Fun

here in Chattanooga with Wendy and Danny. Spent the day sitting by the river, nosing around in the used book store. Wendy bought Animal Soul by Bob Hicok and Paul Zweig's Eternity's Woods for me, which was really sweet.

Meanwhile, the guilty pleasures party is out of control. Keep it up, y'all!

Wendy sightings

in Johnson City and just now in Knoxville and very soon, here.

Ms. Wendy Wisner and her husband Danny will be arriving shortly for two nights and three days of Wheel of Fortune-level opulent vacationing.

Say hi to us!

Guilty!

While I'm figuring up grades to turn in tomorrow, let's start up a reader participation post. In one of my classes, my students had to make a presentation to the class. The topic? Guilty pleasures. Some of the students balked: but we don't like anything! This makes me insane, this reflexive impulse to show no interest in anything. But that's beside the point. It turned out to be a lot of fun. One girl, eensy, demure, quiet, loved horror movies. Which isn't so uncommon. But she reads Fangoria! Another student had a massive collection of Silver Age (generally the 60's) comic books. Which made me very happy (A+!). Another detailed her lifelong fascination with vampires; however, in doing some research she stumbled across websites by people who fancy themselves, to some degree, real vampires. I think the charm began to fade for her. At any rate, what are your guilty pleasures? Those Lifetime movies? A-Ha? Or Brittany? God forbid!

So be brave. Step into the bright light and share. I will if you do.

from The Onion

National Poetry Month Raises Awareness Of
Poetry Prevention
NEW YORK—This month marks the 10th National Poetry Month, a campaign created in 1996 to raise public awareness of the growing problem of poetry. "We must stop this scourge before more lives are exposed to poetry," said Dr. John Nieman of the American Poetry Prevention Society at a Monday fundraising luncheon. "It doesn't just affect women. Young people, particularly morose high-school and college students, are very susceptible to this terrible affliction. It is imperative that we eradicate poetry now, before more rainy afternoons are lost to it." Nieman said some early signs of poetry infection include increased self-absorption and tea consumption.

Read C. Dale's Slate poem

"Few Shall Answer"

A bustle in your hedgerow

I can't decide if it's really great that Dolly Parton covers "Stairway to Heaven" or, you know, disconcertingly weird....

It's about that time

I think I've posted this once before, but it's getting a bit closer, the deadline for this:

The St. Lawrence Book Award


This contest is interesting in that it accepts entries in either short fiction or poetry.

And I'm judging, so I'm excited to at long last have my chance to become a full-fledged Foet!

20,000

Zoinks. It seemed like it wasn't so long ago the little counter at the bottom of the page ticked off hit number 10,000. And that was cool. But 20,000? Now we're just getting silly, people. I mean, really, when was the last time I said anything interesting? Never! Never!

Well, I'm teasing, of course. I guess I still have some thought in my head that no one reads this, though I know that's not the case.

Which leads me to the question I've been thinking about for a few days:

how long to blog?

Is this something, for those of you who keep blogs, you see yourself still doing in a year, 2 years, 5 years?

It's such an open-ended, amorphous medium, which is part of its genius, if you want to call it that.

Your thoughts?

Was asked today

to review Leilani Hall's Swimming the Witch. For who, you ask?

This rag.

This, the Va. Tech reading, what will I be asked next? My hand in marriage?

Submit your proposals below....

;)

Neil Jung

SUCH AS MYSELF

How can one forget each day to eat something

or palm dry gobs of vitamins

or eye the nubile bark of the pink dogwood

burning like adolescence right there

in the miserable scrub of land,

in what no one would call a lawn—

not even the dictionary,

not even the newly born

into this language which trembles

like a rattle. How can one begin

the swim upward, through air,

through the sizzling day,

upward to the moon which is immense

at least to us singing our tiny

songs, each to each and then to no one at all.

And to the bottlebrush throngs

of the oversexed caterpillars

inching their wing-starved lives

towards a mate, towards their alien mating,

how can one make amends

to the living for all the dead

smashed beneath our shadows.

How can one sink in water

and wish to come back

to the reedy bank of the world

that will not pass away,

no matter the apple in the dream,

no matter the girl robed

in rain. How can one answer the choir of crows.

How can one weigh the air

against the gate of glass,

the dew-slick window,

the front door thrumming with the orbit of the days.

