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APOLOGIES TO A MOTH

Forget the striated flutter caught in the door
like a summons to the high court
of the lyric moment; forego the Oz green luna
lovely beyond night’s cobalt
aesthetic; pass over the ragged palpitations
in the dust, mummified, and, alive,
with a fiendish jones for the moon
that is everywhere, everywhere, burning
up. About one poem, she said
attention was sexy and it was now time
to pay that debt—kissing her
leg, like happy hour, was a fetish
somewhere. Forget the scar,
faint, a crescent nick, lambent
in the light on her shin
she cut, years ago, shaving while drunk,
and forget the hay light
of her hair. Her breasts were more
than the architecture
of adolescence—
but what do I know about the pinwheel earth?
Only that once I wrote
a love poem, full of autumn
light that seems so like
a commodity, rare and wire-thin like the sky,
and for that poem I still
vibrate with a foolishness
that won’t leave. In it,
she swam in lakewater and found eggs
salting the surface
and split them open with her water-soft nail—
embryonic turtles
mothered her girl-palm for a moment
before dying. I loved
her broken heart, even
then. And mine beneath bone forgets to beat.

That green eyed monster

Victoria has been having a good discussion on jealousy between poets and I want to add my own story to it, but I'm still talking my brains out with students as they come in. So, later today. It's a good one, I think. It even involves cryptic death threats.

Heh. I'm serious. More later.

Down in Luckenbach, Texas ain't nobody feelin' no pain

A nice evening here, even if grading papers was the bulk of it. I put on Dylan's Live 1975, from the Bootleg series, where he's backed by The Band. Great. And now Willie Nelson's Smokin' at the Paradiso, another live set. Feels like company, helping immeasurably.

Long day, all day, tomorrow. Conferencing with students. And forgot to schedule time to, you know, eat. Oh well, Thursday is always a wrecking ball. Might as well amplify the effect.

Manuscripts go out tomorrow!

Those evil natured robots

Please note Laurel's new address (it had been wrong here for a few days) and drop by. We go way back. Not quite to puberty, but almost.

***

In the mail today: The Fall issue of Prairie Schooner, which features my poem "For a Woman's Back." Appropos of me, it talks about everything but a woman's back. Heh. This got accepted forever ago--two, maybe three years? So it was, of course, mailed to my old address in Tuscaloosa, then on to here, where I owed seventy cents postage. Doh. It's funny: I've been in three or four journals with Lola Haskins, counting this one. We frequent the same place, I guess. Who else in there? Virgil Suarez, of course. He sat next to us at AWP this year and was in a huff, having to sit so far back in that gorgeous, huge ballroom. Don't be late, dood. Mark Halperin. Maxine Kumin. Rick Bass. Amy Beeder. Sundry others. It looks like a good issue.

***

I'm thirsty.

By request

Never let it be said I don't seek to please. Josh Hanson, whose blog at http://www.livejournal.com/users/josh_hanson/ is always a smart read, asked if "Elegy for Gram Parsons" is out there in the world. And it is. In the latest issue of LitRag, a cool mag out of Seattle. As it's not widely available, here's the poem:

ELEGY FOR GRAM PARSONS

Dead in the seedy shag box of a squalid motel,
suffused with cheap liquor, half-fuel,
his body was stolen back, doused in idiot flame
in the alkaline heaven of the desert.
God grant me friends that fevered, I think
tonight, listening again to his handful of songs—
but let me outlive them. He deserves
better than my voice, unable to rise
to the crazed burr of the fiddle, so high
it seems the sky is sublimated, is made dark
music, is all ache ever. Once, in the road I found
a turtle crushed, its shell antique
and mortal. It ghosted my mind for days with grief.
And once, a woman touched me
and trapped me where we were in the sun,
and said I was beautiful, could she pray for me—
and all I could say was yes. Anything
to hurry time. Anything to slink away.
I can’t bear this speeded world—
to almost everything it seems I’ve come late.
I began this thinking of a singer
I loved, but somewhere he fell away and made of this
a double elegy, dying twice. And all
I can think of now is the monstrous sunflower that leaned
against your house. From the road,
I could see it. In those days, in that town
I left you in, the pain would fade
when you could stay no longer—
my heart thudded like a mallet.
I should stop using the word heart
to describe anything. I can’t help it,
at least not tonight, so it must be endured.
Isn’t that a kind of wisdom, worth so much twilight?
Dear forbearance, you matter:
let no one tell you different and while I live, never die.

Table o'

NOTES FOR MY BODY DOUBLE

Table of Contents

I. The All of Otherwise

Elba 4
Plenitude 5
Psalm in Rain 6
Minus 8
Romance 9
Negation 10
Questions for Godzilla 11
The Invisible Man Looks into a Mirror 12
Beyond Repair 13
The Naked 14
Daydreaming of Ghosts 15
The Pyromaniac’s Eulogy 16
The God of Neglect, Overheard 18
Needless Invocation 20
From the Black Lagoon 21
Veneration 23
Phylum 24
After Hearing of Your Separation, I Turn on the Radio 25
The Advent of Zero 27
Resignation 29
The Cartoonist in Hell 30
My Philosophy of Other Lives 31
On Being Asked Who the You Is in My Poems 32
Donald Duck’s Lament 33
Popular Romance 35
Manifesto 36
Pluto’s Loss 37
Consolation for Virgil 38
Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest 40
Notes for My Body Double 41
Benediction 43

