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Note: one line cannibalized from an old poem.

Sara posted a call for us to put up embarrassing childhood pictures of ourselves. Well, I don't have any pictures that are both embarrassing and childhood (there are surely lots of them in existence, but I possess none of them, thank goodness).

This is actually the only thing I have around of me as a kid:



And this is a little embarrassing (perhaps more so because I wasn't drinking):



Whee, I still had hair!

Up today on Anti- is our first featured poet, Aaron Belz. I find this appropriate because so much of what Aaron writes strikes me as a new version of actual antipoetry. And it's damn funny. Aaron will be up on the front page for 2 weeks. Go read!

I already knew Michelle Bitting had won the DeNovo first book contest from C&R Press, and Brent's since-accepted manuscript was one of the runners-up. However, in the letter I received today, I found out that my manuscript was a semifinalist as well. Other names of note on the list include Kathleen Rooney's manuscript now forthcoming from Switchback (she also has some poems upcoming in Anti-), and Ellen Wehle, yet another of those when-with-the-first-book people. Anyway, this is a nice little result for me, especially since the retooled manuscript I'm sending out now is a good bit stronger than the one I sent back in September.

Also, my poem "Oh Kay" is now up in the new issue of 21 Stars Review.

Not much time to write here or elsewhere right now. Shawn's birthday bash is tonight. His parents flew in last night from Oregon. They've known me for 20+ years, so they already know I'm not to be trusted. There will be more doings tomorrow too, so the weekend is already packed.

I'm working on collaborative poetry for the first time ever. I'm glad someone suggested it, but I worry about holding up my end of the bargain. I know how bad my drafts are before y'all ever get to see them (not to say they're always good when you do).

These recent drafts are a little earlier in the process than what I had been posting previously because I'm trying to write them more quickly and then set them aside for some time until I can evaluate and polish them all (or at least, say, 20+ of them) together. I stole the title of this one from Groucho Marx.

Congratulations to Alison Stine for winning this year's Vassar Miller prize. Ohio Violence is a great name for a book, too. Other familiar names among the finalists and semifinalists include Hillary Gravendyk, whom I published in The Eleventh Muse, Dora Malech, definitely one of those "needs to have a book soon" poets, basketball buddy Adrian Matejka (if his manuscript is the one I've read, it's fine indeed), and Seth Abramson, who no longer needs it. Edited to add: this is Seth's second manuscript, not his first, recently accepted by Ghost Road Press, so it is not a residual semifinalist as I thought it was...

I realized this past week that I haven't played pool or darts in months. This may be part of why I've been a little sad too: more favorite activities being lost in the past.

I'm working kind of a laid-back half-day today. Here's some catchup on stuff that I didn't cover previously but maybe should have:

• I did end up driving to Columbia to see Simone Muench and Jason Bredle (as well as three Mizzou PhD students) read. It was a very enjoyable time despite the fact that I drove almost 2 1/2 hours, watched the reading, chatted for about five minutes, and then had to turn right around and drive about 1:45 to get home by midnight. Yes, rush hour added 45 minutes to the drive.
• I've had a poem picked up by Valparaiso Poetry Review. Happily, it was not a previously accepted poem.
• While we're on that topic, my magical ability to make journals vanish seems to have returned with Backwards City Review, which accepted the poem that Southeast Review then double-accepted. BCR's website is gone, and they haven't updated their blog in over two months. I have an e-mail in to them right now, so we shall see.
• Heading out to the River Styx reading series tonight, at which will be National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Troy Jollimore, a nice guy and excellent poet/reader, and a fiction writer I'm unfamiliar with, Gladys Swan, whom I shall refer to as Gladys "Stop Looking at Me" Swan because I am in some ways a perpetual 14-year-old. And I don't even like Adam Sandler much.
• Poetry writing looking up. Drafts no doubt to follow.
• Happy Birthday Week, Shawn!
  

If anyone out there is interested in joining a fantasy baseball league, let me know backchannel. I've started one, and there are slots open.

You Know Who Aaron Belz Reminds Me Of?

Aaron Belz reminds me of Michael Keaton
in the movie where Michael Keaton
plays a serial killer,
and they're in a hospital or something,

I didn't really watch it all
and I don't remember what it's called.
Anyway, I don't mean that Aaron Belz
seems like a serial killer,

just that his facial structure and short
haircut and glasses resemble
Michael Keaton's in that movie.
I'm sure Aaron Belz is kind and gentle,

though sometimes during his event intros
I feel like he's calculating where else he can hide
all the bodies. I guess that says
more about me than about Aaron Belz,

especially since I'm totally lying.
Desperate Measures, that's what it's called!

