November 12, 2006

Back in 1999, just before coming out to California for an ill-advised MFA in poetry I spent the summer in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn on Ryerson Street (I lived across the street from Walt Whitman's old house [the projects in neighboring Fort Greene are named after him]). I basically crashed on my friend Nat Harris' couch but slept mostly on the roof in my sleeping bag. Every night was a late night, and I got up literally with the birds. It seemed ideal at the time. Pete Hoffman, then of the Mendoza Line, lived on the first floor and hadn't yet not given me credit on a song we wrote together ("Everything We Used To Be"); I later used his name for the title character of my first chapbook and called it even, we're on good terms like that. After intial attempts to find work failed, I decided I could afford to sit around the place for a couple of months living lean, real lean & read Ezra Pound's Cantos and otherwise write. As Nat was at Pratt at the time, I sometimes used his painting studio for writing in exchange for some help around the joint. I did everything on manual typewriters back then, so my process was portable enough. The Pratt library is tiny, but the second storey has a Tiffany glass flooring, so you can look down on the folks on the first floor as through a fishbowl. The other roommate in that one bedroom (Nat had built a makeshift 2nd bedroom), third floor walkup was Michael Chapman who was just then in the process of quitting his MFA in photography at LSU and learning computer animation. It seemed somewhat stupid at the time to me to quit an MFA mid-way; I mean what's another year? But Mike made good. He and his brother created the whole Homestar Runner thing, and Strongbad emails are just about my favorite thing on the internet. Hell, Mike's been on NPR, a feat very few of my friends have yet to manage.