You longtime readers of my blog know that I tend to be completely into the practical aspects of poetry editing and publishing. Mary has an insightful post about book manuscripts (and it says it's the first in a series, which I'll be keeping an eye out for). I thought I'd add my own thoughts about manuscripts. This is from my perspective of having helped to judge contests, having read many of my friends' manuscripts both pre- and post-publication, and having had just about as many friends read my manuscript (still pre-publication, of course). Here are a few points.

The things that really matter: the poems themselves and how they go together. Mary's last paragraph kindly says what I'd like to put this way: if you have a manuscript where you feel the need to "bury" weaker work, your manuscript is dead in the water. Don't waste your money. There are manuscripts running around that are front-to-back strong work and still losing dozens of contests. You need to be able to look at each poem in the manuscript and be willing to fight for its presence.

The things that matter insofar as you need to not screw them up: the title, the font, the print quality, the table of contents, etc. Just look like you know what you're doing with these, and don't look like you're desperate for attention.

The things that don't really matter a whole lot: the acknowledgments. As long as you have some reasonable publishing track record, this won't matter in a legit contest.

They may be getting a little sick of seeing my name...

1. Gulf Coast
2. DIAGRAM
3. RATTLE
4. Crazyhorse
5. Redivider
6. POOL
7. Mid-American Review
8. FIELD
9. LIT
10. Ninth Letter
11. Boxcar Poetry Review
12. Caketrain
13. Black Warrior Review

Go see my poem "Self Portrait in a Funhouse Mirror" in the new issue of The Pedestal!

Anyone going to AWP in Chicago need a roommate? Or know someone who will? Let me know...

Well, the first one already is a title in my manuscript project #2. The others I'd like to work in.

"I'm Your Huckleberry" (Tombstone)
"Jehovah Jehovah Jehovah" (Monty Python's Life of Brian)
"Get Your Fucking Shinebox" (Goodfellas)
"I'm Talking to All Those Villains in Missouri" (Unforgiven)
"Jesus Christ, Where Do You Get These Names?" (Get Shorty)
"You're the Guy Who Gets Away with It" (L. A. Confidential)
"Warped My Fragile Little Mind" (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut)

Today we have small doses of good news.

• My brother gets out of jail on Wednesday instead of Sunday--six days instead of 10.
• I completed all the tasks listed a post below before my mom got home. (There really were liquor bottles in the computer room, but of the three, one was still-sealed Almendrado that I bought here to take back to St. Louis because it's so difficult to get there, and another wasn't mine.)
• I rewatched A River Runs Through It on Friday. Oh, I knew what I was getting into. I think people should have a funny relationship-test movie and a sad relationship-test movie. River is my sad one.
• Though I sadly have not played darts since I came back to Colorado, I have played several good games of pool.
  
• Today was a day during which I deliberately accomplished nothing. Now that it's on into evening time, I'm allowing myself to accomplish a few things.
  
• I had brunch with Poetry Pal Aaron today. (I once started an e-mail to several Colorado Springs poets "Dear Poetry Pals," and he liked it because it made us sound like a low-budget superhero group.)
• I only have one manuscript left to send out for my big June push.
• Yesterday, I officially decided that I'm going to reapply to MFA programs for the Fall 2009 semester.
  

My brother is in jail. My mom returns tomorrow from a 3-week trip to Arizona. My brother and I were caring for her old, diabetic cat and "caring" for her house while she was gone. What I have to do before she returns:

• Wash a week's worth of dishes (we actually kept up on this one pretty well)
• Spray and wipe every surface in the kitchen, including counters, floor, and breakfast nook tabletop (glass)
• Take out the pile of recyclables that's accumulated in the kitchen
  
• Sweep cat litter off the laundry room floor
• Vacuum cat litter off the rug in the hallway outside the laundry room
  
• Throw out the beer case in the front hallway that I fucking told my brother to throw out
• Move the sack of half-full liquor bottles from the computer room into my room
  
• Buy a replacement cat (Kidding! Rain, aka "Toaster Cozy," is doing just fine, and is actually thinner now.)
  

"Rash" by Rebecca Loudon (Avatar Review)
"Exile" by Ryo Yamaguchi (Hayden's Ferry Review) (PDF file)

It's funny: I like the idea of William Logan a lot better than the actual execution.

I'd say I agree with the specifics of Logan's negativity at least three quarters of the time, and even when I don't agree, I don't find his opinions dishonest or careless. He's obviously capable of turning a smart, funny phrase. God knows he's a better prose review writer than he is a poet. Beyond that, I think there's very much a place for negative reviews in poetry (I've written them myself, in fact). So why do I not particularly like Logan's body of critical work? Here are a few ideas:

1. The relentless predictability. Logan will bash even the poets he's ostensibly praising, and he'll triple-bash his usual-suspect targets, so I don't go into a Logan review thinking "What did Logan think?" but "What didn't Logan like this time?" At some point you stop being a refreshing realist or even a cynic and just become a nihilist.

2. His limited vision of poetry. There's no question you can gain insight from his reviews, but it's of a small, conservative, old, major-press fragment of the poetry that's being written right now (and a truly tiny fragment of the good poetry). Logan and Ron Silliman are sort of separated-at-birth twins in this regard.

