Almost I rushed from home to tell you this

New

2012-02-14T13:35:00.001-05:00

FOR WHEN YOU ARE DOWN ABOUT VARIOUS IGNOMINIOUS FATES

O bike thief in Las Vegas run to ground on TV

by a one-legged cop, I will tell nobody

of the shame which racked you.

Made your mugshot a study

of failed ambition aplenty. But,

I should be honest. Whatever you felt,

however you rawly ached,

it won’t be found here. Let us be clear:

I’m making you up. Assigning your heart

grand disappointment. Naming you

Russell, or Leonard, maybe Estus–

not all at once, but as my mood goes

I speak good advice to you with great authority.

In the moment you’re knocked

from the suburban kid’s mountain bike

(and how could you take it)

you’re clobbered by the young veteran,

his lungs about to explode into the clip-on microphone.

I’d like to step in

with my mouth full of the obvious:

you do not want to be this.

When I broke my neck,

fez-capped Shriners came to our house,

looking old and white and sad.

They gave me a TV,

and my brother an orange foam football.

Twenty five years later

that set went dark forever,

and nobody would repair it.

I think of the day I went with my brother

in his horrible Camaro

to buy a new television.

He helped me stand,

bracing my knees against his,

then we turned to the unfolded wheelchair.

Over my brother’s shoulder,

I could see an old man watching,

maybe he was a Shriner, too,

ready to come over, offer his strength–

“Can I help you, son?”

When I said no, his face was grave;

I looked down to see that

my jeans had fallen

and my legs were white in the sun.

Which is a way of saying

that I was half-naked

in a Best Buy parking lot,

once. Don’t forget

the pained old man,

the crappy Camaro,

the Shriners who occasioned it all.

Well, not all: I, too, was knocked

from a bike, from a life,

once upon a time. Russell, foolish thief, I think of you

each time I’m caught.

The thought of the catacombs

2011-11-05T19:21:00.000-05:00

Is (was?) Reckoning just about the best album R.E.M. ever made? Maybe so.

***

I find I'm still lagging behind all possible verb tenses, these days. This is not a complaint.

***

Back from less than twenty four hours in New Jersey. Thank you so much to a truly wonderful host of nice people at Brookdale Community College. I had a wonderful, if frenetic, time there. I spent a few moments on the beach, pleased with the ruckus of the lapping waves - I hadn't expected to stay on the beach. And down the street, old bars where Springsteen came up. We only drove by them. Still, I fancied to feel a little of The Boss.

And, then there was Tony Soprano. The poster in the lobby for a bus tour. Tempted. No time.

***

Amtrak never looked at my i.d.

***

It is no real secret I love my Kindle. The new model is pretty fantastic - lighter, slimmer, pared back. I often do readings with it. And just read - a lot of that these days.

***

Charlottesville is wonderful, beautiful in this autumn, a little like a dream.

KJV

2011-06-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

The link is for subscribers only, but I'm happy and thrilled to say that my poem "After Damascus" is part of a feature on the King James Bible in the June issue of Harper's.

UVA

2011-04-18T17:43:00.001-05:00

I'm thrilled and honored to say that this fall I'll be joining the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

Whee

2011-04-07T12:38:00.000-05:00

Great good news: I'm honored to be a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow: http://bit.ly/g7t1uV

Nashville

2011-04-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

At Centennial Park, Caney Fork River Valley Grille, and, yes, Cracker Barrel.

On the road

2011-03-31T16:31:00.000-05:00

Reading at Austin Peay State University on 3-17-11 with me, my fiancée June, and David Keplinger. Introduced by Blas Falconer.

Tag!

2011-03-25T15:36:00.001-05:00

My memoir, translated into German, now available in Germany: http://tinyurl.com/4wfljgh

The Ides

2011-03-15T09:18:00.001-05:00

Cruddy sheets of rain follow a sunny spring day. My birthday. Thank you to everyone who sent such nice wishes. I'm overwhelmed by your kindness. I know I don't write here very much these days, but I plan to get back to it one of these days. Maybe as spring deepens. Anyway, again, my thanks and love to you all.

Thanks

2011-02-23T20:40:00.000-05:00

My thanks to Harper's for publishing my poem "Narrative 6" in their March issue.

Ok

2011-01-18T20:03:00.000-05:00

NARRATIVE 12

The stealing was inevitable, you told yourself,
hiding beneath your scabby shirt a steak,
frozen hard, marbled with white veins of fat.
Some place, maybe a cruddy gas station
or roadside rest stop, would have a functional microwave.
Else, it was fire again, and still,
your hands burned like waving torches,
awful for anyone to see. Your own dismay was gone.
You thought of all the cartoons
you watched when you were young;
you thought of their representation of starvation:
a man cinching his belt so tight
that his waist vanished, with it immense hunger.
You had no belt. Lost in the woods
weeks ago, when worry for it
didn't seem insane, the belt was cheap, entirely fake.
Snow was falling and you said
to a mute woman beside you
that all this was like a mirage,
as it began to catch and melt in her uncombed hair.
That was real, you tell yourself.
The snow and the woman and her glittering hair were real.
This is not.

Or, maybe not

2011-01-17T10:28:00.002-05:00

NARRATIVE 11

The ocean was so near the air
was saline, always cold, and never still:
you waited for the gulls to come
each morning, though they were alien,
ugly, and sounded so sad
you shivered. You bought cheap doughnuts
and tossed torn bits
up to where the birds bobbed.
Once or twice they missed,
but that was all. You were thrilled.
You ignored the water.
The sun had not quite returned.
Along the shore, washed up
jellyfish lay about like weird trash.
Kneeling on the cool grit,
your face low to their almost-shapes,
you tried to stare into
whatever they were, or had been-
clear like glass, or bags of slowly dispensed medicine.
They made you ill.
You took a long stick
and pierced one,
through and through,
though you felt bad about it.
That this was an unknown transgression.
Still, you couldn't help opening it up,
stirring its invisible, inscrutable systems.
Water like jellied tears ran out.
This bothered you most.
You regretted the harm,
completely, though the thing was nerveless, cold.
You walked back.

Last

2010-12-22T11:01:00.000-05:00

NARRATIVE 10

You should not feel so fragile, so fated
to be dashed to dust by a strong sneeze.
But, you do: all day long you wait
to fall beside the toilet, or trip on a rug.
To know that inside your body
something has shattered. You're a fool,
you say. Once, your father wept
over a stray cat that had bounded
into the road and under his wheels.
You found him hosing his car,
blood and shit still clinging to its underside.
Go inside, he said. Just go.
A small part of you broke, then.
You tell yourself that. You blame so much
on that sad moment
you have to admit, you have to laugh,
it is absurd. In your hand,
door knobs turn like uncertain declaration.
You are going. You are returning.
You found this thing. You lost another.
You have decided. Summer in the Azores.
Winter in a little German burg,
though there is only old menace
waiting for you. You know the time will come
when you will be unable
to flee. When your blood
will be worthless. You know
you have already been soundly defeated
at chess, in tennis, in the dojo of an inscrutable master.
You smile. Your teeth ache.
You wonder why.

