In patented Scott Jennings bullet-point format, here’s some miscellany:

• Travis Smith and I wore a path in the highway between Greensboro and Durham this week. On Thursday night, we went out to see Michael McFee and Michael Chitwood read; on Friday, we went to see Natasha Trethewey and Van Jordan. We had the opportunity to hang out for a while after both readings; the chance to be around poets in such high concentration, even if there’s not much talk of poetry, is tonic for the soul. Van and I talked in our last exchange about life after the MFA. Speaking of the intimate connection that the Warren Wilson structure provides to talk about poems, he wrote, “I know how dark it can be.” But I’m starting to feel that I can see what that life will be like, and it doesn’t look dark to me, not at all.
• Remember that song “If You Leave”? Amazon’s offering a free live version, which sounds pretty good.
• Miniature album reviews of stuff I have picked up in the last couple weeks:
  • The Breeders, Mountain Battles - I hope that heaven tastes like carrot souffle from Dillards BBQ and sounds like Kim Deal. If you would like to be thoroughly rocked, listen to “German Lesson.” I suspect German speakers would find their accents deplorable. Whatever, German speakers.
  • R.E.M., Accelerate - It seems impossible that R.E.M., after so many years of middling albums with a few stellar tracks should come back with a stellar album which contains only a few middling tracks. This is the stuff, people. “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” is phenomenal; “Supernatural Superserious,” despite its goofy lyrics that seem so out of place from a guy Stipe’s age, is actually somewhat moving; “Mr. Richards” just flat rocks. I bought the bonus tracks this morning… only one listen each, so too soon to tell for sure, but I think I like.
  • Phantom Planet, Raise the Dead - Disappointment. This is what mediocre pop-rock sounds like. After giving this album a few spins, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want my money back. Not all of it. About half.
  • Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV - Let me first tell you the story of how I purchased this album: Seeing it on sale for $10 at Target, I tossed it in the cart on a big shopping day with Ladybug. When I got home, I found they’d charged me $13, so I returned it and thought I’d try to catch it on sale. I found it later on Amazon’s download service for $5. Score. Worth $13? Actually, probably; it’s atmospheric, sparse at the right times, and very typically NIN. Which, you know, I prefer to, say, Aphex Twin, who is actually probably the closest comp I can think of for this album.
  • Tristan Prettyman, Hello - I had heard some of her live stuff and got suckered into this, an album which is cute and sweet but entirely overproduced. And you don’t hear me say that often.
• I’m doing my first Sequential Swap in a while.
• Ladybug and I have been working iteratively on Iron Scav 11, Chapel Hill’s most socially retarded scavenger hunt. We have about 40 people who have said they’re coming, but not one team has registered with their members’ names, which means no one yet knows the secret third character.
• Can I just say that as much as I love and support National Poetry Month, I freaking hate this “Poem in Your Pocket” thing they have going this year?  Hated it as soon as I heard the name (proof).

I’ll leave you with this poem, which I read Thursday night at Old Town and immediately took a shine to. Apparently, the publisher feels the same way: this is the sample poem on poets.org.

Among the Things He Does Not Deserve

Greek olives in oil, fine beer, the respect of colleagues,
the rapt attention of an audience, pressed white shirts,
just one last-second victory, sympathy, buttons made
to resemble pearls, a pale daughter, living wages, a father
with Italian blood, pity, the miraculous reversal of time,
a benevolent god, good health, another dog, nothing
cruel and unusual, spring, forgiveness, the benefit
of the doubt, the next line, cold fingers against his chest,
rich bass notes from walnut speakers, inebriation, more ink,
a hanging curve, great art, steady rain on Sunday, the purr
of a young cat, the crab cakes at their favorite little place,
the dull pain in his head, the soft gift of her parted lips.

–Dan Albergotti, from The Boatloads 

Dear Georgetown College in Kentucky,

You have made an exceedingly wise choice in hiring Emma Bolden. I had not previously heard of you, but now I hold you in high regard.  You clearly know what you are doing.

Kisses,
Ross White

Tonight

Dean Young reads at the UNC-G Faculty Center on College Ave. in Greensboro.  8 PM.  Dean is the author of several books of poems, including Embryoyo and Primitive Mentor.

Tomorrow Night

I’ll be reading with Ellen C. Bush, Jon Leon, Alyssa Wolf, David Bradshear, and Henry Kearney at Flanders 311, 311 W. Martin St. in downtown Raleigh.  7 PM.  Come on by and see the prints that go with the poems as part of The Illustrated Word, which runs all month at the gallery.

I haven’t felt like blogging a great deal the last few days. Perhaps it was the post-packet sigh of relief, in which I just didn’t do much of anything for about two days. Perhaps it was the stunning pain of UNC’s loss in the Final Four or the Carolina Hurricanes missing the playoffs by a nose. Some of it may be general sloth, to which I am prone.

