Once more

Finally reached the long-awaited "Once More, With Feeling" episode of Buffy. Famously a musical, it occurs to me that everything that's great about the show is brought into stark relief by the singing, even more so than in "Hush," which was mostly worldless. Often, it's easy for, in this case, a few years of advance hype to blunt the power of a movie/show/play/etc. Little is capable of standing up to such hype. Here's the exception to that merciless rule. A handful of times I had chills, not so much because of danger, peril, or whatever, but because of the emotional resonance of the scenes, seeing the distillation of what you've come to love about these people: seeing the rest of the gang decide, after all, to join in with Buffy, to stand with her -- you're seeing how art or artifice raises the ordinary (walking out of the magic shop, down the sidewalk) to the mythic, the transcendant. And that's precisely the source of my chills, bravery that's thrilling. What a wonderful episode. You almost wish it had been saved for the very last.

Ask me

any question. I'll answer. Or try to.

*Edit: I originally meant questions about me, but the oracular angle is fun, too... ;) *

Postcard from Ali Stine 

Rita

As people are now fleeing Galveston, Houston, and who knows where else, my friend Melanie Jordan is somewhere in the exodus, now north of Dallas. I just got off the phone with her: she's with her boyfriend, his mother and sister and a dog. Happy to hear she left last night, early, before the wretched gridlock.

Tentative Meacham schedule

So I agreed to read. Why not? According to Rebecca, I'm to read Friday, October 28th, at noon. Apparently, Stern and Tate, along with Rick Jackson, will read Friday night at eight. I could see that changing: that's an awfully top-heavy reading; maybe one of them might read Thursday night? But that's pure speculation. For Saturday, it looks like Dara Weir will be reading.

For the uninitiated, here's more info. And, maybe, just maybe, a pic of Laurel Snyder walking with Mark Jarman. And some other dude I'm not recognizing, but probably should.

Paulcast

I mean, podcast. I mean, MiPoRadio. I mean, I'm on it. Click.

***

How fun to be sending out poems again! All last year, I never really had to. Several editors asked for work, miracle of miracles, so I went the whole year without the kind of lovely tedium of getting submissions together. Getting these out reminds me of so much: those heady days in awful Alabama. There were so many wonderful poets there. I'm going to brag on the gang:

Eliot Wilson, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go
Ander Monson, Vacationland and Other Electricities
Josh Bell, No Planets Strike
Leah Nielsen, No Magic
Sophia Kartsonis, Intaglio, which just won the Wick first book prize
Tim Earley, Boondoggle

That's everyone with books, I think. I'm leaving out people who will, any day, have books too. People like Ted Worozbyt and Abraham Smith. I'm proud of, and miss, them all.

What to do

Every semester UTC has the Meacham Writers Workshop, three days of readings and workshops and individual conferences with visiting writers for students. We've had Ashbery, Milosz (during his reading, the university's marching band began, well, marching by outside -- he couldn't decide whether to be amused or just plain confused, it seemed), Levine, Tate, Jarman, D. Weir, and tons of other great poets. Always a good lineup. I've read a zillion times myself, it seems. Well, it's coming around again. There's a part of me that'd be content to just sit this one out, absence making the heart grow fonder, or at least less indifferent, after all. But, then, there's another part of me, the one that isn't weary or feeling like a kicked puppy, that is all about getting up in front of James Tate and Gerald Stern, two of the poets coming, and kicking out the jams.

Such as they are.

So should I read? What would you do? Advise, please.

Wave

Is it nuts to obsess over obsession? Probably. Well, I'm not nuts, not certifiable, not just yet at any rate. But I have been thinking a lot about the forces that shape the poems one writes, the poems one cannot help but write. I'm not a huge fan of Mark Jarman's work but, oddly, the first poem of his I ever read has stuck with me over the years. It was called "Groundswell," a poem, ostensibly, about learning to surf, paddling out on the board, when an older boy, an accomplished surfer, swims by with ease on his way to meet the waves. Spelled out this way, it's kind of obviously an ars poetica but it never really announces itself as such until near its end. In its way, it's also about returning to what is brightest, strongest, hardest, most compelling in whatever way that resonates most deeply. And so I've been thinking about my groundswell/s, and my own touchstones, my own obsessions, if you will. It's easy to become distrustful, to fight against them, which I've done, but I tend to think there's nothing one can do. You're imprinted, stamped, by life. You might as well honor that fact in your writing.

Toilet literature

Read Melissa's latest post on a suddenly soggy Raymond Carver volume.

When you come back, what's your bathroom reading consist of?

Even though

the window is titled "Prayer" by Dan Winchester, the poem is mine, here, at The Burnside Review, who just awarded lovely Laurel Snyder their first chapbook contest for Daphne & Jim, which is cool news indeed.

As for "Happiness," it's a response to a poem by my good friend Ted Worozbyt (himself an honorable mention in the Burnside contest) called "Sadness." C. Dale might remember Ted's poem, as it appeared in NER.

I swear, one of these days Kevin Bacon will publish a book of poems.

Then the cosmos will implode.

Octopoem

THESE ARMS OF MINE

Let’s promise never to love like the octopus:

floating in darkness, in jellied ink,

its beak the only hardness it knows,

and though I can’t imagine how

it helps matters, in the eight-armed

midst of its mating, a limb

will often fall away, separate from the body,

by ecstasy amputated to the silt.

All morning I’ve failed to find

why, though no one fails to mention

that death soon follows all

this armlessness. It’s fascinating but a mess.

Imagine if each time we kissed

my ear fell off. If the morning

was not so much for brushing

the fog of the night from the mouth,

but reassembly. You might go

out into the day with my bad ankle.

I’d never hear the end.

What would there be to talk about

except that we were falling

apart, and too soon, and how dull

it had all become, this entropy, this shedding,

this habit of the cephalopod

no one can explain. Maybe

it’s like the threatened sea cucumber

everting its guts, to leave

less to hunger’s hunger. Maybe

eight arms is one arm too many to bear

in the alien instant

of that inscrutable love.

That I would understand, that I could recognize

in the mirror of my skin,

in yours, there in the crushing depth

of the night. There we’d find

each other like exotic gods,

our hands manifold, our fingers infinite—

well, almost. Soon:

the subtraction, the severing, the silence like a wave.

Lost

Received the first season dvd set of Lost in the mail yesterday; excited about tucking in to that. I've only ever seen an episode or two (downloaded illegally!), thought they were very cool, and everyone raves. The beloved Aimee, lost to us bloggers, fittingly, loves the show. So I had to order. It'll be good to be absorbed in something, anything, other than CNN.

One thing I love already about the first disc is its menu: a low shot of the doctor lying unconscious in the bamboo where the first episode begins. His chest rises and falls. The green stalks of bamboo sway in the breeze. Minimal music plays, before the sounds of something trampling through the foliage begins. It's spooky and hypnotic, all at once. I'm looking at it now, can't look away.

***

As long as we're talking Lost, I might as well mention J.J. Abrams, its creator, and also the man behind Alias, probably my favorite thing ever. I've never really watched it on tv, though, catching it instead on dvd. I tried to watch it each week last year but things like AWP and readings knocked me out of the loop, so I reverted back to dvd only status. And it grieves me that the fourth season seemed pretty off, aimless, at least from what I saw. I know ABC had demanded more standalone episodes, denaturing what had been one of the show's strongpoints: the epically involved plotlines, backstories, vendettas, alliances, etc. Taken with the third season, which, while very good, made a few wrong steps, I'd be embarassed to admit how depressed I'd be if the show limped to an end.

So I'm a nerd. Moving on. If C. Dale can have his Carnivale, I can have my Alias. It all strikes me as funny because I never watch tv.

I'm rambling.

***

Second blurb received.

***

I need a job.

***

I'm beginning in my advanced age to make a kind of peace with autumn. It's a gorgeous season, yes, but I've never been able to forgive it for letting winter slip in the back door.

But, here, summer is oh so slightly beginning to recede. Just by a scant few degrees. And I'm enjoying it, trying not to think about the dull grey rain that winter means here. No snow, just dull and drizzly. Bah, I say.

But, for now, I'll manage.

St. Lawrence finalists

Here

Dean Young at Slate

All That Died in the Cat-Punctured Mouse

Testify

Amen.

I'm curious

What do you wear to bed?

Escape from New Orleans

Is anyone envioning a kind of Escape from New York scenario as President Bush finally visits the Gulf Coast area today? If you haven't seen the movie, it's set in an apocalyptic future in which New York is a waste land, walled off, a penitentary full of roving gangs. The president's plane crashes inside the zone and he is taken hostage. Kurt Russell is sent in to rescue the president. Outlandish in 1981, it doesn't seem that far-fetched today.