Here’s a vague “please send me some good vibes, I need them today” blog post.  Don’t you hate these?  Because then you start thinking, “Oh no, what’s the deal? Is something really wrong, or is this blogger just having one of those days where he can’t get the chocolate in the peanut butter?  Because if it’s the former, I will send my good vibes, but if it’s the latter, I could send my good vibes elsewhere… like to the Obama campaign, or to starving children.  Surely they need my good vibes more than this chump.”

So, while remaining perfectly vague, I’ll tell you this: No, I don’t think anything is wrong, and I’m having a perfectly fine day.  But good vibes are still welcome.

Check this out, boys and girls… an upcoming exhibit featuring Bull City Press author Ellen C. Bush, managing editor Marielle Prince, and me… plus our pals Henry Kearney and Zena Cardman.

Please consider coming to the reading on April 11, which features me and Ellen.

“The Illustrated Word” at Flanders 311

Raleigh, NC - Flanders 311 will present “The Illustrated Word,” an exhibition that pairs North Carolina writers and printmakers together to produce specially commissioned illustrations. There will be an opening reception on First Friday, April 4, from 6:00-9:00 p.m. This exhibit will run through Wednesday, April 30.

In a study of collaborative creativity, North Carolina authors were invited to compose and submit one-page pieces - either poetry or prose - which were then assigned to printmakers throughout the state to illustrate. Each illustration was conceived and completed for the purpose of this exhibition and will be unavailable for viewing alongside the accompanying text in any other venue.

The printmakers faced the challenge of keeping true to their own individual styles while also complementing the tone of their respective written pieces. To undertake this task, many participants entered into prolonged discussions with one another to comprehend and determine crucial themes and details worth emphasizing from the works. “The Illustrated Word” references the rich literary and artistic traditions of illustration, but it sets itself apart by removing the mass production element common to most efforts.

As an added event to “The Illustrated Word,” a poetry reading will occur on Friday, April 11, at 7:00 p.m. It will feature recitations by Ross White, Jon Leon, Allyssa Wolf, Ellen Bush, David Bradsher, and Eric Amling. All events are free and open to the public.

Selected books and collections by the participating authors will be available for sale on the opening night, at the poetry reading, and throughout the span of the exhibition.

Participating writers include Eric Amling, Jane Andrews, David Bradsher, Ellen C. Bush, Zena Cardman, Joe Fletcher, Henry Kearney, Carrie Knowles, Tom Lisk, Jon Leon, Ruth Moose, Lawrence Naumoff, Ryan Nilsen, Elaine Orr, Marielle Prince, Maria Rouphail, Christopher Salerno, Ross White, and Allyssa Wolf. Participating printmakers include Owen Beckmann, Daniel Chapin, Andy Farkas, Louise Zjawin Francke, John Gall, Annemarie Gugelmann, Judy Jones, Delia Keefe, Carrie Knowles, Michael Meadors, Mary Mendell, Kristianne Ripple, and Lisa Beth Robinson.

Flanders 311 is located in the Martin Street Galleries and Studios on 311 West Martin Street in downtown Raleigh. Regular gallery hours run 11 a.m.- 6 p.m., Tues - Sat. For more information, contact a gallery representative at 919-834-5044 or visit www.flandersartgallery.com.

Image details: John Gall, He Will Make It Grow. Line and stippled etching on zinc with chine colle, 2008, 10.5 x 8″

Warren Ellis on Twitter today:

Obituaries: letters to people who had no idea, in their lifetimes, that they were loved or admired by anyone. Late mail from the living.

Gorgeous.  In that curmudgeonly Ellis way.

If so,

Elegies: letters to people who had no idea, in their lifetimes, that they were loved or admired by anyone.  Mail misaddressed and delivered in time to  make the reader look around and take stock.  Perhaps, he thinks, I am loved or admired by someone.  I should write a letter of my own.  I should call.  I should be better than I am.  I should be living.

Moorer Denies Holyfield in Twelve

Caesar’s Palace.
The way life keeps splitting itself in two.

Twenty four hours later Florida
had pushed itself under
the wheels of our white Olds.
My father getting out
of the car. I’m squinting, his
shirt is that bright.

I was stunned for a minute
but was able to clear my head.

I’m on the phone now, trying to keep this front
from moving over his white cloud of a head,
because my father used to be two men,
but now he’s old.

One minute, you’re talking weather. Then,
a nasty right hook in the second round.

I didn’t mean to start talking obstacles, hooks,
comebacks.
But, suddenly, I’m going down, saying:

I’ve been holding on with my teeth.
I’ve developed this strange social stutter.

I had to let my cutman go.

–Olena Kalytiak Davis

I seem to have wasted the better part of my day doing nothing, which was, after the past couple weeks, very, very welcome. It’s not that I have been extraordinarily industrious the past few weeks; if anything, I have felt far from it. But yesterday was the first day I’ve felt good in a while, and I didn’t use it to catch up at work or on my MFA work. I used it to hang out with my wife. It’s been a while since I devoted a whole day to that without worry.

Well, not a whole day– I spent a couple hours watching Carolina get taken to the wire by Virginia Tech in the ACC Tournament. And I was almost hoarse at the end of the game.

My plan today is to indulge in things that I know are bad for me, watch some more basketball, and then rock an annotation and maybe a revision that I have had my eye on. I sent my last packet in on Tuesday so I expect I’ll hear something back in the next day or two– I kind of hope I don’t hear back tonight, so I can focus in on what I didn’t get to in the last packet.

