Book Review: Tara Hardy's My, My, My, My, My,

Last month I went to the the book release for My, My, My, My, My, and I was completely blown away by Tara Hardy's performance of her works and by her immense generosity with us as an audience. Her warmth engulfed us. And since then it's taken me a month to read through her book. Yes, because life is busy (graduated from my MFA program and all so woo hoo), but also because the 124 page book of confessional and musical poetry and prose is huge and magical. We're talking a freaking Tardis of a book here people.

Let me explain. To me, the most remarkable trait of My, My, My, My, My, is its cohesive tone. It maintains this unity of voice despite the wide range of themes and topics and especially despite Hardy's diverse use of poetic and prosaic forms and approaches. These potentially disparate elements are held together in part by the repetition of motifs and scenes. The recurrence of a scene between a spider and a ladybug, and the refrain of a lilac tree named Miss Lady offered solid welcoming footholds and echoed the harsher but similarly steady echoes and monotonous repetitions of what it is to live with illness or what it is to live with your trauma always in you.

What cements the cohesion of My, My, My, My, My, as miraculous, what gives it its strange magic is that it is held together through deep dives into many and particularly heavy topics. This book is not a simple book. It is not an "easy" read. In the month it took me to read it, I had to put it down several times because it struck me so strongly. I know it's corny and I don't care: It brought me to tears on multiple occasions and made me laugh out loud alone in my bedroom and once while on the train to the airport. My, My, My, My, My, is a book about growing up, it's about body, it's about divorce, it's about getting sick and getting sicker and fearing death until that fear becomes as familiar as the feel of a butterknife in your hand, it's about abuse and incest, it's about the saving grace of a dog's face, it's about survival and it's also a guide for how to survive and how to revel in this sharp glinting gift of life.

My, My, My, My, My, is not a book about balance, it is balance incarnate. It embodies the deeply shifting struggle and triumph of staying alive. The specifics of Hardy's life will draw you in but it is her alchemically balanced mode of storytelling that will invite you and your own struggles and triumphs into the book. Hardy's gift in My, My, My, My, My, is the pocket she opens for the reader to crawl into. When you finish My, My, My, My, My, the book, and everything in it will belong to you completely. And also you will belong more to yourself.

I have a crush on David Rees and so will you (if you watch Going Deep)

My partner and I just finished the last available episode of Going Deep with David Rees. A show I've come to love for its earnest enthusiasm for strange bits of knowledge about everyday rituals. To me, it functions like good poetry should. It goes both macro and micro on a quests to find how things are done and grasp for meaning surrounding life's every day activities. It makes us sit with what we as humans so often shrug off simply with cliched euphemism and inattention.

The show itself is a simple 30 minute set-up. First David, in his goofy big-eyed excitement explains what we're going deep about today and why it interests him in particular. Over the next 20 minutes the audience gets to sit shotgun on David's field trips and guest appearances to talk with the experts. The experts range in many different fields an are based on the adorably non-scientific understandings David already has about the topic. After each guest or field trip David tallies up what we have learned so far and at the end of the show this list culminates into a final display of David's new and improved method of doing a simple task.

His facial expressions and bodily gesticulations really sell the action of the show and give the viewer their own sense of wonder about what is really being witnessed. In many episodes David goes through what appears to be a significant transformation. This is wonderful to watch and gives the episodes a nice twist.

I think I feel especially kindred to David because he's a very loud socially awkward person (like me). He gets all jazzed and hooty about exciting things but doesn't feel particularly comfortable with the implications of sharing that excitement with others (as is shown clearly in the episode on how to dig a hole). He is a ridiculous man. Which I love and can't get enough of.

Also his demos are silly as fuck. This show it fun. It's like a kids show for adults, but without all the schmaltzy kid stuff in it. If you have ever felt like you've failed at being a human, or that you just don't know how to human like everyone else, you will love this show. Though it may just make you want to buy parachute cord for your shoes.

I recommend starting with either How to Dig a Hole or How to Swat a Fly.

Drafty Annotation of O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency

These poems in Meditation in an Emergency are of a time, location, and context. And by "of a time" I also mean of the moment. Each poem seems an unattached snapshot; a stream of consciouness portrayal of the way reality and thought/feeling permeate one another. This encapsulation gives the poems power and focus but it also requires the reader to strive to join the narrators of these poems in a context that may be forgien to them. For example, I'm a west coast poet without much experience or expertise in the visual art or music disciplines. O'Hara leans heavily on these disciplines as inspiration and illustration. So I had to accept that the peices of mucis or art he referred to were powerful. This gave the poems less of an impact for me and makes me suspect this book was not written with a very wide audience in mind.

That said, there are very interesting lines drawn here between what was then thought of as "high art" and "low art". O'Hara praises the comonplace in the same stanza as the cutlurally prized. He even has an entire poem about the movies, and in another bemoans the slow death of the ballet.

I'm impressed with the variety of forms put forth by O'Hara. It's and interesting sampling of beat influence. Some pieces are one single block of stanza (Chez Jane) while others have a clear cut stanza set up and line distribution (Jane Awake). The form choices make subtle impacts on the reader and  wish I knew more about how he made arrangement choices.

In my opinion he is at his best in the mixed prose/poetry format in the title poem Meditations in and Emergency. There of a beautiful mix here of strange imagery and declaration. It's a deeply quotable piece with bits like "It is more important to affirm the least sincere" and "It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so." It's also the only piece here that makes direct reference to O'Hara's homosexuality. I belive it is hinted at in Poem (p.60 ) with the metaphor of foreigness as a possible stand in for the, at the time unspeakable, sex acts traded between men. I wanted to like this poem but the racism of this poem makes it offensive and staunchly sets its voice in a time and perspective that dehumanizes others by using their "exoticism" to the wrier's benefit. This is unfortunate and off-putting since there is such an enticing tenderness and truth to this poem.

I consider For Grace, After a Party a more successful, less offensive, and well-rounded portrayal of an interaction between lovers. One that, minus the name in the title, goes completely without gender signifiers of either the lover or the other characters. The narrator speaks of the strange pleasure and crooked ache of attending a party along with someone you long for. And it kicks in the end like a haiku with reality pushing things back into old patterns.

As a reader I often had trouble grasping what the point of each poem was. And while some of the poems (like For Grace, After a Party) benefit form this ambiguity, much of the time I found it frustraitng and confusing. The strange and vivid images were enough to push me through the poems with a lovely hunger, but I rarely felt "full" at the end of them.

I remember taking Blas Falconer's workshop on finishing a poem at Antioch. He used his own "perfectly well written" poem with one very piercing line as an example of an unfinished poem that needed to be fueled from the depth that one line came from. O'Hara has many piercing lines but I don't know if all his poems are "finshed" in this way. This contribute to the snapshot-esque feel of this book and I think also why so many of the details seem to have aged poorly since the book came out in 1957.

The Fosters will melt your heart! (a review)

Last month my partner and I started watch The Fosters on netflix.

It has some problematic elements (like siding with the cops, sappy lingering on teenage romance, and comically flat portrayals of poverty/non-middle-class people) but if you're a sucker for Very Special Episodes then you should definitely watch this show. Every episode is very special. Just like all seven of the principle characters. The Fosters addresses many real life issues that other light hearted family shows are unwilling to associate themselves with.

I was particularly impressed with this show's portrayal of rape and the social aftermath and personal trauma that it causes. I've also been impressed with the way that it portrays the subtlety with which most bullying and exclusion happens. While it is still made more obvious for the show, its presentation is more subtle than I have seen before. It's much closer to the realities of discrimination.

All that said, it's an incredibly schmaltzy show that knows how to stick its tear-jerking claws into your heart strings. The writers are masters at making you think the worst is coming and then softening the dramatic blow so you feel sweet sweet relief (in fact I suspect one of the cliffhangers of the most recent midseason finale will pan out this way). The turn of events can also surprise with very dramatic stuff that seems to come out of nowhere and hit you in the guts.

Just based on the amount of principal characters and the vast array of diverse and subversive topics it covers, The Fosters could have been an awful mess of cute faces and progressive Hallmark moments. Diversity Soup if you will. And I'm not gonna lie, it feels a bit like that in the beginning. But by the 5th episode you are fully in love with every character and you physically twitch when they make the wrong choice for loving reasons. Which is basically what drives the plot of this show.

You watch it for the characters. Because you love them, pretend they are your friends, and want them to be happy. The characters and their motivations all ring pretty true and the actors work exceptionally well together. The way they avoid, sublimate, and misread their stresses and anxieties is painfully realistic. Some of the "drama" of the show is definitely played up in a way that is unrealistic, but that's not really what you watch the show for right?

