Dog-Vomit as a Metaphor for Post-MFA Life

I’ve just returned from a month in Prague. We receive our pug back from his grandparents. “He’s had a wonderful time,” they say. “He was an angel—absolutely no trouble,” they say, and I know it must be a lie because if there is one word in the English language that describes this pug, it’s trouble. To a T.

Next morning we wake up to the sound. Those of you who have four-legged furry pets know it—the *gulp, blurp, blub* that precedes a hairball or a vomiting episode. No big deal. Happens all the time. I rise, groggy and bloodshot, to clean the mess. Next morning: *gulp, blurp, blub*

Hmm. Odd. Like clockwork almost. Like a very regular, very nauseating alarm clock.

“Maybe he’s pregnant,” jokes my partner, wielding rags and Lysol.

*

Padraig (that’s his name, it’s pronounced “Patrick”) has been going through some changes lately. A month-long trip to Portland, being weaned off his puppy chow in favor of big-boy kibble, our feeble attempts at training him with little more than pleading tones and broken pieces of Milkbone dog biscuits, a recent move away from the only home he’s ever known. I know how he feels. So I begin with the little changes. No more Milkbones for a while. No trips to the dog park, where those ruffian Seattle dogs could be harboring any number of virulent diseases. A larger portion of puppy chow in his morning meal (I’d never heard of regression as a treatment for vomiting, but it can’t hurt, right?).

*

It’s the middle of the night and there’s that familiar sound again. I get up. I step in a puddle of mucous. I turn on a light and track mucous through the house to the computer, where I Google a number of combinations of “pug,” “vomit,” “symptoms,” and “treatment” until I find this sage advice: withhold food for 12-24 hours and begin a bland diet of chicken and rice.

The next morning, I leave Padraig starving at home to go grocery shopping. Raw chicken makes me want to vomit, but I love my dog, so I buy the least offensive and cheapest package in the meat case. I remember that we’ve got a package of basmati rice at home. I debate: Is basmati rice bland enough? I still don’t have a job, so I wonder, Is it cheaper to purchase new, crappy rice now or feed Padraig the expensive rice that I already have? I decide to go with the basmati and head home.

For dinner, I boil the rice and chicken in separate pots, keeping the chicken water for soup stock (I’m poor now, so it seems like something I need to do even though I never make soup and I have no idea how to use chicken water in the process). When the chicken is done, I cut it into miniscule, easy-to-digest pieces. I add the rice and smoosh it all together. I add water because Padraig might be dehydrated from all the puking. I smoosh it all again. I give it the smell test: smells OK. I wouldn’t eat it, but it smells OK. I give it to Padraig, who eats it with gusto and promptly vomits it all up again. And as I stare at it, lying on the floor like one of those perfectly shaped domes of rice they serve at Chinese restaurants except for having been in my dog’s stomach for all of 3 seconds, I wonder if maybe I should leave it there. Maybe he’ll eat it again. Maybe I won’t have to cook more chicken and rice and smoosh it and add water and smoosh it again if he just eats his own puke. And while I’m engaging in this fantasy, Padraig has already retired to the bedroom to sleep it off.

So I decide maybe I fed him too much. I go back to the drawing board. Boil. Cut. Smoosh. A much, much smaller portion this time. I wake Padraig up and coax him to eat. Never one to turn down food, he does so willingly. I spend the next two hours glancing at him, listening extra hard for the sounds of imminent vomit. Nothing. We enjoy the rest of our evening and go to bed. Three A.M.: *gulp, blurp, blub*

I’ve had it. This is where the metaphor comes into play. All of a sudden, my dog’s illness represents every anxiety of my life. I can’t do anything right. Something is terribly wrong and, despite all of my good-faith efforts, I can’t fix it. This is my life now: dog vomit. I apply for jobs; I don’t get them. I send books and chapbooks and poems to contests; I don’t win. Morning, noon and night for the rest of my days: dog vomit and my vain efforts to staunch it. I am inconsolable. My partner is tired and disgusted and in no mood to deal with my existential crisis. He sends me out to the couch to try and get some sleep, promising that he’ll deal with any other episodes that may occur during the night. But I can’t sleep. It’s gotten so bad that even in the silence of nothing happening I hear it: *gulp, blurp, blub*

*

It’s the morning of the fifth day of puke. We have broken down and taken the pug to the vet. The vet is a lovely woman. She is going to fix everything, I just know it, because her last name is Lamb and that's like Jesus and when she fixes everything I’m going to kiss her full on the mouth. She checks Padraig’s stool. Negative. Her assistant checks his temperature. Normal. She pokes around his abdomen, feeling for blockages. Nothing. She looks at his gums. Pink, slimy, perfect. There appears to be nothing wrong with my dog. So she prescribes some meds and some hydration and she subcutaneously injects a bunch of fluids into his shoulder and tells me he’ll absorb the stuff throughout the day and it should help and eventually the unsightly lump of fluid on his back will go away. Right now he looks like Quasi Modo with his quavering little back-hump. Or a camel. Or Fergi.

