New poetry worksheets are here! I know where the rest of my evening is going– seeing what my friends have been up to for the last couple of months.

I am waiting on a friend– if she agrees to a month of poems, I’m bringing back the microfic for June. But I need a partner to make it through, and I think Emma’s in Europe. Also: Emma will never do something like that again.

Charlie sent along this poem, along with the blog entry that details when he discovered it. I thought you should see it:

Japanese Restaurant

When you’re young you think loneliness
is just something that happens to you, say,
if you don’t get any letters for a while
or no-one asks you out. It isn’t;
it’s part of the basic design concept
of the human heart — like Tartini’s
Abandoned Dido. Me and the violin.
The girl at the next table wipes
her chopsticks and puts her hair up
with them. My teacher says I should brighten
the tone. “Don’t worry,” she says,
“the dark will still shine through.”

–Frederick Jones, from Congreve’s Balsamic Elixir

I’m listening to Soul Coughing’s “True Dreams of Wichita,” which is one of those eerie songs that has voices in the background. If you were to relax, you might allow them to just be part of the sonic landscape. But my ear keeps singling them out and trying to construct the meaning.

It’s really dangerous for the following conditions to be met:

• I am home alone– Ladybug is away on business.
• I have been surfing the Internet for over an hour and have been IMing with friends.
• I begin looking at Amazon
• I see that certain books I covet have come out
• My resistance to Amazon’s clever marketing has been lowered through any variety of factors

Last night: Durham Bulls. Lots of heckling. The Ottawa Lynx probably do not like us very much. Always good to spend time with old friends, and perhaps a new friend or two. One of the girls we were with found out that I’m working on an MFA and was excited. “Are you a poetry fan?” I asked. “I love Billy Collins,” she said. “He’s quite good,” I said. “I made out with him once,” she said. “Is that what sparked your interest in poetry, or was that the end of it?” I asked. “The end,” she said.

Still reading the economics book, but I have also started Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management. This is for the work “book club.” Within three pages, I wished I could retreat into some Elizabeth Bishop or something. I can just see how it’s trying so hard to be pleasure reading… and how it just fails.

If my job switches from Movable Type to WordPress, I’m going to switch as well, in all likelihood.

A welcome new entrant into the poetry blogosphere.

Update: link fixed 5/30

Oh, also: More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics was good, but not great. I checked out Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor–and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! at the same time and I’m now a couple of chapters in; I’m enjoying it more.

No, I do not know why I’m suddenly reading so many books about economics.

Apparently, Memorial Day is the day where I get nuts with text messaging. I used to think that there was no way anyone could buzz through 500 text messages in a month unless they only socialized through txt. I do not believe this any more.

I am quite happy right now– often, this is not the case when Ladybug leaves town. I am genuinely excited about the friends I have spent time with this weekend, and feel a productive streak coming. I spent part of the afternoon revising after MP and I made books. I think I will spend much of the week creating… though some of that creating will probably take the shape of work stuff. That’s OK. I like what I do there, too. After a long conversation with AL tonight, I am reminded of how lucky I am to enjoy what I do, all of it.

But someone shoot me if I commit to another month of microfic in June. I have considered it. I really have. I need to write to Emma right away. She could dissuade me.

Books are made. Well, five of them. But more will get made on another day. Perhaps a day soon. It was an excellent learning experience, and I’m even more in awe of some of the spectacular handmade books that I’ve picked up here and there.

Any last-minute suggestions for some excellent feminist poetry? Left to my own devices, I will merely suggest things I like, whether or not someone has called them feminist before.

OK, if you want an embarrassing fact, here’s one: on Saturday, I got my first public library card since I was 13. Keep in mind that I’ve had access to UNC libraries continuously since I was 18… but that’s still no excuse.

Ladybug flies out in the morning for Minneapolis. I have one week to get lots of work done on poems. First project: making books with MP.

I’ve not really written anything since NaPoWriMo, which sucked the life from me. But I have been kicking around some ideas in the past couple days, and I may be sitting down tomorrow to make something happen. That is, in the time tomorrow when I am not worshiping my beautiful wife.

New NER in the mailbox when I came home– that’s one of my new subscriptions for the year. Once again, I have more fiction than I know what to do with. NER is the first mag I have subscribed to that isn’t focused solely on one genre. I usually invest heavily in the poems.

Bad news for Nikida Koraly: UNC was expecting to have an excellent young poet here teaching next year, but it looks now like she won’t be coming.

I can’t help it: poems that talk about poems, contain the word “poem” anywhere other than the title, are irritating me really badly. I have enjoyed some of them recently, despite my great irritation, which is, I think, a testament to how good some of those particular poems are. But by and large, it really irritates me. I make this proclamation knowing full well that the next poem I will have in print will be guilty of this sin, but in my defense, it was written in 1996, and I was not so irritated by this phenomenon at this time. Why is it bothering me? I cannot say, conclusively, but I have seen the charge leveled that poetry suffers from a disconnect with the real world right now, and poems that reference the poet writing poems seem to be the best evidence. Unless the poem is about the difficulty of writing poems, in which case, it’s not so irksome. And aren’t all poems sort of about the difficulty of writing poems?

I have traded e-mails with a friend recently who has suggested that some of the work she has seen was quite enjoyable… but this is work I did not particularly like. I have much thinking to do about how I release poems into the wild.

Help Robert find elegies.

Since I loved Freakonomics, here’s one that will be added to my reading list immediately: More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. I swear to you, readers (and wife), I am far more interested in the second part of the title than the first.

Thinking of buying a lot of Forever Stamps to hold onto and use for your submissions later? Not such a hot idea, says Slate.

I made plans today to hang out with a friend and talk poems. Someone I did not expect to talk poetry with. A completely pleasant surprise. You just never know who will admit to reading poems when you’re public about it. (I used to not be.)

