Two Happy Things

Had two different students fall asleep in class today. I kept trying to tell myself it was because the room was so damn warm, but I really think it was because I was rambling on and on about C.K. Williams "The Gas Station." (recording).


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It was announced that Carl Dennis will be reading at Hollins in April. I probably don't know his work as well as I should, but at least I have plenty of time to discover it. This put some pep in my step.


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*plish*

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Here's hoping that Duke loses tonight.


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Killer opening line of the now:

"Like a glum cricket"

from James Tate's "Flight"

Oscar Tidbits

Could tell from very early on it was going to be a Slumdog Night. Was happy for Heath Ledger. Was glad to see Joaquin Phoenix get some jabs. Also very pleased to see MILK get the attention it deserved, though it was sad to not have the Best Actor nod go to Mickey. But I think everyone who saw MILK walked out thinking Sean Penn had it in the bag, at least I did. Anyway, now I just want to be friends with DeNiro. Also, what was that thing on Philip Seymour Hoffman's head?

Weekend

Went to a very strange reading on saturday night. The reading itself, by Josip Novakovich, was quite good. He never identified what he read or whether it was story or novel, but it was incredibly funny. There was some great dialogue between Russian police and a hapless American writer/tourist named David (who accidentally pissed on a Russian cathedral). It was the things surrounding the reading that befuddled me. Novakovich was scheduled to read at 7:00, but a bluegrass band named Red Clay River played until 8 o'clock. Don't get me wrong, they were great, but left me a little perplexed about what exactly the event was. Had that been the only anomaly, I probably would have just sucked it up, but then they added another reader after Novakovich and then another band after the reading. Long story short, I went to a 7 o'clock reading and left at about 9:30. The silver lining: we went to IHOP for all you can eat pancakes.


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Did my taxes today. Looks like I've got a refund coming--a refund which will be applied straight to the honeymoon fund. I've got no worries about actually being married, but am so nervous about all the logistics surrounding the wedding coming together. It reminded me--getting married, just planning the damn thing, is hard enough as it is, it's assinine, mean-spirited, and just plain dumb to make it illegal for anyone devoted enough to go through all the hassle. Obviously, I'm simplifying a much more complicated issue, but it's the truth. What possible reasoning could there be (other than bigotry) to not allow everyone to go through with something that in and of itself is so damn difficult? Not just the wedding, but being married--love and let love, people.

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Killer opening line of the now:

"Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon"

-from Adrienne Rich's "Origins and History of Consciousness"


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Second banjo lesson tomorrow. I'm eager to work on my hammering on.

Moldy Piece of Cheese

I bought this cheese from the Kroger today. Needless to say, I didn't look at it until I arrived home to begin grating. Tomorrow, I'm going to take it back in hopes of trading it for a new piece of cheese.


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Thanks to Keith, I've reconsidered my stance on not submitting for the remainder of the semester. Matter of fact, I sent out a slew of new-ish poems via the inter-webs today. There are just too many quality journals that accept online submissions to use moving as an excuse not to send. So we're back on that horse. Even having slowed down, I have almost 20 out there right now, which is a relatively low number for me. For awhile, mostly during last year and this past summer, I was averaging about 40. Anyway--I'll post if anything happy happens on that front.


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Though I'm not sure if I should be posting this since it hasn't been formally announced on the University's website yet, I'm going to anyway (I was told it was okay to put on the Hollins sanctioned website I'm in charge of, so I figure it's kosher here, too). Many congratultions to friend, classmate, and all around poetry bad-ass Will Schutt for being named the 2009-2010 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. I applied for this one too, but I can't think of anyone better suited for it than Will. He'll be working in the Stadler poetry center and contributing editing time to West Branch. There are only 3 poets in the second-year at Hollins, Will and I among them, and I feel very fortunate that I've gotten to work so closely with this guy. Look for his poems in this past summer's issue of The Southern Review and the Spring 2009 issue of Harvard Review. I expect I'll be making a road trip or two to Lewisburg.

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Killer opening line of the now:

"His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney"

from Simon Armitage's "Not the Furniture Game"


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Maybe tomorrow I'll write something. Maybe I'll do my taxes. Who knows?

Don't forget to watch Conan's last show tomorrow night!


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Resolutions

So I'm finally falling back into the rhythm of classes, teaching and taking them. We talked about Ammons and Gluck today. I asked several questions I only half knew the answers to and was happy to have smart things said by the class. I know this last semester is going to move fast, but I'm thankful that I'm concentrating solely on poetry--I've been writing some things that I don't quite hate. See below. But enough about me, how are you?

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Killer opening line of the now:

"I remember how it was to drive in gravel,"

from the second section of Roethke's "Journey to the Interior"

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Drafted another sonnet for the Aerials sequence the other night, I haven't yet lived with it for much time, so I imagine I'll regret posting it here, but thankfully it will disappear soon.

*plish*

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I've decided I'm not going to send out anymore submissions this semester. The practical reason being I don't want to send journals SASEs with an address I'll no longer be living at in four months, but also because I think it will do me some good to sit on these new-ish poems for awhile, to let them marinate more than I usually do before firing them off into the world. I may make an exception for Tar River Poetry, a journal I really dig that's given me some encouragement in the past. They have relatively short reading periods, but their submisisons are online, plus they are usually lightning fast. Anyway, something to ponder.

