Sturgeon's Law

I take off from here early tomorrow morning and arrive in New York in the early afternoon. I assume most people going to AWP have left by now, but in case there are any stragglers, hope to see you there. The blog will most likely be dark all weekend and early next week as I do the AWP thing and then catch up with the horrendous amount of work that is going to pile up for me during my light days tomorrow and Friday.

Yay, I finished a reasonable version of this draft before AWP. I stole the title from Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which took it from a real incident involving a school administrator who was previously my high school principal.



The drat refers to the fact that I developed a cold last night, with perfect AWP timing. I'm likely to be a little groggy if we meet there. Maybe it'll help a little, who knows...

Now that the first wave of Anti- bustle and hubbub is behind us, some news from the other parts of Steve's poetry life.

My poems "Without Glasses" and "Phoenix, Colorado" are available in the second issue of diode.

My poem "Oh Kay" has been picked up by 21 Stars Review.

I'll be flying in to New York on Thursday afternoon for AWP. See you attendees then. If you want to make a specific plan to meet, e-mail me.

It's aliiiiiiive! You probably heard it here first. So go!

Hi, y'all. I know a lot of you do photography or other forms of visual art. If you have any pictures of any sort you'd like considered as "cover art" for upcoming editions of Anti-, please send a JPG file of your art to antipoetry(at)anti-poetry(dot)com. I'd also be happy to look at vispo (or to find an editor who is more in tune with vispo), and, as always, please send me general poetry submissions to consider. I want to consider!

Thanks to the patient teaching of A. D. Thomas, I now (probably) know (most of) what I need to do in order to have Issue #1 of Anti- published by this weekend, before AWP. I'm really happy to be able to do this, and I'll certainly update you once it goes live.

So there's a contest I entered because it's free, it's for St. Louis poets, there are prizes of up to $700, and the final judge is Bob Hicok. All in all, a good deal. However, there was one rule that made me chuckle:

"Any person having won first prize in the contest twice within the last five years is ineligible for further cash awards but may be cited for honors."

Well, since that covers a potential maximum of two people, I assume this rule is there because one person actually has won twice in the past five years. Why not either make the rule broad and sensible ("No previous winners may win further cash awards") or incredibly specific and thus more amusing ("Jane Doe is not eligible to win this contest")?

"Poker Players" by Kate Gale (Valparaiso Poetry Review)
"Sepsis" by C. Dale Young (Virginia Quarterly Review)

This (Diesel Sweeties, one of my favorite comics):



And this.

This is the first draft I wrote for my new project. The project boundaries won't be subject matter or theme but formal (a set of formal rules I've given myself for each poem in the collection), and what you can do to stay within it and escape it at the same time. The title is stolen from Tombstone.

1. 13 Things That Make Me Cry
2. 13 Institutions That Really Piss Me Off
3. 13 Things I Would Like to Be Able to Do But Probably Never Will
4. 13 Popular Contemporary Poets I Don't Like
5. My 13 Favorite Mammals
6. My 13 Favorite Speculative Fiction Novels
7. 13 Acclaimed Books/Movies I Couldn't Finish
8. 13 Books I Wish I'd Already Read
9. My 13 Favorite Mixed Drinks
10. 13 Bookless Poets Who Need to Publish One Pronto
11. 13 Funny Factoids I Want to Use in Poems
12. My 13 Favorite Workout Songs
13. 13 Movies I Would Watch Over and Over to Pass the Evenings

I pick the poems I like out of The Literary Review Spring 2005 issue. Ground rules, in case you haven't seen these posts before: poems I definitely would want to publish are in bold, poets with whom I have a previous connection are in italics so you know (some of) my biases.

"Ariel Unbound," Mary Alexandra Agner
"Inner War," Lightsey Darst
"Hideout," Chris Hosea
"Give, Get, and the Prefix For That Changes Everything," Kevin King
"Music Left by Another," George Looney
"Early Spanish Lyrics (Translations)," D. Nurkse
"Pas De L'Incise," D. Nurkse
"Cigarette Girl," Chad Parmenter
"Pilgrim's Progress," Charles Wright

Total Poems: 22
Poems I Liked More Than Not: 9 (40.9%, very good though a small sample size)
Poem I Definitely Would Have Published: 3 (13.6%, also good, and the Darst poem was very close to that level for me too)

The post I mentioned previously is still coming, but probably not until tomorrow or the next day. Could be this evening if I feel like it.

Anyway, received my contributor copies of both Cimarron Review and Court Green yesterday, and they're great. Especially happy to see Colorado Springs friends Aaron Anstett and Rebecca Laroche in Court Green, Rebecca in the Plath dossier.

