Confessions

Blog, forgive me; I've been neglectful. It's been 4 weeks since my last post. Either my life has been too full to take the time out to post, or the opposite and I have nothing to say to you all. I'll post more. I promise to try better!

**

Lately, I've been reading poetry that's less concerned with narrative elements or has less of a situational backbone. Although its influence hasn't yet surfaced, I think it'll be good for my work. I rely so (too?) much on narrative in my poems. I'm also trying to fill the gaps in my reading list, poets I should have long ago read. I'm reading A.R. Ammons and Gertrude Stein for the first time in my life, Dear Reader. Can you believe that?

**

I landed a summer job teaching creative writing in NC for gifted teenagers. It's nice to push back unemployment by another 8 weeks.

**

I'm participating in another poem-a-day challenge. More than halfway through, it's hard to tell what I will end up working with once the dust settles. So far there's 3 or 4 poems I'm excited about, and if that's all I get out of the month, it will be a month well-spent.

**

On Valentines day, Glitter Tongue launched: a collection of 30 love (or anti-love) poems from queer and trans writers. I'm proud to have a poem included.

**

Spent a long weekend in Athens with Brandon. We made a gourmet vegan dinner that took hours and hours but was absolutely glorious. We also saw a pair of black bears.

Quinoa, avocado, and sweet potato timbale with roasted tomatillo dressing.

Artichoke ricotta tortellini with saffron cream sauce.

Black pepper shortcakes with blackberry basil sauce and cinnamon cream.

Poetry Is Hard

Poetry's been hard lately. I'm sure that has something to do with the end of the semester, but it's no excuse. When I am able to write a poem, I feel good about the work, but my productivity is slowing down quite a bit, which feels like a standstill coming off poem-a-day October. Perhaps my creative well is waiting for rain.

**

I finished grading my students' long poem. No one told me that by assigning a 10-page poem to 13 students that I'd have to read and comment on 130 pages of poetry in a week. But it hardly felt like work; my students this semester are so talented.

**

There's been a call for submissions to send "G-rated" poems to an Eat Local, Read Local festival in Milwaukee. My students have asked me to read a poem of mine at the class reading which we'll have on our final day together. All this has brought to my attention that my poems which make some reference to sperm much outnumber the poems which do not make some reference to sperm.

**

I found out that Poet Lore has nominated my poem "Shank" for a Pushcart Prize. I'm very humbled and honored. They have also asked me to write a post about the poem for their blog, which I'll link here when it goes live.

**

Dear Blog, have I told you I decided not to apply for PhD programs this year? I have decided not to apply for PhD programs this year. My heart just wasn't in it. I'm not completely ruling it out in the future, but I know what sort of steam it takes to roll through a doctorate program, and I think I just need to want it more than I do right now. I sent off some fellowship applications, but in all likelihood, I'll be moving to Georgia, finding some work there, hopefully still writing poems on the side, living with Brandon, and petting his three cats, and that all sounds great to me.

**

Also, Brandon and I celebrated our two year anniversary this past Thanksgiving. I'm a very lucky guy. The luckiest, I reckon.

On Quitting & Pillow Cases

This past October, some poet friends (and friends of friends) and I have been partaking in a poem-a-day challenge. I just sent off my 31st poem! I've tried doing the April challenge a couple of times and I usually end up quitting just over the halfway point, so I'm glad I stuck with it. It was a good exercise, and although half of what I wrote was utter crap, the other half is pliable and something I can keep working with. Some of the better poems I wrote this past month were on the days I wanted to quit, and would've quit if I hadn't felt the responsibility to write something down, and that's a good lesson for me.

**

Recently had some poems taken by the editors of Cream City Review and West Branch. Many thanks to them!

**

Halloween is here, and it's one of my favorite holidays and it comes in one of my favorite months. I've always loved costume parties, and I've always geeked out by dressing  as superheroes. This year I wanted to go as Robin (as in Batman's sidekick), and I wanted to sew most of my costume myself. Here's a roundup of some superheroes I've been in the past, and this year's final product:

Batman, 2005. Made from heavy-duty trashbags and a mask found at Reny's

Superman, 2006. Made from clothes I already had

Robin, 2011. Made from compression cloth, spandex, pillow cases, dish washing gloves, and American Eagle underpants

**

Brandon will be back in Madison in just over two weeks, and I couldn't be more excited.

Beltane Cleansing

Last night, my household celebrated Beltane, the pagan holiday that celebrates the first of May and includes a cleansing ritual, fire, wine, and human sacrifices. With no spare humans to sacrifice, one of my housemates decided to burn drafts of her thesis and I decided to burn all my rejection letters.

I don't know why I kept onto my rejection letters for so long, but ever since I started getting them, I've saved them. I suppose that I was attempting to humble myself, or keep a log of nice notes, or have some physical record of failure, but mostly, I kept them because I always have. Now that most of my rejection letters come via e-mail, the pile has lost most of its sentimentality. So at this point, I just wanted to get rid of the damn things. The Beltane fire offered a rather dramatic way to do it. The drama was only heightened by a fire dancer who came over and did her thing, which looked a lot like magic.

