A few months ago I tried to quit the blog. I emailed the po foundation honchos and my fellow bloggers to say I didn’t think I had it in me to blog more regularly, and I was tired of feeling so guilty about my erratic postings. Well, actually, this is what I said:

i feel really rotten that i'm the lamest blogger on the blog. i
cannot put my baby down without him screaming and i've been
cavilierly using my "free time" to: eat, sleep, pick up older
children from school, buy 15 brands of pacifier (none of which judah
will take) and try to get judah a passport. every single day i think
of a blog entry but i literally can't write it down or type it.
(this is a rare moment when he's sleeping in the sling and i have my
hands free)/

crap.

Last night, Lindsey, the babysitter, drubbed me in Boggle. I think her score was more than triple mine. I'm not positive about this: I was having trouble keeping track of my running total. My brain is soft. Words elude me. In fact, the word "elude" eluded me for about a minute.

“Oh, Mr. Cuthbert,� she whispered, “That place we came through—that white place—what was it?�
“Well now, you must mean the Avenue,� said Matthew after a few moments’ profound reflection. “It is a kind of pretty place.�
“Pretty? Oh, pretty doesn’t seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don’t go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful—wonderful. It’s the first thing I ever saw that couldn’t be improved upon by imagination. It just satisfied me here�—and she put one hand on her breast—“it made a queer funny ache and yet it was a pleasant ache. Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr. Cuthbert?�

(from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.)

I'm going there--to "Anne's Land"--in about 30 minutes. And not in my mind, no, with my three sons and my husband and Lindsey and my very bad cold and our overstuffed luggage and our small plastic bags of gels and creams and no water. I will have only intermittent email access but will try to post from Prince Edward Island at least once to let you know if it makes for a pleasant ache and if I can find a better word than "pretty."

Friday night there was a big party for my mother to celebrate her 40 years of service to the city. People told stories and offered reflections about my mom and then we all watched a movie about my mom’s career. There’s one story in the film that I can’t shake and that has shaken me up.

It was a really well done film and talked about my mom's life and career in moving and interesting ways. In the late 1960s and early '70s my mother told stories twice a day, 5 days a week, in schools all over Manhattan, Harlem and the Bronx. She had a weekly radio program, Stories from Many Lands, on WNYC for years. She’s written 23 books, traveled the world--she's had an incredible career and is still going strong. The movie contained interviews with friends and other storytellers (I was interviewed as were my kids) and also showed amazing still photographs I hadn't seen. It felt very real, much less idealized than I would have imagined. But this one story:

Except I can’t. The problem is technical: hands. The baby must be held. In the sling he falls asleep and I eat and try to sleep make food for my older boys and aim for 15 minutes of attention to each one a day (can’t say that I make my goal very often). So the problem is also logistical: time. Somehow there is more of it now that day and night have blurred into one another and also no time at all. At least, no time with hands.

I nurse in the nursing chair, rocking back and forth, turning over words that disappear before I’ve burped him and even tried to put him down. And he does NOT like to be put down.

I want to describe how he smells. I want to describe how this mostly cranky alien, so new to the world, and, frankly, so dyspeptic and fusspotty in his temperament has stolen my heart. Rationally I am unmoved by his cries and grunts and moans and there I am again moving to move him—swing him, rock him, tuck him in close to my body and when all else fails I strip us down and get in the bath where he stares at me wide-eyed and completely calm. But he has already woken up. Even the sling doesn’t work for more than 15 minutes if I am not moving.

He is three weeks old today. I’d love to tell you what it’s like here but—(fade out with the sound of screaming in the background...)

I think I will not write poems about the birth of my third son. I might be wrong, but I’d bet not. The birth itself was so real, present, calm, loving, right. What poem “needs� to be written about it or of/out of it or in it? Does that mean that I write poems in order to fix experiences? I have always found it annoying when people tell me I write because it is therapeutic. I understand how writing can be therapeutic (and the writing as a therapy can be extremely useful), but the notion that every time I write a poem I’m performing a self-treatment is disturbing. And, if it is true, does it mean that publishing poems is like taking photos of yourself taking medication and showing these snapshots to friends?

