Chuck P. & The Ghosts Of Christmas Poems Past

Chuck P.:

Went out to Coolidge Corner in Brookline tonight to see Chuck Palahniuk do a reading/Q&A and book signing. The pictures above show the line less than 5 minutes after his reading at the Coolidge Corner Theater outside of the Brookline Booksmith for his book signing. The line rolled all around the block!

It was pretty good, and interesting, but for my money Sherman Alexie blew the doors off the hinges when he was there in comparison. Then again, I wouldn't mind if I had written 10 books in the last ten years and that people were begging to turn my books into movies. Hell, I would settle for an invite into my local fight club.

He read an unpublished short story called "Cold Calling," about a guy who does telemarketing. It brought me back to my days soliciting donations for the Northeastern University Alumni Fund. Revise: It brought me back to my days in hell.

But it did remind me of a story from when I was in Montana. One of the jobs prison inmates in Montana can get is telemarketing magazine subscriptions. Well, I both knew some guys who did this telemarketing, and I knew a girl who had received a call from a prison telemarketer. True story: This one girl got a call from a telemarketer one day and they got to talking. They had this long talk, and a series of long intimate talks afterwards- he would call her while he was at work. She started a relationship with him- letters, phone calls- it all got very intimate. Further, they began seeing each other when he got out. They have since broken up, but truth is stranger than fiction, indeed... I wonder if she bought any magazines. Stranger still, those guys get paid like a dollar a day. Prison really isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The Ghosts of Christmas Poems Past:

I took the T (the dreaded Green Line no less) out to Coolidge Corner for the reading tonight. On my way, I began a few notes into my cell phone for a short story and came upon this poem I had written using the keypad (I like to experiment with sudden poems, a la O'Hara- in the middle of crowds, using tape recorders, cell phones. dictating to voice mail, etc.) when I was in line to check out at Old Navy during Christmas shopping season:

The shirts are a Christmas bow
tangle; a long ribbon of multi-colored
confusion. Your fingertip— ripped
against a sharp price tag
hung with plastic and a gun
to stitch it through. There may be
magnetic markers here to ensure
that no packages find the parking lot
the car and the underneath of Christmas trees
without the swipe of plastic and a modem
search for your balance information,
a signature, a receipt like a tag
you push in your pocket. There’s a girl
who decorated her Christmas tree with receipts,
realizing she was praying to America and she’d
really bought a gift for Target and Old Navy
with her bundle of purchases last year.

While you might be able to tell from this why revision is such an important aspect of poetry (yes this is unrevised- straight from the cell piece), I also found it interesting that so many of the same themes that were in the poem from December (consumerism vs. faith; shopping as prayer; receipts.... Old Navy for crying out loud) were here in the blog, and in my new painting, over the past few days. Even stranger, I forgot the poem even existed until I found it on my phone today. I guess the things we need to work on lay patient until we process them. Or pick them up. Or find them in our cell phones.