Of Looking At A Blackbird

Islands Apart

2008-05-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve been terrible about blogging. Blame the fact that, as Eavan Boland puts it in an essay I loved in the current Poetry, “Whether we like it or not, the contemporary poet is increasingly skill-based. Or expected to be. He or she can — or should — lecture, lead a workshop, run an introductory class, teach composition, write a review, give a conference paper [and blog!]. But there is always a fraction — even if it’s just a small minority — of poets out in the world who don’t want to do any of these things. If there’s a conversation, they’re having it with themselves, with their own poems. They don’t want to extend it, share it, structure it. They are private, inward, and dissociated from the skills on offer or in demand. Once I thought there was a broad tolerance for this. Now I’m not so sure.”

Meanwhile, we’re finally moving next week to our “new” home across the Bay! “New” is in quotes because it’s the home where I grew up. You can see the booties we’ve been ordered to wear to protect the newly refinished floors. Just wait till our cats move in, though: you won’t catch them in no damn booties!

Sunset on daffodils = yellow

2008-04-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

Greta in the tall grass (Brooks Park)

2008-04-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

Squirrels and Turtles and Ducks ...

2008-04-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Oh my! Well, sorry bout that. Not much profundity lurking in this noggin of late. Yeah, I'm depressed, and yeah, what else is new. Didn't sleep very well last night, but this morning, as it's Friday and my day to work at home (instead of commuting an hour+ to Mountain View), I didn't get up in the dark to walk pooch, but took her by car to Stern Grove-Pine Lake.

Spring has sprung. Small birds zipped around. (For all I know, it was the same bird!) You could hear, though not see, an industrious woodpecker. The ducks were paired up, the turtles, a whole bunch of 'em, stretched their necks all the way out as they sunned on a log. Greta, whose squirrel-hunting days are over -- was very excited by their scent nevertheless.

It was really very lovely. Fluffy stuff, like snow, blew on the breeze.

Slut for Sound

2008-03-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Haven't had anything terribly profound to post -- but really, why should that stop me? Life has been, well, not very stressful for me (way less stressful than last year at this time), but somewhat difficult -- physical things, irksome things that are not worth talking about, but take up a great deal of time and brain space all the same.

But I want to talk about poetry. C. Dale asks "What makes us choose what we choose when we write?" My answer is definitely music. I don't think that's such a great answer, but it's my answer nonetheless. I play by ear, that's all. More than images, more than ideas, I'm a slut for sound -- and often the beat and vowel sounds will fill my ear even before the words are shaped. Strangely, this is not only what gets me writing poetry -- although it's a heightened experience for poetry. As I'm typing now, I hear the shape of the words before I know precisely what it is that I want to write.

Which is to say that it isn't necessarily gorgeous sounds that I seek -- no, that seek me. Rather, they are like chords that needs one note behind them that insists on being played. I think I may be a victim, more than most, of sound worms. A theme song I hear on the radio on the way to work will be in my mind for a week or more. More than that, in a compulsion almost like Tourette's, words take shape in my mouth and need to be uttered. These words are often names I hear: Moktada al-Sadr, Sylvia Poggioli, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- all, regardless of who they are, that are like candy in my mouth.

There's an answer.

Wild! Check This Out!

2008-02-27T19:38:00.000-08:00

This is so wild! Take a look:

http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

There used to be a group in SF (called the Cacophony Society) that would do off-the-wall things. Don't know what happened to them. Maybe (sigh) they grew up. So half of what intrigues me here is that the people who did this did it in Grand Central Station in NYC. Very cool. And interesting how unnerved people got. This could almost be considered subversive, dangerous.

In other news: In a Salon article this evening, I came across the headline:

Headless Body in Topless Bar

It cracks me up. Okay, life hasn't been much fun lately. But Spring is coming, and I'm jazzed. Hehe. I want to write a poem with this title!

Vanishing Point

2008-02-14T14:59:00.000-08:00

Hey, I've got a poem in Blackbird.

