Lola’s ninth collection of poems, Still the Mountain, is forthcoming (Paper Kite Press, 2010). Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA) appeared in 2004 and The Rim Benders (Anhinga) came out in 2001.  Two prose books appeared in 2007:  Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press), and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook).

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Boooks, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, and The New York Quarterly.  She adores radio—her work has been broadcast on BBC and NPR—and also particularly relishes collaboration. She has worked with dancers (playing Mata Hari in a full-length ballet whose script she wrote and pseudo-Cindy Sherman in a modern dance piece whose words she also scripted; with musicians (Paul Richards is setting her Forty Four Ambitions for the Piano) with and visual artists (currently collaborating with South Florida painter Derek Gores on a piece due in January, 2010.)

Her most recent collaboration was “Of Air and the Water,” done on Gainesville’s Hippodrome main stage with dance and cello. Lately, she has been writing poems set in the natural world. Her new ambition is to be Florida’s ecstatic nature poet. For more information, please see her website.

In the end, as you see, I decided to say yes, because when I’m presented with something I think I can’t do, I have enough it’s-good-for-you in me that I usually go for it. It also helped that Linebreak told me I don’t have to write about poetry. If I were capable of writing intelligent essays and if doing it would bring someone I admire into the light, I would. But it’s a non-issue because I don’t happen to have a critical set of bones.

So what I thought I would do, since I’ve never managed to settle down to just one discipline, is to spend my week as diversely as possible. I’ll start with refrigerators and move on to Hindu classical music. From there, I may talk about my sixth grade teacher or creativity or wild spaces or mistletoe, or maybe water, I haven’t decided. The only promise I can make is that I’ll try not to be boring. Okay, I feel better now. Here goes…..

…

When I was little, some people were still calling refrigerators “iceboxes” and as far as I knew, all of them were as white as Miss Gillespie’s uniform. Miss Gillespie was my pediatrician’s nurse. At some point early on I had a condition that required weekly shots. And since I didn’t like needles especially the big ones they used for penicillin, I used to squeeze myself underneath the doctor’s desk where Miss Gillespie, who was fat, couldn’t reach me. And every week she had to fetch my mother from the waiting room because she, being wiry, could get under there and pull me out. Which, I’m sorry to say, she did.

Like nurse’s uniforms– usually flowered now, right?– refrigerator colors have come a long way since then. I think the first fashion was avocado. Remember when even toilets were avocado? Now, we seem to have calmed down and it’s bone that most often joins the classic white. And for people with urban tastes, there’s black. I did though once come across a red refrigerator.  So why stop at red? Why not hot pink? Or sports team colors? Or camo, for people who hunt or are in the military?   Feel free to pick that up; I won’t charge you a penny.

Refrigerator size has grown more diverse since I was young too. Though I didn’t know anyone who had one, I should think there’ve probably always been small ones, in dorms or apartments and definitely, as there still are, in Europe and Asia.  But I don’t think there were always the steroidal specimens you sometimes see in people’s houses, usually people who pretend to being gourmet. The only justification for those, in my view, is that you live so far from a store you can only stock up once a year. Or you serve twenty or thirty meals a sitting on some regular basis. But if you’re that into level of service, why not open a restaurant?   I have a confession to make here, though, and once you read it I may not have further credibility.  I was the child, who looked at COMING SOON! signs and thought why are they building another grocery store? We already HAVE a grocery store. Remnants of that child still linger. I still don’t see why we need another place to buy the same clothes every other store already has.

But it’s not consumerism I want to talk about. Nor is it even, at least not directly, refrigerators.   What I find most interesting is what we do with (and to) the outsides of them.  Until the 1970s, it would have been basically nothing because until then fridge fronts and the corners tended to be curved,  so nothing larger than plastic letters (which came into vogue in the late 1960s) would have stuck for very long.   When I read in Wikipedia that the first patent for refrigerator magnets was issued to a Mr. Zimmerman of St. Louis early in that decade, though the date made sense, I wondered about that because I’d thought patents were for processes not ideas and it seemed to me that magnetism (not the David Copperfield or the Jesus kind, the scientific kind) would have been in the public domain. And sure enough, according to Patrick Dwyer, the nephew of that same Mr. Zimmerman, the Wikipedia information (which was picked up by almost every other website in the cool world) is wrong and Mr. Zimmerman hadn’t patented refrigerator magnets. But he WAS the first person to successfully market magnetized cartoon figures as paper-holders; he even got the initial contract to make the Disney ones.

