softblow

Lily Ladewig and I have 4 collaborative poems from our "Natural Wonder" series up this month at Softblow. Also up this month are poems by Fiona Wright, Ian C. Smith, and Justin Runge.

In other news, tomorrow is the last day of class.



I will bring my students donuts and we will play Heads Up Seven Up. Then, it's officially time to start worrying about still not having a summer job. Oh dear.

Jellyfish 2.0

Friends, friends!

The newest issue of Jellyfish Magazine is out, and it's a stunner (thanks to editor/designer extraordinaire, Gale Thompson). Lily Ladewig and I have two collaborative poems from our "Natural Wonder" series in there, along with poems by Caroline Cabrera, Luke Bloomfield, Seth Landman, Zachary Schomburg, Zach Savich, Hilary Plum, Miranda Dennis, Chad Abushanab, Philip Muller, Jade Ramsey, Jessica Dylan Miele, Kristen A. Evans, Samantha Nataro, P. Edward Cunningham, Andy Stallings, Kyle Crawford and Francesca Chabrier.

henry's heart, my heart, etc.

- John Berryman, Dream Song 29


Spring makes it much easier to get back into the life-loving business. Today is a nice start: sun, shorts, cleaning, watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-air at the gym, writing a poem about product testing. In an hour, driving to Philadelphia for the weekend. Goodbye winter crankiness. Heart lifted! Let's celebrate.

going to [south] carolina in my mind

... and in a car tomorrow morning. Oh, Spring Break. There will be Sun! Warmth! Chik-fil-A! Then, Florida. Publix! The Atlantic! More Sun! Sandals! I'm confident that I will return a whole, happy person. These sunglasses do all the smiling.

abstraction, imagination, tight pants

From Frank O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto":

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is "yearning."

From "The Man with the Blue Guitar" by Wallace Stevens:

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

From Spring and All by Williams Carlos Williams:

To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.

In fact to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for "the beautiful illusion." Very well. I am not in search of "the beautiful illusion."

And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed--To the imagination--you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force--the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.

In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say "I" I mean also "you." And so, together, as one, we shall begin.

tonight!

The Gather Round Children Variety Show
(hosted by Gabe Durham)

A Lively Evening of Music and Lit For Kids 18 and Up

Saturday, November 7 – 8:00 pm

MEF Community Room – 60 Masonic St, Northampton, MA – Same building as the Woodstar Cafe

Featuring:

Hot oboe: Anne C. Holmes

Hot fiction: Adam Cogbill

Hot guitar n singin: Sarah Malone and Jono Tosch

Hot threats: Mike Young

Hot poems: Boomer Pinches and Lesley Yalen

Behind-the-scenes making it happen: Elizabeth Durham and Ben Kopel

what's new

What's exciting: The new issue of Front Porch is out! I have poems in it, along with some other juicy folks.

eats

It's getting cold, and this is the precise time of year when my sentimental Midwestern brain kicks into Casserole Mode. I recently e-mailed my mom for a few recipes, to which she replied, "I'm a little embarrassed about these recipes now because I realize how much prepackaged food they contain. It's amazing how well you all turned out." I wouldn't have had it any other way, Mom.

Here is what I want to eat for the next five months:


Broccoli, Rice & Cheese Casserole


Chicken & Rice Casserole


Tuna Noodle Casserole


Green Bean Casserole

Also, I discovered this cookbook during my casserole image searches. I won't buy it, but come on:

buckle up, we're wayward bound

I am excited about these things:

1. My new house & lovely housemates (front & back porches! back yard! climbing tree! natural light! etc.!)

2. Riding my bike to school (and other places when my legs are ready)

3. Fall weather, especially the parts concerning maple trees & getting to wear tights again

4. Teaching with a new strategy: relaxation, relaxation, not boring my students or myself (this is key)

5. Writing writing writing

6. Learning how to make food for myself other than turkey sandwiches

7. Another one of my poems, "Olympiad," is up at Juked.

8. I am seeing a film tomorrow that will make my heart go all aflutter, and yours too, because we're all going to see it together. It is the world premiere of WHEN YOU THINK OF IT, a film by online poetry journal notnostrums. The film features "renowned and emerging poets reading new work in a wide range of unexpected places" and "re-imagines the ways poetry reaches us and presents a dazzling array of contemporary poetry." We will watch it together at 7 PM at Amherst Cinema.

If You Think Of It (Trailer) from notnostrums on Vimeo.

check it

Good things around and a-comin'. I just had pudding for dessert. I have the next 1.5 days off. Camp is over this weekend. Summer weather has finally settled in. And right now, I have a poem up at Juked.

things in space, etc.

