Tucker Lieberman's Blog, page 2

My writer’s desk is surrounded by death spikes

In summer 2018, Neologism Poetry Journal published my poem, “Readiness,” which begins:

Bits of wildflowers find their way
into my hand and into my dirt.
The purpose of the seeds: to become their parents.

They were morning glories.

My morning glories, photographed October 4, 2020.

Yesterday, the apartment building manager said that contractors would come to our second-floor balcony to “install something.” To receive them with grace, I tidied the balcony by repotting those morning glories. One had grown long, and I seated the pot in the windowbox and tossed its vines over the side of the balcony like Rapunzel’s hair so that the passersby could enjoy them, too.

Afternoon came, and it seemed the handypeople were not coming. Then, while sitting at my writer’s desk at the corner window that faces east and south, a strip of metal weaved through my field of vision, as if alive, as if wrapping the house of its own accord. Moments later, the man who was holding it came into my field of vision, too. He was crawling backwards on his hands and knees through my compost in the windowbox. The strip of metal was to be installed on the perimeter of the balcony.

Here is the result:

My corner window, showing my writing desk and the balcony.

They installed 178 three-inch, barbed, flame-shaped metal spikes on the edge of the balcony and windowbox. 13 on the west side, 106 on the south side, 50 on the east side, and 9 on the north side. I did not know this was going to happen.

(There are additional spikes outside the bedroom window, too.)

It is supposed to make me feel safer? It does not. It is not my backdrop of choice for my writing desk where I make poetry and anti-fascist essays. It offends me and makes me anxious.

I understand that millions of people are actually in jail. I understand that I am not actually in jail and that what I am complaining about is merely a carceral aesthetic. I understand that some people like this aesthetic and truly feel safer when surrounded by such a physical deterrent to break-ins. I understand that I am not trapped in my room, despite other kinds of real restrictions that the pandemic places on my movement. I understand that I am unlikely to accidentally injure myself because the spikes slope outward away from the person standing on the balcony and that I am not personally at risk for self-harm.

I understand that most writers do not have the privilege of their own quiet, sunny home office—spikes or no.

I understand that my complaint is significant mainly to me and may seem petty to others.

Of course, the construction worker also stole my potted morning glories. I’d like to believe the flowers were kidnapped in kindness and are alive somewhere, but broken Rapunzel vines were left behind.

The time I’ve spent in this apartment is the longest I’ve ever lived in any one place as an adult. As a kid, I lived in three houses for six years each; then I was in college dorms; after college, I had 12 consecutive addresses before this apartment where I have just completed three years.

So I’d like to believe the vines that spiraled slowly down my balcony did not suddenly, when I wasn’t looking, transmute themselves into barbed wire; that they were always only flowers, pure and innocent; that there was nothing else in their DNA.

My poem “Readiness” ended:

They sprout
tendrils that slowly unfold tinctured secrets.
You are becoming what you always were.
I water you. I do not remember what you are,
but do not let me stop you.

Trans-Galactic Bike Ride

We have waited so long for the Trans-Galactic Bike Ride anthology, and it is finally, finally, finally here. This cover art is by Cecilia Granata. Look. Look. Look at it.

Subtitle: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers

Ebooks and print books are available internationally from Microcosm. In the US only, you can order print copies from Bookshop. If you’re not ready to place an order, just mark it as “Want to Read” on Goodreads so that you will find it again someday when you circle back around the galaxy.

[image error] Trans-Galactic Bike Ride

Exuberance and enthusiasm

Kay Redfield Jamison defines “exuberance”:

“Exuberance,” derived from the Latin exuberance—ex, “out of,” + uberare, “to be fruitful, to be abundant”—is at its core a concept of fertility.  Exuberance in nature is defined by lush, profuse, riotous growth; it is an overflowing, opulent, and copious abundance…A fruitful outcome of an alchemy experiment, for instance, was characterized as “exuberated earth” in 1471, according to the Oxford English Dictionary…

Kay Redfield Jamison. Exuberance: The Passion for Life. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. p. 24.

“Enthusiasm” is different. Instead of fertility and abundance, it’s about finding some inspiration, sublime grandeur, or joy within.

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.

Kay Redfield Jamison. Exuberance: The Passion for Life. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. p. 5.