Incidentally, while I was looking around for magnet information I found out that refrigerator magnets are technically different from conventional ones because hey alternate polarities rather than being set up uniformly north-south.  The result of that  is that to double the magnetism on the back side while almost erasing it from  the front. It’s that polarity difference that gives larger refrigerator magnets their staying power.

Enough science, let’s get to the real stuff. I don’t know about you but when I walk into someone’s kitchen the first thing I notice is what’s posted on the refrigerator. I asked Patrick, Mr. Zimmerman’s nephew, what’s on his and he said mostly travel stuff. He’s in the Air Force and has recently come back from Turkey to Del Rio Texas. It’ll be great when he posts pictures of Del Rio, which is a few miles from the Mexican border, alongside shots of Turkey—what an interesting contrast! Still, I‘d bet good money that what the Dwyers post on their fridge is going to change as their baby grows up but, you know, maybe not. When I contacted him, Patrick started looking around for magnet info himself and he told me about a collector named Louise Greenfarb on Facebook who  owns 30,000 magnets, nearly all of which are on either her refrigerator and her car.

The most interesting thing I’ve personally seen on a refrigerator was in the house of someone I dated for awhile, a very good person—we’re still friends—but notoriously commitment-phobic. And what does he have on his refrigerator but several pictures of himself with a gorgeous blonde lady, both of them looking thrilled to be together. The blonde lady, who doesn’t resemble him, happens to be his sister but he doesn’t volunteer that so the photos work perfectly to alert the rest of us that there are plenty of women out there and we’re bound to be replaced by one of them sooner or later. My daughter’s refrigerator, by contrast—she and her husband have two little girls– is plastered with a barrage of school schedules, scribbles her children have come up with, grocery lists, and a scatter of miscellaneous reminders. Oh, and, sliding towards the bottom, some plastic letters. I had those for her when she was growing up and one thing I’ve noticed about them is that as their novelty fades they tend to slip farther and farther down the front of the refrigerator until finally, because they keep falling off, you put them away.

When D’Arcy and her brother Django were growing up, I used to post kid stuff too but I also posted items entirely absent from D’Arcy’s space: listings of upcoming art movies, concert notices, opening, continuing ed possibilities, the Florida gymnastics team’s schedule, etc. etc. I didn’t get to go to many of those events but just posting them kept them, albeit in a shadowy way, part of my life. I also put up newspaper clippings I’d found interesting, lists of what to plant in the garden, cleaning remedies- how to remove red wine stains was a big one, phone numbers I didn’t want to lose, whiteboards for grocery lists, the odd poem, and so on. A few of the magnets had actual meaning, like the one Django decorated at school and the one commemorating the Coast to Coast, a 200 mile trek across northern England I made with my ex-husband.  From time to time my postings would get so layered they began to resemble the internet—too much information and not only that, a lot of it out of date.   I’d tolerate the mess for awhile then, when I couldn’t stand it any more, then I’d go through and junk things. Because our house wasn’t air-conditioned (I live in Florida), I used to find that some of it had been there so long it had mildewed (note the metaphor) underneath. So what do I display now, all these years later? Tune in tomorrow and find out!

What does a non-writing writer do? Here’s a handy list:

* Rediscovers metal, as in heavy. As in 1980s–thrash, speed, and death.
* Launders diapers. Folds diapers. Lots of diapers.
* Plays German boardgames. Er, rather, acquires German boardgames and looks for people to play with him. Recommendations: Carcassonne and Hive.
* Watches vampire movies.
* Makes a mean vindaloo.
* Spends far too much time on Facebook.

And I do a fair amount of reading, though these days most of it is from the laptop screen.

Daniel Nester’s piece in The Morning News manages to capture my feelings about poetry, po-world, po-biz rather nicely: Goodbye to All Them.

Joseph Massey has received plenty of critical attention for his minimalist poems, most recently collected in Areas of Fog, but I’ve always enjoyed his less-well-known IM messages. Here are a few:

A bit of impromptu verse:

plan: slather / my knob in spicy / sugary beef sauce / and then call the cops / because it’s going to catch fire / and ignite my entire Tori Amos / world in flames of flavor / I savor your terrorist titties / and buckle and break like the foundations / of a bombed building

A dialogue:

Joe M: Did you see my post this morning?
TonyR: no
TonyR: i will look now
TonyR: very nice
TonyR: you look good in that outfit
TonyR: last night Jess Mynes called John Weiners “the gay tony”
Joe M: What was the connection?
TonyR: my magnificent poesy
Joe M: I don’t see the similarities.
TonyR: that is fine
TonyR: you may dis me if you like
Joe M: It’s not a diss!
TonyR: by the way, i bought this book the other day:
TonyR: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1906002010/ref=pd_rate_rs/104-8867643-0433557
Joe M: If I had to pick poets that you remind me of, I wouldn’t pick Wieners.
TonyR: it is better than any book of poesy
Joe M: That looks like a fun read. One for the shitter.
TonyR: oh yeah. it’s huge and comprehensive
TonyR: though it’s not very well-edited
TonyR: it contains typos and factual inaccuracies
Joe M: Wieners was very invested in the idea of being a poet as some exalted almost otherworldly duty. You don’t have that attitude.
TonyR: i am invested in being a poet as a quotidian task
Joe M: But he was very frank in his personal poems, the sexual frustration and self-deprecation — I can see that connection.
TonyR: it is a berriganish attitude without the IMPORTANCE
TonyR: i’m gonna start a metal band
Joe M: Call it HELL HAMMS
TonyR: YES
TonyR: our mascot will be a big cuddly bear with a pentagram shaved into his chest fur
Joe M: I love it. I want to be the tambourine girl.
TonyR: You may!
TonyR: hey do you mind if i publish this conversation to one of my clogs?
Joe M: I don’t providing you say something very flattering about my diminutive verses.
Joe M: *mind
TonyR: okay. i will.

Collected wisdom:

I love birds. I dislike bird-like dumb ass people.

*

Mike Joyce is an avaricious monkey.

*

I love Bill Murray. I had a dream about him the other night — he just walked up to me, told me he likes my poems, and gave me a free laptop.

*

measure_elvis: You’re a tactless prick, Bob.
TonyR: why is that tactless?
TonyR: i am merely stating fact
measure_elvis: Well, explain why you requested Def Leppard to be playing from that Hilton hallway boombox when you went into a closet with Eduardo and tongued the lisp out of him?
measure_elvis: Facts, just facts.

*

This fruitcake has put me in a philosophical frame of mind.

***
More to come, after I finish this True Blood marathon.

Confession: I have watched the broader-than-broad comedy Caddyshack two, three, four times, every year, since its release in 1980.

I have often asked myself: What is it that draws me to watching this movie more than 50 times, far more than any other movie I have seen?

Part of it has to be nostalgia. It’s an amorphous term, nostalgia, and one I don’t feel like dealing with completely. It’s a word one has to deal with when one thinks about a movie released when one is 12 years old. It’s also kind of boring.

But I also have this inchoate idea that the movie lifts me out of early-spring doldrums, which I tend to have. Unlike many who feel ebullient when the weather turns, I feel the need to stay inside, play records, read, sulk. I have never been able to explain this.

Somewhere in the mix lies Caddyshack, directed by Harold Ramis, who would go on to direct Groundhog Day, Analyze This and That, and this summer’s  Year One.

One of my projects this summer is to write a full-fledged essay about this. Now, other writers have written about Caddyshack. There’s the Book of Caddyshack that is chockful of interesting anecdotes and scene-by-scene analysis. Literary lion George Plimpton penned an occasional piece as well. And I’ve already written a sonnet, “Caddyshackesque,” which appears here on Linebreak. That poem alludes to some of the things I want to write about: how the movie reminds me of Northrop Frye’s idea of the “Green World” of Shakespeare, for example.  I’ve also been researching comedy in general, the poetics of listlessness, and the changing critical perception of the film. The New York Times‘ film critic Vincent Canby, for example, famously dismissed Caddyshack in his piece “The Golden Age of Junk” as “immediately forgettable.”

Me, I can’t forget Caddyshack. So I have this project going for me.  Which is nice.

***
I’d like to thank the kind folks at Linebreak for having me this week as their guest blogger.  It’s one of my favorite literary journals, and I think they do a great job here.  I almost typed the word “knob”; I always do that.

I don’t normally blog so much as shamelessly self-promote over at my own personal website, so it’s been cool to actually blog here. I will be back around October or November to coincide with the release of my next book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous noncition, which I urge you all to pre-order, order upon release, then order again.

OK, I’ll stop.

Just Call Me Beastmaster of the Morning

My clout sweeps backwards as I run, girded with a sash of garnets.
Sapphires set ablaze by the fire and light of my movement.
And of course I run vertically, dumbass—of course I face forward and down.
Jesus Christ—that’s just the way you do it— not face up or side-saddled,
side-Earthed, if you prefer. So as you draw my extruded arms
and waves and  bubbles, my companions remain surprised at my world
into which I am drawn.  Listen up, mortals, gather round me
as I caw caw caw while small mammals bite me,
for I am in their wise company, for this Beastmaster
will prepare meal for you. He will assign seating according to your hair.