Weasels

2008-02-14T09:29:00.000-08:00

And a happy Valentine's Day to you. This quote, by Matt Groening, was in this morning's Chronicle. "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

I have the Fever -- Post-AWP Sick As Dog Post

2008-02-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

Don't know where that expression came from, but my dog is in much better shape than I am right now -- except that loud coughs and sneezes spook her and she's keeping herself out back. I have the fever, sore throat, the works, and by now, even with the honey tea, my chest feels like it was scrubbed with a copper scrubbee. I've been like this since I woke up at home on Sunday.

Still, I'm hesitant to stay out of work another day. (I dragged myself in on Monday and Tuesday, but today I just couldn't.) John brought me home some Japanese vegetable udon (noodles) from the corner before he went to his Advanced Photoshop class.

Since it's been this long, don't know if it's worth posting my AWP impressions, but here goes: It was interesting to be in New York, and even though I've lived away from it longer than I lived there, I had all these atavistic memories, like the dried brown leaves along the roadway and the water seepage in the subways. Then there was the each-person-for-himself drivers, the body slam I got when I hesitated on a corner trying to decide which way was east -- apparently I was in her way -- the person declaiming to himself/the entire baggage carousel that if he heated his house that hot, his wife would beat him with a baseball bat. Ah, New York!

The conference itself was fun but might have been more fun if I had a home base, an organization where I belonged. Oh there were a few people/organizations who said come and see me, and there were the celebs whom it was fun to see -- Bly, CK Williams, Billy Collins, others. And hanging with Robert, as I said, I was made to feel at home where he was welcome. I saw Greg Rappleye, as he mentioned, and C. Dale, who I don't have to go that far to see. I saw Paul Guest from afar, but he was always surrounded by admirers, and I doubt he knows me. I wish I saw Eduardo. We could have talked about Upstate NY -- I went to school in Rochester. Snow anyone?

I'm happy I stayed in the Hilton. When it just got too much, I could always go up to my room and take a break. I think the rate I got was half price -- and anyway, I just stayed for two nights. That was okay -- I'm not much of a party girl, and the music was loud!

Aside from Robert and Greg's panel, I went to and enjoyed the Graywolf one and the one on UltraTalk Poetry. David Kirby is a blast, and he looks like Steve Martin. If his poetry were ultra-serious, that might be a problem, but as it was ...

On My Way Home

2008-02-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

Will be boarding in five minutes. But it's going to take a long time to process everything that happened here in NYC at AWP. No big news, but a lot of encouragement. Mostly it was fun -- including, maybe especially, seeing my buddies Dennis and Billy from high school days and eating at an amazing Korean restaurant in the East Village. Robert and I hung out a lot, and that was great. I met a great many people. Oh, boarding.

Off to AWP

2008-01-29T22:24:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm going. I'm working all day tomorrow and not leaving until 11:00 -- on the redeye, but I'm going. I figure I will be in the air 10 hours and in New York, from touchdown to takeoff, a total of 37 hours. (I could only take so much time from work, and even at reduced conference rates, could only afford two nights at the Hilton.) I am looking forward to my Hilton stay. I mean I can't remember the last time I had a bathroom all to myself.

Well, other than a spiffy bathroom and a room of my own for two nights, why am I going? Hell if I know. It's just I figured if I were ever to go to this thing, I might as well go to it the year it's in NYC. I'm from the New York area, though after 31 years in SF, the Big Apple (do they still call it that?) is only a dim memory. I mean, the twin towers were only there a few years before I left. I guess I'm hoping to make the acquaintance, if only in passing, of people I know in print or on blogs. I'll go to Robert and Greg's panel. I'll sneak out for drinks with a couple old friends. And then it will be time to return. Maybe I'll meet someone who will ask me to send my manuscript. Maybe not.

Kitsch: Thought for the Day

2008-01-16T08:48:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross and was struck by this in a chapter on the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius:

“Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. Nicolas Slonimsky once put together a delightful book titled Lexicon of Music Invective, anthologizing wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces were compared to feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a Lexicon of Musical Condescension, gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as kitsch, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.”

Pink Ocean

2008-01-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

I really should fire up my work computer and see if there's any work for me. I am glad to be home! I did take Greta out in this storm this morning. My jacket kept me dry down to my thighs. The rest of me looked and felt like I'd slipped into the Bay. So I'm not any too anxious to shower and get all wet again. I'm sitting here at the table, dawdling over a second cup of coffee.

I just read the Stuart Dybek piece in the new Poetry. They call it "fiction," because it isn't really comment, though it's in their Comment section, and it's not shaped like a poem. But it is the most incredible piece of writing I've read in, what, years? Ages? I can't think of an appropriate hyperbole. It is absolutely wonderful. It has so many levels -- the aural and oral and tactile and visual and psychological and critical (as in literary) -- and narrative as well.

I don't know if it's on their website. Wait, I just checked. It is called: Pink Ocean. Read it now!

End of day / End of year

2007-12-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Last of the winter light here in the living room, John and I sitting on the sofa, reading our Christmas books -- mine, Di Piero's Chinese Apples , John going though Salgado's Africa. I like Di Piero for his combination toughness and vulnerability, his originality, the tighness of his lines. John loves Salgado's photographs but says this one is a hard book to browse through, "rips your heart out." He stops to show me this one, and this one. "Look at that; nobody can match him; he's the best there is." The dog is lying between us, old girl, snoring/purring away. She loves nothing more than being between the two of us.

It's a nice quiet end of day -- one more before year's end. I have to work tomorrow, and then we are meeting friends for an early dinner at a local restaurant and come back here for bubbly and to comfort Greta from the fireworks. We cleaned a bit for that, so it's nice to just sit here, watching the seagulls fly in from the Pacific.

It's been a momentous year for us -- Nathaniel getting married, a trip to Ireland, a new deck, a new job for me, some health issues, a few minor victories in my art and John's but not the big ones either of us have hoped for. It's hard to just sum it up, like that. It's just another day, another year, really.

Figured Dark

2007-12-10T13:40:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I went through a period where I lost interest in poetry. Then I happened to pick up one of those “World’s Favorite Poems” anthologies and to open it to Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,” and I was hooked again. With all the arguments over poetics and the thousands of trendy and conventional poems published every day, it’s easy to forget the original impulse to poetry and why you fell in love with it in the first place.

Last week I read Greg Rappleye’s new book Figured Dark. Greg gets as involved as anyone in the blogosphere in arguments over poetics, but what I love about his poetry is that he seems to forget about all that when he sits down to write, and to sink into a place deep within himself, maybe within all of us. His poems make me remember what made me love poetry in the first place. Here’s a link to “Figured Dark,” the title poem of the book. Somehow it brings together Whistler’s Nocturne, Chet Baker’s music and morphine, archaeology and breasts and fireflies, and makes it all feel utterly natural. Not to mention the gorgeous sound of my new favorite word, Cremorne!

December, Life and Death and Everything Else

2007-12-08T18:24:00.000-08:00

With blogs, as with email, the more often you write, the more you can get away with the quotidian details: what you had for breakfast, who called, the weather, what you are wearing, your recipe for French Provincial vegetable soup. If you only blog every once in a while, your posts seem to have more portent. You start getting shyer. Is anyone going to want to read this? Do I really have anything to say?

Twenty-seven years ago today John Lennon was murdered. Other bloggers were talking about What They Were Doing then. I remember I brought in the SF Chronicle and there it was in the headline. I remember friends being pissed off that I didn't want to stand outside on a prayer vigil. But what was the point? He was already dead. In any case, if you want to know what I was doing then, I was having a miscarriage. Well, a long time ago, wasn't it?

So holidays. Grinning and bearing it here. At this stage of my life, I've done more than my share of cooking and all, and so sometimes I'd like to just hide under the covers and wait for all of it to pass. Not going to happen, so deep breath, and deal with it, Diane. (At this moment, I'm sitting on my couch with my sweet dog Greta snuggled up against me. You know everything seems fine when your dog loves you.)