*
So it’s been almost eight hours with no puke. I haven't gone back to the vet to kiss her on the mouth just yet. Padraig is resting comfortably on the couch, having uneventfully eaten his evening meal. I am cautiously optimistic. Maybe, for now, this one problem has been fixed. Of course I am left to wonder whether there’s a subcutaneous hunch-back cure for chronic unemployment and rejection. But I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. At the moment, I’ll settle for vomitless nights.

Hangin' Tough

New Kids in the Block are playing the New Orleans Arena. I picture threadbare Members Only jackets, male pattern baldness, formation dancing, Alleve, Metarie housewives in Coldwater Creek matchables, Cosmos in turquoise plastic tumblers.

As we can see, the post-MFA adjustment is taking time. A fellow Montana MFA grad and I are sharing her studio. Sleeping on the same air mattress. Scrambling eggs out of our single skillet. Reinflating the air mattress. A sampling of college friends, where they are now: head of the radiology dept at Duke University, hi-profile Wall Street stockbroker, professor at Emory working with legislation to protect battered women. As my parents like to remind me, aside from bad marks in cursive writing, my report card showed promise. What went wrong here? A-R-T. Ohnonono, I couldn’t work in a hospital or court or office. I must create.

For work I’m teaching online where I’m learning the joys of emoticons, exclamation points and the sandwich technique:

Dear Administrators:

I am eager to embark on this exciting opportunity. I noticed you don’t pay for training. Is that legal? Again, thanks for this exciting opportunity.

The pay is actually decent, once I actually start teaching (a month from now? A year? From the grave?) For most this job is a part time gig for parents so they afford karate lessons as they organize medical records at some hospital somewhere. Teaching online is the new Tetrus. I’m holding out on full time so I can work on my book. Take my MFA third year, as I’m explaining it. It’s hard. The Visa emits tendrils of smoke as I swipe. I scan the restaurant employment ads with the shameful hungered stealth of drunk-driving by an ex’s house. I worked in the biz for years, have the necessary experience to land a fat job where I can pocket $200 plus a night. For the mere price of my soul. Double hard is that post-Katrina, all the best restaurants in town are (supposedly) in dire need of staff.

The more I sit in hipster coffee shops with my iBook with other black-squared glasses wearing hipsters the more the self-loathing foments.

When in Chicago...

• Editorial Assistant, Medical
• Associate Development Editor, Architecture
• Entry Level Copywriter, Web Writing
• Research Associate
• Technical Writer
• Online Teaching, Composition
• Composition Instructor

The following positions have been applied for. Now I wait. At the Logan Square Public Library until I receive an email. I wait. And I wait. The job hunt continues, and because I'm never sure when the WiFi signal here will diminish I cling to the web pages I have open and scour the job postings. In these 80% humidity days I also cling to the A/C.

I've been in Chicago a little over a week now; our super had to kick in our door after his elaborate assembly of picks and screwdrivers failed on move-in day. We still haven't heard back about our mailbox key. So, I sit and hope I'm not missing any important documents other than the mail that trickles through into the "junk mail" bin in my apartment's foyer. I read last night in the Newcomer's Guide to Chicago that the postal service here is notoriously poor. Apparently, decades ago a federal investigation of Chicago-area postal workers took place, finding "stacks and stacks" of undelivered mail littering the apartments and vehicles of those workers. So, if I miss that electricity bill I blame the postal service.

I've made a commitment to explore downtown since I'm less than a mile from the outskirts of skyscrapers, seen in all its glory from Wicker Park, two L stops away. When T & I were waiting on the L platform for our non-rush hour train to amble in I watched the Sears Tower light up as the smoggy dusk grew; damn those two little "antennae" sticking on the top... My commitment to downtown is spirited in intention but feeble in practice. I haven't yet seen Lake Michigan since I moved.

Mostly I stay around the apartment bemoaning the heat and writing a few tercets. I'm writing in smaller lines and stanzas now, mostly couplets and tercets. I have no idea what this means.

