the story of how it is

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:10:44 GMT

Today i walked up & down the ice cream aisle twice, up & back, up & back, then picked out something random with peanut butter & caramel. in the checkout, the bearded man before me buying a large quantity of carrots said, "that must be good stuff." I looked at the label, not even knowing what it was "Bryers," it said "OVERLOAD!" then something about fudge-covered waffle cones. I held up the ice cream carton next to my head & told the man & the two cashiers that I was feeling a bit OVERWHELMED and so needed something to counteract my emotional state. Everyone giggled. The man behind me was humming in a delightful tenor. The bearded man was a messenger from God. My cashier started talking about how her son kept discouraging her from buying ice cream, kept reminding her about her diet. Fuck the diet, I wanted to whisper too intimately to her, over the conveyer belt & swipe pad, fuck it sister.

la la la
the ice cream was delicious
la la la
it's past my bedtime

la la
la de dah

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:24:13 GMT

the title of the photograph was Pressure/Absence

Outside a train moved slowly, close by.

Thu, 01 May 2008 15:10:35 GMT

last night i dreamed that i found a little gray dog, with an underbite, wrapped in foil like a potato. i wanted to keep him, but i also felt that i couldn't. the clouds came quickly - it was about to rain. i put the little dog under the sink, but then decided that wasn't the right place for him.

the dream also included a peanut butter sandwich with a snake in it, and getting off a bus at night in a stripper outfit, with a lot of other girls in white stripper outfits, consisting of see-through capes & glitter & shiny leather high heeled boots

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:49:34 GMT

I took the above photograph one night while laying in bed, without looking.
The title is "Incubation"

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:36:04 GMT

Iskandariya
Brigit Pegeen Kelly

It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but
maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought
I said not "some sort of fish," but a "scorpion fish," a
request he would surely have granted, being a goodly
God, but then he forgot the "fish" attached to the
"scorpion" (because God, too, forgets, everything
forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish,
sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the
striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and
followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish;
instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar
prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part
bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a
disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or
even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly
does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in
mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling
backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail
doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a
venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of
Cleopatra's asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite
the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men.
In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight
eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and
is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and
feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison
barb when backed against a wall — a thing like me,
but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or
design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the
curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step
softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many
years, have I been stung, both times because,
unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes
now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he
is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal
Book because of his strange organs of breath. His
lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And
inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged
like the pages of a book — imagine that! And when the
holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood
that circles through them touches the air, and by this
bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of
books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library
at Alexandria, which burned.

a poem that I keep in my wallet, from Neruda's "The Book of Questions"

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:49:24 GMT

XXXI

Whom can I ask what I came
to make happen in this world?

Why do I move without wanting to,
why am I not able to sit still?

Why do I go rolling without wheels,
flying without wings or feathers,

and why did I decide to migrate
if my bones live in Chile?

The Question of Books

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:32:46 GMT

I have a new poem project.

Come, befriend me, see if I keep it up.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:17:06 GMT

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

-- from The Duino Elegies, R.M. Rilke

pingu is love.

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:51:22 GMT

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:53:33 GMT

a day of thwartedness! lessons in responsibility; these damn unhealed lesions.

*list of small gratitudes*

Blessed be The Kinks & Amélie's accordion.
Blessed be he who makes curry for she cries often.
Blessed be brisk March days, March sunlight.
Blessed be Skittles, for they are like crack.
Blessed be whispering snores of the sleeping cat
Blessed be successes of beloved friends like mister card.
Blessed be this day, for it is done.

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:15:36 GMT

...to "stubbornly," which we take to mean the living motion of doing without doing, of mourning without mourning, of singing without revealing tone, melody, or breath. He stubbornly stops. He stubbornly moves. A song began stubbornly as his tears. To look into the palm of your hand in the midst of a somber group of relatives whom might as well be strangers. A pierced & private grief. Something to laugh to yourself about on the train back home through the blue mountains.

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:37:09 GMT

Instructions for Existing in February.

Sing only in the shower or car - at night or turning down long roads in the afternoon sun - sing privately with all of your diaphragm, thinking of the steely dome of the Civic Arena, how they said that the arena used to open to the stars. You do not have practical shoes, but since you want to walk, walk, and accept wet soles, wet socks. Keep your hands in your pockets when you walk, even though the bottoms of the pockets have torn. When with children, be patient but firm. Let them touch your hair, your scarf, the shape of your face. Ask them about numbers, about time. Build at least one snowman, with a real carrot nose. Drink Ginger-Peach tea, Ginger-Lemon tea, Ginger tea. Drink mush less than one pot of coffee a day. Continue not to smoke while craving cigarettes, and enjoy your newfound revulsion towards the smoke of others. Talk frequently with your understanding of God, and try to be very quiet when you can, in order to hear the answers. Talk frequently to the animals that talk to you. Learn to bake an apple pie. Remember that there are many kinds of love; be fearlessly honest without comparing your actions to the perceived fearlessly honest actions of others. Believe in what holds you. Trust that you will be held.

