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...

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.