Sturgeon's Law

Some time ago (over a month, yeesh), I posted my silly little project plan to make short anthologies of my favorite poems by individual poets, starting with Weldon Kees. So today I actually completed the Kees anthology. Here are the titles, and links where available:

For My Daughter
Robinson
Aspects of Robinson
Robinson at Home
Relating to Robinson
The Speakers
Farrago
The Base
1926
The Upstairs Room
The Smiles of the Bathers
The Beach in August
The Beach

A lot of the anthology pieces, but certainly not all of them ("Round" is a poem whose idea is much better than its execution, and I really don't get the appeal of "The Bell from Europe"), and some much less collected poems like "Farrago" and "The Base," a truly bitter 12-liner that I can't find anywhere online.

First Kees poem I ever read: "The Beach"
Strangeness: "The Beach," all over the place online, isn't in the Collected Poems edited by Justice.
Favorite poems: "For My Daughter," "1926," and both "Beach" poems.
Poems I could most easily remove for others: a couple Robinson poems (though I think they're better as a whole group, so maybe not), "Farrago," and "The Smiles of the Bathers."
Phrase I'm likely to steal for my new project: "The present stumbles home to bed" from "The Speakers"

Who's up next for my little project? I was thinking Philip Levine or James Wright, but those are somewhat rote choices. Any other suggestions?

Another (quasi-)rhymer, oddly, but not metrical. I stole the title from “Angelico's Crucifixion, Cell 42, Convent of San Marco” by Clare Rossini. At one point I was using the title "Burn Thee to the Bare Bane" from the Lyke-Wake Dirge, but this one worked better for me.

So I've complained a couple times recently on here about how badly I've been eating. Of course, when I say "I need to eat better," what does that really mean, and I'm plowing through chocolate again the next day. Fortunately, I know how I roll--if I say something specific in a public way, I do it. So this week it's "No chips/crackers/fatty snacks and no desserts until Friday." And presto, I'll do it. I'll report on it on Friday too. I know you don't care, but it works for me. I also will do difficult things if you bet me a dollar I can't. Wheeeeee!

I've had two poems accepted by The American Poetry Journal.

This fortnight's featured poet at Anti- is C. Dale Young. You should go read his poems now, then tell everyone you know.

So what I hadn't mentioned on the blog for the last week is that I'm actually back in Colorado for a couple months. I didn't mention it because I wanted to surprise my friends Aaron and Jake at their Colorado College reading last night, and I know they stop by here from time to time. The surprise was a big success, as several of my best friends in town were there, and there were many happy reunions. Now there's only one person left to surprise here, and I don't think she reads the blog. If she does, well, K, let's hang out soon...

Whee, a review for 90 Percent of Everything! It seems pretty accurate to me (it is a miscellany rather than something tied closely by theme or subject matter, it isn't my more personal or emotional work), but this is a contradiction:

"there did not seem to be a lot of schroeder in schroeder's poetry, but there was a ton of twitchy, insomniatic (?) intelligence."

That is the Schroeder in the poetry, my babies!

Thanks for the review, Brooklyn.

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.