Stephanie Goehring

2011: by the numbers, and in books

2012-01-05T16:10:00.000-05:00

Later than I'd like to have this posted, but I just got back from a two-week trip to Virginia. So here it finally is: 2011 by the numbers and in books.

I wrote 63 poems in 2011, which is down from 72 last year but still a really high number. And it works out to more than 1 poem per week, which has been my goal while in my MFA program.

I made 17 poetry submissions in 2011 and received 15 rejections. Not the greatest year for submissions, but not too shabby either. The 2 that worked out were Anti- picking up 1 of my TV poems and D.A. Powell selecting 2 of my poems to win the University of Iowa's John Logan Poetry Prize.

I only completed 1 piece of artwork in 2011. I worked on another, but between not having the best space to paint and trying to focus more on my writing, I'm just happy I managed to complete the 1 piece.

I read 29 books in 2011, which is way down from 41 last year, but there's a reason for that. I read 9 poetry chapbooks last year, compared to only 2 this year, and I also only read 5 non-poetry books last year, compared to 14 this year. So if I looked at the number of words or pages instead of books, I think I actually read more this year than last.

Here's what I read in 2011:

Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock

The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell

If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa edited by Robert Hass (for school)

Longing Distance by Sarah Hannah

Kindred by Octavia Butler (a re-read) (for school) (twice)

The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault

There's Never Been a Day that Didn't Require Knives Like These by Jeff Griffin

Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg

7-9 January by Jeff Griffin

New Exercises by Franck Andre Jamme

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Tongue by Rachel Contreni Flynn

Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Download Helvetica for Free.com by Steve Roggenbuck

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda (a re-read)

Blankets by Craig Thompson

The Hot Tub/Glory Hole by Jon Leon/Dan Hoy

A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham

Tea by D.A. Powell

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

And my top five, in alphabetical order:

"I find people confusing. This is for two main reasons. The first main reason is people do a lot of talking without using any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean 'I want to do sex with you' and it can also mean 'I think that what you just said is very stupid.'"

- from the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon

I had been meaning to read this book for years, and I wish I had picked it up sooner. It's so fantastic. It's a murder mystery but also the main character is writing the book, so there's a wonderful investigation (har har) into structure. The main character is autistic, and Haddon inhabits his voice beautifully. I can't recommend this book enough. It's moving and intelligent and such a joy to read.

"For year's after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation I would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone...

My dad's dead. He jumped in front of a truck.

...eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me."

- from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

This graphic memoir was my first foray into the genre, and it's excellent. I read Craig Thompson's Blankets after and was not impressed, but my interest in the graphic genres was enough to carry me through all 500 pages of that one. I'm actually teaching Fun Home in the upcoming semester, so we'll see how that goes, but I love the idea of a powerful work that (among other things) argues for the necessity of literature via text AND images.

"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."

- from Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Just read it.

"I thought that maybe / If you aren't too busy, we could spend our lives / Parting in stations, promising to write / War and Peace, this time with feeling"

- from Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner

Part love poem, part elegy, Lerner's Mean Free Path is all awesome. The explicit discussions about writing poems and the struggles of doing so can feel a little obnoxious at points, but he just does it so damn well that you forgive him. Plus he seems to be doing so, discussing the ways language fails us, as a way of talking about the ways everything fails us and the ways we try to survive, which, in my book, is the only reason one should ever write about writing: as a way of writing about what's more important.

"I want to sit very calmly with my bangs curled...

But my pet monster has bitten my hand!

Life makes me sad.

So sad that I walk down the street etc."

- from Poemland by Chelsey Minnis

And even though I just wrote that in my book one should only write about writing as a way of writing about what's more important, then you have Minnis' Poemland. The book is full of poetry that mocks poetry, that mocks the Poet, while at the same time admitting that the mocker herself is a poet, obviously. I could see some people being annoyed by this, but the book is often really funny. So as much as I sometimes found Lerner's writing about being a Poet pretentious, I also sometimes found Minnis' writing about being a poet so desperate to be unpretentious that it came off a bit juvenile. And of course Minnis can write all she wants about how stupid it is to write poems, but when she does so in verse, it can feel forced at times. Sort of, We Get It, you know? But again, the book is often hilarious and often incredibly sad and Minnis skillfully slips in some wonderful images amid the exclamation points and silliness. I read this book at a time when I was so sick of not being moved by the poems I was reading, and Poemland was exactly what I needed at that time.

another reading!

2011-12-06T19:04:00.002-05:00

Here's video of the Nov. 19 reading Alex Walton and I gave at Southeastern Community College in Burlington, Iowa. Thanks so much to everyone at SCC for having us! We had a blast.

so many readings!

2011-11-18T18:45:00.005-05:00

So many readings lately!

Two weeks ago, Jeff and I headed to Lincoln, Nebraska, to read from I Miss You Very Much at SP CE. The reading was small but a lot of fun, and the trip was amazing. The two days we spent in the car were exceptionally beautiful, and we made a lot of stops along the way just to get out of the car and be overwhelmed by the landscape.

A week and a half before the trip, I read at one of the Writers' Workshop student reading series, called Talk Art. The reading series is set up so one second-year fiction student and one second-year poetry student read for 15-20 minutes apiece, and each is introduced beforehand, typically in an untraditional fashion (a skit, a roast, etc.) Jeff did my intro and nailed it, naturally. The reading went really well, other than the microphone being placed directly under an incredibly bright light, which 1) made it a bit difficult for me to see my poems and 2) made me look like Powder. I'm going to post the video footage of the reading here now, but I'll take it down soon since I might want to try to publish these poems somewhere.

Lastly: Tomorrow night at 8 p.m., I will be reading with fellow Workshopper Alex Walton; we'll each be reading for 20 minutes at Southeastern Community College in Burlington, Iowa, so if you're in the area, see you there! I'll be reading poems from This Room Has a Ghost and I Miss You Very Much, as well as some newer work.

today!

2011-11-04T00:29:00.003-04:00

(Taken from the Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=266398773397039)

Friday, Nov. 4

sp ce

14th & O - above ali baba's

Lincoln, NE

basic information

DOORS open at 5:30 p.m.ish

MUSIC by Tie These Hands at 8 p.m.ish

POETRY by Rachael Wolfe, Jeff Griffin, and Stephanie Goehring directly after the music.

VIDEO ART by Kan Seidel all night long

PASTRIES will be available until they aren't

SP CEBOOK4 will be available

=========================

more information

-Tie These Hands is a rock band that has been doing good work for awhile now. Come check out this rare intimate acoustic set.http://www.myspace.com/tiethesehands

-Kan Seidel is an impressive artist, writer, and human who lives in Chicago. There will be as many screens as possible showing some of his video work.

-Rachael Wolfe is a poet as well as pastry provider who helps RUN SHIT here at sp ce. She is going to be reading some poems.

-Jeff Griffin is a poet from Nevada currently attending the Iowa Writers Workshop. He does a lot of stuff, has a book called THERE'S NEVER BEEN A DAY THAT DIDN'T REQUIRE KNIVES LIKE THESE and a book called JANUARY 7-9. Here is a link, with a streaming audio file of him reading poetry:http://www.litshow.com/alphsoup4-19

-Stephanie Goehring is a poet from Virginia currently attending the Iowa Writers Workshop. She also does a lot of stuff, has a book called THIS ROOM HAS A GHOST. Here is a link to her blogspot:http://boxfordcourt.blogspot.com/ Here is a link with a streaming audio file of her reading poetry: http://www.litshow.com/archive/season-04/graphiclanguage

-Jeff and Stephanie have written a collaborative book called I MISS YOU VERY MUCH, which will be available for purchase. The book was published by Slim Princess Holdings, http://slimprincessholdings.weebly.com/

letters on the radio part II

2011-10-21T16:09:00.003-04:00

So here's the link to my reading from I Miss You Very Much on The Lit Show (scroll down to find the audio clip). Thanks again to Joe Fassler for having me on the show.

Other than the 3 "uh"s and the 8 "um"s in the 40-second intro and the 2 flubs in the reading, it sounds great!

readings!

2011-10-15T18:40:00.005-04:00

My friend T.J. sent me the above photo the day his copy of I Miss You Very Much arrived. The book has been out for about six weeks now, and I'm happy to announce some upcoming readings at which I will be reading from the book and/or carrying copies available for purchase. I will also have copies of my first chapbook,This Room Has a Ghost, available for purchase.

* On Wednesday, October 26, at 10 p.m., I will be reading at The Mill here in Iowa City as part of the fourth installment of this year's Talk Art, a Writers' Workshop reading series. I will be reading from my series of TV poems. Nickolas Butler will be reading some of his fiction, as well.

* On Friday, November 4, Jeff Griffin and I will be reading from I Miss You Very Much at SP CE in Lincoln, Nebraska. 1416 O Street. We will each also be reading from other work, and there will be other readers as well. I'll post an update when I know what time the reading will be held and who else will be reading.

* On Saturday, November 19, at 8 p.m., I will be reading with Alex Walton as part of Southeastern Community College's Visiting Writers Series. The reading will be held at SCC's West Burlington campus in the Little Theatre, Room 433. I will be reading from both I Miss You Very Much and This Room Has a Ghost, as well as some newer work.

So if you're in Iowa City; West Burlington, IA; or Lincoln, Nebraska, hope to see you there!

letters on the radio

2011-10-05T12:18:00.002-04:00

I'll be reading from I Miss You Very Much on The Lit Show today at 2 p.m. CT. You can stream the show online at http://www.litshow.com or check their archives in a week or so. If you're in the Iowa City area, you can tune in to KRUI at 89.7 to hear me and the other readers.

This is just to say

2011-09-22T20:07:00.003-04:00

I love fall semester

and

I've decided to donate the small (but now no longer mostly insignificant) amount of money I receive from sales of I Miss You Very Much to the March of Dimes.

I haven't yet received any of the money I've earned so far from sales, so that means anyone who has purchased a copy already has contributed to this donation and my share of the money from all future purchases will be contributed as well. I don't expect it to add up to that much money, but any amount of money will help, so I'm really looking forward to making the donation(s). You can read about the history of The March of Dimes and its mission here.

I Miss You Very Much starts shipping today!

2011-09-01T10:09:00.003-04:00

I Miss You Very Much starts shipping today! You can order your copy at the Slim Princess Holdings website, and you can find an excerpt there as well.

Happy September 1st!

I Miss You Very Much ships a week from today!

2011-08-25T08:55:00.005-04:00

(A broadside I made for my letterpress class last semester. The poem, which

is from I Miss You Very Much, has since been revised a bit.)

I Miss You Very Much starts shipping a week from today! The books look beautiful, and I'm excited for people to start receiving and reading them. If you haven't ordered a copy, you can do so at the Slim Princess Holdings website.

It's been an interesting week. I started class on Monday, taught for the first time this semester on Tuesday (and during that class, a student put his foot behind his head and hopped around the room, so I think it's going to be a good semester), made scones from scratch for the first time and wrote a pantoum that might not suck on Wednesday, and today I get to teach again. Tomorrow is the first Anthology reading of the semester, which is really exciting, and then a houseguest for the weekend, which is also exciting. Busy week, which feels really great after a mostly lazy summer.