Monday

2010-12-20T09:56:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Poetry Daily for featuring my poem, "Love Song with Ruin," on their website today.

Pen

2010-12-15T21:03:00.000-05:00

NARRATIVE 9

You never really believed the movies:
a man couldn't slice off his prints
with a razor, couldn't evade apprehension,
forever. You thought about
transgression. You thought about
the candlelight by which
this mutilation was always performed.
The night before a heist,
before the first sickening murder,
the retreat into darkness.
You looked at your own hands.
Almost, you could see
all the blood inside them.
Beside you, an aquarium stank,
thick with green curds of algae,
though nothing in it swam.
With a toy net, with brittle precision,
you'd skimmed the last fish
from the dead water weeks ago,
flushing it like waste.
Your television was a smear of sound.
Your sink made you weep.
Or strain with the sensation,
your lungs filling up with heat.
A child once came to you,
dragging a bucket of cheap chocolates.
Your money went
away to where
good causes originate.
Where swings are made
from limitless concern.
No sharp edges. No lead. No cadmium.
That was her pitch, at least.
Later, the old apologies weren't much good:
I'm sorry, never again, you have to understand.

And run

2010-12-09T11:54:00.000-05:00

On my walk to campus Monday morning, I was crossing the street when a woman driving a small SUV sideswiped my wheelchair, spinning me around and scraping down the length of the vehicle. I'm lucky: I'm unhurt, and my wheelchair is undamaged, thank God. I was stunned - I looked up and could see the driver. She was on her cellphone, looking over her shoulder, her lips moving fast. I glared at her, still shocked. She sped off, tearing around a corner. She was gone.

I looked myself over again to make sure I wasn't injured. I wasn't, so I went on my way. It was the last day of our semester and I didn't want to miss my students.

Hath

2010-11-30T12:10:00.000-05:00

NARRATIVE 8

You called Senators, manufacturers of hay balers,
and demanded lots of things. Concessions
to your sadness, mainly, which had hung around
since at least the second grade, when
a ball of ice had smacked you in the eye
and turned your face into a curtain of blood.
You never saw it coming. Now, you laugh
when the weather is on, thinking of old winters.
How much made of pain they were.
How you placed your body atop the frozen lake
and waited for the cold to come
through the back of you -
it felt like you were falling
into a brick wall, and all time had slowed.
Now, you make notes about
proper techniques regarding the disposal
of old television sets
and complain to the window
your litany of abuses.
All around is motion:
the scrape of jets in ascent,
and the buses passing by on the hour.
You practice stillness. You fill yourself up with it.
Your muscles mutter. Your bones cannot stop their sighing.
Here you've come. Here you came
with absurd things like tube socks.
Your skin. Your skin
like a sort of faith, you think one night when
outside the world heaves
with rain. When the sky burns in the vague distance.
If you inhale, the air has a taste.
Copper wire. Blood.
You are empty. You are unknown.

TSA Patdown

2010-11-17T17:35:00.000-05:00

I have no power to convince you to call your Senators, change your travel plans, or engage in light civil disobedience. But, damn it all, I'll try.

Last week I read at Coastal Carolina University in beautiful Conway, South Carolina. Thanks to Dan Albergotti for inviting me. I had a great time.

But I didn't enjoy the trip's beginning. At the airport in Atlanta, going through security, I was directed to the space where TSA employees usually work with disabled or elderly travelers. This area is in full sight, between the tandem streams of travelers passing through X-ray machines. So far, no big deal: usually, I'm quickly looked over and waved on. Often, the TSA employees are more concerned with my wheelchair's batteries. Which is understandable: my chair runs on two car batteries. By all means, let's check those out.

But, we live in an "enhanced" era: enhanced interrogations, enhanced patdowns. The TSA employee, a dour, middle-aged man with thick silver hair, informed me that he would be performing a patdown on me, that I could request a private room if I was uncomfortable receiving this in public. That's not needed, I said, wanting to get going.

He was wearing blue latex gloves. Several on each hand. He asked me to lean over. I did. He then stuck his left thumb in my pants, between the waistband and my skin, and ran it all the way around. I was shocked.

"I feel like I have to tell you that is wildly intrusive and offensive."

He sputtered a bit about the safety of American lives.

"That's fine," I said, "I understand the concern. That doesn't change the fact that I feel that what you're doing is totally unacceptable."

He didn't say anything. He crouched in front of me. He asked if any parts of my body were sensitive to pain.

"They all are, I think," I replied. He thought about that for a moment before continuing.

"Starting with your ankles, and moving up, I'm going to examine your legs until I feel resistance."

He began kneading my calves and shins, up over my knees to my thighs, squeezing, until he reached my genitals.

It was like a bad date. With the US government.

After he had thoroughly groped me, he sent me on my way.

This was truly, profoundly egregious and contrary to what we claim are American ideals. In fact, this kind of abuse is corrosive to those ideals. If we accept these practices, then we accept the next wave of violations. We are complicit in the extinguishing of our rights.

Say no, stop flying, call your Senators - you have a lot of choices.

The PB cover for OMTAH

2010-11-09T21:23:00.001-05:00

Free

2010-11-04T16:30:00.003-05:00

NARRATIVE 5

Your paperback of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

was ruined when it sank into the motel bathtub,

fat and seeping when you plucked it back. Outside,

there were old people screaming for the bus

or playing games of chance with bits of bones

they’d scooped from the roadkill by the curb.

You were waiting for darkness. So were they.

The bus never came. You suspected

there was no bus. On dried-up stationery,

you drew a picture of a square

with knobby wheels and a few windows.

Stick people stared out them, at the ceaseless road.

At you, you thought. You drew a fat mark

through them, canceling whatever

they had hoped for, and tied it to the soggy book.

You threw it out the motel door,

praying they’d shut up or scatter.

Or go to sleep. No one noticed

and all night long the hiss of oxygen tanks

and the electric clack of wheelchairs

and the chirping alarms of all the world’s congestive failures

were at your door. You missed

the book you’d lifted from a library

in the next town over. Why

you had picked it made no sense.

Everything was pitiable. Above the bed

the room’s sallow light hummed

and wouldn’t shut off. The mattress felt like straw.

You figured it would not be long

before you found work again

in a mine or as a museum docent.

Whatever that meant. Docent. You liked the word

like the matches you kept

in your pocket like identification.

There was more to your story,

you always said if you were asked.

You rarely were.

Total

2010-10-30T21:40:00.002-05:00

WATCHED POT APOSTROPHES

You will never boil. You’ll go blind
not doing that. In space, your blood
will also refuse to boil. No surprise
all the movies are dead wrong,
though my nerves aren’t soothed
whenever I’m bobbing in the vacuum
like an apple in ice water.
You are going to receive money.
And then you’ll spend it
on a fiberglass replica
of the sports car you wanted
when you were thirteen.
Or fifteen. You may think this matters,
this discrepancy fluttering
in your face like a rabid moth.
Trust me, you will summer in Ceylon.
When they decide to change
that name back. When all
the maps at once go a little bad.
I have assumed more
than is good for one’s soul.
You’ll inform me you bled out a long time ago.
In Chicago. In Reading.
Somewhere cold. Winter
all the time, where people go
down to the frozen water
with a rusted crowbar
and bash the skin of the ice back to current.
You were one of them,
weren’t you, with death
itching in the brain like a cloud of midges?
You won’t fall if I let go.
I never held you in my arms.

