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Chicago Poetry Calendar

Just in case you thought sexism and discrimination in poetry were things of the past

There was a rude wake-up call posted on CJ Laity's blog a few days ago, wherein he claimed that woman poet and publisher was using her body as a crutch to get away with encroaching on what he perceived to be his internet domain. (You're thinking to yourself, What? Those two things have nothing to do with each other! And you're right.)

I'm deleting the text of his post from this post now, in the name of removing this slander from the internet, which was my original request. The rest of the text of my initial post is below.

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I'm pretty sure there's only one person acting like he's in high school -- er, more like 7th grade.

Base, low, pitiful, pathetic, cruel.

I hope others will join me in asking that CJ Laity remove this post from his blog and offer up an apology in its place.

JOIN THE RANKS OF PROTEST:

Jenny Boully
Daniela Olszewska
Kate Durbin
Matt Walker

Big-Picture Pop

Though the occasional huge hit collapses the distance between audiences, we will never again experience a moment like Jackson's 1980s apotheosis, when Thriller seemed to shrink the world. Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture—the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song.

"That's a Lot for a Month and Intimidating" (Melix Remix)

Re: Horoscope

I was thinking more like the sun & sand / the closeness and intimacy!

the tennis matches / the confrontations!

the vodka / the cementing of bonds!

the poetry / vows and oaths!

the humid jogs and late night bike rides / face-to-face scenes!

sigh / good night!

omg Rx sunglasses!

I asked if the lenses could be pink (no), but the shiny decals still are -- they can't take my pink away from me. Already much easier to avoid people asking for things on State St.

"I said to Carl look up for once, see just how the sun sets in the sky"

The 90s, As Explained by DCB

Soi-disant means “so called”. the line before it mentions monsters. the singers are calling themselves monsters, but then adding “so called!” . Even in calling myself and Steve monstrous, I had to undercut it, to avoid sounding self-important. It was the tendency of the times.

Out today:

Essential Folk

This list might've been more interesting if they'd tried to bring in more contemporary folksters, but listing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell every few songs was a pretty good idea. I'da put "Like a Rolling Stone" as #1, but I guess it more properly belongs to my true fave genre, folk rock.

Again The Eye Doctor

tells me I need artificial tears.

She checked, just to be sure, and yep, I have the dry eye.

I asked, "How can you tell?"

She said, "Because your tears don't break up properly."

"Haaa!" I replied.

In better news, I found some sweet black & pink frames to turn into Rx sunglasses.
_______

The backdrop (no that's not CGI, that's Chicago):

If You Miss Someone, Click (Your Heels Twice) (This Image)

A Vision-Gift

for the St. Gyros who walked into Murray Place seven years ago today.

Boy Hit by Pea-Sized Meteorite

You think I joke.

I was one year too late for this "wild Chicago night."

Now I feel like watching Donnie Darko.

Shaman Drum To Close June 30

I only got to go to Shaman Drum once -- around this time last year, when St. Gyros and I ducked in from a sunny rain shower and took shelter amidst its yellowy wooden shelves -- but still this makes me sad. I'm sick of awesome bookstores closing.

"Make No Little Plans" -- Daniel Burnham

"Some people go up there, their reaction is, 'I want to keep this completely wild. I want to keep this a secret,' " said Ben Helphand, 34.

"That's not my reaction. My reaction is, 'This is wonderful, this needs to be shared,' " he said of the strip that runs beside West Bloomingdale Avenue. He helped start Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail six years ago to turn it into a park.

--Today's Tribune

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Meanwhile, in New York City: The High Line debuts.

Vivian Gurlesque

This passage from an article about the Vivian Girls reminded me of the Gurlesque:

We get all worked up about pitting mainstream against alternative, or real against manufactured. But the lines between intention and presentation aren't as clear as they used to be. Vivian Girls’ generation feels about music much the same way it feels about feminism: it’s just fine to appropriate cultural touchstones—girl groups, punk, lo-fi, cassette tapes, cheap beer, whatever—and act them out anew, just because it's fun. It's all about choice. Vivian Girls re-create teenage disaffection as a rock ‘n' roll exercise, a way of remembering what being young meant back then and could still mean now, and they do a good job of it. It's not about whether they're pulling one over on us, but whether they can pull it off.

I'm not sure about the observation "It's all about choice," but Gurlesque poets, too, seem to shrug off attempts to talk about the line between "real" and "manufactured" femininity. I notice this shrug as a major cultural shift because I was a teenager in the 90s, and that decade cared a lot about teasing out that mainstream/alternative divide, and of course teenagers are always the experts on real vs. manufactured identities. This is why I loved being a teenage girl, and why I love them now -- they're so clearly constructing their identities, and yet simultaneously invested in the sense that the identity must be "authentic." It was only when I learned to swish around playfully in the constructedness of my identity (hello, third-wave feminism, hello new millennium!) that I dropped that dichotomous worldview. In other words, I kept the former habit (making myself up) but dropped the latter (effort toward authenticity).

Also it reminds me of one of the secrets of the Gurlesque, one that maybe the boy bloggers don't quite get: It's sooooo fun! And so funny. You know that girls'-night sleepover fantasy you have? It's kinda like that. I go gaga and I don't even write the poems. I don't quite know how to formulate this question yet, but I do wonder sometimes about the pleasures a woman gets out of reading Gurlesque poems vs. the pleasures a man gets. It reminds me of the French feminists and reminds me why I'm going to get my PhD--so I can say something here, instead of gesturing.

