Making Room for a(n online) Poetry Box

Twitter has brought so many amazing things to my attention with a simple scroll through my daily feed, things like Casey N. Cep’s essay about the online Emily Dickinson archives and this piece by Maud Newton on meeting the writer Donna Tartt (with bonus Instagram photo of Ms. Tartt’s inscription in Maud’s copy of The Goldfinch). For all its haters, there really is nothing like Twitter for getting you up close on all the action, whether that action is from the literary world, the art world, the sports world, or the Kardashian world (I know, I cringed as I typed that – does that make it any better that I’m referencing THEM? Probably not.).

So today’s tweeted nugget of super loveliness came via Ms. Dorianne Laux, another writer who I drop-dead love.

I saw her and her husband read many years ago in LA and it was a thrill beyond compare, for both the astounding beauty of her poems and her forthright approachability. She is the first poet I think of when recommending poetry to my non-poetry reading friends. She is that good. 

Book Culture: Where to Find It in NYC

I’m routinely asked how I like living in New York City. If it’s by a New Yorker, this is usually phrased as “Don’t you love it here? I mean, I love it. I could never live anywhere else. Could you imagine? God!” or something to that effect. I think this billboard sums up this attitude best:

classic

And while I have loved parts of the city, especially the (often) perfect months of May and October, those parts haven’t added up to enough to allow me to respond with a resounding “Yeah, I love it. It’s amazing.”

My commute crosstown to work each morning  is enough to make any sane non-New Yorker break out in a machine-gun-toting killing spree. Especially in the winter, when it’s 20 degrees out (okay, quiet already, you Midwesterners, I know it could be colder but you have to remember I grew up in Southern California and my peoples are a tropical peoples), and the wind makes that feel like 12 degrees, and you’ve taken great care in dressing so as to not allow one chink in your cold-fighting layers only to have something ride up or ride down, usually where you just can’t reach, and winter’s icy fingers jab you right in the back or hairline or across your presumably boot-bundled toes.

Sorry, I digress. But one of the main things that always, always delights me about New York is the plethora of art/culture offerings, especially for someone like me who is obsessed with the written word. There are book readings, discussions, panels, festivals, award ceremonies, performances – all highlighting that great and magical thing.

Literary Happenings: Colson Whitehead at McNally Jackson 10/20/2011

I love attending a reading at McNally Jackson in SoHo. It’s clean and bright and staffed by loads of smart young things, and they make a mean currant scone (although this time I had to branch out and try a cheddar cheese and chive scone, since they were all out of my fave – hallelujah! new fave!). I always overspend when I’m there, since I feel like my hard-earned dollars are going to a good cause (and I get a bright, shiny book or two or three out of the bargain).

McJ's gorgeous storefront

I’m not sure how they do it, something to do with Sarah McNally  having worked in publishing and it being the It Bookstore of NYC that is not a Barnes and Noble, but they always have the top writers reading from the top books the Internet is all aTwitter over.

Literary Happenings: Emma Straub @ Bookcourt

I don’t know Emma Straub, but I would say, based on my observation of her at Thursday evening’s book launch, that I would happily change lives with her. This instant.

Because she not only has fun, quirky style, amazing powers of observation (more on this later), and works in a cool bookstore, but she also has about a thousand well-wishers, at least in Brooklyn, as evidenced by the packed, and I mean p-a-c-k-e-d reception at Bookcourt.

Here’s the horde surrounding the register:

book! book! book!

I have to give props to Twitter for connecting me, however tangentially, to Ms. Straub. I’d heard very good things about her new book, Other People We Married, from several of the Tweeps I follow (mostly voracious book people). And then there were links to some great interviews (which of course I can’t now locate). Then finally this essay in the Paris Review about that defining 90’s girl drama, My So-Called Life.

So I had to brave the winter weather and trudge out to Bookcourt in Brooklyn. I learned that night that Bookcourt is celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, so congratulations & well-done! I love seeing thriving indies. It turns out Straub even works there:

sweet, no?

Anyway, it was a great reading and well-worth the trudge. Emma (yes, now I’ve graduated to given names) read a little bit from “Rosemary,” a story set in Brooklyn. Over her year-long book tour, she plans to read each story in the place where it’s set. I loved the opening lines:

“Claire didn’t want to tell her husband she’d called a pet psychic. Matt was a lawyer and scoffed easily.”