MB

2010-10-28T18:24:00.000-05:00

NARRATIVE 6

You once dreamed of bedding down in elevators.

Maybe your young life had been touched

by prolonged contact with suburban commerce.

Maybe you had been sexually confounded

by the strain of cinnamon in the air,

or bleating saxophones beamed from low orbit.

Maybe you skipped pennies across

the dimpled waters of the fountain

and recited under your breath

wishes so desperate you recanted in that instant.

Teenagers veered about in misery.

Mall-walkers hissed like adders.

There were grandchildren, there were balloons

they had all let go of, screaming,

there were anatomically indistinct

iterations of the human body

wearing suggestions of life behind glass windows.

It should not go unsaid

how happy you were.

How free of predatory lending practices.

Your ligaments did creak

like ropes in a storm.

You dreamed of dreaming about nothing else.

Only this: rising, descending,

over and over until no one would come in,

and you were alone in a box.

You thought of coffins,

how complacent a comparison,

you said to nobody in particular

as you waited for the doors to shut and motion to resume.

Road

2010-10-17T20:04:00.002-05:00

NARRATIVE 4

In record time you found yourself a little less lost,

the vertigo inside your skull humming

like a piece of abandoned electronics,

or a musty kazoo with no music left inside it,

and began trekking back home,

bearing hard right at the skatepark

its disuse filling up with standing rain,

then straight for two miles

past banks of wild, colorless flowers

and in the road there were

piles of dingy squirrel pelts,

and plastic bottles of prescription medicine

and instruction manuals

for vaguely prosthetic devices.

As you thumbed through each,

the yearning you felt

to be made better, more, made no sense.

You could see a man

setting fire to his arm,

which you had to assume was an accident,

as he waved it wordlessly.

It looked like a flag

announcing dominion,

even as he vanished into the backyard.

Dogs were barking and

then they were quiet

and people issued from their homes

passing questions

one to the other

as if this were a shared dream.

You wanted to say

what this place obviously was.

What had happened.

To tell them to return to their tolerable dinners.

To go back inside.

Because the silence had gone

and this at last was loss,

or what you had guessed it might be for a long time.

You wanted to leave.

You did.

Mass

2010-09-14T18:44:00.001-05:00

TIME OFF

When your genius had grown tiresome to everyone,

and the profligate owners of many karaoke bars

had agreed to never readmit you, not again

after that last time and all the phlegmatic pleading

and bedraggled supplication, you had to go

down to the gushing artery of the interstate

and think of rivers. In your hands you held

a wheel of cheese you bought at a mall

and while the passing cars began to glow in the dark

and their horns sang intermittent rage,

you wished to be more intensely American.

In motion, slamming into the febrile horizon.

While the night just happened, no warning, no nothing,

you tried to eat, to not be hungry,

to be aware of many other things.

It was the kind of holiday no one despises.

People warred about snow and where coffee comes from.

A pigeon hopped past, unable to fly:

one leg dragged on the ground,

mangled, unexplained. You knew it would die.

DBF

2010-09-07T16:08:00.000-05:00

This weekend I had Eggs Benedict across the street from where I sit now. I'm not entirely convinced of the innate interestingness of people-watching, but that's what I was doing while waiting for my reading in the Decatur Book Festival. Lots of people milled past; they were dusty with confectioner's sugar, eating funnel cake. Fried dough: that was poetry, man, whoever done thunk that up. None for me, though, and I really only picked at the brunch I'd ordered. I was in a bad mood.

I went to hear Natasha Trethewey read from her new memoir Beyond Katrina. A great reading, a great audience. I was scheduled to read in the very same spot a few hours later. When I entered the room, my eyes scanned out over the area, checking for any potential problems with access. There were three or four stairs up to the ramp. No ramp. I couldn't see an alternate way on to the stage. I wouldn't be able to get up to the podium and microphone.

If this were the first time something like this had happened, at any reading anywhere, I would have been bemused. But it wasn't the first time, or even the second or third. Instead, I was just unsurprised. When Natasha finished, I left and went back through the crush of people to the author check-in site. I mentioned the problem. After some repeated explanation, the organizers began rapidly iPhoning. There was nothing they could really do at that point, I knew, but I felt compelled to speak up.

I read on the floor in front of the stage with a plastic ironing board for a podium. No big deal. It went just fine.

But I think I should say this to All Organizers Everywhere:

If you invite a disabled person to your party, make sure he can get in the house. If you invite a disabled person for a job interview, don't be annoyed that the person really is, you know, disabled. If you invite a disabled person to read at your campus or festival, whether he reads from a memoir about disability or not, don't ask them to read in places which act as obstacles.

I should also say that I know that running something like the Decatur Book Festival, with its hundreds of writers and tens of thousands of visitors, must be insanely difficult. I can't even know. The Festival was great and I encourage any writer to come if asked. I've always had a great time and look forward to reading there again. But, please don't forget, amidst the frantic sprawl of preparation, to ask if a person's needs are being met or if they're being forgotten.

&

2010-08-07T16:47:00.001-05:00

NARRATIVE 3

Following that, stern-faced authorities suggested

you develop hobbies unlikely to attract

the attention of local apex predators.

You had to concede that made a lot of sense,

so you took to your mail-order

quarter-scale models of sunken cruise liners

with appropriate zeal. You imagined

what it must feel like to drown

as you bore down on the cheap plastic parts,

locking each one to the other,

smearing noxious glue when needed,

deciding the sea was awful,

nearly infinite as far as you were concerned.

Almost a week passed.

You made mustard sandwiches

and watched John Wayne films,

weeping when each was about to end

and you felt tired but good,

the way convalescence looks,

on-screen, with lap shawls in abundance

and guys in starched white scrubs

propelling your made-of-wood wheelchair

through fussy Victorian gardens.

You were too close to the ocean,

either one, and down the block

a goldfish pond bubbled like soda

in a neighbor's weed-twisted lawn.

Whenever you passed, whistling like a pressure cooker,

you could feel the water press

against your shaking ribs

with no real malice, just blank disregard;

whenever the blurred image

of your body moving over the green water

followed you back home,

you thought of the vague pleasures

of Kansas or Fifteenth Street,

or anywhere that hadn't turned so oppressive.

I'll write when I arrive, you said

to the unfortunate, to the curious,

who watched you wave from the ledge of the horizon.

= C

2010-07-29T20:43:00.001-05:00

NARRATIVE 2

Then, this happened: they found your severed thumb.

A listless troop of Eagle Scouts

far outside incorporated Halifax,

where they had no business being.

It was true, everyone had said so,

though suspicious-looking aldermen

lent the boys cheap carbines

and sundry ammunition and mean-looking blades

to clip to their belts like phones.

