Meagan has booked readings for the Bull City Authors. Awesome. If you know anyone with web skills in need of an internship, please send them our way!

Colorado. That’s a good state name, maybe the best of the state names. But one has to wonder if that single “a” gets lonely. I bet it feels crowded by those three big “o”s. Because “o”s will crowd you out. Four of them moved into the room next door while I was living in the college dorms. Pretty soon no one else on the hallway was happy. They were always in the shower, occupying all the urinals, moving their furniture into the hallway God knows why. Three “o”s and an “a” in Colorado. I bet, before the end of this century, that “a” moves to Alabama. To be with family.

OK, I really am acquiring books faster than I can read them, and I should stop, but I know I probably won’t. Today: Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth (on Philip McFee’s recommendation, and after the first five, I was not disappointed… I didn’t want to put it down to work on my independent study student’s sonnet assignment), which is billed as fiction but has to be poetry, and Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions.

I had an extraordinarily bad day, as the day job is feeling less like a job and more like a series of temporary crises. I know this will even out when a) student registration ends, and b) I get back to being fully staffed. I hate the abuse that my co-workers are taking until such time as a) and b) are met. I have some more work to do tonight, but I believe I’ll be blowing it off in favor of Letters to Wendy’s. Take that, responsibility!

The most difficult part of management is not giving credit where credit is due; that is easy. The most difficult part is falling on your sword. When an employee fails spectacularly, you simply must do this. March into a supervisor’s office, or that of a client, and fall on your sword. Care must be taken with the sword, however; it must be unsheathed and placed in some manner of integument which will hold it at roughly a forty-five degree angle. This integument must be bolted to the floor, and if the client is unaccustomed to seeing such displays of atonement or blame, you may have to do the bolting yourself. Should the sword be placed at a poor angle, or the holding device unstable, the cut will not be clean when you fall upon the sword. If the cut is not clean, how will you heal quickly enough to smile at the failed employee through gritted teeth? How will you have the presence of mind, when you prop yourself up slowly off the sword, to ask the client, “Would you like me to remove these bolts, and this jeweled sword-holder”? Will you be thinking of the ragged and long wound, or will you be listening when he says to you, “No, I think you can leave it…”?

We’re coming up on February. I don’t tend towards New Years’ resolutions, but I did read an article about resolving to make certain changes for just 30 days instead of for a full year– you’re more likely to be successful, and if at the end of the 30 days, you find that the resolution does not suit your lifestyle, you can ditch it but still feel good about having committed to something that you wanted to try. This seems like the best way to change behaviors. If you feel better at the end of the 30 days, keeping the resolution should be a natural.

I haven’t decided whether to tell people what the resolution is, or to just do it. It will be difficult for me, but it’s something I want to try. You won’t be able to avoid seeing it in this blog, since it’s a resolution tied to my writing life. (Yeah, maybe if that one works, my next 30 day change could be something like, y’know, exercise or eating right.)

Do you know there are different kinds of intelligences? Do you remember the day you discovered that, as intelligent as you are, you just didn’t have one of those other intelligences? Did it sting? Curse you Gardner, curse you Vygotsky, for making us aware how dumb we are. One of those intelligences is bodily. I don’t have that one. I can’t move my fingers quickly enough, can’t move my thumbs. Run slow. Very little muscle memory, but I can always seem to type “teh” instead of “the.” The muscles remember that. Very little intelligence there, muscles, you can’t even spell.

Books today: two of Merwin’s prose collections, since I’ve been devouring microfiction of late and have more on the way from Amazon; collected D.H. Lawrence and Lorraine Niedecker; finally broke down and bought Laura Kasischke on the promise that there were some oddball sensual bits.

Bjork’s “Play Dead” has come on every audio player available to me today. That’s four sources, all of which played the quirky Icelander. What message?

Well, after several months of suffering through the stutters and the syetm freezes associated with iTunes 7, I finally ditched three months of user data and ratings, and went back to iTunes 6. Sigh. That’s several times that I’ve had that happen. I’m hoping that’s the end of the nightmare that was iTunes 7. I’ve seen several blogs calling for an “iTunes Lite”– something that would take advantage of all the neat stuff you can get in the iTunes store, but not all of the bloated features. Gapless playback might be nice, CoverFlow is not anything I want my memory wasted on.

Wrestling last night. We went to dim sum this morning, I got a haircut, and I did a little research. All of this was a means of delaying the real work; some days, some weekends, you need a little procrastination. When I finally started, I had a great deal of fun looking at student poems. I’ve begun re-thinking which assignments I’ll give to my students. I’m now a little in awe that I didn’t assign sonnets last semester. I’m close to giving up the sestina, villanelle, or pantoum assignment; my apprehension comes from the fact that one of the best poems submitted last semester was a sestina that came in for that assignment. And sestinas are hard little buggers.

I am reading a friend’s book, and I feel like I am being taken to school all over again. Holy cow.

Packages came in the mail yesterday. One was a selected Merwin I’d ordered, since it was time to have more Merwin. Another was a new book I’ve been excited about for months. I slept well last night, dreamt of finally destroying Germany so I could end my alliance with the English. Now I’m listening to English glam rock from the late 80’s.

I’m pretty much out of bookshelf space in my office, which poses an interesting question about priorities.

