"What are borders and pieces of paper and different tongues in different mouths compared to desire, to heart?"

(Image by Ben Gancsos)

I've been thinking a lot these days about integrated art forms and lenses, perspectives and approaches, and how these confluences shape the articulations we make.

This weekend, I attended a preview of The Parkville Project, a production of the new Bated Breath Theatre Company. The company interviewed community members, business people, and senior citizens. They reviewed historical documents. And they used this information to create a piece that combines creative movement, text, music, and photographic projections. The actors moved through the space and, in so doing, implicated the audience in the action of the play.

I was thoroughly excited by it. I wrote a little thing thing, here.

Braiding Media

I've been thinking for some time about how paradigmatic shifts in media affect cultural production. Today I have a post up on Listen, Dammit about the Chicago band Califone's new film/album project All My Friends are Funeral Singers.

Making fun of neurotic writing habits

Some people write postcards to their loved ones; I write postcards to my GP.

You can read about it at thenervousbreakdown.com.

On the geographical, on distance

Since moving to Hartford, I've wanted to write about it. I've wanted to write about it in a way that doesn't feel earned. I often wonder how much I can really claim to be here. I spend time at work and at home - so that the moments of feeling in this place stand out:

walking during snowstorms

obsessive photography

being perched up high for the excellent Branching Out series

But, for the most part, I've felt fairly disconnected from an experience of Hartford that I could present to a general audience.

• • •

Last night I was watching Bas Jan Ader fall from a tree, fall from a roof, fall with a bike.

Gravity everywhere, even in tears.



• • •

I was thinking of sitting up in a tree with Jillian and her telling me about her climbing prowess and near disasters. It settled in that the moments that have been most meaningful in this place, many of them have been on walks with Jillian, cradled in branches with Jillian, wanting to swim in a river with Jillian, standing on a cliff with Jillian.

I feel like I'm losing part of my geography.

Photo by Faith Antion

But I'll write you stories about getting lost.

And I was calm as the plane went down

Sometimes I wake up with a line of a poem stuck in my head.

I've been thinking these days about that space above the things on which we focus. Sometimes, it's the sky:


Sometimes it's the walls and ceiling of a natural history diorama:


Last night I dreamed that the plane I was in clipped the Sydney Opera House before it went down. We were hovering above that eminently photographable skyline identifier.

I've never been the kind of poet that writes from dreams. I write from research. I read. I visit archives. I look through photographs. Frankly, I don't know how to write a poem from a dream; I don't know how to make that relevant to a wider audience than myself.

But I like waking up with a series of words in my head that I trust to be a line of poetry.

Mute and hardly active

Bird Specimens, Study Skins, originally uploaded by profholtz.

The past several days, I've had the distinct feeling of being mute. I feel as though I'm giving stillbirth to words.

I haven't written anything about which I'm content in longer than I can remember.

I need to be bolstered up and ordered by something, but I'm not sure what that might be.

I wish to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.

These days, I've been dreaming about Ireland, about the UK.
[Jillian Green doors everywhere.]

It happens a couple times a week and it's things as specific as basking in dappled aprication (the best way one can, I think) in some NUI garden in Galway, with the smell of it and every blade of grass making its way through my dress to my skin. It's as tangential as incorporating a street into another cityscape. It's been a room in a Cardiff of my imagination.

Tonight, it's my wish that my self-conscious will allow me to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.