Sturgeon's Law

I'm off to see my brother's band play. Here's a link to one of their songs. He originally described it to me as "sort of like System of a Down crossed with Primus." Use that to judge whether you might like it. I do (like the song).

Philosophy - Blauder

In a single thread you must:
1. Post a poem with a lengthy explanation.
2. Tell someone who provides a negative critique that they're stupid.
3. Say the forum is awful and that you'll never post again.

Bonus points if it's your first poem posted on the forum. Bonus points if you post again in the same thread after threatening not to post on the board ever again.

Any other candidates for actions that could make the Poetry Forum Triple Play?

I saw a thing on the Fox News scrollbar today (it was on at the gym, okay?) that reminded me of why I hate them so: it's not just the usual right-wing "if we say it's true, it must be true" fascist propaganda, it's (all of the above) propaganda that demonstrates an abnormally low IQ. This thing, which you've no doubt seen if you watch much Fox News, is that they insist on referring to suicide bombers as "homicide bombers."

Now, let's set aside that such terminology is an obvious example of the political-right thinking "We can't let these damn Ay-rabs get off easy by making any of them look slightly noble or reasoned--let's call them evil thugs in as many ways as possible." That's an ideological thing, and I'm not at all inclined to say anything to ennoble a bomber or try to justify his/her reasons for doing it. I'm also not interested right now in examining the shitty things people of the alleged Christian and American persuasions have done--my main target here is the abject stupidity of Fox's choice of terms.

First of all, how the hell does "suicide bomber" in any way say something positive about the perpetrators? No one's calling them "conscience bombers" or something, are they? It's a simple descriptive: a suicide bomber is a bomber who intentionally dies during the act of setting off his or her bomb. A+B=C. But beyond that, the term "homicide bomber" is idiotic: there are many many bombers who set off their bombs with the intent of killing others but without the intent of killing themselves, and all of these must by nature be "homicide bombers." The concept of homicide is implicit in the word "bomber"--a "non-homicide bomber," now that would be extraordinary! Thus the requirement for a goddamn distinction for suicide bombers in the first place.

Osama Bin Laden is a homicide bomber. Eric Rudolph is a homicide bomber. Ted Kaczynski is a homicide bomber. None of them is what Fox News means when they deploy the term with woeful inaccuracy. They use it over-specifically to refer to a tiny subset of what it actually refers to, as if suicide bombers are somehow less noble and more evil than Osama, Ted, and all those bombers who keep themselves safe and sound as they murder. Stupid fuckwits (Fox, not Osama or Ted, who are batshit but not stupid).

In conclusion, a hearty FUCK YOU to Fox News for their ongoing mutilation of language for vile political ends.

I got a nice positive nudge on the submitting-poetry front--not an acceptance yet, so I won't say what it was due to superstition.

I forgot to mention in the bullet points of bad from yesterday that I had one spare light bulb, and two bulbs burned out the same day.

So last night I had a dream that I woke up, and there was a raccoon walking around on my bed, and then it stood up like a bear. Then I really woke up. I think that's the kind of dream that unsettles me most, one that blurs the sleeping/waking distinction.

It also got me thinking about writers and other creative people who write about the reality/perception line, about what you think is real not being what's actually real, or even what you think is real having the power to affect reality or being its own reality. What's real and what's not.

One of my favorite science fiction authors, Philip K. Dick, has that sort of theme winding through virtually every one of his stories. An alternate history in which the Axis won WWII, a drug that makes you experience an existence controlled by the drug's maker, androids that appear human, implanted memories. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic, so it's not entirely surprising.

A lot of movie directors/screenwriters consistently go that way too: Terry Gilliam, David Fincher, Charlie Kaufman. Of those, Kaufman is too slight for me, and Fincher is too pompously nihilistic. Gilliam seems like another who may have mental issues given his movies: The Fisher King, Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 12 Monkeys, and now The Brothers Grimm.

There are tons of poets who touch on these issues too, but I realized I couldn't think of that many who seem so dedicated to it, which surprises me given the number of poets with mental problems around. The closest thing I came up with was Berryman's Dream Songs (no shock there). I also see some of that in Stevens, Yeats, and Blake, but it's not so pervasive. Any others I'm missing here?

