Oppen after SFO

Haven’t had time to write about the three Bay Area readings, which were great; mainly because I have been having such a great time with my old friend Robyn Schiff, who read with me for the readings in San Francisco and Sonoma, and also read with me last night here in Portland. She is a fantastic poet. Here she is at lunch right after I picked her up from the airport:



We have also been surprisingly busy just getting from place to place. San Francisco airport was kind of a nightmare, but I had an hour to read on the plane—Oppen’s Selected Prose (edited by Stephen Cope, whom I just met while up in Ithaca, now that I think of it). Some good quotes so far:

The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. (32)

Such an art has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant, and it is the nightmare of the poet or the artist to find himself wandering between the grim gray lines of the Philistines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia. If he ceases to believe in the validity of his insights—the truth of what he is saying—he becomes the casualty, the only possible casualty, of that engagement. Philistia and Bohemia, never endangered by the contest, remain precisely what they were. This is the Bohemia that churns and worries the idea of the poet-not-of-this-world, the dissociated poet, the ghostly bard. If the poet is an island, this is the sea which most lovingly and intimately grinds him to sand. (30)

...the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his political non-availability as clearly as the classic pronouncement: "If nominated I will run, if elected I will hide." (37)

I’ll be driving to Missoula today after an 11-noon Q&A at Portland State. Ten hour drive. One shot. Supposed to be beautiful, but it’s raining. Different kind of beauty. Ah, another Oppen:

The cocoon of “Beauty” as the word is often used, the beauty of the background music and of soft lights, though it might be an art, is also an art of the masseur and the perfumist. (30)

Sacramento

October 24: Reading with Rebecca Morrison (aka Eskimo Pie Girl) for a special Friday night presentation at The Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street St., Sacramento, CA.

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Ah, how wonderful Sacramento is! Their rental car operations suck, and there can be a lot of traffic going into downtown Sacramento, but the Bikram yoga studio there is great (more on that later), and there is a cute little square with a wonderful little café there. When I arrived at the café, I kicked myself for ever having left California (I went to Berkeley for undergrad—“best years of my life” and all that). It was beautiful, sunny… there was a garden, soy milk galore, cute people of all shapes and sizes:



I got into town, sweated my ass off in Bikram (again, more later…), then booked it on over to the Sacramento Poetry Center for a lovely reading with a woman named Rebecca Morrison hosted by Tim Kahl. Tim had seen I was going to be in the Bay Area, so contacted me out of the blue to host me—lovely and generous of him; he is a great host.

Here is Rebecca (on the left) with some pre-reading audience:



Here is Tim:



Tim opened up our reading with a poem called “The Serial Bubble” (I don’t think the blogging format is going to accommodate Tim’s text, so posting a YouTube link instead). (I love the epigraph: "When the tide goes out, you can see who’s swimming naked" — Warren Buffett):



Rebecca was lovely—her work was so pure, phenomenological in the natural sense, sensual, thoughtful. Tim provided a link to some video of her reading (there is also video of me reading, but you can skip that… ☺)…

http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2008/10/katy-lederer-and-rebecca-morrison-at.html

After the reading, we all had some wine and cheese, talked politics. I found the community in Sacramento thoughtful and wonderful—had such great conversations with folks about politics, the environment, and the economy. Here are some pictures… A great crowd! Lovely!:

This guy works as a building developer for the city, but says he mostly just helps the city tear things (crack houses, etc) down:



Lovely painter woman:



Check out the awesome t-shirt:

Las Vegas

October, 22: Reading at the Henri and Odette Gallery, 124 South 6th Street, Suite 130, Las Vegas, NV.

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The first thing I noticed, or maybe just imagined I noticed, upon driving away from McCarran Airport in Vegas was the lack of dust in the air—if the dust can ever really settle in Las Vegas it would be now, as the Dow keeps on plunging and housing starts stop.