Also for a show that centers around a lesbian couple and their family, we see a whole lot more of the teens doing sex things than we do the moms. I think that what The Fosters need the most is more sexy lesbian mom sex. This is my biggest critique of the show. Not enough gay sex.

I guess my point here is, if you liked watching Boy Meets world and My So-Called Life and if you get tired of every LGBTQ show out there being "gritty" and "edgy" then this is the show for you. It doesn't turn away from tougher issues but still leaves you feeling good about the world. Enjoy!

PS: I tried to keep spoilers to a minimum in this review but if you want to read more about the show and don't mind spoilers Autostraddle has some amazing posts about it.

Movie review: The Hundred Foot Journey

This film was adorable. Deliciously fluffy. The best features of this movie are of course the food but also the way it glorifies the Taste Face. If you are a person who likes to watch other people experience pure joy and epiphany then you would probably like this movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It made me miss my family.

Now that said, the entire premise of the main character Hassan's progress is slightly irksome to me. He supposedly has this magical Stuff which makes him innately, some sort of genius chef (who can cook you into orgasm even with badly burned and bandaged hands). Most of you who know me or read my words on the the regular already know that I dislike the entire construct of the genius and consider how we romanticism overnight success extremely unhealthy. So the whole "he's got the right stuff and I can taste it" crap kinda bothered me. And I, like Hassan's love interest Marguerite, had to keep fighting to get over my knowledge about what a crock the idea of "natural genius" is.

When I could get over the hokey of that premise, this movie's visuals and style of storytelling hit my nostalgia bones in a good way. The dialogue is almost slapstick, but it has a very classic american-ideal-of-paris quality to it. It reminded me of Sabrina (the 1954 version, not the 1995 disaster) and a few of the other rom coms of the period that I watched when I went through my teenage obsession with Audrey Hepburn. There was a simple and naive sort of passion to this film and all of its characters' motivations.

Granted some of this romanticism comes from the exotificaiton of cultures that are considered "other". And yeah, I know, this film does plenty of work to put equally degrading dialogue into the mouths of both races represented here. But come on. Equal opportunity insults are no substitute for honest depictions of the awkward and subtle way that tension builds up between people of different backgrounds and cultures. Especially when there's a history of oppression and skewed power dynamics there.

With easily identifiable rights and wrongs, and extremely few supporting characters. The friction portrayed is overly simplistic. It is the story book version of cultural exchange and tolerance. At best this can give the message that cooperative and joyful exchange between cultures is possible and beneficial. At worst we get an endorsement of the "melting pot" mythology that has and continues to erase the heritage of those with less privilege (read here the nonwhite and nonwestern).

It's upsetting but unsurprising that The Hundred Foot Journey never even makes a real attempt at addressing the historical contexts of power and oppression would effect the relationships that these characters have. There is an almost satirically comical portrayal of the way racism affects the main character and his family members. But I am glad that this element of being immigrants without community is at least hinted at.

The thing I was most disappointed by was the romantic story line of the main character and another chef. Now I don't want to spoil anything, but the lack of communication between them and odd treatment of the boundaries of their relationship left me in question about the kind of character Marguerite actually was. And I suspect her character development was sacked for a happy coupling that such uplifting films seem to require I guess. Oh well, another female character's complexity sacrificed to the protagonist's development.

But it was still very fun. Also most of the story is given away on the trailer, so um, you don't really neeeeeeed to watch it. I recommend having foodstuffs nearby when you see it.

Check In

Hello friends. My my, have I ever been a busy bee lately! I prepped for and attended the very first residency for my MFA program and generally had my mind blown out of the water in so many ways.

I'm mostly posting right now just to check in with you dear reader, and wanting to let you know that despite my spotty posting on this blog for the last 3 months I am still very much so here and writing up so many storms: some poetic, some nonsensical, some for the rigorous documentation that goes along with being in school again, and some stuff about books too.

I have a few blogposts in the works right now but they need refining, and hopefully I'll find the time between school work in the next two weeks to polish them up for publication. But for now I'll give you some morsel of what I've been working of for grad school.

I've selected a section of or my first book annotation. I read Jericho Brown's Please and I was so impressed I needed to share my thoughts/love for it. I would highly recommend to anyone who likes to read words:

You'd think that the jagged subject matter of Please would relegate it to the “tragic black story” trope* but no, Brown keeps it from being that simple. This book is triumphant, ecstatic, and also heavy with grief. It doesn't pull any of its loving lyrically-saturated punches. The poems in Please don't aim to be universal, they aim to be honest. And in striking those achingly honest melodic cords, the universality of intimacy, othering, violence, and suffering rumble out in slow, synchronous harmony.

