The Hermit Poet

I spent the last few days tinkering and redesigning some of the elements of my website. The big changes? A new image for the splash screen and a major update to the Book section (new blurb added from Terrance Hayes, more information about the cover design, and yes – finally – an image of the front cover).

Check it out here: www.neil-aitken.com

Looking back over the last few weeks and the close of this semester, there are a number of wonderful things to report:

1. The semester is over — as much as I loved and/or learned from my classes, I am grateful for a break. This past week has been a nice vacation from, well, pretty much everything. Finals week was not so restful — I wrote a 20 page paper in 48 hours on 5 hours of sleep, then followed it up by laying out the new issue of Boxcar Poetry Review (which I’m happy to report was only 1 day late despite the circumstances).
2. Thanks to the Writer&Composer class (it paired up graduate poets and graduate music composers for original collaborations), I’ve had the pleasure to work with some fantastic people and to hear some incredible work. At one point I took the opportunity to hear some of their out of class compositions which were being performed at an on-campus recital and was struck by how lucky we were to work with these composers. Our class also worked together with performance singing class, so we had the opportunity to hear the compositions as they were completed. I worked with three composers for the longer compositions. Zhou Tian (www.zhoutian.org) set an older poem of mine called “Elegy” which had never seemed quite finished (I liked the words, but it always felt incomplete) — and transformed it into a haunting piece for piano and voice. Juhi Bansal created a longer piece from “Halfway”, one of the poems in The Lost Country of Sight, which used piano, percussion, cello, and voice — a gorgeous gorgeous piece. Ivor Francis took up the challenge and created a harp, piano, vibraphone, and two-voice opera suite based on “array” one of the many lyric computer poems in the Babbage’s Dream manuscript – a startling and amazing performance, I was quite riveted. Stay tuned for more — we hope to work on a number of other projects through the next year or so.
3. My poem “An Hour Before I Arrive, I See Home” has been picked up by Pebble Lake Review!
4. I’ve already purchased my table at AWP Chicago and booked my hotel space (1 block from the conference hotel, $84/night!). I should start looking at flights to Chicago in the near future as well — given the way the prices are rising, there might not be any good deals left by the end of the year.

As always, stay well. I hope to be blogging more regularly. I’ve put together a schedule of sorts for my day-to-day activities so that I use this summer somewhat effectively. I finally got back on the treadmill this morning after almost 2.5 months of inactivity (this past semester proved especially demanding on my morning time). I hope to lose the extra 10 pounds I picked up in the meantime and get back to my end of February weight.

Still on the schedule today — finish reviewing the editorial suggestions on my book manuscript. Mostly she’s noted minor grammar or punctuation issues, but occasionally there are bigger concerns (“you use ‘grey’ an awful lot, perhaps you might reconsider whether it’s the right word in each case?). “Grey” has does have significance for me — it’s a hybrid color, a color of between-ness, a chromatic transformation. But she’s right, perhaps there are other ways to render that — while I probably won’t change most of them, there may be places that a word change would be helpful.

My blurb post is not forgotten. It will appear this week.

(Apologies for those eagerly waiting for the issue — I tried to finish it last night, but layout was taking longer than expected and I had a late start on the issue thanks to my semester-end paper on Marianne Moore’s relationship to Chinese aesthetics).

Anyway, the issue is up and full of delightful things.

www.boxcarpoetry.com

In this issue:

Poetry

• Derek Henderson: “The Road Along St. Jude’s”
• Tammy Ho: “Elegy to a Brother Who Wrote Autobiographical Poems”
• Mara Michael Jebsen: “Summer Office With a Small View of Grand Central”
• Christina Kallery: “Boogie Nights: A Sestina”
• Julianna McCarthy: “How It Was”
• Michelle Menting: “The Bundling Board”
• Kevin Oberlin: “The Doctor Attempts to Heal His Sister Through Her Own Beauty”
• Matthew Olzmann: “While Scratching My Wife’s Back, I Calculate the Distance Between Sky and Earth”
• Doug Ramspeck: “Stillborn”
• Lafayette Wattles: “Sometimes a Deer is Just a Deer”

Interviews & Conversations

• History, Reconciliation, and Form: Amaud J. Johnson & Douglas Kearney
• Behind the Book with Jay Leeming ~ Matthew Thorburn

Reviews

• Andrew Kozma’s City of Regret ~ Amanda Lleshdedaj
• Christopher Patton’s Ox ~ Diane Schenker
• Purvi Shah’s terrain tracks ~ Soham Patel

Photography

from the editor’s files

Enjoy!

Traveling Through the Prairies,
I Think of My Father’s Voice

How we must have seemed like twins over the phone,
my father speaking with my voice, I speaking with his.
Some strange accident of genetics or the unchecked influence

of mockingbirds and mimeographs. I have heard two trains sound
almost alike till they passed, like the one last night bending westward,
the other slowing to a halt, the earth shuddering in the dark between

while the stars held their place overhead, a thousand points of tin and fire.
Had it been day, I might have seen to the far faded edge of nowhere
or whatever town lies wakeless there. Here, the wind sounds the same

blown from any direction, full of dust, pollen, the deep toll of church bells
rung for mass, weddings, deaths. Coming through on the straight road,
the land seems especially bare this year, although the fields are still green

with new stalks of wheat, rye, canola. Someone has been taking down
the grain elevators one by one, striking their weathered wooden frames
from the skyline, leaving only small metal bins. The way the disease

took him by degrees, the body jettisoning what it could: his arms and legs,
his grin, his laugh, his voice. In the end, only his eyes—their steel doors
opening and closing while the storm rattled within—and his breath,

the body’s voice, repeating the only name it knew sigh after sigh,
a lullaby sung to a restless child on a heaving deck, a hush we only learn
in the quiet dark long after the boat has gone and the waves have ceased.