Come back, they said, giving them up,

miniature sacrifices marching into

the violence of everywhere else.

And you were there already, shaving

with old hubcaps and notched machetes,

line-items in the surplus of a dim, disreputable war.

You slept inside cast-off hammocks

when the nights were warm

and it was easy to believe life

was not an endlessly replicated series of visual puns.

And then in your hands

you were holding some blood,

belonging to nobody but you.

A bland nausea knotting up.

The stirrings of critters in the distant brush.

Not much else to attend you

and your stupid wound.

No orchestral fanfare set to the ticking of tape.

That would have been nice,

you thought, but a mess

within another mess, and your life besides.

It was easy to bind your hand

and cover up your thumb

with some of the cellophane that was all over.

To say a few sweet words

and then leave it on the ground,

as much use as it had ever been.

And then it was easier still to go,

that much lighter in flesh

and the blood that sped out of you.

Whenever they found you

hitching on the road's crumbling shoulder,

there was no good light

by which to see you

swear your name was very serious,

so a few them itched

to unsling their borrowed guns.

You're already dying,

they muttered and coughed and kicked

at the scant clods of grass where you stood.

You're almost out of blood.

You don't even know it.

What could you trade for your life?

A+B

2010-07-27T18:17:00.006-05:00

NARRATIVE

First, this happened: you woke in a strange place.

A glade ringed by indistinct conifers, Bull Pines,

maybe, with your pockets full of bottle caps.

No shoes. No wallet, no memory of one.

This felt unaccountably tragic in the thinned air,

so it took a long time to get going.

And then you came to a river

and thought about swimming across

to the other bank, where you’d be no less lost,

all of you soaked and unhappy.

There was no way that was going to happen,

so you turned away from the loud water

and the promise of that river

humming away with your rescue.

Warm blankets. Mugs of steaming soup.

The shadow of a helicopter

falling on your prodigal self.

Enlisted boys trained to kill

by an amoral government,

though they turned out to be sweethearts.

They had mothers, too, they said,

and that made a lot of sense

as you wept, confessing embarrassing truths

about Vacation Bible School

and the cyclic humiliations of desire.

And then there was the crash landing.

And then the rationalizations of retreat

and the promise to yourself

that one day the world would know their brave tale.

Their culturally proscribed love.

At least their mothers deserved

an anonymous letter or expensive gift.

So you walked through nowhere

until your naked heels bled

on rocks and desiccated curves of bark

littering the dark ground.

The day had become its night.

In the distance people were badly singing,

which was encouraging.

Here, right here, you could always live.

And then you weren't lost,

at least in any geophysical sense.

About what happened when

you hobbled into their appalled midst,

not much more can be said.

J.R.

2010-07-18T11:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks to The Dallas Morning News for this nice review of One More Theory About Happiness.

Press, here

2010-06-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

If you didn't see it in the Sunday paper, here's what the review of my memoir looked like in The New York Times Book Review. I trolled around in 100 degree weather, from coffee shop to corner market, buying up copies like a Very Strange, Inexplicably Acquisitive Guy in a Wheelchair.

Sunday

2010-06-12T09:23:00.000-05:00

Amazed and thrilled by this wonderful review of OMTAH in The New York Times Book Review.

Hey, kids, rock and roll

2010-06-10T20:10:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the Oxford American for their review of my memoir. I love this picture of OMTAH on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. I've never been there, but now it feels like some part of me has.

Be sure to check out their great video piece on Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods in Athens, Ga., inspiration for the title of R.E.M.'s classic Automatic For the People.

It's 7:03

2010-06-03T16:56:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Wil, pictured with me, and everyone at the Buckhead Barnes & Noble for making me feel so welcome last night: I truly appreciate your kindness. Thanks, as well, to my friends in the audience, many of them unexpected. Kudos, especially, to the vaguely creepy guy with the mohawk and the heavy breathing: when you exclaimed, "NO BRAKES," in perfect Don LaFontaine movie trailer voice, as I read the bicycle accident scene from my memoir, it was kind of awesome.

Tee Vee

2010-06-01T23:09:00.000-05:00

Watch me on TV: I'll be on Good Day Atlanta tomorrow, Wednesday, at 9:20 AM to talk OMTAH. Tune in to Fox 5 or stream online.

Sizzle

2010-05-31T16:36:00.000-05:00

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, independent booksellers recommend summer reading picks, including One More Theory About Happiness and My Index Of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge.

New poem

2010-05-30T09:24:00.001-05:00

ANOTHER FAILED POEM ABOUT STAPLINGS

after Sandra Beasley

Maybe it was starlings, and maybe my stunted brain

took in the evident world and the written word

with its usual clubfoot alacrity. It probably was

about those, ah, little birds, famous for

showing up in poems but I was too taken with

my own dumb misprision to get it right.

Think about it: there was a secret

world in which a lot of people, for a long time,

had been writing about multiple fastenings

of disparate paper with bits of post-consumer steel.

I thought of John Keats: all week long

I've struggled in my heart to not be terrorized

by his bloody death, his lungs coming up into his mouth

in unsettling wads. I tried to remember

whether he had ever written about those birds

but I couldn't find his book

and it didn't matter, anyway,

dead as he was and wrong as I was about

that other imagined, weird poem

which announced itself a member

of the violently specific canon regarding office supplies.

Or maybe it was about the awful,

mechanical closings of some surgical incisions

I witnessed when I was a kid,

when I stared, too long, at the zippered wounds

of men whose necks were no

stronger than mine, who I might soon become,

I thought, if nothing went right.

And then nothing did

and whatever was explained to me,

the expectations of textbook procedure and the pain of the actual,

I got that wrong, too, surprise,

let us not be shocked by this apology to the gathered sky.

Reading in Buckhead

2010-05-25T12:58:00.000-05:00

Neue

2010-05-21T12:30:00.007-05:00

RIGHT WHEN I'M FEELING GOOD ABOUT THE MODERN MOMENT

And the fractured self and the gross vagaries of

public life, something arresting happens, pops my good

humor square in its beaming, seraphic face,

and I'm forced to consider my neighbor's lawnmower

chewing through his splotchy lawn like

institutional-grade cheese. No need to meditate

on the engine's whine, its inescapable metaphoric allusiveness:

mob of enraged bees spoiling for a fight;

sewing machine you found in an alley

in a town whose name you can't recall,

just that you lugged it home, its cord

dragging behind you like a frayed tendon,

where in secret you plugged it in

and the thing sang, burning, before

it locked up inside itself, really dead, truly junk.

No need to hover over all this,

no need to extract from it

the flashy ore of unexamined significance,

but I just did, there is no taking back

this sort of thing, no recall to issue

when what you find is not what you want.

When what you wanted was five minutes alone with

the shadow of an ornamental cherry tree,

or sex first thing in the morning,

just beyond the ragged boundaries of sleep,

or a bowl of something good for you,

though your surprise borders on the seismic,

and, really, what you are eating

is your death, your awareness, at last, that it is aware of you.

Catching up

2010-05-20T17:40:00.006-05:00

USA Today reviews One More Theory About Happiness.

