Packet #2 is in. The essay is darn close to completion. I sent a full draft, which will require minor revision at most (I believe, I hope). Next week will be a tough one in the office. I may be quiet a while.

Long day. Exhausting. I won’t bore you with details. Read Jessie’s blog for a recap of two of the more pleasant of the last 24 hours.

I came home today ready to make more than a tiny dent in my packet, which is due on Monday. With the recent craziness at work, I had been coming home absolutely drained, with no real poetry in me. a had a very productive day on Saturday, but didn’t actually do much of anything that will help my next packet, then incredible difficulty focusing on Sunday, and I took yesterday is a sick day because I was just in need of a break (the sore throat didn’t help).

But today I feel energized. This is due partly to the fact that I accomplished quite a bit at work today and left feeling as though I am doing everything I can. But it is also due to the fact that a friend sent me a draft of a poem that left me awed and very excited about poetry. I shouldn’t need these little reminders, but occasionally I do: I am extraordinarily blessed. I’m sure some writers go their whole lives, and never feel understood, never feel like they have co-conspirators and collaborators. Over the last few years, I seem to have no shortage of co-conspirators, people like Ruba, Emma, Michael, Bill and Jeremy, Ellen, Philip and others who shall remain nameless, in order to preserve their reputations as evil intimidators. And all throughout my life, no matter which art form I was working on, I have always been lucky enough to be around people who challenge me to do better, simply by doing fantastic work on their own.

Consider this the occasional, obligatory gushing post about how good life is. Pretty soon, I will feel so saccharine that I will need to say something really rude about some poet I don’t know: watch out, poet, who writes about his childhood but never has much to say. When I write the letter that goes with this packet, you’re gonna get served.

Update: all the misspellings above are due to voice recognition. Yes, I’m embarassed. Will correct later.

C. Dale in the Washington Post! And Pinsky talking about C. Dale.

Also, geekery. Tried this app last night and it works very nicely.

I just finished James Tate’s Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which sat on my shelf too long. You can see his next book neatly brewing in its pages. It was the first time I felt like I had a good handle on what he was doing in Return to the City of White Donkeys… a book I adored but couldn’t quite get underneath. Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, it took the poems in Fletchers that aren’t bizarre conversations to contextualize the imaginative dislocation, the placelessness of place.

How cool is Ruba Ahmed? Check out how she subtly name-dropped Bull City Press in her recent interview with Broadsided Press.

Found this photo on the old hard drive today:

Which made me think of this poem:

You Know This Too

The bird on the gate and the goat nosing the grass below make a funny little fraction, thinks the centaur. He wonders if this thought is more human than horse, more poetry than prose. Sometimes it’s hard not to abandon the whole rigmarole of standing at the counter-using a knife and fork to politely eat his steak and peas-to go outside and put his head in the grass. But what his stomach wants, his tongue won’t touch; what his mouth wants, his stomach recoils from. Through the restaurant window he sees flashes of silver and pink in the river. It’s so clogged with mermaids and mermen, there’s no room for fish. And under the bridge, a group of extremist griffins, intent on their graffiti-Long Live the Berlin. The spray paint runs out and while they’re shaking the next can in their clenched claws, the centaur spells out Wall on his napkin, and sketches next to it a girl in sequins getting sawed in half.

– Matthea Harvey
originally appeared in Octopus, forthcoming in Modern Life

I just finished paying off my undergraduate education. I wrote the final check today. It feels terrific.

Ironically, the engine for this early final payment was teaching undergraduate creative writing– I just got my payment for that today.

So, after ten years of laboring for the state, all of it at the institution I took out a loan to attend, I’ve finally given back the appropriate portion of the money the state gave me.

Still, and I know I’m repeating myself, it feels terrific.

Now, I just have to pay the state back for the money it gives me to attend graduate school.

A certain daily poetry website (no, not the one that you know about) took three of my poems and listed my name as forthcoming on their website. Then, they put up a notice saying they had posted all of the poems that had accepted and are going on hiatus until mid-2008. My poems never went up. I’m assuming that I can start sending them out again.

