I’m setting up next month’s edition of The Grind, in which an intrepid group of poets produces a poem a day for a month and sends it to everyone else in the group.  It’s harrowing, it’s rigorous, it borders on insane, but since the initial group (Matthew Olzmann, Ruba Ahmed, Zena Cardman) did it back in October, it’s become a tradition– it has run continuously since then with a rotating cast of characters.

I traded e-mails with a friend who is finishing up 31 in 31 for July, and has found what many of us have, and what keeps me coming back: the process is liberating, despite all its constraints.  Here’s what I said to her in a moment of clarity:

Well, congratulations on 31 in 31!  It’s no small feat, which you’ve obviously intuited not only from the work itself but from the attrition rate within the group. It’s a worthy and commendable thing that you have carved out the time for your craft, however unpolished those drafts are… And, of course, revision rocks and is the best reason to be a poet.  Think of all the raw work you can now revise.  When this process works, it really works… When you go back to these in a couple months, you will see connections and obsessions that will frighten you and enchant you.  The desperation involved in producing something daily is really instructive.

Most people choose to try it in February, since February only has 28 days, or in April, because it’s NaPoWriMo.  But we’ll go whenever.  If you want in on August, let me know before tomorrow night and I’ll include you in the introductory e-mail.  But remember: the only unforgivable sins are missing a day or dropping out.

I don’t get the notion that in order to be considered for the office of Vice President of the United States, you have to make a big show about how you aren’t interested in holding the office.  I mean, Hillary did that, but you know, that’s her prerogative because she thinks Obama will be a shitty (not to mention black) president.  She still thinks she was wronged somehow that the American public did not choose her.   But the rest of the jokers whose names are being bandied about, they didn’t run.  They have no conceivable reason to not want to be Vice President unless, y’know, they actually don’t want to be Vice President.  But this kind of noise just makes me tired of being American: “I haven’t sought it, I’m not running for it, I’m not asking for it. I never asked anything of the campaign. I didn’t endorse him to get anything. I endorsed him to help him.“  Why not just come out and say, “But if he asked me, I’d say hells yes and gladly serve under the exceptional human being that is Barack Obama, and if he doesn’t ask me, I’m still the Governor of Virginia and kind of a badass in my own right”? A little truth, please.

Also, is this the guy who thought the Internet is a series of tubes?  Did anyone notice that the media is now burying the fact that the guy is a Republican when he’s crooked, but displaying in line 2 of the story when he’s a Democrat?  Is that because crooked Republicans aren’t really newsworthy these days?

Also, please note: Dale broke the Internet.  It’s his fault.  This happened right after he started a game with me.

MFA/MFYOU

When will the annoying to-MFA-or-not-to-MFA prattle end?  Everyone in a MFA program is awful and MFA programs just take your money, you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, only real experience and heart can make you a writer and no amount of MFA will give you that, people with MFAs have a stranglehold on every conceivable publishing avenue, there is a secret syndicate of MFAs who were responsible for the Bay of Pigs and seek to destroy everyone who’s ever put pen to a piece of paper that wasn’t an application to an MFA program, blah blah blah.

Still, the idea behind this new online journal is kind of cute– the editors are a married couple, one enrolled in an MFA program and one working full time.  And to their credit, they don’t seem to skew in one direction of the MFA-or-no nonsense: they want top-quality writing from both ends of the spectrum.  It’s out there, so it just depends on where they solicit and how they market for submissions.  However, take a look at this statement from the website:

So what’s the difference between these two separate paths? What do you gain from an MFA program and what do you gain from doing it on your own? That’s what we hope to find out, and document, on this website.

If they’re successful in finding good writing from both populations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to.

Call me old-fashioned, call me naive, but I just don’t get back tattoos.  I mean, what’s the point of spending the cash on the ink if you don’t ever get to see it.  Also, getting a tattoo with text on your chest.  It just seems like for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading it backwards.  Yeah, it looks cool in photos, but you probably see photos of your chest a lot less frequently than you see your chest in the mirror after a shower.  Unless you’re Tupac.  I bet he saw a lot of photos of his chest.

The list of things I accomplished today is mundane: read some more of a novel, mowed the lawn, steam-cleaned the carpets, watched a movie and some of a television show.  The details are pretty inconsequential.  I won’t look back on today and think that I accomplished anything of note, and by next weekend I probably won’t even remember what I did.  In a couple of years, I may make it back to this blog post and wonder why this is, but today was a pretty good day.

I presented to teachers today.

It did not suck.

Please understand that this was kind of important, as my last presentation to teachers was such a god-awful disaster that I seriously considered leaving my job.  I was entirely sure that I had lost any and all of what made me worthwhile in my current position.