The Los Angeles Times also chimes in.

Followed by the good people at The Boston Phoenix.

And Time Out Chicago, whose nice review originally stated I'm able to walk. Which was a surprise, certainly.

The San Francisco Chronicle features OMTAH's first sentence in its "Grabbers" column.

Sha la la

2010-05-19T12:35:00.001-05:00

Very excited to be asked to contribute a playlist of favorite songs to Paper Cuts, The New York Times Book Review blog.

Book Tour

2010-05-11T23:28:00.002-05:00

This week I'll be reading from One More Theory About Happiness in North Carolina:

The Regulator Bookshop in Durham on Thursday, May 13
http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/

Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville on Friday, May 14
http://www.malaprops.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

Both readings start at 7 p.m. Stop by if you can. It'd be great to see you there!

Guernica Magazine

2010-05-03T12:07:00.002-05:00

Guernica Magazine excerpts my memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. Read the first chapter here: http://bit.ly/d4Cubm

Discover

2010-04-30T13:31:00.000-05:00

Safe to say I never expected news like this: Barnes & Noble has selected my memoir One More Theory About Happiness for its Discover Great New Writers series.

Come on down

2010-04-28T18:02:00.002-05:00

Saturday

2010-04-24T14:54:00.000-05:00

It was almost exactly a year ago I talked with Dick Gordon for The Story; thanks to them for re-airing the interview yesterday.

A smile like a cartoon

2010-04-19T12:47:00.000-05:00

On our doorstep this morning.

NPR

2010-04-15T11:03:00.001-05:00

This morning on NPR's Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep talked to rock star librarian (and action figure) Nancy Pearl about National Poetry Month and some of her favorite poets. An unexpected honor to hear I was one of them. To listen to the segment, or read more of Nancy's thoughts about poetry, here's the link.

Ta-da

2010-04-08T18:11:00.002-05:00

Quatro!

2010-04-07T18:46:00.000-05:00

The first 4 copies of One More Theory About Happiness arrived at Ecco's office today; I'll get my copy tomorrow morning. Very Exciting.

WWW

2010-03-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

Check out my new website, just-live, designed by the wildly genius Will Amato:

http://paulguest.net

I can change it round

2010-03-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

This morning I received my first paperback copy of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge and I can't really account for the butterfly-sensation welling up in me. The first collections I ever bought were paperback and somehow just touching this book reminds me of them in a forceful way. I've published two previous collections and I felt a different excitement. I think, perhaps, that so much of my writing life has been consumed by the memoir that this feels new and charged -- a reintroduction to first love.

Frontispiece

2010-03-21T14:44:00.000-05:00

September

2010-03-17T21:10:00.002-05:00

Rest in Peace, Alex Chilton.

Facebook | One More Theory About Happiness by Paul Guest

2010-03-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

Facebook | One More Theory About Happiness by Paul Guest

If you're on Facebook, stop by the Group I created for my memoir One More Theory About Happiness, coming out May 4th.

Thanks!

Guv

2010-03-14T11:41:00.001-05:00

My birthday today. Number 36. I think I am more concerned with last night's lost hour. Grumble. It isn't saying much to suggest getting rid of the whole antiquated system. But maybe there's value in it. Admittedly, I am charmed by the inefficacy of the idea, of managing light. Maybe our sun has the same designs on us. That idea starts to make some sense.

***

I've been reading some Sherlock Holmes, which I never really have done before. There is something ridiculously perfect in the creation: rather than attempting to hide exposition, to dress it up in the clothes of chit chat, the stories instead mine its pleasures. Add in thick dollops of fog, rainy nights, tobacco smoke, and Holmes' ever epic ego, and you have something fun, lasting.

***

Yesterday, after stepping off the train, I saw an older man holding the elevator for me. He carried two plastic sacks of indistinct groceries and waved me in. I thanked him.

"Goddamn wheelchair," he muttered, looking straight ahead as we were lifted to the street. I glanced at him, noticing how ragged, how gone to seed he looked. How he sounded.

I didn't say anything. Pretended I couldn't hear.

"Goddamn wheelchair," he repeated and now was looking at me. "My wife is in a wheelchair."

"Oh," I replied, trying to be both noncommittal and faintly empathetic at the same time.

"I want her to be able to get up out of that wheelchair," he choked as the elevator doors began to slide open. "Shit."

I began to exit, leaving him to be, well, not private with his grief, as he seemed incapable, but at least alone.

"Thank you," I said. "Have a great day."

"Shit."

***

One More Theory About Happiness, my memoir, hurtles toward publication in May. It's a little strange. A recent Amazon reader review sounds concern over usage of "the f-bomb" while also applauding the "graduate-level vocabulary." I have long aspired to literate vulgarity and to have attained it leaves me feeling, well, totally fucking stoked.

Oops

2010-03-04T11:31:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was editing the links section here, removing inactive sites, etc., only to realize late last night that some had vanished without my intent. Apologies for that.

To that end, if you'd like your blog or page to appear or reappear please post to this and I'll consider adding it.

Thanks, y'all.

Almost final version of the jacket for my memoir

2010-03-03T18:29:00.001-05:00

First review of One More Theory About Happiness

2010-03-01T13:42:00.004-05:00

Click the image to enlarge:

More on disability

2010-02-20T16:40:00.006-05:00

When I was ten years old, or maybe eleven, I felt like winter, like Christmas, was a dark and crystalline thing: all deep, enveloping night, all metallic press of cold wind on my skin. In church, seated beside my mother, I sang the fusty hymns we always sang every Sunday, the abbreviated doxologies, and recited with the larger body of the congregation, which was old and infirm, the various creeds that had come down through the millenia to us, to me. Which seemed a great mystery. At the advent of the holiday season, the choir director mixed in to our worship services a few of the old holiday chestnuts: "Silent Night" and "Little Town of Bethlehem" and "O Holy Night," which retains, for me, even now, a ravishing beauty at the moment of the lyric, "Fall on your knees, O! hear the angels' voices!"

It's that moment of being called to submit coupled with rapturous exclamation (O!) that made me feel like I was, in fact, falling, plunging. That it moved me so was, I think now, an early indication of a future love of poetry.

My church owned an old blue school bus, and inside it everything was hard and cold: the cushions of the bench seats had rotted some, thinned, stiffened, and the barks were gilded with decades of rust. Each holiday season the pastor would gather the children of the church and bundle us up in to the bus and at night we all would lurch in to the darkness.

We sang carols while bouncing about like elements of a pinball machine and when the bus stopped, when he parked it along the curb of a residential street, we would spill out in to the yard. We were there to sing carols to the oldest or sickest members of our church, the ones who no longer left their homes.

They were called the shut-ins. In our prayers, we were instructed to remember them. In our daily lives, we were urged not to forget them. To call, to come by, to bring gifts of food. These exhortations meant nothing to a boy, to me, until the first time I rode on that bus, packed tight with chattering, antic children, all of us cold and wary of that first home, its dry, medicinal interior air.

