I’d been putting off a return to scripted theater until after I finished my graduate degree, but Paul Frellick approached me about a new plat and I couldn’t say no. So I’ll be designing the sound for “The Gratitude of Wasps,” written by Adam Sobsey, directed by Paul, produced by Deep Dish Theater. I’m crazy-busy, but I could not bring myself to pass on this show.

Several artist friends with good news today. It makes me happy to see good people (and people with a generous amount of talent– not that I don’t love you too, my not-so-artistically inclined friends) enjoying some of the small rewards that this life has to offer. If you can’t be rich, you can at least be well-reviewed.

I cut off all my hair today. I am now optimized for spring.

I laid awake in bed for a while. Something was bugging me. Then it hit me– I had a March 22 deadline that I was about to miss. So I came downstairs, ready to work and get some stuff in the mail for tomorrow. Dug through a stack of papers to quell a mild paranoia that perhaps the deadline was not March 22 but March 20. My deadline is April 25. Only blogging can make me feel better about this mistake.

Meagan told me in a Friday e-mail to take the weekend off from Bull City. I’d been going at it harder than normal when Michael McFee’s book came out. When I got her e-mail, I chuckled and thought, “A weekend off? Weekends off are for FOOLS, Bonnell.” But when Saturday morning rolled around, I felt like a total lump. So I did absolutely nothing– no work of any kind. Then Sunday rolled around and I felt the same way. I had some things for other jobs that needed to be done for Monday. But I didn’t lift a finger. Wasted all day Sunday and didn’t even think about working until I woke up this morning. It felt wonderful. Weekend off. I’ll probably take another sometime… in June.

June, suckas!

I love one-line poems. So why do one-line stanzas make me bristle so?

Three of the best new (-ish… I mean from the last year or so) books I have read this spring have been from Four Way Books. Two from Ecco; I can’t think that any other company has more than one… Of course what this really means is that I should be reading more. But still…

OK, I really am acquiring books faster than I can read them, and I should stop, but I know I probably won’t. Today: Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth (on Philip McFee’s recommendation, and after the first five, I was not disappointed… I didn’t want to put it down to work on my independent study student’s sonnet assignment), which is billed as fiction but has to be poetry, and Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions.

I had an extraordinarily bad day, as the day job is feeling less like a job and more like a series of temporary crises. I know this will even out when a) student registration ends, and b) I get back to being fully staffed. I hate the abuse that my co-workers are taking until such time as a) and b) are met. I have some more work to do tonight, but I believe I’ll be blowing it off in favor of Letters to Wendy’s. Take that, responsibility!

The most difficult part of management is not giving credit where credit is due; that is easy. The most difficult part is falling on your sword. When an employee fails spectacularly, you simply must do this. March into a supervisor’s office, or that of a client, and fall on your sword. Care must be taken with the sword, however; it must be unsheathed and placed in some manner of integument which will hold it at roughly a forty-five degree angle. This integument must be bolted to the floor, and if the client is unaccustomed to seeing such displays of atonement or blame, you may have to do the bolting yourself. Should the sword be placed at a poor angle, or the holding device unstable, the cut will not be clean when you fall upon the sword. If the cut is not clean, how will you heal quickly enough to smile at the failed employee through gritted teeth? How will you have the presence of mind, when you prop yourself up slowly off the sword, to ask the client, “Would you like me to remove these bolts, and this jeweled sword-holder”? Will you be thinking of the ragged and long wound, or will you be listening when he says to you, “No, I think you can leave it…”?

It’s now been almost a week since I’ve been able to sit down and read a book cover to cover, but the distractions I’ve been encountering are coming to an end and I expect to be able to get some good reading done as soon as tomorrow night. Thank heavens. Roy Fisher’s The Long and Short of It arrived by mail this weekend and, while I don’t think I’ll read it all in one sitting, I do look forward to giving it several hours of my time. When Reg Gibbons and I spent some time discussing scientific language, Fisher’s name was the first to pop out of his mouth when we began talking about cityscapes. And cityscapes have been on my mind incessantly since Gilles Trehin’s Urville arrived a few weeks ago. (Amazon is already deeply discounting it. It’s well worth the $17 they’re charging… simply beautiful.)

