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.