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.