How can one turn out

the pockets of his love

and not fear the inventory.

How does one stop

the horizon spinning like a compass.

How does one go on.

Some good news

Bob Hicok called today to officially invite me to do a reading at Virginia Tech, where he now teaches. It'll be next spring and will be special: I'll be reading with my best friend Eliot Khalil Wilson, whose book, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, is just sickeningly good.

The last time we read together, just before both of us blew out of Tuscaloosa, John Carpenter-style, we wrote this poem together:

Goodbye Tuscaloosa
a duet with Paul Guest

Goodbye flying cockroaches you, too, were my ontology.
Goodbye Judas tree and dogwood.
Goodbye tulips. I touch your broken teeth.
Goodbye City Park pretty boys. My reading of Thoreau is changed forever
and I am forever changed.
Goodbye shitte Baptists. Look to the ninety-nine sheep still safe in your fold.
Goodbye I reckon, goodbye fixin to, goodbye might could and all other forms
of the Southern vague conditional.
Goodbye Wallace, a wall of my heart falling in when I put you in the ground.

Goodbye fraternity brothers, polyp brained, preppy rats, deaf and unweaned.
Goodbye yellowhammer and maypop.
Goodbye to every street that turned me back.
Goodbye to the last of my sweetness.
Goodbye late thunder of a summer night.
Goodbye magnolias. I will keep the memory of your shade like a secret.

Goodbye gardenia, soft as the sweet ears of an old woman.
Goodbye braless chain smoking attendant at the Cleansing Tide Laundrymat.
Your teeth are as yellow as crime scene tape, but your heart is clean as a hound’s tooth.
Goodbye Mexican roofers, burning in the sun or falling to your deaths. When I asked you
what day it was. I meant what century.
Goodbye Tuscaloosa News—how I lived your oxymoron.
Goodbye Professor Richard Rand. You were my Charleton Heston.

Goodbye electric chair in the Atmore Holman Correctional facility
and the tacky sadist who painted you spring sun-yellow.
Goodbye stumbly-wumblies.
Goodbye Denny Chimes, brick phallus, yours is the true hymn.
Goodbye Monster truck and the monthly gun and knife shows.
Goodbye helicopter, tank, and jet frozen in the moment of their suicidal attack on the mall.

Goodbye co-cola, goodbye sweet tea, you are as advertised.
Goodbye wacked zealots sandwich boarding for Jesus. Yes, God is angry at everyone but you. May a celestial wind fill your mainsail of vitriol and lift you to heaven
or some really high place.
Goodbye sorostitutes. I crunch your cell phones with my SUV, burn your black pants in effigy. “An effigy is an image or representation of a particular person."

Goodbye girls in galvanic sundresses. Yours was the true devotion.
Goodbye honeysuckle.
Goodbye darlin, suga, goodbye bless his hart.
Goodbye to the dye-haired ladies who are someone else’s doting grandmother.
Goodbye un-definable Capstone. So many times I asked and no one knew.

Goodbye balloon man, and bicycle Sam
Goodbye wisteria, perfumed Victorian, my spine is new-woven with your valentine.
Goodbye Ferguson Center Burger King employee. Meat maker. How like a god
in your near deafness and sudden anger and the way I’ve never seen your hands.
Goodbye Christian Rock and your fervent sucking.
Goodbye Jesus Christ Super Store. I’ve completed my collection of bobble-head apostles.

Goodbye to a whole state’s worth of bad road.
Goodbye Mcfarland Boulevard. I sing the body franchised and commercial.
Goodbye to fried corn, fried steak, fried okra, fried water.
Goodbye Montgomery Court House—you were a scene from Beckett.
Goodbye happiness, brief as the Tuscaloosa fall.

