Lights

Thanks to the awesome Cornshake (I can't recall how secret her identity is supposed to be anymore) for teaching my humble little volume of verse in her intermediate creative writing class.

Jonathan Johnson has used it a couple of times in his workshops at Eastern Washington University and he does something fun: he sets up a speakerphone in the classroom and they call whoever they're reading and have a Q&A session. Both times I've really enjoyed it.

Last year, in fact, Wendy Wisner and her husband Danny were visiting with me when they were going to call. We had dinner downtown at Thai Smile and walked back in the warm May evening.

I guess I was excited to have them staying with me, so I was just on when Jonathan called. Really funny that night. I had us all laughing. Good times.

Anyway, thanks again, sort of secret identity lady.

Everywhere you go

All this week, temperatures in the 60's. Can I get an amen?

***

I'm suddenly seized by business. Getting manuscripts out in the mail is, for me, like digging a tunnel with a spoon. But not a regular soup spoon. No, a Barbie spoon. And that makes for slow going, my friends.

When your hands and arms don't work, when you're me, typing, writing, these things are in no way impeded by my disability.

But when it's time for the words to be birthed into the physical world, to appear on crisp, 24 lb. paper, I begin to hate all those sheets just a little bit.

It's one reason why I post new poems here. It takes the place of printing them out.

God help when I'm dealing with 60 pages by myself. Moving them around with a mouthstick that's probably twelve inches in length with a rubber tip at its end can be tedious. Not really challenging, though, as I've figured out, in these twenty years almost, how to make do. For example, I accidentally printed out a copy of my manuscript in reverse the other day, last page first and so on. It probably took me an hour to flip the pages in the right order.

Then there's the collating, clipping, stapling, addressing, stamping, stuffing, sealing, taping. I'm probably leaving something out. All of that is mostly beyond me. So I have to have somebody else do that for me. These days for me somebody's are in short supply.

I'm not complaining, though. There's an excitement in beginning again, corresponding with editors, mailing, rinse, repeat.

***

I didn't mean to steal any of Laurel's thunder (as if I could!) by posting the Meacham line-up before she had herself announced it. My bad. Sorry, Laurel.

***

Making plans to read here on March 23rd with this evildoer.

Meek

Line-up of poets at the Meacham Writers Workshop, March 30-April 1:

Ralph Angel

William Pitt Root

Lydia Melvin

Laurel Snyder

Of course, there will be the usual cast of miscreants who include:

Richard Jackson

(Wait, that's totally the wrong link for Rick. I mean, it's easy to confuse that Rick with this Rick.)

Earl Braggs

Rebecca Cook

and me.

All is full of love

As a little, meaningless, memento of the book that almost was, and hopefully will someday (soon) be, here is the table of contents for Notes for My Body Double:

NOTES FOR MY BODY DOUBLE

Table of Contents

Plenitude 3

Elba 4

On Being Asked Who the You Is in My Poems 5

Questions for Godzilla 6

The Invisible Man Looks into a Mirror 7

Beyond Repair 8

Minus 9

History 10

Psalm in Rain 11

Romance 13

Negation 14

At Night, in November, Trying Not to Think of Asphodel 15
The Naked 16

Daydreaming of Ghosts 17

The God of Neglect, Overheard 18

From the Black Lagoon 20

How It Won’t Be 22

Early in a New Year 23

Veneration 24

Apologia 25

After Hearing of Your Separation, I Turn on the Radio 27

Resignation 29

The Cartoonist in Hell 30

My Philosophy of Other Lives 31

Donald Duck’s Lament 32

Popular Romance 33

These Arms of Mine 35

Such as Myself 36

Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest 37

Notes for My Body Double 38

Questions for Silence 40

For a Woman’s Back 41

Ode 42

Perfume 43

Erasure 45

Praise 47

Poem in which I Seek Consolation in the Etymology of a Word 48

Hunger 49

The Numbers Are Not In 50

Love Poem 52

Water 54

Ptolemaic Sunset 55

Lullaby 56

Garden 57

Since

Two manuscripts go out in the mail today. The insanity begins in earnest, again. It's been a while, a year almost. It gets me nostalgiac for the old Alabama days, which were horrid, but also wonderful. And I miss the secret printing lab, where we could print out untold copies of our manuscripts for free. When they handed them to you, they were warm, like bread.

I haven't printed the manuscript out in a long time. It's slim, 57 pages, but not insubstantial. On good paper, it has a pleasing heft to it.

