetry as well as concurrent criticism or essays, cultural studies, translations, difficult fiction, or books turned away as not being profitable enough enter the world through myriad shoestring, small and distinctive enterprises. But to be part of this tradition requires an examination of one¹s sanity. Why do this? What does one gain by participating when the profit appears hopeless?

Who is this menangerie anyway? I"d say we are disparate array of personal dreams. Many small presses simply do small books, many of which never make it to bookstores but go directly to a mailing list. Many of these are rather ugly books but for their own purposes entirely adequate, and positively essential, as well as inexpensive. Many are really beautiful books letterpress printed, with etchings or woodcuts, handmade paper, short runs and expensive. Most fall in between with hopes of trade market potential to some degree. (Anyone interested in being published by a small press should know of and shop from Small Press Distribution, the last remaining national distributor solely dedicated to the literary arts.)

There are also other distributors with larger purposes. BookPeople [ed. now defunct, alas] and others handle a range of publishers that run from mystical to wellness to feminism to solar power to whatever is in the Whole Earth Catalog to the most quixotic. They act as access for bookstores to the widest possible range of small press publishing. The web is full of niches and survival strategies. Without the menangerie of small presses and supportive organizations dedicated to the multiplicity of voices and perspectives we risk a cultural environment that is completely mass market driven. What we also risk is a form of censorship through attrition. Jesse Helms bets on the inability of artistic voices to survive without the seed money of the NEA.

Many people are not in favor of grants to small presses, because they go to making books which no one reads. They feel that the grants paid for a few copies of a book which went to the author but the rest sat in someone's garage or were tossed. This is untrue. I believe each small press has a network which gets a book into the hands of an audience. The size of an audience varies, and success must be measured with cultural values besides the book business. If anything, a grant just pays for the printing costs which goes out toward commercial industry, not into the pockets of scheming poets rolling in the dough.
 
What is of relevance remains the business of poetry and publishing. When people ask me how the press is doing, I¹m stumped because the question infers only success on a purely ledger book scheme. Probably I'm at best break even, because I put what I sell back into another chance to do another book. The plan is to have enough books selling a little bit to bring in enough to keep my ship afloat. I have no illusions about being a luxury liner, I¹m happy to be a fishing boat, even a canoe. The real profit has to be in the enjoyment of being on the water. The real effort lies in the energy to keep moving forward. My task, other than making books, is trying to figure out the creation and efficient use of that energy. I'm dependent on others not to sink. I make money, I spend money. I admit I haven't broken even yet on certain books. But I don¹t feel they have lost money. They just happen to still be "in print" or a slow title. It may take years to sell through, I aim to do books which have long lives of quality. Every book I've done is beautiful and important.

My goal is to produce a livelihood and if I can I want to use all aspects of that livelihood to aid other's livelihood. This is a different philosophy than bottomline profitmongering. My money interacts with other money. I pay for a computer, toner cartridge, paper, electricity, photocopies, envelopes, stamps, printing costs which include salaries, paper, ink, delivery charges, phone bills. Books that sell contribute to bookstore incomes and their range of business expenses. Books keep all sorts of boats moving forward. This is the inherent beauty of books as objects of
art that live at all levels.

My decisions increasingly become moral, I want chlorine-free recycled paper, or even tree-free, I want soy-based inks, I want remanufactured toner cartridges, I want a printing company who is good to their employees, I want independent bookstores to thrive. I want people to read. I want people to love poetry. I want people to love poetry so much that they buy obscure books. I want them to attend poetry readings. I want people to write their congressmen protesting NEA cuts. I want to see more people doing more than I can do. I want writers who say things I want to say,  but now I don¹t have to say. I want to be part of, and participant in, a vital artistic community whose vitality enriches the larger social ecology.

Many small presses publish friends ,or friends of friends, or people they seek out. Unsolicited manuscripts are usually unwelcome because enough projects already exist. People send me manuscripts yet never mention knowing a book I¹ve published or even bought and enjoyed. I¹m just a name on a list. Let me tell you‹flattery does work and displays at least a desire to be a friend of the press. The best scenario is to be active within your local network, why not strive to make allies? This is reward enough. But we reap what we sow. An oldtime energy maxim.

Many small presses exist because of a desire to produce fine typography. Books are vehicles for artistic work. Fine printing is an end in and of itself. There exists a love for archival paper, the bite of letterpress, cloth binding or handsewn signatures. These publishers choose their writers very, very carefully. Frankly, I believe all writers should study typography and book art skills. The Chicago Manual of Style has a large, informative nuts and bolts section. There are plenty of books on the history of letterforms and their use. There are no excuses for not knowing how books are built. Making friends with a typographer is a good alliance. If you have a computer, or a word processor, you can do a decent chapbook. Everything you need is at Kinko's.  People have done interesting books with only a mimeograph machine.
 