Poems read July-Sept 2020

Albert Abonado, “Luxury,” in Jaw
John Ashbery, “Iphigenia in Sodus”
Ruth Awad, “We don’t talk about children until we do”
David Baker, “Fire Watch: After You Have Gone”
Wendell Berry, “A Warning To My Readers”
Frank Bidart, “You Cannot Rest”
Yves Bonnefoy, “Wind and Smoke,” [trans. John Naughton]
Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats”
Peter Clive, “Chimpanzee”
Natalie Diaz, “Isn’t The Air Also a Body, Moving?” in Postcolonial Love Poem
Jack Gilbert, “Walking Home Across the Island”
Aracelis Girmay, “Jacaranda,” [“Listen to me”]
Louise Glück, “Elms,” “October” “The Traveler” and “The Destination,” “Descent to the Valley”
Linda Gregg, “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” in All of It Singing
Guillevic, tr. Levertov, [“Is there still talk of thee…”]
Joy Harjo, “The Story Wheel”
Jim Harrison, “Return,” “Mary” in Songs of Unreason
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
Denis Johnson, “The Heavens”
Saeed Jones, “A Stranger”
W. Todd Kaneko, “Naming the Birds”
Celia Kim, “We Make the Deer”
Suji Kwock Kim, “The Tree of Unknowing,” in Notes from the Divided Country
Noelle Kocot, “Pressure Belt”
Li-Young Lee, “The Hammock,” [“I loved you before I was born.”]
Ada Limon, “The Conditional”
Timothy Liu, “The Lovers”
Devon Marsh, “Motion”
Jane Mead, “Bounty,” in To the Wren
W. S. Merwin, “Separation”
Emilee Moyce, “To My Younger Self”
Lisel Mueller, “Joy”
John Murillo, “Mercy, Mercy Me”
Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster”
Grace Paley, “Proverbs”
Emily Pettit, “How to Be Alone in a Shape”
Carl Phillips, “For Long to Hold,” [“All night, again…”], “For Chiron”
Ben Purkert, “The Only Conversation”
Adrienne Rich, “Song”
Mary Ruefle, “Blue”
Diane Seuss, “Tear Bottle”
Tracy K. Smith, “The Universe is a House Party,” in Life on Mars
Leon Stokesbury, “Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain”
D. Thomas, “[see the titbits…]”
Tomas Tranströmer, “Slow Music”
Jean Valentine, “[You ask, Could we have coffee?]”
Diane Wakoski, “Walking Past Paul Blackburn’s Apt. on 7th St.”

‘Painting Dragons’ is 99 cents for Kindle right now

Halloween is coming. You need a book on fictional villains.

If you haven’t had a chance to read Painting Dragons, now the ebook is on a flash sale! Starting right now, Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains is only 99 cents for Kindle!

The price goes up the longer you wait.
Right now, at October 15, 2020 at 8:00 AM (PDT) $0.99
As the week progresses, the price will gradually rise back to the original list price: $5.99

I would love to eventually make this book available outside Amazon. That will take some time and money. Right now, I’d like to share it this way, and since it is very-cheap-nearly-free in this Kindle flash sale, Amazon gets only a few pennies if you download it on Kindle today. https://amzn.to/2pU7lo1

Painting Dragons by Tucker Lieberman

Not whether it can be reversed, but how it will resolve

[image error]

A handwritten paragraph from my notes, circa 2000 when I was about 20 years old, rediscovered in 2020.

Nothing is irreversible. True, there is no rewind button to undo the things we ought’nt to have done—but once they are done, we can handle them in a number of different ways. Nothing stays the same for any length of time. It is always changing. So it is not a question of whether it can be ‘reversed’ but how it will resolve itself next week, next lifetime, or in an eon.

Experiencing the feeling of typing

Without a mechanical keyboard, some people’s fingers still like to go through the motions of typing.

[image error]

B. J. Hollars recalled:

“When I was in the first grade, I snuck a glance at my teacher’s ‘teacher edition’ of a writing book called Writing Express. I’m not sure why I did it; I suppose I figured it held all the answers to the universe. I leafed through it, and near the end, came across a pair of pages that served as a two-dimensional keyboard. This was before my family had a computer, and since I knew we likely wouldn’t get one for a few more years, that Christmas, I asked my parents to buy me that book, instead. I wanted that two-dimensional keyboard to write stories on. No matter that my stories were being typed into thin air, I just wanted to experience the process of writing. After a year or so of typing stories into air, my parents opted to buy an actual computer. I traded in the two-dimensional keyboard for a three-dimensional one. And I’ve been writing ever since.”

