By request

Because cK asked for it, and because I forgot to write it up, my take on Miami Vice: not bad. Not as good as Collateral or Heat, and probably never intended to be, it's a dense movie that drops you right into the middle of an undercover scene in a bar. I was fairly certain for a while that a scene or two had been skipped, but no: the whole movie forces you to pay attention or be lost. Even then you're stil somewhat confused, mirroring what it's like, I imagine, to be so deep undercover. The digital camerawork looks great, especially at night with skies that seem painted. Gong Li is hot and she gets bonus points during a dance scene for looking like she's about to pick some kind of grime out of Colin's greasy mane. Some of the greatest recent kill shots. Also, now I want to take a speedboat from Miami to Havanna for drinks. So if anyone reading can set me up, that'd be great.

Sleep late down south

Today I'm taking Molly out to lunch and a movie, for her seventh birthday. For years now her older brother has been doing things with me on weekends, during the summer, but she's been a little too young. She's old enough now, though, and she thinks it's the greatest thing ever. A few weeks ago, I had planned to take them both to see Superman Returns but Ryan got into some sort of trouble, so it was just me and Molly. Near the end, she leaned over to me, tugging my sleeve.

"Is it almost over?"

"Almost. Are you not liking it?"

"No, I like it. It's just a little too exciting."

She's sweet and quiet that way.

***

Ok, maybe that's the plan for tomorrow. Shopping for school clothes today.

***

Mel Gibson, I salute you. With a bazooka.

***


I think I might be beginning to break through the mental block I've had about cover art for Notes. It's daunting, scary. So much depends, etc.

***

I got a postcard from Italy in the mail Saturday. From Bologna, I think. How neat is that?

Days roll into days

Miami Vice today and I must confess I'm excited. Not because it's Miami Vice, or the actors involved, but because it's Michael Mann. He's never going to make a bad movie; I think he's genetically incapable.

One point of concern: has Colin Farrell ever been in a good movie?

***

I'm thinking maybe I'll fingerpaint the cover to Notes. That would be great. An artless smear. Apropos, you're all grumbling.

I took some art classes in middle and high school because it was required in the state curriculum. Having no discernible ability coupled with the fact that I had to hold the pencil/brush/random artistic implement in my mouth did not, as you might guess, produce anything the masters in their cold graves would envy. I did produce one passably crude drawing of a bird. Which my dad, in his fatherly pride, took with him to work to show off but instead left in his car with the window down. At this point, dear reader, I know you're already of me so, yes, it rained. An ink sketch, the bird became positively Rorshachian. Even I, who cared nothing about it all, was less than pleased.

My parents still have, I know, all that stuff. I'm going to have to have it destroyed.

It's funny: the middle school art teacher, who I'm fairly certain depended upon on gaudy baubles for life support, freaked out on the first day of class, seeing me there. She didn't want to let me stay. There was no way I could complete the class, she said.

Off to the side, it was all amusing to me, this conflagration of hokey art teacher, school principal, and occupational therapist. I would have been happy to let her have her way. The art room was this tiny, cramped, boiler-room-like enclosure. It wouldn't have been terribly surprising if Hephaestus had stumped in at some point.

She had no choice, of course, and by the end of the year loved me. If not my art.

***

I'm not sure why I wrote all that.

***

Traded a copy of my book with Kathleen Flenniken, whose Famous was last year's Prairie Schooner Prize winner. Another gorgeous production. Looking forward to reading it.

***

Back to Venture Bros.

She don't care about time

I've been thinking a good dissertation topic would be the difference between a Tom Petty solo album and a Heartbreakers album. Because I sure can't tell. Not that I'm complaining. I've been listening to Tom's new album Highway Companion and digging it. Especially this song "Damaged By Love." And "Down South" with these opening lines:

Headed back down south
Gonna see my daddy's mistress
Gonna buy back her forgiveness
Gonna pay off every witness

Well, that's some kind of perfect and I'm instantly charmed, won.