Making books isnt that hard. I'm not genius and I started a press, many others have done so as well. If you want a book then why not start a press. If you balk and say I don¹t want to be self-published, then publish other people first, then yourself. Most small presses are just such entities. If you say I can¹t afford to pay for printing costs, why do you think anybody else can? Many of the chapbook contests in Poets & Writers are benevolent scams‹reading fees of $10-20 from 100 or so people pays for the costs of said book and maybe some others. But what makes winning this kind of competition better than doing a book yourself, within your own artistic control? 

There are many kinds of poetry books, from modest chapbooks to glossy tomes‹they are all necessary to the world if the aim is true‹if they are done with craft and sincerity. Poems do achieve beauty set in a classic typeface, well wrought words ask for this. I personally love letterpress though I haven¹t printed a book myself. The aspect of handset metal type goes all the way back to the 15th century  a large part of the literary tradition is wedded to the design of type‹William Blake to William Morris to Virginia Woolf to William Everson to Sam Hamill, etc. (Splurge and buy a copy of Printing Poetry by master printer/poet Clifford Burke, Desert Rose Press, Box 50, San Jose, NM 87565, for a sense of how beautiful words can be.) In cases of such fine printing, a book project may take years to find completion for an edition of several hundred.

Why presses say no is usually because they are saying yes‹but to their own selected circle of acquaintances. If you had a press who would you publish and why? There should be lots of poetry books, and there are(!), but it will take more effort by writers themselves to get them to audiences. Every writer should have a large mailing list of whoever they wish to have their work. We all hope for random fans, but at least we should know our coterie of friends, our circle. This is the ecology of poetry, where networking and all the other tasks necessary happen to further the whole literary flowering. An interdependence does exist, not a hierarchy of arbiters determining who wins or loses. What I hope to see occur is a dynamic which inspires people who then foster their own enthusiasms and inspire others and so on.

I advocate joining the Grand Tradition of "doing", not waving "pick me!" from the sidelines. Work hard at your own vision of a book and then make it‹as lovely as you know how and send the thing out to a mailing list of all your favorite people or anyone you wish to gift, or build it for a commercial market and learn the pitfalls of business, or hire someone to do all this for you and you make books with other writers. Or organize your own reading series, you be the gatekeeper according to what you think a poetic culture is about. Or write reviews of books you love and wish people to know about, be a friend of literary arts and support any and all advocacy groups.

The best place to sell poetry books is at poetry readings attended by large enthusiastic supportive crowds. How does this happen? I've contributed much energy to readings where only a few people showed up. The poets didn't even invite their friends or relatives! Who¹s putting on these readings? What stalwart passionate advocate goes through the hard work of organizing and publicizing? What eager person looks forward to attending these events? Who enjoys buying a copy of a poet's book? Of course if you go to a reading, please buy a book. How else does this symbiotic community function and hopefully thrive? 

This is the real web, but it depends on audience and participation. Success in the poetry web is keeping the dream alive, for one's own journey, other's and the all of ours. I advocate pursuit of craft in writing,  but also of good typography, of good design, of good printing, of good reviewers, of good bookstores, of good readings, of good book festivals, of good advocacy groups, of good education, of good arts organizations, of good government, of all of us putting our good shoulders to the wheel. There is something larger than our tiny ambitions, even larger than our high hopes and it is this culture which we live within which gives us a sense of fulfillment, if not outright pleasure.

Thomas Merton wrote, "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being  that did not know it could ever achieve." This is not woo-woo, this is not naiveté. We work on language and vision and form to know the meaning of life and
communicate this to ourselves and anyone who cares to listen. Developing a care to listen is the process of interaction which sends magic energy as well as money throughout the entire community. If you have any kind of ambition for a good book, then help push the stone or pull it in your own cart. The goal is to do it with beauty, or do it in order to work with beauty, get to know what beauty is.

If anyone can help me get clearer about this, please let me know.