B. J. Hollars. “No matter that my stories were being typed into thin air, I just wanted to experience the process of writing.” Interviewed by Speaking of Marvels. September 26, 2019. 

In 2020, engineers at Purdue University are inventing a way to convert an ordinary surface like a paper book to (really, truly!) function as a computer keyboard. It’s called a triboelectric paper keypad.

Telling your story through music

Music is important in most people’s lives, and so references to music can be an important part of telling a story.

Rick Moody describes this excellently in his essay “The End.” He remembers when, at age eight, he learned that his parents would divorce:

“My feeling was that there was nothing I could do about it. My feeling was that I was about to be an item on an itemized list of marital property. My brother wept.

Here’s what I have often found in my moments of keenest disconsolation: that music has an unexpected power to console and to transmute what is most grievous. The layers of imperviousness that smother a song when you listen to it a lot, these layers are sundered away, and music is apparent in its most elemental guise, full of mystery and passion and awe. Things that you haven’t heard in a fresh way in a thousand listens are suddenly bright and new, when you really need them most.”

This can happen even when the music is “adjacent” to the action and not playing as a simultaneous soundtrack.

“It’s not that Abbey Road was playing that night. It’s that through some metonymic action, in which a work of art becomes a symbol of all that is adjacent, Abbey Road, with its bright, glorious production, its elegant string arrangements, its strange and elevated moments, its harpsichord and Moog synthesizer, has become the sound, for me, of my parents separating.”

“The End.” Rick Moody, Brown Alumni Magazine, September/October 2017.

[image error]Detail from the “Abbey Road” album cover.

I’ve written a fictional story built around a pop song.

If you’ve written something—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—involving a significant experience with music, or if you’ve made visual art about music, tell me about it in the comments!

On the infinite expansion of reading lists

Over the past two decades, I’ve read fifteen hundred books. I’m not including newspapers, magazines, online articles, or sources briefly consulted. I mean books with ISBNs that I’ve read cover-to-cover. Over the same period of time, I’ve listed an additional two thousand books that I’d like to read but have not, to this day, yet read.

The “to read” list usually presents itself as a “to-do” question: When and how will I acquire copies of each book and sit with it? Won’t it take more than two decades to read them all? The “to read” list seems to prompt goal-setting. It’s an achievement that lies in my future. It’s an ambition. We are so often taught to think that way: Something we want to do is necessarily something that we are supposed to do, or else others will interpret us as disappointed, ineffectual, unhappy, and therefore pitiable.

There is a better way of understanding this phenomenon: I add books to my “to read” list at more than twice the speed that I read them. If this week is typical, I’m likely to add five books to my list, yet I can only read two. This is a permanent condition. I can’t catch up with my own list. This is not a problem. The only problem is in imagining that I can read five books a week. I can’t.

One solution is to want less. Just delete books from the list. Don’t tell people that they exist. Downsize my imagination to fit my capacity. This would make other people more comfortable around me because they would remain blissfully unaware that there are things I want to do that I will never do. I wouldn’t be giving them the terms by which to interpret me according to my unrealized potential.

But what’s wrong with having unrealized potential? The list does not have to be a source of frustration. Instead, it can represent abundance. It is the abundance of my own imagination regarding what I would like to do with my time. I may never cross everything off the list. That just means I will never run out of things I’d like to do.

‘Painting Dragons’ will be 99 cents for Kindle on Friday, July 31, 2020

If you haven’t had a chance to read Painting Dragons, now the ebook is on a flash sale! Beginning this weekend, Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains will be only 99 cents for Kindle! Put the URL in your calendar for Friday, July 31, 2020 so you don’t forget: https://amzn.to/2pU7lo1

The price goes up the longer you wait.

July 31, 2020 at 8:00 AM (PDT) $0.99
August 1, 2020 at 4:00 PM (PDT) $1.99
August 3, 2020 at 12:00 AM (PDT) $2.99
August 4, 2020 at 8:00 AM (PDT) $3.99
August 5, 2020 at 4:00 PM (PDT) $4.99
August 7, 2020 at 12:00 AM (PDT) Original list price $5.99

Painting Dragons by Tucker Lieberman