Joseph Lease, from “Free Again”

When I can’t sleep I am full of red buds and torn curtains and shiny cars parked in a lot. My lower-middle-class manners tear through my upper-middle-class manners: I stared at braided colors in water while my peers figured out the art of the deal. I was (I wanted to be) a Miwestern boy with a disco in my eyes—Chicago Jew, greengold suburb Jew, son of a Coney Island Jew. When I drank I got punched up by luminous waves of anger. I thought I had to chhoose between winning in New York and being a good person. I’m not a good person: a good person doesn’t talk about himself—or so good people tell me. What is our country. Did it start as blank, as blank blank, as blank blank blank. I would love to fly to Vegas for the Punk Festival—we aren’t the first culture to “monetize relationships”—force steel splintering, force breathing, moisture in the air: the city dissolves, one long story of corruption: USA means the outer miracle kills the inner miracle: history has to live with what was here: no images, no lightning, no letters of flame: leaves move, clouds move, money moves, night pushes through the money—

From Broken World. Lease reads tonight with Paul Vazquez at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and also at Labyrinth Book this Saturday afternoon.

18 April 2007 | uncategorized |

If Retroactively Naming the Site After Her Helps, Consider It Done

If you haven’t read Alex Mar’s profile of Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori in this week’s New York, by all means drop whatever you’re doing right now and have at it! What’s not to like about a woman who opens up her castle to talented young writers, providing them with time and space to be as clever as they can be—not to mention free meals and conversation in the bargain!

“They iron your underwear for you!” says Andrew Sean Greer, still astonished. “That’s hard to take. You have to kind of decide that it’s fantastic, and there were a lot of writers who found it to be too much.”

Not me, that’s for sure. I don’t know if writing a literary blog is good enough to get me an invite, though, so I guess I’d better pull that novel manuscript out of “the drawer” (which is really just a backup hard drive) and get cracking so I can be seen as someone of sufficient imagination!

29 November 2006 | uncategorized |