On Writing & Rejection

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:13:33 GMT

Today I received a very nice rejection from the journal Forklift, OH. With relief.

I don't know if I will ever understand the game that follows creativity. Let's say you're a poet. You write & revise, write & revise, read it aloud, get advice from a friend, write & revise, throw out the middle, fix a bit of syntax & shazaam - you've got a poem you're proud of. Of course, the whole aforementioned process can take months, depending on how you work, depending on the width & depth. Depending on all the interior & exterior factors things tend to depend upon. So then, la-dee-dee-dah, what do you do with your capital P poem? Show it to the parents? Put it under your pillow? Put it in a drawer? Make a little zine? Or submit it to one of the thousands of literary journals? Or maybe submit it to four or five or twenty-five?

Because what does it mean, in 2008 and onwards, in the world of MFA's, if you are not being published, if you never do publish? If you don't publish & you're any good, if you're in anyway notable and/or scandalous, then when you're dead they'll call you An Outsider Artist & find all those terrible poems you never finished and you'll be in some god-awful anthology where there'll be no stylistic or thematic similarity, the only similarity will be that you, the poet, are dead, and they, the other poets, are dead too.

If you pick up any publication that prints poems, from any college rag to the APR, you'll read a bunch of mediocre poems. And maybe, if you're blessed, you'll read one beautiful one.. a poem like Doty's "The Embrace," or something by Frank Stanford, or Anne Carson, or Robert Hayden, or Roethke... you'll read something crafted not by academic exertion but by a need for expression, something terrible in its urgency, something that skips & frets & winks & has to be....

I should have never started submitting to journals, not before I was prepared to be entirely honest with myself. I've done it thus far in a slap-dash way; I submitted to Forklift, OH because my friends Betsy & Matthew (wonderful friends, whose work I respect & enjoy) had been published in the journal, & I supposed that was as good a reason as any. Unfortunately, I submitted before reading a full issue of the journal, which I have at this point done, after picking up a copy at AWP a number of weeks ago. And at this point in time, I would not choose to submit to this journal -- my work doesn't quite jive. My voice isn't... well... wacky enough? I can venture to guess that the poems I sent took themselves too seriously, too darkly. But it would've meant something very strange to me had my work been accepted. I have work out currently at two journals, but this rejection brought with it such a sense of relief that I believe I won't be submitting again for a long time. I'm just not eager enough to be part of the game.

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:49:34 GMT

everyday valentines

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 01:31:47 GMT

2 best things of today:

* eating salmon & carrot ginger salad for dinner with tait
* watching "walking with dinosaurs" programs on youtube with elliot & gabriel. gosh i love dinosaurs.

after sunday, i will be 110% less stressed and have one less job. thank goodnuts. oh oops, typo, hah. must be tired.

edit: almost forgot: i have a poem in the pebble lake review.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:00:12 GMT

another parke-harrison picture

Reading!

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:08:15 GMT

On Friday, January 18th, at 7:30 P.M.
I'll be reading poems at Choice Cuts,
the Slaughterhouse Gallery Reading Series down in Lawrenceville.
My fellow readers are Sten Carlson and Dan Remein.
It would be lovely to see you there!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:21:28 GMT

The Guardian
by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, 2003

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:45:52 GMT

-- I want to give myself permission to not understand. I am tired of arguing about will, self-will, destructive will. will you won't you; you will? who will? she will? he will? why will? why won't? can. should. did. can't. couldn't. had to. compelled, repelled, taken under a long white wing of sleep.

It's embarrassing, how I convince myself I must do XYZ in order to be aligned with God's will. (God being the stage name of the current etc.) And how do I know it's "God's will"? Well, (will) I know because it feels like something I desire not to to, that (will)full unnaturalness & done in order to get out of my way. But I've done: XYZ & I'm still in the way, wondering where Z landed, teeth still parted in the last breath of the consonant that goes.

-- I am going to begin a new photography project in the next couple weeks which will focus on the Narrative of Addiction. Addiction: a mental disease that manifests itself physically. Whether or not they have found recovery or relief, addicts of all kinds often hold the results of their active addiction in an obviously physical way, with scars or tattoos or unplanned children. However, addicts (especially clean addicts) may also hold their physical being in a very particular light, due to traumatic experiences from active addiction, or due to the confusion surrounding self-perception that usually comes after getting clean. I want to maintain the anonimity of my subjects, I want the story of something that I can frame, a hand, a breast, what fell, what weight, what carried. Not a face.

