Imagine my surprise when I realized the poem demanded meter and rhyme. The title is stolen from Johnny Cash's "Thirteen."

"Epistolary" by Jill Alexander Essbaum (42opus)
"Not Let Across the Hood Canal" by J. W. Marshall (FIELD)

I also went through and removed/replaced the dead links on the recommended reading page (the archives of this feature, essentially).

This evening will be the first in nearly a week that I've actually worked on poetry. Both the break and the getting back to it feel necessary and nice--I think that means my writing is in a good place.

I had to shut down my personal resume site and its associated e-mail addresses because spammers had started using it to spoof messages to others, so I was getting hundreds of undeliverable mail notifications per day. I don't really need the resume site at the moment anyway because I'm doing management for the other company full-time, but I'll probably put it back up after that dies down a little. Still, I want to punch a spammer in the eyeball.

Here I am. I got to work out today, which was nice after the bad eating and long driving of the past couple days. I had to drop much of my weightlifting a few months ago because of a shoulder injury that's probably a damaged rotator cuff. I kept playing basketball, though, because it's so enjoyable and because it's great exercise. Now I'm stopping the basketball for a couple months (for other reasons), so I really hope my shoulder will heal up. I definitely don't want to have surgery on it just yet.

I really shouldn't have posted that last post because now I'm going to look at every one of my posts and categorize it (or, even worse, I'll realize another obvious po-blog category I forgot). Anyway, this is mostly an administrative message to let you know that I'm going to be gone Friday and Saturday as I travel to visit a couple friends. I should be back online Sunday.

I'll leave you with a list of just a few of the lines I'd like to steal for titles in my next (current) project:
Get Your Fucking Shinebox
Golly, I'd Hate to Have a Kid Like Me
How Do You Like Your Blueeyed Boy
I Have a Cunning Plan
Like Nothing Else in Tennessee
Rest Assured the Nest Left You
Sanity Is Not Statistical
There Is No Peace but Scavengers
This Is the World with the Fat Burned Off
You Are Beautiful Inexactly

And ones I'm working on currently:
Gave Me the Number When I Was Young
Burn Thee to the Bare Bane

Self-promotion
Dashed-off "funny" list
Half-baked draft
Baby and/or pet
Pictures of same
Copyright violation
Link dump
Long, dense poetry theory
Blog war
I quit






My friends' poetry reading
What I ate today
NaPoWriMo #1, #2, #3, ...
Personal revelation (boring or scary)
Self-promotion
Flirt flirt
Internet meme
Rejection
Rejection
Rejection
Acceptance







Sorry I haven't posted for so long
AWP
Trivial one-line bullet points
Self-promotion
Uninteresting non-poetry hobby
Professional jealousy/snark
Poetry
Easy satire

The new Anti- featured poet is Jake Adam York. Jake will be up as the main page for the next two weeks. His poetry never ceases to grab me one way or another (or both), and thanks to him for sending it!

You blog folk might be interested to know that the cover photo was by Justin Evans.

While you're here, check out the Anti- editor at Verse Daily!

This is back to my second project, which I may say more about as it develops. I stole the title from Utter by Gina Franco. Not sleeping too well tonight...

Work is dying down a little early today, so here are some updates of minor interest in bullet point form.

• I believe I've sent out six journal submissions in the last four days. (Check.) Seven, actually.
• Last night I dreamed I was playing basketball with a couple poets (not the poets in my real basketball game). I only remember who one of them was. He's tall in real life too, so at least that fits.
  
• Oh yeah, and there was a 5.2 earthquake last night too. I woke up, barely comprehended what was happening (I realized there was rattling and shaking), then went back to sleep.
• We're having a poker night tomorrow. It's been quite a while since I played at all, but our home games are super-casual anyway.
  
• My next expensive purchases will be a high-end laptop computer (I'm traveling a little more these days) and a new pair of glasses. And a passenger side mirror apparatus to replace the one I knocked off my car.
• Our neighbor has an adorable new beagle puppy. Its name is Amelia Beagelia.
  
• Recently purchased poetry books: New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, and The Wind Shifts, edited by Francisco Aragon.
• Recently purchased non-poetry books: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (sorry, can't do the tilde quickly in Blogger).
• Draft posted this weekend, I expect. Except I'll also have to take Sunday to announce the new Anti- featured poet. Hmm.
• Nachos are calling. Later...
  

There's been good news every day this week. Today my e-chapbook 90 Percent of Everything is up at Scantily Clad Press. Go look!

This week has been and is crazay bizzay with taxes, poem and manuscript submissions, poem writing, gatherings, chores, preparations for travel, etc., so the posts may be a little skimpy. Today I found out that my poem "Chicago Happened Slowly" has been accepted by Iron Horse Literary Review. Hurrah!

"This week Verse Daily offers poems by:
Brenda Shaughnessy
Dana Curtis
Bruce Bond
Richard Jordan
Ron Paul Salutsky
Robert Pesich
Steven D. Schroeder"

So I think that means I'm up on Sunday. I'm pretty sure I know which poem it is, but I won't spoil the surprise.

The price of a stamp will be increasing by a penny on May 12. Have fun with those one-cent stamps and SASEs! Your journal still only takes snail mail submissions why?

