Self-Portrait with Crayon

H_NGM_N has my review of Allison Benis White's Self-Portrait with Crayon up at their site.

The editors there do excellent work. I'm still exploring the issue...they publish PDF chapbooks. PDF chapbooks, man. Also, how cool is their From section, which publishes whole groups of poems or excerpts from a series or longer work.

And Matt Hart, a poet I always enjoy, has a poem about flamingos, people who love love and of whom he loves, and "the terrible pink sky."

Poem Draft

Another one from the series. This one will come down soon, too.

Once upon a time

planes, trains and automobiles held us
within their dream
of partial annihilation. Ellipses
of ourselves. One heart. And then two. We
were always sped along in one
of them. Her warm hand knotted in mine.
Or my hands in my lap at thirty-
thousand feet, or hers in hers on the train
to and from the airport. And she and I were
sped through Nospace
with badly drawn pictures of each other
bumping along in our heads entubed
in aluminum
…And, suddenly, I would see her
there, exactly where clocks and hearts
beat out Nowhen sealed inside both
the world’s grandest and blandest city.
My face contiguous with hers in her
eyes. Our embrace rocks us, impossibly
together and apart,
like a wave locked within a particle.
A hand waving hello as we say goodbye.

A stack of poetry books

I just finished A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight by Hadara Bar-Nadav.

Soon, I will turn to one of these:

A Model Year by Gina Myers

Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino.

O City by Wayne Miller

Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina

poem draft

Here's a draft of a poem for the series I'm working on...the series is called Notes for a Memoir...

Gone...

Edip Cansever

What a great poem. Can't wait to read more by him.

pole vaulting skills

HTML Giant has this fantastic entry on moves in contemporary poetry. They're so right on. These are the trends. Sadly, I blindly follow more than half of them while writing. It's probably best to break some of these habits once conscious of them.

Headlines

I finished reviewing Allison Benis White's Self Portrait with Crayon. It will be in H_NGM_N's next issue.

Wrote a decent poem with drop lines the other day.

Audrey will begin crawling any day now. At five and a half months, she smiles at strangers and grabs everything. She would eat pizza, drink wine and coffee, and talk on cell phones if she could.

Danna and I found the BEST baby-carrying contraption. It's called an ERGO (see picture).

My farflung, online writer's group will meet up this summer in late July. I'm pretty excited to meet everyone in person. My vote for location is Baltimore. We'll see.

My pal Phil Estes has a poem up at Frigg.

After six months of drinking dark roast coffees exclusively, I'm giving light roasts a chance.

Plain Spoke

I just got an acceptance from Plain Spoke. The poems I've seen in this journal rock and are close to my aesthetic, so I'm psyched to find out they wanted a poem from my Notes for a Memoir series.

Here's what New Pages has to say about the little journal.

"the world exists nowhere but within us"

I've really enjoyed the prose poem sequence from Rilke in the fall issue of The Paris Review. He wrote it as a 22-year-old...such strong juvenilia attests to his possibly being the best poet of the 20th Century.

I love how this passage moves between the metaphors of engraving a watch or compass (with the verb "etch") and plowing a field (with the noun "furrow") to situate the always already here presences of these personages:

You cannot hold anything against this calm and tranquil occupation: the story of Zoroaster, that of Plato, that of Jesus Christ and Columbus and Leonardo and Napoleon and many more, did need to get written. In other words, these stories wrote themselves, so to speak. Every one of this cast of characters etched a furrow in the great gray brain of the earth, and we all carry a miniature reproduction of this archetypal brain within us, like a pocket watch or the small round pill of a compass that shows where the sun rises over a worthy citizen’s belly. (the italics are mine)

What a masterful move. You have to hate him a little.

Headlines

Got two poems picked up by Main Street Rag.

Am excited to review Self-Portrait With Crayon by Allison Benis White for an online journal. Her poems defy expectation in the most genuine way.

Am officially in a music rut. Need new music. I miss new music. Recommendations?

Having drinks with Phil tonight. Phil writes poems and takes the writing of them as seriously as I do.

Like most people, I'm looking forward to eating too much turkey and pie.

Will start a workout regimin soon.

