Cami Park

Archive for the ‘How to’ Category

I have only one house

In How to, Poetry, Science on September 4, 2010 at 8:06 pm

circular motion does zero work
Evelyn Hampton

To attract a swarm of bees, hang a dark box
inside me. Is it my heart or my heart in my hands?
If only I could look closer I would be able to
understand the difference between modern buildings and the
people who built them. The nurses have blood on
their hands and I am the one who has to tell them. A bad
sign, I say, by opening and closing my drawer of
undies. Springs, slinkies, drill bits, and augurs
give the illusion of movement. A man leaves
by getting smaller than my door. A man comes in
by getting taller than my door. This table behaves
more and more like a wave every day. It interferes
with what I am trying to say about the weather,
how it is always hot and gray. The sides of my face
fluctuate randomly, echoing down the hallway. Laughter
the portraitist cannot paint floats to the ceiling
in a photograph of the hallway. Cease to follow the rules
of classical physics and they put you in a room where
four walls are so close together time hardly passes
except to say Bless you and Pass the tissue? At night
I can hear where I put my keys walking behind me. I have only
one house, but I see its doorway everywhere in the
forest. It grows from topsoil I would call enormous.

A moment

In Confessional, How to, Poetry on August 27, 2010 at 12:53 pm

I have 3 pieces in the new Artifice (#2), coming out in October.

Never piss off a poet, unless you want them to give you free books. Reb Livingston lets us know in no uncertain terms that reviewing poetry books is good, and then seriously backs that shit up. I am so on board, and will be reviewing Laurel Snyder‘s The Myth of the Simple Machines for Galatea Resurrects. Besides Galatea, there are quite a few places that solicit reviews of poetry books, even aside from posting on your own blog or website. I’ve listed a few below, but there are many more:

Boxcar Poetry Review first run books only, no chapbooks
Rain Taxi
The American Poetry Journal
Rattle
The Quarterly Conversation
Broken Pencil as of 8/5, seeking reviews of small press poetry book titles
Valparaiso Poetry Review

This seems like as good a time as any to announce my plan to review a poetry book a day in September. I have bunch of books stacked up, waiting to be talked about, and had planned to do this for National Poetry Month in April, but then life went crazy. Things have settled down now, and I can. I only have about half a month’s worth of books, though, so I’ll do it until I run out, unless anybody has something they’d like me to review to fill out the month, in which case I can do that. They’ll probably all be good, don’t worry. Some better than others, though.

The Answer to the Puzzle
Laurel Snyder

The answer to the puzzle
is the mauled bird on the sidewalk,
and the feathers.

The answer to the puzzle
is that things keep getting less lovely,
but more interesting.

When the girl falls
through the air from the top
of a very tall building,

she sees everything
rush past her in great detail
but with little promise.

Onlookers see, “Some girl
cutting through the air
like a knife cuts through water.”

They gasp and say, “How terrible.
That poor girl. It’s just awful.”
And it really is. A moment.

And fill up the tank

In Confessional, How to, Poetry on August 8, 2010 at 1:33 pm

I’ve lost interest in poetry-related blog projects for now. Which is not to say that nothing will happen, only that I am unreliable, as usual.

The most revolutionary thing I could think of to do today was to buy a shovel.

Chinchillas

In Confessional, How to, Music on March 13, 2010 at 9:40 pm

Chinchilla is one of the most costly and fragile of furs, and is best suited to a brunette with a good complexion.

It’s upsetting.

Body hack

In Art, Film, How to on March 3, 2010 at 9:16 pm

Rejection junction, what’s your function?

In How to, Poetry, Prose on February 9, 2010 at 4:29 pm

I’m not sure if there’s room in the online world for yet another highly competitive lit mag, but the editors of Rejection Digest don’t give a flying teardrop. They want your work, but they’re picky, more than most– you have to PROVE yourself to them– your work has to have been REJECTED, at least once, to have a shot at getting in their precious digest, BUT if you can provide FIVE sufficiently valid/form/humiliating rejection e-mails (not including any from them, I assume), publication is GUARANTEED. As if.

Anyway, good luck. Fuck McSweeney’s, there’s a new game in town.

Pours like a fountain

In Confessional, How to, Music on February 6, 2010 at 11:53 pm

I was so busy procrastinating on things today, that now I have to phone my blog post in at the last minute, but in a nice way, with Shelby Lynne.

|||||teers your|||||heart,

In Art, How to, Poetry on January 29, 2010 at 12:12 pm

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Call out

In How to, List, Prose on January 28, 2010 at 9:37 pm

A writer, when he’s asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won’t name any living writers. I don’t think it’s right.J. D. Salinger

Laughs already like a bear

In Art, How to, Poetry on January 5, 2010 at 7:52 pm

Giving Birth
Mary de Rachewiltz

Now She knows what it feels like
24 hours of it & all for a mere girl
when She had expected a male heir.
Has seen so far only the hands &
they are beautiful—laughs already
like a bear, wrapped as a Della Robbia
infant in glazed porcelain on the cornice
of the Loggia degli Innocenti.

Nobody thought of the bottle
nor told her to put a drop of honey
on her teat as She saw the nurse do
when It sucked voraciously.
He better come if He wants to and see
what’s left of It—will hardly survive
another week—& to find a name for It
is his job. I call It Contrary.

Thus entered the world at loggerheads.