Almost I rushed from home to tell you this

Go

2009-04-30T09:16:00.001-05:00

Poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan. Learn more at:

http://findcraigarnold.blogspot.com/

Radio, Radio

2009-04-28T09:58:00.003-05:00

About a month or so ago, I was interviewed by Dick Gordon, host of The Story, a public radio program produced by American Public Media, who also do Garrison Keillor's show. I'm not sure I can stand listening to myself, but the interview airs today. Check your local listings, or listen to the stream here.

I had a great time and thanks to everyone.

Lassitude

2009-04-06T20:19:00.003-05:00

I'm reading tomorrow night, along with poet Megan Volpert, at the Georgia Center for the Book. Be there by 7:15 p.m. when the fun begins. I read there last fall with Thomas Lux and won't repeat a single poem. Or I'll try not. Definitely some new work.

***

I've been absorbed with finishing the memoir. In the last week or so, I've added approximately 10,000 words to the book. The end is near, not exactly mirage-like. But the middle is. What to say about those dull, largely forgettable late teen age years? Dunno. Must figure all that out. Later, rewrite everything.

***

I have 6 weeks.

***

I want it to matter.

***

See you tomorrow night?

Cuz we belong together, yeah

2009-03-10T14:20:00.005-05:00

Were I to peek through the blinds just now, outside everything would be spring: flood of sun and warmth and the (not uber-hyped-up social networking site) twitter of lean little birds and an ur-sky, blue, without end, Amen. I never can adequately express how glad of spring's onset that I am. A parole from winter, my rickety body.

And how silent has it been here? Cobwebbed, even. I haven't had much I wanted to say. At some point a blog becomes a chore and then it's best to step away from the blasted thing. But, with the return of clement weather, I fell less interior, less of a layered mind. Let's see what happens.

***

So much has gone on these last few months, some of it good, some bad, some fleetingly infuriating.

***

Today word from Ecco on My Index's sales numbers, which were wildly beyond what I would have predicted. Thank you to everyone who has purchased it.

The cost of that success is that Ecco/HarperCollins wants to push up the release of my memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, to May 2010, to coincide with the release of the paperback edition of Index. This was always a possibility, discussed, even, shortly after signing with Ecco. Now it's the real deal, sho nuff, and it's all great, except now I have to very seriously finish the darn thing. No sleep till Brooklyn, I guess. I'm not sure what I mean, except: holy crap, time to buckle down, y'all.

To that end, I've been working on a chapter about the time I got mugged.

Tonight

2009-03-08T21:47:00.001-05:00

An interesting review of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is up over at Bookslut.

Rawk

2009-02-25T14:54:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the wonderful Allison Joseph for this photo.

Hey

2009-02-25T14:53:00.000-05:00

AGNOSIA

It’s not that I don’t believe, or never did, or can’t again,
in the tumescent red fable of Santa Claus, exploding
from the mythic chimney we never had, and it’s not
that I was never a child who half-shivered in sleep
the night before the now creepy home invasion
of the Easter Bunny, mute and anthropomorphic
and egg laden and sugar floured, and I confess all
the enmity I ever kept for my milk teeth,
hoping to shed them one by one by one,
to peer for a while at their weird, blood-flecked roots
before hiding them beneath my head
for a fairy engaged in economies
I wish I could grasp. It’s not that I don’t believe in,
of all things, love, because I do
with the bruised zeal of falling objects.
Or fear, though last night I waited
for you or for the storm to rip away this roof
and there were times when
it was easy to imagine everything
peeling away, gone into the rattling night,
dropping into a field with cows
on their knees in the darkness,
all the clover turned ink by an absent moon.
Though I am not proud, I’ve laughed
at the pain of others, who stumbled
in the parking lots of grocery stores,
cans of rolled biscuit dough exploding
with surprising force on the asphalt,
and though I wished them an instant invisibility,
still I watched and watched. But,
what could I do, when helped to stand
in another lot, beside another car,
a wheelchair unfolded behind me, waiting,
what could I say to the man
who asked if we needed help
and, looking down, I could see my pants
crumpled about my ankles,
how like a dark flag of shame they were then,
in summer, the sun on my skin
and all the eyes of passing consumers,
that title we should despise
but don’t. What could I say but yes
or no or that it hardly mattered
if I couldn’t feel the difference anyway?
And that was a pain, but his,
added to all the rest, soon forgotten
or ignored or left to pretense—
it’s not that I don’t believe
in the sour thrum of shame
or that my face has never turned to blood
or believed in a lie
so desperately that eventual truth was almost lethal.
I have, I have, so help me,
I have.