I live with a lawyer, and yes, yes, they do.

She also bravely shared her love of New Kids on the Block, in particular of Joey McIntyre, by reading an essay about going to one of Joey’s solo concerts in 2004. I was instantly reminded of my friend Debbie who is 35+ and loves NKOTB. I mean LOVES. Turns out Emma shares her passion.

I’m starting Other People We Married tonight, but this line grabbed me while I was standing around Bookcourt by myself waiting for the reading to begin. You can probably figure out why:

“One of the poets was hovering in the open doorway, a plastic glass of red wine in her hand, filled all the way to the top. She was new.”

The lady calls it like she sees it. I can’t wait to read the rest of it.

Moving Thoughts

my little sister made these sweet cupcakes

The other day, a coworker, knowing that I moved from California to New York, asked me about my experience. He and his girlfriend are considering moving from New York to Florida, and he wanted some firsthand knowledge. This got me thinking. It’s been almost two years since my move (!!), but I haven’t really reflected too much, at least here, about how the move has gone, how it’s affected me and my relationships with others, and whether I’d do it again.

Since we’re all still thinking about the new year and what it holds for each of us (beyond the feverish, resolution-fueled exercising I see at the gym and yoga studio), I figure this deserves some attention. Here’s what I’ve learned in the past year and a half (not in any particular order):

Save up.

If you’re considering moving to a new city and you don’t already have a job lined up, wait. Stop. Save. As much as you can, but I’m recommending at least enough to cover your expenses for six to nine months. I’d never been unemployed for an extended period of time before I moved to New York, and I’d never really struggled to find work, so I naively thought that it would take me three to six months TOPS to find a new job.

Boy was I mistaken. It took me a full year, about a thousand job applications, and interviews with three companies (the only ones who responded), to find a part-time entry-level customer service job. Whose salary is not even close to what I was making at my previous job.

Of course my search was hindered by the worst national job market in decades, a failing economy, and an extremely competitive under-employed labor pool in New York City, but I wish I’d really heeded all those friends and family members who expressed serious reservations about my plans to leave a good job without having a new one in place. Especially since NYC is probably the most expensive city in the US.

Lights, Camera, 2011!

Fireworks over Central Park

Happy New Year, folks! We made it. This holiday season was a doozy – CityBoy and I spent an unexpected extra week (well I did; CityBoy had ants in his pants…more on that later) in Orange County, celebrating with my family and our friends and eating entirely too much good, good food.

Thankful…

In the mail today, wedged in between the junk mail and the seemingly endless number of magazines to which I now subscribe, was this welcome bit of “real” mail:

Special props to my Tita Lou for this super cute, and super homemade, Thanksgiving card. It elicited a smile and a comment (“cute card”) from one of my normally sullen neighbors during a painfully silent elevator ride. So good job, Tita Lou, and thank you.

And in the spirit of thankfulness, I’ve decided to share with you a few things that brighten my day:

1) The Starbucks Morning Bun – it’s like a cross between a croissant and a cinnamon roll, but only better. Way, way, way better. I don’t always luck out at the ‘Bucks because these babies go fast. But when they’re there, watch out – that’s my Morning Bun, not yours.

it's the one in the middle

2) My Land’s End JHO bag – cuz it’s big, it’s orange, and it says my name in big BLOCK letters. Oh, and it’s got pockets up the ying-yang.

so geek chic, right?

And lastly, 3) a certain forty-something Andrew McCarthy. Because he’s reinvented himself as a travel writer, and a pretty good one at that. Because he’s still so damn hot.

oh, Blaine!

And because I got to hear him read at Strand Books, where I was [thiiiiiiiiiiis] close to him.

giving Patrick Dempsey a run for his money in the hair department

It was a reach-out-and-touch-someone moment, though I controlled myself, being a good New Yorker (our motto is “celebrity, schmallebrity”), and also because CityBoy was with me and ready to lunge out and pin my arms to my sides so I didn’t get arrested for fondling a grown man’s hair.

So in a world of nearly endless crappy news, let’s focus on the positives…our family and friends, our health, our ability to create, and the knowledge that Blaine, that blue-blooded charmer, still has it. In spades.

