Thanks for Ordering

Thanks for ordering After the Ark and for your interest in poetry. Expect to receive the book in the mail sometime in the next week to ten days. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!

Raiding the Inarticulate

I'm writing new poems, tinkering with something (I don't know what, exactly). But I've been re-reading Seamus Heaney's wonderful essays. In "Feeling into Words," he talks about technique vs. craft, which I find abundantly interesting:

"I think technique is different from craft. Craft is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making. It wins competitions in The Irish Times or the New Statesmen. It can be deployed without reference to the feelings or the self. It knows how to keep up a capable verbal athletic display; it can be content to be vox et praeterea nihil--all voice and nothing else--but not voice as in 'finding a voice'. Learning the craft is learning to turn the windlass as the well of poetry. Usually you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up a taking of air. You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You'll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself. Your praties will be 'fit for digging'.

At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft. Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind's and body's resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats's phrase, 'the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast' into 'an idea, something intended, complete'."

Even if you don't love his poems (though, you should probably know that I love them), I highly recommend this collection of essays to anyone who values the reading and writing of poetry: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.

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This made me laugh:

Alleged Reasons to Date a Writer

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Po-biz stuff:

Last week, I had a poem accepted to appear in Epoch, which is especially exciting not only because it is a magazine I admire, but also because the journal comes out of Ithaca (where I spent my first 17 years) and Cornell University (where my father spent 20 years working as chaplain). The accepted poem is set in a university-owned orchard from which half-breed coyotes would poach apples.

Was thrilled, too, to see the final galleys for Best New Poets 2010 and the fall issue of 32 Poems, both of which I'm honored to be appearing in and eager to read. Hopefully, there will be some readings for BNP around the Seattle area during November/December. I'll let you know, fa sho.

Submission season is full-swing. I have a few new poems out, but mostly just a ton in the hopper. I need to get my shit together and lick some envelopes. I want to send poems here and here. I want to believe they have a chance of being accepted. I cannot decide if I do or not. I want to send to the Southern Review, too, more than anything. But, I must first wait for a non-simultaneous market to decide on the poems I want to send.

I, I, I. Self-promotion over. Thanks for your indulgence.

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I really want to see this movie, but don't know how...

via Eduardo Corral

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Singin' it.

"Thank you much, for the walking stick."

I suspect this post will lack cohesion. Mainly, because that's the way things have been lately. I realized the other day that I live in a cave. Sure, they called it a "basement studio apartment," but mostly it's a cave. I sleep below the ground. There's a yellow light in my cave. It comes from a lamp I was given by my Dad. He and my mother made it out of a ceramic flower-pot they bought in Jerusalem. It's the only light I carried with me across the country. That sentence sounds more melodramatic than it actually is. The cave smells like freedom.

Things seem to be happening far too fast for me to process them. I have a new job at a specialty pet-food store. It's a pretty great gig and has provided the hound-dog with a treasure trove of upper-crust dog stuffs. He's chewing on a deer antler right now. I've seen the error-free (to my and my editor's eyes) fifth galley of my first book sent off to proofers. I've seen a draft of a friend's exceptional cover art for said book. There is an online teaching position on the horizon, which I'm excited about (as I thought I would, I already miss teaching...). Seattle continues to surprise and delight. Strangely, as I prepare to move and am aswirl with new responsibilities and existing obligations, I finally feel at home in my new city.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Each day grows old, no minute ever new."

from R.H.W. Dillard's "Without You"

(Sallies, LSU Press, 2001)

(The above is the text of the entire poem, a one-liner.)

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Go here and listen to this NPR interview (or, just the one song if you've got a time crunch) with god-father of bluegrass, Sam Bush.

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So I do this bad thing instead--I write about the objects of my nostalgia. Sometimes I crave familiarity of landscape or face, or picture my grandmother playing organ at the church next to her house, my grandfather growing up in a cabin with no running water. I try to conjure the grandparents I never knew by reimagining their world, one that preceded my own.

But the world I want to return to never existed. It's a soft-hearted pastiche of the Old South, family, the happy highlight reel from my early years--cicadas, Hot Wheels, Atlantic Beach, Levi Stubbs, sweet tea, family stories with the bad parts amplified or buffed out.

--a great blog-post from over at The Plougshares Blog

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The average non-top-50 full-residency MFA is harder to get into than Duke University's undergraduate program.

via The Huffington Post

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The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom—from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.

--Wells Tower writes in GQ about his experience as an Amsterdam coffee-shop barista

via Phil Bost

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YouTube Double Dip Super Bonus Labor Day Blogpost

But we’re all in it for the wrong reasons, at least some of the time. We’re all weaklings when it comes to our ego needs. The question is whether we have the patience to outlast these needs, and the doubts that energize them.

--Steve Almond writes elegantly and intelligently about the very sad situation at VQR.

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Killer first line of the moment:

I have lost more than I kept.

from John Casteen's "Enormity"

(Free Union, University of Georgia Press, 2009)

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I just went back this morning, and I uncovered a piece in the New York Times from 1877. And it's actually fascinating. They had a stray dog population, so what they did is they rounded up 750 stray dogs. They took them to the East River, and they had a large metal cage -- it took them all day to do this -- they would put 50 dogs at a time, 48 dogs at a time in this metal, iron cage, and lower it into the East River with a crane.

via Salon

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If you haven't yet, you should read this poem: "Vocation" by Sandra Beasley. I need to buy that new book of hers, once I have money for such things.