We’ve all been to readings (particularly open mics) when the poems sound a lot like A.A. testimonies. Again, nothing against testimony or A.A., but I often think, sitting at these kinds of readings, “I’m doing something different.� Am I? Or is my poetry simply a more subverted type of testimony, a less obvious form of self-therapy?

In my photography classes with Lois Conner I learned to say I was “making pictures� rather than “taking pictures,� and I hope making a poem is more than recording a (bad) experience or “expressing� how you feel (for more on my thoughts about poetry as “expression� see my GNAT. I don’t write poems to make myself feel better or to convince someone else to do something—these aims are more the purview of diarists, journalists, and essayists—but what then to do with this realization that I will probably not write about the birth of my third son because I don’t need to? (I certainly felt I did need to write about the birth of my second son, see my discussion and birth poems on How2).

Does the fact that I don’t need to write about this birth mean that when I do write, I write to fix something?

My son, Judah Darwin Zucker Goren, was born at home (in the water) yesterday morning. We were gently and lovingly attended to by a midwife and a doula. My husband and our older two sons (and Lindsey, our poet/babysiter) witnessed Judah's arrival. It was everything I could have hoped for. It was, in the most profound sense of the word, awesome.

Some of you reading this blog must have had this experience: someone asks you what you do and you say “I’m a poet� and they laugh uncomfortably, or say, “what?!� or “I don’t like poetry,� or they step away from you, or say, “you’re kidding, right?� Of course there are times when a person says, “me too!� or, “I’m a painter!� or, “really!� but I’m always surprised at how many people seem not only confused by my answer—“I’m a poet�—but concerned or angry.

Well, these responses seem like warm embraces and a big thumbs up compared to how people respond when I tell them I’m planning to have my baby at home. Except for people who have had or witnessed a homebirth or are midwives or have had a close friend who had a baby at home, the response to my plan is overwhelmingly one of fear, disgust, and enormous anger. “You’re WHAT?!� “WHY?!�

This morning I begged the beautiful and brilliant poet Catherine Barnett (author of Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced) to meet me in the lobby of the elementary school (our kids go to the same school) and help me with some commas. As usual, she came through for me. I had a short list of questions, and it didn’t take much time. Occasionally Catherine lingered over a poem, reading, I could tell, for meaning, rather than simply to answer the question and said, “I’m excited for the book.� Book? All I see are words on a page, commas here and there—probably too many. The acknowledgments aren’t standardized. I detest the closed-dot subsection ornaments. The all-caps bother me—TOO EMPHATIC!—and sometimes, when italics meet an em-dash, the two lean into each other like drunken teenagers and begin to collapse. The “w� in Bell font has a little “u� shape inside, which both pleases me and embarrasses me in ways I can’t explain. Some of the poems in this manuscript were written more than seven years ago, and I’ve been revising them off-and-on since then. Now I can hardly see them except as layout and symbols, a code I invented that once stirred me with feeling. Perhaps this makes me a good editor—the ability to objectify the poems and see them as not-mine, unfamiliar? But, I am horrified by the thought that perhaps my husband feels this way when he sees my naked body. Something dear that has since lost meaning. The way a name, repeated, becomes a word, then a sound, then marks on a page.

In October, the manuscript-transformed-to-book will arrive in my mailbox. We will meet one another like lovers who have aged and changed and dressed in unfamiliar clothes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom recently. Maybe it’s all the Mother’s Day hoopla or maybe it’s because I cannot consider the question of why I enjoy poetry readings or why (thanks Jeffrey) I might not suck as a reader without thinking about and acknowledging my mother, Diane Wolkstein.