Old, their bodies were alien: threaded with blue veins beneath skin so thin it looked ready to tear and already had in many places, their clawed-up hands marked with wounds that were there to stay. Even while we sang in the cold, their incremental deaths were plain.

***

That term, "the shut-ins," felt final, fatal, in a way that was new to me when I first heard it. It sounded like verbal bric-a-brac from another era, too: falling into disuse, acquainted with the dust. Just as these people were. Who knew me by name, who had witnessed the youth of my mother, who had been young with my grandparents long, long ago. The term signaled their state but it also identified the responsibility we owed one another. Years later, my great grandmother would be shut in by blindness, by macular degeneration, stumbling the worn paths of her little house until, at age 100, she could no longer live alone, no longer safely cook or clean for herself, and went to live her last year with my parents.

After I broke my neck, when my arms failed to respond to therapy, she worried over them and devised her remedy: a gold nugget ring, cheap, as much as she could afford, on my finger would motivate me to show it off to people and by that movement I'd rehabilitate the daily fading strength of my arms.

I didn't have the heart to say no. I wore the ring for a few years, until it had to be cut away.

***

Many people have commented on the blurb John Ashbery wrote for my most recent collection of poems, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. He writes, in part, "The invalid's rage ... and the ridiculousness of it all" inform the collection. As an aside, I can't recall what the ellipses elide, but I think it was a bit of padding which Ecco trimmed away. What's missing from his blurb, however, isn't so noteworthy as one thing which is present: invalid.

How could I allow myself to be called that? To some, even many, the word is inflammatory, hurtful, demeaning, discriminatory -- to add more adjectives to the catalog accomplishes little. The point is well made. I understand it.

Even though I considered asking for a change, I decided against it. The whole book had begun as a reaction to a previous publisher's insistence on selling the collection as a form of autobiography: every word, every line was a form of gospel, was true, had happened, was me. And that just wasn't true. Every writer understands how much of a fiction we make of our life. Every literature student is taught not to conflate the speaker of the poem with the person who had written it.

And, yet, we can't quite stop ourselves. We want to believe there is no separation. Maybe we need to believe it.

But it isn't true.

That minor irritation began to fuel the poems which would eventually become My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. I began to write poems which were patently false but appeared to be nakedly true. To investigate what post-confessional poems could be. I felt a puckish satisfaction in the sleight of hand. Soon, I realized I could write poems which, conversely, were more truthful than any I ever had and which might appear to be obvious fictions. The two could hide in each other's shadows, I've said.

This was liberating and energizing and I wrote more about my disability but perhaps not when a reader might think. One might never know.

To that end, in a collection filled with masks and unmaskings, mirror images, distortions, sketches, fabrications, confessions, loves, regrets, fears, frustrations, Ashbery's usage of invalid didn't bother me, in fact felt attuned to the book's project of shifting, uncertain identity.

I am not an invalid. I do not believe John Ashbery believes me to be one. I do not believe anyone who knows me, has met me, or has read my work will think that I am one.

Of this, I have no fear.

On disability

2010-02-16T19:08:00.005-05:00

Jennifer Bartlett is involved in a discussion currently taking place in the Women's Poetry listserv here and also posted the following comment on this blog:

Hi Paul,

I don't know if you read, but there has been a long dialog about your work in terms of disability rights on the Wom-po list-serv. It would be great if you weighed in on it. I am still curious as to why you have been so hesitant to write about or confront the disabilities rights movement. The troubles you face effect everyone who is disabled. I know that 'allowing' Ashbery to call you an invalid - and the reviewer mary karr uses the word too - seems like a personal decision. But it is not. As a public figure and fine poet who refuses to address these issues, you make it difficult for us who want DO NOT want to be called invalid. It makes able-bodied reviewers, like Karr, and readers continue to think that is okay to refer to us as less than.

Is there something about the movement that makes you uncomfortable?

***

No, there isn't something about "the movement" that makes me uncomfortable. Unless it's the implication that I must say one thing or another, fall into lockstep, get with "the movement," whatever it is. That makes me uncomfortable. This categorization of me, here and in the listserv, makes me uncomfortable.

I don't much appreciate the notion that I'm somehow unaware of these issues, that I "refuse" to address them, that I'm impeding the lives of anyone. I really don't appreciate the implication she seems to make in the listserv that I am motivated by "personal gain."

I kind of wish that were true. It'd be fun in a diabolical, mustache-twirling way, and her ideas about me would be less troubling.

But it isn't true.

We are not the same person, the two of us. I'm not sure why I need to keep stressing that to people. I don't go around demanding people think a certain way or write their poems to my satisfaction.

I resent it when she writes, again in the listserv, "Everything Guest does seems to perpetuate the able-bodied belief that disability is person tragedy rather than social construction." I have no idea what she means and how she feels it's ok to make such sweeping generalizations. It's the sort of claim I would strike in a freshman composition course. There is no way such a thing is true, and even if it were, no rhetorically sound way of proving it. It's hyperbole. At best.

Most of the dust-up is in reference to my last collection of poems, which features a blurb by John Ashbery wherein he uses the word "invalid." Jennifer Bartlett writes: "Sorry to vent, this has been on my mind for more than a year!" If this is true, then maybe the problem is she is more familiar with Ashbery's writing than my own. Since my first collection, I have written poems which address my disability and the reaction of others to me. Only my second collection, a sad little sequence of breaking-up poems, largely sidesteps the matter. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, the book in question, deals very directly with disability, in ways I had never attempted before, and I found it exciting, and dare I say it, fun. There's no refusal here. Only what I'm interested in writing about at the time. If that fails to meet someone's standards for activism, or content, or style, then that failure really isn't mine.

As for the dread word "invalid," it doesn't really bother me so much in the way that it is used by Ashbery. I thought about it at the time, and requested other edits in his blurb which seemed appropriate to me; in fact, I requested and received plenty of changes to jacket copy, catalog copy, and bits and pieces of other blurbs I was lucky enough to receive. I'm insulted, really, that I'm essentially a dupe or opportunist in this false dichotomy Jennifer Bartlett creates. That I'm not really cognizant of a word's weight or that I am aware in the most calculating, self-hating ways.

This is isn't to say I think others are wrong if they object to the particular usage of a word. If so, we disagree, to varying degrees, and that's about it. At least for me. And it doesn't bother me if others dislike my poems, for any reason whatsoever: I might dislike the poems they especially love. That's fine. A sane expectation in the world. I enjoy disagreement and my feelings aren't easily hurt.

There is no one, correct way to write about disability. No monolithic "movement" in which I must enlist. This is an obvious tenet in other kinds of discourse on identity politics, whether the focus is on race, gender, sexuality, or disability. As such, I'm uncomfortable only with narrow, coercive thinking, which I hope my own writing never is, whether in poems or comments posted online.

Friday

2010-02-05T14:24:00.002-05:00

More rain. But no more vaguely disturbing rust gunk streaming from the ceiling. Thank you, men who climbed atop the roof and fixed whatever was wrong. Even the guy with his fly unzipped. Yes, thank you all.

