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?