One of my favorite things about many other poetry blogs is when they post someone else's poem that I don't understand or don't like, and then reasonably explore why they like the poem. I don't always agree, even after their discussion, but I always appreciate getting a glimpse into why they like what they do, broadening my horizons just that little bit more. And sometimes their explanation really opens my eyes to the point that I add the poem (or poet) to my big list.

Gallaher is very good at it. My favorite posts on Ron Silliman's blog are those types. Johannes Goransson had a post recently that I really appreciated because he went into great detail about a poem he liked that's not what we might call conventionally (mainstreamily) poetic, and not one I would usually seek out. I found this post particularly appealing because I very much float between the worlds that like this poem and that summarily dismiss it, and because I wouldn't have had anywhere near as large a window onto the poem without Johannes' explanation. That the comment field turned into a tiresome pissing contest between Johannes and Joseph Hutchison doesn't diminish my interest in the post itself.

I don't post those kinds of explorations here very often, in part because I subscribe to the Damon Knight school of "science fiction is what we point to when we say 'science fiction'" regarding the poetry I like. But I think I should extend the offer: if I post a poem you don't like or don't feel or whatever, just ask me nicely to tell you what I see in it, and I'd be glad to do my best in a comment or a new post. I think it's the least I can do to thank all the other poets who do that.

What a Circus

First I locked hands with myself
put one foot on the opposite hip
and hup! leapt up
on my own shoulders like two acrobats.
What was underneath one? Space.
I did a double take and dropped.

Then I bent down in between my legs
and curled myself in half.
My head rose up behind me pointing front,
faced by my ass in doubt. I flipped
out. The hell with this
contortionistic acrobatic act. I ache
for the time when I was neither half
nor twice my given height, but one
to any power as a standing man.

--Alan Dugan

I'm sure you all have certain poetry topics that you intrinsically dislike. One of those topics for me is jazz. It's not just that I don't like actual jazz, though surely that is a part of it. All too often, jazz references in poems (especially by middle-aged white poets) come across to me like this Patton Oswalt impression of clueless aging hosts on NPR:

"I know what the kids like. I've got a rare Ornette Coleman solo recorded in a graveyard by Nat Hentoff in 1961, and that's what the kids like!"

Which inevitably leads me to this Oswalt impression of hippie war protesters:

"We're gonna knit the world's smallest pair of hemp pants, and put 'em on a mouse, and hide the mouse in a cupboard. But which cupboard is it in, man? People will be so busy thinking about that, they won't have time to go to war!"

Keep that in mind if you decide to send jazz poems to Anti-. Don't remind me of Patton Oswalt routines, or do deliberately be close to as funny as Patton.

Big-boy bullets:

• I jammed my finger yesterday at basketball. Swelling, bruising, and stiffness in your right index finger is a hassle, especially when you're right-handed.
• My friends and I won a trivia night on Saturday. That's one of the few nerd things I still participate in.
  
• I actually did something in PHP for the first time ever because I needed to fix a problem with Anti-. If you noticed anything odd there yesterday, that may be why.
  
• There are a dozen people following me on Twitter despite the fact that I have not ever posted anything there. I don't know how this happens.
• March was the month of no alcohol. April shall be the month of no restaurant food.
• Poetry reading right now: Above the River by James Wright, The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach. Non-poetry reading: Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe.
  

Retainer: Does it please you, my lord?
Bender: Hmm... It's a good start. Uh, yeah, it's definitely big, all right. I just wonder if it's too big, you know? I mean, are people gonna be remembering me, or the statue?
Retainer: But sire, we made it to your exact specifications.
Bender: Too exact, if you ask me. Tear it down and try again. But this time, don't embarrass yourselves.

--from Futurama, "A Pharaoh to Remember"

Anti-'s newest Featured Poet is C. E. Perry.

"Eight is for the Fantastic Elsewhere."

