Trick

Looking at today's featured poems at both daily sites, Paul Muldoon over at Poetry Daily and Ralph Angel at Verse Daily, leads me to say: Muldoon just doesn't do it for me. All the endless play and cleverness in the end just seems kind of coy to me and I sort of admire what he pulls off but I've never felt bruised or caught or seduced or fed by any of it. Sorry, man, it's important for us Pauls to stick together, I know, but just can't quite go there. Whereas I do like Angel's work: his first book was one of the very first books I bought after a reading. And he gave a pretty great reading here this past spring. I admired the hell out of how he took charge of the crowd: he stood there for thirty seconds or more, completely silent, thinking whatever he was thinking. It was completely audacious, playful in a showy way I loved and likely couldn't pull off, not radiating the same cool.

***

Happy Halloween, y'all.

Drawl

Just came across this interview / discussion with Rodney Jones over at Blackbird. I love it because it's Rodney. Talking. That's pretty much a guarantee for genius or madness or, most likely, both. You can listen to it via Real Audio or read the transcript. Here's an excerpt:

"Okay, how do you know a poem is good? Okay, here’s one of the things that would suggest to you that a poem is good. Let’s say you have a master poet in your mind, say the early works of Hitler that you really like and you think I want to be like Hitler. And you write a poem, and it seems to approach Hitler, and so you, that’s one of the things, it’s like if you’re playing music and you’re able to play a Jim Hall solo that sounds like Jim Hall. It seems very good to me that if I could do that, which I can’t. If you write maybe your own kind of poem, you will not have that marker because you do not know what you smell like."

In about three years, I'll figure that out. :)

Das ist

BAD MOOD

Bad mood and bad dog and bad luck like

my broken neck or heart or head

sussing out so much bad weather

unraveling like kinked yarn by a bad,

a black cat, which summons

luck again, that diffident lover half

naked in the dark. To her

I walked below one thousand ladders

over miles of bad road

ribboned with bad directions

which wasn’t as bad

as I thought it would be

my ear pressed to the powdery wall

behind which strangers

performed badly their bad sex,

their bored adumbrations

conjuring nothing, not even the paleness

of tulips, the heat of Alabama,

the severed instant

in which your voice snapped

like a band of sound

between your phone and my phone,

impossibly distant, impossibly atonal and pale

across that bad connection

the bad things compelling

us to speak out, to end up, to say

even now my skin flecks away

like paint applied

badly, quickly to cover

some previous horror,

some bad end solved

badly, the evidence lost,

thrown out, awarded to the jury of dust.

I said it was not so

bad and it was not—

there were days when knives

of noon light sliced

the day open like sweet fruit

and there were hours

and words amounting to consolation

and entire towns

ripe with welcome

handing me their thousand mirrors,

their seven long years.

Otisburg

I'm thinking of using this for my author's photo. What do you think?

Abra

The Prestige may be the best movie I've seen all year. It's the most gripping film I've seen in longer than that. It's hard to top a movie with its pedigree: directed by Christopher Nolan, with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale starring, Michael Caine and David Bowie (as Tesla, no less) in supporting roles. I love to go to movies, both to watch them, enjoy them, but also as a place to think if the movie is less than stellar. But I realized fairly quickly that I was completely absorbed. Which is fitting for a story of brutal obsession.

One of the best things about the movie is how Nolan doesn't softpedal the various timelines running throughout; other directors would use fades, wipes, different film stocks, to signal where in time, in the narrative, you as viewer are. You have to pay attention but also rely on your understanding of narrative to keep up. It's great.

The plot dovetails so adroitly at one point I chuckled aloud, which is, for me, kind of the highest compliment I pay a movie, when I'm ridiculously pleased by the skill on display.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the very last shot, though, the very last image. I'll have to see it again and I'll be happy to do so.

Love can bring about a change

Thanks to Wendy for pointing out my little mug in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. Hadn't seen that yet, so I picked it up: the listing for the Prairie Schooner Prize in their recent winners section. Cool.

And speaking of Notes, things are beginning to speed along. I had to fill out an AIF, an Author Information Form, five pages of questions about me and the book and my thoughts on its marketing and the like. I'm terrible at that sort of thing so I stumped through. Plus, I found out yesterday I'll be getting copy-edits to proof in two weeks, which is exciting.

It's really happening.

***

Rain. Blah. I become a shut-in during autumn/winter. Not a fan.

***


I've been using the new Firefox browser, Firefox 2, and like it a lot. It's not drastically different from the previous version. It still beats the pants of Explorer.

***

Writing is slow right now. I need a kick in the head. Volunteers?

But I follow you

This article from The Onion falls under the category of "it's funny because it's true." Well, almost.

***

Listening this morning to the Once More, With Feeling soundtrack. God, I miss Buffy.

***

I cannot adequately express how tiresome are the commercials Bob Corker's campaign for the Senate is running. Corker did admittedly great things for this city during his tenure as mayor but the commercials are just the worst. One is focused on Harold Ford, Jr's looks: Ford is a good looking young guy, so the commercial has people from Memphis, Ford's hometown, parroting these ridiculous lines about how good he looks on tv, suggesting he's a pretty boy, vapid. Another uses actors, atrocious ones at that, hamming up this cornpone, hillbilly, down home vibe: one old codger suggesting Ford would have Canada deal with "North Ko-rea" because "they ain't busy." This commercial comes from the national Republican Party and even Corker is embarrassed by it, he claims, demanding it be taken off the air, but as of this morning it's still running. His embarrassment rings hollow, at any rate: I find it hard to believe he had no idea about its content.

