The Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry

My dad was in town last night and gave me a copy of the new issue of Philadelphia Stories, which has the winners of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. It’s got some lovely Japanese Maple foliage on the front, which is eerily apt, as that was the tree in my back yard for 18 years growing up. I’m sure I explained this on the blog before but, succinctly: my mom was on the board of Philadelphia Stories for a couple of years before she died, so my dad decided to endow the prize. This is the first year it’s been awarded, and it’s very exciting for me.

I’ve only read the first prize winner so far; it’s fucking righteous. The first two lines are “I have a twitch sometimes. I keep my left eye open in my sleep./That hole in the bathroom door was not me.” It’s called “Hereditary,” by Jeanann Verlee, and you can read the rest of it here. I recommend doing so as soon as possible. I have very particular tastes in poetry, but this one is hot shit, and what’s more I think my mom would have thoroughly enjoyed it. Her poetry was very far away from leaves falling gently onto ponds (great story about my dad here, but I’ll let that go for now) and this poem by Verlee is similarly unaffected.

Verlee seems like a pretty cool person. I’ve only read the one poem, but I plan to spend some time soon over at her website. The last paragraph of her bio is “She lives in New York City with her best pal (a rescue pup named Callisto) and a pair of origami lovebirds. She believes in you.”

No Cancer Whatsoever

Why I decided to read an article by a father telling the story of his nine month old daughter’s cancer is beyond me, but I did. The Aquarium, by Aleksander Hemon, was in an issue of the New Yorker last summer.

Naturally, I have mixed feelings about it. It was singularly heartbreaking, and I had to exert huge effort to keep from bawling completely in the middle of Caribou Coffee. As it happened, my eyes welled up and a few tears did leak out. But because I can have a hard time separating things, I also read the article for its style and voice; I am for lack of a better term a writer and that’s always going to be a part of how I read. I have read one of Hemon’s novels and a book of his short stories and this man speaking to me from this page was like nothing I’d heard from him before. Like in the best stories of intense pain, the voice was clear and nearly unemotional. This is what happened, this is how it felt. I’ll leave a few block quotes here for you.

1. “There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live.”

Interestingly enough, that “instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence” was an obsession of mine when I was a (younger) child. I think of it as the light-switch moment, the moment when the switch drops back down to “Off” and where there was everything is instantly nothing at all. I used to run back and forth over the moment in my head, sometimes when I was trying to fall asleep, sometimes in church if the readings were particularly bleak. It was always accompanied by an deeply felt emptiness in my chest.

2. “One day at breakfast, while Ella [Hemon's older, healthy daughter] ate her oatmeal and rambled on about her [imaginary] brother, I recognized in a humbling flash that she was doing exactly what I’d been doing as a writer all these years: the fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything). Much like Ella, I’d found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I’d cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me—they did what I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.”

And that’s the nut, isn’t it, that last sentence? Anyone who has spent more than a few hours in my presence, or even a few minutes if I’ve been drinking, knows that I can’t shut up about my mother. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think I’ve been dealing with her death relatively well, and I fully believe that the best thing I’ve been doing in that respect is telling stories about her life constantly, vocalizing her memory so that I’m not the only one in Pittsburgh who has those stories. If, god forbid, something should happen to me, be it death or some memory-traumatizing injury, I know that there would be someone else with the memories. I unburden myself of being the only one out of the people I see every day with her memory, so that I don’t have to be constantly mourning, I can go back to just loving her like I did when she was alive.

My Tag Cloud Is Weird (and more cursing)

I wrote today. I think it’s about a thousand words, a part of a very, very amorphous idea I have. I want to create a character through first person narration by the character’s friends and acquaintances at different parts of his life. Kind of like coloring in all the background of an image and hoping everyone can see something in the foreground.