"Cash at Folsom" by Seth Abramson (Linebreak)
"Track 5: Summertime" by Jericho Brown (The Iowa Review)

Anti- congratulates Jayne Pupek and Jake Adam York. Jayne's "Census of Seagulls" and Jake's "Secession" were finalists for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net 2008.

I stole the title from "Six Apologies, Lord" by Olena Kalytiak Davis. I think I'm in a bit of a combative mood right now. The "Oh" beginning line 8 is very much an Alan Dugan affectation.

...to join Steve's poetry blog friends and family Tournament Bracket pool!

To accept the invitation, just follow this link. For reference, here's the group information.

Group ID#: 128108

-- Tournament Pick'em Commissioner
http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/t1

Blue Cheese Chicken

3-6 boneless skinless chicken breasts (depending on size)
1 16 oz. bottle of blue cheese salad dressing (Lite works fine)

Pour a thin layer of dressing into the bottom of a baking dish (probably 9"x13")
Pat the chicken breasts dry and lay them in a single layer on the dressing base
Pour the remainder of the dressing so it covers the chicken breasts
Bake at 350 degrees (no preheating necessary) for about 1 hour


Bean Dip

1 16 oz. can of refried beans with green chilis
1 cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup of salsa
1 teaspoon of chili powder
1 teaspoon of garlic powder
1 small can of sliced olives (optional)
1 tablespoon of diced onions (optional)

Mix all ingredients in pot and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until cheese is melted together with salsa/beans and the mixture starts to bubble

(Jalapenos would probably also work in this dip, but I don't like the overly spicy stuff)

It never fails to give me the giggles when someone takes a review (usually negative) and creatively erases it into a positive movie-poster style blurb. It's one of my favorite features of the Onion AV Club comment sections. So here's my version of William Logan's review of Mary Oliver, turned into a back-cover blurb.

"Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of ... the human spirit ... indomitable.... She loves ... the landscape ... in a vast nature preserve.... Oliver’s ... prayers ... sweetly ... offer ... beautiful trees.... Imagine the world ... seeking transcendence through nature ... not merely religious, though drawn from faith in nature as an expression of or substitute for the divine.... One of the graces of contemporary verse ... a miracle.... A good poet ... Oliver shows ... everything, until you feel like ... Coleridge.... Thousands of readers ... are satisfied ... come back for second helpings ... with ... profundity.... Mary Oliver is the bestselling poet in the country.... Her poems ... invoke Rilke ... van Gogh or ... Wordsworth.... Mary Oliver ... is not a mean thing ... with ... urgent tears ... shed all the way to the bank."--William Logan

If you have a full-length book I don't own yet, and you don't have Torched Verse Ends yet, want to trade? E-mail me if you're interested.

By the way, note to book reviewers: When someone queries you about sending a review copy, and you give the go-ahead, it's not okay to turn around and sell the book used on Amazon a month later. Kind of surprised I have to explain that, JC from Chicago.

The final tally:

Washington University and Johns Hopkins rejected me.
Colorado State didn't receive one of my recommendation letters and didn't bother to notify me until March.
Vanderbilt put me on the waiting list.

I'll hear back from Vanderbilt no later than April 15th, at which point I can go back to not pursuing an MFA, not having to teach, getting to stay in St. Louis where my girlfriend lives, keeping my full-time job instead of scraping by on stipends, making more money than most of the professors who rejected me, having more time to actually write, and not being pressured to change my writing for any reasons but my own. Hmm, I think I can talk myself into it.

Anti-'s newest featured poet is Rita Mae Reese. Did you know there are patron saints for archives and Arkansas and advertisers?

Also, I'm happy to announce our nominees for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology:
“Public Health Response to a Rabid Kitten—Four States, 2007″ by Marc McKee
“Atomosophobia” by Jessica Piazza

Because the best time to post your own draft is right after you trash someone's poetry. I stole the title from good poetry pal Aaron Anstett's "Prayer Against Dying on Camera."

