The Duende Abides

Chicago is full of people and mounted police. Sometimes, you can catch an officer and his horse running the length of Michigan Avenue Beach. And it's weird. Sometimes, someone who is touched will post this on a dumpster in Logan Square: "Mama No Bred / Buy Gold to Eat / I Will be a Good Nun..."



An unseasonably warm weekend, I spent Saturday biking the Lincoln Park/ Michigan Beach/Loop trail with visitors, winding up on the BP bridge of Millennium Park. We stumbled across a amateur tour guide who informed us the bridge spans 900 ft. This, to traverse a 200-ft. distance. I mention this because, well, metaphors are comfortable. Maybe there's some "troubled water" down there. Who knows.

A few weeks ago a friend worked her magic to score a follow up at a Chicago-area university to my long-pending, lost-in-the-ether temporary employment application (entered, oh, in July). And this was my single most-developed lead in the job front up to this point. I'd managed one interview in person for college comp. teaching and one phone interview for an editor gig. Nothing. Following this, I immediately received a call, came in the following day for an interview, and was hired for an assignment to start the following Monday.

Now. Three weeks later. I've got the hang of a hour+ commute on one bus, one train, one 1/2 mile of walking x2 each day. I've identified--but still cannot speak or make direct eye contact with-- those fellow passengers that have the same weekday schedule, working their way from bus to train, taking stops before and after me.

The job itself is that 900 ft. of bridge, where 200 ft. will do. The paycheck, on the other hand, is that cultural value of the bridge-as-participatory-art-piece. We like it. We're glad for it. Even when it doesn't make any logical sense. Nor does this bridge advance my artistic goals. My goal for survival is met. My duende is not happy until I get back to the couch at the end of the day.


I still have the satisfaction of participating in some specialized, technical aspect of language, as a freelance editor. This reminds me that not everyone puts the Elements of Style under their pillow. And yes, the maddening level of attention I grant to ensuring gnarled syntax and diction in my poems allows me to identify and know when language is being used unconventionally and how to ungnarl it. Luckily, convention still rules my life these days, with proper sentence structure essential to ensuring that supplementary paycheck.

Writerly social endeavors, lack-thereof:
Saw Junot Diaz at the Chicago public library a couple weeks back. Proceeded to obtain book signature and fawning fan photo. Social outings to consist of celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving with literature-minded friends. Projected ratio of beer drinking to conversational asides about elliptical poets: 10-to-1.

A Few More Words on Freelancing, Publication Updates, and Coffee

I just had an iced coffee AND a regular coffee at Butterfly Herbs, so watch out. As the Joker from that first Michael Keaton Batman movie would say, I'm a real live wire. I feel like I just might shoot into orbit. Coherence is not to be expected.

One of the problems of the global economy and the Internet's widespread interconnectivity is that, while it's great to have access to business partners in far-off countries, there is still the issue of time difference. As a freelancer, this boils down to lag time between questions asked and questions answered. Hence this post. (I am waiting, I am multitasking while I wait.)

The new issue of Hayden's Ferry Review is out. My poem, "Skin" is in it. The cover art is phenomenal (see above).

It appears also that I may have some poems in Double Room. This is good news. My prose poems seem to be finding homes with more success than my lineated verse. I have a special place in my heart for prose poetry. Maybe I'm just more comfortable with the sentence as a rhythmic/semantic unit. I'll admit it--to this day, I still have no idea how or when to break a line. I usually just go with what "feels" right, which I know is no way to go about writing poetry. When I revise, I put lineated poems through so many different versions of lineation that I exhaust myself. Whatever point I reach with a poem before I get exasperated is where the poem stays in terms of form. After four years of grad school, you'd think I'd have developed a more systematic approach. But you'd be wrong. I've read Levertov, Olson, myriad books on traditional form, free verse, etc. And I still have no better sense of the line. Some instructors have told me the line should be in tension with the progression of meaning and rhythm in a poem. Others have told me the line should reflect the content of the poem. Still others have told me that it depends on the individual poem, that I'll know the right way to lineate when I see it. I've heard that lines should be able to stand on their own as beautiful things. Never end on a preposition, article, or insignificant word. Blahty blah blah blah.

So, yeah, thank God for prose poems. Three cheers for the sentence.

One phone interview tomorrow, another waiting to be scheduled. Still no place to live in Seattle. Now we're expanding our home horizons in terms of what will suffice (i.e., we've decided to be less picky). There are some lovely places in West Seattle, which I love for its beaches and ties to Richard Hugo. I do not love West Seattle, however, for the commuting obstacles it poses. How can it share the name "Seattle" and be so damned far away and difficult to get to and from? Still, I was walking on Alki beach once and saw two divers come out of the water, like something from James Bond. At first I thought they were seals and I got really excited. I remained somewhat excited when I saw that they were people. And sometimes, when the tide is low, there are purple starfish. And that's not even the caffeine talking.