Meantime, thanks to Jilly Dybka's blog, I read this and following in the New York Times Book Review:

No contemporary poet is famous, but some are less unfamous than others. That’s because the poetry world, like most areas of American life, has its own peculiar celebrity system — and if the rewards of that system rarely involve gift suites filled with swag from Jean Patou, they remain tempting enough to keep grown writers hustling. The problem is, poetic stardom is an unpredictable business. Good writing doesn’t guarantee a reputation; bad writing doesn’t guarantee oblivion; nor can grace, money or nimble careerism entirely explain why Poet X reads to overflowing auditoriums, whereas Poet Y reads to his cats. Maybe it’s simply the case that, as William Munny remarked in “Unforgiven,” “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Anyone who knows me the least little bit knows why I identify with the above.

In other news: my niece in Texas just had a baby. Hurray! A girl named Sydney. And we are making plans to go to Port Clyde, Maine, for another niece's wedding in May. A week on the Maine coast! I'm really looking forward to it.

Cold here. Don't you Midwesterners and Northeasterners laugh, but it has been in the 40s. I don't deal well with cold, so that's quite enough.

Quick now, here, now, always…

2007-11-26T15:41:00.000-08:00

It's just that this is so cool. It makes me want to write a poem -- except I'm at work. Oh yeah. And they just gave me a nice token of appreciation 'cause they like me.

*****

I would give my two front teeth -- and more! -- to hear something (preferably something positive) about my manuscript, especially before having to send out another half dozen competition submissions before week's end.

Not So Fast, Eye of the Beholder!

2007-11-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

Before reading any further, look at the images of the three sculptures and decide which one you find most attractive. No, this isn’t an offshoot of C. Dale’s caption contests—or is it? It’s from a study done in Italy (of course) on people’s responses to works of art. Actually the study itself may be somewhat less interesting than a comparison of the original study to a somewhat popularized summary in LiveScience.

The LiveScience story emphasizes the study’s implication that human perceptions of beauty—specifically, human responses to the classical “golden ratio”—may be genetically hard-wired, because most people pick the same image as their favorite. (Well, it’s not really “most people”; rather, it’s a majority of 14 Italian college students “with no experience in art theory.”)

The study itself focuses more on the different responses of the subjects (as shown by brain scans) to the three questions they were asked—whether they “paid attention” to an image when it was shown to them, whether they “liked” it, and whether they found it “proportional”:

In the condition in which the viewers were asked to indicate explicitly which sculptures they liked, there was a strong increase in the activity of the amygdala, a structure that responds to incoming information laden with emotional value. Thus, instead of allowing their nervous centers to “resonate” in response to the observed stimuli (observation condition), when the viewers judged the stimuli according to their individual idiosyncratic criteria (explicit aesthetic judgment), that structure was activated that signals which stimuli had produced pleasant experiences in the past.

This raises a lot of interesting questions! Were people’s responses to the images more spontaneous and honest when they were merely asked to observe them “as if in a museum” than when they were asked if they “liked” them? Were their responses more “conservative” when they were asked to shift into critic mode and pass judgment on the images, because then they applied the criteria they had developed from looking at other works of art that “had produced pleasant experiences in the past”? Were their responses more “romantic” because of activation of the amygdala, which “responds to incoming information laden with emotional value”? When I picked the same image as most people picked in the study, was I really responding to the “golden ratio” of the distance from his head to his navel to the distance from his navel to his knee, or was I just responding to the cute little swivel of his hip?

Riding to Moscow on Chairs

2007-11-19T15:40:00.000-08:00

The current New Yorker has a wonderful review by James Wood of a new translation of War and Peace. The whole review is worth reading: it captures some of the novel’s most vivid, and “poetic,” moments, and the fact that they're poetic and what we mean by that are what interests me. The young man Petya is killed in battle, and his comrade Denisov “approaches the body and, as he looks at Petya, ‘irrelevantly’ recalls him once saying, ‘I'm used to something sweet. Excellent raisins, take them all.’ I think that “irrelevance” is of the essence of poetry.