If you read poetry blogs, you know the hot thing of the moment is Michael Schiavo's scathing takedown of Matthew Dickman's All American Poem. I have a hard time getting worked up over Dickman's poetry (for good or bad) when Tryfon Tolides is still out there.

What's that? You haven't read Tryfon Tolides? Yeah, neither has anyone else, but he's been published by Penguin and appeared in places that have more circulation than most of us will ever achieve. And his poetry is just awful.

Tryfon Tolides "earned" his MFA at Syracuse. Mary Karr, his teacher at Syracuse, selected his book An Almost Pure Empty Walking (and there's a promising title if ever there was one) to win the National Poetry Series. And then, lo and behold, a couple months ago she used her fucking Washington Post Poet's Choice column to shill two more of his poems, previously unpublished work, as opposed to virtually anything else that column runs. She couldn't even find much nice to say about the poems, which isn't a surprise, because they're terrible.

Poetry Daily liked him enough to run three poems at once, also wretched.

Here are some representatively ridiculous lines from his various poems, in case you don't want to experience the wholes:

so that all your days and the shuttering of each day's
light and the blue magnetic incomprehensible
jumping and motionless blue of twilight and the fine
blackening after, around the incomprehensible
waiting and breathing of trees with their delight-inducing
cloud-depths and freedom-shapes and darting birds,
happen in pure glory, in ineffable joy of consciousness,
so that your senses overfill to muteness,
so that mere being becomes the form of your praise.
(from "Calling")

The heat is so steady, the small logs burn so slowly in
the stove.
They go on burning after they are burned, burned
glowing whole remnants,
After smoke, hissing, last breaths, crackles, some blue
reserve flared
From under the bark, a wind, they become x-rays of
great detail of their former selves,
brittle refinement of surface chafe and molten-like core,
more gone and more alive,
(from "Untitled"--I think the Post web formatting messed up some line breaks, but even if it messed up some, how can a non-undergrad poem not know how to deal with initial caps consistently?)

My mother called this morning, kept trailing away,
or off, with complaints about her failure
to make it, alone in the house, the night being
long, no one to talk to, blaming, in part, America,
hating the mess we've found, or made this year.
(from "Immigrant"--he surely does have a way with titles, doesn't he?)

What will you do in the village alone in the house
with your mother gone in autumn with winter coming?
I will sleep with the terrifying and brave blackness at night
of the village and of the house.
(from "I Will Sleep"--the syntax of this is so inept that it boggles my mind)

The mouse doesn't really bother anyone. It doesn't
go around holding up banks or shooting people
in the face or locking them up in dank jail cells
and sticking electric prods to their genitals. It doesn't
build jet fighters and bomb our cities in the name
of peace in the middle of the night while we are sleeping.
(from "The Mouse and the Human"--I picture a freshman philosophy major saying this while stoned)

Because of the morning bird singing,
song will persist inside me.
Because of the sound of traffic,
I will always wonder,
and I shall be troubled at what remains
Unknown. But I shall hope. And because of the mailbox,
and the road, and the tree. It is hard to despair
because of the tree. Slowly, we turn toward love.
(from "The Tree"--actually, I think that's the whole poem)

My father is at a kind of bus station
outside, mostly men, moving, not moving,
wearing early 1900's mustaches, dark thick coats,
as in black and white immigrant documentaries
where people hold parcels and stand
very close to their unknown lives.
(from "My Father Is at a Kind of Bus Station"--I am reading a kind of a poem with mostly words, some verbs, almost like in old poems where interesting things happen, but not really at all)

"What?" he said,
"sit down under this tree
and what?"

"Yes," I said,
"sit down under this tree;
I want to read you a poem."

He was my
brother and we never
did things like that.
(from "A Perfect Day"--These just get way too easy to mock)

Instead of writing a poem
about writing a poem,
I decided to open
the window.
(from "Early April Evening"--Uhhhhhhhhh...)