***

Talked at length today with a friend about an old love. Which was both good and sad. As is it should be.

***

Tell me about your love life, in 1 sentence or less. Anonymous is ok.

Is it getting heavy?

Congratulations to Sarah Vap for winning the Saturnalia Books contest. She gets my vote for best author's photo over there at Blackbird. Why? The cowboy hat. I just typed hot. It is kind of hot.

At any rate, I like her poems.

***

I received an email this morning in which someone used the word turth. Is that a word? I don't think it is. I'm puzzling over it.

***

I'm freaking out, just a little, mind you, with manliness still ridiculously intact, over cover art/design ideas/suggestions for Notes. I'm corresponding a little with the U. Nebraska Press people, who are great, but I'm just no good at this sort of thing.

So I'm enlisting you, people. Because you're all depressingly smarter than me. Point me in the way that I should go and I will not depart from it.

Well, I might.

Addle

Go congratulate Melanie...

Love makes no sense

I wish I liked Kevin Smith's movies more than I do. Every time I see one, I think that. But they just barely qualify as movies: they're more like filmed plays. That's not a bad thing, really. He's a great writer. But his camera just sits there, inert, while the pungent gabfest plays on. And it's always good stuff, funny stuff, but there's so much digression, digression loses its charm, its oomph, its function. Anyway, this is all preamble to me seeing Clerks II yesterday, with one other girl in the theater. I laughed a lot and fell in love with Rosario Dawson: the Jackson 5's "ABC" will never be the same for me. For once I was glad the camera stayed rock-steady.

Well aware of the romantic comedy cliche of the long-deferred declaration of love, Kevin still uses it but subverts it, maybe even perverts it, like no other film in mainstream movies. I kept waiting for the girl to walk out. Or me. But we stuck with it.

Bottom line: not bad, but not really essential. Look for a blink-length cameo by Viggo Mortenson.

***

Formatting Notes for UNP. They want it double-spaced and in 12 pt. Courier for proofing, which knocks it over one hundred pages. Wild.

I agreed to the contract today. Wilder still.

Bring your lovin' over

Thanks to Poetry Southeast for taking "Trivial Pursuit." For a moment, I thought it was one of the several poems I completely rewrote last week, but no. Thank goodness.

***

Yesterday I watched Ken Burns' documentary on Superman, Look, Up in the Sky - The Amazing Story of Superman, and it's pretty great, the first half especially, documenting the character's origins, initially, as a villain holding the earth in a kind of fascist thrall. Also interesting were the many different iterations on radio and television, including the George Reeves show, which I remember seeing some when I was a kid. Following his suicide, there was a never seen pilot produced: The Adventures of Superpup. It's no wonder this never made it past pilot stage. With sets and stages still standing, the show's producers decided to, uh, hire midgets, dress them up like weird dog people, and act out Superman storylines. I kid you not, my friends. The weirdest thing I've ever seen, like some acid trip gone horribly, horribly wrong.

At two hours, it could stand to be longer: it seemed to me Christopher Reeve's injury could have stood a little more focus, though I know why it didn't receive more. More as well on Richard Donner being fired from Superman II, though he shot 70-80% of it.

At any rate, I loved it.

Buffy: season 8

Bring. It. On.

Dig

Check out the snazz of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Prize:

Famous, by Kathleen Flenniken.

I love that cover. I can't begin to imagine what mine will be.

Grr

I don't even know where to start with Lady in the Water. Except that I'm not sure a muddled meta-fable about, uh, fables is such a good idea. Not to make a movie out of, anyway. I kind of like it up to a point: there's an oddly absorbing quality to its narrative offhandedness , at least for a while. And then it becomes unintentionally funny: why is this happening? what does this mean? In the same way a bedtime story is all exposition, this is all exposition. Shyamalan has said he wants to revere, restore, storytelling but whoever said it needed it? People go to movies all the time and settle in for Buffy marathons and read novels. What he really wants to restore and revere in this movie is himself. This is epic narcissism, especially since Shyamalan casts himself as a writer whose unpublished book will one day change the world.