I'm reading Jorie Graham's The End of Beauty. While I don't particularly care for the initial poems' focus on Adam, Eve, Shadow, Truth and Beauty, a man's neck hair rising as he sits in the back of a cab that opens a later poem is killer. These poems are written in very long lines, lines that often lope on to a second line. She also uses numerals extensively, fracturing and enumerating experiences in her "Self Portrait" series, two things I've tried to use to some success (long lines-yes, numerals-no). I'm also reading Exiles, Ron Hansen's market paperback-feeling novel of Gerard Manley Hopkins' writing of "Wreck of the Deutschland". I think this perhaps-unfair labeling of tone/market fits the first chapter of the novel well but when he turns to novelize the lives of each of the five nuns who did die in the wreck, his exploration of 19th century religion and politics in and around Germany is fascinating and engaging. So is Hansen's portrayal of Hopkins' turn away from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism for many of the reasons (persecution, etc.) I would attribute to the reason for the opposite switch to the Church of England.

This brings me back to the devotion I now give job hunting. I've been fortunate enough to find a small group of former and current MFAers (from the Art Institute) that T knows. Four of them are currently unemployed. This makes for more group bemoaning, ending in the lament: "Well since the Trib laid off some journalists, our job marker is saturated..."

Plugs for Our Fellow UM MFA Grads

Youna Kwak has poems in Boston Review, introduced by Joanna Klink.

Poet Lucas Farrell and artist Louisa Conrad have a blog.

Dispatch from Prague: "Erotic" art and the switch to fiction

Another day, another class field trip: this time to an exhibition of erotic art spanning the 16th-19th centuries. Having your aging poetry instructor invite one to a museum of erotic art is somewhat like having your father invite you to watch porn with him. Luckily, the art was much tamer than I expected after the sex museum debacle. In fact, it was quite lovely and not terribly salacious.

Beyond that, the weirdest thing has happened. I had an idea for a story. A real, live fictional story. I haven't written one of those since I was an undergrad over 10 years ago. I keep trying to avoid it but ideas continue to accrete and I imagine that I'll have to start writing it soon. The idea of sitting down and writing sentences is a daunting one, but also exciting. Obviously, I haven't avoided sentences entirely while I've been focusing on poetry. I've even made some forays into literary nonfiction. But ever since I made the choice to focus on poetry, fiction has been a mystery to me. Much like mountain climbing, I could admire the commitment involved and marvel at the strength and skill it took to finish the task, but I just did't understand why anyone would want to undertake the task in the first place.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes and whether I'm actually up to it.

Tomorrow I fly away from Prague and back to the job search, the struggle to create a writing routine, the daily dog-walking, and the steady diet of burritos and cheese toast that I left behind. Tonight, we dine on pork knuckle!

Dispatch from Prague: Also of Note...

Oh noes you didn't, John McCain.

Dispatch from Prague: Sloshing

The Sex Machines Museum yielded just this nugget: sloshing. I didn't know there was a term for it, but now I do. Was it worth the price of admission? Not really. Nothing will ever top the ingeniousness of donkey-punching. And I learned about that over 10 years ago from a friend. I didn't even have to pay her for the knowledge.

I am reminded of the first time I heard the term rolfing and thought it must be some wicked fetish thing. Then I learned the truth, which was much less interesting than I'd imagined.

It goes without saying that there's something tedious about visiting a sex museum, or any museum for that matter. The modes of display eliminate any dynamism the objects themselves may have had. Certainly, one's imagination can fill in the blanks regarding the many uses for a copulation bench, but does one really need the presence of the object at all at that point?

Regardless, I have been set the task of writing a stanza using the language of the Sex Machines Museum. Beyond the fact that the institution's James Brownsian name makes me giggle, I've got nothing.

Dispatch from Prague: Week Three Begins

We began our workshop with Roger Weingarten on Monday and spent the better part of three hours writing a collaborative sestina.

...

Tomorrow, the members of our workshop have to go to some tourist trap sex museum to write another collaborative poem.

...

Other changes: The program has a two week option as well as the month-long option, so a bunch of people left and a new batch of people arrived. Since I spend most of my time reading in the dorm room, this hasn't had a huge effect on my life here.

Speaking of reading, I can't get enough of novels. After four years of living, eating, and breathing poetry, all I want now is to lose myself in expansive fictions. I've finished Arnost Lustig's Lovely Green Eyes, Phillip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, and Amy Bloom's Away.

I'm currently reading Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and I'm saving Ulysses for the flight home.

Books are incredibly expensive here. A paperback copy of Pullman's The Amber Spyglass at the English language bookstore goes for about 25 dollars.

In other news, we saw Victor Wooten walking around the Charles Bridge yesterday. Doug's a huge, huge fan of his, so of course he plotyed. Turns out Mr. Wooten was headlining the Bohemian Jazz festival that night. It was free, so we went. Things are never free here, so you have to grab that brass ring whenever it presents itself. It was like any other festival--bratwursts and beer, big crowd, etc. The lady in front of me had a kid on her shoulders and was dancing frenetically so that said kid's butt kept waving within an inch of my face. Unpleasant.