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Today has not been the best, but I'm handling it surprisingly well. So far today I've

• found out that someone tried to charge $2500 on one of my credit cards with a furniture store in Utah.
• gotten a mysterious splinter in my hand that hurt like crazy when I typed until I dug it out.
• received another rejection (albeit from another top-tier place).

Is there a word that receives more egregious abuse than "literally"? It used to mean "literally." The way it gets used now, it means "figuratively." Just now, I learned from sportscaster Chris Berman (a hateworthy individual at the best of times) that Tampa Bay running back Carnell "Cadillac" Williams is "literally just out of the showroom."

I also heard not long ago that the crowd at a sellout event was "literally hanging from the rafters," which sounds pretty unpleasant, if you ask me. Poor literally--people who don't have a goddamn clue how to use it nonetheless deploy it in an attempt to give their words greater emphasis, and literally literally suffers as a result. Er...

"MJ Fan Letter # 782" by Terrance Hayes (West Branch)
"Mad Lib Elegy" by Ben Lerner (Fascicle)
"The Little Man in the Fire Hates Me" by G. C. Waldrep (Ploughshares)

Was down on Wednesday but got a call I'd been hoping for, so that was nice. Not poetry-related, though.

In the mail today were my copies of Pebble Lake Review, hurrah! Amanda's journal looks lovely, and I can't wait to see the work in it. Among others, I see poems by Ash Bowen, a name you may recognize if you frequent some of the major poetry forums, and who is also in the next issue of The Eleventh Muse. Also David Koehn of Great American Pinup, which I really ought to stick on my permanent blogroll.

In the mail yesterday were rejections from Poetry (natch) and American Poetry Journal. Fortunately, I did get a personal "try again" note from Dancing Bear at APJ, so it wasn't a complete writeoff. My current rejection streak has me quite down, however.

Two more entries:

"Red Alert" by Lois Beebe Hayna (Snakeskin)
"Luciferin" by Dean Young (Poetry)

Lois Hayna is in my poetry workshop. She's 92 years old, and her most recent book, Keeping Still, just came out from Higganum Hill Press.

And yes, that means that my friends can get their poems in this feature, but it really has to be one of my favorites.

Probably most of the people reading this have manuscripts, either already published or seeking a publisher. I have manuscripts too: a pretty good chapbook manuscript hampered by the fact that I'm not really enthusiastic about chapbook contests/publishing, and a full-length manuscript that simply isn't ready for prime time yet. By the end of the year I think it'll be close, but that's a way off.

My main reason for bringing this up is that I always find it interesting when people talk about writing for their manuscript--either writing for a long period things that are all for the manuscript or at least having most of the poems they write just turn out to be right for it. Unfortunately for me, my writing tends to be all over the map stylistically and thematically (both because I have a lot of random stuff spilling out of my head and because I want to be good at a wide range of poetic types), and so the poems, even the ones that are okay, don't end up fitting all that well on pages next to each other.

So how do you all reconcile writing poems with writing manuscripts?

Yes, more of this ongoing feature! Keep those nominations coming. I did get a couple nominations from Jeff Newberry and Peter Pereira, which I haven't actively considered yet--sorry, guys.

"Auto Salvage" by Ted Kooser (The Hudson Review) (PDF file)

"Commencement Address: The Institute of Convoluted Speech" by Jon Davis (The New Hampshire Review)

I write poetry to impress women. Between one and three in different capacities at any given time. Is that so wrong?

Jeffery has asked us to post our favorite own-poem, so here's the one I think I enjoy the most (and almost definitely had the most fun writing):

[Snip]

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What's your favorite poem that you've written so far?

Happy Premise #1: If you have a print journal, you should have a website for that journal. Even if you have little money for it, the primary investment for a simple website is time.

Happy Premise #2: Once you have a website for your print journal, there are certain things that your website should contain (many print journal sites omit one or more of these):

• Contact information for your journal.
• Enough staff information that correspondents can figure out who to address letters to.
• Clear and detailed submission guidelines.
  
