mythical cities, personal museums, and the gerrymandering of memory

On the 16th, a poem that I wrote called "Mythical Cities of Southwestern Minnesota" was published in Strange Horizons. I never thought I would publish a poem. The fact that I have strikes me as funny, bizarre, absurd, and completely satisfying. Stories are one thing, but poems are a different beast.

I wrote it while drifting in the still, still space that followed an unkind breakup. It was my version of sitting in a darkened room with a pint of ice cream and a single lonely spoon. I wrote it because I felt like I was mired on the thinnest skin of empty water, stretching all the way to an empty horizon, without a breath of wind to change the monotony.

I liked the way it turned out. I liked, even more, the way it appropriated the tiniest and briefest of moments from my memory--a split second of something I saw, thought, or imagined--and dragged it outside the territory of life circumscribed by factual experience. They suddenly existed somewhere else, lifted from the messy drawers in my head and pinned, still, to a plain wall. There they were, serving another purpose, rearranged and divided and carefully distorted to tell a story that was not at all what actually happened, but still something I wanted to say. Reading the poem on publication induced an odd kind of vertigo. It set off a spectacular display of interior fireworks, resuscitating details that I would have otherwise forgotten in enormous, full-blown pungency. It was a pleasure. Not because of any particular nostalgia for the moments in question, but just because they were there, rich and saturated and unexpected.

The title comes from an article I came across while looking for the names of mythical cities. It turned out to be about gerrymandering and the census of 1857, and not about mysterious cities that appear and disappear under certain depths of snow.
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Kapowski, a band that the marvelous Daisy brought to my attention, is running a Kickstarter to produce a music video for one of their songs. They've already reached their goal, but you should still visit the project's page, if only to hear the song in question, which is an utter charmer.
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A rarity:
I hardly ever "plan" stories. I think about them in the car, in bed, in the shower, on walks. I purse my lips over them, rub fists into eyes, make faces, despair. I make a great deal of mistakes, scratch out sentences, tear out pages. But I hardly ever "plan."


The story I'm working on now is doing a number on my head.

When I look at the back of your neck,
the part just above the fold of collar,
I want to curl my hand against your skin
and press.

Ignore the tiny pinnacles,
the short-lived hairs and slept-in
wrinkles, and plunge straight through
the narrow warmth
that keeps you from the world.

***
Today I am a lump.
Well, aside from the dance class and the filing of taxes and the sorting of several pounds of magazines that collected on my bedroom shelf. Other than that: a lump!

Am reading Theft by Peter Carey. It's good. A fast read because I'm lapping it up, entirely enchanted, disgusted, saddened, and delighted by the voices inside.

Trying to figure out some things about dancing. I've been struggling a bit with some technical things that slipped while my attention was elsewhere. In class today, Summer talked about narrowing the margin of error so that even when you're doing badly, you're still functioning at a certain level. My margin of error right now feels so vast that veering from one end to the other is disconcerting. At the same time, I've been trying to mess up my dancing more. To wake up, be more human and textured and pungent. I feel like I've been smoothing things down, giving them polish, instead of sloughing them off, ripping them, digging inside and taking them out. I want to be messy and real; I want to be fluent and perfect. It's frustrating.

It's how I feel about everything right now, though it's more focussed when I'm dancing. Maybe it's the change in seasons. It's getting to be spring and I want to emerge.

force feeding poetry

Mondays are poetry night at the bookstore. This is something new, a little bit of (probably not quite approved) fun to alleviate the usual excruciating slowness of the last half hour.

I inflicted Ogden Nash on the customers. Nash is fun to read, and "The Grynch" is both particularly fun out loud and not too long. I enjoyed watching the bemused expressions that greeted "I dearly love the three-toed grynch" when I launched into it over the loudspeaker, particularly the woman who looked at me as if I had burst into a particularly florid dialect of pig latin.

My coworkers have more majestic tastes. Todd read Mark Strand's excellent "Eating Poetry" last week, and Mack read a beautiful poem that I can't remember except for the glorious image of gramaphones clustered on a beach.

a fine frenzy rolling

I find myself writing a poem.

This is a scary thing. Not content with bumbling my way through stories about extraterrestrial plants, grave robbers, and girls who turn into mushrooms, my brain suddenly feels the need to inflict poetry upon the world.

I will blame the holiday sweets currently drenching my system in sugar. Or possibly the excess of sleep. Words are suddenly shiny and irresistible and I want to cram them together into one vivid blur.

***
Christmas was very gentle, very slow, and very nice. We woke up late, ate French toast and surprisingly delicious berries, and opened presents. The rest of the day was devoted to movies (there's something oddly charming about a family chortle at Goldie Hawn with a hole in her stomach in Death Becomes Her), napping, and playing with the dog, who loves her new toys so much that she keeps picking them up and carrying them to new places of honor on different chairs.

And now it's bed and curling up with the new issue of McSweeney's and being surprised that Christmas is over and it's almost time for a new year.

exactly not quite what i mean

Today I had the opportunity to answer some questions in a rather interview-ish format. One of the questions went along the lines of: "What do you want to achieve in dance? What about dance is important to you?" And I said something along the lines of how I want fluency of expression. Communication with people. Connecting with the audience and saying something honest. Rising above technical amazements. All these rather worn out turns of phrase and sentiment kept falling into my mouth. It's something I've said often, parroted back ever since one of my teachers (the extraordinarily beautiful Ms. Dunn) told me that dance is an art that only becomes meaningful when based on generosity.

Not that I don't believe this. I do, but I've spent the rest of the day thinking about this--injuries have a way of making you evaluate, constantly, the worth of dancing. Over and over again, weighing the drudgery of rehabilitation against the reward of dancing again. Is it worth it? starts off a train of arguments in my head at least ten times in a day-- and I realise that yes, I want to communicate ideas to other people, but the meat of it is what I feel when I'm dancing. That's what intoxicates me. I get satisfaction from other kinds of work. Writing, for instance, has moments of complete absorption. It can be thrilling and exciting and strange, but it's still a pleasure of workmanship for me. Dance is the only thing I know so far that gives me that visceral kick. It makes me feel different, extraordinary. I feel, inside me, the same species of gut and heart and mind vividness that I can sense in poetry and music.






In one of Jasper Fforde's books, a character describes poetry as the "crack-cocaine of the literary world." That's what I feel like when I'm dancing well. I bypass the process of consuming and understanding the art and go straight to wherever it is-- solar plexus, soul, whatever--where you experience those aches of feeling so commonly described in drama, but so rarely felt to that sheer degree in real life.


Chasing that is what means the most to me in dancing. Of course, I want to make other people feel too. If they can have at least a morsel of that same shock of sensation, then I'll feel I'm doing a useful thing. I'm selfish though and the thing that keeps me dancing at all is that greed for feeling.

That's what I really meant. It makes me sound like an addictive personality, doesn't it? Lucky I haven't latched onto any dangerous and illicit substances.

And now, to calm my hyper-ventilating dance indignation organ, I'm going to watch Doctor Who. My first Tom Baker episode. It's called GENESIS OF THE DALEKS, which seems promising.