I got the pork chop and she got the pie

Exit Interview is, in fact, back from the printer. They'll be winding their way down from Grand Rapids to you through the capillaries of the US post in the next day or so if you've pre-ordered. I'm looking forward to seeing it when I get my little passle of copies.

So as a friend of mine described it the other day, eight bucks for a slice of my soul.

That's either a bargain or catstrophic inflation. Haven't decided yet.

***

The new Dylan is rocking my world. I loved Time Out of Mind from the start but Love and Theft took a while to catch on with me, probably because it came out September 11th, 2001. But Modern Times is maybe my favorite of this knockout run he's on. At 65.

***

Word from up north is that the chapbook looks very sharp indeed. Yay very sharp.

Let's forgive each other darling

Have not felt all that verbal of late but let's say this is a return. Money problems, comically mild humiliations, et cetera, will do that to you. By which I mean me.

That's life.

***

Exit Interview should be back from the printer this week so pre-orders will get mailed ahead of the official September 15th publication date.

I'm excited to see it.

Otherwise, I'm absorbed in prep work for Notes, which I love doing.

***

Last week someone I went to high school with but didn't really know all that well emailed me: he broke his neck three years ago and is now paralyzed.

He asked if I ever lost all hope, and I didn't know what to say. My answer is no. But that's no kind of answer.

I was twelve years old. A kid. What did I know of hope then to lose it? By the time I was old enough to get my head and heart around loss, my injury was some faint shadow, ever receding.

So it was a difficult email to write. I tried my best to steer clear of the ripe cheese of inspiration, of pep, but I suspect it's still in the mix.

***

At least Dylan's new album Modern Times is great. Still deep in the swampabilly sound he's been mining for a while, it's immediately winning. The Alicia Keyes namecheck in "Thunder on the Mountain" cracks me up.

Soon your dreams will be dreaming you

Today's Willie Nelson song lyrics:

When you go out to play this evening
Play with fireflies until they're gone
And then rush to meet your lover
And play with real fire until the dawn.

***

Sometimes things get so crappy, it becomes funny. Today, picture me laughing.

Slip

Read my pal Eliot at Poetry Daily today.

When I breeze into that city

Phew. I had to track down contact information for, I think, 400 billion editors today. Well, it felt like that. If you've published me in the past few years, you've probably got an email in your inbox from me.

The University of Nebraska Press wanted written verification that the 42 poems in Notes that were published in journals are mine to reprint outright. I'm almost certain that all of them have reverted back to me upon publication but I can understand why they'd want it spelled out.

That was a mind-numbing few hours. I distracted myself by stirring the pot over in Slate's forums. They've been serializing The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Some bozo was horrified that a comic book, his term, had been made out of such a tragedy. It's clear he hadn't picked one up since about 1950. Longtime comic book reader that I am, I couldn't let him go by unsmacked. So it became this huge discussion about what art is and what medium is and preconceived notions about both.

Of course, this went nowhere. But people have this absurd idea about September 11th and art's relationship to it, that it's too soon, too soon, too soon. I don't know what they expect, that there's an art acceptability counter ticking down implaccably somewhere, probably Area 51, and at some random time a buzzer will go off, freeing us troublesome artists because, well, now it's ok.

It's never going to be that. Art is one of things we have us humans to help us understand, grieve, remember, and heal and this notion that art has no place in these discussions, this unfolding of history, impoverishes us all.

For your consumption

"Letter to Jimmy Swaggart on Country Music, Sadness and Heaven," a poem from my first book, is poem of the week over at Sharkforum: Opinion with Teeth. A little teeth is never bad. Is it?

It's chosen by Simone Muench, which is totally cool.

So kiss me good-bye

Snakes on a Plane: pretty awesome in its gleefully trashy way. There's hardly a brain in its celluloid head but I didn't mind. Best with a large crowd. Sam Jackson grew up here in Chattanooga so a line about growing up in Tennessee got a nice cheer.

***

I took Ryan to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the IMAX theater for his birthday. Wow. A seventy foot high screen and 12,000 watts of power make for a stunning experience. I've seen other IMAX documentaries and came away similarly affected, but seeing a feature length film, especially one like Goblet was awesome.

Before the movie we ate at the Mellow Mushroom, out on the sidewalk. It began to rain, lightly at first so we didn't move from under the table's Coca-Cola bottlecap umbrella, but it came down harder until we were getting soaked.

***

I'm tired. I'm going to go scavenge for caffeine.

No sooner

Here you go: the link to the New Michigan Press homepage where you can order Exit Interview.

