Specific Northwest

Hello there. So much for the blogging on the road thing, right? I tried, but I didn't try that hard. Fact is, the last two weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. In a good way. What things I've seen.

I drove across a couple of mountain ranges. I hid a 9 -foot kayak behind a garage in metropolitan Denver. I was tossed from Temple Square in Salt Lake City by a man who looked like he was in the secret service. [Just in case you were wondering: dogs are not allowed in Temple Square]. Also fell in love with US Soccer. Someone told me I was on the local Seattle news when they showed video of Seattle fans watching at soccer bars (George and the Dragon in Fremont!), but I couldn't find the video. I still can't decide if I'm going to name my first born son Landon or Donovan (I stole that joke from someone on facebook, I forget who, but yeah, there ya go). I find myself loving the new Eminem CD. I have a first line of a poem floating around in my head ("Even the gas stations in Rupert are beautiful") and I'm going to try and write it today. I have moved to Seattle, Washington.

I've been trying to keep posting updates on Facebook, if for nothing else than to assure my father that I've not lost my mind (or perhaps, to confirm that I have), but all this only to say: we're resuming regular programming here, so I hope everyone's doing well.

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In poem news, I had a very new poem accepted to appear in the Fall 2010 issue of Hayden's Ferry Review. It's a journal I've admired since I started submitting, so it's great to get a poem in there after a few rejections with encouragement. Also have poems in soon-to-come Summer 2010 issues of Crab Orchard Review, New York Quarterly, and Sou'wester. If you're already looking ahead to Fall (I know you're not), I'll have poems in 32 Poems, Hollins Critic, and Nimrod. So yeah, read em if you feel so compelled!

Also: posted a new poem on Ink Node!

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Caption contest over at the Muse! Go get you some! (I've got nothing so far for this picture...but still marinating...)

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In honor of Wendell Berry's recent decision to pull his papers from the University of Kentucky library (someone who, I think, provides an excellent example for how a writer should conduct themselves), we're going beyond just the first line, let's read the whole damn poem.

The Broken Ground

The opening out and out,

body yeilding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

bud opening to flower

opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed--

taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

(from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998)

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I found this abundantly interesting.

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Spent the morning watching this movie. Things it effectively accomplished: educated me on the sports history of my new city (and the devotion of said city), renewed my borderline fanatic admiration for Sherman Alexie (read that poem!), and dispelled some of my excitement for tonight's NBA Draft. Seriously, if you have the time, it's a very fine film, if only to hear Sherman Alexie speak elegantly about why basketball is so damn gorgeous...

Adventures and Neglect

I know I have neglected this space recently. Many sorries to everyone out there in TV-land. I'm in the thick of it here on the Virginia side of the Blue Ridge . A U-Haul trailer has been filled, locked, and hitched to the Forester, which has a 9 foot kayak strapped to the top of it. The backseat is ready to be occupied by an 11 month old Redbone Coonhound. I tore a lamp-shade trying to cram it into the trunk. Over the next week, I'll be driving across this fair country of ours and hopefully blogging along the way (starting Tuesday) and posting pictures on facebook (starting already). I still haven't figured out an apartment in Seattle, still no job. It's a big jump. It's terrifying. It's liberating. It's god-damn American. (Yeah, I said it.)

3,058 Miles

Mouth of Wilson, Virginia to Oak Hill, West Virginia

Oak Hill, West Virginia to Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington, Indiana to Des Moines, Iowa

Des Moines, Iowa to Sturgis, South Dakota

Sturgis, South Dakota to Jackson, Wyoming

Jackson, Wyoming to Missoula, Montana

Missoula, Montana to Seattle, Washington

Big jump.

Home Stretch

I shouldn't be doing this. Pronouns can be tricky, so let me clarify: this could stand for any number of things here. I shouldn't be writing this blog-post; instead, I should be grading exams (grades due Friday, with our graduation Saturday), inventorying books, I should be calling utility companies to arrange for disconnection, packing poetry collections in boxes, posting want ads to get rid of all this furniture, writing comments on student poems, preparing an actual resume (on which, publications and awards disappear and I become just another guy who has delivered pizzas and worked at Best Buy). Okayalright.

Or, if you prefer, this could enlarge itself, could swell up like a dollar-store dinosaur to encompass my impending move: I shouldn't be leaving health insurance, housing, meals, and a salary for the ether of Seattle. I shouldn't be giving up a livelihood and a roof to head West to write poems, something I could theoretically do anywhere.

But it's on that last point that I catch a snag. I deeply miss writing poems, something I haven't done since November (!). Sure, I've tinkered with old work, spit-shined the manuscript to send out, shipped poems over the interwebs to august literary institutions; but none of that pays with the same spark as the brand new poem: that stirring in the gut when you sense you've jumped off the poem's high-board and are hurtling toward the deep-end (or, in some cases, an empty pool). Much as I enjoying teaching high-schoolers (which comes with its own brand of existential pay-off), I don't want to get stuck anywhere, I don't want to allow my craft to slip, I don't want to be one of those writers who has stopped writing...