Writing that pantoum yesterday felt phenomenal because I've really been struggling with just getting anything on paper. I'd had the idea to write a pantoum about trauma for a while because I think the structure of the pantoum is designed for such subject matter: the way the lines repeat and possibly change a little but ultimately stay the same echoes the way a person constantly recalls a traumatic event and considers many angles but ultimately can't change anything. And I rarely can read a pantoum without finding the repeating lines annoying, so I felt like a pantoum about trauma could make more effective use of the repetition. So the idea had been with me for a month or so, but I'd been dealing with feeling unable to write anything down for several months. But yesterday an entire pantoum draft.

Life is good.

new chapbook out September 1!

2011-08-04T14:59:00.005-04:00

I'm thrilled to announce that Slim Princess Holdings will release the chapbook I Miss You Very Much by me and Jeff Griffin on September 1.

I Miss You Very Much is one big identity crisis and wants you to hold it. It's available for preorder now and costs $5 plus $2 s/h.

The book is 48 pages of what you might call prose poems or what you might call letters full of things that might be lies. The Slim Princess Holdings website contains an excerpt.

Slim Princess Holdings is a new publishing house. If you're on Facebook, be sure to "like" Slim Princess Holdings for updates on I Miss You Very Much, as well as future projects.

at least there's that

2011-07-20T19:45:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine posted this link on Facebook today, and it reminded me of so much of my time as a teenager. Also, thanks, Mom and Dad.

The summer is rapidly coming to a close, but I'm finally getting into school prep mode, at least in terms of thinking about teaching stuff, and I'm getting excited for the new semester.

I've read a fair amount this summer, mostly fiction, though I've officially given up on Moby Dick. Maybe another summer.

I've got some new submissions out and a few that I should hear about soon. I feel like it's been nothing but rejections this year, but then I look at the total number of submissions I've made and my results, and 1 out of 10 isn't actually that bad, and I've got 5 more out there, so we'll see. I wish I were writing more these days, but I'm having a really hard time with it. Started something, I think, the other night, so at least there's that.

Please help my friend Michael

2011-06-12T19:29:00.004-04:00

I haven't been updating as much, but it's not because I'm busy. It's not technically summer right now, but it's been summer for me for about a month, and I've spent my time mostly by wasting it. Granted, I finished that collage, which I'm immensely proud of, and I've read six chapters of Moby Dick, and I've rearranged and completely cleaned my apartment, and I've read half of Jesus' Son, and I've read some poems and stories here and there, but mostly I've just been relaxing and watching movies. That leaves little to write about on here.

But now I have two quick things to say:

* My friend Michael Fauver will be attending the Lambda Literary Foundation's Emerging Writers' Retreat later this summer, but he needs some financial assistance. I donated when he first asked a few weeks ago, just a small amount but it's helped him toward his goal. He now only needs $98. If you have the means to donate even $1, please do so. Michael is a wonderful man and a talented writer, and the $98 will allow him to attend this wonderful retreat.

* I'm thrilled to announce that Anti- published one of my TV poems in their latest issue. Check it out (and the rest of the great poems in the issue) at this link.

first piece of 2011, only the second for Iowa

2011-05-31T17:20:00.003-04:00

Fools (30x30; collage of colored paper and acrylic and acrylic ink on canvas paper on canvas)

iPhoto is being insane and won't let me crop any photos, so this is the best I could do.

I did the initial painting for this collage and most of the cutting back in October. Then I didn't really touch it again until March, when I finished the cutting and did the perimeter gluing. Then I mostly left it alone until the semester ended. I did the vast majority of the gluing over the past few days. My back is killing me, but I'm really pleased with the results. I love the way this piece looks from far away because it's hard to tell it's a collage. I also noticed that the farther away I get from the piece, the more it's so obviously influenced by Lee Krasner. Oh well. I like it!

sort of

2011-05-06T17:29:00.006-04:00

And so it's (sort of) done.

We always say things go too quickly, but I really can't believe I'm approaching my second year at the Workshop. I have to give my final exam on Monday, grade said exams, jump through the end-of-semester administrative hoops and complete a final project over the summer for one of my classes, but other than that, my first year is done.

I went through all of my Iowa photos to try to find one I hadn't posted that seemed the best fit for an end-of-my-first-year post, and I couldn't decide between these two:

friends human luxury knives

2011-04-24T18:19:00.006-04:00

HTML Giant has an interview up with my friends Jerimee Bloemeke, Henry Finch and Jeff Griffin of Human 500. Check check it out and then go buy the Human 500 releases, LUXURY ARCANA and THERE'S NEVER BEEN A DAY THAT DIDN'T REQUIRE KNIVES LIKE THESE.

the latest from elimae

2011-04-17T18:14:00.003-04:00

Just checked out the latest elimae.

Diggin:

* The last two lines of this poem by Charles Mock.

* "Hold 'em" by Nick Ripatrazone.

* "Hospice" by Mark Jackley.

* "Mortality Haiku" by Lincoln Michel.

* The last stanza of this poem by Masin Persina.

* "The Fingernail Moon of Johnson County" by Jon Cone.

* "The Affair" by Kimberly Poitevin.

Litany

2011-04-16T13:58:00.002-04:00

This video is a year old, and I remember when it first came out, but I've been watching it a lot lately. I'm generally not a huge fan of the Billy Collins poems I've read, but I really like this one, and I love the way this kid recites it.

Also, here's a cute NPR story about the little boy meeting Billy Collins this past fall.

more and more, I think Roethke is my favorite

2011-04-14T14:05:00.002-04:00

(Thanks to Brent Goodman for posting this on Facebook.)

First review!

2011-04-10T21:35:00.002-04:00

Dave Bonta, co-editor of the online journal qarrtsiluni, among a million other things, is reading a book of poetry every day this month and posting his reactions on his blog. Today's post is about my chapbook This Room Has a Ghost.

Some of my favorite words from Dave on the book:

"Every word is an origin, says she who wants to be called Ophelia and who looks for wrong in all the love places."

"I wish I knew Braille so I could read this book with my eyes shut."

HUGE thanks to Dave. I'm so glad to hear of someone enjoying the book, and I'm grateful that he wrote about it, especially so beautifully.

2011-04-03T22:12:00.004-04:00

So it's April. So it's National Poetry Month.

There's a lot of really cool poetry stuff going on around the Web, so I thought I'd link to some of my favorites:

* Dave Bonta has committed to reading a book of poetry every day in April and posting his reactions to the books on his blog. You can find his book posts for the month here. I sent Dave a copy of my chapbook This Room Has a Ghost after he put out a call for review copies for his National Poetry Month reading fest, so hopefully he reads it this month and hopefully he likes it. Honestly, though, even if he reads it and hates it, I'm excited about the possibility of someone reviewing it. Other than the five stars the lovely Brent Goodman gave my chapbook on Good Reads, no one has reviewed This Room Has a Ghost. It's been out for a year, but I haven't known what to do with it. I talked to Kristy Bowen a few weeks ago (Kristy runs dancing girl press), and she said the chap has sold about half its run, which is fantastic, but I also have a ridiculously large family. I'm guessing about five people I don't know have purchased it.

* Kelli Russell Agodon is once again heading up The Big Poetry Giveaway. This year, there are currently 41 bloggers participating, meaning those 41 bloggers are each giving away two books of poetry. Visit the link to Kelli's blog to find out how to participate. I participated last year, giving away a copy of my chapbook and my friend Steven Blaski's wonderful book Keep the Killer Asleep, and I also won three of the contests. It's great fun, and I highly recommend it.

* A few days ago, Kelli also posted 30 poetry prompts for National Poetry Month. There's some really great ones in the list, so check them out.

* 32 Poems is letting a new poet each day of the month post a list of five poetry books the poet thinks you should be reading. You can find a list of the poets and a link to their posts here. I'm particularly excited about seeing the lists for April 7 and April 10 as my former poetry professors Eric Pankey and Jennifer Atkinson are posting those days.

* New journal The Found Poetry Review is posting found-poetry prompts on the journal's Twitter account all month.

Happy National Poetry Month!

the man

2011-03-28T00:54:00.000-04:00

in fashion

2011-03-27T15:16:00.003-04:00

When I first read about O Magazine's poetry issue containing a feature called "Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets," I planned to write a post about it.

Then I read this article and decided a link to that would suffice.

At least for now.

I'm having fun now

2011-03-22T18:04:00.005-04:00

I just got back from an awesome trip to Seattle. I lived in Washington for a few months when I was a toddler, but if I went to Seattle then I certainly don't remember it, so I'm counting this as my first Seattle trip. That city is tremendous. And it was so great to be around water again. I can't wait to go back.

I also can't recommend City Seattle Hostel and Streamliner Diner enough. I went to a lot of great places while in Seattle, but those two were the tops.

Brent Goodman has two rad poems up at Verse Wisconsin that you should read. And J.P. Dancing Bear's poem up at Linebreak is SO GOOD. I read Bear's poem right after a few hours of manuscript-ing and submitting poems and then that poem made me think I should have spent that time writing. I love finding poems I wish I had written.

I finally re-watched Requiem for a Dream about a week ago. It had been several years since my first time seeing it, which was followed by a crazy round of watching it repeatedly. While I don't want to compare the film to Hamlet, re-watching Requiem reminded me of something my freshman literature professor said about how Hamlet was the kind of work that you had to read at certain ages throughout your life because it was so rich that it would affect you in potentially drastically different ways each time. I felt that way re-watching Requiem at 26 and thinking how I responded to it at 19.

In other "finally" news, I'm finally back to work on a collage I started in October. I did the initial painting for it then and most of the cutting. Within the last week or so I've finished the cutting and finished the perimeter gluing, so it should be done in the near future, which is really exciting. It feels really good to be working on visual stuff again.

I can't stop listening to the Jenny and Johnny album I'm Having Fun Now. I love Jenny Lewis, but I'm completely obsessed with the combination of the two artists here. The entire album is wonderful.

requiem

2011-03-08T20:02:00.001-05:00

There was a time in my life when I was completely obsessed with the movie Requiem for a Dream. I drew and painted several pieces based on the film, and I couldn't stop listening to one particular track from the soundtrack.

Today I finally bought the entire soundtrack. It's tremendous.

I feel like I need to watch the film again (and I own it, so I can easily do so), but something's preventing me from re-watching it.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you watch it.

crows, umbrellas

2011-03-06T23:26:00.002-05:00

The latest elimae is out and includes the work of my pal Danielle Wheeler. Check check it out.

Also a fan of "Therapy" by Eric Burke and "Explanation Comes to an End" by Howie Good.

things I wanted to see again

2011-03-02T15:01:00.004-05:00

The best tree on campus

Roof access

Roller rink!

The Iowa Old Capitol Building and ... aliens?

February snowstorm, outside the Foxhead

Three of the reasons my students dislike poetry

Fork in the road, trash on the sidewalk

2011-02-22T21:39:00.005-05:00

I haven't written a poem in about two and a half weeks. Normally that wouldn't bother me, but being in an MFA program, where I'm afforded so much time to write, I feel like I'm wasting time when I'm not writing. I've also got three paintings in progress that I stare at every day and do nothing about. I feel like I'm wandering around the idea of creating, too scared to actually do anything.

But then I ask myself why I think it's fear. Why not something else? Maybe I'm just generally preoccupied. Maybe I'm just planning my next move.

