how incredible are these b&w of the Beales' Grey Gardens?
http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/grey-gardens-the-beautiful-decay/
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Lunch Poems. March 19-27
March 19
My fingers taste like cigarettes, cigar-shaped though
and my cola is part vodka.
It is still my birthday 21 years and 3 days later.
When they told me "beware the ides,"
they left out the warning of whiskey.
We read "I think I'm going crazy"
And what to do with this terrible hangover and the weekends,
OHara?
March 20's Found phrases
she's hair bowed and low-bellied in pyramid mode
oh, she's something in Sanskrit
where am i?
je ne sais quoi
upon return to the states, he exhausts a carton of Gitanes
both have become decidedly unFrench
BOOM! he booms,
or rather he types
these loud letters to Upper-Penninsula babies
just to feel connected.
March 21's marsh
Though we lasted the winter
There is no sure footing
There is grass in my neighborhood again
There are rats again
On the patch of land that escaped cementing
We celebrate our clever survival
All of us narrowly avoided that turn to stone
When one comrade takes to a scurry,
My dog lunges after her breakfast.
I lost a shoe in the muck.
March 23's phone call
He'll PROVE his nunchucks
raps the receiver, but won't believe my crystal ball
"Then tell ME what I'm doing now"
You are purging what's left and yellow
you are standing too close to a window
you are asking the WRONG questions
Ask why not how and I'll fill your ears
with the stuff of inheritance,
mystical theories
He'll say,
could you call another day?
March 24's dog day
It is hard to know whose is whose
as we've begun to resemble one another.
On gray days, I begin to think that
we, black haired and stark white, are all we have in the world.
Oh but that,
that is the last pair!
you Varmint! you Devil!
Inside her all my soles, but no soul!
March 27's aftershocks
when we are too exhausted to fight, we walk and wait for the sun
here it comes.
the earth shook last night, there is proof in the broken ground.
or did it split from cold?
either way, it rushed to fill its voids with the left gravel.
who's to say we couldn't fill our own as quickly?
My fingers taste like cigarettes, cigar-shaped though
and my cola is part vodka.
It is still my birthday 21 years and 3 days later.
When they told me "beware the ides,"
they left out the warning of whiskey.
We read "I think I'm going crazy"
And what to do with this terrible hangover and the weekends,
OHara?
March 20's Found phrases
she's hair bowed and low-bellied in pyramid mode
oh, she's something in Sanskrit
where am i?
je ne sais quoi
upon return to the states, he exhausts a carton of Gitanes
both have become decidedly unFrench
BOOM! he booms,
or rather he types
these loud letters to Upper-Penninsula babies
just to feel connected.
March 21's marsh
Though we lasted the winter
There is no sure footing
There is grass in my neighborhood again
There are rats again
On the patch of land that escaped cementing
We celebrate our clever survival
All of us narrowly avoided that turn to stone
When one comrade takes to a scurry,
My dog lunges after her breakfast.
I lost a shoe in the muck.
March 23's phone call
He'll PROVE his nunchucks
raps the receiver, but won't believe my crystal ball
"Then tell ME what I'm doing now"
You are purging what's left and yellow
you are standing too close to a window
you are asking the WRONG questions
Ask why not how and I'll fill your ears
with the stuff of inheritance,
mystical theories
He'll say,
could you call another day?
March 24's dog day
It is hard to know whose is whose
as we've begun to resemble one another.
On gray days, I begin to think that
we, black haired and stark white, are all we have in the world.
Oh but that,
that is the last pair!
you Varmint! you Devil!
Inside her all my soles, but no soul!
March 27's aftershocks
when we are too exhausted to fight, we walk and wait for the sun
here it comes.
the earth shook last night, there is proof in the broken ground.
or did it split from cold?
either way, it rushed to fill its voids with the left gravel.
who's to say we couldn't fill our own as quickly?
"a self being forged in, as language..."
latinized, i am lucky.
reputed, repeated and inextricably soulless, so
petrified, I opt for atrophy, seeing as
I am proof.
reputed, repeated and inextricably soulless, so
petrified, I opt for atrophy, seeing as
I am proof.
*
there is
no air in here-
where
a disembodied voice can sing like a canary
(no strings)
there is
no air in here-
where
a disembodied voice can sing like a canary
(no strings)
plucked headlines
there is err-
or
glitches in the gospel
sprung from canon
the deity shrugs
in candor
there is err-
or
glitches in the gospel
sprung from canon
the deity shrugs
in candor
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Force of Imagination: Montaigne erasure pt. 1
of the force of Imagination.