Here's a photo of my favorite poem from this book:

PS: I somehow absolutely feel that I should be getting out one post each month at the very least. See you all in July. 

(good lord summer's flying fast ain't it!?)

*Many groups are only allowed to be represented as solely tragic figures in mainstream culture. This simplifies their stories and oppressions. I'm referring to this oversimplification when I say "tragic black story" trope. I don't think this limiting approach to telling stories that involve tragedy is specific to black folks, but I do recognize it as a way that they've had their narratives (over)written.

Book Review: Dispossessed

I've had a pretty good Fall when it comes to books. Seems like I just kept tripping on mind blowing books.

So I've decided to give my review of each of them!

Starting with Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

The premise for the novel is simple, two civilizations orbiting each other, with distinct cultures: Urras is hyper capitalist with many but unevenly distributed resources, and Anarres which was founded on Urras's moon after an anarchist rebellion two hundred years previous and has not/barely enough resources distributed equally/as needed by a computer system. These two wolds have by design, had minimal contact in the past 200 years.

The Dispossessed is the story of Shevek, an intelligently disgruntled Anarresti physicist who travels to Urras.

The story is told in non-chronological order, switching between worlds every chapter. The first two chapters are slightly disorienting in this regard, but this element is perfect because it simulates Shevek's disorientation of culture shock.

While two seemingly polar opposite societies are represented, Le Guin masterfully does not come down on the side of either and instead uses individual characters to expose the problematic elements within both societies.

The sophistication of thought and emotion in this book is sharply philosophical and is as painfully relevant now as the year it was first written (1974). The complexity of societies is portrayed seamlessly through the main character's investigation of character's motives.

I wish that I could go back in time and hand this book to my fifteen year old self. It gave me all the complexity and richness I wanted from and subsequently failed to pry out of Atlas Shrugged.

This story is an appropriately critical approach to idealized societies. Through the voice of Shevek, Le Guin managers to balance care for the individual freedoms of creation/destruction with the needs of humans as a cooperative society.

This book is absolute magic for anyone who consistently feels like an outsider because they refuse to settle for a belonging that comes at too high a cost. This book is for people who are suspicious of both luxury and austerity and know that danger lies in clinging to closely to any ideology.

I know it's premature but I would already classify this book as deeply influential for me. There was so much rich thought surrounding ownership, belonging, suffering, and oppression that I will be chewing on it for years.

The Dues Ex at the end was a little disappointing, but not at all unexpected in a book I know to be part of a series. I look forward to reading more of the Hainish Cycle (maybe this time I'll get past chapter 3 of The Left Hand of Darkness).


Next up on my review list is Whipping Girl! Stay tuned!

A Feminist Analysis of Carrie: Violent Projections of Womanhood (MEGA SPOILERS)

I watched Carrie for the first time this October.

I was alone. And I was ready to be scared.

I was not scared. If anything I was creeped out. Not by the film itself but because it's exaggeration of the violence that women face reminded me of the reality of how difficult it is to be a woman sometimes. And how strange and difficult and lonely it is to be who you are in a world where you have no (real) support and your peers are vastly more privileged and comfortable than you.

A lot of people will think upon viewing Carrie will find a sympathetic character in the gym teacher, Miss Collins, but I don't think she is a actually friend to Carrie. In fact I find her to be a faux-ally. She doesn't reach out to Carrie out of compassion. She reaches out to her to encourage and enforce the her own roll as benevolent teacher and the role of Carrie as a blossoming adolescent. Miss Collins needs Carrie to be successful socially because she see herself as being validated by doing so. She approaches carrie in a passive aggressively predatory manner, trying to make her better fit into her social group, and make her into the "girl" that she is nostalgic for. She is attracted to the an idealized version of Carrie and is not actually interested in the person that Carrie is.

In the beginning of the film when speaking to the principle about slapping Carrie in the shower Miss Collins says "In that moment I knew why those girls wear doing what they did and I just wanted to smack her."

Despite her friendly approach she is still trying to force Carrie into a role. In the infamous pigs blood scene Carrie recognizes Miss Collin's falseness and "sees" her gym teacher laughing along with everyone else. Like all of the women in this film Miss Collins feels the need to discipline ridicule or change Carrie because of her failure to live up to what she considers normal and acceptable for the role of woman.