But I’ve not been completely dead and gone– in the past couple days, I have read over manuscripts, some for Bull City Press and some for friends who honor me by caring about my opinion at all (and who didn’t even know that, as I work on my own manuscript, this was a tremendous exercise and help). I’ve worked on the next issue of Inch, which has seemed, at times, cursed and is now two weeks late. I read all nine books of the terrific series Preacher (I’d read it before, but I needed it). I taught a poetry class at UNC, a bright and very talented group (usually when you sub for someone, you hear in advance how great the students are and then when you arrive, they’re just like everyone else, but this class actually seemed well above average). I went to the opening of The Illustrated Word at Flanders 311 in downtown Raleigh, where I’ll have a reading this Friday at 7 PM in conjunction with the exhibit. And I’ve spent a lot of social time with poets and friends and worst of all, poet-friends– the most dangerous kind of friend known to man.

See? Not all wasted. I’ve tried, since finishing this first draft of my manuscript and loosing it into the world (well, to three people), to not think about manuscript. Which has meant that I haven’t really thought about my own work during that time. And that’s been nice. But the vacation is over.

Rather than issue any apologies of my own for my selfish disregard for myself, I offer what should be the last Olena Kalytiak Davis poem that I post in this blog, lest Ms. Davis start thinking that I am hoping to cannibalize her book sales:

Six Apologies, Lord

 

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I,
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.
Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am
Accountable. Lord.

Lord It Over Me,
Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir,

In This My Mouth.

Apparently, I knew I would like Sarah Manguso’s The Captain Lands in Paradise so much, I ordered one used copy and one new copy.  The used came days ago, and I loved it.  I just wrote all about it to my graduate advisor.  The new one came from Amazon today.

So the used copy will get shipped to whomever writes the most compelling argument for why he/she deserves a free copy of a Sarah Manguso.  Have at it in the comments section.

I also got One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box by Manguso, Dave Eggers, and Deb Olin Unferth.

A dream:

I am in my office wearing just pajamas, and I know I have a meeting coming up so I have to scramble to get dressed. A co-worker comes in and starts telling me about fish. I need to get dressed so I can meet with him properly. DB calls and tells me that there are two women to see me. It’s 9 AM. I walk downstairs. Seated in the waiting area is THE HAND. She has Eleanor with her. I enter the lobby to hug her and she does not stand or hug back.

“This is a wonderful surprise,” I say. “In fact, surprise doesn’t really begin to cover it.”

“I wanted to see where you work,” she says.

“This is the place,” I say. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d take a look around before we send you off to continue your studies.”

“Um, I thought I was almost done.”

“You are,” she says, “with us. You’re going to Sarah Lawrence next.”

The alarm woke me before I had a chance to ask how I was supposed to explain this to my wife or why I was shipping out to a girl’s school. But in my mind, once The Hand had told me I was going, I knew I was going to end up going, and I was in quite a panic, because I really didn’t know how I was going to break the news to Ladybug.

In real, waking life, we bought a new digital camera, since both of our old ones had broken. The idea of having one for the family is great, except the only time I can think of in the next year when I’m going to want to use a digital camera, she’s going to be in Turkey with it.

1. You feel guilty about the time you spent folding laundry even though you’re going to have to have something to wear tomorrow.
2. You start thinking that a poem about lo mein isn’t such a bad idea.
3. It’s Sunday night and you’re wearing the same shirt you woke up in Saturday morning.
4. You’re logged in to Instant Messenger, Gtalk, Twitter, and your e-mail account hoping that someone, even a spambot, will send you a message, the first three words of which will help you solve that difficult Mark Strand poem.
5. The ninth coffee didn’t give you the jitters, but it also didn’t give you the focus you were hoping for.
6. Being identified as a language poet wouldn’t bother you, because nothing you have accomplished in the last couple days makes a damn bit of sense.
7. You wonder what possessed you to commit to reading Lowell’s Collected Poems when you could have picked seventeen volumes no longer than Trethewey’s Native Guard.
8. Larkin doesn’t seem curmudgeonly at all any more. He was dead right about everything and everyone.
9. You avoid human contact. If your wife knocks on your door, you become furious that she had the audacity to interrupt to tell you she’s leaving you.
10. You feel a strange sense of bliss, because you know it won’t last forever.  You sort of wish it could.

The following is stuff that sort of bubbled up to the top when thinking about the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” and while it speaks to the difficult of any evaluation of poetry, it’s not something I’m willing to stand by, just something I present for argument.

The idea of intentional fallacy seems to me inescapable in some ways, though the essay gives me some more context for how it might be better avoided in many of the annotations (and, moving forward, in the class). I think my problem stems from the constant talk about tone in any critical setting. We talk a lot about tone at WWC. I cannot see how any discussion of a speaker’s emotional state can be anything but subjective on the part of the critic and therefore subject to some of the same flaws as the intentional fallacy.