Also, the site was never daily. Heh.

Over the weekend, Ladybug and I watched The Darwin Awards, which had a cameo by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I don’t suppose this can count towards my 25 hours a week working on my MFA, can it?

I am both buoyed and disappointed when I find out that my heroes are actually real people with real problems. Thankfully, there is still Petra Haden. Listen to this. Then, listen to this. Petra Haden is on fire right now.

Arrived home today to a nice, fat DHL package from one Heather McHugh, who was good enough to savage my essay in places and provide encouragement in others. This was exceedingly kind of her. I composed it with Dragon Naturally Speaking 8, which in places came up with some spectacular mistakes. And, when one is tired and has looked at one’s essay for many hours, one tends not to see those awkward constructions quite so much. So, yeah, it was garbled at times, and Heather was a rockstar about understanding.

I have much work to do, but this is the best kind of response to get from a reader. She has confirmed that I am well on the way to being successful and gently tweaked one original assumption, which I’d been ready to tweak and hadn’t fully articulated in positive terms yet. I am very ready to do the work… I just need some uninterrupted hours and a little energy and focus, which means either I get down to business this weekend or I take a day off of work soon. The latter may not be an option.

I spent twenty minutes on the phone today with a Lindanian who is looking seriously at Warren Wilson. I catch myself gushing about this program. Then I come home to a response like this, and want to gush some more. It’s sick, really.

Someone broke into Ladybug’s car last night. Well, not broke in so much as went in, since she left it unlocked. They opened the glove box and tossed some stuff around, and then opened the trunk. But they didn’t take anything, since there wasn’t much of value. It’s hard to whine when nothing’s missing and nothing’s damaged, but it’s just never fun to wake up to a reminder that your world just isn’t as safe as you would like to believe.

Oddly enough, I had terrible trouble going to sleep last night; I kept hearing the cats rumble about and thinking that someone was in the house. I would wake up every couple minutes before I drifted off for good, convinced that when I opened my eyes, I was going to see a human form in the doorway. I am not sure what a panic attack feels like, but I’m guessing that’s pretty close. (My pulse has been well above normal for about two weeks straight, I think due to stress.) I had nightmares most of the night that were based on that initial paranoia…

After Ladybug roused me in the morning and I drifted back to sleep, I continued to have nightmares, but these were actually based on the lowest form of po-gossip. It was still sort of terrifying… people were physically threatening me about keeping their secrets and giving up others. And it was all the juvenile who-kissed-who kind of stuff that makes for interesting conversation but isn’t useful or important in any way. I woke up fairly convinced that I don’t want to know anything about anyone ever again.

Still, it’s nice to go from night terrors to po-terrors, the latter of which is the lesser. I did feel like my mental load was lighter for much of the day. Whatever was bothering me, I think (I hope) it worked itself out of my system.

DHL tried to deliver a package today. I’m guessing it was a packet. So, I’ve signed. Maybe it will be waiting when I come home tomorrow.

Tonight, I have treated myself to luxurious sloth, downloading some songs from music blogs (to give you an idea of the quality, the best was Kix’s “Don’t Close Your Eyes”… for serious) and shredding months worth of bills and bank statements and stuff.I had the shredder on for a good half-hour solid.

One Story arrived today and I still hadn’t read the last one. I’ll remedy that before the end of the night.

The Sheep-Childby James Dickey

I have been thinking of this bizarre Dickey poem, which I first heard at AWP this year. I am afraid I still know entirely too little about James Dickey, despite Betty Adcock’s urgings, which at times seemed like careful warnings that I should be reading him.

Off to dinner with Randall Kenan. I expect that this will be much more fun than the rest of the day, in which I basically fought with this new work laptop. The transfer has not been smooth.

It turns out that Emma’s father grew up with a friend named Ross White.

Dear blogospherian,

Do you know about this book yet? I have it from a very reliable source that at least 1/4 of this book is going to one day be considered “early work from an American poetry legend.”