Sure thing, man.

I could go on. I like three of his movies quite a lot. But Shyamalan's fallen down some rabbit hole he might find hard to climb out of.

Those words we said

Again, thanks to everyone posting the kind words or emailing or sending all those roses. They smell lovely. Ok, there weren't any roses. But I'm thinking now there should have been. Truly obscene quantities of roses. I want to look like Secretariat.

Ok, not really on the roses or the Secretariat thing. But untold thanks all the same.

***

It's kind of strange: I hadn't expected the posting, either here or on Prairie Schooner's website, to re-ignite that giddy feeling I first got when I got the phone call two weeks ago today. But now that it's out there, it's kind of great. Those feelings had subsided a bit: I'd celebrated with family and many of you already knew. If I emailed you or you emailed to ak, I'd tell you. So another volley of thanks to people like Aimee, C. Dale, Eduardo, for being good stewards of the particulars while it was still secret.

***

Tomorrow: Lady in the Water. Terrified. I don't want to see a bad M. Night Shymalan film. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were terrific, and Signs was good despite massive plot holes. The Village, however, was one of the most misguided efforts I've ever seen. Lady looks like it continues that sad arc.

You know you've been burned when My Super Ex-Girlfriend looks more attractive.

Right on time

I figure some of you have by now begun to think it was all an elaborate prank, smoke and mirrors, just plain fiction, but at long last I can tell you all about my book.

Notes for My Body Double was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. That link isn't updated as I'm writing this; I'm told there's a delinquent bio note yet to come in.

But the point is I can go public with it now. The hold-up was due to extra tough competition over on the fiction side of the contest. That's resolved, however, and here we are.

Notes for My Body Double will likely appear in the fall of 2007, published by the University of Nebraska Press

I'm thrilled beyond belief.

Update: the page is up now, with info about the fiction winner and the runner-up's.

Pop quiz kisser

I never considered how utterly freeing it would be to have Notes taken off my hands. I should have! File under: obvious. I guess I'd begun to think it never would be, that I'd obsess for long, embittered decades with my one manuscript, never even able to think beyond it. Ask my poor, long-suffering friends. Well, I wasn't quite that bad.

Almost.

***

Spent the day revising poems in this improbable third manuscript, which I still cannot believe exists, though there it is to my right, all 60 pages. Many of the poems were written quickly, in between classes, back when I was, you know, a productive member of society, so there's a strange quality to them. I'm trying not to revise that out of them.

"Something Happy" is essentially a new poem now. So too "To Beth, whose Photo Reveals Snow and a Passing Train.

I tidied up the endings to "Against Science" and "On Learning the Luna Moth Has No Mouth," though I didn't quite nail "Against Science." I'll try again tomorrow.

Poems that yet require work (or outright banishment): "If Only You Could Give Me an Oracle to See How it All Ends," a poem I wrote for Ali Stine, and "Parts of the Body by Name," a poem written for another distant (though beloved) girl that needs an injection of ... sand. Grit. Something extra.

I'll attempt to knock those out tomorrow. Which is crazy but kind of fun, in the spirit of this.

***

Good night.

Now through the smoke she calls to me

Yesterday we celebrated Molly's eighth birthday, which had come a couple of days earlier. Her younger sister, Sally, is a dynamo and demands the attention of, well, all the known universe. But Molly is quiet, shy, not quite timid but a bit reserved, so it was good for her to be the focus and she drank it in. We did the whole surprise thing. She loved it. Said festivities were the source of all the snazzy photos I've been posting: Starr, the kids' mom, has an awesome digital camera that she was snapping everybody with. Later, homemade ice cream but I missed that somehow. That's more than a little tragic. It's summer, people.

