It's been so long since I've touched you.

Today is day one at week three of Naropa's SWP. The theme of the week:


Kulchur Connections and Beyond

What forces the feeling of an event? The loop occurs-- an index of injury--its locus in gestural form. How can I say this? I'm thinking of Amber DiPietra's thoughts on sentences: How sentences are binding in terms of a system's great churning... the ways in which subject/verb/object can create nervous system entanglement. I want to create a syntax for injury. A language that returns to the invisible space of the pocket. Lint: the viscera of a pouch. Things forgotten/discarded, perhaps even repressed. Today I wrote about animal sacrifice in my notebook. This is a site. In ancient Rome predictions of future events were sometimes based on the examination of the entrails of a sacrificial animal. Perhaps this is an attempt at discovering the mute language of things, an abrasion. The  duration of blips of memory or a loop marking something that has occurred. I suppose I'm trying to reactualize the smudge. I'm calling it "entrail notes":

I don’t know. Maybe the split part of an event demands the errata of gestures in which of the whole of the past is there in the present—in protective shadow—branching mycelium fibers reaching to actualize itself in/through body. I’m a goat. An even-toed animal, meditative, hoofed. How to correlate the pitch of gut and brain where time actualizes itself in/through the body. As seen in a goat’s four stomachs, I felt I had to remind myself that chewing and the lyric could be actualized through the page—an event like chewing the cud. The thing that returns to touch the surfaces of, the place where everything touches itself all at once: the page.

Readings in April

Saturday, April 13, 2013 At 7PM

THE BREW presents: A spoken word-music showcase with:

Jam Hands - Garth Bunse - Raul Gilbert - MG Roberts - Avrille Godchaux - Scot Young - Garrett Murphy

Today is something unexpected. It has been so long since I've touched you. I'm sorry. I've been busy. I've been lazy. My eye is swollen shut. Black and blue splendor emerges from now now slit right eyes. What happens when all is lost? I'm thinking specifically about endings. In 2004 I lost my grandmother and I got a divorce. It is 2012. 
How does one leave a life? What happens when the cup runneth empty? This is an experiment in the leaving. Tomorrow I shall change my mind. What shall I say?
So many questions remain to be answered. It is 3 AM and for once the house is still, while everything inside me shakes, quivers--unravels. This is something.  This is nothing. This is something. This is  ordinary. This happens every second. What can I say? 



I called the police and they came.

Pollen Sneeze

Today I'm feeling sorry for myself. It's cold and windy California and I've had the stomach flu twice in less than two weeks. This is not a lament. The Acacia is blooming in the front yard, yellow balls of pollen line my doorstep. I'm thinking of vegetative cells: pollen grain walls overtaking even breath. I will have to wash my car. I want to lie down next to these sentences. Maybe this will happen tomorrow.  Tomorrow I will clean the surface markings of my life. It should take all day. Perhaps I'll prefer to vomit. I'll keep you posted. Tomorrow I'll make an outline of my life and fill it with scraps, empty water bottles, thinning, ridges of my notebook, and pores that may have once contained thoughts— elongated apertures.  Tomorrow I shall handle the landscape as a scar. I fear that when I sneeze I will not stop.

The Next Big Thing!

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I was tagged by JaiArun Ravine in The Next Big Thing!

The Next Big Thing! as you may know is a multi-branching dna strand of poets twisting and tagging each other in the cybersphere about their digital and actual words as books or chaps, perhaps bound projects. It was spawned by Carol Mirakove.

The Next Big Thing questions:

What is the working title of the book?

 I’m oscillating between two titles: Missives of Appropriation and Error or not so sea

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wanted to weave together my obsessions: the complications of placing the immigrant body, my immigrant body in a “safe,” linear narrative. The book began with a series of missives to my mother, imagining a space in which we share language.

What genre does your book fall under?

Experimental/ Feminist/Asian American/Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm. Someone vey unpolished, loud. A barker. A dog, someone who likes eating meat.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Missives of Appropriation and Error or not so sea is a text that fuses the speaker’s transcontinental and matrilineal lineages with the discourses of the speaker’s own reproductive body and her own daughters bodies.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I’m a slow writer. My book took 5 years to write from 2007-2012.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I wanted to write a text that placed my mother as heroine.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I feel this book represents the ability to touch what isn’t.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m looking for a publisher. Will you publish my book? You can contact me here: emgee_roberts@yahoo.com.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

CandyShue, Steffi Drewes, Jackie Wang, and, BhanuKapil

Excerpt from a letter for funding

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My project works with themes that frame the body, memory, defect, cells, and pan- Asianness. It’s a project that chronicles birth, therapies, perceptions of beauty in relation to what gestates, is born: 

is. 

The working title is X. I could write an essay about Mosaicism, hybrids, and perception, but I wont.

What I will write is that I gave birth in a squatted position. The room was red. What I will write is that my eyes aren’t slanted enough. I will write about the body’s fascia. Did you know that the body’s fascia has the ability to stand on its own without a skeletal structure for over 2 minutes? I will write about ethnic standards, phrenology, and the human zoo at the 1904 St Louis World Fair. I will reach towards this book. What I will write is that the Dr. who examined my daughter after she was two days old said, “There’s something wrong with this baby,” without ever touching her.

I-I-I-am an adjunct.

An optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence.Something omitted, unnecessary, and hence can be discarded without affecting the remainder of the sentence. Hi. I’m unnecessary. I have an MFA. I write poetry. I teach writing. I-I-I-am an adjunct.