Because you asked for it. Oliver, I mean. 

Dear Prudence

Got in touch with Gulf Coast. I can fall into the strange embrace of Goofy without worry. Yay.

I'm passing sleeping cities

Does anybody have like a bat-phone to Gulf Coast? I was wrong: they're the last holdout in this protracted search for the rights to my own poems. Which I already have. I just have to have a record of it for UNP.

See, the monetary value of a poem is so laughably scant, so non-existent, that the rights almost always revert back to the writer upon publication.

They're just words. The material of which they're made isn't mined from gleaming veins threaded through the earth. They aren't rare.

So their value is completely abstract. Probably beyond abstraction.

Will someone in Houston please say I can use this little poem?

Love is a burning thing

Tracking down permissions for the last few poems in Notes. Poor editors! A thankless job, often enough, with so much paper haunting their dreams. And me falling into the slurry of requests, questions, queries, complaints.

Slate is the last holdout, really, and as it's a corporate entity, originally owned by Microsoft but now part of the Washington Post, it's all very, well, corporate.

The assistant editors have changed, I think, who I worked with in the past and I don't have Pinsky's email.

But if you're reading, Mr. Pinsky, email me. ;)

***

Speaking of famous poets and their email addresses, last week I sent out a mass mailing about my chapbook being out. I hate doing it so I stick to people I know in at least some fashion.

But I have lots of poets in my address book I don't know at all: Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland. I think that would be obnoxious to email someone like that.

I get these addresses when replying to some journal I've been in or anthology and all the people included get an email. I think Outlook is set to save those addresses and so I'm always surprised to see who has appeared, almost virally, in the address book.

***

O Disney World, O Mickey, O Sleeping Beauty in your glass sarcophagus.

Jiminy

I don't think I've mentioned that this Friday I'm leaving for here. No? Didn't think I had. Mostly because I've been mildly dreading it. My aunt's family seems to go at least twice a week and have been begging my parents to go with them forever. Somehow my parents agreed this year. I'm going to tag along.

Look for my posts from Cinderella's castle, updates from the Haunted Mansion, missives from twenty thousand leagues below the sea.

Be ready, someone, please, to launch a commando-style extraction from the Magic Kingdom.

Feed

It's official: Exit Interview is, uh, officially available. Which means you should order it because it will write you letters and send you pictures as it grows up.

Here's a link to the press release.

Another thing

Maybe I should point out that Steve Martin's debut album was called Let's Get Small. Maybe that might explain his presence in the poem below. Sort of.

Or maybe not.

High and dry

Listening this morning to The Bends. Does anyone miss the days when Radiohead still made songs? Everything after has been various sorts of cool but they can be so ravishing.

***

Radiohead isn't on it, but the new iTunes is pretty cool. It will download any missing album art in your collection automatically.

And, look, new iPods. The new shuffle, smaller than a matchbook, is wild. It isn't far off from the SNL skit where Will Ferrell answers a cellphone smaller than a tic-tac.

***

There are 2 poet bloggers on my iPod. Who could they be, do you think?

Gams

THE 50 FT. TALL WOMAN IN LOVE

O Steve Martin, let’s get small, both of us,

let’s slip inside that lost decade

that was all yours and even then

your white hair was white in my dreams

and I’ll bring the wreckage

of my decade, the atomic dread

which set me going, which lengthened

my bones like the day. Sleeping

I could feel it and staring

out into the infinite California summer

I could feel it. The aliens

back then always disappointed—

paunchy, covered in tinsel,

sexless from their long voyage

through the stars. They talked that way,

landing their absurd craft,

lockstepping about like arthritic loons.

This one wanted diamonds

and I had one to give

that was bigger than an Idaho potato.

The Star of India

my husband called it

before he started seeing that other woman

down at the bar

that served spaghetti

at the mythic edge of our nowhere town.

But enough of me

and all my destruction,

the rampage

in my makeshift bikini of linens, bedsheets,

anything to cover up

so much iconic embarrassment.

It’s different now

and I’m different

and the years are getting away from me

and what we feared

then, the mushroom cloud

and its fissure

turning all to ash and splinters,

seems quaint

and my long bed is lonesome without a man

and you make me

laugh like thunder

so tell me you aren’t curious,

tell me you’re not

dying to see,

tell me you never

wanted a woman

in whom you could vanish forever,

tell me no,

I dare you.

Leaning on the windowsill

I think, I think, I might be back from having internet down about 85% of the time since last Thursday or so. Comcast came out and drilled a hole in my floor yesterday. It seemed to work.

***

I received chocolate in the mail yesterday.

***

Working on a sort of secret project. Last night my brain cried uncle.