I've now had three poems accepted by journals after I e-mailed to withdraw the poems because they were accepted elsewhere. The list (in each case, the first journal is the place the poem was accepted first, the second the journal I sadly had to say no to):

"Crestone Conglomerate" - The National Poetry Review (won the Laureate Prize) / The Southern Review
"Cushion" - Crab Creek Review / DIAGRAM
"You Throw the Ball, You Hit the Ball, You Catch the Ball" - Backwards City Review / The Southeast Review

So now I've added those unlucky second places to my bio note on this site just so I can have a little fun with it.

P.S. As of right now, I'm still trying to drive to Columbia this evening for the Bredle/Muench reading.

Here are some happy upcoming projects that shouldn't be marred by my current state:

• A draft I have a better handle on so far that steals its title from Groucho Marx.
• A draft that I keep scribbling parts of on my notebook when I go to bed because it just wants out that badly. The hardest part so far is the title, 'cause I got nothing.
  
• Reading some fun poems for Anti-.
• A nice evening in the works for Friday.
• Shawn's birthday is coming up, and I figured out what to buy him.
• I'm nearly finished with Invisible Cities.
• The possibility of a road trip tomorrow.

We shall see...

You ever get one of those overall feelings of malaise you can't put your finger on, and then suddenly you feel like you realize what it is? That happened to me this evening: I committed a very minor faux pas in my basketball game, and I realized after I got home that a lot of why I've been having that bad feeling is that it seems like every other thing I say or do is slightly wrong or slightly regrettable or slightly whatever negative, and all those slightly's (slightlies?) add up. The basketball thing, being curt with some people I shouldn't have been curt with, that last dumb post, the poem draft that was vexing me, a couple minor household items that I broke, etc. There's nothing specific that stands out, and it's not the sort of thing where I'd say "Wow, I've had a terrible week," but it's a down time where it seems like there's too much to get done, and I have to deal with it alone. So yeah, ugh.

Your poetics are an inherently political stance in the same sense that signing an online petition makes you an activist. If you're taking a stand no one cares about against something no one cares about, how fucking political can it really be?

I don't know that this one is working out, but that's why they call them drafts, yes? Definitely one to let sit aside awhile, at best. I stole the title from James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio."

Today I received a form rejection from Westview for a submission sent November 17. That would be November 17, 2005. Here are some appropriate responses:

• I'd submit more work, but I'd like to hear back before I'm dead.
  
• In Oklahoma, do you send your rejections by Pony Express?
• I guess it took some really close consideration of how you should stick that little printed slip into the envelope.
• Forget behind the desk, that baby must have fallen into a space-time wormhole or an alternate universe.
• I sent what to who now?
• 817 days? Even the US Postal Service is embarrassed for you.
• Please mail this to two years ago, when I gave a damn.

Go look at this special event: Anti-'s first chapbook, Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe, edited by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz. The story behind this is amazing, and kudos to AJPL for putting this together so quickly.

Poems by Kelli Russell Agodon, Ivone Alexandre, John Davis, Anne Haines, R. Joyce Heon, Luisa A. Igloria, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, Woody Loverude, Nathan McClain, Carolyn Moore, Pamela Johnson Parker, Heidi Sulzdorf, and Saw Wai (translated by Dr. David Law).

Here are the books and journals I picked up at AWP:

Never Before edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Riverfall by Simmons Buntin
Houses Fly Away by Leigh Anne Couch
Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz
The Little Book of Guesses by John Gallaher
case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet
Superfecta by Clay Matthews
Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort (translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright & Franz Wright)
The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors by Carsten Rene Nielsen (translated by David Keplinger)
National Anthem by Kevin Prufer
The Second Person by C. Dale Young
A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York

the $20 pack of Octopus chapbooks
all the Green Tower Press chapbooks (thanks, John!)

Bat City Review
Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts
Columbia Poetry Review
CutBank (a whole bunch of them were free)
Eleven Eleven
Green Mountains Review
Gulf Coast
Lake Effect
The Laurel Review (thanks, John!)
LIT
Marginalia
Passages North
Witness

Hmm, do I want to drive to Columbia on Thursday to see Simone Muench and Jason Bredle read? On the one hand, I'd like to see them read. On the other hand, two hours each way on a work night isn't exactly super appealing. But I met them both at AWP and would definitely like to buy their books. But Simone is going to be in St. Louis in March. Hmmm...