So I'm off to eat some goulash and take a nap. Tonight: Vibe Fantasy at the USP Jazz Lounge.

Hot Mess

The best thing about this Sexiest Poets Living list (other than the sexy poets) is the comment string.

Dispatch from Prague: An Aesthetic Butting of Heads

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Originally uploaded by trina.burke

As I've mentioned, I'm taking a workshop with Jack Myers here in Prague. Mr. Myers has some very definite ideas about poetry, which is not surprising. I've worked with a number of poets who are very passionate and very articulate about their personal poetic aesthetics. However, this is the first time I've worked with an instructor who is so vehement in impressing his own aesthetic values on his students. I'm not necessarily saying that this is a bad thing--it certainly gives me food for thought. I am forced to examine where my resistance to his statements about poetry comes from and this helps me to articulate my own ideas about poetry--which is never a bad thing.

And, despite my disagreement with the very foundation of many of his ideas, I find that Mr. Myers' critiques are often very insightful and helpful. It's a conundrum that, I think, centers around respect. I've heard about this so-called aesthetic war between more traditional and more elliptical (or avant-garde, or experimental, or whatever you want to call them) poets, but I never thought that anyone put much stake in it. It seems easy enough to me to respect what another artist is doing even if I don't get it or I don't like it; that is, to allow that it has a right to exist in the world, that it has value, that it should be made and there is room enough in the world for all kinds of art. What I am seeing here is a different viewpoint, wherein this elliptical poetry is considered to be the naive, overly clever, overly intellectual bumblings of youth. I am getting the message that I'll eventually (i.e. with age and, impliedly, wisdom) overcome my dedication to convolution in favor of simplicity and plainspeak. As the recipient of such messages, this feels like dismissal.

On the one hand, it makes me wonder whether all the things people say about MFA programs might be true--that they are (or can be)an indoctrination into the intellectualization of poetry, producing a legion of sense-eschewing zombies who worship at the pedestals of Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, et al. It is true that, prior to graduate school, I was writing mostly narrative poetry inspired by life events. I was "writing what I knew". However, I also think that those poems were mostly bad. I feel more confident in the writing I'm doing now, but maybe that's just a product of the stroking I've received over the past four years, the sense of belonging to a community rather than floating about in the abyss.

On the other hand, I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing for the most part. I've always kept issues of accessibility and clarity in the back of my head, and I will continue to do so.

In other news, Doug and I went to a number of museums this week. The Museum of Communism. The Veletrzni Palace. The Manes Gallery.

Among the things I saw, some favorites:

A video called "Cheerleader" that featured the artist singing a bad translation of Gwen Stefani's "What you Waiting for?" in a locker room while a group of undressed/undressing men alternately cheered and jeered her.

A wooden sculpture at the Manes gallery entitled "Woman Skier". It wore a hat of tits, had arms of tits, and stood on skis of tits.

A never-ending painting by an artist named Stibinek featuring robo-futurist figures on other planets. There were lots of egg shells and--surprise--tits and vaginas.

What will I remember most about Prague? Tits and vadge, everywhere!!!

Dispatch from Prague--I Promised Pictures

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Originally uploaded by trina.burke

This is just to say
that when I return from my trip
and I weigh 300 lbs.,
it's the fault
of the butter,
so cold and delicious.

--knife included for scale--

Booted From the MFA Womb

The ripping Kansas winds and humidity blanket let me know I am definitely not in Montana anymore. I want to go home but where is that? If I clicked the heels of my pink flip flops I might get thrown in a worm hole.

My Camry (equipped with a U-Haul trailer) thinks it's some kind of badass parked with the 18 wheelers in the Econo Lodge parking lot of Salina. I've spent the past twelve hours becoming intimately acquainted with the roadkill wildlife of Nebraska. Feathered, furred, domestic, wild, taloned, pawed, clawed. Too bad I can't work some kind of matchmaking deal with all those taxidermy schools in Montana.

I've also had too much time to wonder what I'm doing.

Two more hell days of driving and I'll be in New Orleans to meet fellow MFA grad Anne Marie Inge. She asked me on the phone the other day that gut wrenching post MFA Q: Have you been writing? I was actually writing pretty soon after graduation, but everything got put on hold for the move. And a kickass trip to Glacier National Park. It's weird to think a few weeks ago I was hiking to Iceberg Lake and communing with mountain goats. And in a few days I'll be slurping oysters in Nola. All it's takes is a lot of driving and fuckload of money for gas.