We're two weeks away, kids. There's much to be done (including the aforementioned "should be doing" lists), but also an impromptu east-coast farewell tour with stops in Ithaca, The Jerz, DC, and Elon, culminating in The Farm Party, a grassroots music festival hosted by my friend Harold on a 150-acre farm in Rockingham County, NC. Seems appropriate to start with my childhood home before heading to my new home. Let's make some memories, people.


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In Ithaca, the place I spent the first 17 years of my life and still my favorite place to be during the Summer, some great old friends are letting me crash their book-club. Rather than read a book as is their routine, everyone is just bringing in their favorite poems to talk about (a way of letting me participate, as I said, awesome folks). I can't help but feel a bit of pressure, after all, none of them (at least to my knowledge) are big readers or writers of poetry, so the honus is on me to deliver the goods. A few came to mind fairly quickly (The God Who Loves You, The Haunting), but I immediately second-guessed. Great poems, for me, but what about for the rest of the group? Anyway--I'll keep poking around the shelves--there will surely be some James Galvin, Robert Hayden, Ellen Bryant Voigt, some Heaney, and likely Cavafy (come on! I'm going to Ithaca!). But now, I'm probably already over the polite number of poems to bring...

What would be your cameo-book-club-appearance poems?


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Killer first line of the moment:

"Dear Mattie, Did you have the garden turned?"

from Ellen Bryant Voigt's book-length sonnet sequence "Kyrie"
(Kyrie, W.W. Norton, 1995)


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This song makes me want to drive somewhere with the sun shining and the windows down...

Walking Silly and Other Haberdashery

Big day for rejection, received 'no thanks' correspondence from: Bakeless Prize, Wisconsin Creative Writing Fellowships, Provincetown Fellowships, and a plain ol' poetry submission at DIAGRAM. No huge surprises here, though I was a bit disappointed that I just got the form letter from P-town. Last year they let me know I made it to final consideration, so it feels a bit like I'm regressing. Regardless, all venues/institutions I have great respect for and will likely try again...

Congrats to the winners! (Bakeless, Wisconsin)

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2 weeks left of school. Roughly a month until I leave the East Coast for Seattle. Recently I've been processing all of the things I'll miss about this part of the country. Aside from friends and family, the most costly losses: barbeque (Hursey's is my go-to), the Blue Ridge Mountains and all the glorious aspects of Appalachia (bluegrass, rocking chairs, hound-dogs, porch-sitting, remarking about how hot it is, biscuits, iced tea, waving at strangers, etc.), ACC Basketball (I don't think I can take Pac-10 basketball seriously, I mean, I'll try...), and long road-runs past cow pastures down to the river, where it's shallow enough to walk but deep enough to swim.

Though, I was born in Ithaca, New York, I'll always claim North Carolina and Virginia as home. Is that weird? (I still love Ithaca--it just feels very distant in miles and memory...)

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Killer first line of the moment:

"We have lost even this twilight."

from Pablo Neruda's "We Have Lost Even"

translated by W.S. Merwin

(Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Penguin, 1969)

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Barack Obama's Facebook Feed

via Slate

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Well I missed the memo on it being International Monty Python Status Update Day, so as penance, here's a clip. I had dinner with John Cleese once when I was 14. He was one of the visiting ministers my father brought onto campus while he was at Cornell (along with Harold Bloom, William Buckley, Arianna Huffington, and Peter Gomes). I remember being surprised he didn't do the silly walk the whole evening, not even once.

Archival Awesome

Had a great weekend at Merlefest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Almost as good as all the great music (Highlights: Scythian, Kruger Brothers, Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes, Bearfoot, Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, Doc Watson) was the drive down NC Route 16 over the Eastern Continental Divide. Reminded me how much I love this place, these mountains. I should have taken pictures...but didn't.

Best musical moment: Elvis Costello playing "New Amsterdam" into a cover of The Beatles' "Hide Your Love Away"


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Yet another reason I love Beloit Poetry Journal: they post all their archived issues online. So my poem from last year's summer issue (and better yet, the whole Summer 2009 issue) is now available online, as is the great Albert Goldbarth dramatic monologue he read at AWP, from the newest issue...

Addendum: This poem Karl Elder read at AWP is amazing. I need to find more of his work.

They take online submissions now, too. It makes me want to submit something to them again. Darn tootin'.

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Sometimes I can’t tell why I’m exhausted. Is it from the 100-plus miles per week I run to prepare my body for the grueling demands of a 26.2 mile race? Or is it from the insomnia that pulls me out of bed at 3 a.m. to pound out a 20 miler on the treadmill at a 24-hour fitness club before most people have eaten breakfast? It’s hard to say.

via NYT

There was an article about this (running and insomnia) in Runner's World awhile back. Interesting to see it here...


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Killer first line of the moment:

"The sky's light behind the mountain"

from Louise Gluck's "Threshing"
(A Village Life, FSG, 2009)


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via John Gallaher

"An alien trinket of unimaginable cultural significance..."

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...