Sturgeon's Law

I think I'm feeling some end-of-year fatigue. Too much eating, not enough exercise. Also, I think watching this Broncos game is sapping my will to live. Abysmal performances by Denver, Mike Shanahan, Tatum Bell, the referees, and the announcers (and San Francisco isn't playing particularly well either).

Have a good New Year's Eve, everyone. Be safe and happy.

We're going to have another 6 inches of snow by tomorrow. I'm getting a little bit irritated by all the snowfall keeping me from going out and getting things done. I'll dodge a few mammoths tomorrow or Saturday and go to the gym and grocery store. I also may post a few pictures from the last blizzard to my Flickr account soon.

Happy to see today that I've been picked up for the Outside Voices anthology project.

Also, I've procrastinated long enough finishing the meme that Sandra tagged me with. Here it is:

The first poem I remember reading was... Dr. Seuss is the most likely culprit here. My favorites were the Zaxes and Too Many Daves (which provides the epigraph for section 1 of my current manuscript).

The first non-children's poem I fell in love with was "Ozymandias." It's still my answer when people ask the unfortunate "What's your favorite poem?" question.

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and... the first part of this sentence is inaccurate, as I was not forced to etc. At one point in 7th or 8th grade I had to memorize a poem, and I started memorizing Robert Service's "Dangerous Dan McGrew" because it's fun and definitely has an easy-to-memorize rhyme and rhythm. Then I realized that it was way longer than the amount we were required to memorize (which was only 20 lines or perhaps even less), so I recited one of the little songs from The Lord of the Rings and called it a day.

I have also memorized the prologue to the Canterbury Tales on two separate occasions and can still rip through much of it, though I have no idea anymore how to spell any of the words. Aprille?

I read poetry because... it's kind of hard to be a poet and editor (or at least decent at those things) without doing so. I suppose I gain first and foremost an appreciation for intensified language and sonic/sense (multiple meanings of that word) effects of language. There are many different ways for those things to manifest too, and I think that's reflected in an off-the-top-of-my-head list of favorites: James Wright, Weldon Kees, B. H. Fairchild, Larissa Szporluk, Bob Hicok, Sarah Manguso, Joel Brouwer, Tomas Transtromer, Sarah Lindsay, etc.

I write poetry, but... who the hell cares?

I find poetry... hiding under the bed, stroking a chainsaw, muttering trivia to itself.

The last time I heard poetry... I was listening to my friend Aaron's audio files on the new MiPOesias issue. The last time I heard it live was Harvey Hix's reading at Colorado College in early December. Good poems read a little too far away from the microphone.

I think poetry is like… every other petty subculture of nerds I've ever been part of. I don't particularly mean that as an insult either.

Well, Christmas is gone, and it was a lot of fun, though exhausting. My brother and I got to see the Broncos game on Sunday with our dad and stepmom, and if you follow football you know it was a good game. The experience itself was a blast despite the fact that there was swirling snow for much of the game. On the way home from Denver, we saw a Jeep spin out in front of us while going about 50 MPH on the Interstate. My car, on the other hand, was great. I love my Saturn, I love my Saturn, I love my Saturn.

Yesterday we had Christmas with our mom, and then my brother's girlfriend and daughters came over for dinner. They're cute and precocious kids, even if part of their evening was spent taping things to my head.

My DVD player has been replaced, and I ordered an HDTV off Overstock.com. It's about time I upgraded anyway.

When your DVD player stops recognizing DVDs and your TV color goes all funny the week before Christmas, is it bad timing because there's no way you're going to an electronics store during the madhouse shopping time, or is it good timing because you can ask for a cheap DVD player from someone and hit the after-Christmas sales for a new TV?

The first line (or a close variant thereof, complete with letter K and the alternate spellings) came to me in that half-awake, half-asleep dream state I sometimes achieve.

Over at the Poetry West website, there's a new reviews page, including a brand new review of Amanda Auchter's Light Under Skin by Tony Trigilio.

You can now read my mixed review of 67 Mixed Messages by Ed Allen over at the CutBank blog.

George W. Bush's Army.

Carefully selected lines, themes, and random poetry thoughts.

• Dream control: rewinding to make the shot, clawing upward to wake
• My brother dies at the end of this story
• Ignorance is 9/10ths of the law
• "Birds may be behind exploding German toads" (real headline)
  
• Drawing maps of new worlds: fill in even the parts that won't be visited or leave a blank just off the path?
• That was when the dragon rang the doorbell
• "Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine"--Neil Gaiman, American Gods
• That Was In a Previous Life (potential title)
  

...a good distraction. Right now, it's distracting me from (among other things) all the housecleaning work I really need to do: vacuuming (and thinking about replacing the vacuum cleaner, whose engine is spitting smoke), mildew scrubbing, floor mopping, dusting, etc. On the plus side, my Christmas presents are almost 100% complete, and should be there after today.

Now that the toilet is fixed, some good news from the past couple days:

My poem "Fifteen Ways to Finish Fish" has been accepted by The Laurel Review for the Summer 2007 issue.
And my poem "This Line Fills with All the Sorrow in the World" has been accepted by New Zoo Poetry Review.

So I awakened early this morning to find out that my toilet was leaking into the apartment downstairs, and they had to bring a plumber in to replace the toilet flange for the second time in 3-4 years. I am very happy right now that I'm going to be moving out of here in July regardless of what happens (come hell or high water, so to speak). There's some major bathroom cleaning in store for me the rest of this week. Hooray!

P.S. I hate Blogger ever so much. It only took me about four hours to get this to post.

I finally got a USB microphone (there's something wrong with my soundcard microphone plug-in or the soundcard setup itself), so I've recorded a few of my poems. You can find one now at my poem page at MiPOesias, and another one will be up soon at Pebble Lake Review.

A lot of work going into The Eleventh Muse right now, getting submissions read, acceptances made, contacting the printer, making sure the finances add up, arranging for cover design, going through the contest submissions, etc.

All you editors probably have a number of screen-out factors that let you quickly reject some of the more mediocre submissions from the slush pile. One of my strongest ones (which I see all too often) is an abundance of passive first-person "actions" in narrative (or even worse, in an attempted lyric). I remember, I see, I think, I watch. How many poems with these sorts of phrases wouldn't be made better with their simple removal?

Longtime and close readers may notice some bits in here from a draft I (think I) posted on the blog about a year ago. Or maybe I didn't. Never mind.

My poem "Yellowed" has been accepted by Terminus.

Today was the first day in which I actually managed other people (well, since the video store seven years ago right after I graduated and had no job prospects). It was pretty nice, and there were no catastrophes and in fact no notable problems (except pesky irritations, and those are everywhere and constant).

Side note: sure, those Macintosh/PC ads are fun, but isn't the message they send ultimately "Macintosh, the computer for that smug annoying wuss from Ed"?

Hey, y'all. I'm expanding the FAQ portion of my resume site (it's the blog if you click on my profile...). Do you have any basic questions or things you'd like to know about resumes, cover letters, job searches, etc.?