Don’t get your panties in a wad. It just happens to be Friday and I just happen to be venemous again. I don’t plan to do this every Friday, poemmonkeys.

Quit complaining about the establishment. Some of those people are better writers than you are: The Future of Poetry Magazines.

Both sides suck; writers should have control over their work, yes, but enough sense to choose a program of study that will respect them: Creative writing students struggle to keep their work off the Web.

Everybody’s got their something, which also explains T-Pain: Mad ducats for bad poems.

Oh, awesome, another social network for shitty writers: How to outsource the slush pile.

Spend the time thinking about your acceptances, because clearly your rejections are taking up too much of your mental energy: What counts as a personal rejection?

#8 on the list of problems poets will never have – losing $10m to a gambling habit. WTF, Charles?: Barkley owes a casino $400k.

It’s good to know that the history of langpo can be delivered in a fashion nearly as annoying as langpo itself, but for the love of God, leave O’Hara out of that mess, it ain’t his fault: The Same Old Same Old New York School

Before work, my iTunes, on random, played three Queens of the Stone Age songs, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

On my way to work, my car mp3 player, only a 9% chance of playing Queens of the Stone Age at any time, played three of their songs in a row, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

When I arrived at work, iTunes, again on random, was playing MF Doom.  Then it played “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

I am trying to get a long list of things done today, but every time I make an attempt, I find that either I do not have enough information to complete the task, or I have enough information but I make so many mistakes along the way that I think, “Maybe I should do something else.”  The one positive thing I’ve accomplished at work today was completely an accident.

When I went to get some lunch, my car served up another two Queens of the Stone Age songs.  That was five in a row, despite only a 9% chance that any given song on that disc will be Queens of the Stone Age.

California has overturned a ban on gay marriage.  Charleston is hosting National Microfiction Weekend.  Schools, get your web filters ready to go to work, because Joe Biden just called Bush’s “Democrats appease terrorists” speech “bullshit.”  And if you check my Last.fm page, guess what just came up again?

OK, I will go ahead and tell you:

Queens of the Stone Age – Better Living Through Chemistry [mp3]

Here’s a milestone passed:  On Monday night, I mailed in my final packet for my MFA program.  I’m not done yet, oh no, but the deadlines I still have in front of me will start falling like dominoes: evaluation next week, thesis the following week, writing a class and doing thesis reviews in June, residency (including class and thesis interviews) in July.  But I’m basically done with reading and writing for school.  Now I’m reading and writing for the rest of my life.  That’s kind of cool.  I have yet to select the first book I will read solely for my own enjoyment.

I spent some of the weekend working on some entries for Lauren Turner’s bestiary– check out some of her collages. She’ll have her wares (whoa, easy there, perv-man, not those wares) for sale Sunday at RebusFest (301 N. Kinsey St. in Raleigh).  Go.  Check out the art.  Here’s a sample:

Though “scrobbling” sounds like something that can’t possibly be healthy, I’m doing it again. I hadn’t really considered when I bought my new computer that I finally had the computing power to manage my 35,000-song iTunes library and run other applications, so for months afterwards I didn’t bother with a number of applications that I once tried to use. My last go-round with Last.fm was last year, when I scrobbled a couple of weeks worth of music before realizing that the software was absolutely killing my machine’s performance.

So, if you’re my friend and you’re using Last.fm, go ahead and friend me, but be prepared to see some horrifying tunes come up in my playlist, which basically runs 24/7 on random. (Also be prepared to see the new Portishead album a couple of times. I’m really enjoying that.)  My username there, unsurprisingly, is rosswhite, because either I have no problem with leading a very public life or I am too lazy to come up with a cool username.

Next up, I’ll finally be playing Civilization IV. I’d play Sim City 4, but somewhere along the way, I lost disc 1.  (If you want to maybe burn me a copy of disc 1 of Sim City 4 for Windows, I would reciprocate with some music, which you may pick out by looking at my playlists.)

I think it’s well-documented that my vote in the upcoming presidential election will go to William Shatner.  Over on Twitter, @WilliamShatner brought up the notion that he should have his own meme, similar to the Chuck Norris jokes meme.  Users are responding.  Here are some of the best:

• William Shatner doesn’t overact; it’s the rest of the world that’s phoning it in.
• William Shatner doesn’t have an oversized ego. He has a bigger identity than yours.
• William Shatner knows singing to music is just a fad.

Oh, my stars and garters.  This could be the greatest meme ever.  Follow @WilliamShatner on Twitter.

Two attempts to reach Jeannine Hall Gailey through her web site have failed.  I can leave her a comment on a blog post, but the anal-retentive part of me hates it when the comment isn’t directly relevant to the entry it comments on.  Is that entirely batshit crazy?  But yeah, I can’t bring myself to use that forum for a personal message, or even a general, “Hey, please contact me, even though you don’t know me.”  Is writing this entry in my own blog, which of course carries the implicit message that if you know Jeannine you should e-mail me her e-mail address or direct her here that she may contact me directly, even more batshit crazy?

Other mild compulsions which I would like to overcome but cannot: I have to fold potato chip bags into a neat rectangle before I can throw them away.  If I’m at the top of the stairs and the cat is at the top of the stairs, I have to make him go down first.  I cannot write in books.

It’s Friday afternoon and I am feeling 100% snarky.  (Before you ask: no reason in particular.)

