Let's talk honestly about our teeth:
a) Do you brush your teeth once or twice a day? Or more than twice a day?
b) Do you use mouth wash?
c) Do you floss or just tell your dentist you floss?
I think I've been a bit panicky about my teeth this month, which has now transformed into a slightly OCD routine, BUT only because my gums still weren't happy with me and I'm trying to figure out why since my dentist recently said "everything is a-okay." My teeth are white and I haven't had cavities in years, but still, I really don't want anything bad happening to my teeth. And honestly, I think that my dentist is a little lackadaisical. Everyone in my office sees the same dentist so I don't have anyone else recommending me to someone smarter. I think they like him because he doesn't charge a co-pay. Seriously. But my dentist didn't even ask if I floss, which I didn't at the time, and I think that's in bad form. Usually dentists impress upon you the need for flossing and the need for an electric toothbrush. Dentists are supposed to guilt you into taking better care of your teeth, especially when you clearly are not.
My previous routine in the morning and before bed was a) mouth wash b) brush. Was I being too relaxed about it or is that a normal routine?
So now in the morning:
a) mouth wash
b) floss
c) brush
d) mouth wash
Then repeat this at night. I now firmly believe flossing makes a big difference (duh). I'm actively making my gums stronger. Someday I might actually go to the gym.
Anyways, this routine is good because my mouth is very happy and I am calmer. I am no longer worried. But a little worried that I sound nutty.
I know it's weird to talk about your own teeth for a long time, but I also think that I feel better when people tell me what they're doing about the same issues, in the same situation, etc, dealing with relationships, with sex, with friends, parents, with job-planning. Else it's just too lonely to be stuck in your own head, thinking that everything you're doing might be a bit off the mark. Let's talk about human to human reassurance.
***
I'm reading tonight at an MFA reading. 8 minutes of allotted time. I'll let you know how it goes. What crazy tricks I'll pull in 8 minutes.
Rabbits, a fog machine, tootsie rolls.
***
Are you guys starting to get bored because I'm not posting that many poetry books on my blog anymore? I'm sorry. Tell me if you are and I'll start talking about more books of poetry.
I just received in the mail the journal Abraham Lincoln, the second issue:
I would recommend buying an issue for five bucks and reading it yourself. It looks a little ramshackled in the best way possible, made with some serious love and editorial handywork. Edited by K. Silem Mohammad and Anne Boyer. You can send a check to:
K. Silem Mohammad
840 Park St.
Ashland, OR
97520
Anyways, I'm going to hit you with the first 2/3rds of a poem by Linh Dinh from this issue:
Three One-Sentence Stories
Although we had slept like shit, cold, wet and hungry, I ordered the men and one boy to resume marching just before sunrise, without saying a word of comfort or goodbye to our injured, moaning comrades, left to die in that cave, our motel for the night.
*
Etched into the granite walls of a 6x8, windowless, single-occupancy, postmodern, maximum-security suite: love of country, sandy beach, vigilance against all & everything, sleeping teens, mossy boulders, rolling, grassy meadows, hung ferns, bright birds and dandelions.
*
(you need to buy the issue to read the last sentence.)
***
Mathias sent me the M.I.A. song "Paper Planes" this morning. It's awesome. This is the music video, at least watch it until you get to the gun shots and cash register noises, but watch the whole video if you have time:
**
Earlier this week I mentioned the reading at Stain this Friday. Well, there are two other rival readings tomorrow as well:
1) UGLY DUCKLING PRESS
Friday, April 25, at 7pm [BROOKLYN]
UDP at The Old American Can Factory
Phil Cordell
G.L. Ford
Filip Marinovich
Elizabeth Reddin
UDP editors and collaborators share their work in a beautiful room
in the mythic building that houses the Ugly Duckling Presse workshop.