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Saw this show last weekend (the KEXP Free Concerts at the Mural Series). I wonder how long it is until the masses find out about these guys...

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Throwback goodness.

The Dog Ate Salmon and I Ate Toast

Why hello there. Endeavoring to write a poem tonight, to post it tomorrow. Let's see what happens.

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Two good folks who I've been fortunate to meet have newly released books. Writers and people I admire. Looking forward to both of these:

Originally written in 2000 as his Master’s thesis, Raymond P. Hammond’s Poetic Amusement has been passed around underground as a digital file for ten years among those associated with The New York Quarterly. As provocative today as it was when it was written, what began as Hammond’s observations of the influence of “po’ biz” and writing programs on contemporary American poetry became a timeless treatise on poetry itself.

"Vestments" is generating national buzz. It earned a starred review and Pick of the Week from Publishers Weekly, the first book to receive that honor in Minneapolis-based Milkweed Edition's 30-plus years of publishing. Patricia Hampl, whose memoirs "The Florist's Daughter" and "A Romantic Education" are also paeans to St. Paul, gave Reimringer's book an enthusiastic jacket blurb.

Well-deserved on both counts.

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My book has a web page and a library of congress number. Holy whoa. There's also a book description and the blurbs at the NYQ Site. The release date probably isn't accurate as we're still working that bit out (it's looking like late December to early January, right now). This is all starting to seem tangible. We've been through about four rounds of galleys on the poems and I'm really thrilled with the way things are looking on the page. New Baskerville is in the house and representin'. We're just listing the magazines that originally published the poems in the acknowledgments, rather than including the titles of the poems they published. I know I always like to look at those, but it's an issue of page space, really. How about a preference, blogosphere? What do we want out of an acknowledgments page? (Too much to include a note to family, friends, and teachers? Who and how to thank? Casual, intimate, formal, or straight-foward?)

Still working on cover art stuff, and still hoping to use something from a friend rather than a photo from stock (though, I have found one I like should we need to go that way), so if you've got artwork and think it might work for a cover--send it on over. I'm lucky and thankful to have lots of talented folks around, so I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with...

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The guy has pipes.

On Feeling Very Lucky

Some words about the book from poets I admire, for which I feel extremely grateful and undeserving:

“I don't recall being so moved by a body of poems—surely not any time recently. I'm moved in all ways—not just the details, the family, the place, the memories, but how sturdy the language is, how it never thins out against the subject it is expressing, the emotion that moves it. Mary Oliver says the reader needs to know right away if the poet has the oars of the poem firmly in hand. Every single poem here is rowed with strength and purpose.”

—Kathryn Stripling Byer

“In his exceptionally fine début, After the Ark, Luke Johnson exhibits superb craftsmanship and a precociously profound, sympathetic understanding of human nature. In poems about his parents—ministers—he and we discover a convincing theology of love. The collection pulls us toward the magnificent final and title poem, wherein the book becomes a brilliant revelatory whole. “

—Kelly Cherry

“Luke Johnson is a poet with a keen and open eye—open to human failings, human feelings, and to the hard specifics of the natural world in which and through which we live and love, betray and atone, are abandoned and are found. His language is as clear as his eye, and his poems are for all those who care deeply and remain open to the often painful complexities of that caring.”

—R. H. W. Dillard

“In After the Ark, Luke Johnson carefully ensures the “tautness of the line” between witness, elegy, and survival—the poems documenting finally an arrival at the place “where the flood has become the body.” This beautifully made collection is the welcome work of a poet crossing the threshold of a remarkable career.”

—Claudia Emerson

There's a Man in a Gorilla Suit on Broadway

Seattle is hot again. The dog is not as amused as I am: lots of good time for reading and writing. Book reviews, essays, and poems (oh my). I have a book description from my publisher, too, as well as half my blurbs and a couple of incredibly talented friends at work on possible cover art (though, I have found an image I think would work well should we have to resort to something from stock...). Any artists out there interested in entering the cover art sweepstakes should shoot me an email. Unfortunately, I can't offer anything other than a credit line as compensation. Also: undying gratitude and unlimited high fives.

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The Atlantic has archived six of John Muir's essays about the American wilderness and the importance of creating and preserving a national park system. They were printed between the years 1897 and 1901 and are as well-written and ebullient now as they were then.

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The live show has resulted in some walk-outs amongst disgruntled casual fans. There are no hits, no hooks, hardly any hope for the audience to grab on to. It is beautifully dark and even a little depressing. But it is a brave step which hopefully sees Wainwright finally purging his attempts to court the general public and committing himself to following his own path without worrying how many people are interested in coming along with him.

via Josh Robbins

Is Rufus Wainwright crazy for forgetting about the concerns of his audience? Or is he simply asking more of them?

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TV things I must tell you: I'm upset with Vinnie Chase, annoyed that Kenny is off Top Chef, and addicted to the show Hard Knocks. That is all.

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Without thinking, I started to type a note of congratulations into the comment box, but midway through I erased it and logged off. I hardly knew this person. When had I become such a voyeur?

Interesting essay from the Atlantic on Facebook and friendship, via Liz Gerber