Christopher Patton

birds are obscene fuckers

One of the blogs went in an avian direction, and it’s something how many ways you can go, when you’re up in the air.

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sup birders,

so, I’m taking this really weird but great class called The Art of Compost (or more officially, Multi-Genre Creative Writing) and our hw for the evening is to listen to bird calls and translate them into “human.”

EXCEPT ALL I CAN HEAR ARE OBSCENITIES. THESE BINCHES HAVE THE DIRTIEST BEAKS.

listen to the calls here and find the birds I have translated below !

1. white-throated sparrow (the tamest of the bunch)

please please you may / please please release / hear hear me

2. American crow

fuck u dum prick / why u even here / fuck u get out now

3. blue jay

bleat for fun / or none

4. northern cardinal

*catcalls* / fuck you fuck you fuck you

5. common raven

twat twat twat / twat twat / twat twat twat

I think this says a lot more about me than the birds tbh…like srsly, what do…

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Domestic Metal

And another, kitchen metal collaged.

Copy Cat

A few nights ago I was taking apart my box spring and a bunch of cool staples, as long as vampire teeth, were wedged into the wood. I started to realize how many things are made from metal in my room and around my house.

I of course went to the kitchen and found spoons, knives, and so on.

That’s when it clicked: photocopy collage of domestic metals. Metals that stay around the house but are distinct and specific tools for living.

I wanted to combine the two cohorts (building tools and kitchen tools) not so much that they clashed together, not so they would battle for the attention of the owners hands, but that they would coexist.

If usual domestic metals had feelings, I think the kitchen items would be happiest and the tool box metals would be depressed. The kitchen metals get to be played with daily, the…

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Son

And another for ya, from a student blog on the persistence of folk music in American life.

Run Off

Folk is for the future.

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Dirt

So as I go through the student blogs for The Art of Compost (the course not the blog) grading (cuz one has to) I think I’ll repost some posts that strike me as particularly apropos or sharp or just effin funny. (They’ve come together lovelyly, even the ones, AHEM, kind of assembled in the final 48 hours.) Here’s the first.

Piles of Distinct Pieces.

The assignment was simple.

“Paint.”

Very simple,

if you have paint.

If you don’t have paint, you find some pretty dirt around campus and mix it with some water in your coffee mug and you use it to paint on a sheet of paper you snuck from the drawer of the copy machine in Haggard Hall.

I adore the micro flecks of brown that gave me my pigment.

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Overdraft

First of three sections of Overject, very roughed out, on my dining room table.
Fifty pages give or take. This baby’s going to be a monster. Next is to feed it some foliage. The little leaf impresses you can see there are oceanspray red osier dogwood and vine maple from my back garden. Quaking aspen to come (for some scary bits).

Student blog: Copy Cat

Another student blog for you this fine summery morning: photocopier collages of various and sundries. Laundry unfolded or undone, mix tapes unspooled, unstrung. Like the blog just before this, a sort of love song to the overlooked, our detritus.

Brief my remarks, this time round, as I’ve to go teach in a few. Just go check it out, you’ll have a blast.

Oh but I can’t help connecting to Oppen, his “Of Being Numerous“:

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,
The sad marvels;

Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

I’d speak for the connections but why speak for connections that speak of themselves.

Student Blog: Piles of Distinct Pieces

At the end of oh a long day. Woke at 2am to a possum scratching noisily at a hatch to the crawlspace under my bedroom window and that went on some hours. Now after office hours, teaching, teaching prep, and an edifying but mind-twisting course at the local REI on orienteering with map and compass – now a glass of white wine and a big fat artichoke steaming to be had with butter and garlic, and in the gap as it steams one more blog for you.

So here’s a blog, as all these have been so far, on seeing freshly. In this case, seeing what’s real in the daily, unique in the ostensibly interchangeable. A very William Carlos Williams sort of blog.

Pennies, for instance, we act as if one were as good as another. Look at them better, though, and each is its own creature, has its own smudges, patina, has carved its own arc through the ether to your pocket or your change jar.

Or stones. Everyone talks about snowflakes. Fuck snowflakes. Stones are very different from other stones. Why don’t they get some fucking press?

Why’s this matter. We live in a world system that’d make a given face, a person, interchangeable with every other, if it could, and maybe it could. To recuperate one penny or scrap of stone from all the others and say – this. In that plain ordinary moment attention is love, squishy yeah but that’s the word for it, and nothing the world commodity system raping the earth and our spirits can do will undo the moment, and the system has to fall back and die.

Doesn’t fall back far. Doesn’t die for long. But does a little, does a bit, and’s good and good again.

Student blog: Wandering Words and Sights

Another student blog for yehs from my Art of Compost class now entering its sixth and final whirlwind week. Picture compost aloft in circuits in different densities in fitful gales.

This one, on the face of it, a travel blog, but under its careful surfaces, the transits are interior. Meditation with landscape as alterity mirror.

Something about the introspective quiet of this blog (you can find it here) puts me in mind of John Berger, whose Shape of a Pocket we’re reading this week.

I had a dream in which I was a strange dealer: a dealer in looks or appearances. I collected and distributed them. In the dream I had just discovered a secret! I discovered it on my own, without help or advice.

The secret was to get inside whatever I was looking at – a bucket of water, a cow, a city (like Toledo) seen from above, an oak tree, and, once inside, to arrange its appearances for the better. Better did not mean making the thing seem more beautiful or more harmonious; nor did it mean making it more typical, so that the oak tree might represent all oak trees; it simply meant making it more itself so that the cow or the city or the bucket of water became more evidently unique!

Beautiful man. That is eunoia, Christian, beautiful thinking.

Out of the mouths of nieces

By Isabel, age 10, nature poet in the key of blue.

Writes her dad (my bro): “Asked if she had written a poem, Isabel answered, ‘No. It’s just words that were in my head.'”

My work as a teacher would be so straight & simple, if I could just put this at the front of the room, point, quote that, and go.

Sheeee-it, my work as a poet would be so straight & simple, if I could about forget making poems, & just put some words in my head on some pieces of nice paper.

P.S. Am I just being a foolish uncle or is it kind of exquisite how that raindrop hangs from that that more-than-line but not-yet-branch? Light as air and heavy like a pear.

Student blog: Mind, Drips

Here’s one more for you of an evening. Student blogs I mean. An ode and owed to coffee. Rich in a compost sensibility and not just because coffee grounds make (I’m told) a fine generative soil.

Comma in the name, that’s punc that don’t punk nor get punked.

Lots I enjoy here, but maybe most of all, the quality of attention everywhere in evidence – let’s call it a wakefulness, in the spirit of coffee, noticing minutiae, taking pleasure in, say, the fleeting flowers of foam a barista draws atop your latte, not because she has to, nor even just because she can, but because she can offer.

And chooses to. We’re back with Imagination, living always and only as imaginations, plural, demotic. NO PLATONIC CHICKENS HERE. Just lots of heartful cups of coffee. (A mischievous link in the spirit of Alex’s blog.) (‘Cept I just spoilt it by saying so.)

No words for this. Guess that’s what got me making picture and thing poems. And yet we need to keep finding and failing to find the words for it. Worlds rely on it. E.g., the pic above.