The DSL has been down here which has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, I completed my opera synopsis and sent it off to my collaborator in New Zealand. Also prepped a talk at the last minute which I will give tonite to a creative writing class offered by the Writer's Garrett. The workshop leader is a fiction specialist and sent me a woeful email on Friday morning asking if I would pinch hit on the poetry unit. I think I will use the opportunity to talk about the similarities between fiction and poetry, how poetry differs from fiction, and read some works from A Van Jordan, Andrew Schelling, and Arthur Sze to represent the diversity of what's being done in contemporary poetry. And than I will bring the group downstairs to my gallery for a discussion on ekphrastic poetry and visual poetry and a viewing of "Unnecesssary Roughness".

The intern for the Southside program just started a blog for the program. Visit it here. Nothing posted yet, but will be interesting to see how the blog evolves - as a place to promote the artists, or to document process, who knows.

I cooked roasted okra for my first potluck event last night for the artists in res and met the other folk who share studios on this wing of the building. I am 1 of 3 women in the program and the only writer. Most of the artists seem to be local/have some Texas connection - to SMU, UNT, UTD, on the youngish side, median age I would guess would be late 20s.

Deborah Ager has an interesting post going on the value of the on-line journal and publication. I've noticed too, especially among my students and poetic associates, that a greater respect and value seems to be assigned to print publications for the book/material object aspect of the thing and being able to walk into the Trident Bookstore on Newbury Street and see yourself in print. What I say to my students is to consider the possibilities that exist beyond the page, pointing them to Faruk Ulay's Locus Novus and Oregon's Born Magazine which has won much acclaim for its innovative design and collaborative spirit. Read A Van Jordan's ghazal on a bluesman from "Rise" and compare to how the folks at Born interpreted this piece.

La Alameda Press has just brought out a new and uncollected poems of James Koller. The cover features a painting by Wu Changshuo. The dingbats which separate poem sections are well delicate snowflakes and the table of contents for this collection comes at the end of the book. An original design with much care devoted to the smallest detail. Yet another work of beauty from JB Bryan!

Congrats to Aaron on the publication of Days and Days by Pressed Wafer and to Tim and Christina on their new Faux Press e-chaps!

Happy birthday, Kort!

Finished installing the frontroom gallery with poems and photographs from UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS. The first open studio I will be here for is on November 10, part of a neighborhood art walk sort of thing. While I'm in Pittsburgh, there will also be an art auction in this wing of the building and I imagine we'll get some traffic from that event as well. If you're in the Dallas or Arlington or Fort Worth area, feel free to drop in and check the work out any time. The gallery is technically always open. Just knock. There's also a great exhibition going on in the building right now in the Jeanette Kennedy Gallery - work by PhD candidate Steve Hallas.

I have been busy with preparing two talks that I will be giving at the University of Pittsburgh next week. It's hard work finding the language to talk about one's work - I think I was lucky in Chicago, in that my photography teachers, particularly Aimee, heavily emphasized the importance of being able to talk about your work and to think clearly about issues of presentation. Aimee by the way has some new and interesting work in the print version of Chicago's Polvo Magazine (unfortunately the images aren't on-line at the Polvo site yet), or you can view her work at Carl Hammer. I am totally looking forward to spending time at the Art Institute (my 2nd home while in grad school!) and the galleries in River North. I haven't been back since 2000. Here is the transcript of one of the talks I will be giving in Pittsburgh which is an overview of my development as an artist:

Poetry: A Dialogue with the Visual Arts

For my lecture today, I will talk about the development of my sensibilities as a poet impacted by and working across disciplines. I will give an overview of my work over the past five years starting with a few poems from my poetry collection, EQUIVALENCE and progressing to two recent visual text projects I have been involved with.

My first collection of poems, EQUIVALENCE (La Alameda, 2003) took as one of its major themes the connection between visual arts and language. I started writing the poems in this book as early as 1999, when I was a student in the MFA writing program based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time that I enrolled at the Art Institute I was very interested in the idea of the translation between visual and textual languages. My earliest poems were largely narrative in nature and attempted to work out some of my concerns around cultural identity. THE GATHERING AT THE ORCHID PAVILION was one of the first poems I ever wrote based on the visual arts. I gave myself the assignment to choose a piece of art in the Art Institute’s collections to write about and ended up in Gallery 109 of the museum – this is a special gallery that was commissioned from TADAO ANDO, a Japanese architect. Ando was asked to build a room to house the Museum’s Japanese screens and antiquities – Ando constructed an environment which created a division of space thru the use of pillars which act as a both solid and negative screen, allowing the experience of the viewer to slowly take shape and unfold before them. I went into the gallery at a time when I knew when there would be little traffic with the intent of writing a poem on a folding screen called THE GATHERING AT THE ORCHID PAVILION showcased behind the glass. As I started sketching out notes, two people entered the gallery and very quickly became a part of the life of my poem.

After I graduated from the Art Institute, I moved down to Dallas, Texas in 2000 to take a job as a museum educator at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Working in the museum, I came into contact with many visiting artists and had the opportunity to listen to both artists and curators speak on the artistic process. Being in this environment had a major impact on my sensibilities and built upon my interests from grad school. When the painter JOHN POMARA exhibited his series of drip paintings at the museum, he came did a talk for the museum in which he described in great detail his process for creating his DEADLINE series. Like the AB-EX painters, Pomara works with dripping and pouring paint over his canvases which he works with on the floor. Over time, Pomara became interested in the paint drippings falling off of his canvases and experimented with enlarging these drips on a photocopier and moving these patterns around. He than took these Xeroxes and scanned them into his computer, photoshopped them and re-output them to use as studies for his paintings. In thinking about Pomara’s way of using paint drips, I began to see connections between paint and physical language, words and how they are and can be used on a page. I wrote the poem “feedback” as a response to Pomara’s work – both as a dialogue with the artist, but also playing on Pomara’s interest in punk rock music, sound waves and pattern, i.e. the feedback and distortion of a electric guitar.

As part of my work at the Museum, I worked with finding ways to use language and creative writing to help visitors better connect with works of art. When a Mondrian exhibition was mounted at the DMA, I played around with creating writing exercises off of Mondrian’s paintings. From the research done at Harvard on Mondrian’s work, x-raying his paintings and looking at the layers of paint on the canvases, we know that despite the seeming simplicity of Mondrian’s works, Mondrian actually radically revised his paintings, sometimes over a period of several years – cutting in to the paintings, drawing and crossing out lines and moving things around until he arrived at a perfect harmony of line, color and shape. I thought of the idea of creating a writing exercise that would help the viewer visualize Mondrian’s revision process –Actually moving letters and words around on a page to achieve a similar harmony of meaning and sense thru language. I tested out the exercise on myself and came up with the poem M O N D R I A N (eye-rhyme, 2002).

I started writing more poems based on works of art I was coming into contact with and began to shape the manuscript for EQUIVALENCE. The centerpiece of this book is a poem called EQUIVALENT which is based on a work by Felix Gonzales-Torres but also references ALFRED STIEGLITZ. Stieglitz was in addition to being one of the Modernist photographers of the last century, also a publisher and gallery owner – someone deeply engaged in a conversation with artists from other disciplines. Stieglitz’s major work is his series the EQUIVALENTS – the EQUIVALENTS are studies of the sky, cloud images which Stieglitz likened to a living experience of the sky. Stieglitz was deeply interested in the idea of the connection between the arts and actual life, and idea that I deeply identify with and an analogy that I wanted to make between visual and textual language. Gonzales-Torres was a photographer and installation artist most active in the 1980s. He was interested in using everyday materials in his work and the idea of the democratization of art. He was probably best known for 2 types of works – stack piles and candy pieces. The stack pieces were mass produced poster sheets printed with an image by the artist which would be displayed in a gallery in a pile. The viewer would be invited to peel away a layer of this artwork and take it home with him. The idea being that everyone should have the chance to make a direct and personal connection with a work of art, literally take ownership of their experience with an artwork. The candy piles worked on a similar premise. A viewer could come and choose a piece of candy and take it away with them – subverting the visitor’s expectation of the artwork and museum experience. The one thing that is important to know about the candy piles is that in many cases, Gonzales-Torres designed these works as “portraits” of people in his life whom he loved. The first candy pile he executed was for his lover Ross who later died of AIDS, as did Gonzales-Torres. In writing my poem EQUIVALENT, I was less concerned with making a mimetic analog (i.e. my MONDRIAN piece) and more interested in capturing what I felt was at the heart of the translation between ideas and languages, a simultaneous duality and oneness.

I finished working on the manuscript for EQUIVALENCE in 2003, while on residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. Around that time, I met one my current collaborators, FERENC SUTO who is a fine art photographer working in New York. Ferenc was on residency developing a series of photographs he called “FACE OFF SPOTS IN NEUTRAL ZONES”. The images were of young models outfitted in ill-fitting sports gear, looking oppressed, pained, and extremely uncomfortable. The images struck a chord with me, how the work dealt with the role of sports in adolescent socialization and the development of gender and sexuality, and the notion of tribe. Ferenc was interested in finding a way to incorporate language into his project. He had been photographing enlarged photocopied phrases from vintage sports manuals full of loaded vocabulary like “unnecessary roughness”, “choking”, “holding”, and “banishment” and experimenting with ways to display this language alongside his images. I became obsessed with the word play and multiple meanings inherent in the language that Ferenc was using and began to play around with writing poems using sports language. The first pieces I wrote were called “2 minute minor” and “5 minute major” (Daschund, 2003).