I think what primarily has me thinking about the idea of fear as it relates to creative acts is a poem I workshopped yesterday. It's a poem I wrote before moving to Iowa, and I've revised it significantly several times. I keep changing the poem in some major fashion: eliminating a character, writing a new ending, changing the point of view, etc. I wanted to workshop it because I feel like I'm afraid to write the poem, that I keep writing my way away from what needs to happen in the poem.

I've always been interested in trauma, particularly in my writing. The way I remember my own life, I started writing because of a traumatic event (my first experience with death), though it gets muddy because I also remember writing short stories with my best friend in second grade, and I don't remember which happened first. But the point is that writing as a reaction to trauma was a reality for me as a young child, and I was young enough that I don't believe I had any understanding of that being something people did. It was simply something natural for me.

As I got older, I continued writing short stories, and while I wasn't aware that I was necessarily trying to deal with any personal traumas, I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of trauma. I wrote incredibly violent stories, so violent that some adults asked my mother if she was concerned about me. (I had some stories published in school journals, and my mother kept copies at the hair salon she managed. One client asked her if she was worried about me, and my mom replied that there were no dead bodies in my room, so she was sure I was just being a creative teenager. Thanks, Mom!) So while I was clearly interested in trauma, I wasn't always writing about my own experiences.

But of course I was in some small way, given that one's own perspective is essentially its own experience. Furthermore, in my late teens and early 20s, I did start more directly writing about my own experiences. Someone breaks your heart (or you break your own) and you're a writer and suddenly you're writing about that broken heart. Hopefully the piece of writing moves beyond merely being an expression of that personal experience, so that others will find value in their reading it, but there's value to you as a person and as a writer in allowing yourself to write about such things. If you can push it beyond self-expression, that's obviously better, but merely doing it, saying it, writing it down, making something of it is a worthwhile experience.

With this poem, I'm trying to do that, but I can't seem to balance my selfish need for self-expression and my desire to make it worth more than that. I'm basically tired of writing this poem, but I can't stop writing it. And given my tiny drought on the poem-front these days, I'm worried it's affecting other poems, preventing them from being written.

* A note on the above photograph: After workshopping this poem, I was walking to a bar with a workshop friend, and we spotted this pile of trash on the sidewalk outside of someone's house. I stooped down to photograph the trash because I thought the nearly whole fish was amazing, and my friend spied the fortune cookie in the upper left of the frame. He took it, opened it and found this fortune: Happiness is not a reward; it's a consequence. The learn-Chinese word on the back of the fortune was fork.

the handful of earth you are

2011-02-14T12:02:00.003-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day! Or Monday. Whatever you need.

The Woodrat Podcast on Platonic love is up at Dave Bonta's blog. Check check it out.

I love the handful of earth you are.

Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,

I have no other star. You are my replica

of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know

from extinguished constellations;

your skin throbs like the streak

of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;

your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;

your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.

So I pass across your burning form, kissing

you -- compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.

- Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott

from 100 Love Sonnets

quick note

2011-02-12T20:17:00.003-05:00

On Valentine's Day, a new Woodrat Podcast will go up over at Dave Bonta's blog, Via Negativa. The podcast will be about Platonic love (as Dave put it, "what happens to love when sex is removed from the equation") and will consist of various writers reading various kinds of work on the subject. I will be reading a poem of mine, and I'm looking forward to hearing what else is in the mix.

Whale Belly

2011-02-12T16:25:00.002-05:00

I've been listening to the band Whale Belly's debut album, The Smile at the End of the Slope, pretty much nonstop for the last two weeks.

The Brooklyn band is giving away the album for free online, and you should download it right now.

You can hear a few tracks from the album here. I'm partial to "Louise, Queen of Greenwood," but all four songs up on their MySpace page are excellent.

Life at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (According to one person. You know, ME)

2011-02-03T13:50:00.004-05:00

The Dey House, home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop

* EDIT: This post has been flooded thanks to a Facebook link, which I'm assuming is from the MFA Draft group, so I just wanted to add a note. I have no idea what stage in the application process the Iowa faculty is in, and I have no idea when they will notify people, or if they've already started. I just posted this when I did because I was thinking about where I was a year ago. Good luck to all you MFA applicants out there! Leave a comment if you have any questions about Iowa beyond the notification process, and I'll do my best to answer. *

Two weeks from today will be one year from when I received the greatest phone call of my life: an offer to come to the University of Iowa and study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an MFA candidate in poetry and teach undergraduate literature in my first year of study.

There's a lot wrapped up in the program. The Workshop is the oldest MFA program of its kind in the country. It was the first and is often named the best. Naturally, getting that phone call made me feel like I had accomplished something. The "best" program wanted me? But that's not why that phone call was the greatest phone call of my life; it was the greatest phone call of my life because it ended up being the beginning of what will likely be one of the best times I'll ever have. And I had a feeling it would be that way. On February 17th, 2010, I could see myself happier here.

As it turns out, Iowa is a great fit for me. I love the city, I love the program, I've made excellent friends, I'm writing all the time, I love teaching, and I'm just really, really happy. So while I could never honestly say that it isn't nice to attend a prestigious program because -- let's be real -- prestige is rad, it's everything outside of the prestige that makes being at the Workshop so wonderful. Prestige doesn't manifest into something that matters in your day-to-day life. It isn't going to write your poems. It isn't going to critique your poems. It won't go out to the bar with you. You can't teach it anything. You can't learn anything from it. It won't help you dig your car out of the snow.

In thinking about all of this, I decided it might be worthwhile to write a little about what it's like here, in the event any folks out there stumble across this blog after getting that Super Amazing Phone Call in the near future. I know I did a blog search on Google after I was accepted to the Workshop (and I actually stumbled across a blog by Nickolas Butler, who at the time had also just been accepted to the program; he and I are now TA office mates, as it turns out, and he's a hell of a guy). So in the hopes of helping out, here's just a few things I've noticed in my time in Iowa City that might be of interest to someone recently accepted to the program:

1. An Iowa City winter is legit, dude. I love the cold, so this is one of the things that drew me here, but if you don't like the cold, you might not be so happy. Personally, I think it's easy to deal with; you just wear the appropriate stuff, and you're fine. But, for example, it was negative 12 degrees (F) when I walked to the Dey House around 9:30 this morning. In that kind of weather, your nose hairs freeze almost as soon as you step outside. Really. On the plus side, snow is awesome, and they seem to know how to handle it here.

2. Iowa City summers are legit, too. I assumed that I'd move to Iowa and finally get to escape the kind of summers I was used to in Virginia. With such serious winters, Iowa would have to cut me at least a little slack in the summer, right? Wrong. According to idcide.com, the average maximum temperature in the summer is 88 degrees (excluding heat index), compared to an average minimum winter temperature of 13 degrees (excluding wind chill). For me, that compared to an average maximum summer temperature of 87 degrees in Virginia Beach and an average minimum winter temperature of 32 degrees. When you throw in horrible humidity, which I for some reason thought I'd left behind in Virginia, Iowa City summers can get really sweaty.

3. Iowa City is small. As of the 2008 census, Iowa City's population was around 68,000. More than 30,000 students enroll at the University of Iowa each year. It's absolutely a college town. I love that about it. There's that college town energy here. Iowa City also has such a rich literary history that the town has that energy, as well, so it's not just a bunch of drunk undergraduates swarming the streets day in and day out. The pedestrian mall downtown is wonderful. You can find affordable housing within walking/biking/bus distance of pretty much everything you need. There always seems to be a concert, reading, or party worth going to. Iowa City reminds me quite a bit of Charlottesville, Va., but I (no offense, Cville!) like Iowa City more. It's got a better combination of small town, little college city, I think.

4. I see white people. One thing I loved about going to undergrad right outside of D.C. was that I felt like my campus looked like what the world looks like. That sense of diversity is seriously lacking here. I'm not saying this is something that makes me hate Iowa City; it's just something I noticed right away. When I flew back to Virginia for Christmas, I had a layover in D.C. and looked around, saw so many faces that didn't look exactly like mine, and realized I felt normal in a way I hadn't ever felt in Iowa City.

5. The Workshop is, as far as creative writing MFA programs go, pretty huge. Roughly 25 poets and 25 fiction writers are accepted each year. That translates to a pool of roughly 49 poets for me to potentially end up with in workshop. When I was applying to MFA programs, I didn't really consider program size. I didn't know what I might like or dislike about a small program or a large program, so I just didn't think about it. Now that I'm here, I can't imagine being at a small program. UVA, for example, accepts five poets each year. It's a two-year program. That means there's 9 poets for you to work with. What if you can't stand any of them? It might sound trivial and maybe it is, but for me it's been wonderful to have such a large pool of peers here. If that matters to you, Iowa's great. If it doesn't, Iowa's still great. If it matters to you but on the opposite front, Iowa might not be for you. And don't let the program being large make you think it can't be intimate. Iowa is a lot of things but lacking in intimacy is not one of them.

6. At the Workshop, funding is tiered. Some students might receive more funding than you, and you might resent this. You might receive more funding than some other students, and they might resent this. Overall, I haven't noticed this as a big issue at all, but it's always a possibility in a tiered system, so it's worth noting. Personally, I think complaining about funding at Iowa is stupid because ultimately we're all getting paid to write poems, read, and hang out with each other for two years, but for your second year, funding feels more "merit-based," so maybe that's where the issue comes from. After winter break during your first year at the Workshop, you submit a manuscript of work you've written while at the Workshop, and the faculty members rank the manuscripts and award the top funding for the second year to the top manuscripts. Funding decisions after that process get a little murkier because of TA positions outside of the Workshop, but it can be a frustrating process. I would guess everyone wants one of the few top fellowships, and not everyone is going to get one, so then there's room for resentment, outrage over why that person got one when his poems aren't as good or she's a jerk during workshops, etc. Hopefully this isn't really an issue. I'm going through the process right now, so I don't really have any experience with what happens after the fellowships are awarded, but I've heard some grumbling here and there from some current second-years and former students, so it's worth pointing out.

7. The Workshop is SO. MUCH. FUN. If you find the MFA program that's the right fit for you, this should always be the case, and of course I'm biased, but the Workshop is really a ton of fun. I've worked with two of the three permanent faculty members, and they're rad. They seem really good at picking people to come study here, and so you get a great mix of personalities, poetic styles, ages, backgrounds, etc. There's always a reading somewhere, author Q&As on campus and parties. If you've been accepted and can handle/are interested in everything above, just accept the offer already and come to The Hawkeye State (and help us come up with a cooler nickname).

children's books and "gay poems"

2011-01-28T18:30:00.000-05:00

Poet-blogger Molly has a great post up about children's books and reading to kids. Just yesterday, I read a children's book a friend recommended: Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet. The friend loved the book when she was a child, and it's equally as wonderful for adults, particularly writers, given that the main character is a bat who starts writing poems. The book has plenty to say about the writing process and being a poet. I highly recommend it. Plus, it's illustrated by the super-rad Maurice Sendak.

