I got a response (a super-fast one, at that) from my advisor, Mr. A. Van Jordan, today, and folks, I have assembled the first version of my petition to graduate. I’ll have another look at it tomorrow, just to make sure that after sleeping on it, I don’t freak out about any of the selections.

The intention of the petition is to demonstrate that you have 12-15 pages of completed material, which is difficult for me because I have discovered in the past few years that I never stop revising poems. I really don’t. At any moment, a poem that seemed finished for some length of time is subject to go back on the chopping block. It’s kind of frustrating, actually; when I was younger, I would revise a poem two or three times and then stop, but as I get older, everything’s open for discussion. Even if the poem’s been published, that doesn’t seem to curb the urge.

But tonight’s version of the petition is satisfying– at least for the moment– because I think it shows off some of my good habits and declines to reveal some of my bad ones. Some statistics:

• total poems: 12
• poems in which humans turn into animals: 0
• poems in which animals turn into other animals: 1
• poems in which no metamorphosis occurs but two or more animals are combined: 0
• poems in which people see animals in the sky: 2
• poems about robots: 0
• poems about comic books: 1
• poems about video games: 1
• received forms: 1 (ghazal)
• deeply religious poems: 3
• percentage of all my deeply religious poems represented in this petition: 100
• poems in tercets: 3 (naturally)
• poems in couplets: 2 (naturally)
• prose poems: 2
• poems in the first person singular: 6
• poems I would admit to writing if I were in a crowded bar and someone spontaneously read them aloud: 12

Yeah.

This from a friend today. Sarah Dessen is terrific; if you’re in the area, this is worth going to.

*Sarah Dessen*, author of young adult books, will be the featured presenter at the 2008 Steinfirst Lecture on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hosted by the School of Information and Library Science, the lecture will take place on Saturday, Apr. 5, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. at the Hanes Art Auditorium. A book signing and reception will follow the lecture. For more information about the event go to http://sils.unc.edu/news/releases/2007/12_steinfirst.htm

Dessen is a popular author of young adult books such as: Just Listen, Dreamland and Someone Like You. Several of her novels are award winning, and Just Listen was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 17 weeks.

Sarah Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, NC and attended UNC at Chapel Hill, graduating with highest honors in Creative Writing. She is the author of several novels, including Someone Like You and The Truth About Forever. A motion picture based on her first two books, entitled How to Deal, was released in 2003. For more information about the author, go to her Web site at: www.sarahdessen.com

You know, I should probably devote a whole category in this blog to my friend Emma.  Her new chapbook is available for pre-sale from Finishing Line Press.  Go get.

I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of listening to my grad school supervisors since my initial resistance resulted in such a thorough facing. (Yeah, as in, I got faced. I got faced badly.) When they’ve told me, “You should read x,” I’ve dutifully gone out and found a copy of x so I’d have the benefit of reading x while I was under their tutelage. I mean, that seems simple enough– if they’re charged about a piece of work and think it will help me, I’m going to trust that impulse. Sometimes, I’ve finished the book and felt differently, but even that has occasioned some spirited conversation (and some conversation I wish had been more spirited, but you can only bait someone so far in a letter).

But I made one boo-boo– Mary Leader suggested James Wright, and though I’d gone ahead and bought his Above the River: The Collected Poems, I flipped through his early iambic work and got a little intimidated.

No, “a little intimidated” isn’t quite strong enough. I said in a recent letter, “I was too chickenshit to read it.” That’s the truth. Wright’s early formalism scared me.

Here’s what I read that semester. (Yes, there’s an implied “instead” at the end of that sentence.)

• Amichai, Yehuda. Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
• Dennis, Carl. Practical Gods.
  
• Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems.
  
• Gilbert, Jack. Refusing Heaven.
• Glück, Louise. The First Four Books of Poems.
• Grotz, Jennifer. Cusp.
• Halliday, Mark. Jab.
• Herbert, Zbigniew. Selected Poems.
• Kelly, Brigit Pegeen. Song.
  
• Levine, Philip. What Work Is.
  
• Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda.
• Pope, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope.
• Ryan, Kay. Elephant Rocks.
  
• Simic, Charles. Unending Blues.
  
• Syzmborksa, Wisława. Poems New and Collected 1957-1997.
  
• Wilbur, Richard. Collected Poems 1943-2004.
  
• Yakich, Mark. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross.
  
• Zawacki, Andrew. By Reason of Breakings.

I can’t knock any of that stuff (though the Neruda is the Belitt translation, which I think is a little wretched), but seriously, I had an advisor excited about James Wright and I chickened out in favor of Andrew Zawacki?  One of the folks in that reading list is also a member of my graduate faculty, and I don’t have a hard time seeing her, upon finding out that I skipped Wright, smacking me silly and saying, “Why did you read my book when you could have read Wright?  You idiot!”  (In fairness, she is so sweet, I half-expect that she would thank me for reading her book, though I don’t know if that would be before or after the smacking.)

I don’t think Mary Leader is trolling the Internet, looking at her former students’ blogs, but in case she’s Googling herself someday and see this: Mary, I am sorry I was so stupid that I passed on the chance to read James Wright with you.

(And, on the off chance that Andrew Zawacki is trolling the Internet looking for his own name: Andrew, I really did enjoy your book, dude, and I hope you are not offended by the above. It’s just… James frikkin’ Wright… augh.)

Forgive me, I have gone a little wild with the footnoting function in Word 2007. It’s just so easy.

