April, We Hardly Knew Thee

So April's pretty much done with. Bad news: National Poetry Month is coming to an end. Good news: so is the school year. And don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware how lucky I am to be paid to talk about writing all day, to get to interact with kids and endeavor (usually, in vain) to get them to care about a poem or story; but, that said, I'm eager to get to this summer. Why? Well, I'm starting to get excited about this move; about my east coast farewell tour (oh yeah, it's happening); about the possibility of the idea of maybe one day writing another poem; about the prospect of trekking across these United States with my Redbone Coonhound in the front seat, windows cracked, u-haul trailer clonking along behind. Is that so bad?

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Even with the aforementioned excitement, I'm genuinely digging teaching my 12th graders The Things They Carried. For starters, it gives me a chance to closely read a book I love and try and figure out just exactly why I love it so damn much. Also--it's really illuminating to teach this book to the handful of students I have who are headed for the armed forces. In general, they seem to really be loving it, though I wonder sometimes if that's more posturing than anything else. Lastly (but not least-ly), the book says so much about the nature of story-telling and, perhaps, why we writer-types are so driven:

"And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

I was lucky to have dinner with Tim O'Brien when I was a student at Elon. Not sure how finagled that, but it was cool. He mentioned, more than once, that he always writes wearing nothing but underwear. He signed my copy of his book right underneath a big stamp that says "Property of Lansing High School."

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Shall the water not remember Ember"

from Fred Chappell's "Narcissus and Echo"

(Shadow Box, LSU Press, 2009)

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He's crisscrossed the country to meet with state and local officials in coastal areas, urging them to start planning now for the slow-motion flood. Yet his warnings have mostly fallen on deaf ears. "We were often told by mid-level officials that their bosses did not want to plan for anything past the next election," he says.

via Slate

Half-interesting, half-terrifying.

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Arizona Iced Tea Shows Its Papers

via NYT

On the real, though, this whole thing in Arizona seems surreal. I have a hard time understanding how anyone can not see this legislation as anything but hateful and dangerous. Hey, people of Arizona, remember when your state was, um, part of Mexico? But the immigrants are the interlopers, right? Unbelievable...

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Whoa. Calm down, Eminem. Nonetheless--crazy. Definitely not a freestyle...

Music, Mostly

Celebrated my 25th birthday this past weekend. I was very close to spending it cooped up here in Mouth of Wilson. We had school on Saturday morning so I didn't want to leave town for just a night to drive back the next day, but then I got really frustrated at the idea of sitting at home watching the Facebook salutations roll in (nonetheless, a million thanks for the well-wishes facebook folks!). So I headed South. Got lucky and caught my first Widespread Panic show in Raleigh with great friends from Elon, Nick and Jess. They [the band, not Nick and Jess, though they were pretty rockin' in their own right] whaled. It was awesome. I likely drank too much bourbon and ate far too many over-priced hot-dogs, but Good God was it a great night. Then had a birthday lunch with my Dad the next day, in which we discussed this big impulsive move ahead of me (of which, he had many wise things to say). All this followed by a two-hour drive home, storm clouds chasing me up Route 21 back into the Blue Ridge.

Good places. Good people. Good birthday. Happy to be alive and, more or less, kicking.

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Sent my manuscript off to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize over at University of Pittsburgh Press. Really love the books they make, so I'm eager to see what they pick this year. There's still a few days to send, poets, so get on that (I'm looking at you, Eduardo...). Strange thing, though, they ask for a CV. I couldn't figure why they'd need that...

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Why Your Grandma Loves Bret Michaels

via Slate

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Killer first line of the moment:

"I know, I know, I know, I know, I know"

from Sherman Alexie's "Valediction"

(Cave Wall, Number 7, Winter/Spring 2010)

Dig that iambic pentameter. Also, dig that journal. Check out the table of contents--all those good folks.

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Have you heard of Pomplamoose? I cannot accurately describe how much I enjoy them. I discovered them online semi-randomly and have been unable to stop watching/listening to their youtube 'video-songs.' They're f-ing incredible. And, I have a bonafide crush on Nataly Dawn (those eyes!). Listen to an NPR interview about their project. Better yet, watch Ms. Dawn sing some Bill Withers...Also--make sure to listen to her sing "Book of Love"....cot damn...

