I've Moved ...

I have moved my Blog over to WordPress.

Here is the address:

http://anhedoniapoetry.wordpress.com

Check it out ...

No offense Blogger ...

first my rubber chickens and now my rex galore and my cop who smells like a carnival ...

Here is another reflection on Monica Drake's Clown Girl:

Like Sniffles, I too have a Rex Galore and one resembling Jerrod (the showman and the real man) ... I don't know that they smell like summer or pancakes smothered in ladeled syrup, but they may.

But I guess only time will tell ... it tells on everything.

The Reading Approaches ...

So for any (if any) Milwaukeans reading this, I will be reading from Small Murders at Broad Vocabulary this Friday, April 27th at 6:30!

This is a fantastic store ... please check them out!

www.broadvocabulary.com

Hope to see you there ... perchance.

That's Baloneytown ...

So Monica Drake's debut, Clown Girl is truly amazing. Baloneytown is the hometown of Nita (aka: Sniffles the Clown). It is not anytown America ... it is really an unreal world ... surreal in almost every way except its constant presence of reality-seeped pain, strife, and struggle.

This book took me weeks to read ... a rare occurence for me. It took me this long not because I was not enjoying myself but because I found myself identifying with Sniffles more than I think I have ever identified with another character. I did not find myself identifying with her religious icon balloon forming, her rubber nose ... actually until now I was afraid of clowns. Though I still do not want to meet a clown in a dark alley or in my dark dreams anytime soon ... but I do feel I have lost a rubber chicken, at least metaphorically.

Sniffles' displaced and hopeless feelings, loss, and complete confusion within her world, as well as her bouts of sadness was what sometimes made this a tough read for me. This book was chock full of great truth and an ugly-beauty that is rare and priceless in contemporary fiction. Drake's writing style and quirky, even sometimes other-worldly observations always kept me extremely excited, entertained, and constantly moved.

It is also a book I will value because of its existence in my life when so many changes were happening -- discoveries and finally maybe finding that rubber chicken I (and all of us) so desire to find.

Waiting for My Last Course in Turbulence ... But Aren't We All?

When I handed Dean Young my healthy stack of his poetry collections waiting anxiously for his signature ink marks, he asked me simply: Why the hell are you buying all of my books? Are you crazy? My answer was a shrug and a giggly smirk ... but I wanted to tell him (as cheesy as this may sound) that he had the ability to lessen my turbulence ... that his genius of language and quirky observations were often exactly precisely what it was I needed to calm or keep at bay the flames of my mind and soul.

But I didn't say this. Like I said I only responded with a shrug and a giggly smirk which coincidentally didn't convey diddly to this word-and-image-smith ... but I guess my feelings on this and many many other things are superfluous and often should remain in silence ... and in my head. I fear I have been sharing too much of myself lately ... there are indeed thoughts that should remain cubbied inside of my frontal lobe ... and not everyone needs to know my fears or my deep desires. These things should be saved for my poetry ... not that I have been able to write in weeks.

Then some guy said I looked like the Mona Lisa ... and that was strange enough to at least begin a poem ... but I am stiffled -- ironically by words. I think all he saw through his seeming drugged haze was the knowing shape of my violent smirk.

Dry

While I do not entirely believe in writer's block because one can always write, I am feeling that long sadness again ... that feeling of complete voids all through me. When this happens it feels like a long road in front of me ... with nothing else ... just a road. But miles and miles away I see a speck of red light like neon, my destination. But I feel too tired for the voyage, too apathetic for it. I just want it to be there again ... so I miss it like a lost lover, a lost kitten. I long for the nights that blend together, when the moonglow and the deeply heated sun blend like stretched taffy ... when I go go go because I have so much to say and so much to be. When I am grand ... or at least believe that.

But now it is that road, that lonely road. Maybe I can hitchhike ... risk everything.

april is the cruellest month ...

Or is it? I wonder this in my current state of finally beginning to feel balanced. I do not know how long it will last or if it will last ... but I truly hope it does. Balance ... but buying my plane ticket for my Portland (OR) trip has brought me the gift of something to look forward to ...

But it is cruel to partner Poetry Month with both paying taxes and Alcohol Awareness Month. Maybe T.S. Eliot was privvy to the information of when Poetry Month would happen when he wrote these beautiful lines in The Waste Land.

from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot's line breaks always fascinate me ... they are so intuitive, effortless. He has a balance -- image and emotion balanced delicately like nature, like a dancer in a get-up walking the tightrope above our clamboring heads ...

I hope everyone's April is proving to be uncruel and perhaps beautiful in the way of words and emotion, balance.