Monday, April 26, 2010
upcoming readings
Friday, April 30th at Mostly Books, 529 Bainbridge St, at 9pm
w/ Rick Snyder and Sean Fitts
Sunday, May 9th at Molly's Bookstore, 1010 S. 9th St, at 7pm
w/Jeffrey Stockbridge and Liz Moore
Sunday, May 16th at Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St (2nd Fl), at NOON (not 3) w/ Samantha Barrow, hassen, Heather Saker and more
Thursday, July 1st at UPenn Bookstore, 36th & Walnut, at 6pm
w/ Greg Bem, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and others
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
flash mob
so you come down
so which way to the river, a boy asks
and i point my finger
east into the empty TLA video store
AVAILABLE
AVAILABLE
AVAILABLE
the pink papered up windowfront
fronts nervous moms
with obvious answers
lock their restaurants
whose lookouts keep it coming
whose windowlight turns night
into a story that goes on
the streets which talk of water
til our hearts nod and know
what home is home is
a rival high school as segregated
as your own room it's tired
of listening to you collect
yourself into buckets from
the ceiling that edits you
down to a status update
can you watch my bag?
sure there's a love
that's nothing in another
place you can't find
there's a love it sleeps
and wakes your days
beyond letters stamped,
i clock in the time
is ripe for endless
foolishness a flash mob
mops up the jizz of april
my jacket the weather
counts the people
an arm of the river meets
the mouth of a sea
if more people live here
kill the people!
or turn the page and continue
along an arm of the mouth
the house fronts painted
shut a shade too for the
mobbed heart so goes
the leak of jackets so go
flutter yourself somewhere
a knock at the door dumbs
down your freedom pamphlet
you can be in love in a target
parking lot and sleep for days
under the country's front page
a bus just blew right past me
robbed of lightness
i walk and walk and walk
and walk down the street
to be open like a door
open like a door
hating me won't make you pretty
on a worn-out woman
w/ a bicycle riding
the el to frankford
for easter
me and my brother
to meet our mother
who’ll make dinner for us
who used to make clothes for us
when we were kids who
wanted tee shirts
that said things—
my mother refused
to put words on our shirts
clothes shouldn’t talk, she said
people talk—you’re gonna
speak for yourself
today i said if sorrow’s really
old joy, toss me an absolute
to suck on christ is risen
we hop to & fro the rhythm
opens a small business a prayer
we patronize we are patrons
patriots pick up a pound
of ham from greenman’s
on your way worn pieces of
routines the sense and
nonsense pieces of clothes
in the common weather we’ve
worn pieces of my mother
in pieces because my father’s
left her for good
and all the money from her business
gone for good
that hurts to say for good
it’s not for good
it’s for the fucking worst
you might as well shoot the motherfucker
you’re not supposed to do that
you’re not supposed to take your bike on the el
you’re not supposed to park against the direction of traffic
you’re not supposed to turn on red when there’s a sign and nothing’s coming
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Wendell Berry on restraints in art and life
"In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define 'freedom,' for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, 'free' is etymologically related to 'friend.' These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of 'dear' or 'beloved.' We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections."
It's the thought of faithfulness and loyalty as restraints that caught me this time. I'd never really thought of them as restraints. That is, I've never felt restrained by being faithful or loyal to someone. That's always come natural to me. But I think I'm understanding Berry's point more deeply now. When you're free, you aren't aware of restraints. When you're free you're creating, and you do so hardly knowing. You don't experience restraint as restraint.
Maybe I'm somewhat free in regard to friendship and community then. Certainly I'm not free in other ways. Anyway, Berry believes these restraints are the root of a potential paradigm shift. What about the more obvious restraints--say the restraint of that which does not believe in you--the world that worships efficiency and fashion, that will suck the boss to be the boss? Berry suggests that those restraints are broken by bypassing them for truer restraints, by subscribing to another model and living it.
What's hard, for me, is locating the right restraints, ones that are "not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning." This has to be case by case. It can't be as simple as be a good neighbor or love is all you need. For example, what about my wariness of people (and institutions) that want from me without intent to give back? What about my broken heart? Those too are restraints you have to work within. There are competing restraints on an individual level that seem to make progress impossible. Berry suggests the answers to our problems, individual and collective, are in our cultural heritage, in the products of real freedom; there's nowhere else to go. So back to books and trying to be like Jesus and buying fair trade coffee, I guess.
Out of loyalty to Berry, who's the kind of writer I tend to trust (because he's been around), here are more of his words:
"It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.
"We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."