I think at least 10 campers are working on sci-fi/fantasy novels during the summer here, and many of them ask for feedback from me. After a lot of time spent reading about intergalactic colonial wars, sexual abuse between orcs and fairies, and bumbling-yet-valuable sages who dress in silver lycra, it's fun to look at my notepad to see comments like "Clarify what Crystalline Wormhole Engines do" and "Is Terrentiarius a planetary god or just a spaceship commander?" and "It's unclear why the goblins were banished to live in Amsterdam" and "Explain more about how the activated galactic plasma gel converts manure into carbon."

things you should probably know about

The new jubilat.

The new notnostrums.

The new Octopus.

My gleaming childhood.

collaboration with camper

Massachusetts wants Anne to stop moving from scenes in slow motion.

Why can’t people be mature when they run into walls?

Love makes couples tiny.

Funny that lions never yell.

Funnier that hands always try to break other hands.

Liars can’t get answers from the honest places that sting.

love ate the red wheelbarrow

Greetings from summer camp, where the most popular writing workshops are Poetry and Create-Your-Own Serial Killer.

fishes & campfires

The inaugural issue of Jellyfish Magazine is up and running! I've got two poems in there, along with these fine, sturdy friends and animals: Zach Savich, Ari Feld, Caroline Cabrera, Lily Ladewig, Mike Young, Philip Muller, Adam Cogbill, Kimberly Abruzzo, David Bartone, Shannon Luders-Manuel, Christopher Cheney, Stokely Klasovsky, Miranda Dennis, Jeff Downey, and Jared Sinclair.

Thanks to Gale Thompson, the love of my life, for putting this fresh creation together.

In other news, I'm on vacation #3 of this summer vacation: the Michigan one. All vacation parts have thus far been pretty sweet. For now, I leave you with this:

bursty

School's out. Weather's warm. Mostly I've been sitting around feeling so energetic that I can't decide what I should be doing, so I do little except the sitting around feeling excited part. But other than that, I've taken lots of car rides (which usually lead me somewhere where I end up spending money). I find myself singing louder and more frequently. I played a couple sweet shows with the Cinnamon Urns (pictured above). There's been a late-night, whiskey-doused swim in a creek. Just a couple hours ago, margaritas. More of most of these things, plus others, to come. Right now my brain is in turbo hyperactive mode, so I haven't been able to focus on things like reading or writing much yet. Soon, I hope?

These are exciting times. How about some upcoming adventures?:

Next Wednesday/Thursday: The Berkshires with Matt!
Next Sunday-Tuesday: Camping in the Catskills with Ivy and Alicia!
June 3-9: Michigan!
June 18-August 17: Teaching creative writing at summer camp!

Maybe the only way to truly explain how I feel is to show you this scene from Always Fair Weather. You can ignore the parts of the song about being smitten with a woman, and instead extract the general excitedness. On rollerskates.

my kalamazoo heart swells three sizes

Diane Seuss is the recipient of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her manuscript, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, will be published in 2010 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

My heart is all aflutter. Di was my poetry professor, advisor, mentor, biggest encourager, etc., during my undergrad years at Kalamazoo College, and still plays a valued role as mentor/encourager to this day. She was hugely influential on me as a quiet, hesitant writer, and was the first to really instill in me that poetry matters. It excites me to know that, wherever I am, her poems continue to excite the poets around me, and I'm moved by the way our paths keep crossing.

Here is a Diane Seuss poem for you to love:

prayer that goes: dear god

then it goes: buttercups.
then it goes: marsh marigolds
with waxy petals that time
he sailed the little boat
with a message stuck
in a film canister glued
to the deck. then it leaps
to watercress salad that time.
then it says i gotta bring this
diction down and not rely
so much on italics. down
so low it sounds country
western. dear god
it goes, and some steel guitar,
reverse the flow of water
and send that little boat
home. it goes:
my son
my son
which is how god answered
why hast thou forsaken
me. then it says
cattails. it says those
cattails that one day
and his hair, the curl
and swirl of it.

the radiant bubble that she was

Alas!
Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

-from "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," Wallace Stevens

Spring is starting to creep in. I feel like leapfrogging and humming loudly and carving my initials in everyone's trees, all at the same time.

dance it out

I'll maybe write something real soon, but for right now? One of my favorite movie scenes. I don't apologize for any of it.

on fortresses

Lately, I've been envisioning my entire apartment covered in blankets and compartmentalized into tiny rooms with different themes.



Because of scarce resources (and lack of skill when it comes to building large-scale things), I had to settle for just one tiny room. Attempting to arrange a cozy, warmly lit environment where both productivity and sufficient entertainment can be reached was a difficult task, but then I remembered--forts including the TV always increase value and success.



This is where I spent the better part of last week. Highlights: four hours watching Freaks and Geeks with Matt, five hours drinking wine and grading papers, two hours napping after drinking too much wine while grading papers, many hours writing very bad parts of poems, and eating a huge turkey sandwich picnic-style while watching Welcome Back Kotter.

Things I realized: Forts don't last forever. Eventually, the act of carefully climbing in and out of them becomes much too stressful. Also, it's possible that I'm too old for this.



...or maybe I just need to try harder.