***

Tory Adkisson, a poetry MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and contributor to the MFA Chronicles blog, posted a link on Facebook today to a poem by Ocean Vuong, a 22-year-old English major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. The poem, up at Lambda Literary's poetry spotlight, is the speaker's lament for his relationship with his father. Early in the poem, the father reacts poorly to the speaker's revelation that he is gay. The poem is full of some really wonderful moments:

"Father, I want to be bad again. / The things I would give, the bodies // I would refuse, to feel your knuckles / relearn the curve of my cheek, split skin / into crimson fissures, to smell your sweat // as you break my bones -- anything / to come as close as we were / when you held your battered boy // in your arms and whispered something / like forgiveness. I do not regret you."

Taken by the poem, I searched for more of Vuong's work. I'm particularly fond of "Paramour," up at SOFTBLOW, and "Revelation," up at PANK.

There's a restraint and quiet to Vuong's work that I find remarkable, and that has little to do with his age, which so many people seem bent on pointing to. Yes, he's young, but the poems exist outside his age. I find the restraint and quiet and precision and emotional tenor remarkable for their own sakes. Vuong has a chapbook out from Sibling Rivalry Press, and I plan on buying it. You should, too.

I also read a post from Vuong about what makes a poem gay. It's a good read. I particularly enjoyed this part:

I am still weary of work being gay for the sake of being gay. Again, as we progress towards more proactive societal change, I feel the idea of sexuality as a commodity must be watched carefully. Nonetheless, a poem is gay when a gay reader can relate to it to some degree. That for me is the bottom line. It is naturally more difficult for those outside of the gay identity to know what is authentic. Therefore it is up to us as gay poets to create work that goes somewhere and does something with sexual identity and not just be mere substitutions of pronouns and sexual organs.

Although this is an important question, I often have to remind myself that the ultimate focus is the poem as a whole. Being a gay writer, I write about the experience I am most intimate with. However, sexuality is a mere vehicle towards the more crude and basic communication of emotion. For example, we can have a poem about gay subjects but those subjects should be employed to explore the more core feelings of love, loss, grief, joy, etc… If we use our gay experience in order to move towards a space where all people regardless of sexuality can identify with, then our work would be successful.

And perhaps we can arrive at a place where we no longer even have to ask this question. Just like how I can read a poem about straight love and be totally submerged and touched in it, I hope straight people can feel the same when reading my own work. Ultimately, I think the matter of sexuality, like all forms of identity, should not overshadow the way a poem affects us as human beings.

While I think I understand what he's getting at, I do have a little issue with the idea that a poem is gay if a gay reader can relate to it in some way, because as Vuong himself later says, gay readers can relate to poems about straight relationships, so does that mean that poem about a straight relationship is then gay? I think that gets us to the point that there is no such thing as a straight poem or a gay poem. Right? Those labels are for people, not poems. It might be splitting hairs, but poems don't have sexual orientations. They might have gay or straight subject matters or gay or straight speakers, but the poems themselves should perhaps not be categorized in such a way. And I think that's Vuong's ultimate point, as reflected when he says, "And perhaps we can arrive at a place where we no longer even have to ask this question."

But again, as Vuong says, it's obviously still important to recognize a particular writer's history and a particular poem's social context, so in that respect, the easy labels "gay poem" and "gay poet" still serve an important function.

And it's really interesting to me, as someone who is both a poet and someone who has recently come out to her family as a gay woman, to think about this when no one ever talks about what makes a straight poem. When someone reads a love poem by a straight male that is directed toward a woman, no one questions whether that poem is simply a vehicle for expressing the fact that the writer is straight. We take the poem for what it is: an attempt to recreate what love feels like, no matter the object of that love.

And despite what I envision as ideal circumstance, I know that so-called straight poems will always be able to evade this kind of conversation merely because we live in a heteronormative society, so the so-called gay poem is seen as "other" and therefore subjected to a different kind of microscopic inspection, and that's okay, of course, if it results in a more open, loving society, but it's difficult sometimes to view it that way. It's difficult sometimes to not just see it as another form of persecution. I know that I should ultimately view this sort of conversation as a way to get to that sort of open, loving society, and I do, but sometimes it just hurts.

Most importantly, though, go read Vuong's poems. They're lovely.

this is primarily for my parents

2011-01-28T17:44:00.004-05:00

You know, in the hopes of making my most loyal readers super jealous. My dinner this evening:

That's bacon-wrapped filet mignon and a sort of hot salad I made up. I broiled some honey-brushed endive, since I don't have a grill. I then sauteed some onions in olive oil, adding carrots and balsamic vinegar toward the end. Once the endive, onions and carrots were done, I combined them and added both the juice of half a blood orange and some blood orange segments. The salad was excellent and actually went really well with the steak because I put A1 on the steak, and A1 has that great orangey flavor. And anyone who knows me well knows that I generally hate when my food combines, but the juice from the steak got in the salad and it was actually really excellent.

Yay food!

joy (of cooking and so much else)

2011-01-20T01:37:00.002-05:00

Classes started on Tuesday. The above photo was taken right outside my office. Frozen Iowa River. Snow. A temperature I'm such a fan of. Prepositions at the end of sentences. Life is good.

I've only hung out with my students once, but they seem pretty rad. Talkative. Energetic. Sarcastic. I hope I can help them maintain their enthusiasm/disgust. I think that's (almost) all I can hope to do.

I'm taking workshop with James Galvin this semester. Five of the poets in 'shop are from my 'shop last semester, and then there are four other poets in the mix. Should be good. We haven't had class yet, due to Monday's holiday. On top of 'shop, I'm taking a poetry seminar on image and imagination, and a Center for the Book class on digital to letterpress design. I'm super stoked about that class.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the endless and possibly stupid but possibly worthwhile conversation about the value of MFA programs, and I just don't understand how anyone could argue against them. I understand why someone would say you don't need an MFA. Of course you don't. But I find myself constantly grateful for this opportunity to just hang out with rad people for two years, write poems, read poems, talk to weird people at bars, have a ridiculous sleep schedule and (hopefully) teach some teenagers that books are cool. I spent four years killing myself at a job that I firmly believe did nothing for humanity, and while I'm grateful for the experience and the money and the people I met and the feeling of accomplishment, that experience cannot possibly compare to this one. I'm not saying I think my poems will necessarily matter to anyone ever, but how great is it to think they might? To have two years to spend most of my time thinking they might? Trying to make them better? Trying to make them better so that someone someday might read just one and think, I'm not alone. What could possibly be wrong with that? And while that might not do anything for humanity either, I think it's getting a lot closer than pushing commas around financial terms ever did.

Change of subject: I love to cook. I'm a big believer in everyone having the capability to cook. All you have to do is follow a recipe and learn some really basic stuff about your stove/oven, so it's not that I think I'm a good cook, by any means. I just really like following instructions. But I've been cooking a lot more recently and getting back into making up my own dishes, on top of following recipes. And I've had some good stuff lately:

Crispy kale, lemon pepper tilapia, garlic roasted purple and red potatoes with balsamic and garlic sauteed onions.

Horseradish mustard marinated boneless pork loin chop over sauteed onions and mushrooms over arugula, topped with an overeasy egg.

There's something about making things, about putting things in particular places, about not knowing exactly where things came from and only half-knowing how they got where they are that makes me really happy. I think this is cooking and poetry and joy.

vacation

2011-01-10T16:05:00.007-05:00

It snowed on Christmas in Virginia Beach. It's usually 50 degrees and raining. We got more than a foot.

I've blogged about this before, my favorite Virginia Beach image.

On the way from my sister's house to Charlottesville.

Chicago from the top of what used to be called the Sears Tower.

I wish I were that brave.

One of my favorite pieces from The Art Institute of Chicago, "Couple on a Bed" by George Segal.

The Art Institute is amazing. Truly. There's just so much there. I spent a lot of time with a great de Kooning, saw tons of really great work by people I had never heard of, saw a few Dalis I didn't really like but it was still cool to see them, saw two Pollocks, Hopper's "Nighthawks" (which is a completely different experience in person), "American Gothic," listened to a seven-year-old girl analyze Picasso's "The Old Guitarist," saw a bunch of Monets, some really awful O'Keeffes, Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte," etc. etc. etc. It was a wonderful experience.

One of my favorites at the museum, though, was a complete surprise to me. I had never heard of the artist or the work and didn't expect to enjoy it, let alone fall in love with it, given that it's a film. The films I usually see in museums are rarely my cup of tea, but "Jerry's" by Tom Palazzolo is phenomenal.

Palazzolo introduces the film here, but I recommend skipping to 2:59, watching the film, and then going back to watch his intro if you're interested. I think it's best to go into the film knowing only that it's about the owner of a Chicago deli in the 1970s.

2010 in books

2011-01-05T12:29:00.004-05:00

2010 was the first year I kept a list of the books I read. I'm definitely going to keep doing it.

For my 2009 round-up (which was based on guessing what I read that year), I wrote that I wanted to read more non-poetry books in 2010. Given that I only read one non-poetry book in 2009 (a book of essays), it was pretty easy to accomplish that half-assed goal. This year, I'd like to improve the quality of the non-poetry books I read. I'm reading Lolita right now (finally!), so I'm off to a good start.

So here's what I read in 2010:

And by Michael Blumenthal

Bird Lovers, Backyard by Thalia Field (for school)

The Book of Ephraim by James Merrill (for school)

Catch Light by Sarah O'Brien (for school)

Cenotaph by Eric Pankey (a re-read)

Daphne and Jim: A choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse by Laurel Snyder (twice)

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic (for school)

The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey

Fig by Caroline Bergvall (for school)

Flood Year by Sara Tracey

For the H in Ghost by Julia Cohen

The Ghetto Exorcist by James Tyner

A Ghost as King of the Rabbits by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn

I'll Scream Later by Marlee Matlin (non-poetry)

I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley

Kindred by Octavia Butler (non-poetry; for school; twice)

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (non-poetry; for school)

A Magic Book by Sasha Steenson (for school)

The Marvelous Bones of Time by Brenda Coultas (for school)

The Midnight by Susan Howe (for school)

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (non-poetry)

Mirabell's Books of Number by James Merrill (for school)

Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker

The Nested Object by Dawn Lonsinger

Prairie Fever by Mary Biddinger

Quantum Lyrics by A. Van Jordan (for school)

Sawdust, Sugarcube by Sarah J. Den Boer

Selenography by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

A 12-Step Guide by Jason Bredle

Worth by Robyn Schiff (for school)

X by James Galvin

Your Time Has Come by Joshua Beckman

And my top five, in alphabetical order:

"I'm choosing this, / and helpless to it, leaning."

- from "Who Are We That We Come from Somewhere Else" in Houses are Fields by Taije Silverman

I wrote about this book earlier. Go here for one of my favorite poems in the book.

"I was so high on Sudafed and whiskey today that I couldn't eat. I got a Coke -- actually five Cokes, as I could refill for free. It's times like this -- dehydrated, exhausted, unable to imagine home -- that your plastic seats, your quiet understandable room, set beside but not quite overlooking the source of real value, offer me a tragedy small enough to want to endure."

- "July 6, 1996" from Letters to Wendy's by Joe Wenderoth

This book is labeled fiction but I see these as prose poems. Each page contains a letter to Wendy's, and the letters are hilarious, disgusting, heartbreaking, insightful, etc.

"Some birds can imitate the sound of pouring water, of a closing door. Others can call you by name, but it's not clear if they are aware that it's your name, which is to say, aware that it is you, the person who left, the person who shut the door."