The last time I spent any meaningful time in Las Vegas was back in October of 2001—almost seven years ago to the day, a dreadful little epoch in my life. I had lost my apartment in Gramercy Park, NY after 9/11, the poetry classes I was teaching that fall didn’t fill (enrollment opened on 9/12), and there was a very large and very toxic cloud dangling off the bottom tip of Manhattan like an evil drool, so, partly because, as a single woman in the city, I was terrified beyond belief, and partly because my family made me do it (my brother and sister both lived in Las Vegas at the time), I flew to Las Vegas thinking I’d return to New York a month or two hence. Little did I know that the fall of 2001 until the fall of 2002 would be the worst year of my life.

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When I got into the airport this time, I was possessed by a sudden urge to take pictures of various commercial and/or maniacal visuals with my dog-eared copy of Faust in the frame. Here are some pictures:







I suppose it was apropos, not only because Faust is one of the primary inspirations for the poems in my new book, but also because the story of Faust is really the structuring mytheme of my life (probably most New York lives)—a kind of maniacal striving, a willful and sometimes unethical insistence there has got to be more, a feeling of hideous dissatisfaction with the knowledge… the answers, really… that the current moment has to offer.

I am currently especially dissatisfied with the fact everyone (at least everyone in finance) saw the current financial crisis coming and no one really did, or maybe was able to do, much of anything about it (cf Ben Stein in the New York Times a day or two ago).

And I am currently especially terrified that we really have no control over or truly meaningful insight into the complicated systems (finance, the environment, international politics) that organize our lives. If we couldn’t stop the collapse of the world economic system, even though everyone knew we were, as a collective, aggressively blowing a shiny slick speculative bubble of historical proportions, how can we possibly think we are in any sort of position to stop the collapse of the global eco- or political systems (obviously all three of these systems—financial, environmental, and political form a sort of Triumvirate of The Apocalypse… people are one day going to be murdering each other over what will inevitably be exorbitantly priced bottles of water).

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I had no control over my fate after 9/11 because I had no money. And so, between now and then—today and seven years ago—I got myself some money by working at a hedge fund. (As well as the material for a quizzically melancholy book about life in the cold, clinical, bodiless center of The Imperium…). “Las Vegas drove me to it.”

And when I got back to Las Vegas, I could see the dust had settled—in one of the worst hit real-estate markets in the country. Vegas, as everyone knows, is an industry town, and the industry is tanking… Hotel occupancy is down 10% since this time last year (which isn’t accounting for the precipitous drop in prices)… Foreclosure rates are at an all time high, and, unlike this time seven years ago, the air was clear of all that detritus of housing starts that had assaulted my nose and throat back after 9/11—when I was trying so hard to get away from the toxic cloud back in New York; yeah, it’s a system.

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I stayed with my mother and her husband. Here they are at the reading:



The reading itself was hosted by the inimitable and brilliant Dayvid Figler, who had stayed at my place in Brooklyn just the weekend before to attend the launch party for the newest issue of HEEB Magazine:



He is the author of the cover story on LV mayor Oscar Goodman. Here is the issue of HEEB:



In addition to being a brilliant journalist and sometime poet, Dayvid is a hilarious commentator on Las Vegas NPR and Court TV (maybe not so “hilarious” on the latter, murder and more murder). He is also one of the best criminal defense attorneys (former public defender) in all of Las Vegas and a wonderful host to visiting poets. Here is Dayvid, who arranged to have the reading at a great new downtown gallery called Henri and Odette. (Speaking of exorbitantly priced bottles of water, you can see that the gallery’s mini-café purveys wonderful bottles of water (these are mostly glass—so not only could people murder each other over these bottles, but they could murder each other with the bottles as well)):



The gallery owner also provided a wonderful little tea and cookie spread for the reading.

Here is a rather intent audience member:



There were, total, 16 whole people at the reading, which is about three times more than I ever had for a reading back when I was living in Vegas back in 2001-2002. After the reading, we all went out to a great new bar (they served absinthe—too bad Las Vegas is a driving town and I am a responsible woman) and discussed the fact that Vegas has changed a great deal over the last seven years. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an effect of the boom or more of a long-term trend for the city—then again, it’s not as if LA, San Francisco, or New York, where some of the new people came from, are faring much better.