Goodbye teenage girls in NASCAR T-shirts. You can keep my lighter.
Goodbye Greene county and the hooked-wormed children of greyhound physiques. Remember, on a wet track, to bet on a heavy dog.
Goodbye Pepito’s Mexican Restaurant—and however one says joie de vivre in Mexican
Goodbye Stabler, goodbye Nameth.
Goodbye all discussion of football as a very thinly veiled homoerotic substitute for war.
Goodbye those five hours to New Orleans. You were my salvation.
Goodbye Shelton State Community College, students. Yours is the true devotion.
For you I am a poolside father, reluctantly away and mindful.
Goodbye the right Rev. Horton Heat and bapticisms in the courtyard of the Chukker.
Let me lie down between the bonfire and the library.
Let me lie down with Fob James and the Dubba Twins one last time.
Goodbye Y’all

Goodbye pedestrian faith healers who touched me without asking like I was pregnant.
Goodbye student health center doctors. Thanks for the barrels of codeine.
Goodbye to my reputation for bureautic disregard. It served me like a summons.
Goodbye cedar waxwings in the Foster’s holly, you good lieutenants of the sky.
Goodbye Paul Bear Bryant—drop kick me through the goal posts of life.
Goodbye Tuscaloosa. Your red clay roads do not run out.
I’ll speak to you, and you to me, together, in praise.

***

I'm thinking we'll have to write another one for this one.

O how the days go

Ok, since the announcer at last week's reading apparently vanished with my book, and since I gave a copy of my book to an old high school friend who I ran into the other night, plus the others I've sold, I now have two left in my stash. In honor of National Poetry Month, the first two people to post below can have them.

Good luck!

For Jeanine, whose copy of my book I forgot to sign in Vancouver. Keep in mind this is done with a pen in my mouth, so forgive the less than stellar penmanship.

No good reason

So I was (or am, hard to tell, exactly) feeling discouraged, down, blue, what have you. But discouraged is generally the right word. Sitting here, listening to Guero and then Gold Medal, which helped some, I decided to take a walk: motion, sunlight, trees spilling shade like a girl's long hair, the mountains in the distance -- all that is medicinal.

And it was. Until.

Until I had to swerve to avoid being clipped by some tool in his Manifest Destiny Land Cruising Destroyermobile (read: SUV, probably an Escalade). Which caused me to get stuck in a drainage grate in the road. Luckily, a nice guy was right there and gave me a push.

Behind the Memorial Auditorium (where I've seen Bob Dylan two or three times and, um, Def Leppard on a blizzardy night), my chair skids to a sudden halt. No power, no go. No va.

Great, just great. I'm nearly run over and now stranded within five minutes of leaving my apartment. And nobody's around.

I finally flag down a security guard who calls the UTC Police, who show up, yank the batteries, reconnect them, and restore power. Apparently, when I had to swerve, got stuck, the jolt partially disconnected them. A tiny bump on the sidewalk then shut me down.

I headed home. Clearly, ill omens are flying about, even on this beautiful day.

***

This beautiful day in which I had lunch beneath a tree with a friend.

***

Congratulate the cagey David Hernandez. His second book has been accepted for publication. I also have it on good authority he's been named editor of The Antarctic Review. If you know his previous history with them, then you'll have some idea how surprising that is.

***

Would anyone like to read the manuscript for my second book? I'd like some fresh eyes with a hankering for (presumably) fresh poems.

Today

I'm discouraged. Blah.

So

I sent David Kirby a letter today, thanking him for the almost mention and for the nice review of Lucia's book. I threw in a copy of my book. It'll be interesting to see if there's any response.

***

Was asked just this morning to do a blurb for Frank Matagrano's forthcoming first book, I Can Only Go As Fast As The Guy In Front Of Me. I don't know Frank but I'm looking forward to reading the book. I've never done a blurb before so this will be interesting.

Fubar

Fubar

For starters, scratch the woman weeping over her dead cat--
sorry, but pet death barely puts the needle in the red zone.
And forget about getting brownie points
for any heartbreak mediated by the jukebox.
See the leaves falling; isn't this the trees' way of telling us to just buck up?

Oh they are right: their damage is so much greater than our damage.
I mean, none of my body parts have actually dropped off.
And when the moon is fat and handsome, I know we should be grateful
that its face is only metaphor; it has no teeth to chew us out.
In fact, the meadow isn't spattered with the tatters of our guts.

But in last night's hypnagogic dreamscape where I went
to collect some data. Where I was just getting into the swing of things
tranquility-wise. Then this kid came rolling through the moonlight
in a bed with lots of Rube Goldberg traction rigging.
And it was a kid like you, some kid with a broken neck.

And maybe beauty is medicine quivering on the spoon
but surely you have noticed--the goat painted on the famous old Greek urn
is headed to the slaughter. And don't get me started
on the wildflowers or they will lead me to the killer bees.
And that big ol' moon will lead to a cross section of the spinal cord.
And the trees to their leaves, all smushed in the gutter.
And the gutter to the cat squashed flat as a hotcake.
And the hotcake to the grits, and the grits to the South,
where the meadows were once battlefields.
When a full moon only meant a better chance at being shot.

But come on, the sun is rising, I'll put a bandage on my head,
and we'll be like those guys at the end of the movie--
you take this crutch made from a stick.
For you the South is a mess, what with its cinders and its smoldering.
And looky, looky here at me: I'm playing the piccolo.

Lucia Perillo

***

I don't print the poem to trumpet my place in the poem; I didn't do anything to deserve it. Not really. But it opens up for discussion this interesting idea of how poets talk to each other and poems to other poems.

Not to suggest I know better than David Kirby what "Fubar" is about -- well, ok, just this once I will. Lucia isn't, as he writes in his review, "wagging her finger at those who haven't earned the same right to sympathy." She's wagging her finger at me. She's busting my chops over some recurring images/tropes in my first book, and in this poem in particular (oddly appropriate since I just mentioned it the other night):

On the Persistence of the Letter as a Form

Dear murderous world, dear gawking heart,

I never wrote back to you, not one word

wrenched itself free of my fog-draped mind

to dab in ink the day’s dull catalog

of ruin. Take back the ten-speed bike

which bent like a child’s cheap toy

beneath me. Accept as your own

the guitar that was smashed over my brother,

who writes now from jail in Savannah,

who I cannot begin to answer. Here

is the beloved pet who died at my feet

and there, outside my window,

is where my mother buried it in a coffin

meant for a newborn. Upon

my family, raw and vigilant, visit numbness.

Of numbness I know enough.

And to you I’ve now written too much,

dear cloud of thalidomide,

dear spoon trembling at the mouth,

dear marble-eyed doll never answering back.

***

So the "pet death" in Lucia's poem, the "woman weeping over her dead cat," well, that's my mom. She had this beloved Persian cat named Licorice. One morning my freshman year of college, just out of bed and still bleary, I watched Licorice stretch out in the floor at my feet. He then went into violent seizures in which he twisted like a towel being wrung out, flipping over and over. I can still hear his claws scratching the hardwoor floor. To this day, it's probably the most violent thing I've ever seen. And then he was dead.

My mother went to the funeral home where her mother had been on display (how else to describe it?) and bought a coffin intended for newborns. A tiny thing, lined in baby blue. She buried him in the front yard between two trees just outside my old bedroom window.

So Lucia is, I think, asserting the primacy or value of human suffering over that of animals. And giving me a nudge: wise up, boy!

The bit about jukeboxes comes from me loving jukeboxes. I had several poems that mentioned them in varying ways. Another smack against the back of my head.

Whap!

I've made the big time

I've been mentioned in The New York Times. Well, sorta. In the Sunday Book Review, poet David Kirby reviews Lucia's new book Luck is Luck. He is seemingly most fond of the poem "Fubar":

An even more radiant poem is ''Fubar,'' from a military acronym best rendered in these pages as ''fouled up beyond all repair.'' ''Fubar'' appears to be addressed to a friend who is paraplegic, and Perillo starts by wagging her finger at those who haven't earned the same right to sympathy, like the woman mourning her dead cat (''sorry, but pet death barely puts the needle in the red zone'').

Yes, I am he who is the apparent "paraplegic." It's too funny. So close! I'm going to have to find a print copy to preserve my kinda sorta fame.

Bamboozled!

Well, not really. But I was surprised last night, showing up at the reading. I didn't quite know what to expect. In my mind, I was expecting some small group of people. Not an audience of 40 or so people. And there were about six of us reading, round robin style. Interesting group. I was flat, I think, kind of taken aback; it didn't seem the crowd was my target audience. I read three poems from my book: "On the Persistence of the Letter as a Form," "The Flesh," and "Small Wonder."

***

I'm listening to Steve Martin's album Let's Get Small. Genius stuff.

Live from

Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library. This place once seemed immense. Not so much now. I came here once in jr. high to check out Humphrey Carter's biography of J.R.R. Tolkien. I don't know why I remember that.

I had to get a guest card to use this pc. When the lady asked for my last name, I think she thought I was being cheeky.