Pre

2008-12-15T17:24:00.000-05:00

BEFORE

Maybe I’m done with tragedy; I can’t say how
long I’ve loved without cease fire peeling
away from the Hindenburg like skin. That
nobody knows that infamous voiceover
was really recorded days later, the film silent
before being spliced into newsreels,
I love to tell others, though I’m unsure why.
And I loved the smaller fires
a boy could imagine, feverishly plot, finally make
with thieved matches and rolls
of toilet paper, paper ripped from magazines,
rotten fruit. Once, in my hand,
a thing blew up and through all
my fingers I felt the shock shove through.
Nothing was severed, made
stumps, though my ears filled up
with what seemed was wet
silence, cotton soaked through, packed deep.
At night, now, with my ears
pressed into pillows, the night
pressing back, below or beyond
the little breaths of my love
there is a high sharpness, a ringing
that marks narrow escape.
To think of it, to see again that sea teal sky,
is to feel summer. Now,
it’s winter and all day comes
hateful rain, spattering this part
of the world with the maddening stubbornness
of weather. In bed I’m alone
no longer and even in love
some small part of my brain seeks
to nurse a disbelief. But,
maybe I am done with tragedy,
no matter how seductive its narratives all are.
Even this is a story, these words,
all this shaped air, this habit
of speaking to whatever is broken,
or once was, or might be. True
to say that none of it, none of it,
matters. Why does it seem right
to now speak of flowers?
The pallid lily, the hydrangea like foam from a wave.
I don’t know. All I care
is that we map out
with our bodies the night’s blindness. That we begin.

Life is long if you give it away

2008-12-10T15:41:00.003-05:00

We had a nice time last weekend. First, we bought tickets for a performance of The Nutcracker at The Fox Theater. A lovely production, though somewhat weirdly dotted with a couple of jarring, contemporary moments: a dancer air-guitaring; a breakout into choreography from the "Thriller" video. Crowd pleasers, certainly, but just a little odd. We stayed two nights at the hotel across the street from The Fox, The Georgian Terrace, which was great. Not the plushest place in the world, maybe, but extremely nice with stellar service. Because all their accessible rooms were booked, they upgraded us to a suite. A large bedroom with a massive bed, roomy bathroom, washer and dryer, a full kitchen, a living room and a study. We'll be going back. Sunday we took a cab over to Candler Park for brunch at The Flying Biscuit Cafe. Also very good. We are going back this weekend, I believe, with friends.

***

HOW TO WRITE A LOVE POEM

Not that I would know the way
one knows his path through the worn night
to what his ancestors called
the icebox, the fridge filled with
chilled darkness and detritus
of meals, bundles of grapes
with their white-green skins
and pale, hidden seeds
and packs of ketchup and soy
and yellow mustard
with its alarming fakeness and
a slab of cake burdened with frosting—
God knows what else
except that I’m speaking
of hunger when I meant
to tell you how I’d write a love poem.
As if I knew any such thing
or how to do it
well enough to need the doing no more.
But I’m trying, I’m trying not
to think of the night
in which I must compete with Minnesota,
where you sleep.
I’m trying not to petition
Congress for that state
and all its beauty, all its sky,
all its state issued
bodies of water
to be canceled.
For all the doors to be locked
and the carpets rolled
up and the shutters cinched
against the storm thick
glass and winter declared first an emergency
and then a memory
and I am trying
to think of one rule
which must be observed
above all others.
But all I can see is incessant snow,
even in the month
for which you are
named. Dear heart,
you’ve broken
my own in your hands.
If this is a love poem, this is hunger, this is how.

Poetry Daily

2008-11-25T09:01:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Marc McKee for letting me know about this.

Ring

2008-11-22T12:23:00.003-05:00

My fiancée works in Decatur, a town outside Atlanta that's home to Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control, and lots of good food. We've been sampling some mighty fine take-out, usually at night when she gets off work. Idlis and dosas, curried noodles, pulled pork, and a really decent burger from a place called Wahoo! Any place with an exclamation point in its name generally is trouble, I'd say, but this is the exception that proves the rule.

In short, we like it there. In September I read at the Decatur Book Festival and on Monday, December 1st, I'm reading there again. This time it's with Thomas Lux at the Georgia Center for the Book. If you can, you should come out. It'd be great to see you there.

And here's a new poem.

POEM FOR THE TELEPHONE

Because I can’t imagine much more than
a continent’s worth of copper,

strand to strand, pole to pole,
supporting crows in the moment

before their brains spasm with
not thought but imperative

to flight, because I don’t know
why I see when I walk

knotted shoes hung
like dead things from

those suspensions of imagined
copper, because everything

beyond the toaster oven
glows with a magic

in my cloddish head,
I imagine our four a.m.

talk pulsing dark
to dark and back again,

and I am in love
with you, yes,

but also the world in which
love is translated

and carried and kept,
even meted out

in minutes, in cents per each
sweep of the clock

hand, I am
in love with this

world and this word
and the ones after it,

the ones said
in the night

when we are so close
no one could

say who spoke first
and who answered

if we slept,
if we spoke at all.