Um, Cool Websites?

Feeling lazy. So here are some links and other trinkets.

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Garfield Minus Garfield: My new favorite comic strip.


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Wu-Tang Nickname Generator.

Just what it sounds like. I am "Shriekin' Wanderer." Who are you?


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Building up a solid stack of journals to read. I have 16 poems coming out this spring in 9 different journals. This is crazy to me. I don't know how or why it's happening, but it is. Can't wait to see them, can't wait even more to have time to read them all. 5 weeks till summer starts...but then I'm moving to Seattle; that shouldn't take up much time, should it? I love seeing the company I'm keeping in lit-zines--what's your favorite thing about contributors' copies?

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Like a green ludicrous tow truck"

from David Rivard's "A Real Right Thing"

(Sugartown, Graywolf Press, 2006)

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With festival season just around the bend...here's a drunk man who can't put on his flip flop. Enjoy!

Doo-Dads and Whathaveyous

It's semi-official. Barring any fellowship news, me and the hound are moving to Seattle in June. Big time change, to be sure, but I feel as though it's time. After a lot of flux in the past year, I'm feeling pretty good about where I'm at, beginning to be more comfortable with the uncertainty, beginning to embrace it, even. All this only to say: I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff, which will be hard, but it's mostly things I picked up with the mindset that they'd be going into a house--so now, as a single-dude-headed-west, it seems ridiculous to haul it all across the country. So--couches, coffee tables, miscellaneous trinkets and doo-dads: everything must go!

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Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write. And wanting to write is so much more than a pose. To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated.

--Richard Bausch on How-To manuals

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Best New Poets 2010 is open to submissions! I had a great experience with the 2008 edition and am super-stoked to see Claudia Emerson is guest editing this years. This will be the first year I'm eligible to submit again and I think I will. Why? Because I feel like people read this thing and because I met so many great poets last go-round. I'm still a bit unsure whether I'll submit stuff that's already been published (which is, as they say, copacetic) or new stuff...Anyway--you have until May 20th. Do it, poets, do it.

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Overheard in the beer aisle of a grocery store ('Food City') in Independence, Virginia:

"Do you think Indians drink Miller High Life?"

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Instead of a first line today, a paragraph from the incredible book I just finished, This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry. Reasons you should buy this book: it's a joy to read and nearly impossible to put down (shouldn't that be enough?), it's a steal at only 10 bucks for the hardcover, and it's recently gotten lots of good press (New York Times!). I'm thinking I'll go into more detail in another post, but for now, some words.

(Background, Jack is the central character and father of Hendrick, an autistic boy)

"Jack's pretty sure that he's not that great a father, that he's not in line for any parenting awards or special commendations. He's not even sure he always tries as hard as he can. He's maybe not Living quite Strong enough. Hen is, after all, sitting next to him, having only stopped bleeding from the head about fifteen minutes ago. But what he's always liked about fatherhood, about Hendrick, is his company, his physical presence, even from the first day they brought him home from the hospital. It's what surprised him most--not the overpowering love all the books required that he feel for his child--just that he simply liked being around him. And even with the diagnosis, or even since, there's something a little joyous, alongside all the disaster, about living with Hendrick. Some feeling he gets about being in better or closer contact with the things we need, the things we want. I want to run the controls on the dump truck. I want to touch the faucet. I want to open the drawer three hundred times in a row. Because who doesn't want that from time to time? To fall deeper in? Who doesn't do it? Some mornings Jack taps his own spoon a few extra times on the rim of the cereal bowl just for the sheer pleasure of it, and then he'll wonder what the space really is, after all, between tic and illness. Where biting your fingernails falls on the spectrum. Ticking the button on the emergency break. Ordering salad dressing on the side, having a song stuck in your head, watching the ball game on mute."

-from This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry
(Viking Penguin, 2010)

I'm gonna keep talking about how great it is, so you might as well buy the damn book already.

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My friend and fellow Hollins MFAer (and kick-ass fiction writer) Karen Zvarych recently won a radio contest that got her a spot dancing on-stage with the Flaming Lips. Here's the video that did it. Two thumbs up.

Karen Zvarych Dance Video for 106.1 Flaming Lips Contest from Jason Bennett on Vimeo.