Ick

2010-02-04T14:55:00.002-05:00

Yesterday this began spilling from our ceiling into our upstairs closet and in the hallway:

That'll be the day

2010-01-30T13:17:00.001-05:00

Rain. Soup. Dumplings. It's Saturday but it feels like a haiku.

WHAT!

2010-01-19T19:49:00.003-05:00

A hair cut today. Then time spent in an Ace Hardware, which seems very like Radio Shack. Or the coelacanth. I thought you were extinct?

Then rising in an elevator with two young brothers. The younger, maybe four, hopping up and down, while loudly asking his brother, pointing to me:

"Is he sitting ON a wheelchair?"

"Yes, that's a wheelchair. Be quiet."

"ON a wheelchair?" he asked again, incredulous. "Ow!"

Silence for a moment. Then more from the little guy.

"I'm gonna eat your FACE!"

"What did you say?" his brother asked sternly, embarrassed.

"WHAT!"

***

He was awesome.

***

Delicious Vietnamese food last night with friends. Warm weather.

It was well with my soul.

Block

2010-01-13T18:10:00.001-05:00

PHILADELPHIA

At the Philadelphia International Airport,
in the ground transportation bunker
with lines of green phones on the wall
and one narcoleptic employee for company,
we waited for a cab that never came.
Handed a strobing plastic puck, instructed to wait
for it to vibrate like a personal sexual aid
or summons to a good table at The Olive Garden,
I tried to think it was not new to the earth,
that it was not some weird phylum of shellfish
dug up from warm muck far away
from Philadelphia. I tried not to think
of lights atop towers pulsing their presence at night
so that planes could avert low flight disaster.
I tried not to think of the field
where one crashed when I was a kid,
that brief fire and the sirens which seemed lost
and then the sleep returning to me
though I resisted at the window,
though I hated it, though it took me
with no care for the world where things fell
and were lost and were not found
again. We waited in Philadelphia with luggage
that was not ours spilling out
with others who were ready for anger.
Ready for ragged air to rise hot
in the piping of their throats,
ready with ripe fusillades of fuck you
and where do you get off
and all of us guessing how long we were for the flu.
In Philadelphia we waited
for a cab that never came,
no ramp, no lift, no ride for you,
though on my knee I felt more than heard
the low hive-sound
announce our arrival
to the city and the night, to the wind's alien teeth.

Homage

2010-01-07T19:20:00.004-05:00

WITH A LINE FROM PADGET POWELL

Where is my buffalo,
snuffling in the corner like a dog
gripped by the weirdness of good dreams?
Where is my borrowed car, where is my antique
brush chipped out of bone,
yellowed by time, useless,
where is my house built upon the sand?
A man with a buffalo would not need anything else.
Though his share of solitude might be vast.
And his store of cleaning supplies. His needle,
his strong thread for hemming his guts
back in, after being gored by unpredictable fate.
I think I've desired more than once
to run in herds away from murder
but here I am, complimenting the loveliness of my thumbs.
Here I am, drunk on utility,
when I daily declare a war on breakables
and neglect every fuse, every flange,
every socket, every ashed-out bulb.
That was my custody. My charge.
My scrappy dominion. Oh,
you say to me when I say to you, oh,
it does not matter, not here,
not now when we have our bodies,
and we have this darkness,
and then light like an anecdote,
oh, our little wealths spoken like sonnets, oh.

2010

2010-01-05T14:58:00.004-05:00

I haven't truly blogged in months. I've been busy with finishing One More Theory About Happiness, bits of travel, work on other projects, managing unreliable health care assistants, the holidays, you know, life. It's been difficult to carve out enough time, or mental space, to write something for here.

But my memoir is finished and it's a new year. I feel a bit of clearing inside my head. Which seems right when I read the following comment, left by Anonymous:

"Paul, while I am happy about your success, your poetry is weak and pretentious. I think you realize that yourself. I find it disturbing that everything is being sold on your physical issues. Yes, you have many poets recommending your work as illustrated in "Index," but notice that everyone puts them in the context that you are disabled.

Personally, I would be offended if that is why people read or publish your poetry. You need to allow your poetry to speak for itself--I think you would realize that the poetry is not very good. If you realized that, it might lead you to be a good poet. No one is willing to give you true criticism--I suspect you know it."

***

Oh, where to begin, friends? I don't care, and am not hurt, that someone might dislike my poems. It's hardly a novel opinion, I'm sure. But there are many more crucial elements in this comment which are objectionable, presumptuous, offensive, and, in the end, just plain wrong.

It is a mistake to presume one knows what another person understands, what they "realize." I have not done so for you and would appreciate the same courtesy in return. Whether or not I agree or disagree with you, I know enough to avoid such basic rudeness. Maybe you do, maybe you don't.

As far as the blurbs which appear on the back of Index, you should know that blurbs often are edited. A blurb may arrive in much longer form, talking about many different aspects of a book. A publisher sometimes will shape blurbs to focus on one of those aspects, for whatever reasons. Ecco is an imprint of HarperCollins, one of the largest publishers in the world, and they create books in order to sell them. Blurbs are, it should be remembered, sales tools, a kind of ad or commercial. Not poems.

What I find disturbing is the tacit implication you make that disability, and all its very real trauma and difficulty, are not suitable subject material for poetry. Because that is precisely your point: that the presence of disability does not allow the poems to "speak" for themselves. That poetry cannot contain such material without being corrupted. This line of thinking is depressingly unimaginative, not to mention dangerous.

For a bit of close reading, this: you write, "Personally, I would be offended if that is why people read or publish your poetry." You say you would be offended if that is why people read my poetry. We are not the same person. You are not me. I suggest that this is the crux of the matter. There is a kind of blending in your mind between us. I don't know why. But it's this blurring which allows you to presume what I know. It's what enables your closing remarks: if only I would listen to you. If only.

My friend, I am lucky to be alive today. Consider the twisted line of your thinking when you suggest my disability has been some kind of help to my career. In truth, it is in most ways an absolute detriment. I type with a plastic stick in my mouth. One key at a time. I work hard. I truly hope you don't now know, and never have to, what I mean, what this is like. If you do, my hope is that you would know better.

Which

2009-12-15T15:28:00.004-05:00

BEING REASONABLY CERTAIN

That my presence from the daily report has been elided,
that I forgot some time ago all concise directions
to the freeway, that if you ask me I cannot tell you
how best to escape, that I carry with me
the germ of loss, knotted up inside me,
like a little handkerchief, that I'm thinking
of myself in ridiculous terms, like Bela Lugosi
and lanyard, that to some a leaf-blower
is music, even as it coincides with dawn,
and dreams so good they melt in your
mind when you lay there wanting a lot more
violence or a bowl of cereal and the nagging sense
that you have done the wrong thing,
even that, even that, though this is fodder for debate
and maybe even philosophy, maybe
some other task which begins on a train,
on the walk home, in the middle of being distracted
by porcelain in the fragile aisle
of a store you swear is evil itself,
but here you are because it's dark or raining
or the Super Bowl went sour
in record time, and everything accounted for was too much,
that motion was called for, any sort,
that it was a prescription for an allergy
suffered only by the ancient, by Romans,
by people generally comfortable
with entrails having a larger say in public policy,
that I have been, the whole time, speaking of myself,
that this is no real surprise, that you will not be saved.

