ancient Japanese poetry: topic unknown

why have I begun
to love so recklessly    like
one lost in the night
Middle Mountain of the Night
on the road to Azuma


could I forget him
even for the brief instant
lightning flashes
above the ripening ears
of grain in autumn fields


last night the moonlight
in the broad skies was so bright
that the waters which
reflected it have frozen
to translucence     first of all

some opinions about the media and literature I've been getting into lately

Miami Horror –  Here is my favorite new Australian indie-synth-pop band. The electronic sounds on MH’s Illumination (their recently released first album) sometimes inspires my hips to commence shaking.  Other times, I end up lying on the floor (maybe with a friend, maybe even a boy…), a little tipsy on any number of substances, entranced, letting the psychedelic rhythms take me away. The mood and energy pre-existing the music is always a factor, which is fun, because who doesn't love possibilities?

Vetiver – To Find Me Gone came out in 2006, but it’s fairly new to me. I love low-key folk music with easy, simple melodies, so this band, especially this album, is perfect for me. Sitting by the pool, reading in the sun, I’ve been queuing up TFMG with high frequency. It’s also great as background music when I’m chilling with my friends. I recommend their other albums too, but something about TFMG (it has a more wispy, interesting sound than the others, perhaps) has hooked me. I’m looking forward to listening to Vetiver’s latest album, The Errant Charm, which was released in June.  I guess I’ve been a little behind on new music these days, in this busy, busy life I live. (haha)

Breaking Bad – I’m going to be brief, although I could gush for pages about AMC’s genius television series Breaking Bad. No synopsis from me, although if you’re interested, by all means. I want to recommend this series to anyone who has a thing for great writing, acting, and production—this show is the WHOLE package. It’s smart (but not so complex that it becomes a chore to watch), and the character interactions and development leave me feeling anywhere from wholly heart-warmed to outright empty and devastated. Best show since Six Feet Under.

Curb Your Enthusiasm – I took a break from this show for awhile. It wasn’t a planned break, but I watched through season five and then just stopped. Why? Graduate school maybe, or because I always used to watch it with an exboyfriend and was ready to start my life anew, or because it was getting a little over the top for me. Over the top? Yes, the humor no longer making me laugh, only causing me to turn away cringing in disbelief at Larry David’s absurd behavior in the show. Now that the buzz about Season 8 is sweeping Portland, and I needed a new fix of humor in my life since catching up to Californication and Bored to Death, I have picked up where I left off with CYE, Season 6. Sure, the absurdity is occasionally too much for me, but overall, this is a damn good, laugh-out-loud hilarious series. And I love it when I’m laughing by myself (seemingly out of nowhere), and Luna looks over at me with her tragically big, beautiful dog eyes like I’ve off my rocker.

**a quick aside. I am impressed by the overall quality of television in the past decade. No longer can a person categorically call television a mind-numbing waste of time. These shows I’ve been mentioning, among many others, are thought-provoking & emotionally acute, serious ART.

Source Code -  This flick was recently released on DVD, and let’s be real: Jake Gyllenhaal is so hot I’d watch truly horrendous films just to get a good look at him in action. Source Code is far from horrendous. While not exactly the deepest or even interesting film I’ve seen, it’s interesting enough, and the creativity in ideas is there. The characters are somewhat flat, and the plot loses momentum as it progresses, though, so I’d give it a 6/10 for overall quality and a 10/10 for hotness factor.   

I love to see poetry books
with awesome covers,
because it's a bit rare.

Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio – This collection of poems is good. Not as good as Addonzio's Jimmy & Rita (a great novel-in-poems) or my personal favorite What Is This Thing Called Love, both collections able to hook me into the complexities of the human condition with their bold and expressive use of language, especially where the heart is involved, more than Lucifer at the Starlite. The structure of this book feels forced, and while Addonizio is a master of the List Poem, there are too many in this collection, which make certain ones stand out as being clearly lesser. Still, L at the S has some true gems (Yes, Storm Catechism, My Heart, for example) which play off the book as a whole for their power. This isn’t to say those poems don’t stand alone as Gems, but reading them within the context of the book will always provide the richest experience.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz –I love that this book calls itself the story of a person, a boy, Oscar Wao, but is in reality the story of one Dominican/Jersey-an family.  The chapters alternate between family members (Oscar, mother, sister). Oscar’s roommate (a somewhat intimate figure to the family) is even given a chapter. These shifts in perspective from character to character work to tell the story of a family, using history and culture as backbones, in a way that’s constantly compelling. And talk about tone. The language of the narrator (colloquial and contemporary as hell) makes it so that the readers know that the narrator is obviously SOMEONE, calls attention to itself, providing just a touch of suspense and curiosity without overshadowing the actual story. Superb book.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – So, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Big deal. Just kidding! It is a big deal, and it deserves every prize it gets. Here’s a book that alternates characters from chapter to chapter in perhaps the most fluid way I can imagine. The shifts are not jarring, despite the fact that the characters are not explicitly linked (and we only figure out their often loose links as the book progresses). A story unfolds, one story, through there are a dozen different characters given their own chapter over the course of twenty or thirty years in non-chronological order. And it’s a pretty emotional story that has a lot to do with aging, or maybe what it’s getting at is just living (being alive), and the whole package that comes with it. I’m intrigued by how much I can connect to every single character, no matter how diverse their backgrounds or decisions, and how the book works within its structure to create just one story that feels natural, and honest, regardless of how a structure like this would seem to contradict that outcome. If you love literature, and especially if you think about craft while you’re reading, you should read this book. Probably start today. 

Portland is the best city in America

To hear little jokes made at Portland’s expense is relatively common. People say, “Oh, you live in Portland? Why don’t you put a bird on it (it being anything from your bicycle messenger bag to your personal checks to mowing a bird into your front lawn)?” or “How’s your retirement going?”  The savvy youth know these references began with the popular IFC tv series Portlandia, which the youth probably also realize is widely available for streaming through various internet outlets. (Big ups to free media!) During the opening credits of the show, one character states: “Portland is a city where young people go to retire.”  

I’ve been living in Portland for almost four months, and I see where the jabs at Portland are coming from. Youth culture is alive and well. It is not uncommon to meet someone (age <40) who’s seriously underemployed. If you don’t care about recycling, getting into everything LOCAL and ORGANIC and  GREEN, you’re a minority, perhaps an outcast. If you don’t have a bicycle, you’re a minority. Hipster dive bars and coffee shops exist on nearly every corner. Bird art is HUGE (although this may have more to do with the tv show than anything inherently Portland).

The jokes are usually funny, in which case I will laugh, because I laugh at funny things. Self-deprecating humor is good for the ego, after all. But now that I’m becoming a Portlander, experiencing it all from the inside, I’m realizing that all that PDX humor is a lot more complex, less surface-level than I’d thought. The thriving youth culture, who could complain about that? (Not me, I’m 26, and I want to live it up as much as possible.) Yeah, there are hoards of people under forty who are underemployed, undereducated (formally, anyway), and don’t seem to care to do a damn thing about it.  Or at least, that’s how it might appear from the outside. I see it another way, having met handfuls of Portlanders since I’ve been here. Lots of people are underemployed, but many of them are engaging in projects and activities that they actually care about more than they care about money. They make enough to pay their rent and eat and buy tallboys of PBR or Olympia at the bar, they ride a bike so they don’t have to worry about gas prices and car maintenance. What I’m saying is they are saving time for what is actually important to them—art, music, welding, poetry, bicycle events/races, hiking, zines, or whatever. I don’t think this ideology is given enough credit, really. There are people in this world whose passion is more important to them than money??! They don’t lack ambition, they just lack ambition for getting rich. And to be honest, there are plenty of people working fulltime jobs and still making time for a 60 mile bike ride to the coast to camp for a few days, or dj at a bar/club once in awhile, making time to work on their comic strip or short story collection.  Maybe someday, the evils of capitalism will catch up with Portland, but not yet, and I’m grateful for that.