One interesting tidbit: while I was driving around in Las Vegas, enjoying the newly cleared air, I listened to a lot of NPR. One of the shows featured a bit about “the hemline index,” which is basically shorthand for the fact that, as economic times change, so do hemlines (they go down with the Dow). Some of the other things that supposedly change: beer becomes more popular, carbonated sodas and waters less-so; the popular female “type” goes from big-eyed, full-lipped, and childlike to more mature-looking, smaller-eyed, and thinner-faced; and (my favorite): popular works of art go from being quick, jaunty, and vapid (example: “La Macarena,” barf) to being longer and more serious (“Bridge Over Troubled Water”). Seeing as my favorite art works tend to be morose, brooding, dark, and serious (the original of Solaris, all of Didion and Gaitskill, effing Faust), I am, at least in this one dimension, very much looking forward to the next few years!

Ithaca

October, 18: reading with Rebecca Wolf in the SOON reading series, at No Radio Records, 312 East Seneca Street, Ithaca, NY.

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Finally writing after traveling up to lovely (and freezing!) Ithaca last Saturday night to read with Rebecca Wolff at No Radio Records. I started off the journey by training it up to Athens, New York (they gouge you on Fridays--$60 instead of the usual $30 or so), where Rebecca (editor of Fence) and her husband, the novelist Ira Sher, had prepared a wonderful salmon and spinach dinner. We had wine, talked about the pathetic state of book sales, and (even in spite of sorry state of book sales and the overcrowded market) the continued wonderfulness of the creative life (oh how we all like our writing—cf Avital Ronnel’s Crack Wars, for an account of that).

The next morning, me, Rebecca, Ira, and their two lovely children Asher and Margot, drove about 5 hours upstate, through just-peaking beautiful foliage, to a Holiday Inn. By the end of things, we were dry.

Here are the two lovely children (Asher was furious he couldn’t use my iPhone):



And the road:



Ira was left in the hotel room with the kids while Rebecca and I moseyed on over to the reading. Here is Ira—wine was invented for such occasions:



Me doing a Narcissus sort of thing:



A decent crowd showed up at the venue itself—maybe twenty people—a nice mix of folks from both the Cornell and local communities. Fred Muratori, whom I hadn’t met before but with whom I had corresponded back when I was still editing Explosive Magazine, gave me a very thoughtful and wonderful introduction. Seth Perlow did a great job arranging the entire event. Ron Henry designed beautiful broadsides for the both of us.

Here are Rebecca and Seth:



The audience (and ambience):



More audience:



Part of the audience including nice Fred Muratori:



At the end of things, after a great dinner and great glass of wine (Red Truck), I felt a bit like I was coming down with a cold, so repaired to the hotel early. Rebecca walked with me. We discussed accessibility—I remarked that I would likely never write anything quite so accessible as my new book again (and certainly would never have such incredible timing on a publication). Rebecca remarked that I would (generally) "never be Dana Goodyear” because of the emotional remove in my work. Made me think, of course, about the emotional remove of my self—and perhaps the emotional remove of all “experimental” writings, all experimental selves. A certain "not-in-the-moment" quality because many of us are aware—at this disgraceful moment in history—that the way things are, the way we are, is untenable. Does one really want to inhabit this moment? “You must change your life,” Rilke wrote at the end of a poem about a classical statue with a disappeared head.

The Ruins

Incredible poem by Anne Winters from The Key to the City (slashes represent actual line-breaks):

The Ruins

In shorts and sneakers, torso’s weight caught/
on the bent left leg, palm flat on the granite flutings/
you crouch on a fragment of lintel. Loose masonry/
flours your hams, your calves, the right knee elbow-hooked/
against the sparrowy black ribcase. You bask economically, shoulderblades tilted/
to catch the last sun. Singularities: the eyes slightly/
protuberant, underlid reddish and wet; a slate-blue/
vein in the eyebrow. Expression: furious, inward, fixed./

