Further on up the road

Has anyone seen the new issue of Hunger Mountain? Really nice new journal and I'm in this latest issue. This one is important to me: it's the first time I've managed to appear in the same journal with Eliot, my best friend and just a nauseatingly great poet. His poem is just great and as usual has me feeling covetous. Well, not really. I miss those days in Alabama: he made it bearable there.

And my two poems? One is about my grandfather Rip, the embodiment of cantankerous, still raising hell after losing the ability to speak, the use of one arm, and, in recent years, the amputation of both legs.

The other is called "Questions for Godzilla."

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Saw Friday Night Lights yesterday. Billy Bob Thornton may be a freak of the first order in life, but I'll be damned if he isn't a great actor. He's very quiet here. A good movie, but there's something unusual about that Peter Berg has brought to it. It's almost documentary-like in that there doesn't feel, not exactly, that there is a narrative agenda. In other words, the movie seems to be always just observing. At a distance. Which I think serves the film well. Because, let me tell you, these people are insane for their teams. That distance communicates the differences between the average audience and these towns, but without condescending to them or painting them as redneck mongrels. Rather, it's just how it is there in these poor, hardscrabble, depressed towns. Good film.

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I read Saturday. Got to start thinking about what to read.

Which brings me to something Wendy and I were talking about. I'd love to start my own reading series. We have a great one here already so I wouldn't want to step on its toes. But I know so many good young poets and it'd be a lot of fun to be bringing them down here.

Of course, this means money. Which I don't have, certainly. Where is my wealthy patron?

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End of October manuscript deadlines:

Carnegie Mellon Press
Beatrice Hawley Award
Hollis Summers Prize

There are more, I'm sure. Paris Review prize, for example, but why bother?

Any I'm missing?