Syllabizing and Wedding Bands

So this has been a productive week for me. Unfortunately, it's not new poems (one might be finished, but it could hardly be called new as it's been in the tinkering stage for quite some time now); but, we have finally picked a wedding band. As in music, not as in leaves a tan-line on your finger. Rubberband, yes it's a cheesy name, but they actually funk out enough to satisfy me. Also, their bass player is Ben Folds brother. Shelley made me promise her that that's not the reason I picked them, and it's not, but I certainly am going to enjoy telling people that.

Also, the syllabus for the fall is done, or as done as it's going to be. I'm looking forward to the class, though I worry that I'm not giving them enough diversity, in terms of aesthetic. I really had to resist the urge to simply teach my favorite writers. But for poetry, we're reading: Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, C.K. Williams, James Dickey, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Sharon Olds, James Wright, Mark Strand, Louise Gluck, Robert Penn Warren, and Frank O'Hara. It's tough with only six weeks for each genre, but there were a few on this list that I simply couldn't let myself leave out (specifically Bishop, Ammons, and Wright), but hopefully the students enjoy it. For fiction it was a little bit easier, as certain stories lend themselves to certain lessons, but there are a great number of stories I'm in love with that I can't wait to teach: "A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri, "How Far She Went" by Mary Hood, and "The Hermit's Story" by Rick Bass. These are just a few of my favorites, along with some others I feel obligated to teach: "Things They Carried" simply because it's gorgeous, "Girl" because Jamaica Kincaid is reading at Hollins this year, and "Silver Water" because I think the class will fall in love with it and hopefully seek out more Amy Bloom.

Well Fall Submission season is almost upon us, and I think I've got my list of where I'll be sending my first round. This list is much more ambitious than last year, and I can only imagine will result in across-the-board rejections, but a 23 year-old-boy can dream. For your viewing pleasure: Iowa Review, Barrow Street, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Tin House, Meridian, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Tar River Poetry. All magazines I've had the chance to get my hands on, all magazines I'd lose a fingernail to get in. Here's hoping the last two weeks of summer are productive.

Stephen Dunn's "Summer Nocturne"

This one has been on my mind as of late. A great poem for anyone in a long-distance relationship.

SUMMER NOCTURNE

Let us love this distance, since those
who do not love each other are
not seperaated. --Simone Weil

Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence,
no doubt at what's in the silence,
a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron
or that racoon with its brilliant fingers
testing the garbage can lid by the shed.

Night I've chosen a book to help me think
about the long that's in longing, "the space across
which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music
to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal
night itself is, appetite without limit.

Since I seem to want to be hurt a little,
it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind,"
and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black
coming down now from the cabinet to sing
of its twelve lonely years in the dark.

Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort.
Starting to love this distance.
Starting to feel how present you are in it.


--Stephen Dunn, from "Everything Else in the World" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006)

The Return of the Dog

I have a thinly-veiled obsession with my pooch. He comes home this Friday from his summer at my dad's house where he's been while I've been traipsing up and down the East Coast. Needless to say, I'm very excited.

August Already

Middle-schoolers don't like Tim O'Brien, I do. This was a discovery I made over the past two weeks while I was teaching at the Young Writers' Camp at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. They do, however, like poems that rhyme and stories with dogs. Rick Bass was a hit, as was Jack London; they liked the E.B. White, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Meredith poems I brought, but my oh my, they did not like the Things they Carried. I know what you're thinking...really, Luke--You brought in a gruesome story about Vietnam and taught it to sixth graders? Not quite, I picked just about the most tame passage I could find, but the sentences were incredible, the pacing, but they would just not get on board. Anyway, it's not a huge deal, I was simply a bit crestfallen as I love his prose, and was sad to see the students didn't.

I read this passage from Rilke's Letters on the last day: "A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself."

In other news, I'm still riding the Best New Poets wave, though I arrived home to six rejections (count 'em: Yale Review, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Michigan Quarterly Review, FIELD, and Southern Humanities Review) which effectively took my head out of the sky, despite kind notes from the editors at MQR and Gargoyle. Anyway, I told my friend and former professor (and poet) Kevin Boyle about the good news, and he informally invited me back to read at Elon during the spring, more news there once things become more official. It would be a tremendous honor to read at my alma mater.

Three new poems up at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature today. If you don't know the journal, keep an eye on it, they publish some great poems and each one is accompanied by a "Southern Legitimacy Statement" which trumps a Contributor's Note by a Mile.

And it's starting to smell like Soccer Practice outside...

Best New Poets

Okay, I'm not gonna lie. I'm making this post halfway through my third celebratory Bud Light in a can. And I'm alone. As sad as all of that is, earlier this evening I was thrilled to receive an email from Jeb Livingood letting me know Mark Strand selected one of my poems to appear in the 2008 edition of Best New Poets. You can see the list of the winners here. All self-promotion aside, I'm bloody pumped.

Crumbs from the Table

I spent the last week of June on scholarship at the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference in Boston. While there I had the chance to workshop with Cleopatra Mathis and Stephen Dunn. Below I've collected some of the things I jotted down throughout the week.

"The progress from stanza to stanza must be essential, if the poem could progress in any other order then perhaps the content of the stanza itself should be rethought. The poem must constantly move forward"--C. Mathis

"A line requires a tension within itself, at least two pieces of language interacting in a novel way." --C.M.

"Anything included arbitrarily immediately becomes suspicious."--C.M.

"Writers see the same things as everyone else, they simply see them differently."-Barbara Hurd

"The task of the writer is to familiarize what's strange, to de-familiarize the familiar."-B. Hurd

"Write what you're most afraid of."--Hayden Carruth

"Find in your poem your highest standard, and live up to it with every line before and after."--Stephen Dunn

"A good symbol is something that both conceals and reveals at the same time."--Stephen Dunn

"The facts of what actually happened don't matter, but what import they have to the psyche does."--C. Mathis

"For the poet who writes autobiographically, the burden is to get beyond the experience."--Stephen Dunn

"When beginning a poem, the poet must be at war with what passes for true, the language and rhetoric that is easily accessible."--Stephen Dunn

Doc Watson is Dead

Don't despair, everyone's favorite blind banjoist is still living and breathing. Though, my chapbook loosely based on Doc Watson songs has been put to earth. It just wasn't working, though I got few poems out of it, the limitations were a bit overwhelming. It also didn't leave much room for creative exploration when I had an idea for a whole collection (albeit a mini-one) before the majority of the poems were composed. So I'm back to thesis-ing, and currently am wrestling with a sonnet that may or may not want to be a sonnet, entitled "The Heart, Like a Bocce Ball."

Dog update: We're hoping for a Sunday morning discharge. Apparently the other night he tore out a few of his staples, and is now wearing a cone around his head. The good news is the tumor on his neck was benign, the bad news is the tumor on his abdomen was not. So we're sort of waiting to see what happens next. Regardless, I'm thrilled to be getting my dog back.

In reading news, I've been plowing through the Scribner's fiction book, and loving a great many of the stories I find. "The Caretaker" by Anthony Doerr is incredible, as is "The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier. And here I was worried about teaching the fiction portion of my class in the fall, but now am having a much easier go through the stories than I am through the poems. Though, I must admit, reading most of the poetry in the vintage book is simply rehashing the canonical American poets. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the fiction book just feels infinitely fresher.

It's hot as hell outside. With half-marathon training in full swing and a seven mile run slated for tomorrow morning, I'm ready to head north.