...I remember that I have a blog attached to this website and so I post a little something. Hello. 

It is July and I am in full hermit/garden witch mode; however, here are two August happenings and two interweb happenings I'd like to share.

1. If you are a fan of poetry, mornings, and libraries, I hope you will join us August 15th at 10am for Literary Bridges at the St. Anthony Branch Library in St. Paul. An open mic follows, and then perhaps a Finnish brunch follows. 

2. All month in August, I'll have visual art featured at the wonderful Eat My Words Bookstore, 201 6th Street SE, Minneapolis. 

There will be an artist's reception/celebration just a couple days before the Literary Bridges reading, on August 13th, and I so hope to see friends there! 

3. And finally, both I personally and Beauty School Editions, the small press I co-run, suddenly have substacks. I'm still figuring it out, but BSE will have lots of cool content and pertinent info. I hope you'll connect with @paulacisewski AND @beautyschooleditions. 



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Many thanks to River Urke, who invited me to visit her poetry interview series. It was a delight. 

Thanks to musician/composers Maura Bosch and Jeffrey Brooks, I've begun to curate the poetry for a monthly new music and poetry event, The Waves. Please join us any and every first Sunday at 5pm! Here is our brand new YouTube channel. 

Genre Blenders 
RESCHEDULED & VIRTUAL!
​Six 2-hour sessions, 10am-12pm central time
January 15-February 19, 2021
Pay as you can: $120-$180
DM or contact me through my website!

Start your new year by jumpstarting your writing practice! I run this private workshop for intermediate to advanced writers who are interested in blurred genres or in crossing genre (from poetry to prose or vice versa). We'll focus on writers who make it seem ​​effortless: Claudia Rankine, Brian Blanchfield, Eleni Sikelianos, Bhanu Kapil, and Anne Carson, for example. For six 2-hour sessions, we'll read and discuss prose, poetry, and hybrid texts by one or two authors each week, I'll give a mini craft talk, and we'll generate writing based on prompts. You'll leave our time together with enough inspiration and supplemental prompts to keep you going long after the course ends. ​

In a first attempt to blog at least monthly, I would like to share information about the League of Minnesota Poets Fall Conference, at which Jack and I will be presenting a multimedia exploration of solo and collaborative work. 

Our fellow presenters include See More Perspective, Lisa Marie Brimmer, John Medeiros, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Andrea Jenkins, and Downrange Telemetrics. 

Many years ago in Minneapolis, I went on a date to The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. (I know. It’s gone now, but that it existed at all is one of the many things I love about this city.) The museum housed, among other gems, a phrenology machine, an electric permanent wave contraption, and an x-ray machine for shoe stores, so a salesman could show you how roomy your bones looked inside your brand new loafers.

There was also a working Strength Test Machine: a red box with two metal bars sticking up. After you deposited two dimes and wrapped one fist around each bar, an increasing electric current would begin to course up your arms. The machine timed how long you could endure, up to a minute.

My date went first. He held on for nearly the whole time, shaking and purple-faced by the end. It seemed like some kind of record.

Then I stepped up, popped my dimes in and held on. At the first tickle of electric buzz, I let go. Fuck that, I said. It was going to be a minute of senseless pain I didn't care about and could avoid. Why?

Quitting in general has been on my mind. When is giving up abandonment and when is it liberation? Quitting broken systems and structures heals.

I've quit some things too soon and some too late. I don't doubt--or I should say I no longer doubt--my own tenacity or dedication to what matters, but what about my tenacity or dedication to what doesn't? Why haven't I, historically, released the hurtful, the broken, the restricting, the outgrown? When do I still cling? 

​I wish in the years that followed I had consistently held onto the clarity I experienced at the Strength Test Machine. I'd have had more of myself left for what's worth holding tight to and sometimes suffering through. Over the last few years, however, letting go has become a favorite activity, and it is largely what my collection of poems quitter is about.
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Days before the book was officially released, I came across this essay about quitting and raising kids to be quitters by Nora McInerny, and her writing here makes me feel like a human being. If you haven’t read it yet, you might like it a lot.