– from The History of My World Tonight

If you’re in New York, this is a can’t miss!

The breakdown for this year’s festival is:

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E. 6th St.)
Boog City Classic Albums Live will kick off the festival with local musical acts performing, for its 10th anniversary, The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Among those partaking:

Ben Krieger
Dream Bitches
Gracefully
The Trouble Dolls
Andrew Philip Tipton
Genan Zilkha

and more

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 P.M.
ACA Galleries (529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr., bet. 10th/11th aves.)
This is the first date of season seven of our d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press series, where each month we have a different non-NYC small press host its authors and a musical act.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E.6th St.)
We’ll have poets, smaller musical acts, full bands, and theater performances.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
Poets and musical acts performing nonstop during our 6th annual small, small press fair, which will also have readings from poets representing the exhibiting presses. The day will also feature two poets in conversation with each other.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
We’ll close the festival with more poets and musical acts performing, sandwiched around a discussion.

The poets who will give readings on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Ammiel Alcalay
Sandra Beasley
Mike County
Jim Dunn
Eric Gelsinger
Hailey Higdon
Paolo Javier
Paul Foster Johnson
Basil King
Martha King
Brendan Lorber
Dan Machlin
Justin Marks
Tracey McTague
Ryan Murphy
Elinor Nauen
Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Nick Piombino
Joanna Sondheim
Ryan Walker
Dana Ward
Lewis Warsh
Karen Weiser
Dan Wilcox
Angela Veronica Wong

and more

On Saturday, Anselm Berrigan and Buck Downs will be reading and in conversation with one another.

On Sunday there will be a discussion on politics, poetics, and community curated and moderated by longtime Boog contributor Greg Fuchs

The musical acts who will perform solo sets on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Dorit
Gracefully
Serena Jost
Phoebe Kreutz
Alan Semerdjian
The Lo and the Lonesome

and more

Please email editor@boogcity.com for additional information.

Boy my brothers are weird.
Hmm, but it’s mostly Charlie and Timmy that’s weird.
One of my brothers are weird. Hmmm.
This isn’t making much sense, but
Laughing gulls aren’t weirder than my brothers.
Um, no–don’t put that.
Hmm, wait I have one.
Uh-uh.
Now the seatide is coming in.
Yeah, my brothers are drowning–but not Charlie.
But Charlie got shot by a nuclear torpedo that was launched into space. Johnny and Timmy lived inside the submarine that shot the torpedo.

Charlie is a smelly poop-bag. Siblings
tend to shoot nuclear submarine torpedoes at each other and call each other poop-bags.
The seagulls will feast on their dead flesh after I destroy them with an atom bomb.
But Charlie forgot he was in space.
Hmm.
Timmy makes grunts and slobbers very much like my childhood dog, Snuffy.
Maybe Timmy is Snuffy.
Timmy was soon put to sleep and then reincarnated as a seagull.

Update from Johnathon [4:50 p.m.]: Yes, we have the technology.

COMMENTARY TO THE FIRST STANZA
I don’t know why she showed me her bumpy head.
She went off and became a painter,
a good one really, who liked to show groups of kids
languid and calm after playing all afternoon.
After I looked around in her room
she never spoke to me again,
the forbidden knowledge of what deforms us
forgotten until now.  It must be age.
Shame can only be given in particulars.
I tell these stories to explain why people stop liking me.

– first published in Hollins Critic, 2001; also from The History of My World Tonight

Not the actual ceramic apple, but an approximation.

The Ceramic Apple

From deep inside the ceramic apple
on top of the family fridge, I noodle out
a photo, hidden for years.  The Fourth of July
parade, Maryville, Tennessee, the eastern tip
of the state, visiting relatives.  I was a punky kid
with long bangs, and sulked on the curb,
skinny legs wide-flung in shorts,
watching bands march by. I refused to smile.
Both of my hairless balls were hanging out
in the snapshot, and were visible from across the street.
Why did my mom keep this embarrassment,
tucked under tacks and spare birthday candles?
Whole color guards must have passed, distracted
by my sagging family jewels. I was reunited
at last with distant cousins.  Like Dicky Bird Nester.
He was cool.  He had a speedboat
and was my new hero.  I told Dicky Bird
about junior high band, and how I played trombone,
the cruelest instrument for a pubescent
boy to play.  The slide was always
barreling out, jutting, knotted, protruding.  I still know
one song, the bass part
to that damn Coke commercial,
“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,”
when everyone held candles, singing,
beaming for the camera.

–first published in Mudfish, 1997