Stumbling through the usual literary miscellany, I found a curious interpretation of Weldon Kees’ “For My Daughter” that I simply hadn’t considered. It’s less disconcerting than the readings I had brought to the table, but now that I’ve seen it articulated, it seems so obvious and I feel quite foolish. I’m of two minds about the lesson I might learn from this. I’d been keenly influenced by the tone and character of all of Kees’ work when reading “For My Daughter,” so I brought the darker interpretation with me. That’s not hard with Kees. So, I must be mindful that each poem should be read in more strict isolation. But the reading I stumbled across was clearly based not only on the text (it is fully supported by the text), but on Kees’ personal history as well. (Until today, I knew only what I had read in Donald Justice’s foreword and introduction in The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees.) Which is the more reliable indicator, if one is to be selected, when attempting to contextualize a poet’s work– other texts, or biographical information? Well, of course, the correct answer is “either,” “both,” or “nothing– the text is the only context you will need.”

I’ll be teaching “For My Daughter,” but thankfully, I won’t need to belabor the poem’s meaning, since I’ll be using it as a rather stunning example of how a sonnet can chew the head clean off of a reader.

I’ve replaced White Noise as the main blog on my site with Little Fury. Little Fury will be solely a po-blog, and I am hoping that getting it started may get me a little more involved in the world of po-blogs, since no reasonable discussion seems to be available through conventional discussion forums. (Just to see if I can piss people off, I posted that I am absolutely aghast at the lack of discussion about books and working poets on Absolute Write. I wonder if anyone will take that bait, or better, rise to the challenge.)

I’m going to start a blogroll and see if I can get some reciprocal link action.

It’s obvious from the vast quantity of blogs on the interweb that poets like to fritter away their time as much as anyone does. OK, that’s cool. But what is frustrating is that decent message boards for poets seem to be nonexistent. I’m tooling around on Absolute Write right now, at Doc’s suggestion, but I’m finding that the level of discourse is far below what I had hoped for. The people who post there don’t seem to be interested in reading anyone else, as evidenced by the fact that there aren’t any discussions about books. It seems like people just post bad poems and then congratulate each other on bad poetry. I don’t want any part of that.

So I’m tempted to create something, because I have a bad habit of creating. Bad bad bad. I don’t need to create, I’ll just be disappointed when no one hops on board.

It’s been a good day for poetry, people.

Michael McFee asked me to introduce a Birds of a Feather session at Duke’s NC Festival of the Book. Festival of the Book lost some points with me for this year’s tagline, “It’s About the Story,” since there were poets involved who didn’t really care about the story as much as the language, but that’s a piddling matter. Market your celebration however you want, people.

The session was intended to be a short reading and then a conversation around a certain topic between two poets, in this case Michael and Gerald Barrax. The assigned topic, Culture’s Sway Over Poetry, was significantly less fun than one might want to hear, so Michael and Jerry decided that they would speak specifically about music. And instead of doing a somewhat stodgy reading-then-answer-some-questions session, they decided that the reading would be their conversation.

Each came equipped with some poems, and Jerry read the first poem. Michael then found an aspect of one of his poems that shared a connection with Jerry’s work, and the two riffed off of each other like that for a while. Only once did they really hit a point where they felt like the work was not directly connected to the last poem read, and that was just an opportunity to launch in a new direction.

What resulted was far more fresh than your standard poetry reading– they really managed to have a compelling and thoughtful conversation through their poems, and I think the casual viewer probably suspected several times that they must have planned which poems to read in response. It’s a format that I would gladly see over and over again around any number of vague topics like music, family, the creative process… the kind of stuff that Festival of the Book was interested in presenting.

So, if you’re planning to have a few poets read, see if they are interested in something like that.

Go vote for Dan Telfer’s t-shirt!

If you are looking for a ton of free, legal music, SXSW has collected one track from many of the artists being showcased and is making them available as very large BitTorrent files. With a selection this gargantuan, you would be very hard-pressed not to find some things that you enjoy.

The first release has 713 songs, the second has 229. They’re also releasing trailers for a bunch of the films being shown. Holy cow. That’s awesome. Go get ‘em.

I like this photo. It doesn’t look like a photo, all the way, but it is. It’s the first one off of my cameraphone that I actually think came out well– namely because the picture quality not being perfect helps the shot, rather than hurting it.

The bobblehead that is the subject of the photograph can barely stand on its own any more because the head is a little askew and weighs him down.

You should click on it and make it larger, though.