Yes, I said cheeky.

Rainy day, go away

I like Fence well enough and in the past they've kinda sorta liked me; I got another nice note, a nice rejection, from them yesterday. But the thing is, I couldn't remember sending there. So I checked my records and discovered why I had forgotten. The note arrived two days short of being out an entire year. 363 days. I'm not complaining: all those poems are published now and I wasn't even aware they had them. I'm really just imagining the huge mounds of stuff they, and other journals, have to process. C. Dale! You must feel daunted at times. I edit Mot Juste and we're still small enough that it's quite manageable. New issue soon, by the way. Send poems if you'd like; I'm looking for 5-10 more poems to fill out the issue.

Anyway, that contrasts with The Southern Review, who once rejected me in six days. I had the poems back in my mailbox in six days. That's travel time there and back. I suspect it went right back out the day it arrived. Ouch.

***

Finally caught some baseball games over the weekend. The Lookouts have their home opener here this weekend. I think I'll go.

***

I'm supposed to do some kind of reading tonight at the downtown library but if it's raining I might not go. No walking in the rain for me. And it's not just me who's reading, so I'm not leaving them, the Chattanooga Creative Writers Guild, in the lurch. It's a National Poetry Month celebration here. We'll see.

o

IF ONLY YOU COULD GIVE ME AN ORACLE TO SEE HOW IT ALL ENDS

for Alison Stine

Forgive me if this ordered oracle is not

so oracular. Times are hard, we tell

each mirror in which our face swims

up like a haunted koi. Time is harder

and even the ache of our bones

is apostate. And here we wait,

burning up time. This way, we’ll learn nothing.

I will not be able tell you how

to miss the implosion of traffic

on your way to the park, to the pond

where ducks gorge on rinds of bread

because it’s spring, because

the seasonal lunacy is upon us like a light.

Isn’t the moon, somewhere,

in the glowing honeycombs

of that word, lunacy, present, tidal?

Leave the dictionary to be

denizen of dust. We’ll ask the oracle every origin.

But you wanted endings. An end,

a tidiness in the littered wake

of your life. I wait with you

and just these words, from which a child

might make solemn guesses.

In the end, none of us will live to see

that jellyfish are sentient,

their liquid selves rippling with saline algebra.

And Bigfoot will not come down,

at last, from the ancient bowers

of the poorly photographed,

asking for a bath, a shave, a steady job,

worth in our world beyond

stupid myth. And for this I’m glad

like a child. Like a flower

before the storm of a bee’s blurred wings.

I’m glad to live in darkness

for part of my days. Once

I loved a woman who would not undress

except in the dark, except

in the shadows of her comfort,

and so I was glad to see the sun pass away

or her hand upon the light

switch. But even this came to its end.

No one was surprised

but me. To have had your oracle then!

It would have saved me

from a different darkness,

in which my skin touched only the air.

But then each switch

for me would mean nothing

and dusk bereft

of her shyness would be

only the hour of the cricket’s sad song.

I would not know what to miss.

This is too cool

A concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in my book:

concordance

under

WHETHER

Inside the ghost of a lemon grove I stood.

Or seemed to, each early morning

the elevator bore me up to where you taught,

where the woman who cleaned

had come before with her sacrament

of false citrus. Mysterious machine—

at least to children unable to quite discern

whether they rose or fell,

until the latent lurch, the stammered stop

and the doors shuddering

and the translated world returning.

But, a desperate world.

And it was there we would kiss like shadows.

Or like fools. Of need,

we had need. In that air we made

a vault of breath and motion and

constraint. In that air: persimmon seeded,

a garden wrapped in light

like bark, and both of us unsure

unto the last fossa within

whether we trespassed or whether welcome

walled us in.

