Bloof Books Tour: Let us not speak of Nashville. Georgia's on our mind. (Shanna Compton)

Columbus, Muncie, Nashville, Atlanta, Tallahassee...so it's Day Six of the book tour. (Each morning I have to count.) Each morning we wake up in a hotel, remember where we are (FL), calculate the number of hours we have to drive (9+), and hunt up the nearest Starbucks (.5 miles). Where are the driving directions? GPS has become the most important item in our poetic toolbox—without it no poetry readings will happen.

When we're punchy with highway miles, phrases from billboards (or dangling Truck Nutz) send us all into riots of laughter: WOW WOW WOW CAR WASH. SPICY CRUNCHY JUICY GENIUS. HARDEN’S TAXIDERMY SNAKESKIN KOOZIE $65. What, we wonder, is a "primitive" baptist church vs. the usual kind? (Whatever their theological differences, physically primitives must be smaller; in sparsely populated areas there may be three or four within just a few miles. Congregations of 10, 20 maybe? Or maybe disguised meth labs?) In the afternoons, we check into new rooms, change our clothes, choose from among our poems, gather fresh copies of our books, and warm up our voices. Where are my shoes? No, my other shoes? That first night in Muncie's faded like a dream. We're tired but happy, always ready to do it again. 

(I will speak of Nashville, actually. Because it was fun to hang out with Nancy McGuire Roche and to meet Andrea Hewitt-Gibson and Elvin [the filmmaker whose last name I neglected to get]. Checking into our hotel, we got caught up in the somewhat confusing wake of the Tennesee Titans’ departure from the same location. Beyond that, I will just wonder aloud the following two things: 1) Why are bookstores often the least comfortable venues in which to read literature aloud? And 2) Why didn’t I have the sense to cancel that event when the staff neglected to return my emails? Peter is at least as high a security risk as Meghan McCain (who appeared there the night before.))

On to Atlanta, where Sandra Simonds joined the tour. She, Peter, Jennifer & I read at Emory University for the What's New in Poetry Series hosted by Bruce Covey. (You guys know him; he's blogged here before, and is the editor of Coconut, as well as the author Glass Is Really a Liquid, very shortly forthcoming from No Tell Books.) The campus at Emory is leafy and lovely. We heartily consumed vegan eggplant curry and tofu lettuce bundles at Doc Chey’s with grad student Caroline Crews (a visiting scholar in Emory’s exchange program). In the audience at Few Hall we found a few dozen of Bruce's creative writing students, along with poets Heather Christle (a current fellow at Emory and author of The Difficult Farm from Octopus), Howard Miller, and Julie Bloemeke (see interview below for links). Sandra, Peter and Jennifer performed with their usual liveliness and connected successfully with the crowd, by all signs. (A room in which actual enjoyment of poetry is evident is one of my favorite places, I mean come on. It was awesome.) After the book sales and signing, we went back to the hotel bar (so we didn’t have to DUI—that’s how we roll) and talked for a few hours, and quizzed Julie about poetry, social media, and vultures: 

Sandra Simonds & Julie Bloemeke, Atlanta 9/16/2010

Hastily Scribbled, Liberally Paraphrased Interview with Julie Bloemeke, Typed Up Several Days and Thousands of Miles Later, Partially in the Car, so Perhaps Not as Accurate as She Would Like

Q: When did you begin writing poetry? And/or what attracted you to Poetry as an artform?

A: Oh hmm, here’s an enigmatic answer: Since before I was born.

[Speaking further about discovering her attraction to poems] Reading Shel Silverstein. …A poem of Patricia Smith in which she rhymes panther with anther. That was damn cool. The word thorough: finding that it had magical properties.

Q: You mentioned earlier tonight that you’ve been writing a lot lately after a bit of a break. What are you working on?

A: [Poems] exploring the idea of how we connect. And disconnect. Via technology. The possibility and intimacy there [via social media and the internet]. Distance and closeness.

Q: Are you using these technologies to write the poems?

A: Yes, I don’t want to say exactly how yet, but I’ve used Facebook to invent some of the forms.

Q: Where can folks go online (or elsewhere) to find some of your work, Julie?

A: Mason's Road. Ouroboros Review. [And some anthologies I listed but now cannot read. We were outside on a dark patio, scribbling by candlelight.]

Q: [Ouroboros published a photography + poetry project of Julie’s that we then asked her to talk about further.]

A: I was writing about abandonment, and photographing abandoned buildings, using film, which we’re also abandoning [for digital photography]. [In one of these buildings] I was actually stalked by a vulture. They growl. Did you know that?

Q: No!

UPDATE: Here's a follow-up note from Julie.

I can offer a few points of clarity to offset candlelight handwriting....

1) The first rhyme I heard and fell in love with was Shel Silverstein and the panther/ don't anther. Patricia Smith's poem is called Anemone and follows her fascination with one word. (The poem is in Teahouse of the Almighty; it is simply stellar).

2) The places you can find my work are Pebble Lake Review http://www.pebblelakereview.com/archives/Spring%202008/vol5_iss2.htm (where you can also hear me audio of me reading Tomato)

The anthologies are Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word: http://lavanderiahome.net/
(This is the one published by City Works Press that recently won the San Diego Anthology of the Year award for 2010.)

and forthcoming Obama-Mentum and The Six Word Anthology.

[Thanks for the corrections, Julie! Perhaps by Day 1299836 of this tour I might actually get the hang of this, eh?]

• • •

Last night we read in Tallahassee (there are pics on my Facebook wall), and we managed to do an interview there too. If we ever make it to Raleigh, NC tonight (no reading, just crashing on our way to DC on Sunday), we'll post that next. I think it might be Pete's turn. 

Comments

[Jennifer L. Knox]

I never knew I needed a snakeskin koozy until this moment.

[shanna]

I hear ya.

Also, we miss you, Knox. See you in Philly tomorrow night!

[Royce Ringstrasse]

Thank you for upholding the values of symbolism. The gold standard may not apply in economics but poetry is another matter. Also shoes, which Freud means death. Thank You.

[arnold carson]

Success is the succession of the vice president to the office of the president who has been assassinated in a coup. But if Georgia's on your mind,l what say you to Alabama? (Cnut).