- from section 5 of "Bestiary" in Noon by Cole Swensen

Yes, I know this is lame given that Cole led my workshop this past semester, but I know she's never going to see this post, so no worries. Eric Pankey actually recommended that I read this book way back in 2005, and I can't believe it took me so long to pick it up. It's fantastic.

"And is this not / in the first person? And was I not wrong? // Always? About everything?"

- from "Dream Anatomy" in Ohio Violence by Alison Stine

So in love with this book, and so excited for Stine's second book, which I believe is out in the next month or so. Also, yet another Pankey connection here, as he was the judge who selected Stine's book for publication. Man has excellent taste (and is an excellent poet. Go buy his books. If you need somewhere to start, I highly recommend Cenotaph).

You can read several poems from Ohio Violence here. And my maybe favorite poem from the book here.

"This far inland, the erotic's only obvious from a distance. This far inland you need something more sexual than dichotomy."

- from "The 1200N Road, Going East" in Prairie Style by C.S. Giscombe (read for school)

This was the second Giscombe book I've read (the first being Giscome Road). I love this guy's work. I think I write in his books more than anyone else's: definitions, responses, questions, equations, pictures, etc. His poems just get me going, and I highly recommend the two books of his I've read.

2010 in music

2011-01-02T12:16:00.003-05:00

As I posted about last year, I make a CD each year of my top songs for the year, not necessarily songs released during the year but songs that were new to me. Due to the time constraints of a CD, I sometimes have to swap one song by a particular artist for another if I want that artist represented on the CD, so the CD is less a best-of CD and more just one of many possible soundtracks for the year.

So here's 2010:

1. "Sunlight" / Tune-Yards / Bird-Brains

2. "Many Shades of Black" / The Raconteurs / Consolers of the Lonely

3. "Girl With One Eye" / Florence + The Machine / Lungs

4. "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" / She & Him / Volume Two

5. "Paper Ships" / Dead Man's Bones / Dead Man's Bones (feat. the Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children's Choir)

6. "Your Rabbit Feet" / Wild Nothing / Golden Haze - EP

7. "Matrimony" / The Avett Brothers / Four Thieves Gone - The Robbinsville Sessions

8. "Broadripple is Burning" / Margot and The Nuclear So & Sos / Not Animal

9. "The Rake's Song" / The Decemberists / The Hazards of Love

10. "Say Please" / Monsters of Folk / Monsters of Folk

11. "Reptiles" / Them Crooked Vultures / Them Crooked Vultures

12. "Broken Clock" / Chris Pureka / How I Learned to See in the Dark

13. "Bird Song" / Florence + The Machine / Lungs

14. "Summer Holiday" / Wild Nothing / Gemini

15. "The Mall and Misery" / Broken Bells / Broken Bells

16. "The Drought" / Horse Feathers / Thistled Spring

17. "Coffre-fort" / Eli et Papillon / Eli et Papillon (Demo)

18. "Undenied" / Portishead / Portishead

19. "The Reeling" / Passion Pit / Manners

20. "Come On Over (Turn Me On)" / Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan / Sunday at Devil Dirt

If I was super fancy, I'd make a file of all these songs for you to download if you're interested, but I'm only mildly fancy, so I'll just let you know that all of these songs are available on iTunes.

super rad

2011-01-01T11:51:00.005-05:00

2010 was really good to me.

One of my favorite journals published one of my favorite poems I've written, dancing girl press published my first chapbook, I got admitted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I went to the AWP conference for the first time, I moved on from my first "real" job, I moved away from all of my family and friends and not only survived but found total happiness, I taught a class for the first time and loved it, I had a wonderful first semester in workshop, and I had an intense two weeks of poem writing in December that I'm really thrilled about.

But I still think 2011 has the potential to be even better.

On the numbers front, I wrote 72 poems in 2010. 72! That's 30 more than last year and the year before. It's also 20 more than the half-ass goal I set. I set that goal before getting into the Workshop, and being in an MFA program is definitely a huge contributing factor to that total. I wrote 18 poems in the first eight months of 2010, before getting to Iowa, which means I wrote 54 from September to December. I wrote 23 in December alone.

I'm really excited for 2011. It will be the only full calendar year I'm at the Workshop, and I think it's gonna be super rad.

Happy New Year!

this life I can't believe I have

2010-12-20T13:59:00.006-05:00

My life is so full these days.

Yesterday I finished drafting the 15 poems in one part of my series of TV poems. I'm thrilled with how they're turning out.

Today my semester officially ended. Final grades submitted. Administrative junk finished. Now I've got four weeks off, though I'll still be working, of course. I've got a syllabus to rework and poems to write/revise for my fellowship application for next year. But it will still be a break.

Tomorrow I'm headed back to Virginia. I'll get to see all of my immediate family, all of my nieces and nephews, a couple of college friends and as many Charlottesville friends as I can meet up with, all of which I'm beyond excited about. But I'll be sad to be away from Iowa, this life I can't believe I have here.

And I'll be missing Stephen.

Christmas Eve will be one year since his funeral. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of his death, and I'll spend most of the day alone in various airports, thinking of him, his parents and sister, our big crazy family that is so much smaller without him.

Tonight and in the very early hours of tomorrow, for the first time since the 1600s, there will be a full lunar eclipse coinciding with the winter solstice.

And I don't care that it's not true: I'm believing it's for Stephen.

goodbye, Lindquist N219

2010-12-15T15:18:00.001-05:00

crazymap

2010-12-13T20:15:00.002-05:00

The 20 TV poems I've drafted so far. The ones on the left of the images are one series, the right another.

I haven't left my apartment in almost 48 hours. I hear it's negative 1 out there.

whose life is this?

2010-12-10T18:42:00.004-05:00

Seven poems in five days. I finally feel like I'm in an MFA program. I can't stop writing. I have time to not stop writing.

My life is so beautiful.

I'm writing a series of poems "about" television. The series of poems is then broken into various other series. I've started work on two of those, one of which was fairly easy to do, but I just busted open the other series this week. Seven poems in five days. Taped all over my wall so I can see it as a whole, feel held accountable. I've now written eight out of the 15 poems in that particular series.

That particular series revolves around a prostitute, television, love, invasive airport screenings, desire, houses, sex, hammers, space exploration, dishes, photographs and pornography, among other things.

SO MUCH FUN.

little 'shop of rad

2010-12-06T23:21:00.003-05:00

Today was the last workshop of the semester. Fucking crazy.

I can't believe it's already over.

The above photo is of our workshop classroom for the semester, in the Dey House. Outside those windows: the frozen Iowa River and papery snowflakes.

I almost always get to 'shop first and arrange the chairs to make sure there are enough at the table. Today I had to clean crumbs off the table because another class apparently had a party and had trouble keeping the food in their mouths. It's little quiet moments like this, wiping the crumbs off the 'shop table when no one is around, that I really enjoy. I obviously enjoy everything else, but it's the little things, you know?

For our last 'shop, Cole Swensen had us all turn in poems we wrote when we were kids/younger than we are now. We didn't put our names on the poems and tried to guess which poem belonged to which poet. Cole thought a certain poem early in the packet was mine because it dealt with "big spiritual questions." But then someone chimed in that while that made sense, I clearly wrote the only poem in the packet about suicide (which was true). Once I said I hadn't written the poem Cole was talking about, Cole had really good reasons to agree with the other person's opinion, saying the suicide poem was really compact and had a twist ending that while surprising was also ultimately organic. Surprisingly (for me), she also said that she was actually moved by the poem and hadn't anticipated its ending.

It was hilarious to have people analyze -- in a good-natured fashion -- a poem I wrote when I was twelve.

While there are certain things I wished could have been different about this first Iowa 'shop experience, I had a really wonderful group of people to work with. I will never forget them, as individuals or as a group, or the experience.

This Midwest life is fucking rad for me.

Christmasfy

2010-12-03T18:08:00.004-05:00

I love Christmas. I love Christmas decorations. Even in my apartment, where there's no one to share them with on a daily basis, I have to have them.

Today, the mailman brought me the quilt in the above photo. Pieced by my mama and quilted by Lisa Burgess, the quilt is called "Christmasfy." I can't remember who made up the term -- it might have been me -- but in my family decorating for Christmas is called Christmasfying.

And now with this new Christmas quilt, my apartment is completely Christmasfied. (Thanks, Mom!)

One of my favorite Christmas decorations is the framed photograph you can see on the table by the tree in the above photo. It's a Christmas photograph of me and my siblings. I look about three years old in the photo, but I'm not sure exactly when it was taken.

It's my favorite photo of the four of us.

month-old moldy face

2010-11-29T02:21:00.003-05:00

After taking this photograph, I stepped on a few of these pumpkins. It felt good. Not the moldy one, though.

I've had a headache since early evening on Thanksgiving.

After stepping on the pumpkins, they didn't break. They just sort of caved. Held their expressions.

This headache is really frustrating and confusing. I used to get migraines in high school, and I've had a few after that, but it's been a long time since I've had one, and this headache doesn't exactly feel like one. But I'm occasionally nauseous, I can't stop eating, and it makes me really stupid. When talking to people, it takes me a while to find the words and when I find them, they're wrong.

And I'm not pregnant, so forget that.

A friend asked me to read a poem in his class tomorrow night and the next, and I was searching for a recent poem worth reading on its own and came up short. I've written a bazillion poems since moving to Iowa, and I don't really like many of them.

What does that mean?

Everything about right now feels wrong. Stephen should be here. Today, well, the today that was a few hours ago, was his father's birthday. Thanksgiving before that. His namesake's birthday (my father) in a few weeks. Then Christmas. It's all too much. It's all not enough. I wish I could ever write down who Stephen was. I wish I knew more about him. I wish he was still here.

I don't want to go home for Christmas, as much as I'm desperate to, because the last time I went home for Christmas, Stephen died.

I should have stepped on the moldy pumpkin.

(untitled)

2010-11-20T02:36:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about Stephen lately.

I've been thinking a lot about thinking lately.

I was exhausted today and fell asleep close to 9 while watching Freaks and Geeks. I thought maybe I could sleep through the night. I woke up three hours later to the screams of drunk guys in the alley outside my bedroom window. "Get the fuck out of my alley, asshole!" Right now, there's a different drunk guy inside my apartment building knocking on an apartment door, screaming things like, "Unlock the front door!" and "This isn't a soup kitchen!" and "God bless America!"

I had to make a change to my flight home for Christmas, and after I made the change, I realized I'll be flying home exactly a year from the day Stephen died.

I can't stop listening to this song:

balance

2010-11-19T14:46:00.003-05:00

The above image is the copper in its last position before it broke into three pieces.

I was the last one to bend it into something while it was whole.

I think that's important.

And now this photo is the copper broken into three pieces but reassembled.

No adhesive.

Just balance.

copper field

2010-11-15T01:59:00.005-05:00

Lots of changes in Iowa. Change doesn't necessarily mean something new. It can also mean recognizing and validating something that was always there. In this particular case, though, it means something new.

My best friend and former roommate came home from work a couple years ago and had this piece of copper in his hands. He said he stole it for me because he thought I might like to use it in my art. I eventually bent it into what I thought was the perfect shape and put it on my artstuff shelf so that I could later attach it to a painting.

I came home from work one day and he had re-bent the copper and was really proud of himself because what he came up with looked fantastic. I was heartbroken but couldn't tell him that he had wrecked my plans.

And he had bent it into a better shape than I had, so why say anything?

When I moved to Iowa, I flattened the copper for moving purposes. When I got here, I re-bent it and set it on a bookshelf. I decided in that moment that if Iowa was going to be about new experiences, I would let anyone who came to my apartment bend the copper however he or she wanted.

It's actually kind of terrifying because certain versions are so beautiful that I don't want to lose them. But I can't see what will happen if I don't allow those changes, that terror.

So here are some of the versions the copper has been in over the last few months.

And also me, I think.

About five or six versions ago, the copper was bent in one spot to the point where it's clear that point will break off before others will. The friend who did it felt bad at first, like he had ruined something.

But it will be okay.

Prairie Lights reading

2010-11-07T20:19:00.005-05:00

At the Iowa Writers' Workshop, we have two Workshop reading series. One is called Talk Art, and it involves one poet and one fiction writer reading their work for 15-20 minutes apiece. The other is called Anthology, and it involves about 10 readers, give or take, with a combination of poets and fiction writers from the Workshop, nonfictioners from the nonfiction program, and sometimes writers brought to the university as part of the International Writing Program. Each reader gets 5 minutes. I read at the most recent Anthology, which was held on Friday at Prairie Lights.

Prairie Lights is a famous bookstore, and so many amazing writers have read at PL. It was weird to read there. One thing that helped is that readings usually happen on the bookstore floor, and our reading happened in the cafe, so that allowed some amount of separation.

I had only read in public one time before this, and on that occasion, in May 2006, I was so nervous my hands shook the papers I was holding, which made my voice shake. At Anthology, I somehow had this superhuman calm and confidence. I think it primarily came from the fact that the audience was made up mostly of Workshoppers, so I knew I was in the company of friends and peers. As much as Anthology is about hearing good work, it's also about supporting writers, knowing how hard it is to read in front of people and sticking around to high-five the person afterwards.

It was an amazing experience amid a series of amazing experiences.

I don't know how long I'll keep this video up here because these are all new poems I've written in the last month, and I might like to revise them and submit them various places, but for now, here it is.

[video removed]

24

2010-10-28T02:57:00.004-04:00

In the 12 weeks I've lived in Iowa, I've written 24 poems.

That's crazy because:

1) That averages to two poems a week, which I haven't averaged in who knows how long.

2) I can't believe I've only lived here for 12 weeks.

3) The poems are so varied.

In terms of #3, I've always thought of myself as someone who wrote many different kinds of poems, even if they're all essentially saying the same things, but the variety in what I'm writing here is even more pronounced, especially given that in the few years before moving here, I felt very much in a writing rut.

I do, however, still feel like something's missing, something large is missing, from what I'm writing lately. I don't know what it is, but I keep trying to write my way in to figuring out what it is.

how your mail improves when you move far away

2010-10-22T16:07:00.004-04:00

The mailman brings you a beautiful gift made by your mother

and the gift makes your living room super rad.

(Thanks, Mom! And Lisa Burgess for quilting it.)

a great day

2010-10-17T04:43:00.008-04:00

Today was a great day. Not a good day; a great day.

It all started because I told a friend last night that I wanted to go see a Jackson Pollock painting that is part of the University of Iowa collection, but because of the floods a couple of years ago, the piece is no longer on campus but an hour away. The friend mentioned that she had a car, which I didn't know, and so we decided to make the trek today to see the painting, as well as everything else in the museum that's housing the homeless UIowa work.

So we went. And brought another friend along. And saw so much amazing work.

But mostly, I saw this particular Pollock.

I've seen two or three other Pollocks in person, but this was an even more tremendous experience. I walked into the room that housed the painting and cried immediately. Not major waterworks, but I cried.

It's so much different in person.

And there were so many other pieces that were beautiful and moving. Being at that museum would have been enough for the day.

But then we noticed a nearby casino. And so we went there.

We each lost some money (I lost the most, at five bucks), but we drank cheap daiquiris and had a ton of fun.

Then we left the casino and headed back to the parking garage. But on the way, we found this skywalk/sky bridge, and so we entered it.

I'm terrified of heights, but it was so beautiful. Overlooking the river. Slanted walls. Wide enough to make me forget how scared I was.

On the drive home, we stopped at a truck-stop on I-80 that bills itself as "the largest truck-stop in the world." They have a dentist, a barber, showers, multiple shops and restaurants, etc. It was insane.

But the best part? The sexually suggestive frog statues in one of the stores.

We made it back to Iowa City, went out for drinks, had some dinner, watched some comedian videos on YouTube and then went to a party, at which, among other events, one of the friends shaved a Fu Manchu mustache on another friend.

I didn't write a poem today. And haven't in days. But it's okay.

I had a great day.

swimming

2010-10-11T03:00:00.003-04:00

It's fall. And 85+ degrees. I loathe the heat. And fall is so beautiful that it's annoying when it isn't accompanied by cooler temperatures.

I know I'll be missing this, to a degree, when I'm stuck in the entirely-too-long Iowa winter, but I don't care. It's frustrating now. I want all four seasons.

I thought I left this shit in Virginia.

But there are certainly other things I left in Virginia, more important things to have left behind. (Obviously not talking about family and friends here.)

And I'm glad to have left them. As much as I moved in my childhood, and as much as I didn't really fret about moving after that, this was a big move, out here to Iowa City.

And a good one. Who knew I'd have to get away from the water to finally learn how to swim.

and yet so near

2010-10-03T22:50:00.002-04:00

And this is Iowa.

You can see one of my bookshelves off to the right. (And it's my poetry bookshelf.) You can see my crooked curtains (No offense, Mom. You did so much better than I could have, and these walls are bitches). On my "dining room" table, you can see the orange folder that contains workshop poems. You can also see the anthology underneath it, which is part of the class I'm teaching. The four plastic bottles and the paint tubes are related to the latest collage I'm working on. And the plate contains the lovely dinner I had earlier: vinegar- and Old Bay-steamed shrimp, my grandmother's recipe for bread, and lemon garlic broccolini. Oh yeah, plus delish Pinot Grigio.

Life is fucking great when you let yourself look at it that way. Even when you're all alone.

I talked with three of my munchkins today. My sister's kids. It's made looking at my computer the rest of the day really difficult because I expect them to be there. And they're not. They're growing up so fast. I just want to be near them. But I have to do what's right for me, and that ultimately will be what's right for them.

But it's still hard. The youngest kept asking if he could come to my house. He doesn't understand how far away it is.

How far away everything is. And yet so near.

sounds ridiculous

2010-09-30T20:57:00.001-04:00

(Part of the list of reasons my students hate poetry.)

It's the last day of September, and I've just written what is most likely going to be my last poem of the month. I've written 12 poems this month. Between January and August, I wrote 18 poems.

Dig.

finally (and so soon)

2010-09-22T22:02:00.005-04:00

Semblance (18x32; collage of paper on canvas)

(Click on the image for a closer look.)

I knew it had been a long time since I completed (or even worked on) a large piece, but I didn't realize it had been since January.

January!

No wonder this piece didn't take me very long to complete. I thought it was just the obsession with Merrill's face and the obsession with this one set of lines from his book The Changing Light at Sandover, but I think it was more that I needed to pour myself into a large visual project. Especially since the last one was Stephen's painting.

I'm really pleased with it and really relieved to have this Merrill business done with so I can concentrate on other things and not have Merrill's cut-up face spread all over my living room floor.

fluidity

2010-09-19T23:45:00.004-04:00

One thing that's really interesting so far about being in grad school and teaching at the same time is that I can't believe I worked the job I did for all those years before I came to Iowa. How the hell did I have the stamina for that job? How does anyone who works at that company have the stamina? Such long hours, so much reading. I'm working hard here, and I think the cold I came down with recently might actually be related to stress/exhaustion, but I'm not working nearly the number of hours I used to work, so it's been interesting to see how run-down I've gotten.

The work is certainly more personal, so that's part of it. The work is also not confined to a structured work day, which is a big part of it. I could work 60 hours a week and feel my brain turning to mush, but I knew what time I was going to work, and I knew when I left the work was over until the next day. Here, everything is so fluid, which is both a blessing and a curse.

It's only been a month, so I have to remind myself of that. A hell of a month. I've experienced so much here in the past month that I can't possibly imagine who I'll be at the end of my two years here. And that's terrifying. And exhausting. And beautiful. Because I'll still be me, just with all of this in me.

it's happening

2010-09-13T00:15:00.002-04:00

The above is just a pile of cut-up Merrill faces. I spread them out so I could see if I want to continue, and I do. I think I might incorporate some of his text as well, mutilated of course.

I have 8-10 more Merrill faces printed out but not cut yet. It's going to take a while given all the schoolwork I have to do, but I'm excited about it.

Iowa is pretty gnarly

2010-09-04T02:10:00.000-04:00

facing Merrill

2010-09-01T18:45:00.002-04:00

This Merrill project is so happening.

But first, I have papers to grade.

dust jacket

2010-09-01T00:30:00.006-04:00

So I had my first real workshop this week, though I wasn't up. The group of students/writers is wonderful. There are some very different aesthetics (which is something James Galvin said was so great about Iowa when he called to tell me I got into the program), and it's great to have that in the classroom. Really. It's also incredibly overwhelming. To be surrounded by so many intelligent people (brilliant) who are devoted to poetry but at the same time who are devoted to perhaps different aspects of poetry is beautiful and intense.

We turn in poems every Wednesday, and I'm up for the next workshop. I fortunately had a burst of inspiration several days ago, so my piece is ready to turn in, but tonight, after hours upon hours of reading James Merrill and knowing I still have to crack his crazy Ouija board book early tomorrow morning (because I can't handle what it will do to me tonight), I can't stop thinking about the comments my classmates made on my first poem (We get written comments each week regardless of whether we're up). What was most interesting to me is how many of the comments could be applied to my own life. In undergrad, while I took many workshops and was surrounded by many bright people and received many worthwhile comments, it rarely broke into that sort of realm. The two comments from my first poem that I can't stop thinking about:

From a poet who, among other things, has a wonderful ear for music (and is a musician): Formally it's very interesting. The form is trying (like the speaker) to make itself stable but always one step (or syllable) behind.

From another poet: I wonder if more great things wouldn't happen if you indulged rather than simply effaced.

My life, no?

On (perhaps) a different note, I have huge issues with James Merrill's face. I bought his collected poems a couple of years ago because it was on sale for 6 bucks at this crazy book fair, but I never cracked it. I knew I would at some point, but it has just sat on my bookshelf since I bought it. The only times I've touched it were to box it up for various moves and (most importantly) to remove the dust jacket. James Merrill had a beautiful face, but I couldn't handle him staring at me from my bookshelf. I ended up buying his selected poems for the Merrill class I'm taking, and the book is a paperback. I can't remove the cover. He just keeps staring at me. I have a feeling one of the first art projects I'm going to take on in Iowa will relate to his face. I really want to cut up a bunch of his author photos and do something with them.

at some point, it's got to get ugly

2010-08-29T20:26:00.003-04:00

(Dey House porch)

(Outside my office. Iowa River.)

Iowa

2010-08-22T12:23:00.004-04:00

Long time no blog.

So I'm in Iowa. The move was a pain because my movers sucked. But that's over and done with, and nothing got lost, and nothing important got broken. Moving on.

I love it here. It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville. I love my apartment. I have met so many wonderful and brilliant and funny and warm people from the Workshop. Etc. etc. etc.

Classes start tomorrow. Another first-year asked me yesterday if I was excited about the first day of classes, and I told her no. I'm excited about the semester, the next two years; the first day is just a formality. Plus, I start teaching on Tuesday, and all my excitement and nerves are focused on that.

But bring it on. I can tell that so much over the next two years will scare the shit out of me, so let's just get on with it and see what happens.

and it's not even about birds

2010-07-29T17:01:00.009-04:00

I leave Virginia on Wednesday. I've had a good month here, getting to spend a lot of time with my brother's daughter, who I hadn't spent much time with since I moved to Charlottesville. I lived close to my sister's kids when I was in Charlottesville so I saw them more. It's been really great to get to know my brother's daughter again. I'll miss them all more than I can say.

July has been really dry in terms of writing because I've been working on planning my lit class for the fall, but in the last two days I've written two poems, and I'm really happy with them. The one I wrote today I wrote about 15 minutes ago. About 20 minutes before that, I was cutting up the plastic rings that go around a six-pack of sodas and thought about how I do that even though I hate birds.

Boom. Poem. And it's not even about birds.

I love when that happens, and it's been awhile.

I imagine the next time I update this, it will be from Iowa. Bananas!

they had a dog that was really a bear

2010-07-14T11:09:00.003-04:00

(leaving Charlottesville)

Whenever I move into a new place, my dreams get really exhausting. They start to get more detailed, more everything. With this move, I was nervous that the dreams were going to start about a week before I left Charlottesville and then last until I had been in Iowa for a week or so. Thankfully, I didn't have any of my moving dreams in Charlottesville. I think I had my first one last night (I'll be on a plane to Iowa in three weeks).

As soon as I woke up this morning, I wrote this:

Brendan, Bronson and Bronwyn (9, 7 and 5). Their mother was late thirties, early forties. They had a dog that was really a bear, and it walked really slowly on all fours; it seemed like it was dragging its back legs rather than using them, though.

The mom had written like 10 books of poetry, most of them with "love poems" in the title, but she hadn't finished most of the books, so she decided to collect them all into a best-of kind of book. She did have one book that was finished and published, and it looked like a kid's book for adults, sort of like Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love. And it had a section at the end that was handmade; she had written the poems (in her horrible handwriting) on different colored construction paper. Not really sure what the point was as the paper wasn't in any kind of interesting shape, wasn't supposed to be folded into anything, didn't have any pictures on it.

The mom was recently split up from the kids' dad; it had been six months. The way she talked about it at first, it sounded like it had been years. I met her on the downtown mall in Charlottesville. I saw her husband first. I was sitting outside at a restaurant that doesn't exist, and her husband was performing on a giant piece of cardboard. He was dancing, almost as if he was tap dancing without tap shoes. He wasn't good but he was really earnest. You could tell he was homeless.

Then a guy, who also looked homeless, came up and started dancing with him. The new guy at one point put his face on the other guy's crotch and then they decided to go off and have sex in a nearby bathroom, but they wanted a condom first, so the guy who had come up to the dancer decided to ask people sitting nearby rather than spend the little money he had on condoms. He ended up coming up to the mom and her kids and said, "Excuse me, ma'am, do you have a condom?" And she seemed embarrassed to be asked that in front of her kids but said that yes, she had one, and she gave it to him.

I was watching the whole thing from the next table over and she just started talking to me about it after he left, saying the other guy was her ex-husband (well, still technically her husband as the divorce wasn't final). The kids seemed really detached; I couldn't decide if they knew what was going on around them.

Somehow and for some reason we end up at their house with the bear dog. The house was on a ton of land. The backyard was really complicated and they had a huge garage where her dad took me to show me some car engine that was apparently some kind of secret. At some point, the mother and I are talking and she's telling me about the books/manuscript and I realized she had no legs below her knees. I can't remember exactly how it happened but her husband was responsible. He had some kind of psychotic break and got violent and that was why they were apart but she still loved him and you could tell being without him was worse for her than being without her legs.

I remember then some kind of waterskiing with the kids. The grandpa was driving the boat and it was like we were supposed to be waterskiing but instead we were all just wearing life jackets and hanging on to something extending from the back of the boat. I feel like the kids were getting weirder (none of them had spoken a word the entire dream) and I remember feeling excited that I knocked them off the back of the boat, like I had made the world safer for just that moment, and then the grandpa started driving really fast and turning a lot and I was clinging, clutching, and then my dad woke me up.

Dreams are fucking weird. I know where parts of this came from, like the kids' names. When I was trying to fall asleep last night, I went through the alphabet and tried to come up with as many names as I could for each letter. I fell asleep while doing the Cs. I also watched Best in Show last night, and the grandpa in the dream was totally an older version of Harlan Pepper. That's probably where the bear dog came from, too. Everything else? No idea.

fire on what

2010-07-13T13:13:00.003-04:00

The new issue of Bone Bouquet is up and these three poems are pretty rad:

"Fire Season" by Erica Goss

"On Being an Aquarist" by Rachel Mallino

"what monster" by Kristy Bowen

I can't stop listening to this song:

it'll doodle

2010-07-05T14:31:00.006-04:00

(colored paper and glue on paper)

It's been a really long time since I've painted or doodled or collaged. I was trying not to create more things to move to Iowa. And then I packed up my art supplies.

But a day after getting to my parents' place in Virginia Beach, I wandered around searching the house for things I could cut up or draw on. I found myself sitting on my niece's bedroom floor pushing pieces of her construction paper around.

So the next day, yesterday, I woke up and walked to the super awesome art store that's only a mile from my parents' house and bought a bunch of paper, glue and Sharpies.

It's not the same as painting but it'll do for now.

(marker on paper)

reeling

2010-06-29T18:07:00.005-04:00

A tree fell on my roommate's car. His 1991 Subaru that keeps taking lickings and keeps on ticking. We had a crazy 10-minute storm the day the movers came to get my stuff. The movers came in the morning and that afternoon the tree fell. I asked my roommate if that's a sign I'm supposed to leave or a sign I'm not supposed to leave.

The above photo is of most of my stuff before the movers came. There's about ten pieces of furniture missing and a box or two, but there it is. As much as it sucks to pay for movers, it was pretty damn amazing to watch them load everything up in under 45 minutes and know someone will unload it all in Iowa.

On the poetry front, I'm working on several poems and have been for a while now. It's really frustrating because a few of them are entirely fictional and I'm having a hard time finishing them. When I get stuck on an autobiographical piece or a mostly autobiographical piece, it's solely a matter of figuring out the words to get moving again, but with the fictional poems I have to figure out what the story is doing on top of figuring out the words. Not to mention there's an autobiographical subject I'm dying to tackle but have no words for, so that's really the poem I want to be writing and I think it's distracting me from the fictional ones. I think my brain is just divided too much right now. And I haven't painted in months because of the move so that doesn't help either. I have no where else to go creatively.

Soon enough.

bullshit

2010-06-16T17:53:00.004-04:00

I think everything is bullshit. Is that depressing?

I packed up all of my photos a few weeks ago, and today I came across a photo of Stephen on Facebook (the above photo) and lost it. What is it that makes us mourn people we didn't even know that well? If you counted up the hours I spent with Stephen, it'd add up to probably about a week. Maybe a little more. But I'm so angry that that's it. He was so smart, so hilarious, such a smart-ass, so sweet. And he was my family. Before he died, I emailed him to say I would fly him down to Charlottesville to hang out with me and my brother, who he was incredibly similar to, and I never heard back from him. I'm mad at him for not responding. If he had responded, I would have gotten him down here in a second and then my last memory of him would at least be more recent. Why is that important?

I think everything is bullshit. Is that depressing?

After I lost it earlier, I wrote a poem, one I had been thinking about since yesterday, an ode to an embalmer. Initially, it started out as an ode to whoever embalmed Stephen because I think that's an insane job and whoever did it in this case, quite frankly, did a great job. I spent an hour and half researching embalming yesterday and almost threw up. Seriously.

So I lost it earlier and started writing the poem and as poem-writing tends to go, it ended up veering from the autobiographical and instead turned into a love poem to an anonymous embalmer who embalmed the speaker's lover. I'm really very pleased with it.

Thanks, Stephen. Wish you were here.

peaches and meme

2010-06-13T11:48:00.004-04:00

January O'Neil posted this meme yesterday (and several other poet bloggers have followed suit) and I'm bored so deal with it.

1. What's the last thing you wrote?

A six-line poem that is either done or only just beginning.

2. Is it any good?

I think it is. It's pretty different for me, and that might be why I love it. I'm just having a hard time telling if it's done because I didn't have a narrative planned for it when I set out, or any kind of plan for it, so I'm not sure where it's supposed to end up.

3. What's the first thing you ever wrote that you still have?

A short story I wrote with my best friend in second grade. The story involves us being twins, naturally, and a silly moral.

I don't have the first poem I wrote but if I'm remembering it correctly, I wrote it in elementary school during computer lab. We were asked to write a poem as part of the typing lesson and mine was called "Wishes Don't Come True." So serious!

4. Favorite genre of writing?

Duh.

5. How often do you get writer's block?

My thoughts on writer's block are like my thoughts on the existence of god: At this point in my life, I don't really care. You can believe in it if you want, but I'm done debating it. Some days I believe in it and some days I don't and it's not really important anyway.

6. How do you fix it?

Hammers and glue.

7. Do you save everything you write?

I save everything that I decide is finished or worth keeping around to steal from later.

But yes, I have a filing cabinet full of my middle school, high school and college writing. I go back and forth on burning all of the poems I wrote when I was 12 (and 13 and 14 and 15) but I hang on to them for some reason. Maybe it's for the sweet JNCO references.

8. How do you feel about revision?

That's like asking how I feel about writing.

When I was younger I didn't revise. I wrote until I was done and that was that. In college I was forced to revise for workshop and I really struggled with it. I'd make changes and they would be good changes, but I couldn't get myself to a place where I could step outside what I had already written. In the four years since graduating I've figured out how to get there. Now when a poem doesn't come out mostly whole, I know that I can revise it later and that the revision will usually bring out what should have been there in the first place.

But that's not to say that I think revision is always necessary.

9. What's your favorite thing that you've written?

Today it's "Epic."

10. What's everyone else's favorite thing that you've written?

The feedback I get tends to be on the degrees-of-separation prose poems like "Epic" and the ghost biographies.

11. What writing projects are you working on right now?

No projects. Just trying to write poems.

12. What's one genre you have never written and probably never will?

I will probably never write a play.

13. Do you write for a living?

Right now I don't do anything for a living.

14. Quote something you've written, the first thing to pop into your mind.

"the dirge and wail of an octopus / lovesick over a coral reef lovesick / over a jellyfish skeptical of the sun, / its burn"

- from "No. 2," which is in This Room Has a Ghost

high life

2010-06-07T10:05:00.007-04:00

(last-day gift from one of my reporters)

Today is my first should-be-a-work-day-but-it-isn't day.

Just shy of my four-year anniversary at my job, I'm now happily unemployed in preparation for the move to Iowa. I've got a couple weeks left in Charlottesville, a month at my parents' and then it's off to Iowa.

Holy shit.

walking it off

2010-05-30T14:52:00.002-04:00

Things I'm enjoying right now:

* The poems "Walking it Off" by Adrian Blevins and "Renaissance Coffee & Tea Company, Throwing Knives After Dinner" by Jon Schneider in the Summer/Fall 2010 Gulf Coast.

* Knowing that I only have four more days left at work.

Horse Feathers

2010-05-23T21:20:00.002-04:00

I went, at the request of my roommates at the last minute, to see the band Horse Feathers a few weeks ago. It was a great show by a band I didn't know, intimate show in a tiny venue. Here's their encore: a cover of "Orphan Girl" by Gillian Welch:

diggin' the new diode

2010-05-22T11:51:00.002-04:00

The new diode is up. Diggin' the following:

"worst case scenario" by Kristy Bowen.

"Alarm" by Anna Journey.

"Who Will Bury Me?" by Therese Mattil (and the preface to the issue has a great story to go with that poem).

some of my favorites from the latest Barn Owl Review

2010-05-17T21:40:00.004-04:00

The latest Barn Owl Review is really good. Super good. Stupid good. Good good good. Buy it and be happy.

Here are some of my favorite lines from the issue (the ones I could easily excerpt, that is. There were some poems I just want to reprint in their entirety, but I won't):

An owl / hovers in mid-air. Each night / there is another. They improvise / a roof. They keep / the stars from burning.

- Brent Armendinger

The mosquitoes are drunk with the love / we left in our veins. I want to tell each of them a story. I want to recreate whatever // it was I forgot.

- Adam Clay

Repeat / the word learned, third grade / math: remainder. We are ourselves / what's carried.

- Weston Cutter

I needed the back porch, where the right gust of wind always knows the way I like to comb my hair. I needed the nearest empty parking lot: where a man can shout the word fuck and be sure to mean it.

- Peter Joseph Gloviczki

Don't get me started on the moon. All those nights / watching its slow wink. Rebound guy of the night's / horizon.

- Susan Grimm

I run your reverb / through my wah-wah, turn all your periods to colons; I slant, / if I rhyme at all. I am here, in this deviance, and I am trying / to help you find me. As if you were trying to find me.

- Kimberly Johnson

You buy new chairs and want to sit / in all of them at once. You have to remember / what was said and understand what you / remember and this takes longer than / you have.

- Marc McKee

Two secrets / linger between us, though one is a lie // I'll tell to keep the other company.

- Sarah Perrier

What is the heart but another / mouth to be fed?

- Sarah J. Sloat

It turns out: I am only a mouth / inside a mouth inside a mouth.

- Ruth Williams

(And can I just say the last two excerpts appearing consecutively like that is doing funny things to me right now?)

just watch it. the whole thing.

2010-05-15T14:04:00.003-04:00

The House Floor - Christian Friends from Michael Murray on Vimeo.

The House Floor's website

the good kind of bullets

2010-05-10T20:01:00.005-04:00

What I have on repeat:

The poem "Observer Program Operations Manual" by Leigh Stein, up at InDigest.

The song "Broken Clock" by Chris Pureka. This live version is really good:

Maybe worth mentioning:

I finally signed up for Goodreads.

The move is finally scheduled, which feels amazing. It'd feel better than amazing if not for the pricetag. Yikes.

Poetry Book Giveaway winners

2010-05-01T09:50:00.004-04:00

And the winners of my drawing in the Poetry Book Giveaway for National Poetry Month are...

Molly Spencer and Ron Lewis!

Molly has won a copy of my chapbook, This Room Has a Ghost, and Ronald has won a copy of Steven Blaski's Keep the Killer Asleep.

I've got Molly's email address, so I'll be able to reach her to get her mailing address, but Ron didn't leave his email with his comment on the initial post and he has no Blogger profile. So Ron, if you see this, please leave your email in the comments. If I don't hear from Ron in the next week or so, I'll select another winner for Steven's book.

Thanks to everyone who participated. At Kelli Russell Agodon's original post on the giveaway, she's got 50 giveaways listed, with all of them offering at least two poetry books. And my giveaway alone had 43 entries.

And yet people still insist no one cares about poetry anymore.

Edit: Never heard from Ron, so I ran the random number generator again and Sandy Longhorn is the new winner. Congrats, Sandy.

Sandra and The Grey Matter

2010-04-30T22:11:00.008-04:00

I heard Sandra Beasley read from her new book I Was the Jukebox on Thursday here in Charlottesville. It was a great reading. One of the best things was that a high school creative writing class showed up. They had used one of Sandra's poems as a prompt that week, with their teacher scratching out certain nouns and the students being tasked to replace them, so then their teacher brought them to hear Sandra read. The students laughed when lines were funny, clapped louder and more often than most people do at poetry readings, asked Sandra to sign their writing notebooks. It was great.

And a poem:

Last week, I went to see my favorite local band. It might be the last time I see them before I move to Iowa.

A song:

(The sound isn't the greatest because I recorded it on my digital camera, and they had a technical problem at the end, but it's still great Grey Matter.)

ya dig?

2010-04-27T14:08:00.005-04:00

So it's been awhile.

Things I'm enjoying right now:

The poem "Big Box Encounter" by Erika Meitner, up at Slate (including a reading by the poet).

The poem "The Lightkeeper" by Carolyn Forche, up at The New Yorker.

Things I'm not enjoying right now:

Learning the prices of things like professional movers, mattresses and box springs.

Speed-reading novels to try to pick one to teach this fall under an intense deadline.

Speed-reading said novels during earnings season at work.

More things I'm enjoying right now:

That this is my last earnings season at work.

Knowing I'm going to a reading on Thursday.

Knowing Iowa will be here eventually.

sex at AWP

2010-04-13T11:49:00.007-04:00

One morning at AWP, I was set to attend a particular reading. But like pretty much every time slot at the conference, there were four other events I was also interested in attending. It was quarter to 9 and I was headed to the convention center, proud of myself for even being awake, when I decided at the last minute to attend a different reading.

The panel was called "Writing Sex: Implicit Censorship in Contemporary Poetry." The listed panelists were Jan Beatty, Dorianne Laux, Aaron Smith, Wanda Coleman, Sharon Doubiago and Bruce Weigl. I've heard Dorianne Laux read before but had never heard (or even read) any of the other poets. The topic just sounded fascinating and something told me to go that reading instead of the other.

As it turned out, Wanda Coleman and Bruce Weigl weren't there, and they had asked Stacey Waite to fill in at the last minute. I really love Stacey's chapbook love poem to androgyny, so it was a fun surprise to have her on the panel.

The reading was one of my favorite moments of the conference. I really enjoyed each reader, laughed, was moved.

Highlights:

* Jan Beatty's poem "I Saw One of Blake's Angels." You can read and listen to Jan read it here. Love love "her mouth the only o in prophesy."

* Dorianne Laux's intro to her poem "Vacation Sex."

* Aaron Smith's hilarious commentary. Also, his poem "Appetite."

* Sharon Doubiago's haunting poems "My Brother's Keeper" and "Crucifixion," which I unfortunately can't find online.

* A man in the audience asking during the Q&A portion how he could write about sex as a straight man without sounding misogynistic (and I thought, Just don't be a misogynist) and all of the panelists looked at each other, and Stacey finally said, "Well, since I guess I'm the straightest man up here, I can field this one." Hilarious.

* Hearing Stacey read "Butch Defines Feminism Under the Following Conditions," because she read it very differently than it sounded in my head when I read her chapbook.

you know, an AWP wrap-up, or whatever

2010-04-12T22:20:00.016-04:00

(Stuck at the Cville airport after a scary attempted take-off.)

Ah, AWP. What can I say.

It was a pretty righteous first experience with the conference. I feel like I didn't accomplish enough while I was there: totally missed the one reading I was super stoked about attending (Carolyn Forche, Cate Marvin, etc.) and a flight issue prevented me from attending another, but I also made a snap decision to attend one reading over another and had an amazing experience, got to meet two great poets/people in person (here's looking at you, Brent and Mary), bought a nice stack of books and journals, and had a great time with my infinitely cool conference roommates.

(Book fair haul.)

The altitude definitely affected me, as did the general being away from home-ness, but I'm really glad I went. I got to eavesdrop on many a poet-nerd conversation, attended some great readings and had a good time. I also feel more prepared for the next time I attend. Hopefully I won't be too broke to attend next year's conference, particularly since it's in D.C., which is close to some old stomping grounds.

(The bear outside the convention center, which I named Henry; the bear, not the convention center.)

It was definitely sad to not have a dancing girl press table at the book fair since I got to experience how amazing that can be for a book/press and it would have been really awesome for my little chapbook to participate, but ah well; shit could always be worse.

So, sad to leave you, Denver, but man am I glad to be closer to the sea, even if it's still too far away.

not exactly about NaPoMo

2010-04-06T10:19:00.004-04:00

So it's the sixth day of April and I still haven't posted a thing about National Poetry Month. And this post won't rectify that either.

My vacation starts today (yay!), and I've got to pack for AWP (double yay!), and AWP is at least related to poetry, even if I'm not going to say anything intelligent or interesting about it right now.

But I do have some music to share:

"The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid" by The Decemberists.

The video itself isn't good, but this live version of the song is amazing. If the music isn't your taste, be sure to not give up on it at least until you've heard Shara Worden's vocals, which start just ahead of the 2 minute mark. Chills.

Houses are Fields of Prairie Fever on the way to Iowa

2010-03-24T21:55:00.009-04:00

So I managed to get to a few events at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Heard good readings by Taije Silverman, Hayden Saunier and Eric Pankey. Bought Silverman's Houses are Fields and finished it tonight. Very sad, very ghostly, lyrical collection. I enjoyed it very much. Also read Mary Biddinger's Prairie Fever tonight. That book is like a body of evidence for a crime you can't name and aren't sure actually happened. Hypnotic.

On a non-poetry front, moving a longish distance is exhausting -- and I haven't even really started. My brain hurts.

in which my chapbook resembles a badly drawn bird

2010-03-20T14:48:00.003-04:00

It's here! It's here!

Poetry Book Giveaway for National Poetry Month 2010

2010-03-15T10:19:00.017-04:00

EDIT: THIS DRAWING IS NOW CLOSED.

Kelli Russell Agodon has come up with a great idea for National Poetry Month this year: A poetry book giveaway. Participating bloggers will be giving away two books of poetry; one can be the participating blogger's work but the other must be a book they love that was written by someone else.

Go to Kelli's blog to find all of the participating blogs. This is just getting started, so check back often to find all of the giveaways.

Here's what I'll be giving away:

1. One winner will receive a copy of my new chapbook, This Room Has a Ghost.

Sample poems from the chapbook can be found at the White Whale Review and Reimagining Place links to the left.

2. Another winner will receive a copy of Steven Blaski's beautiful book, Keep the Killer Asleep.

I've posted about this book before, and it's a tremendous collection; to read one of my favorite pieces from the book, click here. You can also read four more poems from the book here.

If you're interested in winning either of these books, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post between now and 11:59 p.m. ET on April 30. I'll choose the winners on May 1; if you don't have a blog, please be sure to include an email address where I can reach you if you win. I'll be using a random number generator to select the winner.

Good luck! And don't forget to check in at Kelli's blog to see what other bloggers are giving away.