To an excruciating and delightfully acted degree Carrie's mother projects the expectation of innocence and virginity onto Carrie. The girls at school project the expectation of teenage normality onto her. The gym teacher is complicit in this although she works her butt off to make Carrie's mandatory assimilation into her version of womanhood as comfortable and humane as possible. Kind but ultimately misguided.

Carrie is a whipping girl, a repository for every other female characters expectations of womanhood. The array of the projections she suffers are often delivered violently. In the literary sense I'd argue, that the heightened adversity she suffers from these projections is the violent crucible from which her powers to arise (much like a superhero is often motivated by tragedy/abuse).

For this reason I view Carrie as a parable about the horrific consequences of women willy-nilly projecting their impossible expectations onto other women. I love this film specifically for it's unique focus on relationships between women. Yes it is violent but the relationships between woman often are (one of the ways the patriarchy maintains itself is by pitting women against each other). And some of my all time favorite movies demonstrate this (Mean Girls).

Call it misandry if you must, but I also find it very funny that all of the men in this movie are inconsequential. Their characters basically only exist to serve the aims of the female characters seeking to undermine Carrie. It's a deliciously strange reversal of how genders are usually represented in film. The women and their twisted motivations drive this film.

Carrie is often billed as a revenge flick and honestly I think that's an oversimplification. Carrie doesn't burn down the school, flip the car, and bring her house down because she wants to get revenge on all of people who have violently projected their crap onto her. She does it because the world as she knows it is a terrible horrible place where if you don't live up to people's expectations you get ridiculed and abused.

She burns the world to the ground because she's had first hand experience after experience of just how fucked the world is. She isn't in it for revenge, this move is a murder suicide story.

In this sense it's telling that Sue, the only survivor of Carrie's rampage, never spoke directly to Carrie and felt actual remorse about the shower incident. Sue made no attempt to change or solicit anything from Carrie at all. The only person in the film who gave Carrie anything without expecting her to fill their ideal role of womanhood was the person allowed to survive. Although she is left haunted by what she witnessed, as are all of us who live in a world were women are pitted against one another for not living up to skewed and violently enforced ideals of womanhood.

Feminism In Action's Open Mic was magical! (a review)

Last night, at a Feminism In Action Open Mic at the Delores Park Cafe in SF, I got up in front of a crowd of complete strangers and read a section of a freewrite/poem.

I felt some measure of security in that the room was full of self professed feminists raising money and awareness for domestic violence. A stranger to the Bay Area, I arrived early and an hour before the person who'd invited me. The venue was packed wall to wall with people. I stood for most of the performances I leaned on a wall near the bathroom and tried not to feel like I was in the way

The people at this event were all stripes of gorgeous. So many good looking queers and my goodness I wish I'd had the gumption to talk to more than a few of them. More than once during the music and poetry I would glance around the room hungry to watch the way people enjoyed and accepted the sounds into their bodies. En mass this collection of humans was exceptionally lovely. This audience was trusting and open and I knew it would be a delight to be in front of.

I had a couple printed off, toiled over poems in my pocket. A poem about being a fish and a poem about how animals navigate using the moon. Now don't get me wrong, I will stand the fuck by scientific poems as being poems of the people. But Graciela, the MC for the event was so thoughtfully insistent about addressing all the performers by their preferred gender pronouns that changed my mind. I did something raw and wild instead. I knew I had to read some of the words I'd drafted about gender and pronouns that very morning.

I am ashamed to say I spent several of the sets half listening frantically editing the freewrite on my iphone so it would be more cogent and have the ending I wanted. Despite being wrapped up in writing there were some unforgettable moment that made me snap out of the obsessive act of editing. The heat and unabashed to resistance to gentrification, racist/sexist/classist oppression kept pulling my eyes up from my own work. Again and agin I was reminded back into the shared discomfort of solidarity.

Even though I was too nervous and unfamiliar to join in, it warmed my heart to watch the small contingent of folks makeshift a dark grinning dance floor during one of the musical sets. The love was so apparent in the room that it overflowed and the streets I'm sure got messy with its healing. Even halfway down the block as I left I could hear its joyous laugher moving like honey in the air.

It was the most fun I've had in a crowded room this season.
I say well done to the organizers and I hope they pulled down a butt load of money last night.