My mother is a famous storyteller. I grew up watching her practice in front of the double full-length mirrors in the apartment upstairs where she wrote and rewrote and rehearsed alone and with musicians and other storytellers. I was such a good listener—so quiet—I was permitted to sit in the on-air studio at WNYC while she recorded her weekly program, “Stories from Many Lands.� From her I had an up-close portrait of a hard-working artist. Our relationship hasn’t always been smooth or uncomplicated; how could it have been?

In any case, I wanted to mention that Mayor Bloomberg has declared June 22nd DIANE WOLKSTEIN DAY in tribute of the 40 years of service my mother has given the city. She has been telling stories and inviting other storytellers to the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park for 40 years. Maybe some of you have seen her there or read her books. If not, you should! On June 22nd and 23rd will be celebration with many world-class storytellers to honor my mother’s service and to promote storytelling in New York City. Check it out:

Wow Kenneth, you make your readings sound really unpleasant.

I love readings. Although maybe I wouldn't love yours? But I think I would.

Sometimes, during a reading, I just sit and write. All that swirling language inspires me or perhaps, more accurately, occupies one part of my brain and allows another to be open to making poems. I’ve written a lot of poems at readings. Sometimes I really, really listen. Sometimes I admire the reader’s clothes or style (Cathy Wagner is HOT! Arielle Greenberg has this totally compelling reading thing she does: like a stance or a tone or a kind of come-hither thing, I can’t explain it) or drunkenness or craziness. Sometimes I give myself over to the pleasure of being entertained. Sometimes I sit and indulge in petty jealousy or in a kind of “well at least I don’t do THAT!� kind of thinking.

And readings are social events for me. Maybe what I’m saying is that I don’t get out enough, but readings are where I see poets I know well or a little and run into old friends. Of course I’d often rather just stay home and watch TV, but almost every time I go to a reading I’m glad I made the effort. The relative silence around a human voice—I imagine it is why some people like to go to church.

I’ve been wanting to finish a post I started writing months ago about description in poetry and writing about real life and Mark Doty and my students and observation and the difference between writing about real life and Confessional poetry, but I couldn’t because I’ve been too busy living my real life. This is not an excuse. This is a list of 30 things I’ve done since April 16th instead of blogging.

1. Sifting through myfonts.com to find the perfect text ornament to use on the section divider pages of my third book (4 + hours).
2. Read newish poems (sort of a weird poetic journalism I’ve fallen into) including a long, sexy-pregnant poem as part of a faculty poetry reading at Fordham (part of the Poets Out Loud Series). Terese Svoboda, Mark Svenvold, and Janet Kaplan also read. Reading the poem before my students and colleagues felt pleasurably naughty which made up for the fact that the reading was poorly attended (ostensibly due to the flood conditions in NY). (2+ hours)

Yesterday my husband attended the certification training for assistant coaches for the U8 (under eight) division of West Side Soccer League (a division of the American Youth Soccer Organization). I was a U6 referee last Fall but I’m too damn big to fit into the yellow and black striped shirt let alone waddle up and down the field, so hubby has to meet our volunteer commitments this Spring. Here is one of the jewels he brought home from the meeting:

1. Location, location, location. As soon as I entered the building I reverted to a 16 year old state. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was about to get in trouble for something. When my cell phone vibrated in my bag I thought, “oh no, it will be confiscated,� and walking through the halls hugely pregnant made me feel I’d brought shame upon myself or at least done very, very poorly in Sex Ed.
2. Listening to poems is easy and good. What a wonderful thing to sit in a room full of people and listen to poems. A simply delightful way to spend an hour. Interested students, teachers and staff, chosen by lottery, sat along the back of the stage. There were about 25 of us and one by one we went up to the podium, briefly explained why we loved this poem or chose this poem, read the poem and sat down. Aside from one row of too-smooth jocky-looking guys and a few very tired looking students sprinkled about, everyone seemed to be listening most of the time. I thought, “even if the students never hear this many poems again, they’ve heard these� and felt happy.
3. The audience knows who’s cool. You could feel it, as a reader reached the podium, if the kid (or teacher) was adored or respected or lusted after by others. It wasn’t always the student I would have expected (from their looks or deportment) that the audience responded to, but the way the energy in the auditorium fluctuated in response to each reader (before the reader began) was very clear. Depending on who was at the podium the audience hushed or rustled, held their breath or slouched. Poems that were not so gripping were afforded more respect if the reader was beloved.
4. Anyone, cool or not, commands attention when reading an Allen Ginsberg poem.
5. Students like to hear poems that “teachers don’t like.�
6. Students like to hear the poem “America� by Allen Ginsberg.
7. Students like to hear “Building Nicole's Mama� by Patricia Smith.
8. Students will mouth the words along with the reader as they listen in rapt attention and then finally burst into thunderous applause if the director of athletics gets up and says, “if you could only see how beautiful my wife is when she reads this to my daughters,� and then reads Goodnight Moon.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to visit Fieldston, the high school I attended. I was graciously invited by poet Michael Morse who is also a teacher at Fieldston (See Verse Daily for one of Michael’s excellent poems.) Michael asked me to participate in a National Poetry Month assembly at the school where students and teachers will read short lyric poems and briefly explain why they chose a particular poem.

Here is my short list:

“God’s World,� by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“You Begin," by Margaret Atwood
"Spelling," by Magaret Atwood
"It's Late Here How Light is Late Once You've Fallen," by Katie Ford
Probably my favorite single (shortish) poem is “A Man Meets a Woman on the Street� by Randall Jarrell but it’s a bit too long and I can’t read that without choking up.

It's interesting that these are the poems I am considering reading at the assembly. If I were going to sit down and read one of my favorite books it wouldn't be one of the books in which these poems appear (except perhaps Katie Ford's book, Deposition). Millay, Atwood, and Jarrell are not poets I routinely recommend to students. On the other hand, I can't imagine reading a selection from Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, David Antin, Brenda Hillman, Wayne Koestenbaum, D.A. Powell or many of the other books that have been vitally important to me. I'm more likely to find a selection from James Schuyler, Alice Notley, David Trinidad, or Jorie Graham, but even these did not make the final list of candidates for assembly. I think it is fair to say that just as there are great songs you really DON'T want to hear when you're in labor, there are favorite poems not right for some circumstances and less favorite poems that perfectly fit the time and place. Audience matters.

Jeffrey and others,

I love the idea of figuring out—in part as a way of exploring what invisible or less visible lines connect us—where our sensibilities overlap and which poets we all hold dear. Harryette Mullen is a damn good choice! Who else? David Antin?

This raises the question of whether the poets we might have in common are “crossover� poets (and what that would mean) or whether we all have somewhat eclectic tastes and are bound to overlap somewhere.

And, Jeffrey, since you asked, the secret to my slam success is this: always read a poem with at least one blowjob in it. Perhaps that makes me a whore: I did win over $40 of slam money with those blowjob poems. Unfortunately, I also attracted a few local fans. At the end of my senior year I did a very Ivory Tower reading hosted by one of Yale’s residential colleges. I read with a talented, soft-spoken, frightened-looking undergrad named Carrie Iverson (where is she now?). In the middle of Carrie’s reading one of my slam fans, a man in his fifties with a gravelly voice so low in pitch it seemed to cause him to stammer, showed up. I’d never seen him outside the Daily Café (which used to be on the corner of Park and Elm and was where the smaller slams were held). This man (I remember his name but won’t use it here) stood up in the middle of Carrie’s reading, walked behind her, and started stamping and dragging his foot along the floor in the back corner of the room. Carrie continued reading but haltingly, looking up uneasily every few seconds. Indeed, everyone was uneasy, and no one knew what to do. After a few minutes of stomping and muttering, my fan turned toward the audience and said, rather proudly, “did you see that?� He looked around dramatically, “That… that was the biggest… the biggest roach I’ve ever seen.�

Kenneth, Kwame, Patricia and Jeffrey,

I’m glad Kenneth pointed out that we do not know each other. Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems to me that the fact that we’re from different communities is no coincidence. I imagine the Poetry Foundation asked us in part because as a group we are “diverse.� So, I’m thinking now about what I “represent:� White, female, New York, MFA from Iowa, under 40, Jewish, “emerging� (my third book is coming out in the fall). Is this me? Yes. Do I resent being chosen in part because I represent these elements? Not really. Do I consider myself interchangeable with other white East Coast female Iowa grads or do I imagine that we would all write similar posts? I hope I'm not interchangable; I think we'd write different posts!

Still, there is no denying that I am, to a large extent, defined (and confined) to the communities from which I come and to which I belong. It’s true I won two local slams in New Haven when I was a Yale undergrad, but I’m not a slam poet. (Unlike Patricia people have very low expectations of me as a reader. I have the pleasant experience of people being incredibly relieved when at readings I'm not deadly boring--most seem to expect, from my bio, that I am going to mumble and read obscure poems with lots of French in them.) I certainly didn’t buy them because of this, but most of the books on my shelves are written by white poets and many more than half are written by women. I pride myself for liking and responding to a wide range of poetries, and one of the best things about co-editing the anthology I’ve been posting about is that within the realms of gender and age the editorial process required me to read across lines of race, geography, sexual preference, style, educational background and class. This was a necessary beginning to what will certainly be a life-long education. I don’t know you, but I’m glad to be here.

than money, but in honor of National Poetry Month, I’m going to do it: let’s talk about money.

For the past month or so I have spent almost every free hour writing emails and letters asking for permission to reprint poems in an anthology I am co-editing with Arielle Greenberg. In his post on this blog, “Book Talking,� Kwame Dawes writes, “Poets may not know this, but the anthology is not our friend.� Because I’ve been so busy doing the permissions work on this (my first) anthology, I haven’t had time to take issue with Kwame on this matter. I will now.

Well, not everything, but a lot. I especially like thinking about how movie structures and devices can translate into poetry writing. I haven't been so interested in writing about movies or art but I like the idea of translating the structure of other arts into poetry.

Here's a minor example: I just watched the movie half nelson. Just before the movie was over my husband said, "this is when they're trying to figure out how to end the movie," and then the music swelled and got louder. And then it was over. I thought, "huh, you don't actually need to end the movie, just turn up the music." So, assignment to self: end a poem without ending, just turn up the music.

Back to matzo balls...

I found this conversation on line:

orangecounty888: Hey I was just wondering if anybody out there has any pictures of Mark Wahlbergs dick or package. :D Hes always been a hunk and I have noticed that he's done Calven Klein ads and such. So please post some pictures if you have any!
Thanks.

dfox7x3.5: Mark's huge cock in Boogie Nights was a prosthesis. When the movie came out he even called a news conference to explain that it wasn't him. That was very cool of him. He's a cool guy.

mattness: Mark also said in another interview, when asked about the prosthesis (paraphrasing), "At first when I heard about it, I was offended, because...I'm not so bad, you know what I mean? But then I saw it and said, "ohhhhh, ok...I get why you want it now...it's HUGE!""

jonb:AFAICT, there are no real nude images of Mark Wahlberg. I've seen several fake ones; a few were stupid enough to claim Mark Wahlberg was uncircumcised.

DerSchwanz: I don't think Mark Wahlberg is Jewish. He's one of nine kids (We don't usually have families that big), and according to his bio on www.us.imdb.com, he "Is of Swedish, Irish, German and French Canadian descent."

Jonb: Anything with berg in it's Jewish. Ditto for gold, stein, and fein.