II. The Nine Heavens

Eulogies at Midnight 44
For a Woman’s Back 45
Ode 47
Libretto for Insomnia 48
Aubade 50
Not for You 51
Hunger 52
First Flight 53
Like Hell 54
My Jazz Poem 55
Elegy for Gram Parsons 56
Living Underwater 57
My Anger 60
Perfume 61
Erasure 62
For a Night Clerk 64
Omaha 66
Poem in which I Seek Consolation in the Etymology of a Word 67
Victoria’s Secret 68
Love Poem 69
Water 71
Ptolemaic Sunset 72
XO 73
Lullaby 74
Dorotheannus 75

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

What a great, bizzaro-world album. I've been listening to it (via Napster) tonight while getting some work done. Printing out mailing labels, with the manuscript soon to follow. I can't decide whether to enter New Issues' Green Rose Prize. They're a great press and I love the people; they did a great job on my book. There's something to be said for staying with them. But, the thing is, harkening back to an earlier blog topic between me, Josh Corey, and Victoria on covers, I've never seen a Green Rose cover I particularly cared for. And you want to care for your cover. Still, that's all kinds of getting too far ahead.

I am sending out to these:

The Juniper Prize
The Brittingham Prize

and possibly these:

The Green Rose Prize
The Journal Award in Poetry (despite my protestations)

The Journal one is iffy. I probably won't. I've been a finalist a couple of times for the Brittingham so I've got to keep at that. What am I missing?

***

Ok, help me out, guys. Back in January I submitted my book to Milkweed Editions. A while after, in March, I'd lost my records of what was where. I emailed Milkweed to make sure I'd in fact sent there. Yes, I had, but since it had arrived a few days into February they were holding it for the June reading period. This shouldn't have mattered as it was only supposed to be postmarked in January, but that's unimportant. Ok, I said, just throw that version out, and I'd send again in June as six months would produce a very different ms. Shortly thereafter, however, the editor emailed to say that one of their readers had already read the ms., responded enthusiastically, recommending it be passed on for consideration. So this editor invited me to send a revised draft at my convenience, which I did.

So, Milkweed has been reading some version of this for seven months now. A couple of months ago, I queried, to no response. A month ago, again.

Advice?

ok

This is a challenge to myself: to write some manner of poem in this blog post window before class starts in thirty minutes. No guarantee of quality.

ELEGY FOR THE HALF-REMEMBERED

The wren-faced girl who dreamed her name
in dense doodle-script while June sun
melted our last learning away. Sixth grade
and the little grace I had, a scrap,
a crumb, already lifting away
from me like blotted ink. The crude diamond
where we played ball at dawn
and the dew soaked our socks
and shoes. The shoes that were sheared
from my feet, the hideous
yellow shorts and shirt
scissored down their middles to reveal mine--
and the bag in which each
ruined bit was given to my mother
where she waited
in chilled hospital air.
The dead blonde hair
of my cousin, dragged
drunken beneath a truck
the length of two football fields.
Virginia Legg, teacher of science,
her whole body shrunken like an arcane skull:
believer in UFO's, in green men
who swam around her
in alien swarms, in the ether of other,
and her grandaughter
born with osteogenesis imperfecta,
so fragile she was carried
through her life on pink pillows like a ring.
The same turn missed
every time. The song sang, smiling, in reverse.

Wow

if U2's new single from their upcoming album is any indication, it's going to be a real corker. The Edge as guitar superhero? I'll have that, please.

Currently, it's only on iTunes. And the radio.

***

And speaking of iTunes, I've got to say in some ways I prefer Napster. With Napster you pay a 9.95 subscription fee per month and can download just about everything in their catalog for free. Now, those files are restricted: to burn them or transfer them to an mp3 player you have to buy them just like iTunes. But with Napster I'm swimming in new music. It's great. And, yes, I'm essentially leasing the music as the license would expire if I cancelled my subscription. But that's a bargain still.

***

I'm using my fourteen year old tank of a wheelchair today, as the other is being, as the kids say, pimped out. This one, though, is like skiing in a canoe. I think. I mean ungainly. Yeah.

Off.

Thanks to

Oliver de la Paz, Ryan Wilson, and others who helped point me in the right direction towards getting links up and running. Appreciate that. I'll be adding to them later on tonight.

Oh, and thanks to Aimee, whose source code I stole. Brazenly! Without shame or remorse! Nada!

More later.

I'll wait for someone wise in these matters to teach me how to add in the links, but for now I'll content myself with the template as is.

It's nearly the end of September, which means there are deadlines approaching for my manuscript. I'll have to get them together, get money orders, collate, etc. So exciting, this part. Actually, it's kind of fun, especially if you do this with a friend. Eliot and I would order a pizza, put on some music, and start putting packets together. He's flying off to the University of North Alabama today to give a reading. I will probably never be invited back to the state of Alabama. ;)

Thinking about a new poem. About my eighth-grade science teacher who believed in UFO's with a fervor. But not so much about that. She had a grandaughter, a newborn, with brittle bone disease. And not so much about that either. More about the half-remembered things of the world, the citizens of the periphery, an elegy.

Links

Ok, so how do I add links? I know it involves pasting code into the template. But where, exactly?

Benedict Me

So I hinted a while back I might switch over here to Blogger and I'm a man of my word. Or boy. Maybe. So, goodbye to Livejournal, which I still really like, but it's limited in what it will allow you to do. Hence, my arrival here. I like so many people over here, I figured I'd crash the party.

Now, the problem is my having built up a readership there. I'll post a link and hope everyone updates theirs and follows me. Please? Grovelling is never attractive, y'all.

Of course, I'll be boring as ever. Nothing can change that genetically hardwired trait, my friends. For that, I'm sorry.

With that in mind, let's throw a party. I've got the space. What are you bringing?