Matthea Harvey, in her Poetry Foundation interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey, pretty much summed up why I love working on Inch:

When something is tiny, maybe the little arrows of heartbreak penetrate more easily—slip in through a tear duct or a pore.

Harvey has always seemed the poetic equivalent of Matthew Barney– you can see the mechanical and pop-cultural influences roiling beneath the surface but the finished product is an otherwordly beauty that cannot be captured simply in (or on) those terms.

My sister and I have never been particularly competitive, or if we have, I’ve never known about it. She did her thing, and I did my thing, and those things didn’t often intersect, so that was good. But she did one thing in her teens that I never did, and I always wished I had, but by the time I was interested in it, I didn’t much have the chance.

Well, roughly 22 years after she did it, I’m doing it. I’m going to see Duran Duran!  I have tickets with friends on May 21.

Word of my joy spread quickly through the Twitterverse (since I twittered it) and soon, the messages and Facebook wall posts were streaming in, my favorite from Amy Minton, who said:

Please. If you love me. Bring me the autograph of John Taylor. It must read: “Amy, I have always loved you, too. -John Taylor.”

This is what the band looked like when they released Astronaut a few years ago.  (”Reach Up for the Sunrise,” the first single from that album, was the song Ladybug and I woke up to for almost a year.  We were, in fact, reaching up for the sunrise.  Or the snooze bar.) So I guess I can see why Amy’s still in love with John Taylor, though I have to admit that Andy Taylor looks shockingly like the woman who taught my fifth grade class.

Here’s a link to one of the songs on their new album, a collaboration with Timbaland, who would collaborate with a horny toad if they paid him enough.  (And he’d probably make the toad sound good.)

Duran Duran - “Skin Divers” (mp3)

I got back and forth on Twitter– sometimes I think there’s a ton of value to it, sometimes I think it’s a complete and total waste.  It is, of course, only as good as the people you’re following, or the content you’re adding.  I’ve felt like a less-than-adequate content producer of late, so that part of the equation isn’t up to snuff.  And I don’t follow a huge number of people– a poet friend-of-a-friend that I respect a great deal, my boss and a handful of co-workers, Smalls and Ayse, a couple improv peeps, and the biggest twit on Twitter, my great friend Lee Creighton.

Some days, my sidebar is full of tweets from just one or two people, and I feel like there’s not much to it– some political linky-linky (important, yes, but not what I use Twitter for), a bunch of @soandso tweets that say good morning or discuss coffee, a little bit of technical discussion (I follow a kickass coder).  None of it makes my life richer.  But you do get things like:

• This morning a friend posted that there was a new traffic pattern at one of the best places to hang out in Carrboro.  This isn’t earth-shattering news, and I am quite sure I would have noticed when I tried to turn in the out lane.  But still, it’s cool to know those things as they happen.
• Found out that an author I have a great deal of respect for is speaking in the Triangle soon, and since I don’t regularly read the Independent, I would not have known that otherwise.  (Alas, I’m spoken for that evening.)
• @arsepoetica tweets about the music she’s listening to, and when she talks about a band I don’t know, I make a point to check them out, because we like a lot of the same stuff.
• A couple of times, I have looked at a recent tweet by Lee and thought, “OK, he’s available for hijinks.”  And then we hijink.

I’ve thought frequently that I would be more interested in following poets; fiction writers would be good too, but poets would be my top targets.  The compact nature of tweets could/should produce some interesting results among a group of like-minded, twittering poets, one that I would be very keen to watch even if I wasn’t an active participant.  But I cannot find that group, if they exist; I can’t find more than one working poet twittering right now (and she tweets about her day job).

So how to make Twitter more useful, if the people I most want to follow aren’t on it?  As it turns out, it may be following more people.  I have been very selective thusfar about who I would follow because I was trying to keep up with everything that people close to me post.  But that actually might not be what serves me– I might do better to follow a bunch of people, and if I miss tweets, I miss tweets.  If I miss tweets aimed at me, so be it.  Because if someone wants/needs to talk to me directly, they know how to find me via more reliable means that Twitter.

Following more people seems like it would create a sort of conversation slipstream– the real world happens, and the conversation on Twitter is the backwash.  So one could reasonably step in and out of that at will; it would be the nerd equivalent of the evil movie character who goes to his room with 100 TVs on 100 different channels and simply sits and absorbs all the information.

Now I just have to find interesting people to follow.  I suppose the problem is still the same… but where, in the past, I would only follow someone I knew in real life (or, at least, had some level of private communication with), I’m going to follow some people who just strike me as interesting.  I added one earlier today, who saw my tweet about wanting to follow more poets and writers, and direct messaged me about it– we have a similar desire to see it happen.  (She’s also a proponent of 140-character microfic, or, as I’m calling it now, “tweetfic.”)

Perhaps I’ll be more interesting as a result.

From the Academy of American Poets:

Americans Carry Poems for Pockets for National Poetry Month

March 12, 2008—On April 17, Americans will mark the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day by carrying poems and sharing them with co-workers, family, friends, and even strangers. Celebrating the power of the poem to both transport a reader and be transported by one, the day will include events at bookstores, libraries, schools, parks, and workplaces throughout the country. Communities are invited to participate in Poem In Your Pocket Day (celebrated in New York City for the last six years) by giving away poems for pockets and hosting creative events to be featured by the Academy of American Poets on Poets.org throughout the spring. www.poets.org/pocket

This one is courtesy Matthew Simmons.