—————————————-
First published in Barn Owl Review #1

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… Neil enters the uncharted realm of his 34th year.

It’s been a good — almost phenomenal year — in many respects. A year of changes, transitions, recognitions, and surprises. A year too with its share of sadness and struggle. I’m grateful for everything and everyone that has into my way, though I do not pretend to understand it all.

Today was a relatively normal day. I worked on a project for my poetry & music composition class. We had a double celebration in my poetry workshop for me and my classmate Jessica who shares the same birthday — lots of food, drink, and banter. I spent a little time with friends afterward, then went back to my apartment to read and relax. I’ve actually done little to celebrate. And perhaps this year that’s fine. I miss my father. That too is normal. It’s been exactly a year since his passing.

I’ve been wondering what the best thing to do would be under these circumstances – how to celebrate my birthday and yet to honor the memory of my father. Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I’ll be giving a poetry reading with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs at Village Books in Pacific Palisades — and to me at least, that feels like the perfect way to combine both.

If you’re free and in LA or Santa Monica, please do stop by. Jennifer’s reading from her new book, Paper Pavilion. I’ll be reading from my forthcoming book, The Lost Country of Sight.  No cover charge, but buying books is much appreciated.

Tuesday April 22, 2008 — 7:30 PM
Neil Aitken & Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Village Books
1049 Swarthmore Ave, Pacific Palisades, CA

Lately I haven’t been blogging much, or even writing much, but I have been reading. Every time I go to campus, I take one or two books of poetry with me and read them on the bus. It’s been rather productive — I’ve been finally working my way through the large stack of books picked up at various conferences and readings over the past few months.

Recently read:

• Paisley Rekdal’s The Invention of the Kaleidoscope — I really enjoyed this book, particularly the title poem which resonated with me as a possible model for some of my work on Charles M. Babbage.
• Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa — another great read, perhaps one of my favorite books in the last little while. Solid all the way through.
• Cecily Parks’ Field Folly Snow — a very pared down, almost stark rendering of world through fragmented language and distorted correspondence. Interesting, but sometimes I felt the voice was more distant than I would have liked.
• Ivy Alvarez’s Mortal — I was delighted by the reinvention of myth, the sharpness of language, and the razor-fine balance which renders complex emotion and memory without falling into tired or sentimental language
• Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes — another fantastic collection and testimony again of why I return to his books again and again. “Descended from Dreamers” has joined my list of favorite poems — I may use it to open some of my readings.
• Jean Follain’s Transparence of the World as translated by W.S. Merwin. Transparence is the right word — there is something quite startling about the luminous poems about history, the simple life, and beauty.
• Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife — this too has joined my list of great books of poetry — solid solid solid. The poems are incredible.

Still on the stack:

• C.G. Hanzlicek’s The Cave
• Susan McCabe’s Descarte’s Nightmare
• Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border
  
• Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

I think this summer I’ll try to systematically read through all the books in my collection (a bit over 300 poetry books at this point). Ambitious? Yes. But I’d like to be a lot more familiar with what I’ve acquired over the years — and perhaps do a little weeding as well.

Just received great news from Ninth Letter that they’ll be publishing my poem, “enumeration” in an upcoming issue.  I’m excited to see another poem from the Babbage’s Dream manuscript find a home.

Writing about computers, computer history, and programming theory from a narrative lyric stance seems like such a hard sell sometimes, but I’m glad that there are journals willing to take a chance on work like this .

I’m also excited to report that two more of my friends in the UC Riverside MFA program have recently found publishers for their first books .

Alba Cruz Hacker’s No Honey for Wild Beasts will be published by Plain View Press (Oct 2008)

Kate Durbin’s The Ravenous Audience will be coming out with Black Goat Press/Akashic Books (Fall 2009)

The folks at Poetry LA have posted a clip of me reading “Traveling Through the Prairies I Think of My Father’s Voice” at the Redondo Poets’ reading at Coffee Cartel.

(I don’t usually look so young — I think there’s something about the lighting and needing a haircut when this was filmed, that create this more boyish look)

Ok, it’s a little behind schedule, but it’s up and looking great.

Read it here

Boxcar Poetry Review
Issue 13

Poetry

• Jeffrey Alfier: “A Rural Baptism”
• J. Mae Barizo: “Vesperae”
• Margaret Bashaar: “Sita”
• Steven Brown: “Hurricane in August”
• Kit Frick: “The Husband, Discovered, A Letter to Two Beloveds”
• Christina Kallery: “The Nest”
• Dana Guthrie Martin: “When the Movie’s Main Character Commits Suicide by Drowning”
• Matthew Olzmann: “NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor”
• Julie Marie Wade: “For the New Year”
• Joe Wilkins: “Five Dreams of Home”

Photography

• An Xiao: “Drive Thru. 2007” & “Just Me. 2008”

Interviews & Conversations

• Conversation Between Ivy Alvarez & Lee Herrick – Part 2
• Interview with F. Daniel Rzicznek ~ Gary McDowell

Reviews

• Review of Lee Herrick‘s This Many Miles From Desire ~ C St Perez

My responses to the 10 Questions about Publishing are up on Nic Sebastian’s blog.

You can check them out here.

Thanks again Nic for the opportunity to be a part of this great series! I’ve learned a lot from reading the other posts so far and look forward to reading more.

Oh, and Happy Pi Day!