Across the street, boarded tenements; on this side/
a level campus of rubble: brickmounds, a worn/
topscrim of silver and cellophane. At Eighth Avenue, one building’s/
still upright, stapled shut with a lustrous/
sheet of industrial grade aluminum. By the stoop, an afghaned/
armchair, a telephone table; here innerness and the street/
begin to converge… On the UNFIT FOR HABITATION sign/
HUMAN is spray-painted over with DOG./

The New York Times, May 6—“Some streets might have ceased to be part/
of the city. No police, fire protection; TB everywhere; heroin; in three blocks/
studied by the Times, the chance for a normal death/
for anyone is one in twenty.” A man on a step is interviewed:/
“The social workers left. The garbage trucks left. The Red Cross left.”/
Then a “lay worker” (this is poetry): “To our demented inn, the world,/
the LORD came uninvited. And only in these/
disinherited, does He hide Himself—for whom there was no room.”/

So Heaven and Earth have put their hands to the work/
that holds this boy, and holds him on this block. Not one/
light swerves of thousands outbound on the East Side Drive or reflected/
in the shady vitrines of Madison, of Park; ten minutes/
on the A Train from air-conditioning, residential/
towers still half I-beams, the endlessly pinwheeling brush-/
points of A Starry Night, and can not one of these/
banks of incandescence cast a lightline to these ruins?/

Candle saucers start yellow smears in the chickenwired/
windows of the corner tenement. It is dark now, and somewhere out in the dark/
a landlord overtightens a pressure valve. Clean rounds of brick/
where Con Ed stripped the meters; a greenish mineral/
floodstain where addicts hacksaw copper pipes/
and strip the burst boiler for salvage. Signs, straws/
in the wind, like the hairline rust circles/
next to the hydrants where women set down their pails./

The capital itself (they say) has fled the city/
that once expressed itself in rows/
of dumbbell tenements. Now insurance costs dictate/
they must seem to fall from within. One chance/
in twenty… No, no god has elected your life. Nothing’s hidden inside you/
but your dying childhood, and whatever is on its way/
from the outside to replace it. Streetlight falls/
like streaks of drypoint around the tight, huddled limbs./

Expression: obscure now, lid-glistening, as if/
you’d tried to seal yourself into something/
separate, and when this is denied a flatness/
comes into the human face. Yet it’s only the armor/
of outside, still inlaid with its useless and lovely/
uniqueness of inside. Almost you weep, taking arms, and one day/
one source of your street cool will be this tear/
spread without depth or relief over the whole eye./

Tallahassee - Part 3

Read last night at a place called The Warehouse. Wonderful crowd—100 or more, people sitting on the floor, that sort of thing. Brian Turner, former infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team and Infantry Division, and author of the fabulous and necessary book, Here, Bullet “warmed up the stage” for me, as he put it. Set it on fire, more like. His reading was passionate, saddening, troubling, and inspiring. Here is the title poem, which he recited by heart to start off his reading, riveting the audience:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends every time.

My work and reading made for an interesting contrast, much more interior, skeptical, cerebral. Whereas his work’s subject is the irrational and tragically animal carnage of war—the horrendous injustices at the margins of The Imperium—mine is about the always calculating, clinical, and disembodied subjectivity at its cold and focused center.

The pairing prompted me to think about the mechanisms of hegemony—for soldiers or others in the working and middle classes, some of the clumsier mechanisms of hegemony (economic hardship, lack of more appealing alternatives, pure force) will do; for the upper classes, however, hegemony has to be achieved in other ways—through therapy, media, corporate protocols such as year-end and compensation reviews, etc. During the reading—during this entire recent period of economic psychosis and political ineptitude—I kept thinking about Yeats’ famous lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” A riddle—jogging the intellect. Yeats is asking: how to act?

The New York Times today remarked: "The economy was in deep pain."

Here is a picture I took earlier in the day while searching fruitlessly for a drug store before the reading. Tallahassee was not designed for pedestrians by any means, and it would have been a mile or more walk over a highway just to find a CVS:



Tallahassee: weeping flag and weeping trees.

Tallahassee - Part 2

Crazy night last night with amazingly well-adjusted Floridian creative writing students...