Live-In Skin

Went to see Pulse yesterday but had to leave about 10 minutes in to make a phone call. I was the only one in the theater. I'll try again today or tomorrow.

At least I got to see a few minutes of Kristen Bell.

***

I think everything is set for Exit Interview: paper stock, cover stock, proofing, etc. It's been a lot of fun doing this. It's work I like, a different kind of creativity, the business of making an actual object instead of dorking around with words inside my head.

I think there will be a link for ordering put up later today. I'll post it when it's there.

It should be out in the next few weeks.

***


I love that place, that space, that span, before poems happen. When you feel like the ionized air just before a lightning strike.

It took some doing, and several false starts, almost right but not quite images, but at long last we've got the cover nailed, I believe, for my chapbook, due out next month from New Michigan Press. Here it is.

Ummmm

Ok, not to steal C. Dale's photo-caption contest thunder but I saw this and, well, I thought it deserved its own contest. So have at it, ya'll.

Let them

Myspace is a strange thing. I rarely use it for anything. A couple of years ago a friend invited me to join, I did, and that was about it. I probably would go several months between checking in. This was prior its explosion into the phenomenon it is now with 30 or 40 million people using it. Now, more and more, people find me, usually from high school or undergrad. But yesterday the little sister of my best friend from the first grade on through middle school (we drifted apart some in high school; different classes led to different friends, the usual) emailed me. Immediately I felt, not old, but transported back twenty years, twenty five even. She was the typical little sister and now she's married, a mom. And, of course, she's not even all that younger than me but back then she was this little thing to our eyes. Crazy.

***

Thought I'd found the cover image for Exit Interview but may not be able to get the image in high enough resolution. Gah. I really liked this one.

***

Birthday party today for Ryan, his dad Ray, my brother Chan. All their birthdays are this week.

Sail on down the line

There's a short-cut I take sometimes, through a field, and parts of it are kept mowed: the path I take alongside a fence and the latter half of the field. But to my left for a good ways is all dense thicket, higher now than I am. A whole little ecosystem. Yesterday I stopped just past the thicket, looking down: some fat little rodent creature, who'd obviously been living well, was hunkered down, his back to me, nibbling on something. I watched him a while, enjoying his little afternoon snack. He finally noticed me and scurried off to the side but watched me go.

***

I mailed off two double spaced, 12 point Courrier copies of Notes to the University of Nebraska Press yesterday. The manuscript comes out huge that way, over 100 pages. They'll begin proofing the manuscript now, which is exciting.

***

The First Noble Truth is so true.

Echo

Grumble: I just made my reservations at the Atlanta Hilton, which is great, but they go ahead and charge one night to your card. Thank God for the AWP rate.

The reservation lady was amused with my last name: "That's perfect for you to stay with us, isn't it?"

Yes, yes, it is.

Silence

Who is this creepy little homunculus guy that's been on the Yahoo homepage all day? Why is he grinning at me? What's with the turtleneck and sweater? And the green upholstered chair. And the cheap-o wood paneling. Why is he thinking of eating my liver and making a nice little shawl out of my skin?

I'm going to go hide under the couch.

Go order

Intaglio by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis

I want

to write a poem for Bill Knott. I really want to. Maybe it will be like fixing him a grilled cheese sandwich with some Campbell's tomato soup.

Yes, that's the kind of poem I want to write.

I think I will.

Walking around in a song

I feel like I never quite left Thursday, that I'm still stuck there, that I'd like to go back. The whole day never came together, fractious, fractured. A new poem got sidelined by the procession of people and events, all the disruptions that seemed to parade through. As a digression, writing parade makes me think of a Czeslaw Milosz (or as Rodney Jones used to say, Coleslaw Meatloaf) reading I was at once, where, between poems, out of the blue, a giant marching band began honking and stomping by; he really didn't know what to say: we just watched the band pass by through the large windows. Anyway, I'm feeling disjointed and the sensation won't go away.

***

One of my fish is dying. My oldest, six years old, which really is very respectable for a store bought comet goldfish. Kidney failure, so he's swelling up and his scales are prickling out from his body so he looks like a pinecomb. I hate this part: you'd take a dog or cat to have them put to sleep but with a fish you don't really do that. I mean, there are various suggested methods: freezing, for example, the idea being they go into shock, slowly, until they're unconscious, until they're frozen dead. Other people suggest cutting the head off. Quick, instant, not exactly clean, but decisive. I'm not going to do either so I guess it will linger, unable to regulate the amount of water in its body.