Links and Anecdotes

Returned last night from four big-time days in Denver. There's too much to mention, both from there and links from elsewhere. So, laziness prevails. But check out all this sweet stuff.


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Short list of cool things that happened in Denver: went to a Colorado Rockies game that lasted 14 innings (though, I left after 9), was standing in a circle at the hotel bar that included 3 Pulitzer Prize winning poets (2 of them were folks I'd been lucky to encounter in other places, the other took a picture on their camera in which I appear--both of these things are surreal to me), met someone who actually reads (and, miraculously, enjoys!) this blog and shared drinks and good conversation with her in Michael Chabon's hotel room (he had left, but the place was massive and included a baby grand piano, it was a party--I did not break in...mostly), rode bikes through downtown Denver at 2 in the morning and ended up at Confluence Park to watch and listen to the Platte River; all this along with too many book-fair encounters/smalltalks to mention, a score of shared drinks with friends from Sewanee, from Hollins, from Elon, from the interwebs. If only this kind of community were not so rare (though, maybe, for my liver's sake, it's a good thing it isn't).

But still: after all this activity, all these great people and artists, I didn't see half of the folks I wanted to see. I need to make a list next time. Apologies to everyone I missed. Let's all go to DC next year and do it again. Same good vibe, lower altitude. And this time, let's ignore the police when they come to close down the hotel bar...


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In a move that qualifies as a shocker, Conan O’Brien has made a deal to return to television in a new late-night show on cable — not network — television.

-from NYT. Conan on TBS!


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2010 Pulitzers announced!


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Favorite AWP Reading: Beloit Poetry Journal 60th Anniversary featuring Albert Goldbarth, Carl Elder, Susan Tichey, Janet Holmes, and Sherman Alexie. All read beautiful poems, but Goldbarth and Alexie stole the show. First off, Goldbarth just had a perfect poem for the the setting, a long dramatic monologue in which a director is speaking to his cast ("The Clothes" which shows up in the forthcoming issue of BPJ). Then, Alexie read "Defending Walt Whitman," which is just a kick ass poem for any occassion. Man alive, what good writers, what a good journal (that now takes online submissions!).


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No verdict yet on new HBO show (from The Wire folks) Treme as I got in too late last night to watch it. But, it was DVR-ed, hope to watch it tonight. If it's half as good as The Wire, I'll be satisfied...


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Received contributor copies of Georgetown Review and Birmingham Poetry Review. Both stellar so far, both unique experiences that I'm super stoked about. Georgetown Review published my poem "Crossing," and it's actually the first piece in the journal, which is a first for me. Birmingham Poetry Review published four of my poems (a new record!) alongside an all-star cast, with some very cool fiction writers crossing genres. Dig this list of contributors: Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Leslie Harrison, William Logan, Jill McCorkle, and Caki Wilkinson, among others. Both journals are clearly worth full-on front-porch experiences.


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Running out of steam. There's more, but it will have to wait. There's a Redbone Coonhound sleeping on my couch and he's in dire need of company. Hope everyone made it home safe, hope everyone is getting this long-awaited taste of spring.

AWP Bound

This will be a quick one as I'm typing this during class while my students are hard at work on their Lord of the Flies essays. But, as soon as the bell rings I'm dashing to my car and taking off for Raleigh-Durham. It's only about a 3 and a half hour drive from Mouth of Wilson, with a brief stop factored-in to drop off the pup at my Dad's house. I'm a bit nervous about flight-catching as my flight leaves Raleigh at 8:00, which is cutting it a bit closer than I like and assuming I won't hit traffic on the way, then I only have a 45 minute layover in Atlanta before shooting out to Denver. If everything goes according to plans, I should be on the ground in Colorado by midnight...


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Excited about AWP. I have looked at the schedule, but have little to no idea about what I'll be attending. Lots of amazing writers are going to be there. Lots of people I've encountered both on and off the page that I'm looking forward to seeing. Not looking forward to: waiting in line and registering on Thursday morning...probably should have pre-registered....


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I'm a guest-blogger over at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. What a cool place that is, what a cool event they host...


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I've got a poem up at Di Mezzo Il Mare. The poem is the same as the one that appeared in a draft on the same website's handwritten journal image feature. The poem is different for me, I think. I don't think I love it, but I don't think I hate it, either.


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My first AWP. Let's go.