Everything we do, if we are to get out of bed in the morning and interact with others, requires a little bit of ego.  Not a ton– though I am an egotistical sonofabitch by most standards– but enough to get out there in the world and not have it crush you like the cockroach you are.  (Feel free to swap “you” for “me” and “I.”)  But for a couple days after one ill-fated presentation, even that took monumental effort.

I used to have no problem with standing in front of a group of people and talking, either about things that I know well or things I know nothing about.  Somewhere along the line, that changed; it took a turn for the worse.  And it’s not all groups; I was able to present my class at school to my peers, a group of people I have tremendous respect for, and my teachers, whom I adore and would never want to let down.  That was no problem at all.  In fact, I looked forward to it.

I wonder sometimes if this is a sign that I am so far removed from the classroom that I know in my heart that I’m less qualified to talk about things than most.  I am feeling that way, even though I was teaching at the college level only a year ago.  But K-12 is a different animal, and it requires a different understanding.  If you have not taught K-12, you cannot actually understand… but then, I suppose what I fear is that I have not taught K-12 in so long that I cannot actually understand either.  That’s disappointing.  And a little scary.

So it was nice that today did not suck.  But I am not out of the woods yet.  I need to find my way back into the school environment for a little while if I am to continue to do my job well.

I am, at the moment, struggling with a new poem.  It started with a pleasant idea, which I suppose is no stunning endorsement, but each time I think I have nailed down the mechanics of the poem, I make a discovery which confounds that logic.

When this happens to me, I often find that some time away helps, so I just leave the poem alone.  And since I am hosting trivia tonight, I will probably do just that.  But it pains me to walk away from this one. I have this nagging suspicion that what it really requires is more attention, not less attention.

My impulse towards making the poem, as opposed to just writing it, has been strong lately.  I find myself drawn to heavily organized information resembling received forms.  And it shows in what I have been enjoying reading recently.

Speaking of what I’m reading, I’m in the middle of a novel, too, and just about three times on every page, I ask myself, “How on earth is the writer pulling this off?” If you analyze it at the sentence level, most of his prose is ridiculous and impossibly unstable.  The novel ought to be a mess, despite its careful organization, just because those sentences are so far out.  But it’s working.  I remember feeling this way about Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  The individual elements in that movie were so out of whack that they simply should not have worked.  But they do.  They work famously.

Melissa showed me this site today: http://wherethehellismatt.com.  We talked for a while about Matt’s job– traveling the world and dancing a stupid dance on Stride’s dime– and while she came to the conclusion that she wants a gig like that, I would have to pass.  What can I say?  I like home, I like being in familiar spaces with all my books around me and a cat on my lap.  Though, I have to tell you, a cat on your lap makes it hard to type up a blog entry.  For srsly.  I mean, I’m experiencing it right now.

OK, after yesterday’s sloth-fest, I kicked it into gear, beginning work today at 8:30 and plowing through all of the remaining poetry submissions in the Inch submissions manager.  A small handful that we liked and were considering had been pending for entirely too long, a disservice to the authors that I hope not to repeat now that the graduate work is finished.  (Our new intern Jordan has been diligently learning the ropes, and shows such a keen eye for fiction that I hope he’ll stick around as a reader even after the summer is up: Bill and I have five fiction submissions left to discuss and we’ll be ready to send fiction contracts, as well.)  I also filled this week’s orders, sent a care package to a friend who is home with her family, and got five submissions of my own out into the wild.  So, it was a massively productive morning.  Clearing those tasks off my plate has me feeling much more mentally prepared for the day job tomorrow… a feeling I did not have at any point last week, when I stumbled through the workweek with a groggy sense that I didn’t belong anywhere near that office.

But the real triumph of the day was mowing the lawn.  Longtime– and I do mean longtime– readers may remember that my most transcendent moments all seem to occur when I’m mowing the lawn, be they revelations about where my life is headed or 70’s porn moments.  (Man, I wish I had not lost all the blog comments when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress… some of the comments accompanying that latter entry were pure gold.)

I hadn’t mowed my own lawn in over a year, since I discovered early last summer that the mower had died.  I honestly don’t recall how I managed to make it through last summer, but this summer I was paying the same guy that mowed for my next door neighbor.  Until, that is, one of the kids from the neighborhood offered to mow for me.  He’s a good guy– I had met him through Lisa– but a total stoner.  I never had any way to contact him, so when the lawn was hilariously overgrown, he’d appear a couple days later.  He would borrow lawnmowers from whoever he could borrow from, and a couple of times he asked me for a raise from $25 to $30, which is what I had been paying him all along (so I always agreed and let him think he was getting a raise).  He would sometimes bring a stoner friend; occasionally I would bring him dinner.  When I found out he was 21, which completely shocked me since I assumed he was 16, I would sometimes hang out and drink a beer with him on the front stoop when he’d finished.

