little thing

the decorum is about to bobble. hold on, she says, teeth clenched and chattering. the veneer of thrust is behind us now. he is a strange sort of confidence, shredding the given sun. diorama. your clavicle turns like a harpsichord, finding its key. playing shadows. come here. you are about to lose your ribbon, nobody said. to me. you are about to be lost. nobody. said nobody, all of them alive with red poesies. hyacinths. cats curling like yellow fog in our guttural speech. bauble. all of us bobbling. take it down from there, little thing. it has been too long. thread. aviation. soon the weaving. soon the weaving will be done.

ABD

ABD
It's official. Now I can say, "Kiss my ABD butt." It does not, however, mean I can get my book published or find a job any easier.

The exam process was so excruciatingly painful. There were so many things wrong with the way it went down that I'm going to hold off on posting anything till I cool off a little bit. Let's just say that I sucessfully played the game, but I'm unsure of what I ultimately gained at the end. Perhaps I'll comment more later, or perhaps I'll just move on and chalk it up to Academic politics.

Onward to my dissertation, where I'm sure I will meet serious opposition and be told not to write what I want to write because it doesn not fit a certain mold. Tough nuggies, as I tell Eliot. I'm moving on regardless.

shorn

A poem about drastically cutting Eliot's hair for the first time. also easter. Pictures to come. . .

you are sewn and tangled to a tree branch. we avoid. missing the glyph interpreted riteously. say stuck in an atmophere. atom. adam. hanging always in your eyes. clear. coming loose is a clean tear, follicular blossom to dust. i know you will be dust. for now. bathing, you swim in outgrowth, brambles. a thicket of hair fastens easter basket. appear as if you are replaced. you regenerate. bear my molted skin. your clippings, a bartered sense of growth. weigh. the lightness, the softness passes by and snags.

On the verge of ABD. . .

Wow, I've lapsed for almost a month. Shame on me. In my defense, it was a brutal month, and I'm glad to be on this side of the first week of April.

I have officially completed my exams-- a grueling process of four days of three hours each day of writing. . .each day answering one question from each of my committee members. It was rough, difficult, blinding, but mostly it's over. That's about al I can say right now. On April 18th I do an oral defense where I either get anihilated or praised. My guess is somewhere in between. Hopefully, though, I will be ABD in a week from today.

There is some good news on the poetry scene- I won the UIC award for poetry with my poem "Leave, light, entropy," which first appeared here on my blog! It's nice to be recognized, especially when I know exactly who my competetion was, and it's stiff competetion. I also won a competetion through UIC which results in publication in Near South-- an experiental journal here in Chicago. I get published, which is a treat. I've been meaning to submit there, so this saves me the chore! Garin Cyncholl is the editor- a fabulous poet who also reins from UIC. He has a book coming ouit by Pavement Saw press, if I'm not mistaken. Rock.

I'm way, way excited to start writing again, and my next challenge is the big dissertation. I'm luck enough to be able to do a creative dissertation, but still-- everything at UIC is about theory, as I'm sure my dissertation will have to be appropriately mapped on some theory trajectory. Such fun. I'm so sick of theory, I could spit. All four of my questions were based in theory. Ick.