The last labyrinth of 2016, December 28th, just off Bee Caves Road in Austin, TX.

​Plus a list of books read in 2016, which I would like to exceed in 2017. (Recommendations welcome.)

January: 
Lisa Ciccarello, I Only Thought of the Farm 
Dean Young, 31 Poems
James Grinwis, Exhibit of Forking Paths
Anis Shivani, My Tranquil War
Linda Bierds, The Ghost Trio (partial read)
Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (first part)

Audiobook: Brene Brown: Rising Strong

Bookshelf revisit: C.D. Wright, Steal Away 
                             "        "         Further Adventures with You
                             Foucault: Discipline and Punish

February:
Lyn Hejinian: The Language of Inquiry (second part) 
C. S. Lewis: A Grief Observed
Pauline Boss: Ambiguous Loss
Jennifer L. Knox: Days of Shame and Failure
Necropastorals: Mary Austin Speaker
Some Planet: Jamie Mortara
Poets and Pints one year Anthology
Verlyn Klinkenborg: Several Short Sentences About Writing
Franny Choi: Floating, Brilliant, Gone

Bookshelf revisit: Kazim Ali: Fasting for Ramadan

Audiobook: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

March
Lyn Hejinian: The Language of Inquiry (last part)
Mary Karr: The Art of Memoir
Steve Roggenbuck: Live my Lief

Bookshelf Revisit: Nick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
                              Upton Sinclair: The Jungle

Audiobook: Roxanne Gay: Bad Feminist

April
Wendy Xu: You Are Not Dead
Mary Karr: Lit
Jennifer Tamayo: Red Missed Aches....
Henri Michaux transl. by Paige Taggart: I Am Writing to You from Another Country
Juliet Patterson: Epilogue
Brian Blanchfield: Proxies

Audiobook: David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1/5th)

May
Hieu Minh Nguyen: This Way to the Sugar
Lee Ann Brown: Polyverse
Laura's unpublished manuscript
Luke Pingel: Happy Apocalypse Day manuscript
Gary McDowell: Mysteries in a World that Thinks there are None
Emily St. John Mandel: Station Eleven
Michael Robins: Ladies & Gentlemen

Audiobook: Vincent Pedre: Happy Gut

June
Brett's manuscript
Nicelle Davis: The Walled-Up Wife
Franz Kafka: Aphorisms
Ed Skoog: Rough Day
Mary Biddinger: O Holy Insurgency
Juan Felipe Herrera: Facegames

Audiobook: Zadie Smith: White Teeth

July
Thomas Foster: How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Cole Swensen: Ours
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Enigmas
Hugh Behm-Steinberg: The Opposite of Work
Dorothea Laskey: Black Life
Leslie Adrienne Miller: Y
Haley Lasche: Where it Leads

Audiobook: Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me

August 
Joni Tevis: the World is on Fire
Francine Sterle: What Thread?
Robin Coste Lewis: Voyage of the Sable Venus
Sun Yung Shin, Ed: A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota
Katie Rauk: Buried Choirs
Diane Seuss: Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open
Karen Babine: Water and What we Know

Audiobook: Patti Smith: M Train

September
Lydia Yuknavich: the Chronology of Water (half) 
DJ Dolack: Whittling a New Face in the Dark
Timothy Liu: Burnt Offerings
Diane Seuss: Four Legged Girl
Sarah Manguso: Ongoingness

Bookshelf revisit: Brooklyn Copeland: Borrowed House

Audiobook: Haruki Murakami: the wind-up Bird Chronicles

October 
Ruth Ozeki: My Year of Meats
Shane McCrae: In Canaan

November
Inger Christensen: Alphabet (reread)
Sarah Manguso: Two Kinds of Decay
Seamus Heaney trans. Sophocles: A Burial at Thebes (reread)

December
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Dictee
Inger Christensen: It
MC Hyland: Mississippi Walk Poems
Li-Young Lee: Behind my Eyes (reread)
Lydia Yuknavivich: The Chronology of Water (half)









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