Just back from a week in Truro, Massachusetts. It’s the death of summertime and everything was so implausibly beautiful there that it really could not fit in to “life” as I know it. Thus Death-Truro.

Back in Albany and quite behind on many tasks and deadlines due to the stark raving madness of my children and the severity of the lack of childcare. It was stark and severe: Death-Children. Read a biography of Ottoline Morrell, LADY Ottoline Morrell that is, whose early success at putting together an idyllic artistic community for herself–with the help of her considerable fortune–later collapsed when her friends started mocking her in print everywhere she turned.

Saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform in Saratoga and was moved to tears. Husband next to me was for once similarly moved and said something about the “10 righteous people,” something Biblical, something about how if there’s 10 righteous people left in the world then we can continue. I’m joining a fan club right now.

MTV, home to a show called “Date My Mom,” as well as the most annoying reality program of them all, “The Hills,” has for years been subject to the complaint that it doesn’t really show music videos anymore, a charge that is essentially true. But MTV now also airs a show called “FNMTV.” On the one hand they featured the premiere of the video for the worst song (to my knowledge) that LL Cool J has ever made. On the other hand, on the the same episode, they premiered the video for that quite lovely She & Him song, “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” (She & Him is, of course, the all-star tag-team of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward). On the one hand the Jonas Brothers appeared on the show a few weeks ago and Miley Cyrus is slated to appear next week (both of whom, unlike “Crank That Soulja Boy” I totally get why the kids like, but still). On the other hand, on this past weeks show they had segments focusing on Chromeo and Tokyo Police Club. And though I missed it, they’ve also featured, according to the website, my new favorite band, No Age and your favorite new band, Vampire Weekend. (A quick note: after you watch the video for No Age’s “Eraser” [a video that will, unless you are one of those people who cleverly insist that LA is “fake,” make you want to move to LA] please watch the video of Lil Wayne performing “A Milli,” a song you are by now probably sick of, but that is even more relentless and amazing live). On the one hand the show is hosted by Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz of “guy-liner” fame, which, one would think would fully push the show in the direction of the bad…But Wentz is actually a pretty capable host, enthusiastic about most of the right things and as natural as one would expect a member of an band hosting a show in a room full of screaming teenagers to be.

“FNMTV” also happens to have, what I have heard, is the worst time slot for a television show, primetime Friday night. Which probably means that they are still shoring up most of their hopes and dreams in “Legally Blonde The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods” and “The X Effect”–a show where, I kid you not, two exes meet up and stay at a resort to see if they still have feelings for each other while their current partners watch via hidden camera from another room…

Yesterday instead of blogging I went and saw the new Batman movie. It is not nearly as bad as the contrarian New York Magazine critic David Edelstein claims or nearly as good as all the fanboys and girls on IMDB insist (I mean, seriously, better than “The Godfather”?) Its definitely better than the movie I just finished watching today when I should have been blogging, “I’m Not There,” the Todd Haynes movie about Bob Dylan. But thats another story. (The soundtrack is pretty rad however; especially the version of “Maggie’s Farm” contained therein. I’m totally in agreement with Rebecca about Stephen Malkmus on the strength of this cover alone).

As the book I am working on right now just so happens to concern itself with crime and with blackmail specifically, I have been thinking a lot about genre and when genre is undertaken in a literary fashion. While there have been many notable instances of the high and low melding in literature, movies have been consistently doing this very well for a long time. For what I like to think of as research I watch a lot of movies–American and French gangster, heist and noir cinema being my favorite. So it was nice to see a short piece by A.O. Scott in the Times today about superhero movies (another subgenre-genre that has, at least of late, aspired to something more) and what he believes is the beginning of the end of their prominence in the marketplace. Scott draws a parallel to the western and the limits of that genre, but then, disappointingly, the article just ends. His point seems to be that while the superhero movie and the western are wholly capable of stating the very things about good and evil and the like that, in a sense, go without saying in non-genre-based drama, of the two, only the western truly explores these ideas. Which got me thinking: in this kind of work, what does it really mean “to explore?”

But I digress…And probably for good reason. Compared with Philadelphia, my reading in Providence the following weekend was a breeze. I took a bus this time and arrived hours ahead of the start time of the reading. I brought books with me, a precaution that was totally unnecessary as the bookstore had already ordered a bunch. My co-reader, Laura Jaramillo was brilliant as ever. My friend and former roommate Gabriel Mendes and his lovely wife, Liz, hosted an afterparty that was fun as hell, if without incident. Then I gave stout handshakes and hugs to everyone and went home.