A Complaint

Okay, I'm so bored with poems about Odysseus. For that matter, can you think of a duller topic for a poem than Greek myths? Sure, Sissyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity is a powerful metaphor, but who wants to reimagine it in a poem knowing it's a thinly guised comparison to the poet's cycles of expectation and disappointment? You can count me out.

Sometimes you feel like a list

1. August Kleinzhaler. New to his work, I have recently read and enjoyed his Sleeping it Off in Rapid City. His lines build neighborhoods of complexity one concrete image at a time. He's unaffraid to drop in pop cultural artifacts and strange personal references (take, for example, Stinky Phil, a bully from his New Jersey childhood). His verse moves down the page so effortlessly...he not only makes the making of a poem look easy but he also makes brilliance look easy. A couple of years ago he openly criticized Garrison Keilor's wholesome Lake Woebegone approach to poetry: “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.” This sealed the deal for me.

2. Richard Buckner. His 2006 album Meadow sounds like this late autumn landscape's orange, brown and gray in the muted light. To mix metaphor,the songs comb the beaches of loss and heartbreak. The lyrics scuttle along like shells in a low tide, the waters of his gorgeous voice pulls one image out of the sand only to cover it with another.

3. 2009. It will come to an end in 56 days. If you count 2000 as the first year of the new millenium, we have worked ourselves a decade into the century. If you're old like me, you might agree that this is the first decade that has passed with the swiftness of a couple of years.

4. Sufjan Stevens. He has finally given up on his 50 states project. I don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that he has worked through this delusion. While it was an obviously impossible undertaking, we have to be glad his psychiatrist held off on prescribing lithium for as long as he did. The Michigan and Illinois albums were like these grand middle school independent study projects. Something we had learned from and have proudly kept over the years.

5. Midtown Kansas City. Needing more space and a landlord willing to make repairs, we have moved back to Midtown after having lived in neighborhoods to the Northeast for the past year and a half. Again, I'm digging Midtwon's mashup of decay and splendor. An abadoned redbrick colonade here and a well-kept shirtwaist there. The sleek highrises along the Plaza boulevards with excellent views of the crumbling Midtown infrastructure. Not one but two Lexuses idling in a left turn lane. A man posted at the tip of the traffic island with a sign that reads "Out of work. Out of luck. Everything Helps." It's all good.

Out on the weekend

New to UMKC's new MFA program, but not in a workshop this semester, I don't really know any of the other candidates. Except for Phil Estes, who I met at a party at the end of the summer, five days before my wife and I had our daughter. Which is to say I was, in some ways, a different man six weeks ago.

Phil and I had beers Friday night at Chez Charlie. Seated along the wall to the right of one of the dartboards, we had the place to ourselves for the duration of the first two cans of beer. Phil is from Dayton, OH, so we talked about Midwestern cities that might have been grand. Phil writes poems that some might categorize as experimental, so we talked to great lengths about certain experiments we admire and others we don't so much. We did so with little excess noise. And with relatively little danger to ourselves. Then the tables started to fill up with loud talkers. Loud talking leads to louder talking, of course, and soon we had to nearly yell our shop talk. Then, to add anxiety to annoyance, the dangerously bad darts players showed up. One woman took pride in her drunken throws. I mean, she was throwing her darts toward the board as if they were steak knives meant for the torso of her most recent ex-husband. The darts that did not pierce the faux wood paneling behind my head rained down at our feet. A balding man, I kept imagining one achieving a perfect score. It wasn't such a big deal, I guess. But it had been six weeks, six weeks since Audrey's birth, since I'd been out for drinks with a friend. Right now, my life needs a little more danger in it.

white envy

Teaching, grad schooling, and caring for an infant, all on 3 to 5 hours of sleep, ain't no joke, son. Life is full but good. Fall has been kind to Kansas City--maybe it's just my sleep deprivation, but the weather has moved along more seamlessly this year. No hot spots in the middle of a week of crisp air. The next two to three sentences are neither here nor there. But our most enviable neighbors, in a of show seasonal abundance, have lined up nine pumpkins, several of which are heirloom, along the brick railing of their gorgeous redbrick colonnade. The colonnade porch overlooking their gorgeously landscaped herb garden and flowers. We watch this couple head out, childless, for a stroll to the River Market, or roll away in their Honda Element around dinnertime, and since they're roughly our age, it's tempting to imagine ourselves the way we were before. It's tempting to hate them a little. But we're not hateful. Envious, yes. Envious with a generous pinch of admiration. The Russians called this shade of envy White Envy.