I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of Imagination: every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very piercing impression upon me and I make it my business to avoid, wanting force to resist it. I could live by
the sole help of healthful and jolly company: the very sight of another's pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person. A perpetual cough in another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned. at, and take it to myself. I do not at all wonder that fancy should give fevers and sometimes kill such as to allow it
too much scope, and are too willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time: I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old fellow's house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with his patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be pleased with his company, I might come often to see him, by which means, and by fixing his eye upon the freshness of my complexion, and his
imagination upon the sprightliness and vigor that glowed in my youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I then was, his habit to body might, peradventure, be amended; but be forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse.
Gallus VibIus so long cudgeled his brains to find out the essence and motions of madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a degree, that he could never after recover his judgment; and might brag that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being unbound to have his pardon read to him, was
found stark dead upon the scaffold, by the stroke of Imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed, feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires: "Ut, quasi transactis saepe omnibu rebu profundant Fluminis ingentes fluctus, vestemque cruentent."
Sunday, August 9, 2009
favorite.
this poem in its full (and...correct) version is lost somewhere in papers. from memory:
spread
as if to say let anything worth taking be took
on the other hand,
i need my fingers, i'll cross them. even if crooked from sprain, i'll cross them.
snap and send coins winged. outline cloud creatures, squint and squish between.
air arrows, drag triggers. fan out in shadows to fly.
measure the miles in the inches of knuckles.
wet and feel wind. wind cassette guts.
flip a bird or flick bent paper. tie a ribbon around and remember to remember.
point
as if, as if to say it is you, but it hasn't always been.
spread
as if to say let anything worth taking be took
on the other hand,
i need my fingers, i'll cross them. even if crooked from sprain, i'll cross them.
snap and send coins winged. outline cloud creatures, squint and squish between.
air arrows, drag triggers. fan out in shadows to fly.
measure the miles in the inches of knuckles.
wet and feel wind. wind cassette guts.
flip a bird or flick bent paper. tie a ribbon around and remember to remember.
point
as if, as if to say it is you, but it hasn't always been.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
the hive mind project: A ten page diatribe against the Dark Mother. An analysis of the Electra Complex.
yesterday was my last day of summer semester. i delivered a speech on why "Crash" is a racist film & a presentation on a project on...sylvia plath...and honeybees....and cheating jaguars...and daddy-complexes...happy apple pies...and such.
consists of ten prose poems, heavily informed by Sylvia's (yes, first name basis) "Bee Poems" & also "Daddy" & "Lament" in conjunction with her journal entries (mad, mad stories, domestic consolations, rough & tough Ted Hughes, etc.) Other sources were research on bees, attempted research of Otto Plath's dissertations & my own poems.
Excerpts, fancied lines:
1. Intro (erasure)
"fight against a simple-mindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them.
What a gift of the god?
Create Queen: a mad, passionate Queen. Immediately I want her husband to keep bees, and I know nothing of bees. My father knew it all."
2. Maestro of Bees
The sting of bees took away my father
who got sick in a minute & wouldn’t see a doctor (I am alive & so-there!)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
He survived the honey-flavored cancer
and wasn’t he lucky? isn’t it awful that (the blood hive-holed my brain)
the sting of bees took away my father
he rots in a grave he barely paid for
bee-bearded near death, the man had tantrums (a shot went home, a sniff of cocaine)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
3. the only one...huge enough for me
"The women lie down for artists.
The mad girl (only a silly girl) scars her legs with nails
through her hands. The stigmata, I said, frozen.
Lesson learned & bang smash on the mouth
Chased by red-gold Whiskey Macs. The bandeau
Is blood-soaked. The wimple, bruised & I
Stink of decaying orange from the vandal.
“I shall keep,” he barked, my blood"
4. The Beekeepers
"We were interested in starting a hive, so I dumped the babies in the factory past a row of orange stucco cottages that flood whenever the river rises. We felt very new & shy within a yard of miscellaneous Devonians in raincoats, bulgy tweeds, shirtsleeves. I had not thought to bring a sweater. I stood for a moment, on the bridge-end.
The man in black is the rector. He carries his dark felt head. The midwife is in the blue coat. She too has a black box head. Everybody had screening. I felt barer & barer. Have you no hat? Have you no coat?
I have a boiler suit. "
5. apple-pie happy
"I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke for instance, or writing---I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst and fast into a bowl of cookie batter. And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less!---and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen."
6. The Contents of the Black Box
"She came with sugar candy. She smelled of vanilla when our morning gruel, coffee was black & bitter-edged & diabetic, He needs it, honey, twice a day.
