A Moving Object
March 18, 2008    File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.

Permalink | Comments (0)



Migration
May 16, 2007    File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

Permalink | Comments (1)



Dear Reader
April 28, 2006    File under: Steganography

I may have been writing to myself.

Permalink



What I Wanted
April 25, 2006    File under: Language , Poetry & Poetics , Steganography

... was for the words to agree in such a way that I could come to them as a man without a soul and take that agreement for my soul and then to understand what it was like to stand inside those words as they emerged from me. Then I would understand.

Permalink




   File under: Steganography

Permalink



Dear Reader
April 24, 2006    File under: Steganography

Permalink



Migrations
March 31, 2006    File under: Steganography

As I have said, everything in my life is in motion right now, much of it extremely personal, too personal to blog about, I think, though it seems a little strange to say.

The story is one that comes from the deepest, strongest, most enduring parts of my life, which are also those parts that have too often been convoluted, hidden, steganographed — and knowing this opening in my life, this great explosion and outward migration from the secret center of my everything, I feel I should talk about everything, though at the same time I am feeling that this story best unfolds in conversation, that it should be told.

Which is to say that I've come to think of blogs, of the blog (or is it just because of the way I've conducted this blog) as too public or too simply public or, when opening what's private, too simply private.

Which is to say that there are things to say and that those things must be said delicately, carefully.

I would want you to hear all that in my voice. To hear in tone what can't travel in the central, semantic stream. What can't travel well.

To know when you hear a particular trill outside the 5am window, the first light easing through the curtains and into bed that something special has arrived, something rare has moved into the territory, that you are in the middle of a great migration. A great re-location.

...

Let me say a few things simply.

I have struggled with Denver.

I have struggled with Alabama.

I have struggled with being from. With being toward.

Suddenly it has become possible not only to imagine living in Denver but, more importantly, to live in Denver. To be in Denver. To be for Denver.

To look at myself and see that I have moved.

And to be moved further by that realization.

The accent stays the same. The ears are different.

And now there is a complementary song.

And what in me has been hidden is now unfolded, now riding these consistent winds.

This is right where I want to be.

...

There is more to say about that, as it comes.

Some of it must remain for the ears from the throat, however.

Come closer and you will hear it.

...

I've been thinking, for a long time, about National Poetry Month, which opens tomorrow with something of a joke.

I've spent most of my professional life thinking about the grim pronouncements and suggestions Dana Gioia made 15 years ago in his essay "Can Poetry Matter?" It was one of the first pieces of criticism of contemporary poetry as a discipline and as a culture I can recall reading. My mentor gave it to a class, said we should consider arranging some readings, getting active. We did. I did. It all made me a better writer.

I let some of that go when I was in graduate school, but in my dissertation, I considered how American poems could have generated resources for helping project poetry into a public sphere.

In my work here in Denver, I have considered how literary community could help project poetry more widely, how it could amplify an appreciation for or how it could create a larger place for writing, for literature.

I have been pleased. I have been frustrated.

I have been thinking about the 2006 Denver Poetry Festival, something that has remained more conceptual than actual, in large part because I inherited much of the coordination over the last few years and this year, because of all the internal migration, I have been unable to arrange the flock of myself enough to arrange anything. But also because of my own ambivalence about community-building efforts.

It's hard to know if they work. It's hard to know who's reading. What they're getting out of it. What people want when they come to readings.

Sometimes I see that people are listening. Sometimes I see people waiting for their turn, impatient. Sometimes I see another kind of hunger.

I started thinking, as my own involuted self began to unfold, about how the public events we plan obscure a bit one of the things that is most important about my own relationship to literature — the actual book in my hand, the quiet of the world around me as I become tuned to another language, as I begin listening to another voice, how everything fades beyond the margin.

I started thinking that I'd like to do a "read out," a public unfolding in silence of poetry books. Maybe 1000 or so of us readers along the 16th Street Mall or some other street. One on each corner, with a book. Or enough so that you could look and see us all with our slim, explosive volumes. So you too could hear that fading out.

So that something that roots pleasure in quiet intimacy could be shown in a way that would encourage others to seek it out.

Like seeing two lovers, hands clasped, and forgetting about all pornography of all time.

You feel something larger unfolding within you. Your sympathy connects you without requiring some burlesque.

...

I'm not saying that public reading is burlesque.

Not exactly.

But I am saying that some things are for more intimate dispositions.

Come closer. You will hear.

Permalink



Traveling
March 2, 2006    File under: Steganography

Out of Lincoln, into Denver, from Denver to Denver around Denver in Denver through Denver, from Denver to Galesburg and soon back to Denver and then to Austin and back to Denver and in Denver and about Denver and for Denver and through Denver and in Denver and sleeping and then back to Alabama and back to Denver and in Denver and sleeping and waking and Denver and then back back to Alabama and back to Denver and more soon...

Permalink



Iron Supplement (2)
February 16, 2006    File under: Steganography

Another, in which the text/ure may be difficult to see. The picture links to a larger version.

Permalink | Comments (1)



Iron Supplement
   File under: Steganography

Another preview of the Ironton work:

This, and the other, accompany a 30-foot scroll of a poem that's 36" high.

Permalink



Dear Reader
   File under: Steganography

I have been writing all this week & am pressing forward to the completion of a new poem, with which the next book will be more than halfway done. This is the Jimmie Lee Jackson poem I have mentioned before. It began as a simple elegy, and then it grew. At one point, I thought it would work all the way from Jimme Lee's shooting through the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Now I have three poems from that draft, one of which is this one, which should come in around 10 pages. I am close.

For that, I have not been blogging much this week.

I am also at work on material for the Ironton show, which opens on March 17th. Lots of photoshop time, layering and re-layering.

(I hope you can see the handwriting, even here.)

Tonight, I am off to the Springs, a reading, with Anstett.

Tomorrow, to Lincoln, a reading with Noah and Joshua.

New poems on the card at each site.

More afterward.

Permalink | Comments (1)



The Prayers of Others
February 6, 2006    File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Steganography

Maybe I've become too easy, but it seems that every couple of weeks I'm discovering something — a book, an album, an artist, but especially a poem, a poet — that comes home to me more powerfully than I remember anything before.

This weekend I have had the immense pleasure to read David Keplinger's The Prayers of Others, which will be published by New Issues in the fall. I'm sorry you all have to wait for it: this is one of the best books I have ever read.

Only the prayers of others can save me. Likewise, mine save only them.

Put this one on all the Christmas lists.

Permalink



Rabbit Hole
January 28, 2006    File under: Lomography / Photography , Steganography

For S—

Permalink



Multitrack Tape
   File under: Steganography , Tapeworm

the eye opens on one Broadway or another: here, the usual:
bright, chill wind shuffling in between the walkers, a knot
of characters waiting for a bus, construction cranes craning

overhead as I crouch at curb, storm drain, standpipe nozzle
to match one opening with another: easing toward Speer.
straining to catch Pike's Peak's distant gray: the phone rings

and you're crossing Houston or Bleecker on some fool errand
I've suggested pausing, I imagine, to wonder why, to draw
the camera, that small, dark room with a window small enough

for the world, reach of stone and steel and light, the narrows
that spread like a shutter's leaves to admit, contract to darken,
the hush of traffic around your voice, what it is you've seen

curling, spindled, waiting as I wait to see: I'm moving South,
you north, each blind to one another, two thousand miles,
magnetic constellations of our having been just here just there

moving against one another on the cassette tape, shift the head
and you hear the other, the ghost of one voice in the other's
silence: one mind a small, dark room with a pinhole small enough

for everything—

Permalink