I wonder if they envy our present source of bliss:

Reviewed (sort of)

The Spring '09 issue of Tar River Poetry, which includes my poem "To Take Them From the Air," is up at New Pages. The reviewer liked my poem, which made my Monday shine.

Neither here nor there, but what a good experience with Tar River Poetry! Luke Whisnant, the editor, has been so professional and kind.

Saturday

Just back from the city market with an opulent spread of fruit--grapes, blueberries, bananas, peaches. And a bag of peppercorn linguine, made locally.

It was a good walk down Pacific Street, over to Missouri Street, past the community garden, through Columbus Square to 5th Street and the crowded market place and back. Hot today. I had woken early to water the garden and plants, feed the feral cat, Ms. Kitteh, and then I sat on the balcony reading from Nils Michals' first book, Lure (Pleiades press, 2004). Gorgeous poems with sudden, striking images that, with graceful turns of phrase, pin complex, almost pre-verbal emotion to ordinary external correlatives. Here, for example, Michals presents the sort of contemplation of life's wonderment in the face of mortality that might befall mourners at a burial:

Waiting for the body to lower,
the family stares at the priest
or into the sea of pressed black clothes.
New white roses with such furious architecture,
the edges spiraling in.
So apparently simple,
like flight or cloud spreading through water,
movement we no longer question.
Still, the family waits,
there is something else entirely--
a bird, a rustle,
the entire flock startled,
each heron shaping into its slicked wing,
hitting the roofless blue.

(from "Burial Procession")

After putting away the groceries, I read Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Poetry Daily has a really clever poem up by Sara Peters called "Babysitters." Can't wait to read more poems by her.

2008

My favorite poem of the year comes from the anthology New European Poets (Graywolf Press, ed. Miller & Prufer). The collection, worth a billion times its weight in devalued dollars, introduces poems from European poets who have not had significant publication in the U.S. Organized geographically, the pages trek eastward through the usual European nation states and switch rails to cover the varied poetries found in the lesser read countries to the east. The last sections fly the reader back west along a northern latitude, if you'll excuse the Lonely Planet Guide analogy, to present poems from the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, and the British Isles. In no hurry, I've kept the book next to the reading chair in my study since July, wandering through to a new section every couple of weeks. I keep returning to this gorgeous little poem, though:

Mornings on the Ground

To accept the day. What will come.
To pass through more streets than houses,
more people than streets. To pass through
skin to the other side. While I make
and unmake the day. Your heart
sleeps with me. It wraps me up at night
and the mornings are cold when I get up.
And I'm always asking where you are and why
the streets no longer are rivers. At times
a drop of water falls to the ground
as if it were a tear. At times
there isn't ground enough to soak it up.

--Rosa Alice Branco, translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

Alec Eiffel! Alec Eiffel?

Wow, I'm going to be a father in August!

Now we're obsessing over baby names, prenatal care, early child development. And we're considering parenting styles (as if you can order them on-line). Danna likes the name Alec Eiffel if we have a boy. You know, as in the title and refrain of that great Pixies song?



As in the name of the architect who dreamed up the towering, derrick-like icon of American Romance in Paris?



I don't know about Alec. Naming our son Alec Eiffel would pin him to several child-archetypal categories worthy of severe beatings. Especially if he's a smart kid who reads too much. Which he will be! I'm so excited!

For a cleverer consideration of the naming process minus the flip tone, visit Alexis Orgera's page and read this entry.

R.I.P. T.S. Eliot (Hound)

Last week Danna and I made the difficult decision to have our beloved Boston Terrier, Eliot, put down. Wracked with anxiety, he had been living a miserable existence. Neighbor kids throwing a football around, for instance, would terrify him and send him, all teeth and claws, into a Taz-like fury at the windows and glass front door. Whenever we left the house, he would nip at us and throw his little body against the door as we slipped out and locked up. And we couldn't have friends over--he bit one of Danna's friends on the nose once as she leaned in to pet him.