One passage about the variety of translations seems particularly relevant to poetry:

In the novel’s epilogue, Marya enters the nursery: “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to come with them.” That is exactly what Tolstoy writes, because he wants us to experience a little shock of readjustment as the adult meets the otherworldliness of childish fantasy. But Garnett, the Maudes, and Briggs [earlier translators] all insert an explanatory “playing at,” to make things easier for the adults. As the Maudes render it, “The children were playing at ‘going to Moscow’ in a carriage made of chairs, and invited her to go with them.”

This might seem like a trivial point, but it is a little clue to the vision of the whole novel. Tolstoy sees reality as a system of constant adjustments, a long, tricky convoy of surprises, as realities jostle together and the vital, solipsistic ego is affronted by the otherness of the world. Nikolai Rostov thinks that warfare is a glamorous business of “cutting people down.” But warfare is nothing like that, and when he finally has the chance to cut down a Frenchman he cannot do it, because the soldier’s face is not that of an enemy but “a most simple, homelike face.” He gets a medal and is called a hero, but can think only, “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism?” By the time Prince Andrei fights at Borodino, he has lost any sense he once had that a battle can be successfully commanded, and applauds General Kutuzov for at least knowing when to leave well enough alone. On a trip home, he sees two girls stealing plums from the estate’s trees, and is comforted, feeling “the existence of other human interests, totally foreign to him and as legitimate as those that concerned him.”

That difference between the alternative translations of “riding to Moscow on chairs” and “playing at ‘going to Moscow” in a carriage made of chairs” seems to capture perfectly what poetry is all about—as Wood says, the ego “affronted by the otherness of the world”—and also captures perfectly why language that is too “accessible” does not always serve the poem.

Tofu Stir-fry

2007-11-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

I'm posting today because I haven't posted for ages. I've seem to have had things to say, but my sluggish brain has not been ready to follow through. I'm still not certain how successful this post will be, so you might as well lower your expectations. Regular visitors to this blog already know that the posts that have meat in them are Robert's. Yeah, this is a tofu post. Tofu stir-fry.

Wanted to post this link to an interview Zack Rogow did with Bob Hass. (I feel obligated to my fellow po groupers, to wave their flags, having been one who started our workshop way back. Way back. Yes, once upon a time we even met in John's studio across from the ball park when the ball park wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eyes and the neighborhood was dumpsterville. Way back Bob Hass came to our group too -- only once, and it was on his side of the Bay, in Orinda. I remember the poem he brought. I remember the poem I brought.)

We are sick, sick, sick about the oil spill in the Bay! How can you crash into the Bay Bridge? Isn't it big enough? Oh, it was foggy. Well, duh. I am so upset about this, my brain starts to sputter when I think about it. I cannot look at the wildlife-coated-in-oil photos.

I am off from work today, thank you, veterans. As a pacifist, that's about the extent of my gratitude. I know most people think some wars are necessary or inevitable, but I don't understand how you solve anything by killing X number of people.

I have not been writing a lot. I don't want to make excuses. Even my reading has been sporadic. But I read a very interesting essay on Creeley by Charles Simic, published in NY Review of Books, October 25. Now Creeley never really did much for me, was just sort of on the periphery of my vision. But Simic totally impresses me as a poet who can talk about poetry in a way that is more interested in substance than in impressing you with his erudition -- a rare and totally welcome breath of fresh air -- and yet who doesn't look to get extra points for folksy ways, like some other poets laureate. (Not talking about BH. Bob is the best!) Anyway, what he said, by way of preamble, was "Unless one is an inmate serving a life sentence in a state penetentiary, a book of a thousand poems is nearly impossible to read... More to the point, there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading."

