Thanksgiving was calm and uneventful. Spent yesterday at Kort's Uncle Jim's ranch in the community of "Poetry", Texas (Terrell to be specific) and later that day at my first rodeo. "Poetry" is not actually a town on any map of Texas, rather known as a small community in East, Texas where in the early days, an itinerant worker would come thru town and nail his poems to trees. When this person passed on, the community adopted his passion as their namesake. What's poetic about Poetry, Texas? Hard to say, but wouldn't that make an interesting subject for a documentary? On the drive, we spied lots of cows, horses, green fields, a Baptist cemetery and church. It was my first time ever on a farm and I don't think I can quite describe the copious amounts of horse excrement that were everywhere. Good reason to wear cowboy boots and to keep fully covered. Watched Jim get ready for the rodeo by clipping his horse's hooves and filing them (his pet pitt bull devoured these clippings), buzz cutting the horse's mane. We accompanied Jim while he fed his herd of pregnant cows and one bull and drove around his 250 acres, down a grass runway which he uses for piloting a small cessna plane.

The church sponsored rodeo happened in the evening at a space that also doubles as a house of worship - the cowboy church, I think it was called. Bleachers and chairs surrounding a dirt ring where on one end, a pen for calves and on the opposite end, the entry way for the cowboys/girls. We only stayed for 3 events - cow separation, cow roping and faux cow branding. Those little calves sure did look scared and it was hard to watch the whole thing - in the first event, the goal of the cowboy is to break up the herd and get certain cows down field. Not such a bad event, but the cows were mistrustful, suspicious and at certain points, formed a wall, gazing warily out at the humans. Event #2, cow roping, more traumatic. A team of 4 takes on a little calf, one rider ropes the calf (sometimes too tightly) and the rest of the group tackles the calf while one of the team grabs a ribbon off of the calf's ankle and runs it over to the judge. Similar action in the fake cow branding event. I should add that in these two events, the calves were made to wear fake headgear with horns (blunted on the tips) so that the ropers would have something to get their rope around. The smells were terrible.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers!

Heading to Kort's uncle David's house for a gathering of the Bergman clan. Dinner starts at 12 noon (isn't that extraordinarily early?), to be followed by professional sports.

Things that I am grateful for:

- Kort
- my family
- my friends
- my community
- this residency program
- opportunities to transform

The folks on the Buffalo List have been circulating emails about the NEA results for poetry grants. Apparently rejection letters have been mailed (oy - a second ago I typed "failed", instead of "mailed"). This was my first year applying for one, and like everyone else who applied, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the results, and extra anxious, because of my screwy mail situation which has resulted from mail/identity theft and which makes me question everything about the U.S. postal service. Anyways, after reading about the NEA thread on Buffalo I went to bed last night and promptly had a nightmare. Boy was it terrible. I dreamed I got a big fat rejection PACKAGE which included handwritten notes from the 4 jurors who read and evaluated my application. Several of them commented on the unprofessional job I had done on assembling my package, laughing at what I had put a lot of hard work and thought into. The clincher was that as my eye ran down the list of jurors it fell upon the name and handwriting of a young poet from Ohio who I met at MacDowell in 2003 who embodied self-interest, deception, sharkiness, gossip and contentiousness. And this poet had left me some rather mean and dismissive notes on my work. Hey - I thought the process was supposed to be anonymous! I woke up quite distraught and didn't remember the dream until I was reading the new comments on the NEA thread at Buffalo and thought, wow, this is really familiar. The Buffalo group have some interesting thoughts on the NEA process, prize winners, sensibilities and also touch on the Guggenheim process - all illuminating stuff.

Yesterday I met a poet who may be residing here at Southside while she completes another residency in the area in February. She was lovely and somewhat jetlagged having just flown in from Tokyo and I liked her quite a bit but our conversation went something like this:

Poet: How did you get your book published? Did you win a prize?
SP: No prize. No...
Poet: But you won a prize?
SP: No, no prize.
Poet: So are you working on your MFA here?
SP: No, I already have one.
Poet: Really, from where?

and than

Poet: So how do you know your next book is getting published? And did you win a prize? Do you have a contract?
SP: No, no contract.
Poet: Well how do you know...

ARGGGGGGHHHHHHH....

The airline prices to Hartford finally dropped and I managed to purchase a ticket to Connecticut for the America Zen reading next week. Here are the details if you are in the New York or Connecticut areas:

America Zen: A Gathering of Poets reading with

Chase Twichell
Stanford Forrester
Margaret Gibson
Shin Yu Pai

at the University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art. December 1 at 7 p.m. Visit the Museum's website for directions at:

http://www.benton.uconn.edu/visitor.htm

Thanks to Margaret for organizing this reading!

My main project this week is to finish working on a children's story concept that has been sitting on my desk since October for which I will at some point be looking for test readers. If you have kids in the 7-10 range who would be interested in reading a story about chickens, please contact me... in the course of thinking about literature for children, I've recently rediscovered a few old favorites including Lon Po Po. Amanda has been reading the Moomin books - I had almost forgotten about these delightful books - the local branch of the library in Highgrove carried Finn Family Moomintroll and maybe one another of Tove Jansson's books which are filled with wonderful drawings of fantastic creatures like the Snork Maiden and the Hattifatteners.

What do elevators and art galleries have in common? This is the question Candida Alvarez' Subcity Projects poses. Housed in non-functioning elevator space on the 8th floor of the Fine Arts Building on Lower Michigan Ave., Alvarez invites a variety of artists to install work in this peculiar space. I am supposed to be installing a work in this space next year and while I had some serious resistance initially around the idea of the space in general, I am now growing to be very excited about the possibilities. I see the elevator as a metaphor for the high culture of art, likening this space to a pedestal or vitrine under which objects are displayed. Works are literally suspended on the 8th floor of a non-functional elevator and the doors of the elevator are padlocked for security, keeping the viewer from full engagement with the work. The elevator is an interesting vehicle in that it literally transports people/objects to higher levels, but at the same time, occupies such a daily/mundane function of human life/our everyday environment. High vs. low culture.

Robert Downey, Jr. crosses over into music and the Best American Poetry reviewed at the New York Times website.

On blog comments - initially I had my blog set to accept comments from registered users only. Then people started emailing me comments about the Asian American anthology post and telling me that they were unable to post their comments. So than I changed the settings to accept comments from all users. So now there is a high number of comments from anonymous folks. I understand wanting to protect one's anonymity for various reasons- but I just changed my settings again to only accept comments from registered users. There have been a lot of passionate things said on the subject of the Asian American anthology/community and I think we would all like to know who's participating in the real dialogue in all fairness to those involved. If you are unable to post comments and would like to be - email me your comments and I will post them on your behalf.

Talk about fucked up - my dear friend Catherine has also been going thru her Saturn return and has been in the middle of trying to move out of her apartment for the past 3 months - the date keeps get moved back and her landlord is absolutely psychotic, won't even give Catherine her mail. Catherine was about to move all of her things into her storage facility when a body was found.

Quote of the day by Karen X:

"Hitler was a vegetarian. It takes a lot more than pushing away a plate of burgers to be a compassionate person."

Lately I have been thinking a lot about a relationship to place. I meet new people, they say where are you from. Depending on my mood, I answer different things. For instance, a few weeks ago when I felt like I had to be assertive and bitchy with my banking institution around issues of having had identity theft, when asked where I had come from, I said Boston. Not too far from the truth, of all the places I've lived, I've spent the most time in Southern California and second to that, Boston where we recently moved from. And living now in Texas, when I'm on the road and people say where are you from, it seems awkward to volunteer Texas considering what a shocked response this usually solicits. For many years, I identified myself only with the West Coast, and when Nato was here, I remembered why. The vibe. I have never known anyone (myself included) who uses the word "dude" unless they are from California, Southern California specifically. Back in college at B.U., I could identity a Californian immediately by clothes, demeanor and lingo. Lately, I guess I've felt a little out of touch with my West Coast roots which is worth closer examination. This train of thought leads me to something I had thought about when I was back in the collections of the Art Institute two weeks ago in the modern art gallery - when does a culture/place claim us as artists? I found myself looking at the work of French surrealists who found a career in America in their later years - the wall labels would go on for quite a bit - born in Belgium, lived in France, worked in New York, etc. So who do these artists "belong" to? I liken this a bit to schools trying to make a claim about their grads and proteges. Whether or not you graduate from an institution, you are considered an alumni (for fundraising purposes among other things) - for instance, Georgia O'Keefe never finished at the Art Institute, but her name is thrown around as one of their most famous alumnae. A couple of years ago I was at a poetry event at Harvard organized by a former professor at SAIC, she introduced me to her colleagues as one of her "students" despite the fact that I had not been a student for a few years. In the end, perhaps this post is more about questions of ownership and claims, and how can we go about resisting these labels as artists, resist our own commodification by the culture around us.

Got books ordered for my poetry class at SMU this Spring. I will be teaching among other things:

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
The Haiku Year by Tom Gilroy, et al
Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje
Rise by A Van Jordan
Red as a Lotus by Lisa gill
Words for Images: A Gallery of Poems, edited by John Hollander & Joanna Weber

Nato Thompson of MassMOCA delivered a great talk on "The Interventionists" to the artists in residence at Southside and the general public last night. Nato talked about the many artists who he is showcasing in his exhibition which runs until the end of March. Here are some notes on Nato's talk from my journal..

Culture is the #1 export/production of this country - we are in a current state of visual exhaustion in an age where the Taco Bell chihuahua poses as Che Guevara in television ads and Gandhi sells Mac computers - it's a new hip consumerism or age of "MacDeath", where we experience a nostalgia for neocapitalism in an age of neofascism.

Foregoing the term "political" art in place of the term RELEVANT art.

- art as a culture of resistance
- "the Situationists" - interest in the visual trespassing of signatures, hatred of art, love of meaning
- art not as a castle that you live in (most artists are living in the dungeon)
- art not as Foucault type "discourse" but art as a set of tools to rework expectations
- these particular artists are not concerned with "retaining the integrity of the ambiguity"

THE INTERVENTIONISTS is organized into 4 themes:
Nomads
Ready 2 Wear
Reclaim the street
Experimental universities

The nomads section of the show included many interesting pieces addressing the issue of homelessness. Tents for sleeping, bathing, birthing and dying (a la "death bivouac"). Exploration of the refugee as a global condition. Interesting installation pieces on top of taxi cabs driving around North Adams programmed to display certain messages when passing certain locations - when passing thru a MacDonald's drive thru the message "To work in MacDonald's, you must wear MacDonald's pants". And when driving thru downtown, "Whey are there no benches?" Artists as facilitators of conversation with the town of North Adams (population 12,000).

Brilliance of William Pope L's "The Black Factory". A UPS like vehicle delivers the black factory to a neighborhood, a mall, where the "friendliest black artist in America" collects articles donated by the public which embody "blackness". The artist than pulverizes and demolishes "blackness" and reconstitutes it into recyclable product which is recirculated to the public in some other form - i.e. water. Some articles collected/donated to this project include dominoes, nike shoes, and diet coke.

Yo Mango = "I steal" - a Barcelona art collective who produce shopping bags resembling monk bags and shoplift items (clothing typically) from major corporate enterprises and return these objects to the poor, a la Robin Hood, after tearing out the labels and replacing them with "yo mango".

Reverend Billy - a performance artist who delivers sermons against shopping at Starbuck's. Billy has been so successful that the Starbuck's chain has issued a training manual/brochure instructing employees what to do if Reverend Billy shows up at your store.

And than of course there are the YES MEN, the subject of a wonderful new documentary which we saw a few weeks ago at the Angelika. These guys, who posed at the WTO, are the ultimate interventionists.

Tomorrow at Southside on Lamar Nato Thompson, Assistant Curator at MassMoca, will deliver a talk on his exhibition "The Interventionists" at 7 p.m. in the Janette Kennedy Gallery.

November 26 is both the busiest shopping day of the year and official "Buy Nothing Day". Participate!

I had a nice catch-up session with a friend involved in Boston poetry this morning who's seen many an ugly blog war erupt between contemporary poets in the last year involving cafeshop.com g-strings, attacks at one's maculinity/sexuality, etc. Blog conflicts have been going on much longer then the current dispute regarding the Asian American anthology.

I think an appropriately absurdist analogy for all of this mayhem is the movie I HEART HUCKABEES. Maybe some of you have seen it. And if you have not - go see it for its comic relief. It provides a strong living reenactment of parallel issues in our present reality. Yours truly is played by Jason Schwartzman aka Albert, Bino is played by Marky Mark aka Tommy, and Victoria is played by Jude Law aka Brad. Note the importance of poetry in the plot line which actually opens the film ("you rock"), and the ridiculousness and futility of the poetry presented in the story. When you torch someone's jetskis you deal with the karmic repercussions, but did Brad have it coming. It's good to have an other on the journey.

This post has been removed due to THREAT OF LEGAL ACTION at the request of Victoria Chang.

Big news just in: I am very very very pleased to announce that Tupelo Press will be publishing my collaboration with David Lukowski Nutritional Feed in Fall 2005! Our manuscript will be Tupelo's first publication of a book that includes both poetry and art.

In other news, I just applied for a job in New Zealand!

The School has undergone some major restructuring in the last few years since I was a student. Chicago has lost one of its finest photographers and teachers to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Right before the Art Institute headed south with its finances, the school published a report of salary for all faculty - full-time, adjunct, etc. The numbers reflected that male instructurs with less teaching experience than their female counterparts were getting paid twice as much for the same positions, regardless of experience, seniority, etc. This is of course no surprise, but still outrageous. How lucky New Mexico is!