Also I'll bet the original Vivian Girls (Henry Darger's, that is) are at least somewhat connected to the Gurlesque, at least in Arielle's mind!


Illustrated by several hundred large watercolors paintings as well as smaller drawings and collages, the Vivian Girls are seven preadolescent sisters, princesses, sometimes depicted as hermaphrodites, who fight against and ultimately prevail over evil deeds prepetrated by sadistic adults.

Salingeresque

Still alive, still holed up in New Hampshire, still issuing lawsuits instead of books:

But what if there were real stuff up there? Real Salinger-esque stuff. (Wouldn't it be a brilliant jest on us all, for example, if Salinger himself had actually written the Holden Caulfield sequel 60 years later, hired this (apparently) Swedish guy to impersonate the pseudonymous author, then sued himself to insure no one would guess the real author?

The Glass family: the only family I've ever compared mine to in any meaningful way. And while I've never been alive for an actual Salinger publication, I kind of miss them, too!

The New Boy

In THE SECRET LIVES OF BOYS: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens by Malina Saval, you'll meet:

... a rich kid with severe O.C.D.; a gay, vegan, hearing-impaired would-be Republican; a rural home-schooled Shakespeare fan; a bizarrely sheltered African-American boy who wears suits to school but is inexplicably popular; an optimist with an abusive father; a former methamphetamine addict who does his rehabilitation work as a teaching assistant at a Los Angeles Hebrew school; an ambitious mini-adult intensely focused on his future; a self-described trouble­maker with bipolar disorder; a Muslim who considers himself an average American kid; and a teenage dad with gang ties who bonds with Saval over discussions about sippy cups and diapers.

But as different as these boys seem, what unites them, Saval says, is the very quality boys reputedly lack — a desire for connection: “The boys told me straight out that they were not just looking for someone to talk to, but someone to talk with.”

I Can't Tell

if this article is secretly an ad for Urban Outfitters or really dissing Urbs, as it claims to be. Since I just added two things to my urbanoutfitters.com cart, I'm guessing the former.

They're right about "nostalgia tech," though:

It’s pretty cool that your iPhone tells you how to get to that underground club in Bushwick and all, but I just rotary-dialed the 411 operator, made best friends with her, and scored the unlisted phone number. So there.

Clear the cart, clear the brainwash!

Itchin 4 Diction

beyond "douchebag"? Defaming is here to help.

"because a hurricane will not / rearrange its creativity for you"

The best Hurricane Katrina poem I've ever read: "Talking About New Orleans" by Jayne Cortez.

Found Poem: Bees on a Plane

Maybe these bees were too tired
to fly for themselves.

A gang of honeybees landed
on the wing of a plane
used for flight school training
at Beverly Airport.

At first, the 10,000 or so bees
swarmed over the left side
of the aircraft, then landed
on top of the left wing.

The owner of the flight center
called police, who said to call
local bee removal expert Al Wilkins.

Wilkins used a specially designed vacuum
to suck the bees off the plane,
and then relocated them to hives
where they will produce honey.

Wilkins guessed that the queen
may have stopped to rest on the plane,
and the other bees congregated around
to protect her.

These people need to go back to school

--where I, for one, learned early and quick that everyone has a subject position, that white people's and especially white men's subject positions are often invisible because they are seen as "the norm," whereas a Hispanic woman's subject position feels aberrant or threatening or loca to lovers of the norm.

Hey, Sotomayor haters, guess what? White people and men have "philosophies" and "biases" and whatever you want to call them, too. These viewpoints are just so deeply ingrained in the status quo -- in all of our institutions that were once upon a time created by white men for white men -- that you don't see them anymore. But they're there. That's not legislating from the bench. That's being human -- a "marked" human who, oh, I dunno, just might have some insight into age-old laws for changing populations in changing times.

But we all know who hates change (conservative, adj., "tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions").

Deviant Beach Reads

Happy June, beach bunnies! That wild curator, species Pafunda, has done it again! Click on over to Delirious Hem this week for blurbs, endorsements, homages, and imitations on over up under around experimental/innovative/feminist/deviant woman fiction writers. I'm up on Wednesday, drooling all over Miranda July. Again. And then in August you'll find a feature curated by K. Lorraine Graham & yrs truly madly deeply. More details soon!

Monday June 1:
Michele Battiste on Emma Donoghue
Cara Benson on Marianne Apostolides
Mary Biddinger on Banana Yoshimoto

Tuesday June 2:
Michelle Detorie on Carol Emshwiller
Kate Durbin on Angela Carter & Joan Didion
Elisa Gabbert on Joy Williams

Wednesday June 3:
Brandi Homan on Selah Saterstrom
Becca Klaver on Miranda July
Kathleen Ossip on Jennifer Moxley

Thursday June 4:
Evie Shockley on Renee Gladman & Selah Saterstrom
Elizabeth Treadwell on Janet Frame

Friday June 5:
Erika Meitner on Marjane Satrapi
Sarah Murphy on Margo Lanagan & Maggie Stiefvater

Curated by Danielle Pafunda