I asked an advanced class what they were reading, and was well-pleased to hear a couple of names that I’d been meaning to read, myself. Olena Davis was one of them; I forget who was raving about her work but I think it was Tua. Found out later how those neat poets had gotten on all of those reading lists: the interesting ones grew out of Rachel Richardson’s intermediate class. Is there a way to keep Rachel Richardson in North Carolina for some time to come?

Licorice is now proudly carried at the Bull’s Head Book Store on the UNC campus. Please, go there and spend your money! Please, tell others to do so as well! Sadly, what appears to be the official page for the Bull’s Head sells only one book. That book isn’t Ellen’s.

I’m coming to the end of a busy busy couple days– instead of teaching my usual two classes this week, I had four classes, a faculty meeting (my first), and the first public reading for Ellen’s new book. Oh, also, I had two new staff members starting at the day job Monday, and Jeremy (Inch poetry editor) resigned his position from the day job Monday afternoon because he got a kick-ass offer from a marketing firm in Carrboro. I really thought, about mid-day Tuesday, that I was close to having a heart attack.

Last night, while watching Carolina basketball, I took a few deep breaths and realized that I’m lucky to be able to be so busy. I ate dinner with a student– my “office hours”– and we talked about the difference between a set of good poems and a good book for half an hour. I spent a good half an hour in a class just looking at Wendy Cope’s “The Orange.” I couldn’t have spent an hour like this a year ago, two years ago, five years ago. My day job is hectic and changing, but I have the opportunity to do good, socially responsible work (or blow it off to write in my lame-o blog). Ruba and I chatted about distance, absurdity and weight this morning. We traded poems; I sent Salerno and O’Hara, she sent Koch and Young. She made me laugh out loud when she signed off, “Boffo! I am having so much fun but I need to work on annotations.”

Last night, I was willing to argue that the Cope poem is too sentimental. Today, I am not sure.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

– Wendy Cope

Ah, it’s a good time of the semester. The first creative work came in from my students, and I have high hopes. There’s a lot of raw potential in this group. The beginning of the semester is a great renewal; there are so many unknowns and so many opportunities.

I ask students each semester to bring in an exemplary poem, an assignment I stole from a friend. It is fascinating and revealing in ways that I’m not sure they realize. It’s difficult sometimes to tell how honest the exemplary poems are, because you wonder if there’s a certain amount of posturing for the sake of the students’ perceptions of the instructors wants. I have no want other than honesty. I think, by and large, I got a very honest batch of poems. I’d never read three of the poems, which was a nice treat, and I’d never even heard of one of the poets. If you’ve heard of John Duvernoy, holler at me in the comments. Googling him turned up a title, Razor Love, but I wasn’t even fully convinced that it’s a book. I’d love to know more about him.

I surprised myself somewhat with a comment in class, and I don’t feel I handled the situation as well as I might have. But basically, here’s the gist: “art for the sake of art” (art devoid of a message or meaning from the artist) is rarely great art, and if gains any traction, it owes to its status as a sociological and ethnographic curiosity rather than to its merit as art. And I’m uninterested in helping students create such a product. How’s that for being completely dismissive of whole movements and swaths of culture?

Oh, and I must thank CeCe and Beth for sending me Merwin’s “Paul.” I knew I’d read it from a familiar source; that CeCe found it in Christopher Salerno’s blog is wonderful. Where were my Googling skills on that one?

So, some nice movement with the press. I talked for a short while with one of the buyers at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill, and they’ll be stocking BCP books in the near future. It’ll be nice to have a physical outlet for the books, and I hope that some of the other cool little bookstores in the area will follow suit.

I spent this morning going back over author photos for the next book, and sent my three finalists off to Michael. I was listening to Beyonce when I was doing it. Overall, I’m pretty unimpressed, but man, “Crazy in Love” is a killer hook. Wasn’t sorry to move on to listening to the new RJD2.

I need to send out poems again… I have about 20 that are in some state of “finished” and should be out looking for homes. The only ones still out have been out for quite a while; in fact, if I were to use Duotrope as any indicator, I would guess that I’m actually getting a pretty good look from the editors that have them.

I just read Anne Sexton’s “”Transformations” again, this time with a much more heavily critical eye. I think it’s the finest of her work. But I could probably stand to read her Complete Poems again before making that pronouncement for certain.

Picked up a few new books that I am excited about last weekend: Howard Nemerov, Landis Everson, and Eleanor Wilner among them. Finally broke down and bought Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, as well. I haven’t finished it, but it’s very different than what I expected. I’d love to know why Copper Canyon chose such a giant book. I can’t find any evidence that it should be on 7″ x 10″ paper, but there it is.

Ending what I estimate to be a ten-year drought, which was drought-y because I hardly ever sent poems out until last March, I’ve had a poem taken.

The best part: this one was written right around the time I stopped sending stuff out, but revised just recently. Carolina Quarterly will bring it into the world in a few months. Sweet.

CQ was the last place I had work published, come to think of it– a capsule review of Jay Snodgrass’s Monster Zero in 2003.

HEY– if anyone has a copy in electronic format of the W.S. Merwin poem “Paul,” or if you know which of Merwin’s books the poem appears in, do me a solid and send it my way. I really want a copy of that poem.