Literature of the American Apocalypse

Green Mountains Review is waiting.

Check out The Great American Pinup

It's been around awhile, and it's still right where we left it.

Sestina: Bob

This is an amazing sestina. It's by Jonah Winter. Find it here in Ploughshares.

Still Waiting

It's ok. My flight leaves at 5.

Waiting in the Reno Airport

The shuttle dropped me here at 1. I'm on my way home from Squaw Valley Community of Writers. If you ever have a chance to attend, do. It's a rare experience. Each writer in attendance is expected to bring a new poem to workshop/meeting every day. Bob Hass, on the first day, making quotation marks in the air as he spoke, referred to SVCW as "Poetry Boot Camp."

I had my doubts, worried that I might be entering a culture of inexplicable praise, but it was highly effective, the right amount of pressure combined with the right amount of help and well-thought out praise.

I'm lucky to have a good writing community where I live, but truly, Squaw Valley was a completely different kind of nexus. I've never been at the confluence of so many talented poets all of them urging one another forward to the brink of the poem, and on.

For a week we most of us lived and wrote in a large Squaw Valley resort house. The house where I lived for a week housed nine poets. In no particular order, my housemates for the week were: Ted Lardner, Jolie Clark, Greg Randall, Eliza Rotterman, Jill Bergantz, Steve Masamilla, Sara Wallace, and Zanni Schauffler. Primo Primavera also made an appearance. Their presence made me a better writer. I've rarely had such a productive week of writing. If I were a better person, I would have been more emphatic in thanking each of them for the help they gave me.

In fact, this has been one hell of a good summer. In Lincoln, at the Nebraska Writers' Conference, I finally came to understand the way poetry books are supposed to work, and there I also made some new friends, good writers all. Don, Stella, Nancy, Howard, Todd, Suzanne, Ann, thank you guys, too!

Is Bee Flight Possible?

More amazing to me than the flight of bees is the flight of extruded aluminum tubes. I'll be getting into one of those tubes tomorrow. Will return next Saturday. In the meantime, check out the "Request to Be Edited" in the sidebar.

I'll be in California. Do they have internet in California?

Pet Peeve

The Pushcart Prize web site explains the nomination process:

"Little magazine and small book press editors may make up to six nominations from their year’s publications by our December 1 deadline. The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot. Editors may nominate self-contained portions of books — for instance, a chapter from a novel. We welcome translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing. One copy of each selection should be sent. No nominations can be returned. There is no entry fee. We also accept nominations from our staff of permanent, distinguished Contributing Editors."

Six nominations per editor! Plus nominations from contributing editors! Holy moly! That must make for thousands of nominees every year.

No wonder almost everybody who's a writer has been nominated. And while it must be fun to have an editor nominate your work, it's hardly seems worth mentioning in a bio or c.v.

Saloon Pantoum

Kathy Fagan

Luis Alberto Urrea

He has a blog.

Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

I like the way this old Dodge Festival blurb about Mark Doty begins.

Series of Photos

Any Questions?

Surrealist Compliment Generator Meets Ange's Anagram Generator

SCG:
The green paint on the walls much clouds my thoughts of flying planks.


IAG:
Doughty scuffling plank smoothly loathes repentant welshing chum.

In your presence even a batallion of body builders could pass the New York State driving exam.

Another from the Surrealist Compliment Generator.

Here's one from me:

Windshields open into broken-toothed jaws as we pass through your presidency.

July Rejections Are Arriving

Cortland Review 8/21/05, rej 7/3/06
The Journal 3/22/06, rej 7/12/06
Blackbird 9/3/05, rej 7/14/06
Cimarron Review 5/1/06, rej 7/14/06


August still looks good, however. Still no rejections for August.

Maybe I need to send some more poems out. Things are starting to slow down.

Trout Flight

Wrote a poem recently about a trout stuck in a tree. Led to research that included finding this:

Is bee flight impossible?

Anybody know how long a bee can survive in a freezer?

Mark Doty's Web Site

http://www.markdoty.org/

William Carpenter

"Girl Writing a Letter" by William Carpenter

Carpenter's poem "Rain" is the third poem Stephen Dunn cites in his essay "Bringing Home the Strange." "Bringing Home the Strange" is collected in Walking Light.

Carpenter teaches at College of the Atlantic in Maine. One of the courses he teaches is called "Creative Reading: Poetry as Ecology." You can find a brief description if you browse around in the "Girl Writing..." link.

Sort of Funny

If you ever have to do improv with radio disc jockeys, pretend you're drunk. I guess it makes sense that they would have taken pictures.

The show was actually pretty fun to do. I got to perform with my old friend Tom. You couldn't tell while he was on stage, but he was a pretty freaked out the whole night. About half an hour before the show he had a fender bender involving the company van and motorcycles and police and threats of beatings and threats of jail. We thought we'd have to go on without him, but Tom came through. He always does.

Adam Hammer

I don't know if you can still get Adam Hammer's 1978 book of poetry Deja Everything, but you might want to contact Lynx House Press and try.

Light Emergenc--

Assignment/Exercise

Take two image-heavy poems you've written and fit their lines together as you would if you were lacing the fingers of two hands.

Poem number 1


Poem number 2



Lines folded together


Now go back and cut and add and change to make the new poem work. Does this new poem now have any unexpected leaps?

Performative Photos?