Posted by Colie Collen

trap of ever-rising

energy: I ask them to come

slowly at first and then with great speed

rise, clear-eyed and alert

bear witness to the people’s appetite for change

now lift our nation

looking straight up into the air

vulnerable to cascading failure

vested interest in perpetuating

conserve presently wasted

destabilizing nations

some of them are being stampeded

beyond empty rhetoric

strategic initiative

strategic challenge

melting pressure

kindling for mega-fires

good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner

willingness as a people

generational moment

See the video here, here (skip the first 1  1/2 minutes of thank-yous), or here (shortened version)    

And the crux of the argument, wrapped around cliche but still quite beautifully done:

“Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises.

“But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.

“The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.” 

Also in this speech, Gore uses the word sclerotic to describe our democracy.  Dictionary.com provides the following definition.

 sclerotic: 1. Hard; firm; indurated; — applied especially in anatomy to the firm outer coat of the eyeball, which is often cartilaginous and sometimes bony.  

So he made me cry, a little, at my desk and over my tea.  What will happen now? 

Bill McKibben brings up a good point:  ”I’m not sure what prize you get once you’ve won the Nobel.”   

Look for meetings the Obama campaign is holding nationwide to seek input on the Democratic Party’s issue positions.  Go here to find one locally.

On May 2nd, my friend (and poet and artist and Fence board member) Christopher Stackhouse and I went to Philadelphia. Though I’d had the lineup of co-readers (Dorothea Lasky, Brian Kim Stefans and Caroline Noble Whitbeck) figured out for months, I’d only sort of recently figured out a venue…

…But i’m getting ahead of myself. I realize now I should actually stop and step back and talk about putting together readings. I will try (both here and in future posts) to not get mad all over again and go on a rant. It basically all comes down to four different types: The University Reading, The Bookstore Reading, The Curated Reading, and The Other. The University Reading usually comes about through the faculty of an institution deciding they’d like to have you come and read. These are great because–thanks to the department–the poets get paid, the students get to go for free and the non-student members of the community get to go either for free or for less than what they’d pay at a Curated Reading. The Bookstore Reading usually happens at the insistence of the writer or the press publishing the writer. The Curated Reading, though it sounds like it should only happen in a museum or gallery, usually happens in a bookstore or cafe, though it may also take place at someone’s loft-style apartment. The Other includes huge group readings in cemeteries, marathons on various holidays and my favorite: non-curated readings in galleries (more on this later).

In putting together my tour I found that I’d committed to a combination of all of the above. The New School reading I talked about last time was, of course, a University Reading. The Providence reading was a Curated Reading. The LA reading was a gallery reading. And the Berkeley and Philadelphia readings were Bookstore Readings.

Though I probably should have just gotten in touch with Robin’s from the start, I had it in my head that Philadelphia would be a perfect place for an Other-style, gallery reading. (I also somewhat naively believed that I could have readings that turned into dance parties [more on this later]). After a few rejections–the most civil and helpful of which came from the good folks at the Kelly Writers House–I took their suggestion and finally got in touch with Robin’s Bookstore…

…While there is no excuse for tardiness I should stop here again and say that I was, the day after the reading, headed out of town for a month. Also, the night before going to Philadelphia I’d curated, in conjunction with my friend Xaviera Simmons’ installation, a reading with Tisa Bryant and Christopher Stackhouse in Harlem and so hadn’t had time to pack. Leaving an hour later than we should have and thinking that if nothing went wrong, that if we didn’t hit terrible traffic and didn’t get lost we’d still make it on time, we, of course did hit terrible traffic and did get lost, both on the outskirts and in Philadelphia proper. Somewhere in all the screaming at the drivers in front of me and stopping to ask for directions, I called my friend Brooke and told her to tell them to start without me. We arrived nearly an hour after the six start time. On the one hand this is the most “rock star” thing i’ve ever done in relation to a reading. On the other hand its also the time i’m most felt like an asshole. Dorothea and Brian and Caroline read beautifully, or so I’m told. To top off the lateness the battery on the microphone my friend Brooke was using to videotape the reading died and so while the image is perfectly framed by Ms. Bocast, one sees only my lips moving. And to top this off the box of books sent down from Albany for me to sell were nowhere to be found. Luckily, the aforementioned Brooke Bocast, already generously putting Christopher and I up for the night, had agreed to have an after party for me. That night I fell in love with Philadelphia, with its citizens, all of them great dancers and possessors of good taste in music, and with its food. I resolved to never be late to a reading again and have mostly stuck to this. Mostly.

Just stepping in for a moment to recommend some things.

Last night: this intensely well-acted and plainly emotional narrative film called Sherrybaby, with Maggie Gyllenhaal (sp) as a young, trashy, recovering heroin addict just out of jail trying to stay clean and get back to being close with her daughter. Not a manipulative moment in it, as far as I could tell with my fairly sensitive emotional-manipulation meter-reader. Not a clever film, but very dense and varied.