3. Making things personal. Not one of his reviews goes by without him making statements that could, with some modification, say something about the poetry at hand, but are instead ludicrously attached to the poet. (For one egregious example, read Brian Henry's mention of the nasty sexist overtones in his review of Mary Jo Salter.)

4. Ultimately, every William Logan review seems to be about William Logan. Every flashy insult shows off the Logan. Every poet gets pounded into a Logan-shaped hole.

By request, here's a picture of my niece, Maile. She's 10 months old now.



By the end of her two weeks here, she was no longer crying or burying her head in Mom/Dad's shoulder when I approached.

Returning from a few games of pool with my brother (during which I played terribly), I found an e-mail in my inbox informing me that Barrow Street was picking up a poem of mine. Hurrah!

Send poems to Anti-. Yeah, you. You know you want to.

Today is in fact my bthuthdy. I have no party planned, though I will be grabbing coffee with a friend later, and hope to do some stuff this weekend. And now, back to work... It's that kind of birthday.

I'm really not sure about how well this one works, but it was definitely interesting to write. Jumps from thought to thought more than my usual.

This is at least somewhat off the top of my head. All these books are (A) favorites from my childhood (age 3-12) and (B) books that I think more-or-less qualify as children's literature, so The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't make the list even though I read it and loved it before I was 12.

1. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings pushes a little more into adult-level literature (though, again, it was something I read in the right age range), so I'll go with the one that's clearly a children's adventure.

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. Another one that straddles that line, but it's just too good. The great American novel, ending be damned. Substitute Tom Sawyer if you insist it be clearcut kidlit.

3. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson. Arguably the best piece of escapist literature ever written for boys. And I still love the concept of pirates based at least 50% on it.

4. A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L'Engle. I liked it better than A Wrinkle in Time. There were parts in both that scared the hell out of me.

5. Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne. There's the Dorothy Parker school of thought that finds these too cutesy, but I think they're just cute enough, and funny, and sad at the end. I still use some of the broken language from them, like "Heffalump" and "Bisy Backson" and "Bthuthdy."

6. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Oh man. I don't even want to talk about this. Let's move on.

7. Animal Farm, George Orwell. Might not be intended as children's lit, but I'd argue that that's exactly what it is: something very adult finessed into a kids' story.

8. The BFG, Roald Dahl. Love his wicked sense of humor and outlook on life and wordplay. The Charlie books are superb too.

9. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster. The wordplay and the loopy logic carried the story, but I cared about the character too.

10. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle. The definitive Robin Hood for me. I wore this book out growing up.

11. The City of Gold and Lead, John Christopher. Apparently I prefer dark second books in trilogies. A Wind in the Door, this, Prince Caspian...

12. The Hardy Boys, "Franklin W. Dixon" (Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate). The only ones on this list I wouldn't be likely to stand by as good now, but hoo boy did I love these when I was a kid.

13. The Sneetches, Dr. Seuss. I cannot possibly pick just one Seuss. I pinballed between about a dozen different stories here.

Maybe Hitchhiker's Guide should have been on here after all. Oh well, I mentioned it enough.

On the way home yesterday, my car died three times. What's usually a four-hour trip on the high side ended up taking over six hours, and it cost me several hundred dollars once I took my car in today. I also found out that because of my brother's driver's license revocation, I am the only available option to drive his girlfriend and daughter to the airport. That makes four unplanned trips to DIA for me since I arrived home for what was allegedly a vacation. I am officially over being in Colorado.

The last time I saw my grandmother was about a year ago. She had some short term memory loss and would tell the same story three or four times, but she also talked about how she liked my poetry, even if she didn't understand it. Yesterday, at the big family gathering, she asked what my name was and whose son I was. She doesn't know I'm a writer anymore. She's often unsure about the names of her own children. It's sad.

I'm leaving here in about an hour to drive back down to Colorado Springs. I've had about as much family as I can take. Thursday will be "happy." A week from Thursday I get to drive my brother to jail for his DUI sentence.

Pleased to find out that poetry of mine will be coming out in Copper Nickel. Jake's done amazing things with that journal.

Off to grill burgers with dad, stepmom, brother, brother's girlfriend, and niece. Tales from the big dysfunctional family gathering tomorrow.

Woke up afraid of my own shadow
Like genuinely afraid
Headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade

Someday something's coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It'll store our brains in mason jars

And then the girl behind the counter
She asks me how I feel today
I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

--The Mountain Goats, "Lovecraft in Brooklyn"

Man, I want to write a paranoia poem now.

"Poem without Free Will" by Elisa Gabbert (Coconut)
"Street Fight" by Wayne Miller (Barn Owl Review)

Pleased to note that Jason Bredle's "Information Kiosk" from Anti- #2 is already the current Verse Daily Web Monthly feature. Congratulations, Jason!

Anti- Issue #2 is now posted.

18 poems by Joshua Ware, Sally Van Doren, Mathias Svalina, Sean Singer, Sandra Simonds, Jessica Piazza, Carrie Meadows, Ada Limón, Thomas Fink, Jason Bredle, Kate Bernadette Benedict, Boe Barnett, Deborah Ager, and William Aarnes.

Upcoming Featured Poets include Dora Malech, Aaron Anstett, Jill Alexander Essbaum, and more.

Plus visual poetry by Michael Basinski!

We are now accepting poetry submissions for Issue #3 and future Featured Poet slots, as well as visual art submissions for the cover.