My cheap a$$ made reservations at a hotel less than a block from the conference hotel and saved $50 a night. Looks like gentleman Bill Ferris may also be attending, but we’re open to having four in the room, if you want to slum it with two of the hottest fellas at the conference.

Like most everybody who reads blogs about poetry, I’ve been sucked into the recent uproar about David Lehman and Best American Poetry. Seth Abramson seems to have spent the most time making constructive arguments here, here, here, here and here.

As a poet who falls well outside the poetry establishment, I’m thoroughly amused by all of this, and pretty squarely agree that maybe putting your wife into your anthology might not reek of editorial ethics, but I can also see both sides. We each answer to a different authority. Fairness is nice, but the establishment as a whole is clearly unfair; good work should be expected to rise to the top regardless of its inclusion in BAP but BAP certainly helps, so why not do “what it takes” to make yourself accessible to BAP’s selection process?

Even the whole Stacey Harwood thing has its own sad, sympathetic side: I’m a married guy, and I regularly find myself thinking, “Boy, I’ve really screwed the pooch here. How can I get out of this one?” I don’t have an anthology series, and if I did, it wouldn’t mean much since my wife isn’t a writer. But hey, if I thought including her in my anthology (and letting Billy Collins take the credit/blame for her inclusion) would make my marriage a happier place, I can’t honestly say I’d be above that. I’d know that it was shady and perhaps a little creepy, but I can’t say I wouldn’t do it anyhow, because I don’t imagine there’s an anthology series out there whose credibility is more important to me than making my wife happy. She’s a pretty keen person. Also, an anthology series won’t keep me warm in bed. And yes, I have tried sleeping next to Best American Poetry. It was the 1999 edition.

For my part, I disagree with Jordan Davis that one couldn’t create a list of the best poetry out there without naming a lot of friends; that’d be really easy to avoid if you also avoid making friends. Which sounds better: complete aesthetic purity or existing in the world as a human being? I’m going to choose the latter.

But Jordan has done more to combat any cronyism or douchebaggery (if there really is any) from David Lehman than the rest of us combined: Jordan’s created a list of the best poems in a given year, and he’s populated it with some superlative work. Lehman and Scribner may have dibs on the name Best American Poetry YearX, and they’re welcome to it. No one is stopping you from creating Best Poetry in the US YearX and publishing it at your micropress, or The Year’s 100 Best Poems, or America’s Best Poems YearX, or anything like that. Scribner doesn’t have the market cornered on “Best.” Jordan’s list, published in his blog– maybe it isn’t as influential as Lehman’s anthology series, but at least he’s staked a claim to communicating what he thinks the best poems of the year are. It’s tempting to do the same here in my blog, and let you reader judge whether you think that I’m more right than David Lehman or Jordan Davis or anyone else who puts the subjective tag “best” onto poems. Whatever you make think of Lehman’s editorial practices, or Davis’s, whatever compromises you believe they have made along the way, there’s something to be said for those who are trying to put work they find worthy in front of others.

I won’t go so far as to say “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” But take a good look before you blog about how unfair poetry or po-biz is. Answer some questions:

1. Do you routinely advocate for the publication of work other than your own?
2. Are you editing or publishing a magazine, online journal, or book series so that you can get work you believe in before a wider audience, despite the fact that you may not receive adequate (or any) monetary compensation for your efforts?
3. Do you buy books of poetry (by people other than your friends)?
4. Do you buy books of poetry (by people other than your friends) for other people?
5. Do you recommend or require that friends, students, associates, family, or cronies purchase books of poetry other than your own or those by friends?
6. Do you run a reading series and regular attempt to attract new audiences?

If the answer yes to at least 4 of those questions, I’m now happy to listen to your complaints. If they’re in cartoon form, I’ll enjoy them much more.

You don’t wake up in the morning and think to yourself, “Gee, Dolly Parton has made my day.” But sure enough, that’s what I am thinking today.

So, “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a modified ghazal (3 lines per verse instead of 2, but still basically closed stanzas that could be interchangably used with syntatic difficulty). In class today some students mentioned that there are rap songs that take this form, repeating one word at the end of couplets (or in RCHP’s case, tercets) that can be used interchangably. Anyone know any of those?

Some people say guh-ZAHL, some say GAA-zul. I’m ok with those. But please, please, don’t come near me saying “guzzle” when you refer to the form. Even if that’s technically correct. I just… I just don’t want to know.