Sunday

2008-11-16T10:09:00.002-05:00

EROS POETICA

Always bad form to say, to announce, this is
a poem, though I’m not sure why, as if
the few of us here with me in these lines
might have ever thought it anything
else: a letter or guide to constructing
something improbable, without discernible
parts, like love. Here I am, waiting
on the night to press up against
the world as though all my stillness
were penitence. Or practice
for your arrival, for your body,
the sum of all your cells, the billions
which you are. This is a poem
but a poem is also your hair
in the night, barely different, one from the other,
your hair in the composed night
above the bed. Bad form or
manners or rhetoric or what,
I don’t know, to say so
plainly some simple thing
like the sun dropping
past the rim of sight
is red because of particulate in the air.
Or the moon burns all
night because of stolen
light, that the tides stir
at the beck of a burning
parlor trick. But all this is true
and soundly unromantic
and has hardly any place
in the stuff of poems,
except that in thinking of you
all else fails the test
of artifice. No longer is there
any use in pretending
one thing is another.
I am tired of metaphor.
I want you, whether your soul
and mine are some elusive
shade or highest function
of biology, whether your heart
is the fist-sized knot
of muscle thudding away
beneath your ribs
and the modesty of your breasts,
or the fragile vase
in which you have carried
all your life, here to me,
from a river which even now is shining,
speaking to stone your name
over and again,
the only poem it knows or needs.

On sale today

2008-11-11T21:28:00.000-05:00

Sill

2008-10-29T09:54:00.003-05:00

So I was gone for two months or so. Maybe you noticed. Partly, it was nice to be away, to forget about thinking of new posts. But, in truth, my attention was elsewhere: my book, work, moving to a new place, and so forth. But, that list is incomplete and with the appearance of the feature in the latest issue in Poets & Writers, it seems disingenuous to not mention it here: I got engaged this summer. Recent poems like "Love Song with Ruin" are for her; my next collection of poems will be, I'm guessing, something different altogether from the previous three. I'm fantastically happy and it will be interesting to see what sort of art comes from that.

In the meantime, I don't expect this space to become DishCentral but I did want to share this with you. Thanks for reading, as always.

Post

2008-10-27T14:19:00.000-05:00

Stuff

2008-10-25T20:36:00.004-05:00

Here's a preview of poems in the current issue of The Paris Review. "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation" is the lead poem in my new book, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, due out in a couple of weeks. I received my box of copies and Ecco did a superlative job -- thank you, everyone.

Finally read the Poets & Writers article. Not bad.

And today, in The Washington Post, Mary Karr features My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge in the column Poet's Choice. You'll probably need to register to read it online.

And here's a new poem.

THINKING ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT

Everyone I know is mad
to make a mess of every littlest thing.
Thinking this makes numbers
easier to dial when all the news will be
about dead Bigfoot, ape suit
with a mouth full of phony
orthodontics and the pink guts spooled out
of a possum, more to be feared,
believe me, with its glass chunk eyes and needle
teeth. But I want to be terrified.
I want to sleep beneath
something antique
even beasts won’t want to lift
no matter the ravening gush of blood in their ears.
I want to count footsteps
in their approach
when all the precepts of ambush
have been abandoned. What a hoax
are these few seasons dwindling down
to a manageable monotony of blue
sky and the vapor-dowsed horizon
over there and the coiled-up weathers
stupid with rage and water. Right now
there is a roar of crappy cars coming
ever this way and it’s like sadness
is being delivered doorstep
to doorstep. And I’m with them,
running out into the night.
My naked chest, my crashing heart,
a crumpled sound falling out of heaven.

First copy

2008-10-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

PW

2008-10-20T17:24:00.001-05:00

In the meantime

2008-10-20T07:48:00.001-05:00

APOLOGIA

Despite all my cloddish ways and everything
broken or turned over or tea spilled
and the serious thought given to mourning
what is mostly water and sugar
and tea steeped a while in its bitterness,
I have been essentially able
to live in this precarious world without
breaking into socially questionable bouts
of fervent clogging or crunking
or whatever the kids these days
call joy. I’ve managed
to never be naked in the startled company
of strangers, except for that one
time I’m obligated by law
and all its bloodless strictures
to remain utterly silent
about, which is no fun, no fun
the way the word laparoscopy is no fun
to even consider. Love, look
at the modest scarring my modest skin
carries like luggage: forgive
me there are no better stories,
no flaming hulls crawled out of,
no eardrums perforated by fathoms of brine,
forgive me, forgive me,
that within me there are
no better lived lives,
none truer or more kind or generous
or at least wracked
with ecstatic danger
in countries no one could spell
or even say. All that I have
left are these elbows,
the same as most men
who have passed through life
without a moment
boiled in rage. And this sore toe,
victim of my lifelong failure
to turn appliances off
without minor injury.
All that I have is what barely works,
holds true to no station
and no song no matter
how piercingly sad,
leaving me to sing the vanished rest
to you, to you, to you,
while the night draws near enough
to think anything might
listen.