When I was living in Buenos Aires, I met people from Australia and the UK who were in their mid-twenties, and were just about to start “university.” Much different from in the US, where if you’re not finished with college by your mid-twenties, something went wrong. The reason for their delayed school track, I think, has a lot to do with the way their versions of western culture have adapted to changes in youth perception and development over time (which I bet has a lot to do with our prolonged lifespan and projected length of employment in the course of a lifetime). In other words, what’s the rush? Why push kids (yes, kids) to make big decisions about their future when they know nothing about themselves or the world yet, and when they have so much time to make such discoveries? Why push kids to take a bunch of classes they don’t care about, the information within those classes only to pass quickly through their brain, never retained? While I love my life, and I’m happy with the outcome so far, I am a little jealous of my peers who only now, at my age, are taking classes and actually learning things in them that they will remember forever, not doing it for a grade, but for the genuine betterment of the self. In Portland, this is exactly what’s happening. People in their mid-twenties and thirties are working on Undergraduate degrees, and obviously getting a lot out of it. When they graduate, they’ll have more knowledge and skills than they know what to do with, and it will probably be easier to get a job, because they ACTUALLY LEARNED SOMETHING by going to college. Portland, with its youth that are passionate, ambitious about their passions, making good decisions about education (not paying six figures for a useless degree in which they crammed for every exam and forgot all the information the next day), living modestly and earnestly and aware---these people aren't retired, they're just living the dream, and loving it. 

What else? It goes without saying, I think, the benefits of living in a place where people care about the production of local, organic food and products. (Health benefits, large-scale economic benefits, quality of life benefits).

And I mentioned earlier that I’d met handfuls of people since I’ve been here. I don’t want that phenomenon to be missed. It’s easy to meet people in Portland. All you have to do is go out and be friendly, and suddenly, you have friends! Every time I go to a pod of food carts, or a bar, or an indie show, or an organic beer festival, or to hang out in the park, the opportunity to meet new people is seriously aplenty. This is probably true in many cities, but it feels easier in Portland. I think this is because young people who act like young people see the advantages in being open to new experiences, which often starts with meeting new people. While the stigma is that Hipsters are too cool to talk to you, new to Portland, standing in line (alone!) for a savory crepe at your favorite crepe food cart, you'd probably be surprised by what happens. Talking to strangers is a Portland pastime. One of my BFF’s in Portland (a girl I met here in May), goes out by herself at night and always ends up with a bunch of new potential friends. At the very least, they’ll be inviting each other to cool events, and maybe if they hang out once or twice more in the next few weeks, they’ll form a more intimate friendship that progresses beyond acquaintanceship. I always thought that life after college would make it difficult to meet people, given that in the world at large, there are less built-in social networks, but I love Portland for proving me wrong.

I could probably go on forever about how Portland is the best city in America right now.

-cost of living is low (especially for the best I mean west coast)

- thriving art/music scene

-brewpubs per capita

-dog-friendly as hell (most restaurants/cafes allow dogs on their patios, some even allow them inside)

-bike-friendly as hell (SHARE THE ROAD is for real)

-summer weather

-winter weather, for that matter

-open-mindedness of inhabitants (I don’t like the phrase Keep Portland Weird, though)

-food-carts!
-food-love in general (taco fusion, especially)
-mountains, rivers, Pacific ocean, beaches, it’s all here

Ok, that’s enough. But where do I fit into all of this? What better place for a self (me, myself), a mid-twenties, dog-loving, overeducated server working 30ish hours a week at a fancypants restaurant that grows veggies and herbs in its garden out back and gets all of its meat and cheese and produce as locally as possible, also a writer, with an MFA even, still working on getting my first book ready to send out for publication(and only a few days ago I submitted some poems to a contest with a huge cash prize, that I could afford to submit to because of my awesome job), also in the whirlwind of the quarterlife existential crisis at times (I’m STILL a server, shouldn’t I have a REAL job???) but thanking Portland immensely for showing me that I have lots of time to pursue MYSELF before I need to worry about that REAL job in this horrendous economy, and I’m single, and did I mention how easy it is to meet people, lots of wonderful, interesting, passionate people in this city, and soon I’ll have a bicycle, because I’m moving to the Mississippi neighborhood on the east side of the river, out of the unbikefriendly West Hills which are gorgeous but useless to me in every other way, and I can’t forget about the friends I’ve made here, I love them already, and I can’t wait to keep meeting more people and loving some of them too.

