the autobiography of flapjack sally

OI MOI

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:06:55 -0500

I spelled “murmur” wrong repeatedly on a project for Anne’s class yesterday. OI MOI. Thinking of inviting her to my reading Tuesday night as penance. Come see the carnage: 6 pm at Cornelia Street Cafe.

a personal essay

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:17:44 -0500

In getting ready to apply for some fellowships, thinking about what to do after nyu, I came upon the “personal statement” that I wrote when applying to this phase of my life. Call me sentimental, but I still love this essay a lot. It makes me feel more firmly like myself just to read it:

The summer after I graduated from Vassar College, I moved to Maine and got a job with the Department of Parks and Recreation, driving a small tractor that, in the winter, was used to plow the snowy sidewalks. For the warmer months, this orange vehicle was outfitted with a 500 gallon water tank, its transmission rigged so that power could be diverted to fuel an internal pump. From this pump ran a hose, which coiled around a spool mounted on the front of the rig to end in a hollow metal spike of about three feet in length. My job was to visit all the newly planted saplings in the city, using a list of the trees’ addresses and their varietals (Tree Lilac, ‘Leprechaun’ Ash, Red Maple, ‘Rocky Mountain Glow’ Maple, Three Flower Maple, Flowering Crabapple, Hawthorne, and Zelkova Serrata were favorite cultivars, bred to attain no more than fifteen feet of height in order to avoid interfering with the power lines above.) When, with the help of a city map, I located my target, I would park my vehicle in neutral, engage the pump, uncoil the hose, drive the watering spike firmly into the soil below the root ball, and finally open a valve so that water would flow from the tip of the underground sprinkler, at a rate of approximately 50 gallons every ten minutes.

During the ten minute intervals for which I stood with each tree, I read books. I read Glyn Maxwell, I read Mario Luzi, I read Dante. I read the cannonical, the obscure, whatever I could find readily at the library and carry inconspicuously in my hardhat. At the time I thought I was doing it despite the world around me, despite the men in the garage who would casually go about their business in slow motion while I stood in the wide doorway, so that the sunlight might warm me while the industrial, high-pressure hose filled my small truck’s water reservoir. I suspect now that my understanding of purgatory would have differed without the greasy, half-lit vault of the garage at my back, the Sisyphean fifteen-mile-an-hour pace of my truck, the cold mornings turning without transition into hot noons and the longed-for, dark lunchroom which, once reached, bristled silently with rivalries between the men of the City Forestry Division, the head of which, it was rumored, had thrown a live chainsaw at a coworker in wrath (although he was always gentle to me, even lending me his safety harness once when the cherry-picker was parked on the Eastern Promenade, so that I could see what it was like to stand in the bucket with the metal arm of the truck fully extended, directly and invisibly beneath me, eighty feet above the highest point in the city.)

I mention these experiences to illustrate the “research method” I have held myself to these past years: not only looking at what can be found in books, which I consider an essential practice for a poet, who can always find something to learn from both the ideas of other writers and also their stylistic choices, but also extending the same involvement to the world at large and the people who inhabit it. My poems serve as crucibles to test my understanding of the ideas I encounter.

In the third canto of The Divine Comedy, Dante partially describes the indescribable Heaven by saying that only in Paradise can individuals know, and tell what they know. I would reverse the sense of this and say that to be able to know, and tell—comprehensively, elegantly, affectingly—what I know, this is the future I’m envisioning for my poetry, my aim, and my heaven.

"I’ve been struggling with this problem of the page being two-dimensional, not plastic, not an..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:02:49 -0500

“I’ve been struggling with this problem of the page being two-dimensional, not plastic, not an event…”

- the more-beautiful-every-Tuesday Anne Carson

nylon + insulation + zippers = heart osarinainkorea: solo...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:55:10 -0500

nylon + insulation + zippers = heart

osarinainkorea:

solo exhibition by oh hye-seon. hearts made from nylon stockings, insulation and massive amounts of zippers.

Behind the scenes: the making of the breakfast blog!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:59:00 -0500

Behind the scenes: the making of the breakfast blog!

"university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:47:01 -0500

“university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life.”

- the curious conclusion of a new yorker article eli recommended to me…

writing exercise

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:56:00 -0400

* Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you.

(courtesy of Bernadette Mayer)

"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more..."

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:48:45 -0400

“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

"There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the..."

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0400

“There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.”

- “I am exaggerating of course. Like a book.” -M.R.

Yes poetry still makes me feel shattered.

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:45:54 -0400

Yes poetry still makes me feel shattered.

"Connoisseurs of reading are very silly people. But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0400

“Connoisseurs of reading are very silly people. But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?”

- Mary Ruefle, again

Oh Mary Ruefle you slay me. (Thanks, Sarah, for brightening my...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0400

Oh Mary Ruefle you slay me.

(Thanks, Sarah, for brightening my subway ride with A Little White Shadow)

This is what workshop comments from Sharon Olds look like. Could...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:22:05 -0400

This is what workshop comments from Sharon Olds look like. Could I be more charmed? (No.)

…and your daily dose of nonsense. (We finally made it to...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:22:23 -0400

…and your daily dose of nonsense. (We finally made it to YouTube!)

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:38:05 -0400

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect:

what a scoop!

my opinion about temp jobs hasn't changed since 2004

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:32:00 -0400

an email recently unarchived by Emily:

—————————————— Original Message ——————————————
Subject: temp jobs
From: ”elsbeth pancrazi” <elpancrazi@vassar.edu>
Date: Sun, May 9, 2004 2:12 pm
To: emscarr@vassar.edu
—————————————————————————————————————

temp jobs!
emily, i want to marry a ranger and go live in the wilderness of a
foreign land like henry david thourough [sic] but not a philosopher and grow
tamales and tomatillos and hot peppers and never be a temp.

"Professors, [King Louis XI] reasoned, should be as intelligent as possible, since they represented..."

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:37:54 -0400

“Professors, [King Louis XI] reasoned, should be as intelligent as possible, since they represented him, “le roi terrible,” and therefore he saw that they did not disappoint him. Once a year, willy-nilly, they were served a dinner at the king’s orders, and at that dinner they were bound to eat, and eat prodigiously, of oysters. It was to make them bright, and once accomplished, keep them so!”

- MFK Fischer on the many potent qualities of oysters.

"… you don’t have to worry about not being in the avante-garde camp."

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:27:30 -0400

“… you don’t have to worry about not being in the avante-garde camp.”

- A fellow student in my poetry workshop, commenting on my poem.

"Let’s do like that crazy mathematician who employed a new principle of measurement for each..."

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0400

“Let’s do like that crazy mathematician who employed a new principle of measurement for each step of his calculations….”

- Beckett to Axel Kaun, again

"It is becoming more difficult even senseless, for me to write a standard English. More and more my..."

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:15:00 -0400

“It is becoming more difficult even senseless, for me to write a standard English. More and more my own language appears to me as a veil, to be torn apart to approach the things (or the nothings) behind it. Grammar and style! They seem to me as superannuated as a Victorian bathing suit or the dignity of a gentleman. A mask. A time, let’s hope, is coming when language will be best used when best abused. Since we can’t eliminate it all at once, let’s not neglect anything that might contribute to its corruption. To bore hole after hole in it, until what cowers behind it begins to seep through - I can imagine no higher goal for a contemporary writer.”

- Samuel Beckett in a letter [in German] to Axel Kaun via Anne Carson