I recognize the difference to a limited degree. The intentional fallacy occurs when the reader supposes that the work’s merit is in some way tied to what the author hoped to accomplish. Tone is focused on the text and not on the author.

But it seems to me that judgment of tone is still wholly subjective. A poem which says “I hate cereal” could be judged by different readers to have wholly different tones. One might think that the speaker is dead serious, that his hatred of cereal is withering and consuming; another might think the speaker prone to hyperbole; another might think the speaker sarcastic. Of course, these interpretations are subject to context, but isn’t any interpretation drawn from the critic’s own experience, as applied to the body of the poem, and therefore suspect? Can’t we then throw out tone entirely as a measurable or observable element of a poem due to that suspicion?

I tend to feel the same way when hearing people talk about the effects of syllabics. It’s wholly subjective; iambs feel no more aggressive to me, by design, than trochees or dactyls. But I feel like I hear statements like that all the time, and if the critic is careful to attribute those emotions to the poem and not to the poet, it passes as valid observation.

How are we to consider, to evaluate a poem without constant self-reference? And how are we to observe when we have first read the poem as a reader, a voracious entity with both an intellectual and emotional appetite, then later attempt to “observe and describe” as though we hadn’t already interacted with, loved or hated or been stymied by or fought with before acquiescing to, a poem? A critic attempts to be a scientist only after he’s had an affair with the subject. We do not, we cannot, read poems as objective scientists, not ever. And once committed to the work as a biased, human, and very fallible reader, it almost seems foolish to bother with a hierarchy of fallibility, where intentional fallacy is bad but emotional or presumptive fallacies are fine.

So that’s where I’m struggling; I feel like the annotation process asks me to be that scientist and I’m never going to be able; I cannot measure the effect of the work without some flavor of informal fallacy. (Obviously, my early annotations, which say “the poem does x to the reader” were poorly veiled references to what the poem did to me; I am the only reader who will ever be relevant to the annotations so it didn’t seem such a rotten linguistic substitution. But I see the necessity for the purposes of awarding credit to the exercise of removing those kinds of statements, and don’t have a problem doing so. It seems a bit askew to ask students to focus on an aspect of the work that they feel they need—and are therefore emotionally committed to—and then ask them not to engage with the work at that level. Beyond concatenating the words, counting the syllables, and observing pattern and deviation, there’s not much one might say without committing some level of autobiography to the page. And simple counting and observing doesn’t seem sufficient to address issues in the writer’s own work; word and syllable counts are hardly teaching tools. So some interpretive fallacy will be necessary to draw any creative fuel from the process, whether it be converse fallacy of accident, non sequitur, or consequent fallacy.)

Despite having turned down the opportunity to do it ten days ago, I found myself thinking about NaPoWriMo all morning.

I am now resorting to the pros and cons list.

Pros

• I have produced only three new poems since January, and two of them were stinkers.  One was so bad I could not show it to anyone in draft form.
• My grad school advisor has challenged me to write three new poems for my next packet, which I will send in April 2.
• Emma wanted to revive our awesome, secret NaPo blog, which was great fun to work on because we had awesome characters.
• Clearly the exercise works– almost half of my graduate thesis will be poems that were first drafted in a poem-a-day grind.
• Our October grind group has grown and grown, and though people come and go in 29-to-31-day increments, I expect that April will have a healthy number of poem-a-day-ers.

Cons

• I’ve struggled to keep up with commitments the last couple months, and with various trips to doctors and some sick days, I’ve been having what I would consider my roughest semester thus far in grad school.
• Ladybug hates it when I could be spending time with her and I’m obsessing over a deadline for a poem that I know won’t be very good anyhow.
• I can’t get too focused on new work while I have so much revision to be done for my thesis.  And the poems which need the most revision are ones that came from the October and November grinds.

Tomfoolery and sheer idiocy, in bullet format:

• The list of people I’m following on Twitter has swelled from 15 to 34 in the last couple weeks.  Twitter is infinitely more satisfying now.  If you’re reading this, and you’re on Twitter, and I ain’t following you, let me know.  Perhaps you interest me.
• This is kind of amazing.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for the guy.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for anyone who’s going to have to return the stuff they hauled away.  You cannot help but wonder how anyone came up with it.
• Spent most of yesterday moving furniture. We now have the corner cabinets that Ladybug’s grandfather made.  And some other crap.
• I’m headed back to the classroom!  Well, for a day.  I’m subbing for a colleague’s poetry workshop next week.  I have missed being around poetry students.  Badly.  I realized it once more when I was writing a recommendation for a student and I read over his creative sample.
• I’m currently badgering Tom McHenry to make me into a cyborg.