I liked the idea of putting the poems in a grid, or “penalty box”, a format in which the words could be read in any direction, horizontally, vertically. Here are a few more images of FERENC’s work. Over the past year, I have played around with the idea of using the playing fields of sports and games as structures for poems. Roller derby, dodgeball, four square.. the last poem I wrote for this series "The Wet Area" accompanies a Polaroid collage of a swimmer and uses the field of a swimming pool. We renamed this series “UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS”. I have had to make sense of why as a female Asian American poet I should respond so deeply to artwork about sports who’s primary interest is to explore issues of gender and power – I realize that for me the work is ultimately about “fitting in”.

My most recent project is a collaboration with New York painter DAVID LUKOWKSI (see blog links or visit www.davidlukowski.com). I was drawn to David’s work for his interest in text – many of his paintings embed language into their surfaces. This first image is called “Good Morning Institute of Health Professionals” – David worked as an administrator for a big medical school in the Boston area which was part of the same corporate entity that I worked for. With David’s work, I lived with his images for a long time before I was able to write anything in response to them. The poems for this project at times incorporate fragments of David’s language into their bodies. Mostly, I saw in David’s work theme and subject matter which have also concerned me – a preoccupation with childhood, food and its relationship to culture, education, corporate life and the relationship between these concepts and our creative development. As part of his practice, David also appropriates liberally from many sources and I had been interested in loosening up my process and letting different types of language and personas enter my poems.

NET COOKIE incorporates string, an old bed sheet and various pieces of trash – recycled junk mail and other objects. An image of a ravenous COOKIE MONSTER seems like the perfect metaphor for a virus in a closed system corrupting everything within sight. Here is the poem I wrote in response to David’s painting. In looking at David’s paintings, I felt that process was an important part of his work. Sometimes, past layers of old images and ideas come thru the surfaces as David reworks his paintings. One day David showed me a painting of hamburgers on a blue and yellow background which I went totally crazy about. It was a damn fine painting. The next time I saw the hamburger painting, the burgers had completely disappeared, much to my shock and dismay. He had completely overworked the painting, gotten frustrated and scrapped the whole thing, covering the whole thing in a wash of red. (Perhaps an appropriate alternative title for NET COOKIE might be “Where’s the Beef?”)In writing NET COOKIE, I thought a lot about the revision process, for both painter and poet, and the frustrations of overworking and losing a piece, when you can no longer see what is in front of you and cannot reconstruct what came before. In each our own way, we both filtered this process thru the tech jargon that was a part of our everyday lives in the corporate world.

OPTOMETRIST was the first piece that David painted for this series – it was for him a break-through painting. Strangely enough, it was also the first of David’s images that I ended up writing about, without knowing of its importance in his process. In this painting, there are collaged elements – the logo for Copy Cop appears in triple vision, alongside an enlarged thumbprint, and a Xerox transfer of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic, (which is a stand in for the artist and a recurring figure throughout his paintings). When I first saw this painting, I felt that it was really teaching me how to see, retraining my eye. I read this painting like an eye chart of various elements. All art and all poetry, to a degree have the potential to teach us how to see the world anew. My poem OPTOMETRIST was the response to David’s painting. In this poem, I lifted the form from the familiar eye chart we encounter at the doctor’s office when having our vision tested. This poem marked the first time I began to experiment with using symbols and multiple typefaces within a single poem. No word seemed to communicate transparency as well as literally taking the fill out of “see-through” and making the language visually transparent.

Another of David’s works which was a “breakthrough” poem for me was his painting STA-TYT which I felt was a very aesthetically unpleasing painting but had something to say which I needed to figure out. For several months, my mind had nothing to grab on to in looking at this work, Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t the mind, but the eye at work in this painting. This is the poem I wrote in response. I played with moving the break in the title (STA-TYT to STAT-YT) to create a word/sound play that would allow me to catalog the elements of the painting “stat” and explore the definition of the indirect object (“it”). I found that ultimately, the painting and the poem are both unique physical objects, neither with a direct equal, each resisting simple paraphrase.