Black tambourine

In all the hubbub of the recent week and a half, I've neglected to mention Beck's new album, Guero. Which is predictably great. It's a more modest, in some ways at least, album than, say, Midnite Vultures (what album isn't?): Beck isn't really the wacky 25 year old anymore. After Mutations, after Sea Change, a space, a human space, has opened up in his work for the un/non-ironic. Balladry, mood, melancholy. A piano. Strings. Here and there. That said, the album is still out there. Video game sounds, car horns "honking like a mariachi band," daffy na na choruses -- all that and more percolates in the mix. Guero just isn't designed to go off like a bomb. It isn't the throwback to Odelay some claim. It's a slowburn of wildfire.

cut

ANTIDOTE

There is a moment and there is a singing
bird and both are brutal
in this green, in this animal air.
You asked what might call
halt to the tender world,
the world like the pink white skin
beneath a scarlet scab,
and you asked it all in measures of breath.
But you were not singing.
And if you spoke at all,
if your mouth made more
than a bee’s fleshy hum,
I will never remember it all.
Maybe it was your hand,
vein-rooted, your skin tamped down
so close to the floating bones
I have always been alarmed
for them. Like crayoned eggs.
Like the fragile air
one dreams for his child
when the street seems scented
by sulfur. I stood there
and let the morning seduce me,
the lie of that day, that
invidious instant,
that story framed with moonbeam
in a jellied sky. To what
end did I speak
to each absent ear?
The first five songs made no sense at all.
But you cannot claim iotas
of surprise. If you live,
if the collaboration
of each threaded nerve
with each marbled muscle
served to bring you here
in the hall of your voice,
then you understand.
And this is how my body began
to know love. In the dark, the stolen darkness.

AWPotpourri

Following, a randomized list of random trivia, facts, sightings, sighings, rumors, suspicions, lingering discontentments, love letters, complaints, supplications, entreaties, obeissances, genuflections, misdirections and other stuff:

• Victoria Chang is just the best. No if's about it. We met in an empty room while I was killing time before her panel. Lunch on Friday where she witnessed some extra special service given to us by the little underground deli. We forgot to have our sandwiches toasted. About this, we were sorely aggrieved. Her husband Todd then joined us. He's great, too. They sent two cupcakes up to my room. Enough said.
• Bob Hicok and I whispering all through one panel. "Can you talk about poems like this," he asked. "No," I said. "We're in the wrong profession," he said. "Yes," I agreed.
• Chad Davidson in his Constant Rock Star get-up. Too funny. Hockey haiku. Both of us spouting off in German.
• Meeting Jill for the third AWP in a room. I say we go for a fourth in Austin. Hi, Jill!
• Forgetting to sign Jeanine's copy of my book. I'm sorry! Send it to me and I will. I promise.
• Dinner with Lucia Perillo and Jane Mead in their hotel room. Take-out Chinese!
• Frinding out I was a finalist for the Tufts Prize. I never knew!
• Trying to decide if that was Merwin at the bar at the Fairmont or some random old guy. Random old guy. Merwin showed up shortly thereafter, though, and had a drink.
• Lollipops from the beautiful Stacey Brown.
• Practically living at the Hyatt Bar, where Adrian commandeered and kept the best spot in the whole bar, the massive corner windows with a view of the castle-like Fairmont rising up.
• The rapid-fire Crazyhorse reading. Nearly knocked over the table. I should have. Dramatic end to my poem. "Yeah, I read a poem. If you don't like it, fine!" :)
• Seeing uncorrected galleys of Ander Monson's forthcoming book from Tupelo, Vacationland.
• Jon Tribble's awesome knowledge of just about everything. I love Jon.
• The almost comically pleasant people of Canada.
• Rigoberto Gonzalez summoning me to the Swink table by calling out, "Paul! Honey!" This was followed by Rigoberto chastizing me for not mentioning here I had a poem in the just released issue of Swink. So I mention it here!
  
• Mavis the hotel lobby dog.
• The conference that came in just after AWP: The American Mosquito Control Association. I'm serious.

The rain-soaked view of the AirCanada terminal leaving Vancouver on Sunday. I should have known how the day would go.

That's Mistress of Ceremonies Victoria Chang introducing someone at the NextGen reading, which was great. 

Me and Aimee Nez. Notice my stupid grin. Dumbstruck by the Aimee-loveliness. 

The outskirts of Vancouver. Malkat, my taxi driver, was driving just short of mach 18, hence the blur. 

The Canadian Rockies. I think. 

Me and Adrian Matejka, author of The Devil's Garden.

When last

When last we left our intrepid international travellers, I'd just been asked by a flight attendant in Toronto if I could identify my wheelchair. Why yes, I could. He nodded and walked back to the front of the plane. Some fifteen minutes passed before he reappeared.

"Has anyone talked to you about your wheelchair?" he asked.

"Not really, no."

He seemed to grimace, but with a kind of mordant humor. He nodded and walked off.

Shortly, the pilot began to speak over the jet's PA system:

"Ladies and gentleman, I'd like to explain the reason behind the ongoing delay of our departure. It seems we have lost the electric wheelchair of one of our passengers and are currently looking for it. As he needs it, we won't leave until we find it."

Yes, you read that right. Somehow they managed to "lose" a 200 lb. electric wheelchair. At this point, I was just laughing. Good grief. As Bugs Bunny said, what a bunch of maroons. Without belaboring the point, they eventually found the chair and we took off for Chicago.

All this lost time almost certainly meant I'd miss my flight back to Chattanooga. The last flight of the day. And, sure enough, I did. The woman, named Karen, at the ticket desk was mortified. The more she heard about the whole fiasco, her face seemed to darken. Karen began making phone calls, tapping furiously away at keyboards (what can they possibly be doing?), and sending Mike, one of the guys who helped transport me off the plane, looking for our luggage. He soon returns to tell us there is no sign of our luggage anywhere. I'm not surprised. I'd half-expected them to bring me someone else's wheelchair.

So Karen leaves her desk, her post. Leaves! She's AWOL now, with us and Mike, a squat, fire-plug of a man, in tow.

Downstairs, the woman in charge of luggage, Lisa, did not offer much hope. She didn't have it. It had likely been stored in the cavernous facility where thousands of pieces of luggage are stored and sorted for later flights. Mike basically resolved to bust in after calling over there and getting the run-around. He retrieved one of our bags but not the other, the most important one. I imagine an Indiana Jones-like scene of Mike swinging in, punching out Nazi goons, clambering to the top of a mountain of luggage piled high.

Karen arranged to put us up at the airport Hilton and gave us vouchers for three meals. We were booked on a 1:20 flight. The rest of the trip passed without incident.

Those three AirCanada employees were heroic. They'll be praised in my otherwise scathing letter to AirCanada's headquarters. That kind of confusion and ineptitude is just unacceptable.

It was a bad end to an otherwise great trip. More to come soon.

Vancouver rain

Wow. Overload. That's really what AWP is about. From the seven zillion readings and panels to the cascade of books, AWP seems designed to overwhelm. But I love the experience. This was my third time going and in some ways most special. Meeting many of you was fantastic. I feel like Victoria Chang and her husband Todd are old friends already. Aimee Nez was marvellous and sweet. Jennifer Thornton, we should hang out in hotel lobbies more often. Jeanine Gailey and Shanna Compton are too cute. Kelli Agodon? She mugged me. Knocked me over the head and stole one of my books then ran away. Met Josh Corey, too, who was way cool. Oliver del la Paz. C. Dale. Ali Stine, who is really sweet and cute. Who else? I may be leaving out a blogger or two. If I am, apologies! It's hard to recall everyone.

And so today is Monday. Maybe you're wondering why I'm behind most of the other bloggers in posting my thoughts. Maybe you're not. But I'll tell you, anyway.

The trip back was nightmarish. I flew out of Vancouver at 8:20 Sunday morning for the very long flight to Toronto. We were on a 330 AirBus, an amazing, immense vehicle, the biggest plane I've been on. Behind me sat the editor of Another Chicago Magazine; I fought the urge to turn around and say thanks for publishing a couple of poems from a few years ago. Nearing Toronto, the weather turned nasty: high winds, rain and snow. We circled over Toronto for 45 minutes before landing. On the ground, it took a long while for Air Canada's people to help me out of my seat and into the aisle chair. In case you've never seen one, it's like riding your wallet through a mail slot in a door. They then pushed me towards the next terminal but the elevator was broken. So I had to walk this huge distance back towards the shuttle center, be driven around the other side of the airport, and finally transferred on to the plane.

On the plane now, I asked the flight attendant to be sure my chair was being loaded on to the plane. Oh yes, she said. That's what they just told me. She gave me a too-cheery thumbs up. Everyone was boarded but the plane did not move. We waited. And waited. Followed by an extra dose of waiting. The pilot announced that they were loading a final piece of luggage and would be leaving in no more than five minutes. Those five minutes came and went. Another attendant came back to me. He asked if I could describe my wheelchair for him. That sinking sensation began....

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Mega-post of (mis)adventures coming up soon.