Sooner or later

PRACTICE

Love, my faith is vague. When others speak

of how they practice it, I think of kung fu

and plywood split by pajamed banshees,

how they always say you learn

such force through practice, pain repeated until

pain isn’t pain. It’s the piccolo

with its reed humming slivers

of sound that won’t ever be music

no matter the fervor of practice,

no matter the pursed poise

of your lips. When I write you, when I peel

away the stamps one no longer

need lick, I’m careful. Careful

for ounces of ink and pulp

and minutes shaved from time

if it exists at all and these words

I strung together beyond needful elaboration

only to say I thought of you

today beside the humming fountain

and had no change to wish

you some better life,

some cloud of shade to be

at your infinite beck, your always and immediate

call. A form of faith I follow

is the sky because it never falls,

despite the testimony of chickens

snuffed by hail, ragdolled by the rain

and through my window

I’m watching the last of summer

as the leaves begin to curl

in invisible fire

and I want to tell you

one thing which has within it no urgency at all

over and over again.

Sweet Melinda

One thing I just cannot abide is being accused of something I didn't do. It makes me nuts. Bananas. And other applicable food items.

I should be able to let it roll off my back, as I can almost anything, but I can't.

Your railroad gate

AFTER SUMMER

The moon will never be my Duncan yo-yo

though we whispered it would,

some summer, some drenched season—

you’d hold my hand, frame it

against the moon while in the half-dusk

fireflies bobbed, flashing

their ache, the semaphore

of lust. That was not a long time ago

but as long as we live

one picnic in darkness

begins to lessen, to compress, to rank with dust.

I’m trying to learn

how to live like flint—

to give fire each time I’m struck

by the cellular

strangeness of history,

to imagine Tokyo beset by spring, by petals,

by diffident squalls

of rain, trains beneath us

in arterial velocity

going everywhere, nowhere,

all at once. That’s no surprise

when I’m walking

home with food

and the light left

on flutters like moths

in a jar, like your heart beneath curved bone.

It’s no surprise

when the rain-slick knob

spins in my hand

and the hunger

mewls away

until my body seems to lift from itself

like a bird over water

is beautiful

somehow.

Today

I ordered my copy of Matt Guenette's A Hush of Something Endless and you should too. Matt and I started our MFA's at SIU the same year, under the cruel tutelage of Rodney Jones. And look at what a handsome boy he's turned into. He didn't ask but were I to contribute a blurb to his collection it would be one word:

"Bitter."

Matt knows why.

***

Setting the way back machine one notch further back on the dial, go welcome Karri Paul to blogger. She's been blogging over in the gated community of MySpace and I loved everything she wrote so much I suggested she take it public. I'm glad she did. Nothing much there now besides a little introductory note but whatever follows will be gold.

Karri and I were in our undergrad poetry workshops. She's a great poet but also a great painter and is in Austin working on her MFA in painting.

So say hey.

Needs a title

How many nights in the adoration of insomnia

did I mean to ask you one thing

or another, if teeth, yours, mine, the ones

you dream of coughing up, flowers of blood

into your fist, were specialized

bones. Because I wrestle

with the angel of science

there are days I want my citizenry

of the earth, my government of flesh,

revoked, disbanded, recalled, impeached,

impugned by the hail of noon light.

I never want the meal

from the gravid machine

which accepts my coins

like excuses, but you, how can I account

for your absence,

what is my excuse

for my own presence? Even in these words,

I’m dusting for prints

hoping to track where I’ve been

and what I’ve touched

and the fiber of the air disturbs all things,

every thing. Let me sweep

you up, bundle the day

with string, let me hide the sky’s refracted

realia of starlight

in the sugar on the sill

above the sink

where my hands

pretend to make a code of being clean.

How many unknowns

there are in the day,

in the algebra of wakefulness,

in the skitter of birds through the storm-thinned trees,

how much I’ll never care

to know, how heavy

your arms in mine as we lift

the separate darkness of sleep.

No fight left or so it seems

I've been listening to a lot of Johnny Cash lately, really digging into some of his back catalog, and yesterday I found a new favorite: "While I've Got It On My Mind." I'm guessing it's a 70's track from the sound of its production, or maybe late 60's. Basically, the song is this guy lounging about on Saturday watching the game and his wife is cooking up blackberry jam and he's horny and likes to give his loving while he's got on his mind. It's too funny but also kind of sweet and real and not some endless well of sap. Fun.

***

I just realized it was Labor Day.

***


Today it's Wicker Man. I'm not sure why.

Why was I born to love you?

An actual blueberry muffin for breakfast this morning. Not bad. It's not pancakes and apple smoked bacon, which I've never had, but it sounds great. And overwhelming. Like I'd have to schedule my next meal for sometime in my forties.

***

Still buzzing over how nice Exit Interview is. I feel like I should be giving readings. But I also feel like an accidental, unintentional Howard Hughes.

***

Three poems accepted by 42 Opus, which is great, especially that one of the ones they took is "Garden," the last poem in Notes and one of my very favorite poems.

I've sent it out a zillion times but I think it's just too sweet, too unassuming in its way. Maybe I'm dressing up what others might call slight but I don't think it is.

It's about buying a packet of seeds. And Latin. And a girl.

Dancing days

In the mail today: my box stuffed with copies of Exit Interview and packing peanuts. It's so nice. I'm insanely pleased with it. Hats off to Ander for doing such a great job on it.

I imagine pre-orders will be arriving in the next few days.