I’m lying in bed, surfing the web.  Ladybug is talking to a Chinese friend in Canada, using that enunciation that she reserves for non-native English speakers.  I’m listening to her, thinking that voice recognition would serve her well.  She has a good voice for poems, though she would not be caught dead reading a poem aloud.  I should make her read what I write so I can hear it aloud.  I would be mortified to hear her read my poems aloud.  She is talking to a friend who speaks Chinglish.  She would not read in Chinglish.

The expression fits, in this case. One seldom sees poems about heads torn off.

I’d never read James Wright beyond a poem here or there until I began Above the River a couple days ago. I knew I wanted to give Wright some serious study after Scott Challener taught a class at Warren Wilson and used the poem “Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism.”

On the Skeleton of a Hound

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body. Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer. Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;\
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

– James Wright

We are lucky to have to the occasion and desire to write poems…

RELICS WITH OLD BLUE MEDICINE-TYPE BOTTLE: TO X

This old blue medicine-type bottle, unburied
From your garden last year’s the perfect centerpiece
To suit our supper—the totem-trope we need
Across this kitchen table, to show how dangerous

It is where we sit (knees near touching at times)
Dawdling and playing with our silverware,
Tapping teacups, tired and satisfied and prime
From a stint in that garden: in a few hours

We’ll find ourselves in bed, but we don’t know that now,
Do we—we’re still exchanging histories,
(It’s only my something visit to your house)
Just sorting out the portions of who, when, how—

Numbering the decades and the romances
That went bad, the faces that faded on us,
Though nothing too personal at first, just pain;
Divorces, liaisons, estrangements, fixations—

Of course our brows hurry away from hurt:
Anecdotes begun in wince end in wrinkly;
Our woeful tales go told through a mode that’s mostly
A kind of moue, comic attitude, which flirts

With grimace-smiles, jokes, the mocking of those choices,
Those great mismatings: funny how it seems of late
Both of us have been alone, celibate . . .
Collating, getting our dates right, our voices

Shed their list of affairs, entanglements, crises:
So we accord the past its poisons, and theorize
That even this old blue bottle here, stored poisons
Before we were born:—followed by suggestions

That the toxin of those heartbreaks is gone
After this long, their vitriol has fizzed out,
And we could, given an occasion, again
Consume the spirit that killed us once, if not

The letter: confessions used as cue-cards to prompt
Mutual responses of empathy or hope:
No former hemlock can harm us now—we’re immune
By now—don’t you agree—because what happens

Ripens in retrospect; each sour memory
Blossoming like the flowers you sometimes spruce
This bottle’s corroded throat with. We certainly
Are not eating much, are we, but we don’t notice—

Can’t we see how our fingers will likewise bloom
From off these knives and forks and force their field,
Interlocking like tugged-at roots . . . Untombed
Of its venom, this blue vial vigils our held

Glances. Sieved in its acid, its distilled mirror,
Would we (almost as soiled as it by time) appear
A beauty, a scarred heirloom any collector
Might stuff high on a shelf amid simulacra—

Somber still, it approbates that emptiness
We must be preparing to fill with each other—
It foretells the coiled taste, the bite unearthed
In the antiquity of a sudden, wild kiss

Whose disclosure will surprise us, as if
We have not been wholly inured by the years,
The stories we bare here across the rice, the life
Stories bittersweet, neutered, too well-rehearsed.

Will deadlier words then surface—their potency
Dis-elixired, drawn; decanted so often
That by our courteous age they’ve turned as grimy
And bunged with dust as this blue glass was when

Your shovel showed it that summer morning, and
My phrases here are (surely) just as corrupt—
What matter its sharpness, no metaphor can
Pare the ground from us as hard as we try to dig up,

To excavate feelings a bottomless need for
Soars as we toss the salad greens and pour
Dressing dripping down their fineleaved freshness
Starting to wilt already around the edges,

To rot back to that mulch they burst from. Such decay
Preserves some artifacts, if not us: they lie in
Graves contrived to obviate the skeleton
They survive beside, they strive to deny

The obvious, the crepitude fate-of-flesh bleak
Facts of our demise, obdurate bricabrac knickknacks
Laid by ancients in the coffin to propitiate
Ancestors, to aid, via these vain trinkets,

(Are we the ‘subjective correlatives’ of these
Objects, this chthonic junk the tomb-robbers missed,
Tools and talismans, amulets, a corpse-cache
Gear for ghosts, props to assist the posthumous)

Some afterworld sojourn of the soul entering
Itself, self dying to carpe diem one more day.
Refocus us on this figure, this table-centering
Blue bottle. Whose future dye indigos our day.

Dulled, we ignore these darker, gnawing warnings—
Our own skull-and-crossbone labels long since skinned—
We poke at our plates, we pat our napkins.
What antidote waits, withering, within

Against that great granulate upheaval of
Fields whose depths have grown archeological—
Filled by fucked relics and by that above-all
Most subterranean of discoveries, love?

–Bill Knott

Knott has posted every poem he’s written to his web site.  We are insanely lucky to have him, griping and all.

Is it just me, or is this a tad awkward?

It is a well-documented fact that I have a certain automatic distrust for babies, though I should like to be fed, clothed and cared for. Perhaps I view them as competition.

So a baby has to be exceptionally cute for me to be warm to it… but my frequent co-conspirator Ruba has had a heck of an adorable baby:

Congrats Ruba and Shom. Welcome, new friend. How long will it be before we can play Scrabulous? With your parents, I give it… six to eight days.