Saturday

2008-10-18T12:31:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago there was a cricket inside my bathroom wall. It was a mystery at the time. Now I'm thinking it must have come over from this blog and all its recent silence.

Well, I'm back. Or I am for today. A lot has been going on and, really, all of it has been good. Word from Ecco is that My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge will be back from the printer this week. Meaning I should have my first copies within a few days. And that's very exciting. There are a few other things afoot with it that I can't quite mention.

I haven't seen the Poets & Writers article yet. Is it out yet?

What's new? What have I missed?

Peach

2008-08-29T19:28:00.003-05:00

I'm remiss in not mentioning that I'll read tomorrow, Saturday the 30th, at 4:15 (along with Dan Albergotti and Juliana Gray) at The Decatur Book Festival.

***

Also, next week, on September the 4th, I'm reading at Bowling Green State University. In Ohio. Not Ken-tuck-ee.

***

And then, on September 14th, at The Brooklyn Book Festival, I'm reading with D. Nurkse, Kevin Young, and Patricia Smith.

***

So come on out.

Read

2008-08-24T15:36:00.002-05:00

An important piece from poet (and good friend) Stacey Brown on an unethical press and its dealings with her and her book.

Daze

2008-08-19T18:49:00.002-05:00

Back to teaching today. Several students from last year signing up for other classes I'm teaching. One of them overheard a student from my freshman comp. class remark that they were "stuck with the handicapped professor."

*blink*

I must confess a little outrage. Normally, I'd find it funny, and I do, to a degree, but something about it cut me The Wrong Way.

Had I heard it, all that would have been left was a smoking, greasy crater in the sidewalk.

Tues.

2008-08-19T07:30:00.000-05:00

LOVE SONG WITH RUIN

I’ve been thinking about thinking about
obliteration, again, the time, all of it,
I spent swept up in its romance.
Dust before a broom’s baleen maw. Circuit
of the second hand which, even now,
holds a magic or a beauty
in its indifferent grasp. Easy thoughts,
which on a lesser day, one
that had none of this late light
or the hum of the wind,
would, or should, fix me with incredulous
shame. For my own brain,
floating in fluid laze,
content to let the garden
forget itself. For my own hands,
busied with buttons,
keying the codes of indolence.
Important, I think,
to accept the testimony of a shadow.
To say it is gospel.
To know there is no need
to make peace with
a world that has no peace.
About bombs I was dreaming
and Dresden, drained
of the colors of ruin,
newsreel footage flickering inside
my sleeping mind.
And then in your arms
I returned to this
world, awake, an old war dropping away.
Just the tonnage
of sleep, receding,
and I felt the need to say farewell.
To mark the moment,
even with dawn
and its idiopathic dumbness.
But there you were,
asleep, in need of none of this
embellishment. When
I kissed your forehead,
I dreamed I dreamed
your dreams, that I slept your sleep.

%

2008-08-18T17:46:00.000-05:00

IMPURE POEM

Its etymology seemed plain but I looked—
its terminal moment came to us
whenever people spoke a middle English,
which I did not research, I’m sorry,
all I could think of was you, all I could do
was close that book and begin
to write you this poem which cannot be
pure. With every word, I am
failing you, amazed you took to heart,
that worn phrase which should
be struck from the line but won’t be,
anything I wrote, anything I will write
tonight. And why I write—
a mystery when all I can think of
is you in the darkness,
your body in black lace or not,
your hand in mine, your hair a long warmth
spooled against my neck,
your mouth more still
than mine. And all that I want
is three rivers by which
to snooze. Or two if we must not be triangulated
by knotted threads of silt.
Or one if location, location,
is not the location it’s made out to be.
Or none. I am happy
also within sight of snow
provided it never comes down to stay,
to sleep in the yard as
soundly as the dead.
Give me an ocean for us
and what could I want
that was more than your sweet face?
Every morning, come dawn,
I won’t go down to the surf
like a penitent county employee
in whose mind the wheel
of pension spins with a slowness that is life,
won’t toe the froth wanting
shells for your collection,
won’t peruse the shed exocoils of starfish.
No, I’ll sleep the sleep
of children or sedated logs
or sedated children
as heavy with dream as logs are
heavy with years in rings. I wish
I were decent. I wish I did
not plot in the play
of your skin on mine
in the morning of my true nature.
But I do. I plot and plan
because there are rivers
to find and mountains to map out
and maybe lush expanses
of veldt, high with grass
combed by wind. An ocean,
a tree house, a hammock strung between elms.
Anything, anything, so long
as you consent
to live with me beneath the moon’s thrown light.