I got the idea from The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (there’s supposed to be a tilde on that). The entire middle section of the book, which is also the books longest section, describes the travels of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (no tilde there) through narration by their friends and acquaintances. I guess I stole the idea, but I was planning on forsaking the introductory section (which Bolano’s book has) and just plunge right into the stories. I also don’t think the kind of stuff I’m producing right now has the stamina to be a full book (Detective‘s is huge, 600 pages or something like that). Maybe it could be a long short story or a short novella. But really, right now it’s just character sketching, and I’m more pleased with myself for writing it at all than for any quality it might have. Daily writing has never been my strong suit, but I feel like if I start up the habit this summer there’s more of a likelihood I can continue it on into adulthood.

I started reading The Rum Diary as well. When I finished the Teddy book I didn’t have anything to read and I didn’t feel like going to the library, I was too stoned, so I grabbed it off my friend’s bookshelf and set too. I read the first 20 pages in about as many minutes, and it’s a short book, so I decided to just keep going on this slight detour or summer reading.

I really like Hunter Thompson’s pre-Gonzo stuff — Hells Angels is a badass piece of reporting — and Rum certainly isn’t Gonzo. It is the product of a very young guy, only 22. The prose still has his voice but it isn’t full-throated yet, if that makes any sense.

I know I mentioned Hunter Thompson as an imposing figure in my head what with the youth with which achieved some measure of an interesting life, and this book is definitely good to combat that. It does two things simultaneously: First, it pounds it into my head that Hunter Thompson did not pop out of the womb and great writer. Second, it shows me that even if someone’s first major attempt at their work isn’t nearly of their later quality, it doesn’t automatically mean the early book is shit. Cause this may not be the full Hunter, but it ain’t bad.

No one ever wants a blog post longer than 500 words, so before I go I have some links. Apparently it’s all about the links.

Matt Taibbi’s blog I referenced the other day is definitely worth a look : Taibblog

and so is his Goldman Sachs article: The Great American Bubble Machine

My mom worked for Philadelphia Stories, and look at her award information.

That’s about it for now. Still figuring out WordPress shit, but it’ll flow better soon I’d hope.

Let the Rejection Ensue

And now I shall begin to submit things. Let the rejection ensue.

I wrote a little essay last semester, when I was burned out on my senior seminar project, as a break. It’s about my mom, which is a shocker I’m sure, and about the watersheds of various rivers and creeks in and around Philadelphia. I like watersheds, they’re an interesting way to divide up areas of land, even though American settlers tended to put their borders in the middle of them, along rivers, as opposed to on ridges and divides.

I wrote the little essay, “a mere bagatelle,” as my mother might have said, when I found out that the Cresheim Creek, which flows at most half a mile from my house, rises from a spring near Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, where my mom’s buried. From the Cresheim down through the Wissahickon, then Schuylkill, then Delaware, then Atlantic Ocean, I have memories of childhood and of my mother. It seemed too perfect a correlation that I felt I needed to write it out. It came out okay, but I’m still glad I wrote it.

I know where I want to submit it, Philadelphia Stories, because it’s about the region and they dig that shit. But then again my mom worked for them, she was a poetry board member, and was published there at least once or twice. And my dad just endowed a poetry prize there. (Google “Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize, and submit: the prize is $1000, I think.)

If they were to like the essay, and wanted to publish it, I’d be overjoyed, but I’m kind of worried that my name would influence their decision. I’ve toyed with the idea of a pseudonym, but I can’t think of anything I’d like. Maybe I’m just over-reacting, and this is just nerves because I haven’t submitted much to independent publications in the past. I probably could have addressed this by calling my dad instead of blogging about it, but fuck it, I don’t want to start work yet.

I have been writing, though, and I think I’m going to set a very modest goal of ~750 words a day, which fits nicely with four pages of the notebook I’ve been using (thanks Margaret!) As I’ve complained before, to no effect, writing can be like pulling teeth for me, but 750 words is possible. I imagine that as I get used to daily writing again (I unfortunately let that drop these last couple semesters) I’ll be able to raise it, incrementally. Fuckin’ fiction.