It reminds me to be confident in my work. To believe others will value it.

hap

SOMETHING HAPPY

One day you find yourself a bullet

fired from the barrel of your old

life. In the baptism of the shower

you begin to speak fluent

Dolphin. No one stops to inform

you smell like a sarcophagus

and the clouds begin

their strange worship of your shadow.

What was it about London

that plagued you so long

ago? The girl whose hair haunted

your hands does not

speak Dolphin, not even a word

or enough to confess

desire beneath the blue shell of a wave.

You are free to forget

at last, in this hour,

while the sun spills about you,

the last memory

of her breasts.

And so you do.

Your pockets cough up hidden inheritances

and the song you sing

is, well, not your own

but if your mouth were a bucket

today it carries the tune

well enough

that you cause the air no permanent offense

and while flowers

do not follow

you like the time-lapsed sun

neither do

the squiring bees

who would die

to leave in you

the thorn of their one and only venom rich sting.

If this is not

happiness

then nothing is

and nothing could ever be.

Catch

EXIT INTERVIEW

This is about failure but let’s pretend

it’s the rain that fixes us here

stamping our feet in this gulag

of a month. Let’s pretend the moon

isn’t the sky’s scar tissue.

Let’s pretend the artifact

of our breath will remain

obedient, not like a good dog

licking the deep salt

from your hands, but like

a robot or a butler,

or in a better world than this one,

a robot butler. Let’s say

it was summer

and the world

became a lurid green

and all we could

do to survive was darn the socks of tyrants

in a cave beside

the green murmur of the sea.

What would it mean

turning to you

in the night

disguised in the milk light of the moon?

To your throat

I would press

my lips like a voided stamp.

You could never return me.

If this life is

the only one,

it will not be so hard to love ashes before salt.

To always ache.

Fun with cameras, taken by Molly, age 7.

I can hear that lonesome whistle blowing

For those of you who were looking forward to Notes for My Body Double, your wait has now been indefinitely extended. In fact, Notes is, well, no more. It's back to being an abstraction, a file on my hard drive, a stack of paper.

Yesterday I withdrew the book from the publisher. There were production issues that they were upfront about and in light of those I felt it was best for me and my book to go a different direction.

On one hand, I hated doing it; I very much was looking forward to it appearing in the near future. On the other hand, though, there's a kind of thrill in starting over, something like the rush of free-fall, perhaps.

It will be a huge headache, even though I'm kind of excited. I haven't sent anything, manuscript-wise, for a year now.

I'd like to stay away from the contest route, if I can, though. That way lies madness.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd appreciate them.

Here

ECHO

There is not a katydid anywhere near

drawing its strange fathoms

of breath into its odd non-lungs,

book lungs, maybe they’re called

if it is kin to the spider,

prevented from growing much larger

than a dinner plate

by the constraints of air.

Breathe, yourself, I’m saying to the glass

froth of the mirror while

a woman shaves my face

lost, almost, in practiced boredom.

Next month is my birthday

and already I’m rehearsing

the revamping of my history.

I’ve added trees spindling out

into the dark, over water,

budded pink like a girl you can’t quite

remember. Hanging

from the tree by rope

a shredded tire holds rain water,

a sloshing song. Whatever

you do, look back

is carved into the tree’s black bole.

I’ve forgotten love.

It’s no surprise.

What could I say to the woman in the darkness,

except by your leave,

except that song, that poem,

that world hidden

like an arsonist

in plain sight, in the air which is fuel?

What could I say?

Invent for me

some new season

that is not this one,

teach me to love the flower in your throat.

Ch-ch-changes

St.

VALENTINE

Tell me to sleep, to be still, to root.

All atoms, star litter, my body.

I practice breath like an arcane trick.

To the afterthought night

makes of your hair

I’m saying nuzzle,

pneumatic with fear I said nozzle.

Or the rain I want

to be snow

and the snow I wish were ashes,

ashes. Tell me not

to burn, to burrow, to seek dark soil.

Tell me not.

Beside you, my weight in blood

and my lungs dreaming

of the silent ocean

floor. This is my shell, beloved, and these,

my claws. When

you speak to me

like the vivisected moon,

you are mine.

On my desk

• Snazzy new issue of Passages North, featuring poems by rock stars like Bob Hicok, Matthew Thorburn, John Pursley, Ted Worozbyt, Matt Guenette, Hadara Bar-Nadav and many others. And two by me.
• My cell phone, missing its number 4 and 7 keys.
• The Death of Superman, an oddly ill-timed gift from a friend when I was in the hospital once.
• The first season of Buffy.
• Old, old, old poems I found while cleaning off a shelf.
• Spring Tide by Suzanne Frischkorn.
• Giant set of headphones.
• The Best of Liberace (cassette tape)
• Deck of cards
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
• Cadbury chocolate bar
• Tomorrow's Sounds Today, Dwight Yoakam

What's on your desk?