38,995 MILK CAPS FOR A COMPUTER was an image that interested me for its reference back to childhood, education and nutrition. As an Asian American, I did not find out until much later in my life that I am lactose intolerant, something which was overlooked in my socialization experience of food as a child. I found the idea of drinking all those jugs of milk to win a free computer as disgusting back then as I do now. Working in the healthcare industry, you learn some interesting things about health and nutrition and one piece of information that I retained long enough to slip into my poem HOODED (like the milk company) PROMOTIONS was that the food triangle was not developed by healthcare workers at all but was created by the agricultural industry to market goods. I also lifted some language for this poem from milk industry ads – the media and television had a huge impact on both how David and I grew up, despite us being very different individuals, this was one thing that we discovered we had in common in the course of our conversations together.

This last piece that I will talk about is called HEADS UP 7 UP. Heads up 7 up is a childhood game played in classrooms, typically in elementary school. The game, like dodgeball, deals with the idea of being picked or singled out. But here, those who are picked are at least somewhat lucky; if those picked can guess who picked them, they reverse the power structure and quite literally open their eyes. Those who are not picked continue to have their eyes closed and are in a sense excluded from the game and must wait until their chance to switch roles arises. The game can be viewed as both an exercise in learning how to follow rules and to accept fairly static roles.

A lot of the ideas that David and I are dealing in our project with have to do with subverting rules and authority, re-examining the notion of learning, and redefining the way that we see and communicate.

It’s been important to me to reflect back on my own childhood and education, and to realize that my interest in the relationship between visual arts and language developed at a very early age, long before any formal schooling or interest in poetry developed. As the child of immigrant parents, I was challenged to find new ways to communicate across languages to connect to my parents. My own mother is a visual artist working in abstraction and the visual arts have always had some presence in my life. While I do have vague memories of reading Dr. Seuss together, the more poignant memories I have of my childhood relate to moments spent in Museums with my mother and father, looking at works of art together, listening deeply to what each had to say and learning things in a much more experiential way than in school.

In wrapping up, I think it is important to say that I’ve approached writing for the sports project and NUTRITIONAL FEED in the way that I approached writing poems for EQUIVALENCE. All of the poems for both the sports project and NUTRITIONAL FEED were written with very little actual dialogue between myself and my collaborators, although there has definitely been an ongoing exchange of ideas. This is interesting to me, because as living artists, both Ferenc and David are resources who are obviously available to me and who can take an active role in my creative process. With EQUIVALENCE, the artists who informed my poems were largely unavailable, often times dead. Ferenc and David did not give me clues to understanding their work or suggest directions that I might take in writing my texts. At times I asked questions to clarify my understanding of areas like hockey or bodybuilding , but ultimately, the dialogue that occurs is one that truly occurs between the photographs or paintings and the poems themselves, image and the word. In this way, while both the images and the poems stand independently of one another and are “successful”, in that they work in their own ways, what is more interesting to me is the way in which these works talk to one another within a context.

Often in the arts, we talk about lineage and influence – I am more interested in the notion of “CONSOCIATION” and conversation- I feel that I am in a dialogue with the works of art themselves, and at times, with their creators, but that these are 2 very different conversations.

Thanks to Chi Tung of Asia Pacific Arts for the positive review of Equivalence!

Have you all met the young and talented Orlando White? Orlando studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts with Arthur Sze and at Naropa with the usual suspects. Here is a poem by Orlando - please feel free to post comments.

Ars Poetica

He gave me a book and I opened it. The first line I noticed was “…the child with the blank face of an egg.” Then, I felt my face erased to its skull.




There was a missing space. So I peeled off a piece of a letter from the next page. And I nudged it carefully between the i and j.




She said “How does it feel to have your head stuck in a zero?” Silence in a moment is imagination and I replied, “It is my halo.”




I erased a zero and it appeared in someone else’s thoughts. The sum of a zero and zero is zero. I wrote it out again, and this time it made sense.




He said “We raise it to the lips of the nearest ear.” And when I opened books, I listened for ink boiling, the scent of words; coffee brewing in my ear.




I watched the clock as if reading a sentence. The numbers were letters. The short hand was a subject, the long hand, a predicate, and the seconds, verb.




We both stared at the ceiling. I said “My eyes feel as if they’re inside two cups.” She leaned toward me and said, “Shall I pour them into your ears?”




I heard the circle shaped like a clock; it did not tick, instead, made the sound of an insect. I stared at it and saw a cricket shaped like a number.
I looked at a handicap sign. Language structures what we see without saying it. There were three letters and a punctuation mark: the C, the F, the L, and a period.




