Today my review of Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice is up at The Rumpus.

How Like Foreign Objects was reviewed in Ploughshares!

Two poems at Barrelhouse Online.

New issue of Parthenon West, in which I have a few poems.

Oh, and I’m reading the H_ngm_n Bks Reissue of Paul Violi’s In Baltic Circles. Buy this book, and read Matt Hart’s Afterword first. This is a treasure of a book. Nate, Matt, and crew: you’re doing the good work!!

I was up until 2 a.m. watching back episodes of a new ABC show called Once Upon a Time, which isn’t nearly as cheesy at it sounds. This is how I know for sure that I’m a TV junkie. And I don’t just like the high brow shit. I’m all about The Vampire Diaries and Fringe, Prime Suspect and Grimm, Dexter and True Blood. (Umm, I vote that Dex and TB have the best music/image montage-intros ever made for tv).  The television drama, whether teen angsty, supernatural inspired (the networks’ new obsession is “the fairy tale re-examined”), or cop procedural, I’ll bite. But the same isn’t true for the sitcom. I’ve watched The New Girl a few times, which can be funny but mostly sucks. If you’re going to invest in television watching, you want some meat with your potatoes, no?. I want to be invested in characters’ lives because something important or meaningful is happening, not because they’re embarrassed that they accidentally flashed their roommate in the communal bathroom or burned the Thanksgiving turkey in the dryer (yes, this happened to overly quirky Deschanel in New Girl). I want life-or-death, even if it’s in the guise of hot teenage vampires or Snow White or parallel universes. Which is strange because I love to laugh–maybe we’ve outgrown the sitcom format as a culture, and what used to be funny is now just tired, even if it elicits a laugh here or there. Or maybe we want to watch culture at its fringes. Maybe we’re all tired of the hum drum we’re told existence should be. Normal hardly exists anymore, but abnormal does. Maybe, collectively, we’re more curious about what’s going on inside the imagination rather than behind the apartment door.

Some days are worse than others. I’ll wake up fine, enjoy my morning coffee, etc. etc., but slowly the fist in my stomach tightens, my jaw clenches, my chest constricts. And BLAM! I hate people again. Seriously, I’ll be scrubbing the toilet and constructing scenarios about how I’ll embarrass people I don’t like. And I don’t like a lot of people it turns out, although there are one or two at a time I will demonize for various weak and dumb traits. Today, for instance, I hate people who try too hard to be liked. I hate cheesiness and manufactured sweetness. I really fucking hate attention grubbing behind the guise of philanthropy, and I hate when people get their feelings hurt because you’re not on board with their schtick. I hate soft voice–the one that people use when they’re trying to be diplomatic. I hate too skinny people and too fat people and everyone in between. I’m frowning and can’t stop! Already two people at Barnes and Noble have jumped out of my way, startled by my snarl. I hate you and your floppy dresses. I hate you and your sunglasses. I hate you and your niggling poodle, but only because you’ve ruined another creature. I am disappointed in humans. I hate how people act on fear. I hate how we can’t see past our own noses, if that. I hate your voice! I hate your Facebook posts! I hate your hipster friends with their faux-floppy hair and their dumb poems! I hate your artwork. I hate your fucking ballet flats. I hate your basketball shorts. I can see the outline of your penis, which I hate. I hate your perfect stomach. I hate when guys stare at girls with their tongues wagging, and I really hate when guys write about wanting to be violent to women. It’s not cool to be honest if you’re just a douchebag. I hate gluttony and arranging days around food. I cannot stand self-righteous bastards who condescend to people who are better than they are. I hate plasticity, physical and emotional. Who am I? Holden Caulfield? Fucking stupid. Fucking twelve-year-old bullshit. Fucking asshole sitting in a corner of Barnes and Noble fucking hating everyone, two or three fights going in my head. Oh, don’t even think about getting out of line with me, Mister. I will cut you. I will fuck your shit up, swallow you whole. I fucking hate small talk. Small time. Small beans. Small town thinking. But I love small animals. I love large animals. I love big love. I love people who are quietly friends, who don’t need to make a scene about anything. I like secret promises. I like being hungry. I like smoking cigarettes. I like swimming and walking the dog. I like people who do the work and shut the fuck up. I like tirades. I like the girl with lavender hair sitting by the window. I like the old woman reading Socrates by Paul Johnson; I like her because she’s defying my expectations. Also her purse is polka-dotted. I love my dog lying at home immovable. Depressed, lovely creature. My hatred is subsiding. I don’t necessarily hate you, it turns out. On the bright side, we might get to watch NBA basketball on Christmas day. I surely won’t hate you then.

a purple-hearted tuber,

a goat  with a sworn horn.