I am reading Anne Carson's "Plainwater." Her voice influences what can (will) be called "movement." Changes the dusk sounds. Shapes between the trees.

S y n c h r o n i c i t y B o o k (by Noelle Kocot

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:34:02 GMT

The paranormal doesn't agree with me.
The normal, you, sending me signs of love
And freedom, does.
Lies and arrogance make me ill.
Sweetness, you were truth,
Even if at the end you were caught in the lie of a needle.
Who understands? Because I am seeking understanding,
Even if I know I shouldn't.
Philosophy. Metaphysics. Fuck.
Just be with me, like you are,
And that will be enough,
As it was when you walked and ate and slept
Beside me, no plan on either of our parts,
No understanding from anyone else necessary
To create what will outlive us.
Help me to look outward, on the driving wind.
And please don't stop your messages;
I read something like happiness for me in them.

read more by Kocot in Pilot magazine.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:48:46 GMT

I found myself in a large old house that recalled Marathon, in Syracuse - a screened porch, hardwood floors, what-seemed-to-be complicated passages which I intellectually knew were not, but what I experienced as such

You "found" yourself? That seems a little irresponsible for a dreamer retelling her dream; You know that you were dreaming. Shouldn't you be saying "In my dream, I was in.." or "at" or some other such phrase that would frame?

No that's precisely the problem I have no true frame I don't own the places I go when I sleep nor the body that goes I think of the finding as a gesture of humility

So tell the dream

There were many people, acquaintances, friends - the feeling of a celebration, perhaps a cocktail party, or potluck dinner or buffet - the people were other addicts and alcoholics mostly.

You were using?

No not using but high there was an old energy jittering

You speak about it as if the walls shook

That's how Marathon felt the walls were constantly threatening to cave in a tinge of darkness always
threatening the whole scene

You were scared?

Not conscious enough to be scared but moving on - i found myself involved with S., strangely torn but not because I was aware of my waking life relationship but because the physicality felt wrong and my morals & emotions were recognizable & younger than i am in my waking life

Betrayal was not unfamiliar to you

No but i would not let it grab me ( perhaps i was drinking after all). I went into a bathroom consisting of two rooms. it was dark. i tried the light switch & it did not work & i know this to be a dream sign. "perhaps i'm dreaming," i thought, but then thought that it was only a fluke, and that I should just try the light in the other bathroom. Tried that light. Didn't work. Slowly woke.

You were nearly lucid

I know & it's the first time that I can really remember a dream of that particular clarity. I believe I can do it again, that perhaps next time I'll be able to continue dreaming.

Love has been an education in itself.

Yes.

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:58:46 GMT

Last night, before I fell asleep, I closed my eyes and saw wolves. It kept happening. Wolves, the torn wallpaper of the house in upstate New York, the blood of something dragged smeared along the walls. i followed the smear and saw wolves. But I had seen them before, when I first closed my eyes, before I saw the carpet or the walls or the blood...

Wolves?

Yes, wolves. Sometimes men.

Ha ha Little Red-

-The whole thing's inevitable. Not conclusive. Cyclical.

The feeling of Doom?

Not that kind of inevitability. More known, understood primally.

So seeing them represents a kind of simplicity?

Yes...which makes the experience terrifying.

Yes.

december last

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:41:38 GMT

...because it was a harder patience that took prayer. remember: your raw knuckles, your Need to Understand? how angry tangents & little misuse went skipping? now i'm happier baffled, sleeping warmly. the forecast is crystalized ginger, smokeless rooms, cardboard boxes, picture frames to fill.

hope hops behind me like a long-eared jerboa:

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:52:52 GMT

to everyone i recommend Shortbus. i also recommend that you buy the soundtrack, as Scott Matthew's voice is entirely cathartic.

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:52:51 GMT

...whittled; the number of times "veins" have appeared in writing,
over the last three years
how one can miss loneliness still
a little confused with fear a little expanding belly
of hope and the effect of heat on plastic;
the First Step: a tautness & urgency
the effect of rain on recovery: two prongs of the triumverate
dissapate, & the distant third only a fiction a last silence
a fast night, these swollen feet and a song about dinosaurs,
fitzgerald's theories on intelligence;
a little sadness, a little battlefield, a little shunning of voices

when i sleep i do dream of your arms when i can't
kiss you i sign letters with sextants;
i squabble with symbols and sigh too much
& this is still a story about loving