Just before residency, he came by late at night (did I mention he never began mowing before 8:30 PM?) and couldn’t finish the whole yard before it got too dark, so he left the side yard unmowed and said he’d get it in the morning.  I went ahead and paid him since I was leaving in the morning, but when I got back into town, the lawn looked decidedly overgrown in that area.  He came by Wednesday night, late once again, and finished only the front yard (though he did manage to mow an X into the back yard… why that happened, I cannot be entirely sure).  I paid him when he said he’d be back in the morning, but as of this morning, it was still looking pretty rough.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, I’ve been outwitted twice by the neighborhood stoner.  So, cognizant that spending another $30 would likely get no more than a small swath of my lawn cut– I would suspect that he was conditioning me to expect less and less, until he could one day ring the bell and have me just hand him thirty bucks, saying “See you in a couple weeks,” but seriously, the kid is a mad stoner and I just don’t think there’s enough guile there to undertake a summer-long program of conditioning– I finally got my mower up and running, a process which proved much easier than I had envisioned, and spent an hour puttering around that lawn, choking the mower almost to death in the thick patches that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time.

It’s a little thing, chopping up the grass on a patch of land that you own (or that your wife owns and allows you to manicure).  And it’s a little thing, finishing a job left undone by your neighborhood stoner.  But for about an hour this afternoon, I felt like the returning conqueror, like the hero in a late-night western, like the king of the fucking world.

We go tonight to see The Dark Knight on the big screen.  The BIG screen– we got in with a group of people who are going out to the IMAX theater in Raleigh.  Oh my goodness, this is promising to be good, and I say that as someone who is completely underwhelmed by Heath Ledger as the Joker.  It’s an all-escapism weekend, as I’ve spent the day so far reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao while Ladybug watched a movie, napping, and lying in bed thinking about reading or napping. You might think all of this is pure laziness, but trust me, this low-energy day is just what the doctor ordered.

We know your iPhone is the greatest machine ever invented.  Thank you so much for posting about it in fifteen consecutive Twitter messages.  How do you say “unfollow”?

Seriously, Ladybug and I just had a conversation this week where we decided to buy iPhones when our Sprint contract is up in October.  They are nice machines.  But I swear to God, if I become one of those people whose every breath is spent in praise of Apple, I want you to shoot me in the face.

If it’s Friday, I must be feeling snarky!  Watch the hell out, poetry world!

Clearly, the author failed to take into account that most everyone in Philadelphia is paralyzed, watching what New Yorkers are doing – “It’s not every day that a new magazine is launched in Philadelphia, and even rarer still does a literary journal make its debut in the City of Brotherly Love”

You guys were just dying to use that Photoshopped picture, huh? – Poetry Foundation’s new commenting policy on Harriet

Man is “contacted by professional genealogists, librarians, and members of the public from all over the world” and makes amazing discovery: the poet he was researching was also a grocer. A GROCER!  Praise be! – Readers of the BBC Scotland news website have helped solve the mystery of a 19th Century poet

Poetry Everywhere attempts to get Marie Howe’s Hair Everywhere.  Hey, look, Marie Howe has beautiful hair.  I’m not being snarky now.  Marie Howe really does have beautiful hair. – Poetry Everywhere is designed to take a fresh look at poetry

Of course, the best snark of the week comes from the comments on the Harriet comment policy page: “I find I’m more aggravated by self-promotional posts than combative ones (“I wrote about this in my book…,” “Let me direct you to a conversation I had with…,” “Here are some passages written after I met…” — that sort of thing).”  Hells yes, Lydia Olidea!  I believe I wrote about this in my book, Why Some Commenters on Harriet are Douches. I am agreeing with this sentiment for the very first time.

There’s nothing more backwardly snarky in the world than the community that’s sprung up around failwhale.com, and ReadWriteWeb details the history in this post.  I <3 the fail whale!  (If you don’t know what fail whale is, you clearly need to join Twitter.)

Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  I’m not one to get too awfully excited about Poets Laureate, because, well, it’s probably not really all that desirable a job in some ways and selecting artists to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative… well, the success rate on that is about the same as the success rate for selecting teachers to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative.  Our most recent Poets Laureate have been tremendous artists and, for a variety of reasons, perfectly mediocre Poets Laureate.

Well, in fairness to them, the job description kind of sucks: “The poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the poet laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.”  Raising the national consciousness to greater appreciation of anything is all but impossible, unless we’re appreciating terrorist fist jabs and that sort of thing.  And poetry… how is one to raise the awareness?  Fly to Hollywood and ask every studio currently producing a tearjerker movie to include a great poem in the eulogy scene?  Lobby USA Today to replace their visually-appealing-but-grossly-incorrect info-graphics with poem-graphics?