Sad news

Herbert Scott, my editor at New Issues, passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. He was a delightful, sweet man and I'll always be grateful to him. The last time I saw him was in Vancouver, I believe, and before that in Carbondale, where I had barbeque with him and his wife.

I love the book he made for me, and will always remember his gruff voice on the phone that day he called to give me the good news. I had just walked back from lunch with my then girlfriend and we were chatting a bit in her lab (she was finishing a ph.d. in genetics) when her cell phone rang. I'd provided my home number and her cell number since my voice mail never worked.

It was great news, but also nauseating in that I had just been offered publication by another press and suddenly this embarassment of riches was kind of mind-blowing. I mentioned this to him, and he kind of sold me right then and there on New Issues.

I've never regretted that choice.

So, if you have ever enjoyed a New Issues book, mine or Matthew Thorburn's or anyone else's, give them a read tonight.

Dick

There are days when The Daily Show can't come on soon enough. Especially days when the Vice President has just shot somebody.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Sunday

Last night, snow. This morning, snow. Now, no snow, not anywhere.

Que

A double bill of Hitchcock these last two nights: North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. North is flat out one of my favorite movies, inexhaustibly entertaining, the prototype of the modern action movie. I'd never seen The Man Who Knew Too Much before, one of those I'd missed somehow. Maybe I just wasn't on the right frequency, but it seems a lesser effort by Hitchcock, often narratively inert, maddeningly slow at times, taking forty five minutes to set up what could have been done in ten. I kept pausing it, going off to check email, work on poems, anything. But, really, it's not a bad movie, it's even good in its way, but not particularly engaging at all, which disappoints me. I'm a huge Hitchcock fan, obviously, despite his aversion to shooting on location, which often lends his films a weird staginess. So, kind of bummed about this one.

***

Working on two blurbs today. It's hard writing them but humbling. Who am I?

Nobody, nobody.

***

Working on a poem about cooking. Cooking!

By mentioning it here, it'll become something else, entirely.

Damn it.

There must be some way back

I'm beginning to love the mail again: just got an acceptance letter from American Literary Review, taking one of my favorite newer poems.

Two hits out of ten ain't bad. I'll take it.

Mr. Chocolate

I watched some of Grizzly Man, the Werner Herzog documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the self-proclaimed "protector" of grizzly bears, who was ultimately eaten by one of them, and the impression one is left with is that of an arrogant, deluded, foolish man. Arrogant because he believed he could cross over in to that world, that he could, in effect, become a bear himself. Treadwell appeared to be a font of narcissism, with much of the beautiful footage he shot being a series of multiple takes of him entering a scene, sometimes with a green bandana on his head, sometimes with a black one. He often claims he is the bears' only protection, as massive bears thrash about in the background, clearly in need of no protection he could ever provide.

It's an absorbingly sad picture of a lost soul. In one scene, Herzog sits with an ex-girlfriend of Treadwell's, to whom some of his last possessions have fallen, including the video camera that recorded the audio of his and his then girlfriend's deaths. The tape lasts six minutes. Herzog listens with headphones before the stricken woman. "You must never listen to this," he says.

The echoes of that moment, unheard, seem to pervade all the sunny footage, all the daffy babble Treadwell spouts. "I don't want to be hurt by a bear, I don't, I don't," he says quietly, almost like a prayer, one that will not be answered.

This is a call

My legs hurt. Somebody pass me the Advil.

***

I'm looking for poems for the third issue of Mot Juste, which is starting to come together, so please send us good poems.

Or great ones. That'd be ok, too.

***

Missed this the other day, but here's a fine poem from my pal Ted:

When I Was Gone to Summer

***

As Notes for My Body Double draws ever nearer, I thought I'd post again the link for pre-ordering it:

Pre-order!

Of course, you'll have my eternal gratitude and undying affection if you do. I promise, it's less crappy than the first one.

And

Boy, is Underworld Evolution a load. Of crap. I never saw the first, so maybe I was at a disadvantage, but I was able to sort of understand the basics. Cheap, cheap, cheap, though that kind of heartened me in a way: it was like the 80's all over again, when your average movie could look like it was made of cardboard, when people could spout off lines like, "You'll never stop him." and "We'll see about that."

Jesus wept.

***

Four rejections to go with The Southern Review acceptance.

***

Spring is so very close.