Will post one of those "Finding Good Poems in Old Journals" pieces tomorrow. This evening I'll be at the Observable Readings event featuring Dana Goodyear (of Poetry Foundation dustup fame) and Aliki Barnstone (of Barnstone family fame).

Also, here's this forwarded by the associate editors of Cimarron Review:

We are pleased to announce our Winter Issue, 162.

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting
it together. Feel free to visit our website
and subscribe to the Cimarron Review if you haven't already.
Our website features samples of poetry and fiction from current
and past issues, as well as contributors' notes. Congratulations
to all the contributors for your wonderful work.

Best Regards,
Robin Carstensen and Dinah Cox

My poem in there is right next to one by Charles Bernstein, which I find funny in more ways than one.

A semi-serious daydream list not in order of importance. Deliberately leaving out super-high-end stuff like "A full-size basketball court" for things that I can actually envision myself getting.

1. A pool table
2. A standing dart board
3. A bar
4. A single large room in which all of the above will fit without spilling over into the rest of the house
5. No ceilings on which I can easily hit my head
6. A bookshelf in every room
7. A small desk/cabinet space right next to my computer for my writing materials
8. An entertainment center, especially good speakers, probably in the aforementioned large room
9. An elliptical machine at the minimum
10. Excellent insulation, heating, and air conditioning
11. A nice deck with a view of the mountains
12. No high-maintenance pets
13. A lovely lovely girlfriend/wife/partner who understands my desire for these things

Not that I expect any or all of these things, but I'm working on it.

1. A book of poetry (this is the nearest to fruition, obviously, but it's also holding up progress on a lot of the others, so it annoys me a little)
2. Another book of poetry (Haha, okay, I'll stop cheating)
3. A book of short stories (I want to do prose, and this seems like a logical place to go--maybe ONE short story first)
4. A science fiction novel (My first love in writing, along with fantasy)
5. A fantasy novel (I'd like it to play with the conventions of the Tolkien-descendant high fantasy that got crammed down my throat for years)
6. A book of humor (Could be essays, could be stories, could be a parody, I dunno)
7. A children's book (Seriously, I think I'd do well at this, and not just because I still laugh at poop jokes)
8. A game (Roleplaying, card, board, strategy, script for a computer game, many possibilities here)
9. A book that crosses multiple genres so publishers and booksellers aren't quite sure where to put it (This one will obviously have to wait a while)
10. An anthology of work by my favorite writers (I would be editor on this one, obviously, and this is also a very wide open one, also obviously)
11. A how-to guide replete with all the worst advice in the world
12. A comic strip (Only if I can get someone else to do the drawing, which I realize pretty much defeats the purpose)
13. A book on resume writing (Less professional and more acerbic than a typical resume book--could be the humor book, even)

Conspicuously absent and probably always so: a memoir or any "creative nonfiction"

"Joyce" by Joel Brouwer (The Cortland Review)
from Liner Notes by Andrew Mister (/nor)

Spent part of yesterday and today dealing with a flat tire apparently caused by driving over a screw (which isn't a surprise given the debris-littered alleyway here). In the course of that, I (re)discovered that I have one of those miniature cigarette-lighter-powered air compressors, which is nice. Didn't find that out until after I borrowed and used Shawn's, of course. Anyway, the problem seems to be fixed now, and it didn't keep me from playing basketball yesterday. Tomorrow I shall celebrate by trying Steak and Shake's frozen yogurt shake.

...and if it's not, it should be: the more you know about a specialized subject, the less you'll like the details of that subject in a movie or TV show about it. They just have to change too much to make it palatable to people without that deep knowledge (and of course they screw stuff up for no good reason too). My dad has a hard time watching doctor shows on TV because he gets distracted by how things aren't that way in real hospitals. I knew a guy who disliked A River Runs Through It because "they're flycasting all wrong" (which is a stupid reason to dislike a good movie, but whatever). One of the reasons I prefer both Bull Durham and Eight Men Out to Field of Dreams (not that I dislike Field of Dreams at all) is that the baseball details in the first two feel much more authentic.

I think that applies in poetry, too. I hate when a poet who clearly isn't more than a dabbler in a field of study clumsily uses that field to try to leap into some pseudo-poetic/philosophical point. I hate when I catch myself trying to make serious use of topics I don't know more about than a Wikipedia article. On the other hand, I realize that I can't put my expertise in certain areas into a poem unalloyed, or the many people who don't share that passion won't connect with the poem. I may love (or have loved once) The Lord of the Rings or GURPS or baseball statistics or Sid Meier's Civilization or GI Joe or quiz bowl or Tool or Tombstone or "Cuckoo" by Larissa Szporluk or salmon fishing in Alaska or playing basketball or sweet margaritas or whatever, but I have to make that relevant to you/the world.