And now for an update on my own work:

It’s been slow going for the writer side of me; fast-paced fun for the editor side of me.

Writing: I’m stuck on a poem right now, and the core issue seems to be one that holds me up every time I tackle it. I’m currently working on a simple narrative in a jumbled order, trying to release the information in such a way that the poem reads as smoothly straight through as it does when the reader orders the narrative in linear fashion. This should lead to two distinct interpretations for the reader, and I’d like to balance the poem so that each is engaging separately. Thus far, no luck, and as I type this out I realize that the next step is the one I haven’t taken yet– leave the poem alone for a while, and let the subconscious work on it for a while. The first poem that frustrated me to this degree is still unfinished, as is the second. But I’ve made significant progress on those two since July, despite the fact that they each turned a year old in the past few weeks. Of course I need to let this new poem breathe.

Reading: I’ve read very little that wasn’t for my UNC class just recently, and that which I read purely for pleasure turned out ot be so good that I see a million ways to use it in class. I’ve already assigned three pleasure-reading books, and hope to stay this lucky– I’m not reading any stinkers.

Editing: Ellen’s book Licorice is in such fantastic shape; I simply couldn’t be prouder of this first book for Bull City Press. I’m still working towards an October 10 publication date, and don’t see any significant barriers to meeting that deadline at this time. The cover photography is by Stephen Grubb and I think it’s stunning. ISBNs and bar codes are in place, which was a relief; that was something of a question mark for me. The second mss. is something I’ll begin combing through in a few days, and I’m now keeping eyes and ears open in case I choose to solicit a third manuscript in the very near future. I think I’ve said before that I would like to open submissions for chapbooks in 2007 and publish a great book by an author I have never heard of, ever. Which should not be that hard for me, in all honesty. Inch has gone out to almost 250 people now, and my fears that the submissions for the second issue would dip has not come to complete fruition, though we’re not facing a ton of work. I’d certainly be happy to come home to 2-3 submissions a day, or 8-10 like I was getting in early August, but averaging one a day is better than averaging none. I almost hate passing them on to our poetry and fiction editors instead of reading them all first.

Teaching: I had a chance to sub in for a friend and teach a fiction class this past week, and it was simply delightful.

Online: Finally, validation that I haven’t been pwned. Unless I begin playing computer games again, at which time I’ll no doubt be pwned by any 15-year-old with a monkey’s hand-eye coordination.

It’s new book day in the White House! In anticipation of a quiet office hour (I was correct), stopped in at the Bull’s Head for a copy of A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. Then, arrived home to an overdue Amazon order consisting of Matthea Harvey’s first book, a Mark Jarman book I’ve been looking forward to, and Richard Siken’s Crush, which I assigned to a student assuming I would get the book before the end of the assignment. Ladybug has a volleyball game tonight so I’ll have some time to finish M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A and start in on Crush; necessity dictates that I should start the latter immediately, but the former has its hooks in deep.

Clearly, Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy are drunk with their own power. In the eleventh edition of An Introduction to Poetry, they define consonance as the repetition of both the initial and terminal consonant sounds in a word, with variable vowel sounds in the middle. (An example would be “stick” and “struck.”) I glossed over this issue when I initially read the text, but as I re-read this section last week to prepare for my class today, the narrow definition once again stuck in my craw. I’d always understood consonance to be repeated consonant sounds that simply weren’t at the beginning of the words (repeated, non-alliterative consonants).

I did a little research on the topic and it turns out that most definitions that I can find either agree with my broader definition, or consider only terminal consonant sounds to be fodder for consonance (i.e., “luck” and “trick”). I’m at a loss, however, when it comes to finding a source other than Kennedy and Gioia that definitively narrows the meaning of the term.

Like a coward, we discussed sound in class today, and I failed to mention to students that I thought, but wasn’t sure, that Kennedy and Gioia were unnecessarily rigid in their definition. Should have trusted the gut. Ah, well.

Poetry by:
Ellen Bush
Melissa Eleftherion
Michael McFee
Chris Tonelli
Laura Li Ziegler

Fiction by:
Liliana V. Blum
Will Rodriguez

Translations by:
Toshiya Kamei

Want a copy? Or better yet, want to subscribe?

Or, writerly friends, do you have short poems or microfiction that need a home?