He picked up a stone, held it close to his ear; shook it as if were a broken watch. Then, he took it home, opened it, and removed a grain of sand stuck in its gears.




I opened an envelope addressed to me. I pulled out a black piece of paper, unfolded it. But in the letter, the sender never left a name, just a white space.




“I like that you exist,” she said. Like the lower case letter i, my body felt present on a page: fitted in a dark suit, white neck tie, and a smile inside the black dot.




But it was the way her skin felt as she dressed into a shadow. The way her figure, under dark silk feels like slipping on a long black dress.




I am a skeleton. I am a sentence too. Although like you I am not a meaning or a structure. But, a silence between a complete thought.

Kort gone to take part II of the National Herbal Board Exam and finally a quiet moment at the casa. Listened to local NPR affiliate KERA this morning while unpacking more boxes - great piece on Elliott Smith who died about a year ago now. His posthumous album due out Tuesday. Smith grew up in Dallas, Duncanville, to be precise, and the local papers are buzzing about the new album.

Loft living is more challenging than I thought it would be. Southside on Lamar is a terrific building but when the developers were designing the spaces, no one thought about the need for closet space. Not in the artist's quarters where I live or the 3,000 square feet lofts upstairs. So residents here invest in armoires or little DIY structures to create storage solutions. I went armoire shopping yesterday in lower Greenville and also hit a few yard sales and my very first estate sale. The estate sale had an eerie feel to it. We went to a sale organized by Ahab Bowen, who was not the deceased (morbid, ack!), but a company who contracts with people looking to sell off their belongings. Basically, you have not been to an estate sale before, you walk into a normal residential home and everything is pretty much where it would have lived with its owners. The nightstands and the bureaus are in the bedroom, the clothes are in the closet...the dishes are in the kitchen - everything is out on countertops and on display with pricetags and discounts after so many days of being on display. And the crowds of people are like at a Filene's Basement sale. Good God! In this particular home that I was in, a portrait of an attractive middle-aged woman hung over the fireplace, overlooking the living room and tables of fine china and collectibles being sorted through by the great unwashed. By the dishware and furniture, it is fairly easy to place the age of the former occupants of the house. I picked up a couple of original opera librettos from the Met for a buck and bought an $8 Limoge cup and saucer for E. who's big find was a typewriter table to add to her painting/teaching studio. I felt a sense of deep shock and displacement at the estate sale and much preferred the vibe of a casual Saturday morning yard/garage sale - the ability to engage with the owner about the objects for sale. Elsewhere picked up a 3 speed bike for Kort complete with leather seat to replace his Huffy. E.'s eye landed on a feather jacket which sold to her for $2. The owner wore it once, her husband said - he probably had very little since of how much she paid for it. Yard saling can be a highly addictive activity, albeit fun. For those of you who don't know John Freyer's work on this subject, please check him out now. John was at MacDowell this past spring when I was in residence and I went on a garage sale run with him in and around Peterborough. He is best known for his PBS pilot show on yard sale-ing - with his partner, he traveled the U.S. in a restored ambulance ("Lance") and went around to yard sales, garage sales and thrift stores purchasing items, interviewing buyers, and sellers and gathering the history of secondhand objects. The piece is quite tender and thought-provoking and John is working on a book that will supplement the documentary and project.

More soon on my arbiters of style post and responses received when things settle down (thanks JB for your warm and generous response! I too love Lewis Hyde's "The Gift"). Working now on installing my first gallery show in my frontroom. I am hanging work from "Unnecessary Roughness", my sports project with Ferenc Suto - a few photographs alongside some text pieces. Eventually, I hope to get a little table in that space where I can put out some freebie publications (extra contributors' copies of chaps, mags,etc.) during open studios and my Underwood typewriter which I hope will coax visitors to type their own poems. Kort suggested that I curate an ongoing reading series in the space which I cannot see happening for the time being, given my lack of interest in being an arbiter! As for our dream of a tea room - well given that the space may get some heavy traffic from the public, we may have to hold on that one, or have the tea room on a rotating basis, or... something. It is a nice feeling to walk out my front door into my gallery space and have nothing in that space except for my current work up on the walls. It is my viewing room and a place to reassess issues of presentation. After the Hedwig Dance performances in Chicago in early November, I may invest in a monitor and DVD player and show the dance piece in the gallery space as an extension of the performance that takes place in Chi-town.

Two fun calls for work:

Winter 2004-5 Call for Submissions
        

Artists interested in submitting proposals for consideration should contact Pond by submitting images and project descriptions to the mail box address below.  Submissions may be received by email but must contain the
subject title "Submission" (for easier sorting). 