Another

2009-12-02T21:52:00.001-05:00

I'M SORRY

Whatever murderous rampage I snoozed through
is to be regretted. It is true, I have let
many millions of you down because
the ethos I inherited from a tottering aunt
a long time ago was not equipped
to deal with the inerrant allure of hydrochloric
acid. Please respect the privacy
of the darling bobbin in this time
when I won't say much, or shave the hair
which grows from my body
in embarrassing waves. Please know
how much I will think of you,
which is only a little. If you were insulted
by something I said, let me say
I remember nothing, that I am leaking in this instant
all the qualities of the living
which many philosophers agree
amounts to self-hood. Address
your letters, your get well never cards,
to Husk Formerly Trusted
With the Maintenance of Households
and the Health of Small
Creatures. I'm told this will reach me.
That a concordance of my shames will be recited
wherever I go, and, maybe
it's just me, that seems harsh,
the sort of punishment reserved
for the homeless, whose filthy habits I condemn.

Radar love

2009-12-02T17:24:00.000-05:00

THAT GUY ON THE RADIO IS TALKING ABOUT THE BIBLE AGAIN

That guy on the radio is talking about the Bible,
again, reciting from it, his lunch breath
a paraphrased ecstasy, his pants over there
on a hook, or in a tote bag he got
for free, somewhere, and that day was a good one,
an example unto all the others,
you might say, he might say, Jesus
might have said a long time ago
when nobody cared about the sad eventuality
of this prick. I was saying
something concerning pantlessness
but I got caught up
in anger. The way dolphins knot themselves
in skeins meant for tuna.
Which are miles long, the nets and not the tuna.
It is still true: I love this
planet, even though my life
amounts to a lot of waiting
on the lives of others to line up with mine.
So I'm not so unlike
you or this mouth that on the radio
becomes invisible
or monstrous tuna which pass through the waters
like freight trains,
never stopping until they do stop,
fatigued, sinking, glad
to arrive. This is what we mean by
at long last. This is what I mean,
though it confirms me
a fool, though my knuckles stain the walls with blood.

Cover for my memoir

2009-11-10T15:45:00.002-05:00

Simple

2009-11-10T13:34:00.001-05:00

INVOCATION

O voice on the radio almost dying, O articulation
of that pain, O hateful name, O anonymous schlub
I'd love to staple to something high up
there, where the angels and the weather dither,
O shame I once subscribed to when
I was a kid who feared a lot more than I fear now,
O petunia, O poodle, O wise master,
O supplicant drowning in the gutter,
what was I thinking when I thought of nothing,
only of all the days I'd fretted
at algebraic failures, the tires bleeding air
and the long walk, then, cursing
whatever was in sight, O gas station,
you too can go hang, you too can swing in the lambent
breeze, see if I care, see if I come
too late, weeping, with all my strength
in my arms and plans to save you
and two or three bus tickets, however many
I could afford, see that I am
every atom made of anguish,
see that I came a long way, see that hate
sent me out when the night
was everything, see that soon
it failed to ignite, O moon, O sun,
O flea mall lamp, O bargain, O repaired flame.

D.C.

2009-10-09T18:13:00.006-05:00

FIRST IN A SERIES OF CORRUPTED INSPIRATIONAL TEXTS

A heart is a wish your dream makes so be glad
I tell myself like old cartoons advise,
that I have one, that one out of three ain’t bad
in ponderous games like baseball
or emergency animal medicine. You don’t care
which summer it was, gilded then burning,
and maybe by this point, this juncture
in the blood of it all, maybe I no longer remember
if it really was that season
I say it was. Maybe it was winter
or November, whichever fell first—
I was obsessing in those days
about the mechanics of cruelty,
the engine in which I was always losing
a finger, or something crucial,
an item on which the hopes of everything hung,
heavy and obdurate and impossible to forget.
Except that with time I failed
to remember: miserable, unable to shop
for adequate produce, tangelos which pop
like little suns in your mouth,
like balloons loaded with syrup.
Unable to assess the sky.
Whether the clouds and all the living
which are in them somehow,
whether these things know
their purpose and if they feel like sharing,
opening up at last, inducting the rest of us
into the details of the joke.
The password, the secret handshake,
the confirmation that yes,
all that pain added up to something
more than the fudged sums of so many fragments,
though my word isn’t one
you should trust, you should trust me on that.

2

2009-09-14T16:51:00.002-05:00

ELEGY WITH NARRATIVE OF TRAGIC PASSING,
NOSTALGIA, AND PERFUNCTORY INVOCATION OF PEACE

There was the slip, the fall, the misstep and then
behind them all the cast-off banana peel
or slick of ice impossible at night to even see
or warm puddle of water issuing from
the refrigerator larded with how many years
of midnight oaths of final repair,
and the ankle turned years ago, lifetimes ago,
agos ago, it seems, so long it's been
cursing you, your stupidity, your drunkenness,
your inability to lift from the earth
one inch without truly dire consequence.
And then the bad knee, no, both,
plural in their congenital ache,
their first-thing-in-the-morning tale of woe--
but to go on is to belabor it,
your hypothetical end, your agnostic demise,
the groomed rows of data
on the actuarial table
which could have saved us all
this trouble, even if it couldn't save you from you.
Before this moment, and that,
in the other words of the past,
where you never really lived
nor in perfect truth did a single one of us,
the sun did your sweet bidding,
came when you called it,
and the clouds were strange, trained pets,
the good kinds, requiring no
effort on your part, no attention, nothing.

SINCERELY

Your rosy-fingered stevedore, your diligent crank,
your toxic asset, your uncle back in Malibu,
your aunt in Kittyhawk, your arcane symbol,
your broken clarinet, your lastborn, squirming
wildly in his swaddled birthright, your
instant message, your itemized brokenness,
your list of lost things, your forgotten abandonments,
your cast-offs, your too-small ring,
your finger bruised by the door,
your bruise in the night, which is not like
a bruise, though once this was
asserted, once this was written down,
sent to you, once this did seem right
to a lot of people, your aggrieved body mass index,
which scolds you in the dark
like a little dog, your papers, your imprint,
your forgeries, all of them in a row,
plain to children who have no gifts to speak of,
your naked sentiments, shining
like vegetables, rinsed then peeled
then served to people who appeared starved,
your pocket's pathetic cargo,
lint you cursed, change you hoarded,
your idiopathic dreams,
your mottle of skin, your rotten rot,
whatever that was in
the sink, all its improbable taxonomies,
your continued presence,
your philosophical cold case,
your evasions, your returns, your holographic scams,
your angelic coteries,
their hymns like an aftershock
in which there is only stillness,
stillness like a rock, your rock, your wound.

2009-09-02T20:23:00.001-05:00

At least for now, I'm mostly goofing around over at Twitter. Follow me there if you like for updates as I revise my memoir.

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.

%

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.

No jacket required

2008-08-16T17:22:00.000-05:00