Slightly Mesmerizing

Still trucking out here in the Northwest. Working, writing, and revising. For the first time in what seems like ages, not submitting relentlessly. It feels good to let the poems breathe a bit, to let them shift and speak and grow. I'm writing 7 poems in 7 days with some tremendously talented folks, which has me energized and writing forward.

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For me, beautiful poems (or stories) are as we are all describing them: volatile examinations of the world. I don’t especially care what corner of the world is being examined, or in what tone or style or vernacular. The crucial thing is my unconscious sense that the speaker cannot stop herself. Whenever I have occasion to teach, I always inflict on my students stories and poems that reinforce this urgency, and broaden their sense of how language can be used. Barry Hannah. Emily Dickinson. Stephen Elliot. The freaks and obsessives who run howling toward the shame, with only their precision as a shield. I love to reach those moments in a piece where the reader is suddenly implicated in the madness. To be joined to the reader, made more common, less alone. It hardly ever happens for me, and never as a poet. But it does happen.

-Great conversation between Steve Almond, Timothy Donnelly, Matthew Zapruder, and Ange Mlinko over at APR

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If a politician can’t talk about dogs without sounding slightly deranged, what hope does he have? The crude familiarity in the way L.B.J. made a spectacle of himself with his dogs—the ear incident occurred when he was displaying them to the press—was shocking, but slightly mesmerizing, an echo of the way he used to bully and cajole legislators, and sometimes undermine himself. They also reveal an element of self-aggrandizement: one of the dogs was named Little Beagle Johnson. The demand for a pet-based normalcy test has since been ritualized, in tiresome but necessary books by or addressed to Millie, Socks, and their ilk.

-via The New Yorker

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Every 53 minutes, someone in Washington State gets arrested for pot. That could be a thing of the past before the year is out. Initiative 502, on the November ballot, is the whole shebang: legalization, taxation, and regulation of marijuana. We're not just talking about making pot possession punishable by, say, a $100 fine, like Massachusetts did in 2008. Instead, I-502 would remove all penalties for adults 21 and older who possess up to an ounce of marijuana. It would also license pot agriculture, allow trucks to drive around distributing pot like beer, and permit stores to sell pot over the counter.

-via The Stranger

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Mr. Gilbert’s career-embracing “Collected Poems” is, however, a revelation, almost certainly among the two or three most important books of poetry that will be published this year. His poetry is helped, not hurt, by this context and relative abundance. Around this book’s margins a scruffy and blood-warm autobiography emerges.

-Heading to Open Books this week to pick up my copy...


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Is there anything worse than watching yourself talk? Seriously mortifying. Still, huge thanks to 32 Poems for allowing me to read with such a stellar line-up, and to Smartish Pace for co-hosting and making the video. AWP was awesome and exhausting.