One of my best friends is getting married soon and has entrusted me with reading a poem in his wedding.  This is very, very cool, but it’s also really terrifying, because they’d like me to read one of my poems.  I do not make it S.O.P. to deal with the reader with utter sincerity, but the occasion demands it, so I have been out of my element a little.  The challenge, intellectually, is really enjoyable, but I have a tremendous fear that the poem will end up not being very good (despite the fact that the bride and groom chose it from a selection of poems, not all of which were mine).  I think in the elaborate, fearful fantasy I have been busy constructing, not only do I arrive at the ceremony with a poem that seems workable only to have it be total gibberish when I go to recite it, but the recitation is so awful that it causes the floor of the church to shatter and all of the wedding-goers to tumble into a pit of damnation, which, obviously, ruins the wedding day for the bride and groom, who not only never speak to me, but get a legal injunction barring me from ever publishing the poem, which wouldn’t seem probable anyhow but in the hours after the wedding-goers are swallowed up, I revise the poem and the revision is really, really good– it’s the poem I would have wanted to read at their wedding in the first place.

Unrelated:

• OK, so Scrabulous for Facebook is gone, but you can still play and get notifications by e-mail.  Daniel Wallace told me this.  I am so on… none of the Facebook alternatives has brought me quite as much joy as Scrabulous.  I just really like that interface.
• Speaking of which, Ladybug and I appear to be headed to a board game night tonight.  She does love board games, my wife.
• To anyone who doesn’t understand Twitter, let me just say this: when you’re writing a poem a day, Twitter is the best thing in the world, because you have all of that information, all organized chaotically, all of the thoughts complete and at the same time incomplete.  Could you ask for a better way to launch a meditation?

Further unrelated:

A couple of days ago, I linked to a 43 Folders post about Frank O’Hara and a series about making the time you need to be creative.  Merlin Mann hasn’t stopped thinking about carving out this space in his life (well, he’s on to attention in general, but what do you need attention for, if not to do the important things, and aren’t the important things almost always creative?), and he said something recently that I adored and wanted to rebroadcast:

Here’s the thing. It’s like being able to see The Matrix; once you realize the control you can choose to exercise regarding your attention, you’ll start to see all the unnecessary waste that everybody else thinks is unavoidable, natural, and even healthy (“I NEVER shut off my BlackBerry!”). See? Now, you are the weird one. Weirdo.

Yes, yes, yes, this puts into words a feeling I have been having very strongly in my life.  I’m by no means a zen master of my own attention, but I have been working as hard as I can to get there because it’s necessary for me to continue the creative life that I want to have.  I have been at the point where I have wondered if I lack empathy because I simply cannot imagine why other people aren’t working just as hard to control their own inputs and experience the rediscovery of purpose that accompanies.

• I have seen a couple pictures of Katy “I Kissed a Girl” Perry and I think she looks way too much like Zooey Deschanel.  I liked the idea of “I Kissed a Girl” a lot better when Jill Sobule did it.  Oh, wait, I didn’t really care then, either.  Kiss whoever you damn well please.
• Ladybug and I were watching Mad Men on DVD and we both felt the urge to drink more.  I had whiskey and she had something with Kahlua.  If we’d had cigarettes in the house, we would have smoked them, and damn, I hate cigarettes.
• Bull City Press has a brand new look on the web!  Our incredible intern, Jordan Wingate, redesigned the whole thing and it looks light years better than the old site.  Plus, you can now buy the newest issues of Inch… Jordan is not just our intern, he’s also a reader for the fiction you see in Inch.
• I am getting my contact list organized so I can be a better correspondent.  Or, at least, I hope to be a better correspondent.  So, if you have moved and you think you might one day like mail from me or from my press, send me your new address.
• Inch #8 is for sale now!  Did I tell you that?  You can buy a single issue, but you know, we like it better if you subscribe for a year.  It’s only four bucks plus a dollar for shipping.  Seriously, you can’t even go out to eat for five bucks.  Unless you go to Taco Bell, at which point your body is paying such a price for the food that you probably should have spent your money on a subscription to this little magazine!

43 Folders has been doing a series on making time to make things, and followed up today with a post about Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.  Productivity blog + poetry?  I think I may have just had a geek nirvana moment.

Kenneth Burke called literature equipment for living, and O’Hara never put his away. He was always making. Sometimes poems, sometimes friends.

He has a slim book of work called Lunch Poems, and you might think of that as his primary mode of composition. While out walking from the museum to get lunch, he’d do a poem. Maybe he’d type it up and stick it in a drawer later.

I think that may be an oversimplification of O’Hara’s process, but who can say for sure?  What is certain is that O’Hara had a true gift for capturing the beauty of the colloquial and trivial, and it’s no coincidence that he was a poet who remained immersed in the world of work, firmly rooted in the everyday experience and not some artistic or romantic ideal, remaining engaged not to promote his work but to create it.

But in case you were, I am in Myrtle Beach for Anthony’s bachelor party, and the most trouble we have gotten in to so far is buying Rock Band and playing all night.  Tame by any standards, but far more fulfilling than our aborted plan of hiring some strippers to come play Rock Band for us.