Here is Adam, Erin Belieu's boyfriend: opener of car doors for ladies, procurer of potato chips and soda, thoughtful man:



Here are Frank and Jen, my "official" ferriers... This picture was taken at a lovely little bar named Water Works... water streamed over the windows... sad windows.



Here are Adam and April:



Tallahassee: crying windows, weeping trees.

Tallahassee - Part 1

October 14: Reading with Brian Turner at Florida State University. The Warehouse, 706 W. Gaines Street, Tallahassee, FL.

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I am writing from a fluffy white bed at the Doubletree Hotel in Tallahassee, exhausted...

Had dinner last night in New York at a wonderful vegan restaurant called Blossom with a nice friend named B. I met B three years or so ago through my sister, who used to give him poker lessons. She set the two of us up thinking he was “my type.” We went on a couple of dates… I blew him off for someone else and then regretted it, but by the time I said anything, he’d gotten into a serious relationship and is living with that girlfriend still.

Not that this is at all apropos of anything at all, except for the fact B is an equities trader and the both of us were talking about the Dow and the economy, the potential impending collapse. He is worried he might lose his job and said—in all seriousness—that I was lucky because I had “anther career,” i.e. poetry, to fall back on (oh how I laughed), whereas all he knew was trading. We split a bottle of wine, ate honorably and long. I went home and conversed with my roommate in the yard until 1 in the morning.

From that—drunken musings on an unpleasant economic future in the rotten bleeding bleating heart of the mess, New York City—to an alarm at 4:40AM this morning to catch a flight to Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.

Frank, a nice graduate student in the poetry program at Florida State University, picked me up. Here is Frank meeting me at the airport:



Here is a picture of Tallahasse (you can see it's pretty flat):



I am here to read tomorrow night for the creative writing program. I have to say I’m pretty excited to be getting out of the rotten bleeding bleating heart for a couple of days, but I’m also pretty tired. And the economy's still tanking. Today, stocks staged a rally due to the promise of a massive infusion of capital in the form of equity stakes in banks. I am skeptical, however, and sick of all the writing and talking and editorializing... It's like commentating in the background while an entire herd of elephants takes ill and collapses...

Austin

October 4: Reading with Philip Nikolayev at Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith's house, Austin, TX.

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A rushed first entry for a rushed first couple of readings on the tour…

On Friday, the 3rd, read at NYU on behalf of the new anthology Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship. This was a lovely event – even lovelier than I would have expected. Pretty much every single woman poet reading (Rebecca Wolff, Molly Peacock, Susan Wheeler, Joy Katz, Kristin Prevallet, among many wonderful others) went on far past the allotted five minutes, but all were so charismatic and engaging and (usually) hilarious, it didn’t matter and the time just flew.

The next morning, flew down to Austin – early, a little hung-over (there was some woman poet revelry the night before)… Arrived at Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith’s lovely little house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Higgins after being lost – driving back and forth and back and forth on the highway (I don’t even know which, but it was an ugly highway) in my pimped out rental PT Cruiser – for about an hour. I was wearing jeans, knee-length suede boots, sweating through my wool sweater. Hoa and I sat out on her porch, drinking homemade nettle tea, catching up on the last twelve years or so (we met when we were just “poet babies” back in the Bay Area in – oh 1995 or ’96. I had had them down to Vegas when I was running a reading series there… they were always beautiful – a beautiful couple… and now they have two beautiful boys). Here are some pictures. I wish I could get as excited about Halloween (very important note: “the muscles in the suit aren’t REAL muscles, they are PART OF THE SUIT!!!”):






I was tired, but the reading that night, which I shared with Philip Nikolayev, was fun – a mellow affair. Maybe twenty people from the Austin community showed up. I spent the majority of the evening after the reading stuffing corn chips into my mouth, and laughing a lot. It was wonderful. I wish I had pictures (of the crazy winding light they had around the podium, the boys as the “opening act” doing crazy dances with their arms flailing wildly as they screamed and exclaimed), but my iPhone doesn’t have a flash, and I’ve been too rushed with preparing for the book tour (sending boxes to and fro, making various rental and hotel arrangements) to buy a real camera…