This Way Please
Opening Reception: Sat Nov 19th, 2004, 7-10 pm
Deadline to Receive Initial Project Descriptions: Sun Oct 24th
Location: Pond (324 14th St., San Francisco)
This Way Please is a participatory curatorial installation premised on the concept of a travel agency, offering tours of the exotic everyday. For this exhibition, Pond asks artists and non-artists to contribute their views ofthe world as represented through personalized maps, guides, tours and cartographic accoutrement. For instance, a submission could consist of a map that highlights the personal, an audio tour that illuminates a buried history, or a tour guide that frames a subjective experience of space. For the exhibition, singular items will be displayed in the gallery from Nov 20-21 (and thereafter by appointment) and multiples will be distributed to passersby and gallery visitors.  This event is scheduled to coincide with
the annual Crosswalks Mission Art Walk. This exhibition in the future may be presented as satellite tour agencies or tour guides disseminating maps.

Shopdropping
Opening Reception: Fri Feb 11th, 2005, 7-10 pm
Deadline to Receive Submissions: Dec 10th, 2004
Location: Bay Area local conglomerate retail stores
ShopDropping is an exhibition featuring artwork and live art parodying consumer commodities. This show will feature performance, installation, faux products and services that take place inside supermarkets and retail stores
throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  In addition, writers (fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction) are invited to submit text-based pieces which will be inserted into the pockets of garments at department/retail stores. Artists interested in submitting work should contact us at the information below with images and a written proposal.   In addition, artists will be asked to document their work for an exhibition through the creation of multiples, duplicates, audio, photo, video, etc.

Pond is a 501(3)c non-profit grassroots art-activist organization dedicated to showcasing experimental art.  Our mission is to create a non-competitive forum that fosters dialogue between artists and the greater community in an accessible and intimate environment.

Pond: art, activism,  and ideas
Gallery: 324 14th St., San Francisco, CA 94103
Mail: 1855 Mission St #229, San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel: 415.437.9151 | fax: 800.867.2839
pondpeople@mucketymuck.org | www.mucketymuck.org
   

Thanks, Eileen for your Tuesday post on the po biz!

Despite the absence of chairs, a desk, and any physical comforts, I've decided to dig in. Here is the first poem written while on residency:


look mom no plugs OR inside the iron lung

brachiole branchiole bronchiole

boneless flank of beef
invertebrate animal anatomy
lacks a backbone

branching as
in the government
my Uncle Bill

on life support
keeps breathing thanks
to negative pressure

fed on dream rub
eraser heads
to keep clean

steel zinc manganese

normal

household

(+) battery (-)

and waste
recyclable
leakage & rupture

the circuit complete

when the power runs out
we’ll just hum
a song

(clearing of throat)

followed by

(characteristic wheezing noises )

OK
OK
OK

Folk currently in residence at Southside:

David Sequeira
Kaneem Smith
Ryan Fitzer
Baseera Kahn
Christopher Jagers
Brian Fridge

and due to arrive soon:

Misty Keasler

Yesterday we got our phone line and DSL hooked up. Thursday morning our things should be arriving from the shipping company. I'll be here for about 2 weeks before I have to fly to Pittsburgh and than Chicago for another round of programs. Hard to be "here" when the mind is running around elsewhere.

While I was in Boston, I had the chance to sit down over dinner with my friend Walker and we had a good talk about negotiating the path of being an artist vs a working "professional" in the arts which somehow made me feel a great deal better. Walker's in a fortunate position - he doesn't have to sell his paintings to pay the bills, though he's represented by a fine dealer in New York, and he is able to spend as much of his time painting as he would like. I've felt let down recently about my relationship to the arts community here in Dallas - old connections, that is, which haven't come thru - it's been frustrating to be told/asked to apply for position openings, and in the end I find that my former attitude of "when hell freezes over" better serves me. My attitude has grown towards one where museums and the culture of museums and galleries can be viewed as a type of arbiter of style, a social and artistic elite - and I think in some ways, this role may also apply to editors, anthologists, critics as well. And in my own way, as a poet who writes about the arts, as a blogger, as an occasional critic, I am my own arbiter of style - which is a role that I would like to resist. Or rather I believe that we should all be our own individual arbiters of style. I arrive at a feeling that chasing after ANY sort of status or recognition is an illusion and so what if nothing ever gets published or shown again? In the end if it is about the work and the process that's all there is. The sooner I put this belief into practice, the better.