***

I'm not Canadian, but I'm off to deal with North Ko-rea. With cornbread bombs.

draft

ELISION

How natural to flee before the natural

like women and children and rats

from the sloped decks of something

sinking like my head each night

into my ancient pillow, full of foam

nothing like the curds

the ocean kicks up in its lunar froth.

Which is what I want once more,

the ocean but not the two-thirds fraction

in which the world soaks

like a battered toe. The ocean I want

is you, your saline self,

your not quite infinite tally of cells

sloughing off, most of what

dust is. So you’re the ocean and you’re the dust.

I can’t decide. After dinner,

maybe I’ll say you

are Kentucky. Maybe Rhode Island.

Through both I’ve gone

like a bullet, through both

I’ve driven wanting

just one thing: an end, cessation,

silence, the dime

moon rolling away like exact change.

In Tokyo I bought

from street vendors

horse-meat flavored ice cream

by the scoop

if only to hold

evidence of some awful fact

like a grenade or a Ronald Reagan action figure—

I threw it away

without tasting

but now the taste I imagine

is only sweet,

fills my mouth like a bowl left in the rain.

O

There's this guy. He writes poems. You've probably never heard of him. But he's featured today over at Verse Daily.

I'm a seasick sailor

Waking up to these dark mornings and rain. The weekend was one last outpost of summer. Tomorrow may be the last litter of light and warmth for a while.

But today it's pouring, that long steady shush of falling water.

***

I have a new job: grading SAT essays. I was turned down for ditch-digging. It's all done online, this grades, and if you imagine it to be some cruel factor of tedious, multiply it by at least a billion.

I fear I will not be one of their better graders: at its base, their grading system is based on a six point scale. In the training, and there's a staggering amount, I only matched the "true scores" 60% of the time. Which seems not so good. But I think there are several layers of redundancy built in. It's chocolate redundancy cake.

***

So I used the recent sales of Exit Interview to do something really sexy for myself: buy more copies of Exit Interview.

Yes, as Heather remarked, poetry is totally a giant pyramid scheme. Except you're scamming yourself. And you know it. Very odd.

So I have more copies to sign, seal and deliver for 9 bucks. Email if you'd like.

Lord, please, don't forsake me

Beck's new album The Information is great, if, maybe, a smidge too long. Has he made a bad, or even average, album yet? I'd like to have a sequel to Midnite Vultures, too.

***

Saw The Departed: very good, a return to form for Scorcese after two embarassingly obvious Oscar-bait pictures. It's not quite top-shelf: it doesn't have the kinetic swagger of, say, Goodfellas, but what does? A zillion people are offed but even more deadly than guns are the cell phones, which is curious and modern and apt.

***


Yesterday when I brought up Yahoo, seeing the breaking news banner about a small plane crashing into a New York building, I felt a strange wash of foreboding: a sense that it was likely an accident but that toeing that edge where it could have been something else -- it's difficult to articulate.

***


Fall is here. Grumble.

Anything should make you happy

Ok, continuing the fire sale, I've got one kind of goofy deal/offer:

if you'd like a copy of my first book cheap, and can put up with it being signed to someone else (I'll still sign it for you on another page), I'll sell it to you for half-price, 7 bucks, plus 2 postage. 9 total.

Someone wanted a copy once then I never heard from them again. So that's where the stray signature comes from.

Also, I have maybe two chapbooks left. Want one?

When the Lord rings my front door

Another Meacham done gone. I read on Friday, just 4 poems, all of them new or newish and in Notes, but nothing from Exit Interview: Nothing; In Praise of the Defective; Concern; At Last. Well received.

I had an especially good time this go-round. I can't quite put my finger on why. The weather was gorgeous, for one. Shopping for reproductions of vintage toy robots helps too.

Strangely, Styx was the weekend's soundtrack. The story is too long to repeat but it involves late night driving around with the truly dreadful "Lorelei" blasting out of the cd player.

Eek.

And there's one story I wish I could tell you. But I can't. It's pretty wacko.

***

I have a few chapbooks left. If you'd like one, I'll sign it and send it for 9 bucks.

It makes a great trick/treat for Halloween.

One last shot. 

Reality = 1, witty caption = 0. 

The La Dean Shop, above BINGO BINGO BINGO. 

The BINGO BINGO BINGO parlor on Rossville Blvd. Also the cover for Betsy's new wave album. 

More pasta party revelry. 

Me with Zeb, Monica, Sherri, Betsy, Sebastian and Earl Braggs. 

Sebastian Matthews in high safari gear, right, chatting with Sherri and David St. John, the young one. 

Dark star

I think I'm emerging from post-Disney decompression. What a strange, strange place: I spent a lot of time imagining what a city owned and operated by Disney would be like because that's essentially what they have going down there. Once you enter the Mickey zone, an amazingly elaborate system of roads, freeways, transportation including buses and boats and monorails, becomes apparent. Everything is pristine and and well kept and unnerving. I really think that somewhere they're thinking of building Disney towns. I mean, Martha Stewart is doing it, building her own gated community. Disney could buy, say, North Dakota just for a trial run. Or the moon. They could terraform the moon and begin the colonization with a low-grav theme park. At first, I was kind of terrified by the prospect but I really want to go to a low-grav theme park, so Walt's minions, you have my blessing.


I rode the Tower of Terror, which was awesome: they have little grips to hold at your sides but as I can't do that I really rose from the seat. Otherwise, I didn't ride much I had to transfer into: too much hassle.

Here's a pic of me and Ryan with Minnie. I'm not sure what's up with the date on the pictures.

Oh, yeah: I saw a naked woman while there.