He’ll keep you in a cigar box & twenty-five just like you (rather crude) until you’re planted in the family plot. Escaped the panzer-man, did you?
O & isn’t he the bees knees! Fourth husband material, indeed. You know, in bed, he smells like a butcher. Sure, he’ll write a book to you. Saying “sweetness, sweetness” to the gas chamber with you!"
7. The Red Queen's Race, The Requeening Game
"I put on my red-hot shoes & join in the swarm: the race of winged, unmiraculous women, those spasmodic tricks. Some Dody bird, who I took for long dead, explained the rules of the hive:
The Red Queen needs no pawn to defeat the black rooks.
The Red Queen hears no backtalk from her cell in the mute sky.
The Red Queen is your competitor. You compete for the hive."
8. The Queendom of Dreams
"Waking, I can't help longing for lost Edens, but I am only an outlet blocked as with wax.
The Queen is waking in a constructed cell built by too dreamy a drone. It’s sure to collapse, a suffocating cuddle death. A caged & wild pulse there at the center, but I know now that my ribs aren’t broken.
My pen fell from my hand after two aspirins & I fell asleep: head swimming off “The Island of the Dead.” Strange visions read about: “Why Men Desert Their Hives.” The hive is a black box. The hive is an algorithm.
Electrocution in tinfoil veins, a new satellite shot into stars; The planet halted & at once I was lifted up, died in my stomach & fell forward, hung in middle of a room, someone twirling me about. Faceless crowding & I spun & they spun: surgical, distant, stellar. Me & my experimental predicament."
9. The Cellar Jar
"a.m.
I have my honey, a jar of it.
I will sleep through the wintering. Better than shock treatment.
p.m.
Today, you made a fatal decision. And you vacillated like a nervous seesaw-- gulped, chose blindly & immediately wanted to reverse a decision which is speeding into finality now already on the w of mails, minds &secretarial files. You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite:
you wanted time to think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you have it: practically 3 months of godawful time, you are nausea, a stasis. You are plunged so deep in your own very private little rote forbidding and enormous.
Your mind is planned, diagrammed for you—practically the way it will be at Smith next year: and just now that kind of security seems desirable—it is just another way of absolving you of taking responsibilities for your own actions & planning, really, although now the issue is so confused it is hard which choice would take the most guts: and which kind of guts. Marcia i you are doing neither: the woman at
you can now learn it—you won’t have it this good again, baby. "You
i think there are probably three people who read this, so you three, i need something to do with my time for the rest of july & august, and i am going to spend some time crafting or working on visual representations of poems, prose, etc.
With that in mind, if anybody would like to be the recipient of any sort of crafty, zine-esque, versions of any work on this blog, or would like to read full versions of the plath pieces, it would not only give me something to do and give me some new & keen editing eyes, but make me feel super-duper.
email me: nikkimarss@gmail.com
hi, deidre!
consists of ten prose poems, heavily informed by Sylvia's (yes, first name basis) "Bee Poems" & also "Daddy" & "Lament" in conjunction with her journal entries (mad, mad stories, domestic consolations, rough & tough Ted Hughes, etc.) Other sources were research on bees, attempted research of Otto Plath's dissertations & my own poems.
Excerpts, fancied lines:
1. Intro (erasure)
"fight against a simple-mindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them.
What a gift of the god?
Create Queen: a mad, passionate Queen. Immediately I want her husband to keep bees, and I know nothing of bees. My father knew it all."
2. Maestro of Bees
The sting of bees took away my father
who got sick in a minute & wouldn’t see a doctor (I am alive & so-there!)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
He survived the honey-flavored cancer
and wasn’t he lucky? isn’t it awful that (the blood hive-holed my brain)
the sting of bees took away my father
he rots in a grave he barely paid for
bee-bearded near death, the man had tantrums (a shot went home, a sniff of cocaine)
and I’ll never speak to the Queen again
3. the only one...huge enough for me
"The women lie down for artists.
The mad girl (only a silly girl) scars her legs with nails
through her hands. The stigmata, I said, frozen.
Lesson learned & bang smash on the mouth
Chased by red-gold Whiskey Macs. The bandeau
Is blood-soaked. The wimple, bruised & I
Stink of decaying orange from the vandal.
“I shall keep,” he barked, my blood"
4. The Beekeepers
"We were interested in starting a hive, so I dumped the babies in the factory past a row of orange stucco cottages that flood whenever the river rises. We felt very new & shy within a yard of miscellaneous Devonians in raincoats, bulgy tweeds, shirtsleeves. I had not thought to bring a sweater. I stood for a moment, on the bridge-end.