I danced dark’s two-step

swearing mad and breaking

the back of spider-

sense. Tonight, post-surgery

the Frankenstein details

of your shorn fur

prolapsing our years together:

you are my calendar, chocolate dog–

you’ve ferried me

across our country in zig-zags

and through landscapes of the heart.

How can a not-human rend

my fabric so close to dirt? Tonight,

I vomited an icepick from my brain

for you and all our years together.

Dear dog, tonight’s whimper

and stitches and loosened blood-

flesh is a makeshift

canyon. Cower in it

with me, lone wolf. I’m a howling

about to lose control,

what’s done is a decade.

What’s done, what’s done

is pounds of unmaking.

As I’ve said before, to go on would be profane. So, too bad about fuck. Another word we’ve fucked up for posterity. Readers will look back on the 2000s and wonder why the hell so many birds and fucks. They’re great archetypes, so I suppose the actual words bird and fuck are just 21st century synecdoches for the larger themes of existence (and literature) always and forever. I will continue to say fuck with gusto. I will continue, also, to fuck with gusto. How else to live in this living? People still get uncomfortable when poems are littered, alternately, with fucks and hallelujahs. They get uncomfortable when you talk about fucking, too.  I like the juxtaposition of sacred and profane as an act of living. Say a prayer, suck a dick. We are both. We are always both. We’re the altar and the lion’s den, the birthing room and the torture chamber. Fuck. I fucking love this life.

I’m sitting on the sunporch of writer Chad Faries’ house in Savannah. Oaks and pecan trees marbling the room’s morning sun. Black cat and fluffy rainbow cat on stand-by. Lat night I read for the Poetry Society of Georgia with a few other writers, and in the afternoon I gave a talk at Savannah State University about poetry-as-memoir, which is not to be confused as poetry-as-confession. The students were really excited and receptive–always a plus when visiting a strange place. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience.

Last night after the reading, we went to the courtyard of the Ships of the Sea museum to see Pokey Lafarge and the South City Three. I’d say go ahead and see them if you can. Good, old-fashioned Americana–done superbly. I bought a record with the money I made on book sales. See? Artists feeding artists! Pokey told me he loved East of Eden so much it made him cry. Here’s to musicians who ride the rails and hike the highways with great American novels in their back pockets.

Went to Bonaventure Cemetery yesterday, too, on Chad’s fancy bicycle. Maybe the most peaceful cemetery I’ve ever visited. It overlooks the marsh and feels more like a park than a cemetery–aside from the tombstones and monuments. Conrad Aiken’s tombstone’s a bench that reads: “Cosmos Mariner Destination Unknown” and “Give My Love to the World.”

There’s a new issue of H_ngm_n up and ready for the world to devour–just in time, too. I was getting hungry for great poems and such. Go to, old chap!

I don’t join clubs. I don’t join teams. No groups. No circles. Definitely no churches. So far, no unions. I don’t meet my crowd for lunch, though sometimes I have lunch with people. Sometimes I’ll go to the pub. Sometimes a dinner party. I have a hard time going to Bikram Yoga, where I see the same people over and over. The same people hanging out in a room together, sweating religiously: cultish. And yet I love doing it, so I’m denying myself the pleasure of the experience. No collectives. I tried the collective model recently. It made me want to scratch my eyes out. I’m not a joiner.  Is that it? Is it that I’m not a joiner? That I’d rather spend entire weekends speaking to not another human being? It’s pretty close.

I think people don’t understand this. It’s difficult to understand things outside your experience, I get it. For instance, I look at people who socialize more than once or twice a week and I think they are quite literally maniacal. I’m convinced they’re missing part of their brain, that their well of loneliness is so deep that it never fills.