This morning: recent album Real Emotional Trash from The Jicks, Steve Malkmus’s band. He’s got such good sound. I love him. I used to be irritated by his narrative songs, the ones with little stories about quirky characters, a la Rocky Raccoon, but I’ve even capitulated to loving those now. My children adore “Willy Hopscotch” off this album. I still prefer the more abstracted songs. But I’m so glad he’s back to guitars.

What these have in common: Emotion. Ex-addicts. People with kids.

Hi. My name is Khalil and I will be blogging this week and throughout the fall about giving and organizing readings and, when I get tired of talking about this, movies I have seen around the time of my giving or organizing readings. As I am in the midst of downtime having finished all of the spring readings, I will do my best to help you catch up on what has happened so far.

Or something like that. Yesterday, for instance, I saw two movies when I should have been emailing people about reading in Austin and Houston in the fall–”In Bruges,” because I love Martin McDonagh and “Hancock,” because when I got to the movie theater, alone, as I tend to view many movies, I felt weird seeing “Wall-E”by myself with an audience of little kids.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it used to be way worse. At the very first reading in which I was involved, when I was a freshman in high school and when my English teacher decided it would do us good to participate in the open mic at the Barnes and Noble in the strip mall down the road, my mother actually had to bribe me with a CD to get me to go through with it. After that I avoided participating in readings for years. Then in college I discovered beer and that I didn’t mind speaking in front of other people so long as I was able to drink beforehand.

All of which leads me to this past April, when my first book came out and when I was invited along with Kaisa Ullsvick Miller, Carl Martin, and Aaron Kunin to read at the New School. Arriving late, I focused all my attention on Kaisa’s reading. Then I went up. Though I usually make a point of looking up here and there while reading, I was, that night, particularly flustered and so didn’t notice, until about halfway through reading a poem called “Canto de Ossanha”–a poem, I should note, that includes at the end, a line about fucking people up the ass–that my mother was in the audience. Because of our crazy schedules and because of the two years I spent broke and depressed in Austin, Texas and the lack of desire to travel this inspired, I hadn’t seen my mother for almost 3 years at this point. Realizing she’d surprised me by flying up, I somehow managed to continue reading the poem, line about sodomy and all. During the banter between that poem and the next, I voiced my surprise at her being in the audience as well as the fact that I probably wouldn’t have read the poem knowing she was there.

Then Aaron read and then Carl read, both as great as Kaisa. Then we all went out to dinner and I managed to steer the conversation away from the Bush administration and anyone pissing off my mother, the churchgoer and sort-of-conservative. At the time this all seemed like the perfect start to the tour that would continue the following week. It seemed that, knowing what I knew then about booze and about watching out for surprise audience members, nothing would go wrong. Then came Philadelphia.

Fence is happy to announce that the winner of this year’s Motherwell Prize is Elizabeth Marie Young.

The Motherwell Prize, formerly run as the Alberta Prize, is an annual series, generously endowed by Jennifer S. Epstein, which offers publication of a first or second book of poems by a woman, as well as a five thousand dollar cash prize.

Young’s manuscript, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, will be published in the spring of 2009, most likely under a different title. The author is in the process of completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She will be teaching Latin and comparative literature at Boston’s Wellesley College. A small book of her sonnets is coming out from Omahrahu press.

The finalists for this year’s prize were: Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree, by Lara Candland, of Provo, Utah; Notes from Outside Sources, by Amick Boone, of San Francisco, CA; Cryptography for Robert Lansberry, by Robin Clarke, of Pittsburgh, PA; Dressed Like a Kwaker, by Melanie Hubbard, of Ruskin, FL; Partial Waking, by Lizbeth Keiley, of Boca Raton, FL; The Law of Double Reflection, by Jennifer Mackenzie, of Portland, OR; The Dwarf Light, by Marina Lazzara, of San Francisco, CA; and The Two Standards, by Heather Winterer, of Las Vegas, NV.

yes, i mean… what is wrong with art as comfort? sometimes i think it’s just a sexist rubric… the way women are cooks and men are chefs…. women have historically been poets and men have been Poets… look at the historical reaction to dickinson… it’s as if she were knitting or something… but yes, is it feminist (would only men be Feminists?) to get behind rumi, perchance? as a feminist, would i serve my cause better by being the theory-head i have been - showing i can play with the “big boys” - or by settling into my yoga (i am a huge yoga practitioner, bwt, because it COMFORTS ME)… taking long walks in the woods, contemplating… thinking of poetry as sweeter… another rubric (if we feel like getting dark and mean) is to think about corporate culture, which, in a funny way, is highly feminized… encourages positive thinking via continual euphemism, is passive-aggressive in many of its modalities, is trite and highly legible… like rumi….?

Here is an amazing poem my friend emailed me… WB Yeats…

The Cold Heaven

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?