Pathetic, right? Tryfon Tolides' publications represent the worst kind of ugliness spawned by po-biz cronyism.

Are you interested in reviewing Torched Verse Ends? You can find review copies here and here and here and here and here, among other outlets. Claim them while they're still hot!

Or, if you already own the book, why not write a review and submit it to an outlet whose editor you know? Or even put it on the book's Amazon page or GoodReads? I'd certainly appreciate it!

• My month of no desserts is over, and I had Ted Drewes custard last night.
• Now that the month of no desserts is done, it's time for the month of no alcohol. This is kind of fun.
  
• Apparently now is also the time to receive contributor copies. From AWP to now, I've gotten contributor issues of Sentence, Natural Bridge, Copper Nickel, and New Zoo Poetry Review. Lots and lots of familiar, quality names in them.
• I think I'm just about out of contributor copies to receive until I ramp up my submissions, either this summer or this fall.
• Nothing new on the MFA application front. Wait-listed at Vanderbilt, out at Washington University.
• Working on two drafts, one special submission, and one interview right now.
  

Picked this up off Mr. John Gallaher's blog. These are really the ones that got me at the time, not necessarily my favorites now (or my favorite overall songs by the artist). Just the way it happened, and the songs on the album that mean the most to me.

Nevermind - Nirvana
"Territorial Pissings"
"Breed"
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
"Come As You Are"

Zen Arcade - Husker Du
"Never Talking to You Again"
"Something I Learned Today"
"Pink Turns to Blue"
"Turn on the News"

Automatic for the People - REM
"Drive"
"Monty Got a Raw Deal"
"Sweetness Follows"
"Man on the Moon"

All Ages - Bad Religion
"I Want to Conquer the World"
"Against the Grain"
"Generator"
"21st Century Digital Boy"

Decade - Neil Young
"Ohio"
"After the Gold Rush"
"Heart of Gold"
"Sugar Mountain"

Metallica - Metallica
"The God That Failed"
"Nothing Else Matters"
"The Unforgiven"
"My Friend of Misery"

Aenima - Tool
"Forty Six & 2"
"Hooker with a Penis"
"Aenema"
"Eulogy"

Tantilla - House of Freaks
"Big Houses"
"I Want Answers"
"King of Kings"
"The Righteous Will Fall"

Blast Tyrant - Clutch
"Ghost"
"Cypress Grove"
"Regulator"
"(In the Wake of) the Swollen Goat"

Vs. - Pearl Jam
"Rearviewmirror"
"Indifference"
"W. M. A."
"Daughter"

The Joshua Tree - U2
"With or Without You"
"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
"In God's Country"
"Red Hill Mining Town"

Shake the Sheets - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
"Me and Mia"
"Counting Down the Hours"
"The Angels' Share"
"Heart Problems"

Mezmerize - System of a Down
"Revenga"
"This Cocaine Makes Me Feel Like I'm on This Song"
"Violent Pornography"
"Sad Statue"

Genius - Warren Zevon
"Interlude No. 1 / Play It All Night Long"
"Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead"
"Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner"
"Mr. Bad Example"

Graceland - Paul Simon
"The Boy in the Bubble"
"Graceland"
"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"
"Gumboots"

Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine
"Bullet in the Head"
"Know Your Enemy"
"Bombtrack"
"Killing in the Name"

Broken - Nine Inch Nails
"Wish"
"Gave Up"
"Last"
"Suck"

Sailing the Seas of Cheese - Primus
"Tommy the Cat"
"Here Come the Bastards"
"Jerry Was a Race Car Driver"
"American Life"

Use Your Illusion II - Guns n' Roses
"Pretty Tied Up"
"You Could Be Mine"
"14 Years"
"Yesterdays"

Operation: Mindcrime - Queensryche
"Speak"
"Spreading the Disease"
"Revolution Calling"
"The Needle Lies"