I'm down about this. I bought him out of some crappy pet store in Tuscaloosa, small, mostly white with some orange. He grew to be over six inches long with white and red patterning. I transported him back here in a water cooler, with a little battery powered air pump clipped to the side. Good grief.

***

I watched The Insider again. What a great movie.

***

There's a certain poetry magazine that took two poems from me the first time I ever sent them anything. I was amazed. One of those poems they've used for other projects. Yet everything I've sent since has been rejected, including the ones I got back yesterday. And I've sent better poems. I'm not upset. It's fine. It's just evidence of how unpredictable, unknowable, this thing is.

***

Ask me a question. Anything.

Brick

I decided against interviewing. It was just dumb. I don't want to waste their time or mine. Mine's not all that valuable, really, but their's is. So that's that.

There's rain on the road

Would you, dear reader, even bother interviewing for a half-time (which always means half-money) lecturership in poetry a grand total of 17 days, 2 hours and 15 minutes before the semester starts?

And if offered that job, in that said time, you would have to:

• pack
• move
• find an accessible place to live, which everyone thinks is easy because they've never had to do it
• scare up a list of people interested in being a personal care attendant, of which there are at any given time in the world perhaps 14 who are suitably experienced, speak English, and only staggeringly strange
• interview them
• settle
  
• remember to write syllabi
• expend kilowatts of energy trying not to turn into Bill Knott.

***

I suck.

It took a long time to get back here

Received the first proofs of Exit Interview, the chapbook New Michigan Press is doing, and man, they look great. Very clean, very sharp. I'm excited. It shouldn't be too awfully long before it's out. Of course, gotta decide on the cover. I'm besieged by covers. Save me!

Eyes down

CONCERN

Who knew I could be so easily changed?

Not me, looking to the beeping man

who asks how many cigarettes do I have

and if I’m a woman, really, he asks that

and the caesura of my surprise

must confirm for him the obscurity

of his suspicions. Because he’s walking

away, beeping again, like a bird

or a car unlocking for you in this heat,

in your approach. I don’t drive,

I can’t drive, and it’s now I begin dreaming

where I’d go if I did. Know

that my direction would be

wherever you are. I don’t even know.

Last night I watched the rain

while pretending to watch

a war movie with men trudging hip-deep

through snow. Specks of dust

and water frozen in their fall

towards earth, towards this place

I like to call here, I like to call February

even though it's August. No one I know pretends

likewise. One more reason

to feel a slight sadness,

one more reason to send you an email

that lies about the beauty

of Bavaria. About snow’s massive serenity—

the way it accrues in silence,

the way I pretend to keep track

of each flake like a concerned parent.

Which I’m not but a vial

of heartsickness I’m closer

to being. Each day I’m asked

what I’d like to eat

and never do I know.

It’s an algebra I’ve no gift for, no gift at all.

I love the clouds for the courage

I assign them, as they empty,

as they eddy in endless jags overhead.

Maybe it’s a way to make peace

with my own foolishness

that’s currently jetting through Europe.

It never writes but I receive

its bills. It hates the cold and so do I.

Why I bother with February,

the real one in which

I ache like everyone else,

I’ll never know. In the emptied-out dawn

when the birds begin

to enunciate their insane haiku,

know that I’m awake, watching the sun turn to snow.

Pure

I haven't been able to listen to its entirety, due largely to the excruciating pain and tsunami-level waves of nausea swamping me, but here's a link to what might have been had the Batman musical announced a couple of years ago seen the light of day. Based on Tim Burton's two films with Jim Steinman, he of Meat Loaf "fame," penning songs, the project never materialized, presumably due to the rash of aneurysms suffered by anyone involved.

Listen at your own peril.

Ankle deep

So I ended up taking Molly out for her birthday yesterday after all. We saw The Ant Bully, which she loved but I thought was pretty generic and a distant, distant third place in the CG ants movies genre. It didn't help much that some of the opening shots were practically lifted from A Bug's Life. But she loved it.

***

Later I was being chased/squirted by water-guns.

***

I can't adequately express my love for The Venture Bros. I'd never seen it until I decided to try it out on Netflix. For someone with my misspent youth filled with comic books and Saturday morning reruns of Jonny Quest (the show is even mentioned in a poem in Notes), it hits all the pleasure spots with knowing, fatal aim. The show can hit such daffy, absurd heights I can barely stand it. I love the ever-thwarted Monarch, his neuroses. Great show.

***

C. Dale has a good post on Keats today, something I've thought about before. Go check it out.