I wrote these all between 2000 and 2004 or so.

Anthropology A to Z

Analyzing bigamy, chiropractors dissecting Ethiopians find gratuitous horniness. “Inferior jism kills,” lament medical non-Negroes. “Our prostitutes qualmlessly relish sable, towering usufructuaries.” Vampire-vivisectionist-vasectomites want xenopotency — yea, zoöplasty.

Grants A to Z

Argh. Bastard coins demand enthusiastic flim-flam, genuflecting horse-pucky — iterated. Jejune kleptomaniacs like myself nuzzle other’s piss (quantified.) Respect seeps through undergarments viscously. Wampum-warranted xenogenesis yields zilch.

Marx A to Z

Attacked by capitalists, Dimitri Endclass fretfully grunted, “Help!” Injustice jouster King Lumpen materialized. “No obstreperous prole quashing, reactionary swine!” the über-underdog vociferated. “Working-class xanthochroi yean Zion!”

Physics A to Z

“Atomic bomb,” cogito. Deductively, ergo, funding. Gravity’s hierophant, I, Jehovah-Kewpie, license meritocrats; noblesse oblige. Prosper, quantum Rotarians! Seek, thou, universal vacuity! Wantonly X-ray your Zeitgeist!

Spielberg A to Z

Amiable Bildungsroman chug-a-lugs deep emotions, feels great! Heroine (innocent, jiggly) kisses lachrymose morality’s nether orifice. Peddlers quiver righteously! Suddenly, teleologically, upstart visionaries win! Xeroxed youngsters zombify!

Xmas A to Z

Avaricious bambinos covet Disney-detritus. Elders’ Fallopian genitals, heaving immaculately, jaculate kenosis-knickknacks. Levittowners merrily nurse organized pedophilia. Quasi-riant revenue-ravenous Santa Taws uncoil. Vultures watch Xt.’s yummy zygote.

Last week I printed the Statement of Purpose I sent to MFA programs in 1998. Below is the one I sent in 1997. (I like the 1998 one better, I think…though among MFA program evaluators, both were greeted with equal indifference, as far as I could tell.)

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Statement of Purpose

I plan to write poetry because I want my letters anthologized. “Dear Poetry, How are u? How is e? How are all the little words that rhyme with Christina Rossetti? I would very much like to be affecting, but today one must be ironic, and one must say one before two, though it’s two every one loves. ‘Aren’t those two cute together?’ And they are so much so it makes you cry and makes me want to dry heave and whine, ‘I want to make people cry, poor wretch, without the aid of my onion breath, and yet I’m too sophisticated for sentimental claptrapcrap (note the neologism.) If you can feel sorry for me just a little I’ll gladly grovel. I’m not proud.'”

At least I’m honest, though. Or at least I’d like to be thought honest. “Well, Mr. Thought Honest, you’re a hypocrite. But take solace in being a relatively small land mammal, unlike a hippopotamus.” These are complicated theses, Diogenes, and your kind attention makes me weak in the knees. Please! Explain my brain. We elucidate snide critiques of each other, that squooshy grey matter and I. It makes my head as heavy as lead, and I stagger about beneath it trying to keep body and skull together. Someday my scalp will open like a lid and the earth will open like a lid and I will fall from one into the other and everything will be simpler. “I have an M.A. in British History from the U of C. My influences include Marianne Moore, Stephen Crane, and the New York school poets. I have had poetry published in Sidewalks,Parting Gifts, and Pleiades, and a short story published in Fugue. Every morning before work for the past couple of years I’ve gotten up at 4:30 to write. Often, though, I just fall back asleep.”

Is that all right?

I wrote this in 1998, I think, when I was unsuccessfully applying to MFA programs. I actually used this as my Statement of Purpose. It was published in the Chicago Review a couple of years later.

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Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.

This short short story is from 2001, 2002 or thereabouts. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out where I stole the good professor from (using google doesn’t count.)
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Why We Can’t Do Lots of Things at Once

Professor Challenger lives in the future. Because of all the time machines there are dinosaurs everywhere. Luckily most people are robots and when they are stomped they just drink oil from the kitchen faucets which make oil and then they get full size again after they drink enough like bicycle tires. Being stepped on is bad though because robots are very clean and dinosaurs are dirty. Professor Challenger has a solution! Small trained supersmart octopuses in your shoes. They just stay there until you are dirty and then they come out and clean you off with brushes. But the robots say the octopuses are illogical and they won’t put them in their shoes. They would rather use vacuum cleaners. Professor Challenger swears revenge! He kidnaps robots and sends them to the past where there are no vacuum cleaners. The octopuses in the past offer to help, but of course the robots don’t trust them. Instead they marry monkeys. If they’d only married octopuses we would have lots of arms and would be able to do lots of things at once!

Since it’s the 4th, I thought I’d do an American themed poem. Sort of. This is from 2003 or so, I think.

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Christopher Columbus

If I was Christopher Columbus I wouldn’t be so boring. Because that is the name of a parrot and he just sits there on the island he is on. Maybe he was stranded there when he pooped on Bluebeard’s beard and that is why it is blue. Also he flew into things by accident. Like eyeballs so they had to get eyepatches. Trees and things were afraid and they ran off the island and even his poop was afraid of his later poop. So he sleeps a lot. My Dad would say he needs ambition and maybe some money.

I wrote this in the mid-90s, I think.

A Reply to Thoreau

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

My mind is but the stream I go drowning in
and time is the bank of a stream
where fish eyes stare unmoving at the ravelling motion
of water catching at the banks of the stream.

I know mind is water, for it fills like breath
the body it carries till still.
And mute fish floating thoughtless before the flatness of death
know time from water, for their eyes remain still.

This actually is a recent drawing.Edra Soto has an exhibition at the MCA. She asked a number of artists and friends to contribute drawings combining her face with the face of a gorilla. Most people followed the assignment, but, unfortunately, I can’t really draw, so I ended up with this:

Edra’s face is under there somewhere, truly.

Anyway, you can go to the MCA at the moment and see the original drawing, with many other more competent drawings of Edra as a gorilla and an amazing stage set constructed by Edra’s husband Dan if you happen to be in Chicago. Here’s Edra’s description of her show, open through June 28.

Soto’s installation, The Chacon-Soto Show, focuses on Iris Chacon, the charismatic Puerto Rican performer who starred in the 1970s variety television show El Show de Iris Chacon. Despite sexually provocative costumes and performances, the legendary diva became a popular family entertainer. Flamboyantly dressed and flanked by male backup singers and dancers, Chacon became a symbol of the liberated Puerto Rican woman. For this work, the artist analyzes issues of sexuality specific to Puerto Rican culture through the double filter of her adult understanding of US feminist issues and childhood memories of Chacon on television.