*UDP books will be sold at deep discount, as long as you can carry them away.*
@ THE OLD AMERICAN CAN FACTORY
232 Third Street, Brooklyn, NY
(corner of 3rd Ave and 3rd St., near the Gowanus Canal, F or R trains nearby)
2) MULTIFARIOUS ARRAY reading hosted by the lovely Sommer Browning
Well, I'm missing another reading by Evie Shockley. This bums me out. Luckily, I saw Brenda read last weekend, but now I'm mising them both:
This Friday, April 25th, 7pm
Evie Shockley and Brenda Iijima
Get Nabbed!
Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and a poetry chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), both published by Carolina Wren Press. Her work appears or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including 1913: a journal of forms, No Tell Motel, PMS:PoemMemoirStory, and others. In 2007, she guest edited "~QUEST~": a special issue of MiPOesias featuring the work of contemporary
African American poets and is currently serving as a guest editor of jubilat. Shockley is a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University.
Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus, 2007) and Around Sea (O Books, 2004). Her book, If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. A work called revv.you'll-ution, is forthcoming from Displaced Editions in 2008. She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Together with Evelyn Reilly she is editing a collection of essays by poets concerning poetry and ecological ethics titled )((eco(lang)(uage(reader). She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she designs and constructs homeopathic gardens.
Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-3770
"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan.
***
ALSO THIS SATURDAY. You can't miss Elizabeth Willis reading at Bowery. No, you really cannot:
The Segue Reading Series Presents:
Thomas Fink and Elizabeth Willis
Saturday, April 26, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson
Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently A Different Sense of Power, and he is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia.
from "Deconstricted Sestina 5"
Dialogue will swerve repeatedly before it survives
patriarchy. Thanks for not smoking inside. I
trust you to profit from any experiment
that respects the survival of those not
yet as fit. Reach into my pocket
and husband what's left. My husband assumes
immortality, but one attentive scribe is becoming
my sole access to recommencing dialogue, into
which labors or equalization should
be poured. My thanks are
colored by suspicion of vested
recollection. Lately, many fund Plato's
experiment; mine could take several
millennia to breed a profit.
Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.
"Her Mossy Couch"
I stain lengthwise all I touch. The world is so touching, seen this
way, in fleshtones, aggrieved, gleaming as the lights go out, look-
ing into the crease of relativity. We've seen this before, why? Tri-
umph arches over us like bad emotion. We were supposed to feel
more connected to it, we were supposed to feel humanly moved
by imaginary strings. All the words in the world are moving pic-
tures to the dizzy ear, fleas, inadequate deceptions of nocturnal
hair, pushing buttons, pushing papers, pushing pedals up the
long hill. Who could get over the blatant radiance of a name like
Doris Day, throwing your finest features into political relief, a
warehouse in the shadow of apples and streams?
***
7 comments:
hey ya dissin' on M.I.A.
tsk tsk tsk!
C.R.E.A.M. u know?
what? that song is awesome.
big ups for M.I.A.
I don't think I've been to a dentist in about eight years. Is that bad?
I brush before bed. Why do people brush in the morning? It's not like you were eating something while you were asleep (unless you're a sleepwalker).
I've used mouthwash approximately once. This was when I had my first apartment and thought I should start doing grown-up things like use mouthwash. My interest in it vanished pretty quickly.
I go through periods of heavy flossing activity, which come between much longer periods of flossing inactivity.
Never had a cavity.
wow. your teeth have good stamina.
yeah, mouth wash is expensive.
yo, i just like our dentist because he has an awesome goody bag! and there's floss in the goody bag - the recommendation to use it is implicit. like when you made me that goody bag that wasn't a goody bag but was just a brown paper bag with eye and mouth holes cut out of it.
That was, in fact, a goody-bag, Jose.
I used to compulsively brush my teeth. Like, many many times a day. The last time I went to the dentist, he told me that my teeth were strangely eroded. He called over the hygienist to check out my crazy teeth, like "whoa, check this out, have you ever seen anything like it?" And she was like, "No, I never have." He then, in not so many words, asked me if I was ever pregnant or bulimic. I said no. Now I brush my teeth twice a day.
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