***

Hard to believe, but I mailed off 90 pages of my memoir yesterday, in between all the birthday-palooza.

Said printing of all those pages made me decide it was time for a new printer. My old inkjet had hung in there for ten years and God only knows how many drafts of books (I still find drafts of my first book stuffed places) and individual poems. I hiked over to the Office Depot, spending a bit more than I wanted, but left with a swank printer. It's almost too fast. I printed out a new draft of One More Theory About Happiness and the sheets were fairly shooting out of the bay. Still, it's nice to be done in two minutes, compared to the old mark of ten or fifteen minutes at best.

***

I've been listening a lot to the soundtrack for Once More, with Feeling. It reminds me of how much I miss that show.

***

I've been sitting on this for a few days, not terribly disposed to disclosing, but I guess now is as good a time as any. No, not the albatross-like details regarding the publication of Notes, which I promise is forthcoming. That Memphis job I interviewed for?

Didn't get it.

Probably because I end sentences with prepositions.

***

If I'm forgetting anyone, please forgive me, but people like Victoria Chang and Jeanine Hall Gailey read drafts of Notes last spring or summer, making wise suggestions about what to cut and why. To those of you who were so helpful, I wanted to thank you again. I was at my wits' end last year, dispirited, discouraged, distended--no, wait, I wasn't that, but who knows how far off from that I was. I appreciate you all.

My mom, looking horrified by something off-camera, and my dad, striking a pose. 

Molly and Sally, plum tuckered out. 

Sally running. 

New author's photo? ;) 

The Fabulous Guest Boys: Bo, Chan, Clay, me. Bo and Clay are identical. And yes, that's a vintage outhouse we're standing in front of. Someone once asked my dad if he wanted a real, old outhouse. He said yes. 

Me and Ryan, in my parents' front yard. 

Qin

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HISTORY

If alchemists ever surrendered to common sense,

I’m not sure my mailbox noticed,

everyday coughing up a wealth

of free credit, a siren’s song of silk

in the free bras promised me

(or current resident) by each coupon

in touching good faith. The infinite

has never to me beckoned

so well I want to follow

after it into further confusion. If by that

confession I’m coined a curmudgeon,

what can I do? The Chinese

in searching for life

eternal found instead galvanic blackpowder.

For whole years potions

were heated over low fires

set in clay earth, tended to

at the cost of their lives. Sent to the green

eastern seas with five hundred

boys and five hundred girls,

Xu Fu never returned. Who can blame him?

This was never my dream,

to live beyond the code

coiled in my cells,

to live longer than the mountain

above me or the river

at my side like a woman, like you in moon-

light. Except we never

sleep with windows up

or the shades drawn

so it’s a lie to say I’ve seen you glowing

like the harmless half-life

of the clockface

counting out the measure of irradiated time.

Better to say I’ve seen you

barely at all. Better to say

the lost moon will never

guide us. Better to cover you

beside the eastern sea

in lapidary jade

fat emperors ate hoping not to die.

About you

Updating some of my links: if you'd like to be added in, let me know. I've already put up blogs I regularly read, via bookmark, but was too lazy to update the template.

***

I'm still waiting for an ok to reveal my new press. I'm anxious to share. I may just have to break the rules if this embargo lasts much longer....

***

To that end, a few more presses who will not be publishing me this time out: not Four Way Books. Not Alice James Books. Not the University of Illinois Press. Not New Issues, my old home.

***

Slow this morning.

