CURRENT MISSION

disrupting vulgar linear time/learning how to live finally/behaving lyrically

ABOUT ME

I'm working on my MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is a scenic but very small town. I miss being in cities, in or around which I've spent most of my life: first in a suburb of Philly, then in DC for undergraduate work. I'm terrible at writing about myself in general, but I think it's more important to know whom (and what) I "haunt" (to paraphrase Breton) than anything else, so more important than this are probably the other sections in the profile, and then also I'm always happy/excited to meet and talk to people, online or in person, so I'd love to hear from you.

PHILOSOPHY

"There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last."
- Frank O'Hara, "Poem"

living affirmatively as revolutionary praxis

Interests

Poetry, literary theory, the historical avant-garde, reading, walking, everyday life, language, ethics, food, happiness, writing, humor, talking, adding more things to this list

• writing
• poetry
• ethics
• dining
• walking
• reading
• music
• guitar
• teaching
• history

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: Lunch Poems, Spring And All, The Logic Of Sense, Tender Buttons, A Border Comedy, Century Of Clouds, Rivers And Mountains

Music: Rihanna, Of Montreal, The Libertines, Rachmaninoff

Movies: Up, Pontypool, Stranger Than Fiction, Hook, The Big Lebowski

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

For the final project in my high school AP European History class, I rewrote the lyrics to songs by the Decemberists so they were from the perspective of Karl Marx, tracing, in a way, the development of his thought. Part of this project involved donning a fake beard and performing several of these songs in front of my class (with my brother as accompaniment on the guitar). Afterwards, we recorded the songs, and my teacher remarked that they were good music by which to cut vegetables. So the amazing thing is that I created good Marxist vegetable-cutting music.