WhimsyLand

I'm sure they mean well, but this ad from the National Fatherhood Initiative reminded me of the report today that Bush's faith-based insistence that our nation's schools teach abstinence-only sex education was a bust.  The ad was attached to the comical but tragic analysis by Glenn Greenwald on the ongoing criminal duplicity of this Administration when it comes to "lost" emails, videos and correspondence.

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As you may know, I'm a director of Many Mountains Moving, a literary journal of some note.  We're in the middle of our submission period for our annual Poetry Book Contest and entrants are coming in slower than last year.  Frankly, I'm amazed.  Our judge is Yusef Komunyakaa.  We adhere to strict guidelines in terms of fair treatment, anonymous reads, and serious consideration of all manuscripts.  We have a track record of publishing some really terrific books in the past four contests – books of widely varying themes and aesthetics.  The entry fee includes discounts on subscriptions, current MMM Press Books, and back issues.  What's not to like?  If you're tired of sending $25 to The Same Old Contests and reading about your non-acceptance in the trade press, give us a try.  Who knows, you may be the next Patrick Lawler or Anne-Marie Cusac.

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I miss Junie.

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Derek, Kyle and Cath have organized a reason for me to engage in another boondoggle, this time the Moving Of Derek's Stuff.  It takes place in early May, when Kyle and I will descend on Chicago to cart Derek's paraphernalia from his dorm room to "Max's place".  Max is Derek's best buddy and, as far as I can tell, lives in an apartment roughly the size of a Yugo's back seat.   I will be flying in, renting the Internal Combustion-Powered Conveyance Vehicle (probably a Ford Taurus, judging from the Hertz site), getting a room at a local hotel (I don't think the Palmer House is in my budget, though it is close), and probably taking everybody out for a terrific dinner at that fish house downstairs looking out over the Bank One Building's fountain or Italian Village or someplace else capable of putting a large uptick in my AMEX bill.  Der will then be officially done with school for the year, and he and Max will leave almost immediately for Europe.  They have their backpacks and travel guides.  They've purchased their EuroRail passes.  They've plotted out their itinerary starting with Paris, sidetracking to Provence, wandering through Italy, slugging over the Alps to Munich, thumbing on the AutoBahn to Berlin, and ending up in Amsterdam.  They probably don't have enough money, but they do have a google list of European youth hostels and a backup credit card from Cath and me, should we need to ransom them from the gypsies.

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I was reading Rebecca's blog after a long absence, and I'm quite sure that I could never be that honest and engaging.  Nor could I ever find a photo of 3 tigers in a swimming pool.

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I've been thinking a lot about poetry lately.  And, of course, talking to Junie about it.  Mainly, I wonder if I'm done.  I don't write it anymore, and it's not because I can't.  As an experiment, I stopped bitching to my friendlies and critiqued a few pieces today.  In the four years that I spent on various poetry boards, I probably critiqued a couple of thousand poems, maybe twice that.  Doing it again today, I found that I was required to pinpoint the specifics of my objections, rather than summarize as I have been wont to do lately.  Truth be told, 90% of what I read bores me to tears.  That is consistent with Sturgeon's Law, of course.  Unlike many of my blogmates, I am a civilian.  I don't have the disadvantage of running workshops and providing blurbs and generally having to maintain an open-mindedness consistent with keeping my career unimpeded by enemies created by my comments.  I think I sit somewhere between the great unwashed masses of conventional poets and the rarefied artisans of All Things Post LangPo.  My favorite poems include those by Sharon Olds, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Jorie Graham, Mary Jo Bang, Billy Collins, Lyn Hejinian, Lucie Brock-Broido, and John Ashbery.  The poems I like tend to have one or more of these characteristics:  subtlety, concision, clever breaks, compelling overstory, good titles, in media res, strong imagery, lack of summarizing closes, enough mystery to make you wonder, enough cues to clue you in.  Other facets, no doubt.  What I don't want to read is a poem that sounds like a poem, I guess.  I don't care at all about poetics, which started an exchange one time with Joshua.  Why would I care about that?  I once characterized this attitude as an indifference to strategy (as opposed to tactics), but I mis-spoke:  I mean that I don't care about extra-poetic agendas.  Like most poets, or perhaps as I expect most poets to be, the poetry I like the best is what I wrote last year and forgot about long enough to read it again and smile.  So, perhaps, it is all about self-indulgence.  I'm still trying to figure it out.