Rock on, people.

– Jho

Poets House: Mighty Poetry Megolopolis

A while back (okay, it was July, people. July. And yes, I know it’s October now. Sheesh-I’ve been busy, okay? And yes, I know you know “busy” means watching too much TV while eating too many potato chips. Whatever.) I trekked out to Poets House in Battery Park City with a poet-friend in town from Southern California to show off how awesome the New York City writing world is. (Yes, I’m a braggart and a lout about New York City when it suits me.)

Little did I realize just how awesome Poets House would be. My friend actually berated me for not coming here sooner on my own (by that point, I’d been in NYC for a year and never visited). The building is gorgeous, with huge windows overlooking Battery Park City, big tables to spread yourself (by which I mean, your work) out on, free WiFi, and even a cozy private reading room where you can read aloud any poetry books you pick out. Oh, and the books? Mind-boggling would be a good word. Lust-inducing would also be appropriate, as would profoundly moving. They have rows and rows and rows and rows of poetry books. And journals. And anthologies. And sound recordings. And. And.

But the best thing of all is their Showcase, which we happened to be in time to visit.  The Showcase, in short, is a round-up and brag-on of all the poetry (and poetry-related) books published in the U.S. THAT YEAR. Yup. All. Of. Them. It’s pretty friggin’ awe-inspiring.

 

Here's my brilliant friend K in the Room of Glorious Wandering

 

Literary Happenings: Linh Dinh and Matthew Sharpe 10/07/10

 

”]Last night, CityBoy and I met up at the Center for Fiction in Mid-town Manhattan for “Matthew Sharpe & Linh Dinh: A Literary Friendship.” I’m so glad we did. Sharpe and Dinh are both great writers, with an amazing sense of wry humor and an obvious love for language and wordplay. But they’re also great friends and supporters of each other’s work. Sharpe even had notes at the ready to point out passages in Dinh’s new novel, Love Like Hate, that he particularly wanted to talk about. The Center usually videotapes these readings, and they were at it again last night (using the video camera that CityBoy’s been eying like some voracious media whore), so I hope the video somehow makes it onto the Interwebs. I take notes, but I’m not that fast and my handwriting’s become atrocious over the years–I’m a bit hard-pressed to make out all the words in my chicken scribble.

 

* * * *

Here’s the first sentence from Sharpe’s new novel, You Were Wrong:

“At twenty-six, Karl Floor had had a hard life: father dead, mother dead, stepdad sick and mean, siblings none, friends none, foes so offhanded in their molestations that they did not make a crisp enough focal point for his energies.”

I love a good “molestations.” And he’s an excellent reader of his own work (you’d be surprised at how bad others are), slow enough so you can actually follow and appreciate his complex sentences, with a tremendous sense of comic timing.

Why My MFA Is Better Than Yours, or “Poetry in Person” the Reading

You know, I don’t usually go in for the agonizing comparisons between poetry MFA programs.  Each one is different:  some are more prestigious to attend, some are more rigorous, some are better funded, but if you find your time in one useful, then that’s really all that matters.  My humble MFA comes from Cal State Long Beach, which is a very reputable state school, and I was blessed to meet a wonderful group of fellow writers while there, teachers and students, who helped me tremendously (and continue to do so).

However (here it comes), this reading I recently attended at the New School made me throb with envy.  Literally.  Palpitations.  Because the reading was organized to coincide with the publication of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversations with American Poets.  If you’re anything like me, then I know you’re thinking:  a) WTF is that? and b) that’s one hell of an unwieldy title.  Let me explain. 

Poetry in Person is the distillation of Pearl London’s legendary class at the New School, in which, over the course of thirty years, she invited some of the greatest, big-league poets in modern American poetry to come talk to her class about their writing, specifically their works-in-progress (which is what the class came to be called).  In-progress, as in drafts, doodles, scraps of paper, notations, all and anything that would peel back the process of writing and revision for her lucky, rat-bastard students (yeah, yeah, I’m sure they were all lovely people).  After London’s death in 2003, her son contacted the head of the New School’s writing program with a tantalizing discovery:  three cardboard boxes full of cassette tapes.  It seems that London, in addition to being a very devoted and exacting teacher, had also taped AND SAVED her sessions.  The book is a culling of twenty-seven years of master classes.