Rebecca Wolff

Before I left Truro

I started reading this old novel on the bookshelf next to my bed, a hardback of the kind that is picked up in a thrift shop and left for summer tenants to bring to the beach. It is by the prolific R.V. Cassill, a former neighbor of mine in Truro, now dead. He was, I’m almost positive, though Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know it, the founder of the Associated Writing Programs!

The novel is very interesting to me for several reasons. First, you can see from the start why no one reads it anymore. It was published in 1983 but feels like a novel of the early 60s, in terms of its attitudes toward women (it concerns a married, failed novelist, the protagonist, on summer vacation on the Cape, who’s having an affair with a much younger woman–who quite literally worships his prick!–in the midwest where he travels for his job). It’s all going along like a derivation of Updike when the interesting part starts and the young woman in Cincinnati starts speaking in tongues out of her hoo-ha. It’s very sexual, as I remember novels in the 70s being. The failed novelist’s wife is a former dancer with two kids who’s very pragmatic, and here’s where my ears pricked up: I think that character is based on my mother! (I’m enjoying writing about something that could only possibly be of real interest to me.) At one point when I was about nine or ten we, my mother and brother and I, started going down the road to visit this old novelist quite often. Then stopped.

Of most interest to anyone in this episode will be how sad it is to read a novel with actually very rich and worked prose that just fails fails fails because you can see, for various reasons, that it’s too close to the source material. It’s undigested? Or unmined? Unprocessed, unflagellated, unfiltered? Is there a name for this, in literary critical terminology? If so, does it apply to poems too? And if not, what’s it doing on this blog.

08.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (21)

Tonya Foster

New Moon

New Moon

So where do I begin? Particularly when rage makes direction difficult. Particularly when grief dislocates, is about extended dislocations. I was invited to participate as a Harriet blogger some time ago, and found it remarkably difficult to decide on the “voice” to cultivate. Even the title of this entry is already days old (the moon’s now crescent) (UPDATE: now half) and from an earlier attempt to begin/enter conversation. So given all that, where do I begin? Particularly when so much time has passed that when is as accurate an indication of north as satellites and magnetized needles. Today is August 24, 2009. (A newscaster voice that imagines an August 25^th?) (UPDATE: Today is August 28, 2009) This is one of the last three days of classes for students in Bard’s Language and Thinking Workshop where for the last almost three weeks I’ve been teaching a class of thirteen. (Yesterday, the students matriculated.)

In my initial attempts to begin this blog thing, I focused on a calling up a rather pleasant pseudo-confessional persona:

08.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (24)

Eileen Myles

Brazil

The only thing interfering with the timelessness of summer is the heat. I spent the summer of 1975 in New York having a really hard time making a living mainly putting up gallery posters in the windows of stores for three dollars and hour. Some waitressing which I was really bad at. Happily there was beer. I remember a friend coming over and saying you don’t even have a fan when I remarked on how hopeless everything was. Oh you’re right. Someone gave me a fan I think. I don’t ever remember buying one except for a really cool looking deco one at an auction upstate which only died last summer on Cape

08.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Eileen Myles

AFTER THE READING

I’m going to read at Bluestockings in about forty minutes and I haven’t figured out what to wear yet but I do know what I’m reading. I’m expecting there’ll be a nice audience and I have friends coming, and my girlfriend, and I’m looking forward to it which I usually do cause I love reading. It seems like the most athletic part of our sport. The

08.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Rebecca Wolff

Dispatch from Truro

I’ve been in a beautiful place the past week or so. Every time I try to write something about where I am I think of all the possible misconstruals of it. Or that maybe from a certain perspective it could all be seen to be true.

\\\\\\\\\ This last was typed by Myshka, who is with us on the Cape, otherwise known as Cape Cod–specifically in Truro. We can’t let her outside because of the mangy, starved-looking coyotes, who now trot up to the screen door in full daylight to nab chipmunks off the patio. Patio, deck, porch–which sounds least like I am John Cheever?

08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Joel Brouwer

Hoodoo You Love

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens was the fourth book of poetry I ever bought, with a gift certificate to Schuler Books in Grand Rapids I’d been given for a birthday, probably my sixteenth or so. Why that book? I’m not entirely sure.

08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)