Still, he brought so much joy to our home. Boston Terriers, with their short snouts and huge eyes, are known for their human-like facial expressions. Sometimes, when sleepy, he would look like our little boy who needed tucking in or another song sung to him. Other times (which was every time we watched a movie on the couch) he would lock his eyes with ours, giving us the most serious look you can imagine to demand we play fetch or tug-of-war. I know this will sound irreverent, but his prominent brow, intense, unflinching eyes combined with his mustache-like jowls connoted the face of Friedrick Nietzsche or other Wiemar Era men whose walrus staches underscore their soul-beholding stares in the old photographs:







We got Eliot from a breeder in Clinton, Missouri, two and a half years ago. When we first talked seriously about getting a Boston Terrier, Danna and I had just returned from a multi-city trip to Chicago and NYC (where I proposed to her), where we had seen more than several of these handsome looking dogs, strolling the sidewalks of Logan Square & the East Village, dressed in tuxedos. They were gregarious little creatures and had these adorable perpetual smiles on their faces. Danna wanted one, and when we got back home, she did some research and learned they were the perfect city dogs due to their small size, minimal need for exercise, and preference for living indoors.

I happened to mention that my wife really wanted a Boston Terrier at the end of class one day that fall, and one of my students mentioned that her aunt breeds Bostons and English Bulldogs. She said she could 'hook us up' with her aunt the breeder. We didn't know what to look for in a dog, much less did we know what to look out for. For instance, upon arrival we noticed that the breeder kept the Bostons in the same pens as the English Bulldogs, which should have sounded the first alarm. The dog she recommended to us seemed healthy enough, but he had scratches on his pupils, which she claimed were superficial, and he was already six months old (alarms two & three). The breeder rationalized this last fact for us with a simple-enough explanation: "He was the runt of the litter." Danna loved him right away; I liked his looks and loved how inexpensive he was: at $150.00, this broke-as-a-joke teacher would not find his fiance a better dog for less. Soon we learned that the scratches weren't in the least bit superficial. He had cataracts. Soon we realized that he hadn't found a home not because of his runt status but because of his eye condition and his less than ideal socialization. Despite his problems, we bonded with him, and soon he was our baby.

Our first six months with him seemed comparable to experiences everyone has with puppies. He quickly acclimated to our apartment at the edge of one of Kansas City's noisiest entertainment districts. We took him on long walks around the neighborhood, where we introduced him to children and passers-by. We visited the dog park and the pet store, it seems, once a week. He wasn't aggressive at first, only fearful, pinning his big ears back and tensing up whenever someone came within proximity of him. One day on the patio of the neighborhood coffee shop, though, he growled at one of Danna's friends. This was pivotal.

At around the same time as the earliest signs of aggression, he took up his post as house sentry. Whenever someone walked down the sidewalk, he manned the armchair facing the window and barked and whined. Over time, this guard dogging behavior turned into acute anxiety. Hearing the slightest noise, he would register it as a threat, often leaping out of sleep on the couch to growl and bark from the windows, pacing the length of our apartment with tears staining the fur around his eyes.

Needing help, we rented the first two seasons of The Dog Whisperer and indoctrinated ourselves with Cesar Milan's behaviorism like a new religion. He had to sit or lay down before eating, receiving a treat, or leashing up. On walks, Eliot trotted at our side or just a pace behind our footsteps. We blew Casar's Sch, Sch! attention-grabbing sound from our teeth and parted lips like pros whenever he got anxious over a noise. Carrying ourselves as the alpha dogs worked in some contexts: he seemed more disciplined and compliant around the house, and our walks around the block were more efficient than before.

But his watch dog's aggression soon transferred itself to other situations. On walks, Eliot began lunging after passing trucks and bicyclists. We had to start avoiding pedestrians by steering him across the street to the adjacent sidewalk. When we took him to Arkansas for Thanksgiving two years ago, he nipped at my brother as he leaned in to pet him. That winter, he began nipping the shins and hands of friends as they entered the apartment. He growled at them and bared his teeth. His growl had grown deeper and more serious, which alarmed us.