*

The semester is nearly over, and so is my MFA. I turn in my thesis this week, and after not touching it for the last month or so, now I have all these ideas as to how to change it. I came to the conclusion that many of the new poems may actually still belong in the first manuscript, so now I want to break it open, add the new ones, take out some others, and reorder it all again for something like the 12th time.

National Poetry Month has come to a close, and the first half of the month was much more productive than the second half. All said and done, I missed eight days, but it's more optimistic to say I got 22 poems out of it,  which is great, even if most of them are pretty early drafts.

*

I really love the way Theodore Roethke's poem "The Lost Son" opens:

1. The Flight

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time. 

Some Thoughts in April

It's April 19th (my father's birthday, in fact) and I woke up to freezing rain and a layer of snow. Apparently, spring will never arrive.

After 15 days of participating in the poem-a-day challenge without fail, I've hit a minor wall, which is due to two things: 

1. My teaching responsibilities suddenly spiked at the same time my short story was due for fiction workshop, and
2. I wrote a beast of a poem (1300+ word, three-page draft) on Saturday that I'm excited about and all I want to do is chisel at it and revise and not draft new work. So I don't feel too badly about the challenge. It's not as if I'm watching youtube videos all day long instead (although, I am fond if this one). Since Saturday, I've winnowed the poem down by almost 200 words. I worldled (wordle.net) this newest poem and the three words that appeared the most often were: doe, father, God. Sounds about right. 

Kay Ryan wins the Pulitzer, as did one my favorites, Jennifer Egan. Also, last night Billy Collins came to Madison to read and I am endlessly charmed by him. 

Things I'm looking forward to: 50 degree weather; farmer's market; books by Lauren Berry, Seth Abramson, and Tracy K. Smith to drop soon; student presentations; and collecting signatures to recall Scott Walker this fall. 

Lastly: 

A tremendous number of people also write poetry. If you want to determine how many, simply let the person sitting next to you on an airplane know that you write poetry. If you make them feel comfortable enough, you can bet they'll regale you with some of their own verse. Of course, these poets are "untrained," so they're probably not worth listening to--which might be an attitude you'd find inside the academy, where training is the necessary credential for access. Outside the academy, nobody cares. Those people aren't writing for audiences and adulation; they're writing for themselves, maybe their families, maybe some friends. And that is awesome.

--Charles Jensen, "The Lost Poets," Dream of the Unified Media

Can I hear an Amen?

National Poetry Month

We're knee-deep in National Poetry Month, and I've been chugging away at the NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) Poem-A-Day challenge. I've decided against using the website's prompts because I found that the end product wasn't anything I was excited about working on.

The poems, by and large, have been quite rough, but I've mostly been able to get to a point where I think there might be something there in each of them, something worth chiseling out at a later date. Maybe May will be National Poetry Revision Month.

As per Bri Cavallaro and Rebecca Hazelton, I'm making a list of the poem titles from this challenge. The dash indicates those lucky days when I was able to get two. This is so that you, dear reader, can use this as guilt ammunition.

1. Thaw
2. Old Men Truly Older Now
3. A Duck's Head Is Hard to Explain
4. Husband 
5. Black Horse
6. Radio
7. What I Couldn't Say: Nor'easter
8. The Weary Body Breathes as One / Speak Low, the Spirit is With Us
9. We the Corporeal Dozen
10. Whitetail Country 
11. You Too Have Been This Divided
12. Carrion in the Fly Dawn
13. Two Hundred Degrees / Go North, Old Man, and Die

Dreaming of Commas

Happy National Poetry Month! Like many, I'm writing a poem a day, no matter how bad they may (will) be. I used to do this religiously when I first started my MFA but at some point I stopped. A good quarter of my book came from that time, and I'm hoping this month I'll generate a lot of new work for the next project so that I can stop obsessing about the little things in my current one.

Last night I had a dream that if I were to swap the order of two clauses (just two!) in one of my poems, my book would suddenly work and then it would be done. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up, I knew exactly which poem and which two clauses I had dreamed about. And sure enough after I switched them, the poem was better for it. There's nothing more I love about writing poems than the tinkering and trimming, and I very much believe knowing exactly where to drop a comma (or where to take one out) can make a poem more or less successful. But I also think that if I can edit poems in my sleep, then it might be time to start sending it out.

Which is what I did! I sent out the book (the thesis, the pile, the stack of poems--whatever you want to call it) to its first contest. And so begins what I suspect will be a very long road paved by rejection slips and self-doubt and a jackpot of contest fees, but I'm okay with that. I've been talking to a lot of people who've been through the process to gear myself up for it.

It's a beautiful day in Madison. Some measure spring by when the birds first return, but I measure spring by the return of shirtless joggers, and I can say with full confidence, "Yes, Wisconsin: spring is here!" It's hard to believe that just yesterday we had a wet onslaught of snow. But the sun's out, people are sweeping their sidewalks, the garlic has sprouted, and the ice on lake Manona has broken. The last snowpile in Madison lives next door to me in Olin Park, and it will be my great pleasure to watch it die a slow and agonizing death over the next few days.