I have been a rover

CARBONDALE LOVE POEM

That the sexagesimal calendar had no zero

was reason enough for me to grouse

four thousand years too late, in September,

in Illinois, never to be confused

with ancient Babylon, with mythic

Mesopotamia, which never existed

except in the past tense cast upon

the silt-sewn shores of the Tigris and Euphrates,

and not the two distant rivers

I swore at night we could hear

running away when we were through

with each other’s skin. Little Egypt,

everything there was called:

the place that took my film,

the cabs I had to dodge in the dark

carrying home some drunken

boy with his freight of vomit in tow—

Little Egypt this and that

and our mascot was the Saluki,

a long-haired Egyptian hunting dog

trotted around the arenas

of our ineptitudes. Not until one Sunday

morning when we drove west

beneath mottled, Midwestern dawn

towards St. Louis, towards

the Mississippi wider, almost,

than we could see with fog twill

rising from the water’s passive face,

not until I thought backwards

to the Ohio I’d crossed first

in coming there, in love with the imprecision

of words, did I make sense

of that little name, that borrowed

history, that endlessness slowly passing by.

Time can only make demands

Today I ordered these. Because I am a huge nerd. I don't think I'll be able to mail them, though. Which I'm pretty sure qualifies me for even greater levels of nerdom.

Sigh.

***

Anyone cheap? In regards to web design, I mean.

Ahem.

I'm looking to put up a modest little homepage and if anyone is good with html, etc., and would like to help me out, give me a shout. I appreciate it.

One time one night

Excited yesterday by friends writing great poems and completely schooling me in the process, as evidenced by my cruddy outpout. That's how it goes, though.

***

I've a friend who's being mysterious. Which is, in fact, mysterious.

***

Who should I go to for domain name registration, web hosting, all that? GoDaddy?

V

VARIOUS MISERIES

All those times I said the key to Heaven

was right there in my dungarees,

that it was in the Bible and

thus we lacked essential devotion,

you never believed me, you turned back

to the white snow light

of the television, your face

nothing like Helen’s, not the font of all

this war, but lovely enough

to want, to see through the beaded curtains

of rain, to finally find

thanks to a search engine

the verse in Deuteronomy proving me

right. That were I ever

crushed or cut or by white fire cauterized,

I could not enter in

to the assembly of the Lord.

That we’d best be

careful. Never mind that I’ve never

been able to make peace

with this idea of the afterlife

I’m told I must

accept. Never mind that it’s eternal

singing we’re promised

and not an atom

of silence, not so much

as a whisper’s worth of radiant repose.

Never you mind, love,

that love’s no more

our lot. That various miseries

like uncertain weather

appear. That a cartoon cloud

tethered to the tonsured

hair of my head

in the mirror’s mild adumbrations

rains and rains.

That there are whole days

I share with

only the crows

mouthing in the grass

for bread

I broke apart and scattered

with my hands.

For that day

I counted this

as work—

I spoke your name to dry chalk

cool in my fist

like a stone

born in a month of shadows.

Through the dead

field behind

the nursing home

I went, seeking

a little speed

through hip-high grass—

a straight line,

a bit of fact like bone

in my throat.

If –.

If you believe

anything I’ve said,

let it be what I said whenever I was silent.

Would you

pay $329 for a royalty-free image from Getty Images for the cover of your chapbook?

I don't think I would. I don't have that much money, for starters.

I would for my book. But that isn't to say I value the chapbook less than the book.

Crap.

In

Yesterday I bought a blueberry Slushie for a seven year old girl. That was a highlight in an otherwise kind of crappy day.

***

Still, things are good. I'm not sure when I'll be able to give y'all the lowdown on Notes. Surely this week. I think I'll start eliminating presses. Ok, it's not, uh, Norton. I know everyone here just knew it was Norton. Sorry.

And it's not ... Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Amazing, I know. Guess numero dos, right? Thought so.

Stay tuned for more.

***

I have a third manuscript called One More Theory About Happiness. I don't think it's any good.

Aaarrrr

It's no surprise to me that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest raked in 55 million dollars on Friday alone. I saw it with more than a few audience members who were dressed as pirates or cinched into corsets and bustiers. At Johnny Depp's entrance on screen, the packed theater broke into wild applause. That's a formula for serious bank. As for the movie itself, I thought it was pretty great, having only liked the first one. This one is again too long, but it never really feels like it, better paced for the most part. There are passages that seem like Looney Toons brought to life, which made me smile to no end. Good fun.

