elizabethaethertownusa

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here is the opening of my poem She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes, originally printed in Colorado Review in '23

#my work #my drawings

[elizabethaethertownusa]

It's so true ... one desert one tortoise one chance

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here are some Picasso silhouettes I really liked and then the road in the evening

#joshua tree #palm springs

[elizabethaethertownusa]

The best advice I ever got professionally was from my father and it follows directly from what I said about the worst advice I ever got. When I was thirteen or fourteen I got my first Writer's Market, which was the big annual book of publishing markets on which people used to depend before Submittable et al. The front of the book was always padded out with useless essays about How to Publish Now, and How to Be a Real Author, total craziness. Trying to tell somebody how to be an artist is like that joke about punk rock (Mike: What's punk rock? Punk Rock Joe: This is punk rock [smashes a car's windshield with a brick] Mike: This is punk rock? [smashes a car's windshield with a brick] Punk Rock Joe: No, that's derivative). Anyhow, awful, awful essays, but I read them, because I was a kid, and they got me worried. I said to my dad, who was a pro artist, I'm scared about this, do I really have to pay attention to publishing trends? Do I really have to worry about what's popular? He dismissed it instantly. He said "It's the editor's job to worry about that. Your job is just to write." It's the audience's job to worry if it's good—it's the editor's job to worry if it's marketable—it's my job to write.

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here are some lines from my poem The Fulfillment House, originally printed in Meat For Tea: The Valley Review in '19. A fulfillment house is the warehouse where orders are packed and shipped—it's the place of real work and real substance which is disguised by the name of the place from which you order your products. In this poem I am more like Jonah than the giant

#my work #my drawings

[elizabethaethertownusa]

The worst advice I ever got professionally—which is to say, about my profession and from somebody I was prepared to trust, professionally; obviously people talk a lot of gibberish all the time about what you ought to do, especially when you're young—was to hold off on submitting work for publication.

My college poetry professor gave me that advice. She said "Give yourself your apprenticeship," and "You could probably find some magazines that will publish you, but I think you'd be embarrassed later on." If I'd realized she was quoting Sylvia Plath with that apprenticeship thing I would have dismissed everything else out of hand. That part rang false for me, since I had already been writing a long time at that point and had moved through anything you might call an apprenticeship—I don't mean I was writing well, but I was definitely an adult writer. I took the second part seriously, because my professor had said it, and because I was by my nature earnest about not putting work out in the world before I felt it was done. I thought: Well, I think this work is done and good, but if she doesn't, I must be missing something.

I was of course missing something. It is absolutely true that now I would be embarrassed by the work I wrote when I was nineteen and twenty. I was trying things out and I was putting on voices and I was very loose and careless. But it is also true that I will never ever write that work again. Its time was then and not now. I will never be nineteen again. I will never think what I thought then in the way I thought it. So there are lots of poems which will never be remembered and more poems which will never exist, because certainly writing for publication would have gotten more work out of me than writing in total loneliness and to no clear end, which is what I proceeded to do.

I have grown into an artist almost incapacitated by the habit of drafting and re-drafting. I respect my habits and I don't think they're entirely neurotic but unquestionably I lose work this way—I lose time, I lose material, I lose what might exist now and never again. I know, very clearly, that works of art in progress expire: you cannot work for years on a single piece of art, because you will continually outgrow yourself, improving, and so you'll perpetually be discarding the now-earliest drafts. This kills art. This kills work. This is not how you build a body of good work but how you build a single okay thing that if you are lucky you kind of finish by dying. I have got to unbend a little bit.

You must try to be as honest as you can and you must try to publish work when you think it is good and you must be aware that we are moving through time and that you are changing at every moment. In every period of your life you are precious and temporary. You will not exist next year. Put your good work in the world now. It's not your job to feel good or bad about it later on—it's your job to do the work now.

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Evening evening

#joshua tree

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here's a pictorial rug I really enjoyed by Isabel John (c. 1975).

I want to start collecting pictorial rugs this year and the next. Hit me up if you can recommend good sites for finding rugs for prices that are fair to the artist and yet which a poor author can afford

#pictorial rug #navajo pictorial weaving #palm springs art museum #isabel john

[elizabethaethertownusa]

What do we think the difference should be between my social medias, professionally? What goes on the instagram vs the tumblr? I like the idea of a tumblr because nobody has any right to complain if I put any kind of scrap I feel like onto a tumblr because that's like complaining about possums in the woods. But then what goes on a professional instagram? I don't want one of those ugly author-pages but then I don't want one of those tryhard aesthetic pages either. What's the point of an instagram? Thoughts??

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here are three things that I saw and I saw them. The lilacs were bobbing so much in the evening air that they got blurry in my camera's at-night setting

[elizabethaethertownusa]

This is from a blog post I made about six short stories that stay in my head. Sometimes I think the only measure of a good short story is if it sticks around with you.

#my blog

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Here are the first two stanzas from my poem The Flayed Man, originally published in High Shelf Press in '20 (where it appeared as "The Flayed Man / and You Stop In a Stranger’s Field in 1542”).

#my work

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Excerpt from my short The Valley of the Kings, originally published in Beacon Quarterly in '20

#my work #my drawings

[elizabethaethertownusa]

There I was Joshua Tree / the special pink of desert flowers which first got me way back when I was eleven. I grew up in the midwest and didn't mind it but just before middle school my family went on a trip to Tucson and I said to myself Oh here's where I'm from for real, and it was in large part that special electric dragon-pink which did it. I think that's a prickly pear blooming there

#joshua tree #photo of me

[elizabethaethertownusa]

I've still got Joshua Tree photos to show you. It was rather more a Desert Fathers experience (spiritually speaking) than it was the rejuvenating Palm Springs chill-outs I've gotten used to but it was beautiful and you do need to seer your soul sometimes or you will become less than human

#joshua tree

[elizabethaethertownusa]

At the Palm Springs Art Museum, which is one of my very favorite art museums, I was surprised to see a Picasso etching which is important to me—the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, from the '30s.

I wrote about it for a chapbook I never got it together to have printed. One of the reasons I abandoned it was that, despite encouragement from a friend, I felt like it was basically not of interest to any readers—it is a series of descriptions of artworks depicting animal-humans and animal-human transformations. Mostly I am not bothered by worries about whether or not anyone will find my work interesting because I frankly do not care. In this case however it just seemed like a fundamentally uninteresting subject to anybody but the person for whom it is an exercise. I don't care if people are interested in my work but I do care a great deal about putting out work I intend for people to read—there is a difference.

Maybe I'll put the whole thing on this blog in parts. The text is complete but I had always meant to illustrate it. I don't actually know how to photograph illustrations for printing. I guess I'd go to Office Max or something.

#my work #Minotaur chapbook

[elizabethaethertownusa]

Purse notebook from summer '21

#my notebooks