Somehow I just don’t think I’ll like my co-workers’ updates about conferences they attended any better when they’re in sonnet form: Arts conference speaker urges more poetry in the workplace

Thank God he was the only white male poet ever to experience body issues, lest we be bombarded with hundreds of poets by middle-aged men about their flaccid penises (oh, wait): Larkin: “I’m Ugly”

I don’t see what all the fuss is about since 99% of VQR submitters have never seen the magazine.  Hell, 99% of all submitters anywhere have never read the magazine: VQR apologizes for publishing reader comments on manuscripts

48% of poetry readers find poetry through television… which either means that I’m watching all the wrong television or the 9 people who admitted to reading poems for a University of Chicago survey don’t have 500 channels to choose from:  Survey takes a closer look at fans of verse

The part that doesn’t shock me is that Shel Silverstein’s verse is indistinguishable from that of a 10-year-old: KidsPost contest winners are plaigarists

After months of not hearing a single response to a single submission (I couldn’t even get responses to several queries for submissions that have been out for over a year– should I go ahead and assume they’re not taking the work?), I’ve had two responses in the last couple of weeks.  Both acceptances.

Rawk. I’m gonna send more stuff out.

Trent Reznor wins.  Nine Inch Nails, finally freed of its record contract, released a new album, The Slip, for free today, without DRM.  It was a classy move, and it’s potentially a very important one for digital rights and the future of music.  And here’s the best part – it’s good!  Go get it from nin.com.

I remember someone saying in a Warren Wilson class that the line has trouble sustaining itself upwards of sixteen syllables, which I found to be a curious observation at the time but which I have come to believe as fairly correct; if the line is representative of a unit of breath, one which can be subdivided with pause and caesura, the lungs get tighter and tighter after about sixteen syllables.

But not every syllable is equal; the tongue and brain have more work to do with “floral embroidered” than “I ate six whole eggs” for several reasons: the imagistic but not perfectly concrete nature, the concordance of sounds, the multi-syllabic words. Essentially, you might see most of the words in the latter in a five-year-old’s vocabulary, while the words in the former are more complex.

Most of my recent reading has involved long, long lines, either through whole poems (Lynda Hull’s Star Ledger, T.R. Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell) or interspersed with short lines in compact spaces (Christine Garren’s The Piercing), so I thought I would give long lines another whirl. Previous experiments with them had turned out poorly.

So, for today’s grind poem, I wrote in exceptionally long lines. Or, so I thought, but when I went back and did some counting, I found I was still nowhere near, say, C.K. Williams’s average line length.

But the lines were long for me, and I could feel them buckling even as they were being written. They look like prose on the page and I found myself fighting against a normative urge to make them sound like prose. Prose communicates meaning and, by and large, doesn’t care where the breath of the words occurs– I think that’s true for even most literary prose, which manages tone, diction, and syntax the way poems do but fails to compensate for the aural. I found myself wanting to resort to that convention in ways that I manage to avoid even working with prose poems– looking for the line break for so long, and denying it to myself, was uncomfortable and bizarre, which probably means that I should try it again, continue trying it until I can get it to click. But for now, I’ll simply say, “No sir, I don’t like it.”

I had cause to quote this poem today.  Dan Albergotti turned me on to it last weekend.  It is the first poem in Jack Gilbert’s first book.

In Dispraise Of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

–Jack Gilbert

I’ve had the horrible feeling this evening that my domain name is about to expire, at which point I’m reasonably sure it would snapped up by pornographers. Then there would be lascivious pictures and videos of a man purporting to be Ross White, but who would, in fact, not be named Ross White. It would all be a clever trick by the makers of the pornography.

If you consider this a far-fetched, futuristic fiction, consider the case of HeidiWhite.com, a domain I have tried to buy for my beautiful wife several times only to be foiled.

In 2001, it was operated by a blonde actress who looked like she had been turned into a clone of Brigitte Nielsen, circa 1992. And, be still my heart, this Heidi White wrote poems. link

In 2002, the clone was replaced by a normal-looking girl who, unable to come up with a new logo or back-story, used the clone’s back-story as her own. Her poems, however, became much shorter, though no less trite. link

On August 8, 2003, the clone captured the normal-looking Heidi White and resumed control of the web page. link

Presumably drugged with clone-altering substances, the clone let the domain, and perhaps her own body, fall in the hands of pornographers. Follow this link to the Wayback Machine, and click on any of the 2004 links. You’ll be presented with a “you must be 18 to enter” page, following which you will see one of any number of porn sites. Presumably, if you were to pay these archived sites using some of your own archived funding, you could see shockingly graphic representations of the clone engaged in lewd acts. You might also find the normal-looking girl in some sort of bondage, since presumably the clone, having kidnapped her to resume control of the domain, and the pornographers who subsequently took control of both the clone and the site, would not have released her for fear that the site would once again change hands and the poetry featured therein would become even more trite.

In 2005, GoDaddy assumed control of the site, and neither the clone or the nice-looking girl were anywhere to be found. This was, I believe, the same year GoDaddy bought Super Bowl airtime and filled it with boobies. So we’ll assume they were in cahoots with the pornographers. link

It appears that clip art took over the site in 2006. link

Finally, in 2007, GoDaddy once again took control of the site, and the clip art was vanquished to 1992, where presumably, it will send a clone of Brigitte Nielsen forward into the future to purchase the most important domain in the history of mankind: HeidiWhite.com. link

Jeez, by the time I’d finished mapping out that horrific sequence of events, I finally found my login for my registrar, and discovered that BullCityPress.com was set to expire in 20 days. Thankfully, I caught it in time, so you won’t find surprising bull-porn at your favorite press web site for the next 5 years.