A video posted by N (@natalie_raymond) on May 5, 2016 at 8:12pm PDT

graduating with my MFA on friday. 

concretes

emotion regulation handout 6, cut & woven paper, 2015.

writing is ruthlessly cutting out things your spent hours fashioning from nothing.

here is a concrete poem I cut from my graduate thesis last week. 

list of words while watching Samiya Bashir's 'M A P S'

class notes

compulsive/documenting

hyper-graphia

home spaces as a way to reveal the personality of the occupants.

keeping the memory.

"from another past"

out west

I've been accepted to the Graduate Writing Program at The California Institute of the Arts. This is one of the top hybrid writing programs in the country. I am extremely honoured to accept my position in the program.

I will be a California girl beginning the first week of June. & officially a grad student again this fall.

excerpt from my annotation on mary ruefle.

"The world is wide & black stretching out before you… like falling asleep in a far-away field & waking up at midnight to see nothing but statuesque darkness in every direction. The time I was swept off the rocks at the beach by what my mother called a “sneaker wave” & almost drown in less than three feet of water because my brain couldn’t register which direction was up. 

I keep thinking of it as ash. The moments after the volcanic eruption in which all the noise has stopped, & the ash wafts down like blurry snow. I’ve never been in a volcanic eruption, but I’ve seen pictures: my mother standing in her prom dress on the front lawn—the sky grey above her."

-nr

near to the wild heart

In putting together my final MFA packet of this semester I was tasked with writing an annotation of Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart. The novel is influenced by James Joyce & is written almost entirely in an introspective dialogue. There is very little, if any, physical action. Reading the book felt like being lost in a blue waterworld, with no direction & no footholds to grasp at. Needless to say, I wasn't sure how to write about it.

So I put together this audio/visual piece called lispector blue as a kind of response/exploration of the process of reading the book.

lispector blue from Natalie Raymond on Vimeo.

notes on autoportrait by edouard leve

"

the small combined to make the big.
what binds us to this earth?
(gravity recurring)

inventory before disposal.

"

a playlist & a reading list

I decided to make a sad hipster playlist last night... here's what I came up with:




& my reading list for spring 2013 is pretty rad:

• Life on Mars - Tracy K. Smith
• My Emily Dickinson - Susan Howe
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• The MS of M Y Kin - Janet Holmes
• The Guardians - Sarah Manguso
• Threads - Jill Magi
• The Book of Beginnings & Endings - Jenny Boully
• Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector
• Autoportrait - Edouard Leve
• Humaninal - Bhanu Kapil
• The Red Parts: A Memoir - Maggie Nelson
• Walking Through Clear Water in A Pool Painted Black - Cookie Mueller
• My Life - Lyn Hejinian
• Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading & Collective Identity - Juliana Spahr
• The Quest for Christa T - Christa Wolf (trans. by Christopher Middleton

You can follow me on goodreads if you're interested in what I'm reading. 

instant (return)

After a week in the wild frozen tundra of northern Vermont, it takes a little gettin' used to to be in the wild dank city again. My second residency at Goddard was all I could have hoped. It wasn't even that cold.

I jumped in a snow bank, exchanged energy with classmates, listened to poems, chilled wine in snow drifts, ate my weight in tofu scramble & home fries, talked about ethics & equality in education, explored creating a hybrid from the body, was blessed with rose water, told & listened to ghost stories, sifted through library books, lost an earring, read poems, wrote poems, submitted some things to a magazine, & talked talked talked. A good way to spend several days.

missoula

 Currently in the wilds of snowy Vermont, I'm enjoying my second graduate school residency so far. Today I was in a workshop about writing a blurb for your book, & this is what I came up with.....

Through expanding the intersection of science and emotion, missoula traces the ice-age floods responsible for the geography of the Pacific Northwest, and outlines a woman’s struggle with identity after an abusive childhood. Juxtaposing the findings of J Harlen Bretz—the rebel geologist whose 1928 explorations led to the development of a catastrophic flood theory—with stunning moments of sparse imagistic poetry missoula asks how fathers can shape their daughters in the same way these catastrophic natural disasters once carved the physical landscape. 

back in bk after the wilderness

I've returned successfully to brooklyn after living a week in the wilds of vermont. Honestly, I wish I was still there on many levels... someone to cook for me, clean, only talking about poetry & writing, & art. Spending time with good & interesting people. No real job. Just reading & reading & reading.

Now I have to return to the "real" world. Work on monday, & I have to sink into this system of working in packets to send to my advisor every few weeks. This is going to be the hard part... remembering I'm in school. (Even though I'm sure it will be over before I know it, & I'll have an MFA & I'll be trying to do something with that).

I started the missoula. project while I was away. one single glistening poem composed in half an hour & workshopped the next day. I see the roots, & I think this is going to work out, make itself.

photos:

puddle jumper.

walk to the dorms.

campus & the haunted martin manor.

fire.

the long walk to the library.

outside.

campus & the clockhouse.

reading list

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Complete Poems of Muriel Rukeyser - Muriel Rukeyser.
• This Connection of Everyone with Lungs - Juliana Spahr.
• The Narrow Road to the Interior - Matsuo Basho (Sam Hammel translation).
• Humanimal - Banu Kapal.
• In the Western Night - Frank Bidart.
• What is Found There - Adrienne Rich.
• One with Others - C.D. Wright.
• The Collected Poems of George Oppen - George Oppen.
• Ceremony - Leslie Silko.
• The Pillow Book - Sei Shonagon (translation?).
• Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes (Edith Grossman translation).
• Ship Fever - Andrea Barette.
• Frame Structures - Susan Howe.

terribly sorry for all the posts... but my brain is stewing.

n

things i said in grad school:

"I HAVE NO INTEREST IN WRITING POEMS THAT SOUND LIKE POETRY."

gemini's can't make decisions.

hi y'all-

I've been really vacilating back and forth on this new site issue. & now I've decided this:

The only platform for blogging that I find really effective (i.e. it has all the features I'm looking for without costing an arm and a leg) is blogger. SO, now when you click "blog" in my menu bar it will take you to this new blogger blog. I think this is the best way to keep the blog up to date (blogger is easier for me to update on the go), and interesting (more options for multimedia posting).

So there you have it.

I'm at grad school now... there are a lot of bugs in vermont. I saw the biggest moth of my life last night and I almost had a coronary. I'm off to finalise my semester study plan with my advisor now.

xoxo
n

the car I rented:

p.s.
I really thought about calling this blog: Hot Child in the City.

also: read about my graduate project. (if you want).