Do what you feel, now
Personal rejection from Mannequin Envy: you made the final cut and we adore your poems but had too many this time around, please resubmit next season, we want very much to read more. Sigh. Ran two miles without stopping and then spent 45 minutes hauling ass on the elliptical singing this is what the world is for: making electricity as if I’d never lain in bed with an astronomically high fever, suffering zombie nightmares and wondering what it felt like to be fit enough to stand upright on a fucking treadmill. This morning, due to the unseasonable warmth, I reached for a pair of 3/4 length pants that used to be a wardrobe staple in Santa Fe and they were almost a perfect fit again. Grinning and sweating after my workout, I stepped on the gym scale and sure enough, I am back down to my leaving-Santa Fe weight. Which is still heavier than I’d like to be, but I’m feeling all the time less like Alice and more like Farren. She got the power in her hand to shock you like you won’t believe.
Excerpt from an email to the Un (because I LOVE recycling content!)
Earlier in the month I was the astrological darling–the focus of everyone’s attention, the glowing goddess in the middle of the room. Now I’m back to being another member of the circuit, moving around the edges with everyone else, and I’m not surrendering my spotlight gracefully–I am BITTER. CITY. Still, this is the nature of things. Somedays, Marianne Boruch calls to tell you how much she loves your poetry and some days, all you get is grocery store circulars in the mail. This is the way things go.
In the meantime, I’m saddled with NOTHING — and I’ve just gotten an enormous thumbs-up-Go-ahead-and-BE-a-poet-then from the Universe and so, so, who’s complaining?
Not dis girl.
my thighs have been involved in many accidents
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
Sir Thomas Wyatt
When I walked through the front door of the bar last night, where I stopped off for a quick drink after a four hour drive home in the dark punctuated by a costly speeding ticket, about 14 people wheeled around, shrieked, and came barreling over for hugs and news. I nursed two beers, gossiped with Dana T, and showed Mano and Josh the postcards I got at the Menil bookstore while waving my hands and going on and on about THE ART! THE ART!
Mostly it was just really nice to have landed, quite accidentally and without realizing it was happening, among so many friends. Dallas. Who’d have thought? Not dis girl.
Expanded excerpt from an email to Anna and Forest
I’ve been thinking of you guys a LOT while I am here. I am staying in a neighborhood called Montrose–a historical neighborhood that fell into disrepair and is in the process of being updated, which makes it alternately sketchy and charming, depending on which block you’re standing at a given moment. Although I am staying with two male grad students so obvs it’s like the sixth ring of hell.
I am two blocks from the Rothko chapel (which is just…a really remarkably desolate experience. It was like, DIFFICULT to be in there). But also! Also! The Rothko chapel is in a like, 4-block area of houses that are all painted the same color? And owned by the Menil Foundation, a ridiculous crazy Lannan-style, endlessly-endowed oil money trust with about a BAJILLION galleries all within walking distance. I went to the Cy Twombly gallery yesterday. Everything in the Menil compound is open to the public and free, free, free.
The Menil Gallery is AMAZING dude. It’s like this plantation mansion but all the extras have been stripped off so it’s very modern, clean lines, minimal and gorgeous. And inside, you know, it’s a lot like a gutted house? So instead of GIANT WHITE gallery space, it’s wood floors, small rooms, muted colors–the paintings are lit really well and you can really kinda get intimate with them. They have a STUPID AMAZING surrealism wing–I just–I can’t even–SO MANY MAGRITTES! And Max Ernsts and Man Rays! And Picasso with those fruity, overblown block-y gold leaf picture-framed monstrosities! (Also a couple of busted up Mondrians, what is the deal with his paintings? They never hold up. And of course the requisite ONE Judd box) And they have a WHOLE WHOLE BUNCH of rull pretty Rauschenbergs. I didn’t really take notice of Rauschenberg until I went to the Menil and now I’m all OH WOWZ!
Plus some pretty Jasper Johns, too, and some James Terrell drawings, and a whole show dedicated to the treatment of the face through time? Where there was a very seksy Francis Bacon and ANDRE BRETON’S DEATH MASK OMG
We’re going to the MFA tonight. I hear it has lots and lots of great contemporary whathaveyou. Basically, can you come to Houston immediately plz? It’s going to blow yr mind.