• Instructions on how to order and subscribe. A Paypal/online credit card option is a good way to sell a few more too.
  
• Some sample poems from past issues--they're not only a good way for people to figure out if they should send their poems to you, they're (get this) a good way to entice people into buying full issues.

Happy Premise #3: If your journal is still active, the "Current Issue" should not be Winter 2003.

Let's see how long it takes me to get a cease-and-desist.

"It took that stone four thousand years to get to shore, and now you’ve thrown it back."

"Everything I do makes me feel guilty."

--Linus and Charlie Brown

It's easy sometimes to forget what an amazingly sad comic Peanuts was. It's also in the top few overall influences on my writing. It's hard to read it for very long now without tearing up a little.

A small, incompetent man who was obviously not up to big events and who owed all his success to powerful friends resigned today. Too bad it was just the director of FEMA and not the man who appointed him.

Well, it's been a while, so I should say something, but the stuff I want to write about is pretty long, so instead it's a quick bullet update:

• I just finished first of 45 in an online poker tournament. Maybe I should be a gambler instead of a poet.
• I pulled two poems out of circulation today. I had thought they were done, but now I don't think so muchly. On the plus side, I've finished drafts of a couple poems I'm very happy with in the past week.
• Here's another entry for the Best of Poetry Journals Online etc. feature: "Life is Happy," Albert Goldbarth (Boulevard) (there are other poems on the same page, with no indexing)
  

I'm launching a new semi-regular feature inspired in equal parts by Jordan's (and Jeffery's) list of poems he's liked this year, by Tony's Poetry Less Than Daily, and by my own desire to catalog and link to stuff. It's Best of Poetry Journals Online and Online Poetry Journals. The rules are simple: any poem from an online journal or posted as a sample on a print journal's site or taken as a sample of the journal on a site like Verse Daily that credits the original journal is eligible. Nominate whatever you want, and I'll check it and see if I like it. If so, I'll link to it here on the blog and on my Recommended Reading page--title, author, and journal. Here are the opening few:

"Here, Bullet" by Brian Turner, The Georgia Review (I already had this one on the RR page)
"I'm Not Carlos" by Zachary Schomburg, Fence (But fix those apostrophes)
"Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree" by Sarah Lindsay, Rhino
"February Flu" by John Poch, The Paris Review

So if you've got nominations, feel free to put them in the comment box or my e-mail inbox. Provide URLs. I may not respond for a while, but shall eventually.

Man, you know what bothers me sometimes in poems? Comma splices. I write a sentence, I write another sentence but put a comma instead of a period. Maybe some people think it's poetic, I think it's sloppy. I've mockingly used the gimmick enough, I'm stopping now. Is there anything the comma does there that a period or a dash or a semicolon, all acceptable punctuation marks in such a case, couldn't do? A comma splice won't ruin a good poem for me, but it's going to be a point against a merely competent poem. Why use it?

Edited to add: arbitrarily removing commas at the end of lines bothers me too. Do it all the time or not at all in a poem...

While we're at it, some other writing/language things that bother me:

• It's not "shoe-in," it's "shoo-in."
• You don't "pour over" a document, you "pore over" it. Unless you're spilling water, I suppose.
• When the hell did "busses" become an acceptable plural for "bus"? Busses are kisses. Goddamnit, maybe I just didn't learn the variant.
• It's not a "shuffle pass," it's a "shovel pass." Sports announcers are some of the most spectacular manglers of language and terminology in the entire world.
  

Okay, I'm going to go back to the trivial now. In celebration of the end of summer, I'm discounting copies of the 2005 issue of The Eleventh Muse. You can now buy a copy for $5, a significant discount from the $8 it costs new. Alternately, $8 now will get you both the 2005 issue and the 2004 issue. You can send a check to

Poetry West
PO Box 2413
Colorado Springs, CO 80901

or pay via Paypal to poetrywest@yahoo.com (I'm working on getting buttons on the site). Be sure to note "blog offer" with the check or Paypal payment.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

https://www2.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp