One of my problems was that in spite of everything I'd tried - writing novels, political reporting, making movies, even starting The Rumpus - despite all those hats at 40 years old I was still a poet, and I was doomed to a poet's life. Which shows you can never escape your past, or your destiny. Best not to run too far from yourself, you'll only have to walk back.

--Stephen Elliott, November 6, 2012 daily Rumpus email

She was the kind of girl who liked her coffee strong and black, and her chocolate dark and bitter.

Have you ever tracked your unconscious body movements? You know, those little things your appendages do when they are left to their own devices, when your brain is busy focusing or thinking or has just checked out. I bite the scar on the inside of my lip when I'm thinking. I curl my toes when I'm really focused. I stretch out my fingers when I'm anticipating something. It's odd how your body acts seemingly of its own free will. Like small rebellions against order and control.

Impatience. It's not one of my more attractive qualities. I suffer from a desire for instant gratification. When I set out to lose weight, I want to lose it all as soon as I start working out. When I set out to learn a new skill, I want to be good at it from my first attempt. When I decide to grow my hair out, I want it to magically extend like those dolls with the hair that you can reel in and out to make it shorter or longer. Basically, once I know what I want, I want it right away. Apparently when you combine indecisiveness, lack of motivation, and perfectionism, you get this very particular variety of impatience.

Marking my territory. My apartment can be identified as mine by the half-full cups of coffee and tea and giant stacks of books on every available flat surface. It's the detritus of grad student life, the evidence of my need for more bookshelves, and the traces of my absent-mindedness.

I've returned to Anne Michaels once again. Or, given that I'm writing about some of her poetry in my thesis, perhaps I should say that I have returned to her novels once again, although the two do not feel all that different from one another. I'm reading The Winter Vault right now. It is totally indulgent. I don't really have time for this variety of reading. But I crawl into bed at night and read it out loud to myself, and it is deeply restorative after the natural disaster of a thesis has battered my mind all day. As I am reading this novel, I keep thinking of this particular poem by Michaels. It's called "Phantom Limbs" and pulls on some of the same themes that the novel works with. How do buildings embody those who create them, those who live in them? Can we separate ourselves from place? It's an idea that intrigues me.

"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart."
     —Charles Baudelaire 

So much of the city
is our bodies. Place in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs. 

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers. 

[KEEP READING]

Choosing a username is a strangely difficult process. It's like choosing your own nickname. It seems presumptuous in some way. They tend to haunt you, too. I mean, is there anyone who isn't a little bit embarrassed by their first email address or MSN username? I think I place too much value on these kinds of things, consider too many factors.

Also, who are all of these people running around with my monikers?