I do not feel low today, no thanks to YOU. (Unless you are Elisa Gabbert, who sent a link to a delightful poem. Check yesterday’s comments.)

I’ve just been flipping through William Stafford’s Stories That Could Be True, reading some of the short lyrics. And they’re tight. I also spent a little time nosing back through Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved last night while listening to Mazzy Star. Some of those poems are similarly precisely wound. I should go ahead and finish one of the books I started, I know, but have not yet done so. I’ve been a messy, messy reader of late.

Readers, I cannot claim to have stared into hell, nor can I claim to have looked in the Devil’s eyes, but I do believe that the woman on Ladybug’s pilates DVD, the one repeatedly saying “and dowwwn, and dowwwn,” might be the voice of Hell itself.

Let me tell you this, too, while we’re talking hell: I hope the next time I have a bacterial infection, that bacteria’s got Paradise Lost written all over it.

I am low, friends, low. Someone send me a wicked poem, or link me to one. Otherwise, I will be listening to Mazzy Star. Furreals.

Yikes. I tend to sign my business correspondence with “Best,” because, well, I generally do wish the best for my clients and co-workers. But apparently, some of them are thinking that’s a brush-off!

Dear reader, know that if I e-mail you and sign the e-mail “Best,” I still love you. If I sign it “Sincerely,” I’m keeping my distance but you can trust the contents of the e-mail. If I don’t like you, you’ll see a signature like “I hope you die.” Or perhaps “Until the next time I hear from you.”

Oh, blog, I have done you such disservice to leave that lame video as the top entry since last week. And yet, I’ve not had the time to devote to you. This hardly seems fair, as you do little but wait for me. I know that some might argue that when I’m not here, you can at least serve up your content to others who might happen by. But let’s be honest– that’s like 10 people a day. You miss me.

So, what’s happened since I came to see you last?

• I have spent what downtime has been available to me with Ladybug, during which time we watched The Queen and Idlewild. I would have been better served writing in you, blog, during that time.
• I have done yardwork which was sorely overdue. Yardwork often leads directly to writing for me. That did not happen this weekend.
• The show I worked on so hard last month closed Saturday night, and strike was Sunday. Though it was an incredibly efficient strike, I think I managed to scare people by looking, at the end of it, as though I had just worked for 17 straight hours. No one else seemed to have that affect.
• I attended an “Art Party.” I understood the concept of the art party to be painting on the walls of my friend’s apartment, but when I arrived, it turned out that we were to paint things to hang on the wall. My impulse towards vandalism remains unsatisfied.

I’m not one to post YouTube videos, but I found this through Good Weather for Airstrikes, and couldn’t resist watching, since its title is one of the best lines from Chapelle’s Show. And once I had seen the video, I could not resist sharing. Robyn, you have totally made my night.

While Jilly is on vacation from Poetry Hut, I thought I’d spend a little time trolling Technorati for po-news. What keywords would one use to find po-news? Because when I just searched on “poetry,” holy crap, the majority of the results made me want to gouge out my eyes. I mean, I was as horrified by some of these links as I was by the idea that there’s now bingo on network TV. Thankfully, I’d somehow skimmed over the part of Jilly’s post that said Michael Wells would be posting some news links. Those were much better than anything I could find on my own.

Mentally, I made a real big deal about buying Civilization IV, but then played it for about 45 minutes and haven’t come back to it since. Heh. So much for that idea.

One of my students e-mailed to inquire about this, which reminded me, oh, yeah, that would be quite a nice thing to go to.

Thinking about pursuing a residency to work on my essay and a manuscript this fall.

Oh happy day! One Story was in the mailbox waiting for me.

Had beer and fries with MP today and discussed the future of the press. Now I have lots of energy and excitement. Having a potential collaborator is invigorating.

I finally got tagged for the “five songs” meme, which had been floating around the poetry blogosphere for days. I was pretty sure I did this when it was in the improv blogosphere, and sure enough, searching the old blog for “five songs” turned up an entry from July 2005. I think, at that time, the meme was more geared towards “stuff you’re enjoying right now.” Here were my answers then:

• The Comas, “Dirty South”
• The Decemberists, “The Bachelor and the Bride”
• Metric, “IOU”
• Son Volt, “Drown”
• Ben Lee, “Ache for You”

The current seems to flip back and forth between your five currently-digging songs and five songs that had significant impact or rocked you hard in some way. I’ll explore the latter this time around:

• XTC, “Dear God”
• Jane’s Addiction, “…Then She Did”
• Cold War Kids, “We Used to Vacation”
• Ben Folds Five, “Mess”
• Sarah Harmer, “Lodestar”

You’re tagged: Daryl, Jessie, Emma, Dan, Chris Fadden the great

I saw in someone else’s blog not too long ago a “poetry mixtape”– a list of several unrelated poems meant to be read in a specific order as a sort of written mix tape. I love the idea. I may have to nab it.

New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.

Poets! Your help and attention, please!

Why couldn’t I have thought of using the MetaFilter when KB asked a similar question on the Hot Chicks listserv?

New postage rates are in effect. I wonder what this will mean for all of the journals that have long backlogs of submissions? If the SASEs have the old postage on them, will the submitters just be SOL?

(In case yr wondering, Inch cleared its queue last week– the last set of responses went out on Saturday morning.)

One of the great joys of Mothers Day, for me, was sending dirty text Mothers Day messages to poet-friends who have kids. Perhaps “dirty” overstates things a bit. But in at least three messages, I claimed to be pantsless.

Jeremy turned me on to Rumble this morning. I just ate a sub at my desk, so I have about 20 minutes to spend poking through some microfiction. Rock.