Do you really want to be left out in the cold when this book sells out? Do you really want to be forced to buy on the black market for hundreds of dollars above the cover price? I don’t want this for you, dear reader. So crack open your checkbook and buy a copy from Toadlilly Press right this second. It is the only safe and sensible option.

Plus, this book was blurbed by THE MURCH. THE MURCH knows what she is talking about.

Best,
Ross V. White
Interwebs Fanboy

Again? Furreals?

I’m just angry tonight. A total douchebag sent a nastygram to a good friend, and somehow, since I didn’t get copied on the original e-mail that went out, there was some suspicion that I might feel the same way. Not even close. Nastygrams suck. They are for nasty people.

Ohhh, I am so irritated right now. If Ladybug and I had not had beer with a former student that I just adore tonight, I would be steaming. But, I’m just very irritated.

Stop with the nastygramming! Write vague, noncommittal entries in your blog, instead!

It’s amazing how an hour and a hot bathtub can give you a new perspective. My new perspective is: my fingers and toes are shriveled.

I did indeed send the essay in yesterday. I’ve written about 34 pages so far, though I haven’t yet formulated an ending. I was also somewhat surprised while I was working on Saturday to find that I had about five pages worth of letter to send in.

Now I’m up for some serious po-gossip, but alas, most of the blogs I read were quiet today. Here’s about all I gots:

• Emma has a chapbook coming out. Yay!
• Anne has a chapbook coming out. Yay!
• Deborah Ager is making September 2007 “Memorize-a-Poem-Every-Week Month.” I’m down for that.
• Inch contributor Jeffery Beam has work up at The Dead Mule.
• Courtney Love continues to wow the world with her experimental prose.
• Scientists may have figured out how to levitate. I give it six months before I have me a MODOK chair, people.

I’ve spent the last couple days getting things in order on my sweet new 320 GB hard drive. Turns out, even an USB 2.0 external drive is faster than my old 200 GB internal. I’ve been cleaning up and transferring music from the office drive to home and vice versa, getting ready for a sweet new laptop at work. That’s a lot of new toys, you feel me?

Poor Clay Hensley. He’ll be answering questions about this for years to come. I thought Greg Maddux was supposed to pitch tonight. If Bonds had hit his homer of Maddux, Maddux could have shaken it off and entered Cooperstown without feeling too badly. I mean, sure, giving up 755 would suck, but being the greatest control pitcher of the last 20 years would probably take some of the sting away.

I guess the guy who gives up 756 will have it worse, won’t he?

It must be horrible to live in someone’s shadow. I would imagine that Robert Olen Butler is feeling sort of the same way about Ted Turner right now. This kind of shit is enough to make you not want to live a literary life. Thank heavens no one cares about poets. It’s safe to be one.

I was at a baseball game with friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. He brought a date, a delightful girl he was excited about seeing. When I told her I was working on an MFA in poetry, she said, “I love poetry!”

“Who do you like to read?” I asked.

“Oh, Billy Collins is my favorite,” she said.

“He’s quite good,” I said.

She kind of furrowed her brow for a moment. There was a long pause. “I made out with him once,” she said.

“Smashing,” I said.

I really didn’t know how to follow up on that. I write poetry, too, but I wasn’t really planning to make out with this young woman to get her to read my stuff. I kind of wished she’d said she reads a lot of Mary Oliver.

Ladybug and I have watched movies in the evenings after I finish working on my essay, a first draft of which should be somewhat complete tomorrow. Good heavens. Tonight, we watched Hot Fuzz, which was pretty terrible. The preview looked good. The preview showed all the best parts.

But last night, we watched Venus, which was one of the best movies we’ve seen in a long time. I was so struck by it that I was ready to put it in my top 5– it was hilarious, pathetic, and touching all at the same time. I had read in this blog and that blog how Peter O’Toole was getting some Oscar buzz. Sure, people are thinking that he’ll win on the “body of work” principle… but why is no one talking about him winning solely on the strength of his performance in this terrific film? Peter O’Toole deserves two Oscars for this movie… one for himself, and one for all the ass he kicked.