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.