I'm so bad about using my camera, it's a miracle I got this many. And sorry to all the people I know I forgot to get pictures with or didn't run into at the right time.


Amanda



Brandi



Charles



Eduardo



Jake (to be fair, I knew Jake personally pre-blog)



John



Mary



Paul



Sandra


Also, thanks to Marianne of New Issues for taking several of these photos and being a very good sport about the whole thing.

• It scares your seatmate on an airplane when you have a hot flash (caused by your fever, congested sinuses not allowing your ears to pop, and/or a bad reaction to a menthol cough drop) and lean forward with your head in your hands, sweating profusely.
• Book fair + ATM (though the one in the Hilton was broken) = dangerous.
  
• David Keplinger is a sweetheart. Still.
  
• Mary should be very proud of her work on Barn Owl Review. Great debut!
  
• Charles Jensen is better looking and taller than me, and still manages to be highly likable. Dammit.
• I may have to reapply to the Vanderbilt MFA program. I saw Mark in the taxi line, and the about the second thing he said was "We're fully funded now. You should reapply."
  
• Students can be a little cavalier about wandering into your room when you're passed out sick there at 11 PM on Thursday.
• Doing your resume work for a couple hours during Thursday and Friday sucks, but it's doable.
• John Gallaher is an early riser, but good conversation does help me wake up.
• Eduardo Corral is my new favorite huggable Latino stuffed animal. And he bought me breakfast! Ha ha...
• Suzanne does seem a little wilder in person than on her blog. I like it.
  
• Sandra will rule the poetry world someday if she wants to. But she's also wonderfully sweet.
  
• The panels and readings are tertiary at best at AWP.
  
• Brandi gets nervous about her events, but they turn out well in the end. Probably something to do with having her shit together and being whip smart.
  
• It's hard to find a cab on a rainy Friday in New York, but maybe, just maybe, you'll get a cab driver who will sit at a green light showing you his acting portfolio.
• The Hilton bar stops serving at 12:30, which is just ludicrous. Especially when you can walk a block away and get served again for about half the price.
  
• AWP is also apparently good for bumping into people you haven't seen in 2+ years and didn't know were attending.
  
• I bear something of a resemblance to Johannes Goransson. In learning this, I met Amy King, who no doubt thought Johannes was rudely ignoring her at first.
• Jake is a very busy person. He is far from alone in this at AWP.
  
• I could be convinced to do a panel or a reading. It would be very hard to convince me to work the book fair.
  
• The Carnegie Deli is good and has giant portions, but I recommend whichever incarnation it was of the Original Ray's pizza that was right on the back side of the Hilton block.
• C. Dale Young is not as easy to find as some people.
• I already know a lot more people than I realized.
• Book fair + ATM + space in your luggage = really dangerous.
• Number of really nice one-to-one conversations I had with friends at bars: at least 4.
  
• There are few enough direct flights between St. Louis and New York that were one to crash after AWP, a huge slew of Eastern/Central Missouri poets, including Mary Jo Bang, Scott Cairns, Aliki Barnstone and yours truly, would be taken out all at once.
  
• Other people I met/re-met: Amanda, Sara, Simmons, Gina, Jessica, Gary, Oliver, Reb, Matthew, Adam Deutsch, Paul Guest, Daniel Nester, Adam Clay, Zachary Schomburg, Jordan Davis, Ali Stine, Ander Monson, Tim Green, Dorothea Lasky, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, etc. I can probably just come back to this list and add more as I think of them. Sorry if you're reading this and I forgot you.
  

That doesn't cover the half of it, really. There are tons more things I did and so on. I'll post more if I think of them. Pictures should be forthcoming, though I got a disappointingly small total.

So there is a full AWP post (or perhaps series of posts) coming this week when I get caught up, but I am not going to be caught up today, so here's a draft I started Saturday evening and finished about 95% on the plane home. It's definitely rawer than usual (3 lines in particular I think are bad) and not really in my dominant mode, but I figured it was one of those hurriers, so I ought to put it up.

I stole the title from Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. I stole one phrase from John Gallaher. I stole one line from something I said Friday. I stole the gimmick in the pivot line from an existing published poem of mine.