***

I've bought several books of poems lately, Maine, by Jonah Winter; A Defense of Poetry, by Gabriel Gudding; The Captain Lands in Paradise, by Sarah Manguso; The Legend of Light, by Bob Hicok. A couple others.

***

Bad dreams last night but feeling good.

Smiling skull ring

Last night various constituencies of my family took me out to dinner to celebrate the new book: my dad was out of town, in Alabama at one of his petroliana meets, so it was me, my mom, my oldest brother and his girlfriend, my aunt and her youngest girl, Sally, my mom's friend Caroline and her friend Lee, plus a childhood friend of theirs visiting from Atlanta, Terry Lee, who rode with Starr and Sally. So we were seated, after waiting around for Starr to arrive, and Terry Lee produces a birthday cake. On the way, they stopped at a Wal-Mart to buy a cake; a birthday cake was all they had. All of which is fine: I don't care for cake much but everybody else does. Fine. Our waiter sees the cake, and when we're through, appears with a bunch of waiters and waitresses, lights four candles, and they launch into a rousing "Happy Birthday." So I have to blow them out and everyone cheers the guy in the wheelchair. For the rest of the evening, people came by, wishing me well. It was comical. So, get wishing, people. It's my second birthday this year. Presents are mandatory.

Run on for a long time

I would tell you that Johnny Cash's new album A Hundred Highways is great but I can't get past the second track, "God's Gonna Cut You Down." Over simple, hypnotic accoustic guitar lines, Cash does his apocalyptic thing but what blasts this off is the backing tracks: all handclaps and footstomps, it's completely arresting, the sort of stylistic thing that have made the American albums such pleasures. You just have to hear it. Get thee to iTunes.

***

So in thinking how best to decline the other press, I began to wonder how many poems I had between new work written this year and poems just lying around, forgotten. I find a lot of the time I'll write a poem that doesn't strike me in the right way immediately, so I forget about it; I never do anything with it. So I get to rooting around, throwing things together, and soon enough I have a 60 page manuscript of poems written during the same period as Notes. Many of them need some revision, but lots are perfectly fine, and some I'm even tempted to cart over to Notes, though I won't do that. A lot of these poems have even been published. I'm such a dummy. So I don't know what I'll do with it; I offered it to the editor and they're going to look at it but I can't imagine them switching gears.


***

Nice 4th here. You?

Weird

So I've spent the weekend sending out emails withdrawing Notes from wherever it was still under consideration: not that many places, in fact, but it has to be done, regardless. One of the editors replied, essentially making a play for the book. I'm flattered, of course, but I don't think it'd be right to pull away from the other press at this point.

It's perplexing: for two years I couldn't throw the book at anyone. I mean, that's an exaggeration: it was a finalist several times, was accepted briefly, so it's not like it was repudiated at every turn. But it began to feel that way.

So I began to think, am I making the right decision? But I know I am.

today's bad poem

ELSEWHERE

How long a citizen of that white silence

was I, did I know enough not to name

all things winter, even my own skin,

even the edge of the water, its strangeness,

its molecular tongue, all grief

added to it, all the words I knew,

the ones sewn into my pockets like warding,

how long did I sleep in that life

of night, what did I guard

with my breath while my bones leeched away,

with the salting of love

everything that morning

seemed made of snow, statuaries of vapor,

and you at the center of it

reading about atoms,

about that which has no mass,

displaces nothing,

drifting through all this life and unlife,

to whom could I speak

like a stranger

and in what language

struggle to articulate

even this hour

filling up with the imprimatur of dust,

and when I dream

of my body perforated by starlight

reaching me like pale roots

through dark soil, what am I

except awake, except a name, except lost?

Saturday

Do me a favor and go harass my good friend Melanie at the Dangfool Temple of the Word. Say hello, trade recipes, complain about font size, ask if Houston is really as bad as people claim.