St. Louis is a city of food (and eaty Midwestern people), so it seems fitting that I write this list (mostly off the top of my head). I might go to one of these places this weekend. In no particular order:

1. Sidney Street Cafe. Oh, if only I could afford to eat there more than once an ever. The food when we went for Shawn's birthday was outlandishly good.
2. The Royale. Upscale pub food. Loved both the grilled cheese and the beef brisket tacos with blue cheese. The burgers are apparently great too.
3. Pueblo Solis. An affordable (though not super-authentic) Mexican restaurant with great margaritas and huge nacho plates.
4. Black Thorn. Ridiculously loaded Chicago-style pizza that takes forever to cook.
5. Racanelli's. New York-style pizza for a change of pace.
6. Llywelyn's. Quasi-British pub food, and an amazing cheese steak sandwich.
7. King Dragon. Oh, I had to put a takeout Chinese place on here.
8. Uncle Bill's Pancakes. Breakfast served 24 hours. They have dinner food too, but I don't know why.
9. "Famous" Seamus McDaniel's. A huge burger, one of the best in town, and a great nacho appetizer.
10. Favazza's. I haven't even explored the Italian restaurants of The Hill that thoroughly, but the lasagna here is superb.
11. La Tropicana. A little Mexican market very close to here.
12. Tony's. This one is actually in St. Charles, but they have amazing chicken nachos (as an appetizer) and garlic butter steak.
13. Schlafly Bottleworks. Plenty of good food, but the Schlafly microwbrews are the big attraction here.

This one was fun to write. It's also the sort that helps me fight my impulse to put everything in a poem, since I could have kept coming up with these pretty much forever, but if I had I would have ended up with a monstrosity like this.

In light of yesterpost, here are some poems that evoke strong visceral sadness in me:

1. "What Work Is" by Philip Levine
2. "The City" by C. P. Cavafy
3. "Body and Soul" by B. H. Fairchild
4. "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden
5. "Song of Roland" by Mark Jarman
6. "On the Death of Friends in Childhood" by Donald Justice
7. "The Mower" by Philip Larkin
8. "Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree" by Sarah Lindsay
9. "Sunday" by Timothy Liu
10. "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen
11. "Behaving Like a Jew" by Gerald Stern
12. "A Drinking Song" by William Butler Yeats
13. "Elegy for James Knox" by Jake Adam York

What about you?

6 Things That Made Me Laugh Like Crazy, 7 That Made Me Cry

Laugh:

1. The first time I saw the sequence in Young Frankenstein where the kindly blind hermit played by Gene Hackman oh yeah, YouTube exists now.
2. When Shawn and I used a pro wrestling video game to create a wrestler with a giant tyrannosaurus head and a miniskirt, whose signature move was the crotch punch, and who was named Dragzilla. And this is one of the less inside-jokey things with Shawn that I could put on the list.
3. The time in study hall when I was reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and got to some part I really liked and started laughing silently, then couldn't stop because everyone at my table was looking at me like I was a lunatic. Junior high was definitely my most socially awkward time (which is not to say the others have been graceful).
4. This scene from 30 Rock (funniest show on TV now) once Alec Baldwin gets going.
5. When I was playing with Gompers, and I got him to chase my hand in a tight circle/spin about five consecutive times, and then he staggered around dizzy and nearly fell over.
6. When my brother and my Uncle Randy and I-don't-recall-who-all-else played one of those time-killing "What If" games where everyone gave their answer to some hypothetical scenario, and my brother started finding a way to work "sock monkey" into every one of his answers. Randy and my brother are good for me.

Cry:

7. The end of A River Runs Through It. Book or movie.
8. "What Work Is" by Philip Levine, the first time I read it.
9. Half the songs from this list, though the most recent one is "Let Me In." I think.
10. When I was pitching in Little League and I allowed a game-winning home run in the playoffs in the bottom of the last inning.
11. A lot of the times I've posted on here about my brother.
12. Pretty much everything when I was clinically depressed, including a cellphone ad.
13. Everything from the scouring of the Shire on in The Lord of the Rings, anytime after the first time I read it.

The new featured poet at Anti- is David Graham. David's poems will be the front page for the next two weeks. Thank you, David. Upcoming featured poets include Jake Adam York, C. Dale Young, Kathleen Rooney and, pending receipt of sound file, Michael Basinski.

If you or anyone you know is a visual artist or photographer, please consider sending some potential cover art. And poetry, too, is always wanted here.

This draft has some good stuff, but man was it a slog to write. I need to shift gears for sure. That little shoe argument poem was the most fun thing I've written recently.



Tomorrow I'll launch the next Anti- featured poet (which you saw for a while yesterday if you looked at the front page, because I kind of suck with WordPress still).

Tuesday, look for a slightly more unguarded post.

I've had this Diesel Sweeties cartoon sitting around on my desktop for several weeks now with nothing to do, so I'm posting it here. It seems appropriate today (today as in Friday afternoon-into-evening, today as in the week I've had, today as in stupid romantic images of writers, today as in my ongoing attempts to be someone else, today as in how awkward I was yesterday).



Now I'm going to get dinner. I have many good unhealthy choices.

Draft tomorrow. Better poems ahead.

I know I don't have a big St. Louis readership, but if you're around you should come out to the Eight Kates reading at the Observable Series tonight. That's a lot of poets named Kate. All the ones I know except for Kate Northrop.

In other reading news, I found out today that I'm going to be reading in the River Styx Hungry Young Poets series again this summer. I'll update you once I actually know the date. Come out and see me. I'm a good reader. Even if you don't live in St. Louis, you should plan a trip around it to visit me. We can eat at Llewellyn's before the show.

My friend Aaron is the Pikes Peak Poet Laureate. Now if only he'll do for Colorado Springs what he did for Texas City, Texas.

My review of Caroline Noble Whitbeck's Our Classical Heritage: A Homing Device is up in the Rattle e-review section. Thanks for the review copy, Brandi.

I am unfamiliar with Michael Morse's poetry, but I liked this a lot.

If you have lots of mp3s on your computer and like deceptively simple, addictive games, I highly recommend Audiosurf. Only $10! Turn your mp3s into racetracks and play a block stacking game. Er, or something like that. I am losing serious productivity here.