Still, our dog wasn't aggressive toward us. He was affectionate if not more than a little needy. He always had to be in a lap, for example. I called Danna the Lady with the Lapdog , and soon our baby talk voice for him developed into a unique dialect of English.

Unlike his aggressive tendencies around people, Eliot's interactions with other dogs were merely fearful and therefore awkward. Face to face with a dog, he reminded me of Melville's Bartleby. As the dog approached him and attempted to interact, Eliot's body language all but said I would prefer not to. At the dog park, we would have to encourage him to play chase with the other dogs. Too skittish to play, he would either stand back and watch, or move in and sniff their equipment. Most dogs just ignored our little gentleman, overdressed as he was in his black and white tuxedo. Some dogs, though, seemed offended by his aloofness (if you'll excuse this slip into complete anthropomorphizing) and singled him out for abuse. Once a miniature pinscher tried picking a fight. Another time, on a crowded Saturday morning, this Greyhound-Pit Bull mix from hell, intent on roughing him up, chased him through a slalom-like course swerved between the field packed with dogs and people. (He won the race, by the way, and in his single shining dog park moment earned the attention and praise of all in attendance.) The last straw was one spring afternoon last year when a Great Dane chased him, placed his giant paw on his back, and rode him into the grass like a linebacker sacking a quarterback's failed sneak along the sideline. Afterward, we marked the dog park off of our list of outdoor activities.

One day I came home from work to find Danna on the stoop in tears. "When you go inside, don't look at him," she said. "He's been bad. He bit our neighbor on the face...he drew blood...we might get sued and they might make us put him to sleep." It turned out that the neighbor had been drinking heavily, which explained, in turns, why the guy felt the need to lean in and put his head next to a strange dog's, why his superficial cut bled so much, and why he never mentioned the incident. A week later, Danna scheduled a behavior consultation with the leading animal behaviorist in Kansas City, a solid professional who often answers pet questions on KCUR's Up To Date. The behaviorist confirmed what we already knew: Eliot suffered from extreme anxiety, which caused him to react to strangers approaching him aggressively. He prescribed Prozac and recommended several behavior modification exercises we could practice while at home and on walks. Several months passed with minimal improvements. The watch-dogging reached a new crescendo. And he was still aggressive toward pedestrians. At the next consultation, the behaviorist increased the dosage of Prozac to a level often used to treat dogs twice his weight. When the increased dosage did not improve his anxiety, the behaviorist switched Eliot to the canine form of Paxil. Months passed. Still, there was no improvement.

[I'll post more later.]

Sean Hill was in Kansas City over the weekend to give a reading promoting his first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. After hearing him read and spending some time talking with him, I'm really excited to read the book, which is a series of poems excavating the Wright family lineage and post-Civil War race relations in his hometown, Milledgeville, GA (incidentally, Flannery O'Connor's hometown). Good friend Wayne Miller, friends with Sean since their MFA days in Houston, had recommended the book back in February. But I had a giant stack of new poetry books to work through and couldn't afford to order the six he recommended.

But the reading went so well! Filling the auditorium at the Plaza Library, I was proud of Kansas City. Sean read his gorgeous poems, more than several of them written in form, traditional and invented. He read one, a new one, called "Penumbra" whose ending had the most seamless associative shifts from image to image that I've come across in months. Here's the first two sections of "Words like Rivers", from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor:


Words Like Rivers

1.

At bars we banter over brown liquor,
Irish Scotch Canadian—
none of these my people.

Whiskeys, brown with undertones—
reds and yellows—
arranged behind bars.

All I want is a swallow,
but I just broke this bottle.
Lord all I need’s a swallow,
but I done broke my bottle.
Broken bottle blues—wallowing
in them broken bottle blues.

2.

Black men bibulous—
bilious like me belching
the morning after whiskey—

stream words like rivers
and families riven over
centuries.

My old lady’s yellow
and round like the moon.
I say my lady’s full
and yellow like the moon.
And Lord I can’t afford her
and that baby due in June.

He, Wayne, Jeanne (Wayne's totally awesome gf) and I had drinks at Wayne & Jeanne's after the reading. Sean's company proved solid as his poems.