GroupThink. I loathe it. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right people to group think with? I don’t know. I have no patience for self-serving in the guise of “what’s best for the group.” I have no patience for idle chatter. I have no patience for shared belief in fabricated events and stories or in future utopias.

I’ll go to concerts. I’ve always enjoyed a good show. But only when I was in my late teens did I get into the mosh pit. Then, one broken nose was enough reason to stand on the sidelines forevermore. Have you ever watched a humming, buzzing pit from a balcony? It’s a fascinating hive, a vortex, a freeze-burning energy.

Maybe my disdain for GroupThink is a result of growing up in The Worldwide Church of God  (lovingly referred to as the world wide web by my college friends), when it was still fashionable and lucrative to be cultish. Our edict was to stay away from “the world.” We thought of ourselves as God’s One True Chosen People and the rest of the world as “the world.” We were encouraged to have no friends in the world. Dating in the world was frowned upon. Dating in general was frowned upon. I had lots of sleepovers with church girls.

There were times as a congregant of the WWCG that I’d walk into our ramshackle church building–sometimes a rented mint green bingo hall, sometimes a Woodmen of the World Insurance building–and the GroupThink energy would almost literally blind me. I’d spend half of a church service sitting out in the car, fending off an impending migraine.

I enjoy individuals, individually. Start grouping them together, start mobilizing them, start talking about community and support and connections, and I want to barf. Maybe being a swimmer for most of my life did it to me. Swimming is a nice metaphor for the way I like to exist. You have this pool full of people all doing virtually the same workout, but you’re not talking to them or hugging each other–except on the rare occasion that you’re on a relay team together–or evoking the incessant chatter that somehow comes with GroupThink. No, everyone’s just going about the hard business of swimming. Everyone’s pushing each other by virtue of being in the pool together. Everybody in the pool wants to do this thing and strives to get good at this thing by doing it–not by talking about it. During races we cheer each other on. In the locker room we cheer each other on. But we don’t define ourselves by the cheering.

Or maybe it’s being a writer that made me hate GroupThink. Or maybe my hatred of GroupThink made me a writer. Writing is the same as swimming. You do it. You have friends who do it. You admire many of your friends’ skill and passion. You get together a few times a year to get drunk with congratulations (literally drunk and congratulating each other). You go back to your life, which generally consists of many hours of solitary sitting and thinking. Phone calls here and there. You go to coffee shops to write where there are plenty of strangers, many of whom you like to talk to. You love city streets and parks where packs of dogs play. You love the chance encounter. But then you really love that when it’s time to part ways, nobody’s asking you to mobilize anything, or to congregate, or to create a supportive network of such-and-such.

And yet, GroupThinkers have been known to accomplish great things. Aside from killing Jews, raising Inquisitions, championing unchecked capitalism, and plotting the deaths of every citizen of the West, GroupThink also saves baby seals, bans shark fin soup, organizes revolts and protests, gives people purpose, makes people feel less alone…

I’m reading a book right now that quotes Mother Theresa after a lifetime of service: “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.” Is that why we sign up? Is that why we join?

I’ll paraphrase Ani DiFranco: They asked me which one is different, it does not belong? They taught me different is wrong. I’m not sure it’s the disease of not belonging we need to worry about, rather the idea that not belonging is somehow wrong.

Filed under: My life Tagged: being a loner, cultish behavior, GroupThink, loneliness, mother theresa, swim team, worldwide church of god ]]> http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/groupthink-a-self-exploration/feed/ 5 newcollage http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/merwins-follain-color-and-color-and-color/ http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/merwins-follain-color-and-color-and-color/#comments Sat, 08 Oct 2011 12:57:51 +0000 alexisorgera http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/?p=1227 ]]> I’m reading Merwin’s translation of Jean Follain, Transparence of the World. Follain’s world is like a transparency with drops of color, like ink, bleeding through it. Here’s a poem called “Evenings of Ink” :

Obsessive memory of first

contacts,

it was the rustling of twigs

and leaves in the garden

in the sullen days of ash.

Spots of ink

in the red evenings

while the beasts trembled;

spots that ran into stars

on the thin paper of cold notebooks.

Immense fogs around women,

they went

greeting the gnawed crosses.

Ink whose green salts he sees again

when his eyes grow tired,

when his throat is bitter.

Sumptuous ink

in the envious town.