"It's the same story the crow told me" -- Grateful Dead
"A restless, hyper-referential book, pressing through killer desert winds to coal countries; thoroughly situating and deracinating from Tonga to the Joisey Toinpike, and from kitchen sink to dojo. It is an odic elegy, it is an elegiac ode composed of Everything and nothing. Call it a fugue composed between states. It is a pot of no ordinary beans." —C.D. Wright
"A vividness and lushness of diction—that stubborn willingness to say whatever it takes to bring the poem alive for the reader—distinguishes Gwyn McVay’s poems from the vast majority of young poets publishing today. Combined with a serious and politically charged regard for our world, these poems are mature artistically as well as intellectually. When I came to the end, I wanted more." —Bruce Weigl
Left upper arm: Golden apple with pen, banner, and Rufous Hummingbirds
In my head:
Crow artwork by Kim Koskamp
Magpies from the back cover of Bird Brains, to be mirrored on either side of my om-mani
BME Celtic rings (the three CBRs, not the five-rings version)
Piercings
Lobes: outside to inside, 8g/2g/0g/1/2" left ear; 2g/0g/1/2" right ear
2x 16g tragus
16g left outer helix
2x 16g top helix
8g 6g septum
RIP: top navel that should never have been, since I fold there
My silly MySpace. I signed up as a "band" in order to put up some audio tracks (better ones are slowly being added!) and a few videos (hopefully, new ones are coming soon also). Drop me a message if you're absolutely desperate to see my boring LiveJournal.
2007/04/16 20:55 Nothing witty to put here. School and campus shooters want to attack the whole idea and feeling of higher education, and while it's true that I don't know anyone personally who works or attends school at Virginia Tech -- apart from having spoken briefly to Nikki Giovanni while working at Associated Writing Programs years ago -- a friend's husband works there; a friend's brother goes there. And yeah, we all take it kind of personally.
With a change of scenery and change of pissed-off shooter, that could have been me in charge of a class of terrified students, sitting in the middle of a classroom frantically web-surfing for news about their own situation. Or, you know, worse.
I have no words about this that make it make sense. Go Virginia Tech; we love you.
2007/03/28 12:44 I aten't dead. I've been wondering what it is I have, in fact, spawned. Next week I'm doing a reading on Wednesday night; lecturing to a creative writing class on Thursday night; and then giving another reading on Saturday. Great Googa Mooga. I'm also healing my newest tattoo work, by Ben of Transcending Flesh.
And because I am crazy, I will probably be doing NaPoeWriMo as well. See, April has been designated National Poetry Month since 1996. So, a group of my fellow batshit crazies, in response to NaNoWriMo, have started doing one poem per day, every day, during the month of April. So I may let peer pressure lead me down the dark path that is insta-po. (What the hell. Haiku counts.)
I just signed a student's withdrawal form; he says merely that family problems have given him a particularly bad semester. I told him that if and when he comes back in the fall, to look me up anytime; he's a good kid, and can do the stuff when not otherwise distracted. I always wonder what I could have done better, how I could have made the save. Sometimes there isn't an answer, and I just have to cope with that.
So that's what's up. If you live anywhere near me and want to sit through some poetry (the April 4th one is an open-mic, so you could sit through your own poetry), drop an IM or something.
2007/01/26 22:37 My MedicAlert bracelet, I discovered this week, was hurting me. Is that the living, flaming definition of irony? See, it's titanium-coated steel. So far, so good. Only to do the engraving -- which I didn't even think about until very recently -- they cut all the way through the Ti layer into the steel, and they did it jaggedly, not bothering to buff the edges of the letters or apply a bio-inert polymer to the wearing surface. So I have these lovely metal-allergy lesions inside my wrist. Someday, of course, I can elect to have myself microchipped with my whole medical history, including recent scan images and yada yada.
I find myself deeply conflicted about whether I would personally buy the proposed "best of Modblog" book. Do I want to support BME? Hells yeah. The question is whether the book would genuinely showcase mods of really excellent artistic and technical skill, really inspiring suspensions, and you know, the good stuff, or whether it would be "Shannon's Wank Book of Pretty, Lightly Modded Young Women, Mostly Caucasian, Plus Some Self-Done Penectomies." I have nothing against the beauty of the human form, or photography that showcases it. Being drop-dead gorgeous myself, I would be the last person on earth to have a valid objection to the gorgeousness of others. It's just -- there's a fine line between saying, "Hi, BME has beautiful members," and saying, "Hi, we're just a clone of the Suicide Girls." There's got to be something in the book that shows what the modification community itself is that makes it special and different, or Ryan's going to be using the boxes of it as furniture.
2007/01/21 11:34 I've caved to pressure and created a BMEshop wishlist, mainly a lot of glass stuff in my goal size, with some little stuff for my nose. (Anatomy lesson from putting in a septum thingy slightly larger than the claimed 8g: Stretching the hole in my septum, given my facial innervation, refers pain to the middle of my upper lip. You learn something every day!) That was briefly fun, and it's kind of sad that it feels like an achievement. Otherwise, I've got the don't-want-to-go-back-to-work-tomorrow blues. Standard Sunday mode. Bleh.