The man in black is the rector. He carries his dark felt head. The midwife is in the blue coat. She too has a black box head. Everybody had screening. I felt barer & barer. Have you no hat? Have you no coat?
I have a boiler suit. "
5. apple-pie happy
"I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke for instance, or writing---I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst and fast into a bowl of cookie batter. And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less!---and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen."
6. The Contents of the Black Box
"She came with sugar candy. She smelled of vanilla when our morning gruel, coffee was black & bitter-edged & diabetic, He needs it, honey, twice a day.
He’ll keep you in a cigar box & twenty-five just like you (rather crude) until you’re planted in the family plot. Escaped the panzer-man, did you?
O & isn’t he the bees knees! Fourth husband material, indeed. You know, in bed, he smells like a butcher. Sure, he’ll write a book to you. Saying “sweetness, sweetness” to the gas chamber with you!"
7. The Red Queen's Race, The Requeening Game
"I put on my red-hot shoes & join in the swarm: the race of winged, unmiraculous women, those spasmodic tricks. Some Dody bird, who I took for long dead, explained the rules of the hive:
The Red Queen needs no pawn to defeat the black rooks.
The Red Queen hears no backtalk from her cell in the mute sky.
The Red Queen is your competitor. You compete for the hive."
8. The Queendom of Dreams
"Waking, I can't help longing for lost Edens, but I am only an outlet blocked as with wax.
The Queen is waking in a constructed cell built by too dreamy a drone. It’s sure to collapse, a suffocating cuddle death. A caged & wild pulse there at the center, but I know now that my ribs aren’t broken.
My pen fell from my hand after two aspirins & I fell asleep: head swimming off “The Island of the Dead.” Strange visions read about: “Why Men Desert Their Hives.” The hive is a black box. The hive is an algorithm.
Electrocution in tinfoil veins, a new satellite shot into stars; The planet halted & at once I was lifted up, died in my stomach & fell forward, hung in middle of a room, someone twirling me about. Faceless crowding & I spun & they spun: surgical, distant, stellar. Me & my experimental predicament."
9. The Cellar Jar
"a.m.
I have my honey, a jar of it.
I will sleep through the wintering. Better than shock treatment.
p.m.
Today, you made a fatal decision. And you vacillated like a nervous seesaw-- gulped, chose blindly & immediately wanted to reverse a decision which is speeding into finality now already on the w of mails, minds &secretarial files. You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite:
you wanted time to think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you have it: practically 3 months of godawful time, you are nausea, a stasis. You are plunged so deep in your own very private little rote forbidding and enormous.
Your mind is planned, diagrammed for you—practically the way it will be at Smith next year: and just now that kind of security seems desirable—it is just another way of absolving you of taking responsibilities for your own actions & planning, really, although now the issue is so confused it is hard which choice would take the most guts: and which kind of guts. Marcia i you are doing neither: the woman at
you can now learn it—you won’t have it this good again, baby. "You
i think there are probably three people who read this, so you three, i need something to do with my time for the rest of july & august, and i am going to spend some time crafting or working on visual representations of poems, prose, etc.
With that in mind, if anybody would like to be the recipient of any sort of crafty, zine-esque, versions of any work on this blog, or would like to read full versions of the plath pieces, it would not only give me something to do and give me some new & keen editing eyes, but make me feel super-duper.
email me: nikkimarss@gmail.com
hi, deidre!
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Louis comes around
sometimes, I let him lie to me
while I am clicking sounds for money
he says it was easier then to find a house
he says mine reminds him, the red reminds him
of the 60s
he hums shoo-be-doo-be-doo through a talk box
it’s an ancient art, he says playing a single note
he has vocal paralysis, whatever that means
he’s on dialysis too.
Louis remembers his voice and the 60s
when he built an empire with fake jewelry
and fell off the truck bell-bottoms
he remembers Carson’s and green
where gold was
it was easier then a record, an empire
he hums shoo-be-doo-be-doo in my bedroom
all that jive, he could sell it.
I believe he’s lying
how about another round?
sometimes, I let him lie to me
while I am clicking sounds for money
he says it was easier then to find a house
he says mine reminds him, the red reminds him
of the 60s
he hums shoo-be-doo-be-doo through a talk box
it’s an ancient art, he says playing a single note
he has vocal paralysis, whatever that means
he’s on dialysis too.
Louis remembers his voice and the 60s
when he built an empire with fake jewelry
and fell off the truck bell-bottoms
he remembers Carson’s and green
where gold was
it was easier then a record, an empire
he hums shoo-be-doo-be-doo in my bedroom
all that jive, he could sell it.
I believe he’s lying
how about another round?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