If you ask me (and no one did, by the way), Poets Laureate should be spending all of their time and energy promoting programs for teachers, programs that not only get poetry into schools but raise the quality and character of poetry instruction.  Because it sucks!  From what I have heard, Robert Pinsky did a tremendous job during his tenure as Poet Laureate and has continued to focus his energies in this direction, for which I am tremendously grateful.

Kay Ryan’s appointment to the post has potential, people, so I’m hopeful.  By her own admission, Ryan is “an outsider,” though I suppose I dare you to name a poet who doesn’t believe he or she is, in some fundamental human way, an outsider.  Dana Gioia, maybe.  Billy Collins.  Yeah, ok, so give me a list of ten.

At the very least, I find Ryan’s work to be magnificently energetic.  If you’re not familiar, you should check out these poems.

…by an Earthquake

John Ashbery

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.
B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.
B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.
A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.
A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.
A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.
A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”
A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.
A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.
A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.
Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.
Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.
A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.
A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.
A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education,loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means ofinformation obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.
A dies of psychic shock.
Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.
Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.
Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.
Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.
A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.
Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.
Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.
A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.
Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.
Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.
Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.
Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.
Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.
In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.
More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.
Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.
Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.
A violent wind blows the fog around.
Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.
Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.
Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.
Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.
A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.
Jarvis loses a small fortune in trying to help a friend.
Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.
“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.
Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.
Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.
Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.
Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.
Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in the park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.
Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.
In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.
Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.
B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.
B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.
A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.
Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.
Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.
No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.
Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.
Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

So, lest I be lost, allow me to update you on what’s happening.  (And seriously, allow me to plug YOUR stuff, if you are a respected peer.  E-mail me with your goings on.  If you are not sure if you have earned my respect, well, perhaps you should wait on e-mailing me your news and focus on sorting out the respect issue.)  I plan to be much more active, with healthy assistance from Marielle, about updating people as to the whereabouts and happenings of Inch contributors in the Bull City Press blog, which should launch in 2-3 weeks.  But those that have not published with Bull City?  I show them love right here:

• Rosalynde vas Dias is included alongside some pretty terrific poets (Robert Wrigley, Jane Hirshfield, some guy I have never heard of named “CK Williams”) in Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, available now from Yarroway Mountain Press.  She says, “Like horses?  Know someone who likes horses??  This anthology of horse poems is the perfect gift!!  & my poem ‘Pupil Dilated’ is in it!!”  One can hardly find a better phrasing than that.
• Don’t be fooled by the outdated URL in the link– Emma Bolden’s The Mariner’s Wife is available from Finishing Line Press in the here and now, 2008!  (And look through the page… as I was scrolling down, I found a couple other books that I must have.)
• Twitterers, you are missing out if you are not following Jeremy Griffin’s new account, @tweettales.

After 10 days in Swannanoa, I’m now a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Dealing with Humidity.  The most difficult part was probably the dealing with the humidity, rather than the creative writing.

My last residency at Warren Wilson College was the typical wormhole: in retrospect, it seems to have flown by in the blink of an eye, but while it was happening, it seemed like it went on forever.  The class I taught during the residency, Gravity Along the Space-Time Continuum: Position and Superposition in Poetry, dealt with how one might slow time in a poem (among other issues), but certainly the faculty and staff of the program did not need any instruction, as they already have significant experience with bending time.

I’m back at home, clearing out the inbox, catching up on correspondence, and trying to sort out some of my thoughts.  I awoke yesterday with an acuteness of thought: the graduate degree was the easy part, and the work required to be a functional poet in the world really begins now.  I think my plan for later today is to assemble eight to ten submissions and get them out into the world.

A number of my peers got weepy during their last residency, but I could never quite get there.  I’m enormously grateful for everything that the program has done for me, and I’m certainly sad to leave, but I’m actually delighted to finish.  I don’t really consider this an ending, and it doesn’t really occur to me that I won’t see these people again.  I suppose there are a few that will disappear from my life, but more than anything, I was reminded in my last residency that I have a number of friends and fellow writers with whom I’ll be conversing for years to come. Notes of congratulation came from all around the country, from people who graduated one, two, even three years ago. It was truly touching.

So, get ready to start seeing my work in print more frequently.  It’s on.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that Robin Black was in this month’s One Story (which, as you know, is the greatest magazine being published today, and I say that knowing full-well that I am, as a result, admitting that the little magazine I publish, Inch, is not the greatest magazine being published today, though I am certain we are still in the top seven).  It looks like I wasn’t the only one to take notice– Robin gets a shout-out from Esquire this month for her story.

I hadn’t looked at Esquire in… well, maybe ever… but finding that link also led me to Esquire’s napkin fiction, in which authors send contributions on a napkin.  (Good stuff, but hardly a match for Michael McFee’s The Napkin Manuscripts.)  That, in turn, to this beautiful piece on last lines by another writer whose name crops up in this space every so often: Sarah Manguso.  Read.  Perhaps you will be left breathless.