I personally, don't want to argue the point -- it is the emperor's-no-clothes attitude of the statement that impresses me. He also said -- and here I'd like to get input, if you have any opinions on the matter -- that "They [Creeley's early poems] were almost all about love, a subect of considerable interest to a vast number of human beings that for some curious reason is absent from the work of many of our poets today, who, unlike poets in other cultures, generally stay away from any overt expression of erotic feelings, as if love and sex were of little concern to them."

Do you think this is so? Not whether or not love and sex were Creeley's early subjects, but that many of our poets today shy away from this?

Bronze by Gold

2007-11-10T17:12:00.001-08:00

The more I read, the more I come back to James Joyce. Radically innovative in both form and content, Joyce also wrote language unrivaled for sheer beauty and told moving human stories. He was both radically traditional and revolutionary. I really can’t think of a 20th Century poet who came anywhere close to Joyce’s success in creating the literature of the future without sacrificing the artistic values of the past that deserve to be saved. William Carlos Williams? Please. Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens …? If there had been such a poet, I suspect more people would be reading poetry now.

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores …

—James Joyce

Fear of the Past

2007-11-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

I fear this will be one of those posts that will interest no one but me (they come so fast and furious), but I’ve been thinking about my feelings about the future and the past. Readers of Ron Silliman’s blog will have noted his recent use of the term neophobe to refer to poets “afraid of the new.” That argument doesn’t particularly interest me at the moment, but I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a corresponding “fear of the old” (perhaps we could call poets who suffer from it senaphobes).

What interests me is the idea that there really is validity to this observation about the relationship of different poets to the past and the future. If we avoid derogatory terms like neophobe and talk in less loaded terms like “postromantic” and “postmodern,” there are clear differences between the typical interests of postromantic and postmodern poets. It is a cliché, but a valid one, that “romantics” are interested in love, beauty, imagination, and nature. I think it is equally true (if less noticed) that romantics are typically interested in the past, both historical and mythological. Of course this is not the same as saying that romantic poetry is of the past. If anyone is still reading anything five hundred years from now, chances are good they will still be moved by a poem like Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us,” because if human beings survive that long, they will probably feel all the more that the world is too much with them and will long to hear the sound of that old horn:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Happy Birthday, John Keats!

2007-10-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

Keats was born on October 31, and this great poem of his seems appropriate to Halloween. It was written toward the end of his life in the margin of another, very different poem he was working on, and the story is that he was thinking of Fanny Brawne when he wrote it, but no one knows for sure. It may simply have been notes toward a drama he was thinking of writing.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Stupidest Man Alive

2007-10-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

So yesterday afternoon I'm home working on a poem. I go out to the garage to look for mail, and I hear a door slam. The front door has blown shut and I'm locked out without keys or phone. I feared I'd be there all day, but luckily, with the help of a small stepladder from the garage, I was able to go around to the back of the house and climb over the back fence (not so easy for an old guy like me!) and (again luckily) I'd left the back door open because I'd been going in and out of the patio. Actually I think it's because the back door was open that enough of a wind went through the house to blow shut the front door, because that's never happened before. Now does that make me the stupidest man alive? Of course not. It could happen to anyone, right? No, what makes me the stupidest man alive is that a couple hours later I DID THE SAME THING. Yep, locked myself out the exact same way and had to take the stepladder around the house to the back and climb over the fence for the second time to get back in. Possibly I can blame it all on my being in a poetic trance. Or perhaps I'm just The Stupidest Man Alive.

Checking In

2007-10-21T08:58:00.001-07:00

I’m three weeks into my four-week “writer’s colony at home,” and yesterday I finished the draft of a new book. There’s still a lot (months) of work to be done, but the draft is on the table! I’m not sure I’ll follow C. Dale’s method of letting it sit for six months, but if I start working my way through it now, it’ll probably be at least six months before I get to the sections I wrote recently.

I couldn’t sleep last night and got up early and found myself rereading Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures, particularly his essay on James Wright. I read Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River when I was 18, and it was my first love in contemporary poetry (I’m afraid my own poetry still has its weaknesses without its strengths). Later I got into the poets like Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder who were considered cooler and hipper, especially in the Bay Area, but you never get over your first love.