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Apartment view just after the rain:

My Life as a Banjo

When one posts a photo of oneself on one's blog, why does one immediately feel like a douchebag? That aside, this is the only photo I have of my new banjo which I've really been dying to share with the world. I've been told musical instruments should have names. I've chosen to name my banjo Roddrick Muckelroy. When I heard this name for the first time, I asked Shelley if we could name one of our kids after him. She said no. Then I asked if we could name one of our dogs this. She said no. Tenatively, I'm allowed to name my banjo Roddrick Muckelroy. But the head isn't usually red, I've stuffed a red t-shirt in there to keep my neighbors from complaining. Banjo updates to come periodically. In addition to cool new banjo, also note cool new hat and cool new sweatpants.

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Drafting new poems in the Aerials sequence. Since the idea relies so heavily on perspective, I've been switching P.O.V.'s from sonnet to sonnet. Compadre Will Schutt suggested that at least one poem in the sequence has to be long ("at least a page and a half"). His reasoning: "Aerials are big, man." I trust Will Schutt. I will try to write this long poem.

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Killer opening line of the moment:

"All the toothy Frauleins are left behind:"

from Rita Dove's "The Son"

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Spent the weekend in Cleveland. Now way behind on everything. Still, for some reason, reading people's AWP reports. I've never been to an AWP. But one day, I will, I think. Denver?

Missing the Dog

So what I was referring to in the last post: unfortunately, we lost Laddie this weekend. My dad called me a few days ago to tell me that the dog hadn't been eating anything or able to stand up for the last two to three days. At the vet, we found out that his kidneys were failing. This, paired with the epilepsy he was diagnosed with a few weeks ago, provided a very bleak outlook (4-5 days left) and we had to make a tough decision. We didn't want him to suffer any more than necessary, and decided to have Laddie put down. He would have been 14 in March. As sad as this makes me, I couldn't have hoped for a better dog, or for him to have had a better life. I received Laddie as a gift from my parents on my tenth birthday. He was a great companion and he will be greatly missed. This helped: James Dickey's Heaven for Animals.


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After hearing about Third Coast the other day via email, I came home to a mail acceptance from Beloit Poetry Journal, another great magazine I'm stunned to be showing up in. My poem "Corn Snake as Compass" will be in their Summer 2009 issue. They have such an amazing history and they also keep an online archive of all of their past issues (over 50 years) featuring poems by A.R. Ammons, Anne Sexton (her first published poem), Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, W.S. Merwin, James Dickey, Philip Larkin, Rosellen Brown, Charles Bukowski, and others. It's a bit surreal to think I'm going to be on the same list. I also had to sign a verse daily and poetry daily contract, so I'll keep my fingers crossed on those fronts....

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First banjo lesson today...

Shiny Spot

It's been a rough weekend, which I'll write about when I get back to Roanoke (at my Dad's house in NC for now), but this afternoon I had a poem accepted to appear in the Fall 2009 issue of Third Coast. This provides some much needed light.

End of the First Half-Week

So we finally got started on Wednesday. Shelley is headed back to Ohio to start her position as a Physical Therapist at Cleveland Clinic. She will be working in orthopedics (dig the number three ranking at that link). I know it seems silly to resort to rankings, but my college-basketball trained mind finds lists with numbers very helpful when quantifying quality.

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I have seventeen students in my intro. class this semester, which is two more than I had last semester. I think I have 4 Californians, too! Not that this is in any way significant, it just surprises me as I think everyone in my last class was from the state of Virginia. I'm excited to get going--starting with Imagery on Monday. Having them read some Fred Chappell essays to get ready (from Plow Naked: Selected Writings on Poetry). Also going to have them read Yeats' "The Fisherman" and write a little bit on their ideal reader...mainly it's just an excuse to read them Yeats...God I love that poem.


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As promised, here's the reading list for Kelly Cherry's class on Poetic Sequence:

Collected Poems by Theodore Roethke
Moon Road by Ron Smith
Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams
The Dream Songs by John Berryman
River by Fred Chappell
God's Loud Hand by Kelly Cherry
Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
Words by the Water by William Jay Smith

All in all, I'm pretty excited about the list. I love Roethke's North American Sequence which Aaron Baker (not this one, but this one) pointed me to last year when we were working together. I'm always a little skeptical when someone includes their own book as required reading for a class they're teaching, but who knows, maybe she'll convince me. I have enjoyed the two collections of her's that I've read (God's Loud Hand is not one of them, love the title, though).


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Staying on the topic of sequences--I've been thinking more and more of the one I'm going to write, and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced they should be sonnets. I like the idea of a formal, tight-knit core that might be able to exist somewhere in the middle of my manuscript. There are a couple of collections with similar sonnet sequences to the one I'm thinking of: in Late Wife, Claudia Emerson begins the final section with hers, including some sonnets that have only the octave and no sestet (an idea I love and plan on using). Also, Eric Nelson's book Terrestrials starts with a sonnet sequence about his mother (a topic which will hopefully jump in and out of my own sequence, not his mother, but mine) which I really enjoy, but I think if I were to start the manuscript with a sequence it might mislead the reader as to the project I'm undertaking (and they are too, I guess, by reading). Anyway, something to think about. I posted an earlier version of this, the first section, of my sequence. It has since been sonnetized. To disappear shortly:

*plish*


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I've been thinking a lot about opening lines in poems, thus, a new feature:

Killer opening poetry line of the moment
This week's from A.R. Ammons' MECHANISM:

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

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