DoubleMeatWhopper: Frankenstein was Jewish? :blink:

Proudly_Italian: Ever heard about Golem, dublemeat?

Lapdog2001: I went to school with a bunch of Wahlbergs in the Boston area (not Mark or Donny), none of whom were Jewish.

jonb:Donny's Jewish. I'm pretty sure Mark is too. Just it'd be strange if he broke the rule.
As for Frankenstein, the doctor was. In fact, the whole story's based on the Golem of Prague.

(For more excellent literary and cinematic criticism like this—can your students make connections between Mark Wahlberg and Mary Shelley this artfully?—you can visit the Large Penis Suport Group website.)

It’s been a while since I’ve written a new poem. While I was at AWP I wrote a 27 word ode to sexy-man Mark Wahlberg, but other than that, nary a poem since October when I wrote a “this happened then this happened� short super-realist poem. Last summer I wrote a five-page miscarriage poem and a short anti-Bush poem inspired in part by the Wave Books Poetry Bus. Nothing last Spring. Two poems in Fall of 2006. Six poems in a year and a half, including my Mark Wahlberg masterpiece. Not nothing, but not much either.

When asked to pick one favorite poem I usually choose “A Few Days� by James Schuyler. It’s a great poem. It’s a long poem. I love long poems. I’m not always up for the challenge of sitting down with a long poem, but when I do, I’m not usually disappointed. A few weeks ago I ran into poet Miranda Field who insisted I go see the Kiki Smith show and read Midwinter’s Day by Bernadette Mayer. I stupidly missed the Smith show but am reading Mayer and loving it. I love the discursiveness of the long form. I love the way the length allows a poet multiple chances to change her mind and switch strategies and develop the kind of relationship with her reader that can withstand some highly unpoetic moments. It’s a bit like marriage, the long poem. But rather than develop a long theory of the long poem, I’ll be brief and urge you to stop reading this blog and go read a long poem. If “A Few Days� seems like too many, what about “The Prophet� by Alice Notley (which is really a medium-long poem)? And for anyone with a bad back or weak eyes, go to the PENN SOUND site, download “Hymn to Life� by James Schuyler onto your ipod and go for a long walk. I believe that if at least five people listen to “Hymn to Life� this week that Spring will come and stay for good.

Yesterday was a glorious day in New York City. I dropped my sons off at school and decided to walk home instead of taking the bus or subway. I walked down Riverside Drive, thinking, as I often do when walking on Riverside Drive, about my grandparents. My father’s parents fled Paris just after my father was born in late December 1940. They stayed in Cuba for a time, waiting for visas, then moved to the Bronx and then to 88th and West End Avenue where they lived for the rest of their lives. I spent my childhood in Greenwich Village (my grandparents called it “the Willage�) but visited them often in their Upper West Side rental. In elementary school my grandmother would pick me up from school once a week and I’d sleep over at their apartment. She’d make me cheese (usually leyden and Jarlseberg side by side) melted on tinfoil and buttered Pepperidge Farm toast with the crusts cut off. I’d eat the toast first and pick the melted cheese off the tinfoil as it cooled.

Greetings from planet progesterone!

I just entered the third trimester of pregnancy and am feeling round and slow and stupid. I use the word “stupid� despite it being a no-no in the motherhood (“stupid,� like “poop,� is so terrifically repeatable) because it captures my current state quite accurately. I’m not saying that all pregnant women are stupid, and I’m certainly not saying that all stupid women are pregnant. But, I happen to be both right now. I put the leftover pizza in the drawer with the plastic wrap instead of the refrigerator. I pour the cooked pasta into a colander on the countertop so boiling starch water flows all over the counter. I walk into the bathroom looking for the blender. I have to ask people to repeat themselves. Sometimes more than twice.

For those of you who have never been pregnant, let me try to describe it. The progesterone-heavy state is similar to a moderate dose of Xanax. For those of you who have never taken a moderate dose of Xanax: