WHAT THE HELL, TELL THE STORY AGAIN

i'm hoping this can be a kind of catch-all file for me, something to stuff full of poems and apple trees and clips of rockstars singing on children's television shows. talk about po-biz, or my own personal poetry business, something on the constant edge of spiritual bankruptcy. this blog thing is a risky endeavor: i feel like i'm already writing in so many places right now (snapshut journals, obligatory moleskines, my - shhh - ten year old livejournal), but most of that chickenscratch is so painfully personal that i'm surprised it hasn't shamed itself into disappearing. hopefully i'm not so horribly solipsistic that i can't keep up this sort of thing, a blog. a blog! jesus, i hate that word. i'll keep writing it until i get used to seeing its ugly face.

i think blogs are funny things for would-be writers, for writers, really - for the rest of us sifting through all the word debris online. i'm the worst kind of skeptic, the girl who can't really trust her writing to the internet, makes a quiet fuss about the people who can, who presses her nose back against the glass as soon as no one's looking. i used to think you couldn't be a writer unless you were scratching your poems into tree bark (also unless you were male, a smoker, in flannels, undeniably bearded - none of that stubble bullshit). this of course damned me, as i wear dresses to go to the damn supermarket. i think these kind of ideas about authenticity + austerity spread into you when you go to school in northern michigan & in southern vermont: full of people having perspicacious epiphanies out in the woods while, inside and in your bathroom, you accidentally strangle yourself with your hairdryer.

but whatever, i tried anyway. i wrote my poems on looseleaf, and while i wasn't writing for my drawer, i wasn't looking that much further: writing for your high school (and then undergraduate) workshop, twelve people will see your work. and after submitting to highbrow literary journals for the past few years, i think the consensus is that generally -- well, twelve people see my work (thirteen, if you count that slush pile reader who stuffs envelopes with rejection). for a few years there my stuff was really touch & go, lots of narratives about the ocean and the word 'language' repeated like it was going to give the whole mess meaning. whatever. it wasn't going anywhere, and, well, i was -- sour trips to dublin, a much better one to southern spain, trains between norfolk and petersborough, a flat in edinburgh and someone i loved enough to blow off larry levis for. (who i now consistently blow off everything else for. i apparently like him better than the following things: most meals, shows in historic outdoor parks, smoking all the time, my loathing for mid-nineties alternative rock. whatever. he's worth it.)

anyway, this past june i went to this seminar thing with a bunch of people around my age and we wrote things. and i talked a lot to one of my professors about writing things, and writing things and putting them online, and online literary magazines -- i'm sorry, i'm like way behind, i'm still scared of getting poetry dot conned -- and how, really, maybe someone writing in 2008 could read some stuff along with those dead nature poets, like stuff written in the past fifty years.

so i'm trying. this is me waving the big I'M TRYING flag. i'm applying to grad schools and all that crap this fall and i don't want my urge to write to get buried in the applications to go somewhere and, you know, write. because i know this will happen.

other things i know will happen: i will scavenge lots of furniture to throw into the apartment i'm renting for my last semester of undergrad. it's above an indian restaurant: i will gain (even more) weight. i will write a lot of poems for my thesis, and some will be lyric narrative, some will be about serial killers and towns burning underground, and some, naturally, limericks about the x-files (the movie is coming out in like a week, holy christ, i have almost no connection to pop culture anymore because i'm like a savant or something but can we talk about this effing movie please). i will spend a lot of time eating things with my best friend. i'll spend a lot of time saving money for applications and also saving up to go to scotland for thanksgiving (boy's in chicago this summer & i'm in edinburgh next summer; exciting but there are like three seasons between to grapple with between, guys), and i'll fail at one or the other. oh yeah, i'll fail the gre. have i mentioned that i'm going to fail the gre?

so i just tried to make that into a list and lost. wasn't i going to use this blog to post pictures and shit? fail. fail.