Portland is the best city in America right now, and I feel so lucky to be living here, experiencing it, becoming a part of it, putting a bird on it, even. 

i didn't take this picture. 

spreading the good words (aka poetry)

The Love-Hat Relationship

by Aaron Belz
I have been thinking about the love-hat relationship. It is the relationship based on love of one another's hats. The problem with the love-hat relationship is that it is superficial. You don't necessarily even know the other person. Also it is too dependent on whether the other person is even wearing the favored hat. We all enjoy hats, but they're not something to build an entire relationship on. My advice to young people is to like hats but not love them. Try having like-hat relationships with one another. See if you can find something interesting about the personality of the person whose hat you like.

For the love, comes the burning young/ From the liver, sweating through your tongue

What do I think of the new Bon Iver album? I know you’re curious. It’s a brilliantly floaty, dreamy, melancholy story. Every so often, the tone lifts enough to leave a break for breath amidst all the grief, because despite itself, this album is not desperate. There seems to be hope. Maybe it’s the way Justin Vernon’s voice goes up with the crescendo of the melody and rhythm sometimes, which is reminiscent of church music. I’m thinking particularly of “Towers” when I say this. Not that “Towers” can be called a happy song. It’s just got some hope. I don’t know about anyone else, but when you’ve got a hole in your life, a lovesickness that keeps you up at night, a propensity to (delicately) use substances for some kind of relief, hope is good. My only issue with the album is the last song. It sounds like it was stolen from the GAYNGS record (one of Vernon’s other bands). GAYNGS’ music is a bit too close to cheesy 80’s synth-pop for me. Why end the album this way? It’s already a short listen, and to leave the previous, beautiful wistfulness of the earlier songs is a mistake. When I listen to the album straight through, which I, so far, have done every time, namely in the dark, on one or more of aforementioned substances, a body floating in a small yellow raft through the Pacific, looking up at all the fucking stars and feeling so alone, so lonely, so captivated by this aloneness that it almost seems right, that there can be nothing else at that moment, despite who I might be missing or the subsequent emptiness that enters, which feels like a kind of cleansing at least, when I listen to the album straight through, the last song doesn’t fit, and suddenly I am back in my bed, getting up to change the track back to one and start over.  

Also, just in case anyone is wondering, I watched an old chick flick last night, called Under the Tuscan Sun. This is not a good movie, but I enjoyed it, like I am apt to. Somewhere in the middle, the main character reminded me of something true, something I have been overlooking, despite how true it is. Heartbreak doesn’t kill us (even though maybe it should, to avoid the agony that comes after). Not only am I not dead, but I am living in a new city, making new friends, still growing, still learning, still keeping it together, sometimes letting the wildness (that’s thank fucking god still there) inside me out, and it’s gradually getting easier, like it always was going to. 

did i need to know?

The World At Large

Ice-age heat wave, can't complain.
If the world's at large, why should I remain?
Walked away to another plan. 
Gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand. 
I move on to another day, 
to a whole new town with a whole new way. 
Went to the porch to have a thought. 
Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop. 
You don't know where and you don't know when. 
But you still got your words and you got your friends. 
Walk along to another day. 
Work a little harder, work another way. 

Well uh-uh baby I ain't got no plan. 
We'll float on maybe would you understand? 
Gonna float on maybe would you understand? 
Well float on maybe would you understand? 

The days get shorter and the nights get cold. 
I like the autumn but this place is getting old. 
I pack up my belongings and I head for the coast. 
It might not be a lot but I feel like I'm making the most. 
The days get longer and the nights smell green. 
I guess it's not surprising but it's spring and I should leave. 

I like songs about drifters - books about the same. 
They both seem to make me feel a little less insane. 
Walked on off to another spot. 
I still haven't gotten anywhere that I want. 
Did I want love? Did I need to know? 
Why does it always feel like I'm caught in an undertow? 

The moths beat themselves to death against the lights. 
Adding their breeze to the summer nights. 
Outside, water like air was great. 
I didn't know what I had that day. 
Walk a little farther to another plan. 
You said that you did, but you didn't understand. 

I know that starting over is not what life's about. 
But my thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth. 
My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth. 
My thoughts were so loud. 


(modest mouse)

welcome to purgatory.

Losing that kind of love is a death, but worse, because you have to die again day after day until there is nothing left to die.  Then you are sentenced to walk around numb and utterly dead inside for a while, a kind of personal purgatory, until you are able to lift your head above the ground and breathe again, and of course, you will . . .

Loneliness feels so slow & alone no matter what, until someone says the right thing that lifts everything just enough. Thanks Sean.