Swampland | Redemption

Poetry is truth invigorated by beautiful words said deliberately.

2012-01-22T12:39:00.001-06:00

I Can't Draw

2012-01-14T01:27:00.001-06:00

For Abner

2012-01-08T22:56:00.002-06:00

A poetic response to a fiction piece. Not the most original thing to do, but there's no one writer in the world I'd hope to show my appreciation to (for his writing, and his friendship) than Steve. How y'all like it:

Your undertaker father barred you
from the ivy leagues you’d skated into.
Money wasn’t tight. He thought it better
you learn the family trade. Hating it,
the only gig you got was making donuts
for fat city drag queens leaving discos.
You didn’t rat their hustle and reward
was cut coke or more than decent weed.
You needed a friend. One who stole
wine because you drank it, smoked
because you smoked yet always lacked
a lasting pack. We spared a room,
a plate at dinner—you could never
pay it back.
                     In Kansas, you got better.
Doing so required a memory short
on me or the nutrias tussle over donuts.
You proposed marriage to a librarian
Kansan finds your redeeming neat.
Your tidy life, your cold coffee meetings
in the church basement’s anonymity.
You needed better friends. Earned them
with wit and being for others what you
once needed from me. Found faith
fortifying a troubled New Orleans past.

A friend won’t make it to your wedding.
Can’t afford the ticket gets him there.
Can’t afford the suit. The grinning needed
in a year short on reasons.
                                             He’ll smile
                                             elsewhere
for the life you’ve built, that lacquered ark
he likes to think he once helped patch.

He'd rather drown than tie it down.

Woodside Drive in Gambier, OH

2011-12-09T14:28:00.001-06:00

At seeds in the snow I lend a warm water bath.
Chipmunk blood crystalizes underneath the ice.
Before this latest blizzard hit, we bathed wet logs
in kerosene and threw a match incinerated quick

in exploding flame. Mixed Everclear and wine
in the biggest bowl Salvation Army sold, plugged
a Cooper Tires mug through broth to ladle liquor
into hungry cups. The earth burns for four days.

Caught in harshest gossip, driving bitter thorns
into the place’s pressure points, it’s easy to forget
Ohio wasn’t always ice or fire, that blight boomed

in dance parties, Cheez Wiz soirees, and annual
performance art festivals in the backyard where
I’d pass out sober staring up at globs.

12092011

There’s Value In the Land You Live On

2011-11-26T13:54:00.001-06:00

They started with the mailbox—we found a leaking hole where it leaned.
Christmas comes and they yank lights still blinking from the shingles.
Yanked the shingles too. The bricks, the roofing tiles, the turret spun
through hurricanes and stay slightly dilapidated. The pulled up sod,
dug out the trees, ripped fixtures, faucets, our old carpet stains too,
the watermelon patch and coupons kept my father sane after his
heart half died. Someone not us got pad off—the fence missing,
the neighbor’s patio nowhere. The windows are stripped from
their frames stripped from the walls. Muck dribbled our feet
made naked by the takers. One chubby politician screamed
until hoarse, stayed hoarse for campaign commercials.
They take the tackle box, the rod, the bait bucket,
the spool of twine. When they took the boat
they didn’t take the floating keychain keys
until they took those too. They took the
mower, the light bulbs, the wall studs.
Muck where there was once a house.
They took my mother’s sugar
cookie recipe, my brother’s
cds I didn’t take, kryloned
number from the curb.
They take the dirt
under fingernails,
the weak beagle’s
sense of smell,
my father’s
eyes, my
mother’s
husband

and sell it back to us by the gallon.

A Zombie Epic Poem Update.

2011-11-18T13:24:00.001-06:00

Y'all:

You can click here read about the history of "the book" if you want. I wrote it October of 2009 that it was done and that I was going to publish it and get a diploma and be happy and healthy and wise.

I didn't mean to lie. It wasn't done then and it still isn't done now. But here's the thing: I've read from it before to little response. Last night I read it to a small crowd of the Gold Mine Saloon krewe still standing at the end of the night. What I read felt right; it's never felt right before.

There's also this. I'm going to be twenty-seven in February. I've been writing this book since I was twenty. That's a long time to work on a book, but those seven years have been defining as a person. Who I am was made in that time and the only constant in my life has been this shitty little book that won't get written.

I got a zombie tattoo is 2005 to motivate my finishing it. I guess it wasn't big enough. I've talked about what I want the book to be for so long (what I want it to mean, to accomplish) that I forgot that foremost I want it to be a good poem.

It's really so different from anything before it that I've had to teach myself how to write a south-louisiana zombie-gothic novel-in-verse. I think I've got it now.

Steve Miller, help me out. You read the early drafts and now you've got the first two of this latest piece. Better, right?

I want to finish my revision by January 15th. For $25, Bernadette Mayer will read it if I enter it into the pool of books for the Bob Kaufman Prize. Although I think reading the first three poems to her and the Saloon krewe disqualifies me? In any case, I'm setting that date in my head.

I read the old draft and think "just cut the shit! there's good poems stuck in here." Alan Heathcock's great highlighting trick where he reads and highlights great lines in other book prompted me to highlight the good lines in my book. I started to see what works and what doesn't. It's a good trick.

I want to make something like nothing you've ever read, and as year seven approaches I've learned without doubt that it ain't easy.

The King of an Interstate Waffle House Humbles Three-in-the-Morning Courtiers

2011-11-18T13:22:00.001-06:00

His chef’s hat death-
defies the buyers
of his chops.Young
drunk who wandered
into culinary school
and pooled his kitchen
wisdom into good
fuckin’ food.

Ask all you like
but he won’t fry shit
except a crisp egg
tastes like love. Demon
with a beef patty
his steel blade
repealing tendons
into a thin fissure
of incorruptible yum.

He don’t give six
squirts of piss if
toast dust makes
your throat explode.
A waitress sharing
someone’s yolk allergy
makes him quit
each night he hears it.
Even his waitress rage
is delicious—truckers
paying double when
it spills from his grill.
For ten bucks
your tongue becomes
a wonderland.

2011-10-27T23:33:00.004-06:00

WORK

2011-10-21T20:31:00.001-06:00

I. Ohio

The summer Nat Otting tried to teach
me German by having me read Rilke
in German, I woke before the sun
buzzed through Ohio hornet wings
and wrote because I wanted something
more than sweat and quarter-hopping
bookstores for another gem I’d have to
sell for rent. Eight hours in and pages
inked alive, I’d set on the poor excuse
for a porch Ohio offered, and hushed
home’s ghosts before darkness rose.

Spliced lines of books into my DNA
and raked my own lines for an image
potent as the blueberry wine from
Wheeling tasted like candied fire.
Now come fireflies sparking crabgrass
and picnics as near the apple orchard
anyone can get without being charged.

Now comes Mardi Gras, where it snows
and schools make their students show—
a sacrilege giving homework on that day
no matter what burgh I’m buttressed to.
All around faces unaware of the sacred day,
or worse wear beads and talk of drunks
want me hyping infomercial narratives.
Tack trawl nets to cinder blocks, scream
over jazz about cities in peril, stockpile
Tichenor’s, chicory, and cajun spice.

A call from home and I’m staining
My Belle Chasse High School yearbook
where married couples pose with kids
or wave enlistment papers with tears.
Hussein captured and I’m in Ohio
while friends search spider-holes
or get shot for lies. Amazed how few
among me know a person there when
I cursed and fished with whole battalions.

The Kokosing River’s muddy bank
starts calling. I leave before I’m drowned.
I didn’t get my piece of paper. Didn’t
learn a poet’s German. Didn’t die.

II. Home

My Uncle drinks cheap beer because
his wife passed on and doesn’t rub
roughness from his shoulders anymore.

He says—Wanna talk about the oil?
I say—Yeah. He says—That shit gets
ugly in the sunlight and heavy in a net,
but what they say on CNN ain’t true.
Some birds died but some birds laid
their young in untouched patches
and that oil couldn’t kill me—he kills
his Schlitz and stomps it flat—even if
they made me drink a gallon of it down.

We keep working, even when they say
we can’t. We work cause what we do
ain’t up to them. Cause work needs
someone wants to get it done, someone
does it because the work itself nourishes..

He fishes another can from his cooler
and cracks the golden nectar free.
He doesn’t know he’s dying yet,
won’t care much when he does.

Poem for Miss (rough draft)

2011-10-16T21:44:00.001-06:00

You never knew who loved you more—
or cared. You followed heat
like a guided weapon & pressed
against whatever gentle stranger
let your forehead bat their jaws.

Something sacred in you
goes mostly ignored.

A bright few grew allergic
to your domestic goddess antics
& the shallow pool of romeos
who follow you home care less
if you drown or the grill of Septa bus
sprawls your thoughts across Broad.

I loved you in Ohio
when we were both our best.
Crowds there digested
the tickle of your eyelashes
flapped like whiskers
as music rolled your tongue until
its rough buds buttered like parsnips
the eclipse glistening our shared sky.

Whichever city wiped our cheeks
of Ohio soot
should’ve taken better care
of both of us.

Some presume you died. Likely since
you congregate with rougher folks
than poets from the fertile crescent.
I’d like to think you hopped a train
and found another chump
that gives his heat and gets rewarded
with a kiss tuned high and playing long.

Cousins (rough draft)

2011-10-16T21:38:00.001-06:00

I’m dreaming of stewed rabbit
& carrots, persimmons in a pan
& pecan cookies dipped in chicory
brewed thick enough to walk across.

Aunt Joan died
but she wasn’t among the stats.
Her heart gave out after her lungs
but she hung in until a Christmas
spent in Meadowcrest
made her crazy, made her think
she was her daddy’s daughter
massaging frozen bulbs back
from death in his backyard garden.

A husband more stubborn
than smart, he lives down
on that parish & raises
their two boys.

Robbie stinks of bleach
from running shrimp boats
through petroleum-ruined gulf
& his hair grows long from
momma’s scissors silenced.
Worn like a callous, cousin Robbie
carries memories in his skin
& prays when clouds change.

Dusty like me tries outrunning
this thin rip of a parish. Drives
uproad and makes it far as Old Algiers
before his mother calls him home.

I’m dreaming of stewed rabbit
& carrots, persimmons in a pan
& pecan cookies dipped in chicory
brewed thick enough to walk across.

On the boat all they talk about
is titties & saints, a damn good
hunting trip & who came back
from Iraq a little less themselves.

Sunset & six-packs. A little
homegrown weed. Dusty flicks
his worn knife out & tears fur
from trapped rabbit’s backs.
Robbie watches as the bug light
fries another rotten politician
reincarnated as mosquito.

Riced and diced carrots happen
like magic. Coffee strong as booze.

I’m dreaming of stewed rabbit
& carrots until we get a chance
to make that meal again.

Papa Jimmy

2011-09-29T08:54:00.000-06:00

Old man tough as a turkish knot,
you stole cars for twenty years
until one lucky patrolman
followed a red Chevelle
on Spillway road past tangled weeds
to the motherload & cuffed
your faded bony wrist.

Seventy-six counts earned you
thirty hard labor at Angola,
where you farmed string beans
& rode bulls in prison rodeos.
Played chess once you’d whittled
the pieces, sat through masses,
grew old. Digging irrigation trenches
when the guards rip the shovel
from your hand & irrigate the streets
with hardened you. Somewhere
between Angola & south
of New Orleans, you scheme
a bus ticket & two Old Gold
cartons to the second cache—
cars time & storms stole,
a graveyard for your life

reignited in a shanty of car parts
& downed trees, a moss thatched
roof rough as your tongue
older kids liked to hear so much
they threatened letting out your hogs
until you’d bust from your oak
& Chevy shanty cursing & toting
a double barrel parole violation.

My brother swore
to younger kids like me you
worshipped the goddamned devil.
All the brothers swore your hog-pen
confined kids who traveled too
deep into the woods too late at night
& got hoodimoumoued to pigs.
Any doubting little brothers
& his elder drags or dares him
close enough to look you in the eye.
Once my brother tried tying me
to a tree within your sight. No knots
before he heard your shotgun click.

Nightmares you’d wander out
from the tree-line to the field
behind my house, incinerating fences
as you pass through them
into the backyard, bedroom,
toss dirty trough water on my face
until all screams reach snorts
& grunts. How many kids was it
you jacked & sliced for back fat
bacon, cooked in the rusted trunk
of one of your stolen cars?

Later, after Bo Gainey took a pellet
to the eye inside their clubhouse
we learned the stories were all false.
Bo’s prosthetic leaks when he blinks
& cops confiscated my brother’s gun.
You die one winter night the fire’s
cinders freeze. First thaw of Spring,
we smell your body thawing
as wasps wings investigate
your cloudy corneas.

Your pen unmended over time
& hogs escape. Terrorizing
neighbors, they kill small dogs
& cats too stupid to keep indoors.
A congregation of them haunt
the sandlot, so no one plays ball.

The older boys spooked
that after you died their cars
overheat on lost highways, jerk
sudden into ditches or like
Mattie Clark’s silver Mustang
half-mile barrel-roll in flames.
His survival shocking nurses,
his sobriety the cops.

Once trucks tow totaled vehicles
to scrap, the brothers tuck away
their roughed-up tongues,
vanishing you like the sores
blemishes & broken bones
time’s medicines amend.

All that’s left of you now
are ruins & the rusted cars that—
if someone musters the guts
to sit in, like sitting in
a stranger’s casket—make bones
thunder under skin.

In Hopes of Cleansing My Brain of Bad Ideas, I Write a Shitty Villanelle

2011-09-26T21:06:00.004-06:00

I jumped off the bridge and no one saw me waving;
such need to say goodbye and abandon these bones
to jump said loud that what fell wasn't worth saving.

Bad analogies accumulate like a cigarette craving
Sisyphus moves his boulder, I've accumulated stones.
I jumped off the bridge and no one saw me waving

all those heavy, jagged stones from my body weighing
me down. Jump, I think, and listen for their tones--
to jump said loud that what fell wasn't worth saving.

Refinery pollutants insulate cheap beer misbehaving
in my brain beaten by unpaid bills & student loans.
I jumped off the bridge and no one saw me waving

like Berryman. He at least accomplished something
worth dying for—I'll never wake up from these towns
saying jump saying what's the use you ain't worth saving.

The eyeless cat perceives—no. No more staving
what should be done, what a selfish fool postpones.
I'll jump off the bridge though no one sees me waving.
I'll say jump. I'll say that what falls isn't worth saving.

***

If I'm dead, I can't revise this hunk of shit.

Fortune Cookie

2011-09-16T11:03:00.000-06:00

Redemption isn't found in a bottle or a bible
but in the precious work of being
a decent human being.

***

Write a fortune cookie poem. This is a very brief poem that either forecasts the reader’s future or imparts some life advice (can be profound, mind scrambling, or funny).

In Praise of MFAs: A Clarification

2011-09-09T11:02:00.000-06:00

"An essay on the literary biz by my friend geoff. i differ in one way--i hope to have an MFA this coming spring, but even without it, i know i'm a much better writer than i would be without having been at UNO the last few years. (which is not to say that geoff needs one, only that i need one.) still, i quite enjoyed this essay, particularly as i'm working on cracking the literary "business" myself right now."
--Alden Eagle

(This is a long post, about 1,600 words. I've placed the main points in bold because I'm willing to negotiate my need for you to read something I wrote with your need to not waste your time doing it.)

Perhaps not being clear enough in my previous post, I hope to state with greater clarity the following:

I'd love to pursue an MFA. And even though I may need an MFA, that isn't an option right now. Though I may attack the MaFiA, the MFA culture in poetry that rewards where a person achieved higher learning instead of how that higher learning affects their writing, there isn't any place in the world I'd rather be than enrolled in an MFA.

I love the workshop. I love the critical conversation. I seek the camaraderie one finds by working toward an MFA with equally gifted and driven people. I think that part of the reason I had trouble in Kollege was that I treated it like an MFA; I cared little about courses not English and, while I managed decent grades outside of my major, I never took them seriously. To me, the science, history, economics, and sociology classes I took at Kollege were merely giving me tools to use in my writing and not for their own intrinsic values. I had my own weird little obsession driving my work and anything entered into my brain merely conformed to that obsession instead of living in congress with it.

I love the workshop; it's my favorite place in the world. The chance to speak with other writers about their work and use my aesthetic to try and make their work better is my favorite thing in the universe to do. And that they'll help my work? Simply awesome. That part of the workshop is the pursuit to creating new work through exercises and prompts, through the reading and comprehension of poets familiar and new, and through the consumption of critical and theoretical works that examine how the functions of language affect how what we say is interpreted works like an accelerant to my already burning desire to write good poems.

I love the critical conversation. The chance to read great pieces of literature through the lens of my own work and the goal of making it better; that close of a reading where the works aren't read to learn character names, setting, and plot but for what the book says and how it says it for the betterment of what you say and how you say it is something that students in MFAs should thank their lucky stars for being able to do. Most people read books to escape; some to find themselves. The idea that MFA students are tasked to read books to find themselves through their craft is a gift. In an MFA, there is no escape; you are there to be better, smarter, better prepared to have the great long conversation with all the authors that have come before and will come after -- essentially, the great task good art endeavors to perform.

I love that in an MFA, you are not alone. Your classroom isn't an accumulation of the curious and uninitiated. At the MFA level, you all want to do it as more than a flirtation. At the MFA level, you've all accepted that making great art takes going through hell in both a personal and critical examination. It isn't luck that Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" exists in the world. It isn't little effort. Writing a poem like that takes Herculean strength, both to explore your own depths of expression and understanding and accept the limitation of your ability. "One Art" wasn't one take. With the perfectionism of Steely Dan, Bishop comes back again and again to the lines, whittling and injecting until a poem is there. And then whittling and injecting more lines until a great poem is there. A poem that says something. A poem that does the work of saying something in an interesting way. A poem that matters. The students in an MFA understand that that's what it takes. And they bond over it, and help each other.
I went to Kollege to be a better writer, not to get a piece of paper. I didn't realize that until I was told I wasn't getting the piece of paper. It's not that I didn't take college seriously, I just had different values than most people. I can't say why. I assumed that if I was the best writer I could be then the piece of paper would happen. I left, finally, for a myriad of reasons. But here are the big three:

I wasn't going to finish in a way that was meaningful to me. I was going to limp into the finish line from wounds that I wasn't sure I'd ever recover from (still haven't yet, which means I didn't leave soon enough).

I couldn't write anymore. Not even my name on a check. I'd developed such anxiety from my failings that I'd crippled the one thing that got me to the show. Papers weren't going to get written. Lines went unwritten. Once that collapse began, it became unceasing in its dehumanization. I cowered at the commonplace: showering, eating, sleeping, communicating with people.

Because I couldn't write, I became mean and reckless with my life, and the value I placed on it. It became worthless in my eyes. If I didn't leave, I was going to do something terrible and stupid to myself. I left to save myself, and to save myself I'd have to give up on the dream of an MFA and, in essence, lose myself anyway.

Pursuing an MFA was the dream. More than winning the Powerball or finding a decent job. My life was my work, and my work was destined to be made greater in an MFA environment.

At a certain point, it wasn't going to happen. Because the dream had been degraded by those who were jaded with the system. Because I had been degraded by personal and public tragedies that made doing the work harder than even I could handle. I think, and am probably wrong, that it wasn't going to happen because I wanted it too much and that, like Kollege, I ascribed an unfair haven on the idea of an MFA. An MFA would solve all of my problems, redeem all of the choices I'd made with my life.

It's just a piece of paper and a chance. A piece of paper that allows more choices with your life and a chance to expose yourself to new understandings that can influence your writing. Without the piece of paper, I have fewer choices but what I've learned is that the world is full of chances to expose yourself to understanding and that the work done in an MFA is only what you make of it. While I don't have any regular workshop environment to rely on (last year I went to one in Phoenix, Arizona and this year sat in on a lovely workshop held in Manhattan) I do have the tools I've been given in older workshops. Another thing I learned in Kollege is that workshops aren't to be relied on too heavily, and that another person's eyes aren't nearly as valuable as your own if you can't learn to trust what you're seeing. I had to learn, on the undergraduate level, to make myself a better writer because I arrived at Kollege and was told that freshmen couldn't take workshops until their sophomore year. I had to find, as writers do, a voice in my mind that speaks outside of myself to a larger audience; a voice that relates and manages to communicate with people clearly without the benefit of someone saying 'I don't get it' or 'what is this image doing?'

I learned that I see the world with a critical eye and that any work I read is seen through that lens. I learned that old friends with access to JSTOR will download essays for you if you ask them nicely (thank you Chris Bench!!). I learned that prompts and exercises are readily available on the internet, and you can find a few amazing people that have a way of speaking to your creative juices even when it's acting like a teenage girl.

I learned to work harder than the MFA student because my reward doesn't include a piece of paper. It's akin to faith in a higher power. That faith gives you the strength to do amazing things and only asks that you be a good person. If I don't have faith, being a good person is a task that I must assign upon myself. Fouling up means letting myself down, losing faith in myself. All I have is the task of being the best possible poet I can be, which means doing the work without receiving the choices. God, how I would love having choices. Why? Because mopping floors, frying wings, and scooping lilies out of my brother's pond for $500 is not a career.

So while I may value the MFA and give the degree weight (maybe even a greater weight than someone suffering through it) I have to make due without it. It's the life I can't have, the life I tell myself I shouldn't want because accepting the inverse on some days might make me incurably depressed. Because I've learned that, as Galway Kinnell said of (Kollege alum) James Wright:

in those days when you walked on Middle Path on fire
in the clear idea that it could be done,
but, since speech that expresses trouble
takes going through hell, also afraid
that it could not be done for long.

When I read this poem in memory of James Wright, a poet I followed to Kollege, I cried. Because I thought it was about me, that's how I was in those days. I don't walk on fire anymore, but god damn it, I walk. I have to.

Emma: A Sonnet

2011-09-06T14:46:00.002-06:00

Got drunk one night and confessed an adoration
I’d felt for years. Drunk, you followed me home.

We never made love, but cuddled and spooned
and in sleep had mad dreams of rabbit fur
insulating our raptures. In the cold mornings
Ohio always brings, I’d share my last cigarette

and watch you leave for the classes I’d sworn off.
At the ice cream parlor you told me about cysts
and being barren soon, how the thin window
where you could be a mother was slamming shut.

I was a coward. I’d love to raise a child with you;
to see my father’s nose scaffolding your blue eyes
on a child I’d teach to sing and rhyme and you
would teach to bake is all I’ll ever really want.

Vanity Sick: The Business of a Poetry Career

2011-09-06T00:31:00.000-06:00

I am a so-called 'inexperienced' poet.

I don't have an MFA. Hell, I don't even have my Bachelor's. My first chapbook was funded through my old Kollege. The judge who selected it was my professor, who tabbed me to also designed my book and the other books for the series. I handled the marketing, cold-called independent bookstores in and around Columbus, Ohio and near Poughkeepsie, New York. I worked to get the authors to readings in their hometowns, for those like me that went away for school.

I didn't really get to enjoy the whole "I won a book prize" thing. I was too busy making the book, and getting it sold.

Before it was even over, the professor was suddenly no longer employed by the Kollege and his endeavors (like the chapbook series) were violently disregarded. It was a labor of love, but also a student job for which I received no pay.

None.

I bought ISBNs for the series out-of-pocket because I was told I'd be reimbursed. I wasn't. The money to print the books was in a college bank account that had been emptied by the college, and no one told me. I never heard back from the college bookstore. They seemed to pocket the money as pure profit, which probably went to the college anyway. The printshop I'd known for two years was mega-pissed and a promising opportunity to apprentice there dried up. Instead, I made deliveries for free until the bill was fifty percent paid and the college finally paid the rest (or, at least, that's what the manager of the print shop told me). All things considered, the publication of my first chapbook cost me about $350.

You see, I sometimes get a lot of flack for leaving Kollege. For me, it was a cumulative process of being demeaned for truly believing that Kollege was the place to be a student of poetry. I constantly fought to keep long-held and new literary endeavors funded. I watched great professors come and go. I saw kids who loved poetry have their feelings crushed by a department that didn't really seem to care either way. You're great. So what? You're mediocre. Whatever. The chapbook series died with me, and I feel such shame for that. But the college didn't care. That was our fundamental disagreement, ultimately. I cared. They didn't.

I am a so-called 'inexperienced' poet.

I have a few publications in mostly small literary journals and websites. Five bucks to Margie earned me my first publication. Of the fourteen or so publishing credits, six are online journals. Last year, one journal paid me $2.50. It's the only time I've ever been paid, but there was no contributor's copy. Price of seeing my name in print: $15.00. Minus my fee, of course. I send work out for three months a years. Each month is split in three month intervals; that way, I can take advantage of fall, spring, and summer reading periods without killing myself on postage or driving myself crazy waiting to hear back. I spend a little time in the three months reading journals, checking websites, reading where poets I like are getting their work published so that when my month comes up I know where I want to send work.

I am a so-called 'inexperienced' poet.

I self-published my second chapbook. I've submitted to maybe five contests, but in the end it was too much money and, having been a reader for multiple contests, I felt like I didn't have much of a chance anyway. Last November, I printed and bound According To the Drunken Elders of my Past in an apartment I was weeks from being evicted from and sold it on facebook and at readings. I wrote it, edited it, designed it, printed it, bound it, and sold it with a budget of fifty dollars. I went way over budget, spending $68.78 on ink, paper, fishing twine to bind it. I ran out of red card stock, which was on sale when I chose red but marked back up to fifteen dollars when I bought more. I used an old paper cutter and a swiss army knife. A hundred copy run sold out in two weeks. I did that. I put 100 books of my own poetry out in the world. Was it perfect? Of course not. Did I miss out on the prestige of being selected as the winner of the 2010 Michael Wigglesworth Prize? I guess so. An old teacher of mine met with me for coffee and he bought my cheap little dinky little books. He read them, and a little while later wrote a very nice letter about how much he enjoyed them. I don't know if the fact that it was a 'vanity publication' made him enjoy them less than he would have, but he seemed to like it enough for me.

I am a so-called 'inexperienced' poet.

When I write poems, I don't have the knowledge that an MFA degree helped shape me into the writer I am. Professors never grilled me on a manuscript, or told me where my work would receive favorable reception. When I send work out, I do so because I'm done writing the poem and what the hell else are you going to do with it if you think it's interesting and people might enjoy reading it? I don't pick the journals based on a ranking in Poets & Writers or some equivalent journal creating a pantheon of literary merit. To me, the three most prestigious publications I've ever been in were Margie, YAWP, and Poetry Quarterly because my old teacher Andy Young was in Margie, I was featured next to a Paul Chasse poem in YAWP, and Shaindel Beers appeared in the same issue of PQ. I don't send work to journals where friends of mine are the readers unless I know my friends will either abstain from judging my work or flat out reject it for my being such a little cheat.

I don't think about literary agents. I don't know the name of one. I wouldn't know where to look for one. I don't care to know where to look.

I don't think about money. Other than books and postage, I invest zero dollars in my poetry 'career' because I'm not a career poet. This is not a job to me and I'd buy the books anyway. I'm not doing this because I have a wild delusion that there is money in it; I had teachers early that made clear that poets make nothing. I don't imagine being poet laureate, featured on The Essential American Poets podcast, or talked about by Garrison Keillor.

I have three full-length manuscripts in my file cabinet. They're not good enough to be published. I don't need a publisher to tell me that; I wouldn't buy them. They show my youth and inexperience. They lack the general pungency a good book has; it takes easy outs when it should be challenging and challenges played-out ideas. Most of the poems in the three manuscripts are either homages to poems I love or poetry exercises. They are collections, not books.

If I cared about money, I might polish them up and pray some publisher would take a chance on a non-MFA poet with only a few publications under his belt.

I care a little more about being a better writer, about being the author of a book and not a collection of poems. But, when the day comes that I do write a book I'm in love with and want to share, believe me when I say that if a publisher I like and respect wants me to chip in to get it out into the world I will. Because the book matters more to me than the money (as proof I submit my bookshelf against my Regions Bank checking account...one is empty and one is full and you can guess which one is which).

Poem For the Chapmen

2011-05-04T01:34:00.000-06:00

Chapbook is a generic term to cover a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet, popular from the sixteenth through to the later part of the nineteenth century.

No exact definition can be applied. Chapbook can mean anything that would have formed part of the stock of chapmen, a variety of peddler. The word chapman probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for barter, buy and sell.

The term chapbook was formalized by bibliophiles of the nineteenth century, as a variety of ephemera (disposable printed material.) It includes many kinds of printed material, such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children’s literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints.

…

Chapbook is also a term currently used to denote low-cost hard copy production, particularly of poetry.

Poetry chapbooks tend to focus on a specific theme, story, or form to unify the entire book.

The genre has been revitalized in the past 20 years by the widespread availability of low-cost copy centers and the cultural revolutions spurred by both zines and poetry slams, the latter generating hundreds upon hundreds of self-published chapbooks that are used to fund tours.

Poetry Month Day 24 - Dear Lord

2011-04-24T15:34:00.003-06:00

A wink of wind chills my brow
as pastel eggs ache to be found
by my dirty-finger nieces
babbling pure joy of youth.
Parsley in the garden blooms
around a plastic egg singing
of its jelly bean innards
when wind shakes it.

This is your son’s day—
he became a man in your eyes
by dying, but the world
you made (on whim, some say,
or because you could) keeps
going. And I keep going too
because I’m stubborn
or stupid or can’t afford
life-taking measures.

Don’t worry, I’m not here
to ask you anything.

Today I will not ask
what was your purpose
in making me—
one broke man’s tribute
to your dead boy. Mother
makes red velvet cupcakes
covered in coconut stems.
Aunt Pat frosts her crucifix cake.
I’d offer a piece, but
I’m not in the kitchen.
I’m smoking on the porch
as salamanders blink
and stare.

***

For today's prompt, write a prayer poem. Your prayer poem could be religious, but it doesn't have to be. People can pray to make it to work on time. Or to be rich. Or even for the rain. It's completely up to you what you're poem is about. (I pray that everyone is respectful of each other's prayer poems today.)

Just Quit

2011-04-23T15:57:00.000-06:00

Just Quit

Seldom do I crack a smile
doesn’t somehow save my life.
The hours spent listening
to Szekely, Pryor, and Hicks
aren’t for enjoyment. I’m trying
to get by. God damns me
before I laugh, disavows
the moment laughing passes.
Why feel sorry or sad
when I know how to laugh
better than the masters.
Each chuckle a cooler
emptied of ice and beer
to bail the boat from sinking
in this ancient nasty fetid drink.
I need the comedians, dead
or dying, to tell me the truth.

And they do. And it matters
that they do, because I’m lying
everyday lately when people ask
how ya doin’, how ya been,
or what’s goin’ on. I’m not
doing well, but on most days
still feel superior to you. I been
bad, but at least I’m honest
to myself. What’s going on
is I’m the one the family comes to
when the dog is sick, the pond
is poisoned with lilies, and snakes
making themselves at home
on our porches need reminding
that we’ve taken over their homes.

The shy rat snake made blind
by the shovel blast
weaves through trees toward
the undeveloped grids of land.
Lilies desiccate near shore.
Roscoe’s failing hips
and broken eyes mean soon
I’ll lead him by the leash
to where I’ll have to shoot
and bury him. There is no solution
worth feeling this horrible.

***

For today's prompt, write a quit doing what you're doing poem. This could be about something you need to quit doing or that someone or something else should quit doing.

Owes the Charmer

2011-04-22T16:07:00.000-06:00

Ask about the honeybees
but you want to talk of the men
who break your beauty down
like chairs & tables after bingo.

I pretend I’m not crazy about you
long enough to learn how
unhappy as me you are.

The last time I was satisfied
was years ago, and brief.
Your small apartment only had
one small bed, but we share well.
Your radiator clinked and popped
like bologna in a buttered skillet.

You weren’t going to love me,
but you did the human thing
and let me hold you for a while.
I’ll never get over that kind act
no matter the women who let
me paw them up and down.

A forehead kiss, a dance is all
I’ll ever get from you. Enough.

***

For today's prompt, write an "only one in the world" poem. This only one in the world might be a person, an animal, a place, or an object. Think of someone or something unique and write.

These Are the Dark Days

2011-03-16T01:35:00.000-06:00

Not writing. Wrapped up in other people's troubles. Money is tight and responsibilities hang heavy on me. The hypnagogic dreams have gone away, which is both a blessing and a worry. Beggars on the street all call me 'big man' and even though I'm at the coinstar scraping pennies together for food I give them what I have. My illness is trying to make people like me. My illness is never believing people do.

There are a thousand poems I haven't written. There are a thousand poems I need to write, and yet I really want to

Indexing the Year

2010-12-30T08:41:00.000-06:00

There's a warrant out for my arrest. No, there's no reward (to all of my friends). No, I didn't do anything worse than drive near the Quarter with a cracked windshield, then not pay the ticket or show up in court to tell the judge "I can't pay the ticket."

I wrote good poems, became friends with good people. I lost my Uncle, my job. I can't seem to keep my head above water.

Everybody wants a piece. And money. With the windshield thing, I worked five jobs to pay for that, leaving nothing to pay for the ticket. How stupid is that?

2011 won't be much easier, at least in the beginning. If I can stay afloat long enough, I might even be happy with all of the cool things I've been involved with lately.

In a few hours, I'm going to traffic court. Maybe they lock me up, maybe I'll just have to pay an even bigger fine. Makes sense, since I just got paid from my highest-paying part-time today. Kiss it goodbye. I was going to pay my car insurance, but now I'll pay for the ticket I couldn't pay for because I had to pay for the windshield before I could pay for the ticket I couldn't afford. And in the process, I'll probably get a ticket for driving with bad insurance.

Like God said, "Well, ole Geoffy boy, you wanted a wonderful woman in your life? I'll make that happen. But first, lemme take EVERYTHING ELSE."

Fuck the world. You want a piece, come get it.

See y'all in 2011

Mississippi Hippie

2010-12-15T17:44:00.000-06:00

for Elmo Grouse

He makes his home behind all other homes. His life
behind all lives. A tourist in his own country—
Haight-Ashbury days crushed by the government
his lack of haircut angered. Makes raising anchor
& moving on habitual after soft hands fighting
for Kennedy & King hardened with blood.

In this old farm gone sour with neglect, our hippie
cultivates the holy fragrance of peace in silence.

Sometimes watermelon farmers visit, buy his grass.
Because their money is little, he doesn’t take it.
Asks for a story or a song—a melon if the grass
last time was good. Cops come fluttering waded
twenties; they never make the bust because
he’s sold to them since they were teens escaping
cop fathers breaking their defenses down.

Is this the dreamed-of life? Is smoking pot
with melon farmers hacking hacked melon fuzz
from their lungs his generation’s deep promise?

The last president he cared about grew peanuts
& just before the continent went mad an uncle died
& left this land to anyone gutsy enough to make
a living on it. He doesn’t make a living, he makes a life.
The only right he stands for now is being left alone
to watch if anyone young can promise better.

What food he eats he raised himself & all the songs
he used to worship with bent antenna snags
from the college station. They know what he likes;
he tells them when they spend their textbook cash
on grass—the way he thinks it always ought to be.

New Chapbook for Sale

2010-11-23T19:41:00.002-06:00

According to the Drunken Elders of my Past (2010)

Geoff Munsterman
32 pages, twine-bound

$5

These are poems of Plaquemines, poems of the great BP oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. Written in the summer and fall of 2010, According to the Drunken Elders of my Past is part elegy, part celebration of the tiny strip of land known as Plaquemines, made famous this past year by petroleum, tar balls, dead fish, and the resilience of a region known for weathering its disasters. While the themes of loss and regret abound, its the sense of redemption, and eventually celebration, that shine through. According to the Drunken Elders of my Past becomes, finally, a book about surviving without guidance and living well while doing without. These accessible poems rely on the music of the spoken and written word as well as the odd beauty of swampland and engage the reader to heed the call of their own "drunken elders" to live good, get by, and endure.

The Lyre Player

2010-09-04T07:40:00.004-06:00

His music chops the woods to hell—
no easy task for tender hands like his
whose only callouses express slavish duty
to an instrument that as a youngster
he could sit and play for unbothered hours.

A sound hounding him stimulates a twitch.
A deer in the distance shakes a hunting party
and he turns to see it scamper through trees.
His heel fails him. Each time he turns his back
he trains his motions with switch thwacks
like the mother worked music into every orifice—
a desire others after him attempt to emulate.

Now his mind is focused on the first step.
He hasn’t learned he’s not the kind of man
who can’t look back. Near the first bleak step
a mocking laugh emerges. He holds her hand
and doesn’t feel her soul, and looking back
expects a dirty trick exposed but sees instead
his bright bride behind, her face like shadow
introduced to light, diminishing in his glance.
Exposes a sin—his own. Watches as darkness
gobbles golden cheekbones buckling under
his bride’s welling eyes. Her tears are all that
he’s entitled to. He blamed the devil, blamed
the girl—which always turns to blaming just
himself, for whom no mere note consoles.
The horns and hooves take pity, knowing
he’s not the kind of man who can’t look back.

Jazz Funeral & Second Line: My 'It Was Five Years Ago That...' Post

2010-08-30T09:00:00.000-06:00

It wasn't August 29th, 2005 I want to remember. It's the decades upon decades of government apathy that zones homes on flood plains instead of building levees.

I didn't do much celebrating, but one event raised millions for coastal rene...wal that could potentially prevent a devastation on the scale of Katrina. In a lot of ways, people were mourning what was lost five years ago but also what we've gotten back.

Five years ago, people were calling us stubborn for even wanting to come back. Five years later you can still get beignets at Du Monde, still get muffalettas at Central Grocery, and the team everyone thought would become the Los Angeles or San Antonio Saints won the big game in the only city that counts.

As for Plaquemines and St. Bernard? Yeah, first hit worst hit.

But the body count was minimal, and those areas have come back too.

2007-2008 Division 1A High School Football Champion South Plaquemines Hurricanes.

2009 Division 4A High School Football Champion Belle Chasse Cardinals.

You can still get mac-n-cheese from Rocky and Carlo's.

You can still get creole tomatoes and oranges from Becnel's.

Shit. Even all that oil could do was slow us down. Not even Anderson Cooper sticking his microphone in a bunch of Cajun faces could prevent the men and women down there from prepping nets, hauling fish, and harvesting oyster.

We had two nasty storms and failures on every level of government. There was looting, murder, suicide, dehydration, drowning.

But we're still here.

And we should never forget what we can survive in spite of or the people for which we keep surviving.

Five years ago a sitting US senator said "“It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

He was talking about my home.

The dome.

St. Louis cathedral.

Tulane.

Myrtle Grove down to Venice.

All of St. Bernard.

Well he's a moron. History proves it, and a five year anniversary is just another year where that guy and all of the other people who wrote obituaries for south Louisiana greatly exaggerated the reports of our death.

But if none of that makes sense for why commemorating the date wasn't such a bad thing, think about this: instead of thanking Katrina, maybe people are thanking God they're alive and that they don't have to live in Ohio. Cause lemme tell ya, a lot of that place could be bulldozed:

"Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, […] nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”

There is still so much to do. And still so much that never seems to get done. Blame the crooked politicians, or the so-called lazy people. Blame Bourbon Street, if you're ill-informed (only tourists go there). Even a place that's crumbling into ashes survives.

It endures.

We endure with it.

Because we are New Orleans.

A Lost Month (or two)

2010-08-23T04:38:00.000-06:00

Nothing much to report in the way of writing. I haven't felt up to posting much lately, since it's been mostly crap. I think part of every writer's life comes a period where there seems to be no inspiration, or no time to seek inspiration out.

July and August happened in a blink. I only work about 16 days a month and yet I always feel like there's no time for writing. It doesn't help that I've given up coffee for the most part and most of my writing gets done in cafes.

It is way too damn hot to do anything in New Orleans in the Summer. I laid six tiles in my kitchen in May and have since laid two. It's peel-and-stick. I re-carpeted my entire living room/bedroom in an evening but my kitchen has taken three months to get two more tiles.

Mainly I read. Summer is a good season for reading, but the other three are good for writing. Especially autumn. I think my best poems came in Autumn.

So, I'll probably post some awful thing on here soon just to be a jerk about it. And to the people who visit here expecting something new, I apologize. I've never been the regimented poster type.

I just re-submitted work to Poets for Living Waters. And I'm currently looking to submit my book-length collection to several places with the idea that if I send to thirty and get rejected by thirty I'll self-publish. Another dream given up, I suppose.

Recently it was noted that the highest paid authors in American literature are:

James Patterson, $70 million: He'll put out 17 more books by the end of 2012.
Stephenie Meyer, $40 million: Vampires pay.
Stephen King, $34 million: He's even got a musical in the works with John Mellencamp.
Danielle Steel, $32 million: Four new hardcovers this year alone.
Ken Follett, $20 million: His Pillars of the Earth thriller has been adapted to a TV series with Donald Sutherland.

Part of this has to do with the amount of stuff they write and the various genres. King, I think, has written some fine things but the rest are more or less jokes. There's something to be learned from this list, however. None of them are academics. All of them are read. All of them allow with their works the ability for adaptation. While I don't think all poetry or fiction should be able to fill Lifetime or SyFy's fall schedule, it is interesting to see what kinds of stories people want to read (escapism) and how much publishers are willing to pay for it.

Just Post Something...

2010-07-29T09:30:00.000-06:00

Ohio to New Orleans: September '05

The route is unfamiliar, the destination home.
Boots my father gave me heavy my gait,
help me keep the pedal down.
Once I'm through Ohio, it's eighty all the way
except the cop who stops and sees Louisiana plates
and lets us go. Kingsley doesn't drive. His eyes
are bad as Dante's in the dark, and yet
he's taking pictures of the trip:

me behind the wheel,
the clothes in back
donated baby shoes
dangle the rearview
until I find them feet.

To go the old way means seeing other states
whose homes were torn to kindling:
Huntsville to Birmingham, Birmingham
to Meridian, Meridian to Hattiesburg,
Hattiesburg until you hit New Orleans East
where all that stands is Mary Queen of Vietnam.
A church my father built.

Each city that we pass through weeps for us,
for the city that we're headed to.

I left before the storm, to Ohio
only weeks ago. Two days after
loading up my minivan with books,
a guitar, a mini-fridge and clothes,
the parish ordered everybody out.

She followed right behind me:
a rainstorm by the time she got to me.

All day watching news streams on the internet.
The levee failing, the phone lines down.
Who made it out? Grandpa lost his mind
after father died; Grandma always difficult
to make her leave. My teachers smart enough
to go, my boss's wife too stubborn
not to stay. Aunt Patty uptown. Was she safe?
The girl who hitched a ride one day
was surely drowned, or in the Superdome.

A teacher tells me if I'm late again,
she'll drop me from the class.
All the poems she's read of mine and yet
she's shocked after a fellow student asks
if I still have a home.

It's a sweepstakes: who gets to tag along.
Friends line up to offer help to take donations down.
The college springs for gas,
then publicizes what I plan to do, how they helped.
It doesn't matter. All I want to do
is get back home, to see if it's still there,
then turn around
and get back to the life I'm making
unaware that any storm could knock it down.

Kingsley snaps his photographs
of Tulane Avenue. A boat docked
through the window of a store,
the diaper bags and walkers parked
atop the courthouse steps,
trees in my neighborhood snapped like twigs.

I take him as a gesture back to school,
but don't go back. Two years I stayed in school
but never was I there. Even when the van
gives out, gets junked for $150 bucks
and hauled away I'm in the driver's seat
staring in the rearview.
Gustav rumbling in the Gulf, I hop a greyhound.
If they ask, tell them I was never in Oregon.
Tell them I've been on that unfamiliar route
with stops in Bucksnort, Oxford, Baton Rouge.

It's still September somewhere in my mind,
and there are things to be done.
So many things I couldn't do again.

Veil Baby

2010-07-10T22:22:00.000-06:00

Veil Baby

Weather underneath your skin.
Your eyes turn the color of clouds
before they've darkened, gone light.
At my birth, a girl knelt between
mother’s legs expecting feet or a head.
I came sac intact, born sealed. Unsure,
she cut me out with the knife father used
to slit the throats of rabbits with
and handed me over to my mother.

Last year, I didn’t know I was going to die.
Last year I thought I would be able to live on
without pills and chemo poisoning my body,
poisoning the sky like a hurricane bearing
slow and angry, thrashing over land.
You feel weather scratching, wanting out.

Tequila Mockingbird

2010-07-07T09:47:00.000-06:00

Two ounces Tequila, two half limes, squeezed,
dash of Creme de Menthe, serve over lots of ice
(add a dash of cranberry juice, because a ‘mockingbird’ should be dark)

As summer thunders heat to cheeks
through opened storm doors
of the Pirates’ Alley Cafe Bar
reduces cups to sweaty messes of plastic
only snowballs, a/c, and occasional
handfuls of alcohol can stall.

Cecelia didn’t like to make this drink
she tasted once to satisfy her curiosity.
Tequila dribbling from the straw
her tan, indelicate fingers—fingers
of a girl who likes to labor,
and has to for everything except
her loveliness—dip into my plastic cup.
Cheese plates sour like her face
as cocktail napkins suffer greatly.
This sour drink I swear by
once the solstice brings its heat index
boasting triple-digit fahrenheit
cools my mouth and helps
the pressure of another working day
evaporate like sunset from the sky.

I joke about the other authors
famous for their one good book
and how we pray their deaths come
just to open up a closet in their house
so manuscripts can bury us.
I joke about damn near anything
to make Cecelia smile—
her gums are the pink disposition
of a crape myrtle’s blooms.
Sweat is a second skin exfoliated
with cocktail napkins not jotted on
as swindlers peddle famous tales
of playwrights, poets living
in the house next door
but getting out once summer ends
when barmaids they idealize
relocate to somewhere cooler,
with kinder condensation,
and sweeter drinks.

Hiding Places

2010-07-02T22:17:00.006-06:00

Hiding Places

Hiding in the cabinets, knees bent
to accommodate the Tupperware lids
I'd surprise my mother, grabbing
at her calves. Once she dropped
a heavy knife and it fell, nicking ear.

Mother scrubs my face with peroxide
and it haunts my pores. Father slaps
a nail into a board, throws it in a pile
outside the kitchen window, where
a woman mourning the death of her son
watches him construct basic shelves
where she can keep her memories safe
under pine planks and fireproofed glass.

There was an absence when she was gone.

Some Recent Haikus

2010-06-25T21:13:00.001-06:00

Haiku to B.P.
they weren't small people
until your oil melted them
down their white shrimp boots

Haiku to Federal Government
someone soon will say
hey British Petroleum
you've learned your lesson

Haiku to B.P. Poems
when you read your poems
about the gulf all I heard
was spill! fuck! spill! birds! fuck!

Haiku to CNN
all those brown pelicans
don't care about your haircut
Anderson Cooper

Haiku to the Radio Call-ins
Tony Hayward sucks
and please keep thinking like that
blaming only one

Haiku to the Krewe of Dead Pelicans
People of NOLA
flooding the streets protesting
enjoy their cheap gas

Traction

2010-06-25T15:47:00.001-06:00

Traction

Tread sighs like skin. This whole town is a ditch
and I’m stuck. Passing headlights shine indifferent
mosquito wings steel and windshield will obliterate.
Nobody stops to help. At least its safe in town
all times of night. At least a trooper isn’t stopping.
If a deputy takes a look at me or Sean whose hair
turns copper shrimping with his father, or those girls
his curls and wicked grin produced, and no way
I’m not sobbing hard exhales through an apparatus
as the trooper radios through laughs the K-9 unit.

Transformers shrug the situation up and down
above my head. There’s no getting out after tonight,
even if I manage to graduate without knocking up a girl.
No bases rounded, no chance dropping them home
before curfew as giggles from the backseat now
are full-on laughs and plans to make out safely slide
on permanent hold. Two mad fathers threaten murder.
Or worse. One more angry parent calls my folks,
those tri-fold military school brochures will spackle
the kitchen table camo green and service-medal bronze.

Sean attempts to build a dock of branches sturdy
as the one his father grooms him to work until he dies.
I kick the catty girls out, send them walking towards
a cash-n-carry where they call their parents up upset.
Sean decides to save his back for work tomorrow,
works the steering as my shoving shoulder inches tires
from the mud. The ditch devours all except the roof,
from the backseat burps a purse up neither one of us
attempt to save. I say another boy will have to come
and trick and trap that girl with chivalry. Cracked, Sean
fumigates the darkness with his laughter as bites welt.
Tonight, the moon is a bullet whizzing past our ears.

Does Any of This Make Sense?

2010-06-24T15:00:00.002-06:00

The dead aren’t silent. If they were, writing poetry would be much easier.

The idea is to imagine ourselves dead in the act of composition, meaning that our works are read ‘posthumously’ and all reception towards our work is dead to us. Something happens, we write about it, and by the time someone else reads it, it’s already dead to us. Poets are ghosts, poems are our ectoplasm.

Keats’ negative capability, Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, Lorca’s duende, Eliot’s clerk, Yeats’ vision; we’re all operating in these ideas of tradition. And these traditions haunt our present. Poets are patiently writing the same poem in different generations, but nothing is added or taken away. In the margins, there are hidden poems only we can see. It’s been called the “anxiety of influence” but really all that means is that generationally we are either arguing or agreeing while adding to the poem.

That’s the project, that’s the work: conversations with the past, in the present, to the future.

Then poetry becomes a mighty river carrying traditions of the past from upriver to future traditions yet to be defined downriver with our little bend in that river is being shaped by all that comes before it and shaping all that comes after it.

We can’t stop the river and only critics, like salmon, swim upriver. Critics define the present by the past, but poets merely hope to rinse our faces in the past. Whether any grit of sand from our brows becomes rolling boulders like Dante and Shakespeare or floats forever down like someone we’ve yet to discover isn’t the concern of a poet.

Just enjoy the water cooling off your face, the sweet sensation (and occasional trash) of all that flows from upriver. And we’ll dump trash too, but hopefully not so much that the people standing at the next bend downriver won’t pull their faces out forever from the current.

Poetry Prompt 094: The Meaning of Happiness

2010-06-24T14:19:00.002-06:00

The Meaning of Happiness  

Meatloaf and mashed potatoes done fucking right. 
Tea so sweet it makes you see the Resurrection
of the Lord—the only thing that’s just as sweet. 
Tip a little extra for the extra brussels sprouts, 
the lesson that a pleasant meal now and again
on days when grief and worry take a break 
and all those things you griped about last night
and plan to wring your hands about tomorrow 
won’t vanish any faster with you pacing hairs
into the bathroom sink. The counter woman, 
whose hair is blood spun into silk and kissed  
with sunlight after cloudy morning traffic jams
smiles and hikes her hips accenting jeans.
She doesn’t have to love you to know what
makes you happy: a corny joke or two, sprig
of saltiness with everything she says including
Thank ya, darling. And ya better come see us again.
A smile unwarranted. A big plate of good food.
The ceiling fan above your head whispers
cool your brow and isn’t any louder than
the pretty blondes with snow for skin singing
praise on where you live, finally, after years away
attempting a life you can’t remember why  
you wanted anymore. Friends aren’t around, 
but close. Because you feel your heart again. 
Because the meal relaxes muscles like regrets
reconciled, or listening as Rain Dogs sweats
a cocktail in your hand. It isn’t much. Telling 
yourself you never needed much, you smile.

***

For this week's prompt, take the phrase "The Meaning of (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: "The Meaning of Life," "The Meaning of Algebra," "The Meaning of Meanings," etc.

Bad Night Haikus (as seen on Undead Poets)

2010-06-23T10:04:00.001-06:00

Bad Night

They had to do it—pressure from one in the group.
Swamp gas vile as booze.

In back the pickup,
two twin red plastic gas cans dream of burning you.
Looked at the wrong girl or some grand diss forgotten
as smoke and stink rise.

Steel-toe boots stomp reeds
to ash, as mosquitoes wait. Dinner hot tonight.
Your body not found quick. No eyes except the forest’s—
charred flesh in its teeth.

Proud men weep as much
as anyone when shadows cloak their shame, their wet eyes.

Loup Garou (as Seen on Undead Poets)

2010-06-23T10:00:00.003-06:00

Loup Garou

Some who live in fear will taste that moon in their blood
when teeth come like tide.

No laughter, no tears, and no grief. All humanity
replaced by hunger.

As joints dislocate, bones thicken, re-align—
a reborn creature.

done.

2010-06-22T11:34:00.005-06:00

Folks,

I had a nightmare I brought some friend from out of town to the 17 Poets poetry reading in New Orleans at The Goldmine Saloon and someone was reading 'A Blessing' by James Wright.

READER: Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would...

MY FRIEND (loudly):Hey bar keep! Who do I have to blow to get a Flaming Doctor fuckin' Pepper!?!?!

I was sweating when I woke up, so I showered. Scrubbing my pits of that horrific vision, I thought to myself 'I still have no idea what 'thisness' means. Toweled off and, put on Wynton's Hot House Flowers (used to have the vinyl!) to read through last night's revisions and relax. Then it hit me:

I am finally Redeemed.

***

I've been revising at a pace whose speed rivals that of the Penny-farthing! You know what I mean...breakneck. That's where that comes from, by the way. Those wacky big-wheels people who grew 'moustaches' and imbibed 'phosphates' peddled went so fast and were so dangerous going downhill that you'd break your neck. Thus: breakneck pace.

God, it feels good to be able to google again. Brief, though. The Cox Cable guy won't be at my place until Friday at the earliest, so I've been spending the week hopping coffee shops around the Greater New Orleans area.

When not doing that, I've either been earning money driving my river pilot Uncle up and down the Mississippi River or revising poems.

I haven't done this in a while. I print the poems out, go somewhere and make edits in pencil. I go home, make the changes, and print the new draft out. Staple the two drafts together, go somewhere different than I went to work on the first draft and make changes in pencil. Repeat, ad indigestion, until I can write in my pretty little cursive in the lower-right corner of the page 'done' and plunk it in a file box.

So while I could post revisions on this site over and over again (nine drafts of 'Traction' in the last three days, and 'Boom' will likely cost me a ream of paper by the time its done) or I could wait until I write that little cursive equivalent to a white flag in the corner of the page.

Here's a list of the poems I'm intensively working on. By intensively, I mean that I've either made drastic revisions or I've printed it out and stared blankly at it for the past five days while drinking expensive coffee. Here's the list:

(note: this list was been updated 6/23...)

Traction
Boom
And Suddenly done.
According to the Drunken Elders of My Past done.
The Young Ghost Acrostic for My Friends done.
I've Been Riding With the Ghost
Immolate done/abandoned.
Ways to Piss Me Off done/abandoned.
Bad Dreams done.
Unseen Haikus (as shown on Undead Poets) done.
Moon Haikus ('' '') done.
Madame Delphine LaLaurie done.
Geoff Munsterman (now "The Worry Lines") done.
Resurrecting Fish and Other Mysteries done/abandoned.
Crooked Letter Crooked Letter River Kid Blues done.
Laptop abandoned.
The End of Bradstreet's Life
Orpheus Gets to Stepping

So yeah. I'd say I've made serious changes to all of these. Delphine, the drunken elders, and Freddy Krueger were more tweaks than anything.

Also, I think people write haikus because there's nothing to revising them. It's just a little image. No rhetorical strategy, and no real time to build a voice (unless you're Jack Kerouac, who I am decidedly not!) so there's not much more than scrubbing a few syllables to gain optimal shininess.

I think when I'm done I might make a little e-book chapbook for this blog. I need practice before undertaking The Undead Poets Review. Free is good? Would you download it if it were free?

Cheap bastards just like me. And yet I love you anyhow.

If you're wondering what brought all this about, I'd have to point to four things. Another list, this one is smaller:

I started writing under pseudonyms, which took the pressure off to 'make my words count.'
I started writing everyday again in April. Since moving back to New Orleans, I've started writing everyday again.
I wrote out my revision strategies, and saw in print what my mind attempts. Made it easier.
I don't have internet. No Hulu, no Netflix Instant, no porn sites. No googling incessantly, no looking for lamps, muses, and late-night talk shows on Craigslist

That's all I got right now. Once I have internet in my place, I'll start en-masse posting all the new stuff I'm writing. Until then, stay undead.

Madame Delphine LaLaurie

2010-06-22T09:59:00.000-06:00

Madame Delphine LaLaurie

“These slaves were the property of the demon, in the shape of a woman”
—The New Orleans Bee, 11 April 1834

At market stood among the men plantation living savaged
whose unshaved faces turned in lust at me, finest laces
tight against my frame. I buy a girl, the darkest they got,
and bring her home with me. Drain her eyes of vitreous
boiled in the sockets and, mixed with lilies, make a pulp
ground to powder which I brush on until my flesh lacks
any color, any stink. You see, was a ghost before I died.
Palest of the native flowers, soft as clouds in moonlight,

owned the men of class who looked on me. Louis tamed
me, let my appetite for bone and broken tendon bloom.
He made me his like riders do their mares. What flesh
we tested once, what beauty did I find when his fingers
worked shoulders from a creature’s torso with his blade
or weaved a needle through the pink lips of a foul male
could not cease his pleas for help. Testicles and phallus
I’d lop like chicken heads, but my Louis like a maestro

used his scalpel like a wand, conducting off the organs.
In bed he’d whisper I was like that on the second floor
when tending to the royal and distinguished guests who
came into our house. More than delicate china patterns,
or fabrics ships brought from the Orient, I waltzed into
conversations, into men’s hearts. Without misstepping,
watched as all were drinking, singing, dancing delight.
Because I willed them. With a fat heart Louis extracts

from a slave’s chest, my lovely husband demonstrates
how much control I have of other men by squeezing
it until the veins retract like springs. Louis let me know
how much his heart loves me: tracing his bloody thumb
along my lips and, pulsing with desire, he kisses me deep
as shackled slaves pinned to the wall look on and weep.

Poetry Prompt 093: Traction

2010-06-17T18:05:00.003-06:00

Traction

Let’s start simple: that ditch was the final
minute of the last class of high school.
Passing headlights blink indifferent, shine
wings that steel and windshield obliterate.

No bases rounded, no getting them home
before curfew. Giggles from the backseat
now are full-on laughs. Plans to make out
on permanent hold. Tread sighs like skin.

Two mad fathers threaten murder or worse.
If one more angry parent calls my folks up,
those military school brochures will spackle
the coffee table camo green, medal bronze.

When troopers come, they’ll make me blow.
Those girls in back; those fuming parents;
even the pal peeling branches desperate,
hoping he can make a surface tough enough

to get a little traction, praying for traction;
and this whole town is a ditch I’m stuck in.

***

For today's prompt, write a poem in which someone (or something) is stuck somewhere. Perhaps, someone is stuck in line or in a situation (job, relationship, conversation, etc.). Maybe something (like a firefly) is stuck somewhere (like a Mason jar). Hope you're not stuck on a writer's block.

Strategic Maneuvers, Tightening/Revising a Poem

2010-06-16T23:36:00.000-06:00

This is something I've been working on tonight. I think it still needs a little work, clarification. And by no means do I think I could write a book about writing, but I do have some thoughts on the subject of revising poems. This is a collection of things I do, and things I think about when revising. I'm sure I left stuff out, and that it's different for everyone, but this is what came to mind when I sat down to write it out. Hope it is helpful to anyone who reads this stuff.

Something triggered this poem. Maybe it was a word, or a smell, or a scene. Usually this can be found after the first stanza, since we often try to build up to our trigger or set the scene. Consider cutting the first stanza. See how the poem looks when you don’t avoid talking about what you want to talk about.
Seek out cliches. Destroy them. Seek out the little bits of language that don’t immediately grab you (maybe it’s too wordy, or awkward sounding) and destroy them. Seek out the things that do work, and make sure you earn them, or destroy them.
Find the emotional heart of the poem. Ask yourself 'What's the point?' and 'What am I trying to say?' Usually the emotional heart of a poem will be a moment when you're directing to the reader 'This is the thing that matters, so listen up.' It is usually at the end of the poem, or near it.
Cut the emotional heart from the poem and put it in an ice chest. While no poem can live without this, sometimes to perform surgery we need to remove the organ and make the body well enough to harbor it. What does your poem do without this 'lesson' being there? Is it stronger? Is it weaker? Do the things you set in motion to earn this ‘lesson’ still work?
Figure out your cadence. Are short sentences compacted together one after another? Is your ten thousand line poem one giant run-on? What is the natural breath with which you speak? In your head, think of someone who is part best friend, part confessor and confide in them this situation you’re describing. Just like any confidant, you wouldn’t want to bore them with a bad story, so be mindful of your embellishments. Maybe this person you’re imagining is the kind of person who is simply waiting for their turn to talk, so to avoid that you need to say what you want to say in a manner that literally takes their breath away.
What is a strong verb or a weak verb? Something that animates the object, makes it into something you can visualize is strong. Something that points at an object is weak. Its the difference between ‘he crushed the ball out of the park’ and ‘look at that ball go.’ While some moments in a poem will require you to point the reader to look at something, the basic rule of thumb is that it is far better to have them directed toward something animated than static. This, coincidentally, is why baseball announcers usually say both ‘He crushed the ball out of the park,’ and ‘look at that ball go.’ They’ve shown you force with one statement, and delivered velocity with the other. They’ve given both cause and effect and, because of it, I can imagine the ball taking off into the bleachers without physically seeing the batter hit the ball.
Make a list of your verbs. Yes, go through the whole poem and make a list of your verbs. Is there a pattern that forms? Usually, the first or second verb should really cajole the reader into listening. Verbs after that tend to move more into explicating, and are weaker. Then, with your triggering mechanism in place, you attempt to transform or amplify the scene. This is done with strong verbs. By the time you get to the emotional heart, you are less concerned with the strength of the verbs and more concerned with the strength of the lesson. Strong verbs are the sturdy floor you place your lesson on.
Certain images or statements are directly related to either the trigger or the emotional heart. They’re background, they’re landscape. They tell us about how the speaker sees things. These bits of language set our tone. Check them for consistency. Make note of times when there’s a shift in them. If a speaker says something funny and then three lines later says something serious, then we as readers know something happened in those three lines in between that’s worth looking at again.
More than anything, when tightening a poem you want to pay attention to the music. How do words interact together? What is the meter of a crucial line opposed to a line of landscape?
Say something, and mean it. Decide what this poem is and make it so that a person doesn’t need to know you or your situation to feel what you feel.
Never stop playing with the language. Say it the clearest and nicest sounding way possible. If you’re talking about sex you enjoyed, the sounds, verbs, cadence, and rhythm of the line should sing and dance. If you’re talking about scraping dog shit from your shoe, there’s likely to be harsher rhythms that convey your disgust and anger. Which leads me to my final point:
In a poem, all the pieces have to work together. Rhythm, meter, line length, verbs, tone, the lessons, the scenes, the images, the sounds, etc. should all have purpose. And like anything done well, all of these parts should be working together. The number one goal of a poem should be to say something well. My definition of poetry is ‘A truth said beautifully and deliberately.’ The beautiful comes with the music of the words working. The deliberate comes with the work of putting those words together. The truth comes when those beautiful words said deliberately add up to some reason for being said other than the music and the working. If I want music, I can listen to The Drive-By Truckers, or Pantera, or MF Doom. If I want to work, I can go sling hash at a Waffle House. If I’m reading a poem, I’m reading it because I expect you to say something worth hearing. And not all truths are self-evident, some need an advocate.

Now, tomorrow I plan to post the two POETIC ASIDES exercises I've neglected on my week off. I was painting, re-tiling, and moving into my apartment. It's an efficiency, so really just me and a lot of books. it's my hope to create a writer's haven; somewhere where I can go to get work done. And sleep. Oh how I love to sleep. I've started taking two ginko pills in the afternoon and, while I don't feel smarter, I certainly am having more vivid dreams.

Go check out Culture Sandwich. There have been a lot of really good articles lately.

Poetry Prompt 092: Laptop

2010-06-10T13:40:00.000-06:00

Laptop

There are three cities in Louisiana
where mosquitoes swam in pixels.
I have a laptop, and I like to write
outside. In Geismar, moths survey
my punctuation. A bullfrog’s note
is quarter, for love. So horny, he’s
screaming under the crape myrtle
for a mate. An armadillo evacuates
his dirt patch under the porch, chews
flowers to pink ash. Even the bees
jangle like custodian keys my ears.
A pink garden shovel blood-stained
from the moccasin leers the screen
door bends at the bullfrog’s brogue.

Lafayette meanwhile is pimps, dogs.
An adirondack tacked to cut grass
as Atchafalaya Basin drains collect
the cigarette butts, dog turds, trash,
and apathy of pushers eyeing cops
between Cameron and Simcoe St.

New Orleans proud of a skyline harsh
with ships, twin-span bridges, levees
warning their decrepitude as joggers
bounce their iPod-studded biceps
past stray chickens, wicked litterers
and derelict poets like Thaddeus
and I who let wine roll down gullets
like a slug and promise dedicating
more time to our work, and less time
listening to girls who need attention
talk about their cats. The neighbor
comes, admires the wicker bench
unraveling beneath my sweaty ass.
A little lovin’ all she needs he says
and waves as friends since birth
who head to Caesar’s Seafood pass.

***

For today's prompt, write a poem that incorporates three things you can see from your computer. Use those three things however you wish. Maybe there's a picture, a window and a desk lamp. Maybe a pen, a paper and a cell phone. Pick the items, then write a poem. (If you want, for fun, you can include what the three things you used are either before or after the poem.)

Fight (from Jaw:Poems 2004)

2010-06-06T15:52:00.006-06:00

Fight

One spring afternoon, I beat the hell
out of a kid I called my friend.
I ground his face into a concrete ditch
I sat on his back and scrubbed his face
into a concrete ditch like a dirty sheet.

But that seems like a long time ago.
He still lives in the same house
down the street, scratches thin
as spider web lancing his left cheek.

It was no secret what I did to him
but he shares it with no one.
He will spend the rest of his life
shepherding my shame on his face.

Poetry Prompt 091

2010-06-03T19:56:00.002-06:00

The Young Lost Ghosts Acrostic For My Friends

Centuries old trees lean aching for the sun
like skinned-knee children for their mothers.
On the creosote posts, redwing blackbirds sneer.
Dial their eyes to the green lagoon
hopping mad with fish and algae.
Only the dead know this place, the cemetery
past the bait shop next to the leaky tunnel
peeling tiles each time a semi slices through.
Ears pressed tight against the dirty tiles
rescues you from fates like kids hit like trash,

flung like satellites in space back to the earth.
Lungs sucked in or else the wind could catch you
and pull you in like tide. A dead kid’s clodhopper
shrinks behind a shadow like a secret or reminder—
Hell’s little skill of showing you its fingerprints.

Sometimes in the tunnel dead come back,
at least the people slamming on their brakes claim
they do. I don’t have to find them where they died.
Each one comes up from the levee, wet,
lace trough blackberry patches and ready to talk
like couples after fights. They’re willing to talk
if I’m willing to listen, sit on the swing set
that in summer sits unused except the dead.
Even they like it higher, higher, higher.

***

For today's prompt, use the following three words in a poem: clodhopper, flash and satellite. Put the words anywhere you like in the poem and use them however you wish.

Poetry Prompt 090

2010-06-03T18:29:00.001-06:00

Ways to Piss Me Off

Flirt with someone you don’t like
and not for the same reasons hooters girls
or strippers flirt with men they don’t like.
Don’t cop to your mistakes.
Don’t tell the truth
when telling the truth matters.
Sure, a lie or three
might make for fun when dates
or business meetings go awry, but lies
when lying hurts someone
is tantamount to crime.
Make me feel sorry for you
because you want something.
Make me think you’re a good person
when you’re not.

I live by the scorched earth credo
people who don’t make plans live by.
I’m honest when it matters,
I flirt when I care, and I tip
like the champion of the middle class
my parents raised me to be.
I smoke when I’m nervous or stressed
if a sink to wash my wrist isn’t handy.

Listen to bad music at your peril.
Quote Rush Limbaugh to me
and I’m no longer held responsible
for what happens to you.
And if you say you love me,
mean it.

***

For this week's prompt, I want you to take the phrase "Ways to (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new word or phrase the title of your poem, and then write the poem. Examples: "Ways to write a poem," "Ways to not write a poem," "Ways to avoid homework," "Ways to fall in love," etc. There are so many ways to come at this one!

Immolate (revision)

2010-05-25T16:51:00.001-06:00

Original draft Click Here

Immolate

This is the morning I never let myself believe.
The memories of our failed relationships recede
and something new arrives. I lend a shirt sleeve
to last night’s tears, a bed that claims misdeed

when you eventually regret our being together.
But this is the morning when you’d rather bliss
than messy sorrys. Heart of a cinematographer,
I brush back sable hairs obscure your neck, kiss

you dry and simple, more innocent than before.
Holding you through dreams I merely guess at,
nightmares where you quiver, kicks that I adore,
you know though sleeping I prefer you like that.

In my arms you can’t grab the gas and immolate
this moment I pray your flames won’t desecrate.

Suck It (an explanation and link)

2010-05-20T16:06:00.003-06:00

I'm not much for the vampire trope, but lately I've been lucky enough to read more than a few poems about the bloodsuckers. Much like the zombie trope, the vampire trope saturates the culture. I just happen to find the zombie trope more interesting, likely because (as an image) it reminds me of the hellish visions from Dante's Inferno. From Bram Stoker and Carl Dreyer to Joss Whedon and Andrew Fox, the vampire trope has many proponents who do it justice. I'm not one of them. But, what the hell? I gave it a shot and, while I have no intention of sharing it here (doesn't fit with what I'm trying to do on S | R ) I think the surly persona of the poem belongs inside the hallways of the Undead Poets castle. Click below, if you dare to read it:

SUCK IT

Wednesday Poetry Prompts # 89: Immolate

2010-05-19T10:09:00.002-06:00

Immolate

This is the morning we dreamed about together
where, woken up by vacuum motors rummaging
the hallway, the charm of new relationships fade
and something new arrives. Sable hairs obscure
your neck brushed away with my hand not busy
cradling your frame. I place a dry and simple kiss
more innocent than kisses from the night before.

Comfortable as lovers, we could go on like this:
meeting at the bar or coffee shop, at functions
we come separate, meet up afterwards. Or end
it now and immolate the nights I hold you there
through nightmares when you quiver, the dreams
I merely guess at while you sleep. If comfort is
the only thing you want, I think I don’t want you.

***

For this week's prompt, write a lightbulb poem. By lightbulb, I mean the kind of lightbulb that pops over a cartoon character's head when it has a "Eureka!" moment. So a poem with some sort of epiphany. And yes, it's fine to write a poem about an actual lightbulb too if you've always wanted to wax poetic about an incandescent lamp.

Boom (a rough draft)

2010-05-18T15:57:00.000-06:00

Fourteen on and seven off. Keep your head down,
do what people qualified to handle messes like this say.
Buoyant with oil, two crabs surf the pulling tide.
A habit I’ve adopted people say I need to shake

is naming every bird I treat. Perform a triage good
enough to rescue Alpha through November.
By Whiskey I’m the one who’s drowning. Dish soap
comes in buckets for their wings. Inject a tablespoon

of bismuth subsalicylate past Whiskey’s beak. He coughs,
and dies. Cousins of mine lay out boom and talk
of football season revving up. Them Hurricanes
is looking good. Think the Cardinals got a chance

with Wright at LSU? Everybody loving on the Saints.
Everybody smarter than the Army Corp of Engineers.
Sick of hearing its a spill. Sick of worry on the news
about the Keys. They tell me I’m supposed to dump

his oily body in a bag and date it. Keep a running toll,
they say, so we know how much they’ll have to pay.
Jindal, Vitter, Gao, and both the Landrieus praise
the parish president who hasn’t slept well in a month.

Bait shops closing. Vietnamese fishermen scramble
for a translator keeps them in the loop. Yugoslavs
protect their oyster beds with anything not nailed.
I’m calling it: It’s fuck you you fucking fucks redux.

Last one left in Plaquemines Parish, don’t forget
to turn the lights off. Companies still in the black
refuse to pay for anything not handled with receipts.
There isn’t enough dawn to douse the delta clean.

Here's a Taste of What I'm Working On...

2010-05-14T16:37:00.003-06:00

Madame Delphine LaLaurie

2010-05-13T13:21:00.002-06:00

“These slaves were the property of the demon, in the shape of a woman”

—The New Orleans Bee 11 April 1834

We were before your freedom and peace. We were better.
Many hands have held the deed to 1140 Royal Street, but
it’s always been my house. Always will be too as long as
I who have no hands can choke a person from their sleep.
I sometimes wonder if the Quarter tour guides are aware
that every time they give their speech and list our crimes
I stand among the tourists taking snapshots of my house
and wait to hear news of my husband, why he isn’t here.

At market stood among the men plantations turned wild
whose unshaved faces turned in lust at me. Finest laces
tight against my frame. I buy a girl, the darkest they got,
and bring her home with me. Drain her eyes of vitreous
boiled in the sockets and, mixed with lilies, make a pulp
ground to powder which I brush on until my flesh lacks
any color, any stink. You see, was a ghost before I died,
palest of the native flowers, soft as clouds in moonlight.
Owned the men of class who looked at me. Only Louis
had the skill of taming and defaming tendon and bone.

He broke me like a mare, and made me his. What flesh
we tested once, what beauty did I find when his fingers
worked shoulders from a creature’s torso with his blade
or weaved a needle through the pink lips of a foul male
could not cease his pleas for help. Testicles and phallus
I’d lop off like chicken heads. My Louis like a maestro
used his scalpel like a wand, conducting off the organs.
In bed he’d whisper I was like that on the second floor
when tending to the royal and distinguished guests who
came into our house. More than delicate china patterns,
or fabrics ships brought from the Orient, I danced into
conversations, into men’s hearts. Without misstepping,
watched as all were drinking, singing, dancing delight.

Because I willed them. With a fat heart Louis extracts
from a slave’s chest, my lovely husband demonstrates
how much control I have of other men, and squeezing
it until the veins retract like springs, Louis let me know
how much his heart loves me. He traces bloody thumb
along my lips and, pulsing with desire, kisses me deep
as shackled slaves pinned to the wall look on and weep.

***

To Her Man Across the Nile

2010-05-12T15:37:00.000-06:00

Before the clouds dark as sparrow feathers come in,
or the teens in keds who walk through the meadow

runs along the river and sing or bully or look to initiate
themselves into adulthood by hassling an artist,

or the homeless man who made himself a home
underneath the upside-down tree she covets

as an image settles down from begging after pennies
and heads back to his crude canopy home, or

the sun goes down and all its natural light with it,
or the model that she pays in wings and pilsner

quits on her, or the stocky set of officer who keep
the field quiet with spotlights and sirens

louder than cricket chirps, or the flowers wilt
from an unexpected snowfall in late May,

or her feet grow weary walking shoeless
through gravel and anthills,

she preps her camera for an image
that looking upon it later

makes her think of youth before distraction
enough that she remembers being young

and like a girl who knows she's lost
her favorite toy, weeps unapologetic

until her lost toy finds its way back to her
or something newer comes along.

The Photojournalist's Wife

2010-05-11T15:40:00.000-06:00

It's not about my kids
or my husband’s work
or the waterfall in Haiti
where topless among
women, men, and kids
I bathed a baking torso.

It’s not about the time
a Sandinista stomped
my spine in boots bigger
than his 13-year old foot
and later his sister asked
I comb her hair like mine.
It’s not about our baby
lost soon after on a cot
as doctoros tell too fast
in a foreign tongue my
never walking again.
It’s not about how
wrong they were, weeks
later dancing the joropo,
playing futbol, and long

lovemaking. Not bones
chewed through, slaw
so good we don’t wait
for clean forks, finger
eaten, in a delta blues
bar backroom where
later I’m shaking ass
with old black men as
husband photographs.

It’s not about the a-line
ruined by sweat and sauce.

Holidays we spend telling
relatives it’s not about
the money, how grants
can’t satisfy bank loans
or purchase Prada purses.

How our children learn
as we learn—that hard
and beautiful, the world
allows a lens to capture
all its images. It’s about
the erotic clutch of sun
bleaches hair, tans skin,
that we get to share it
when it hits sullen faces
captured in his lens.

From the Author to His Book (in May)

2010-05-10T11:10:00.000-06:00

I can’t take credit for the bulk of it,
you mostly wrote yourself. Called
on me when some words didn’t fit,
or all your ideas were brick-walled.

Facing these dilemmas, you turned
to me; we talked breakup scenarios
until all your characters had earned
your spotlessly penned imbroglios.

I toiled for you, listened to you list
blocks preventing your final pages:
health, hurt, some deadlines missed.
I never flinch giving you advantages.

You see, I was a book once. You’d
come to read my lines, and thought
my ending would be happy, or good.
Near the final chapter I was caught

on a phrase, an important sentence
never found its shape. With no end,
the book remains unfinished, dense.
My book, you don’t have to pretend:

you’re finished with me. You will shun
your cautious tale/sometimes editor
now that all your chapters are done.
You have no need to call me anymore.

I am Of the Undead...

2010-05-08T18:54:00.007-06:00

My work and dedication to meeting and sharing both my poems and ideas with other poets last month paid off: I've become a Charter Member of The Undead Poets Society. As far as I can tell, Undead Poets are great ones. I'd direct you to Tim Keeton and Jodi MacArthur's works in particular. One nice aspect of making new connections while having solid old ones is that fellow ingrate Sarah Kemp jumped on with them and has quickly outshined me (as she tends to do).

Even though I haven't been posting poems, I've been writing and reading in between 2am runs down to the river road to pick my pilot uncle up. I've been doing so many runs lately that I'm establishing a little savings that may go into travel, or renting a cabin on the bayou for a month in the summer.

I take the swamps and the hotspots of New Orleans for granted. I've lived it, and I know my two or three places I like to go and that's where I go. I've also never been in a position where I could really take people to the cool places. Venice, Louisiana is in the news now because that's where the correspondents are now to report on the oil leak in the Gulf. But to me, that's where there's good fishing and big white birds flying everywhere. Venice is like walking into the ocean; sky and water all around you but for the thin strip of land with cattails and egrets.

No Derision in Revision

2010-05-05T13:43:00.000-06:00

So thankfully I sat down and start to look at what I wrote last month. Some of those drafts were so drafty, I needed a sweater just to read them. And believe me when I tell that the south Louisiana heat has forced all garments not thin into bins until next December.

I've singled out what I think was the best five:

    DAY 10: Bad Dreams
    DAY 19: Geoff Munsterman
    DAY 21: According to the Drunken Elders of my Past
    DAY 25: I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost
    DAY 29 And Suddenly

Right now I'm happy with the changes I've made. Mainly I tried to work on the music of them, and clean up both the images and the metaphors. I find all three of these things work in unison: good music nudges you to a point, and a good image is made all the better when it makes a point that sounds good. Anything worth saying tends to roll off of the tongue.

With "Bad Dreams" I didn't find I had too much to do except justify the ending. I also cleaned up some of the music.

With "Geoff Munsterman" it was again a matter of justifying the concept of "love. The absence of" as a legitimate ending to this poem. I worked on the poem's argument, that is, if brevity is the soul of wit why is a person's life so long? It was important to me to establish my turn on this phrase: "Soul of wit and yet my life provides no brevity." as a central question for the speaker to dissect. In doing that, and coming to a resolution, he earns "love. The absense of." Also all the music stunk.

With "According to the Drunken Elders of My Past" all I did was fix the sticky section about fish and beer in ice chests. I thought it best to explain why, though really how much spelling out do people need. Beer=good, fish=slimy, slimy beer=not good. So I fixed that and the bit about the alligator eyes. Mainly I wanted to make these lines that could be throwaway have more potency and voltage to them.

"I've Been Riding With the Ghost" is the one I put the most work into, and the one I think that yielded the most from that work. "According to the Drunken Elders of My Past"was something I wrote rather quickly after the first line popped into my head. "Bad Dreams" I labored over, studying the lore of Freddy Krueger both in film and television (did you know Freddy had his own show? It was the 90s, they were desperate...not that they're not desperate now come to think of it.) and then studying some scenes from the films. I even fished a Hamlet quote, which Craven popped into a scene from film one. In those instances, I either knew what I had immediately, or worked to have something even if I didn't know it would be substantial in the end. With "I've Been Riding With the Ghost" I listened to the song a lot and engaged in a little free-writing. Now, I'd say it's the best thing I've ever written about my time at Kenyon College. This blog has been around since March of '09 and the gist of what I've written here pertains to my time at Kenyon College. It's not bitter, but it talks about the bitterness. It pays homage to the writers of Kenyon without becoming too doting. It allows me to address the friends I made, and lost. I like it very much.

And "And Suddenly" was a big surprise. While revising I discovered I had a conceit I didn't even know was there. Flushing it out, and making an extended metaphor work for and not against me made the poem come from the draft. I did snag a line or two from another Poem-A-Day exercise I wrote, but only because the poems were of a similar theme (I loved that chick, and that chick went away). I think I wrote three love poems here (or love lost) after claiming on the day that called for one that I was incapable of penning love poems. Like punish work, I forced myself to say something in the love vein and after three attempts I managed one good poem.

So what now? The site that provided all of these prompts asked its entrants send in their best five. I clicked send on an email about seven minutes ago. From the thousands Robert Lee Brewer will likely get, I have the five. He probably won't choose any of them, but I'm hopeful he will. In the meantime, I wonder whether posting the revisions here disqualifies me from the competition so unfortunately I'll refrain. If you're interested in seeing what I did with them, just shoot me an email and I can get them to you. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until after the forth of July.

I'm working on revising all the others. When I do, I'll either post them on here or send them out to magazines. Likely, though, I just trashed a lot of them.

The act of writing last month a poem a day is a step to my redemption. Writing "I've Been Riding With the Ghost" is one as well. Whoever said you have to die to be redeemed doesn't understand sin as well as they might think. This labor, this work, is what redeems me.

Hot Pursuit

2010-05-04T17:19:00.002-06:00

You can find this poem here:

Hot Pursuit on Undead Poets Society

Thirty Poems in Thirty Days

2010-05-01T05:13:00.013-06:00

A month ago, I never would have posted these poems here. Or written them, I imagine. The poet Paul Scott August posted something on facebook about participating in a 30 for 30 project and I asked him about six days into April where he was getting his prompts. He pointed me to Robert Lee Brewer's blog for Writer's Digest and I was off.

I edit obsessively. I edit to the point that I have started to edit before putting pen to paper. That's a "Houston, we have a problem" kind of bad for anyone who writes. And I used to be a prolific failure when it comes to drafts. I'd churn out 10 to 14 drafts a week, and sometimes that many in a good day. By week's end, I'd try to have 7 good poems. Looking through an old 2003 notebook, I found from July to November I wrote approximately 193 drafts for poems no shorter than 14 lines. The longest of them was a four-pager, which I whittled down to a tight twenty lines.

So how did I go from nearly 200 poems in four months to being unable to write my name unless I masked and altered my handwriting to look like it wasn't my own?

Psychology. Writer's block. An empty tank. Honestly, probably all three. I used to hide under my bed in college so people wouldn't find me. I didn't want to talk about my work, their work, their problems, and NEVER my problems. Never like King Lear Never.

I can honestly say that all 30 of the drafts I posted this month are a little stale. They tend toward the sentimental, they lack intrusive and piercing verbs, they rely too heavily on ghosts, and girls, and the river. I went to my wheelhouse for these, but I think I did that because (in drafts) I go to my wheelhouse to see what I can do differently among those comfortable tropes. It's like starting a baseball game off with the National Anthem: the game played isn't completely different, people still use bats and balls and play on two teams but it starts the same but ends in a different result. While I definitely rely on certain tropes of mine too much in this series, I think more than a few times I ended up in surprising directions.

That's what you lose when you edit yourself so much. I used to not know what I was writing sometimes until after I'd edited it three or four times.

Is it enough to say I'd lost my way? Can I blame the zombie book?

In the zombie book, I needed to stick to certain tropes so that when I divert from them there's a clear purpose. I couldn't write about unicorns or 1850s Paris or Marty Scorcese films in a book-length poem where the themes, motifs, tone, setting, character, time, et cetera et cetera are all set.

In the end, I'm a fan of what I undertook. This is the most prolific I've been in years. I'll try to keep it up without the prompts set out for me, but I know I'll likely wind up somewhere less productive.

I used to write in the morning, and edit at night. That was my little schedule, and I kept to it like a devout christian keeps to his prayers. If a day went bad (she didn't like me back, I didn't say the right thing when someone needed me to) I still could say I plied my craft and got a little better at writing. It was important. It made me happy. When a couple days went very bad, my writing regiment slipped into occasional lines and then, with the words coming so rarely, I wanted to make what I wrote count.

Nothing I wrote here counts. It's all for fun. And therefore, it was fun to write. Tomorrow I'll be in Venice awaiting slick birds doused in oil. With a case of Dawn dish soap and some Pink Bismuth, I'll try to save a couple birds from dying. It will be emotional and hard, but the work (any work you care about) gets you through it.

I lost that. I really hope I don't lose it again.

Poetry Month Day 30 - Throw off the Bowlines

2010-04-30T13:35:00.001-06:00

Throw Off the Bowlines

Strict as mathematics, nervous as asthmatics
in the smoky bar I mourned my decisions in,
I float a paraffin boat endures tide’s acrobatics
to a gulf can drown the poems I can’t begin.

First to be good, second be respected. Wrote
because the men who let me forsake bedtime
told stories at the kitchen table, on the boat.
I’d hold a stuffed bear, hear accidental rhyme

of men too many beers in to hear what I heard.
Initiated my older brother before they all died:
one falls in leaves as his crosshairs track a bird.
Another said he’d be back for lunch, but lied.

Grandfather gave us children nickels for a song
before time, that pimpled megaplex custodian,
plucked all the letters from his marquee. Strong
as he was and finally he couldn’t name his kin.

Got me to the good school, got me from home.
Tell stories about singing jawbones, pigs, lice,
and those men who’d cure baldness with a comb—
knowing that their stories mattered had to suffice.

Initiated in academia, a group those men attack
before their hearts gave out, am told I’m smart
and that if I follow the rules I’ll never go back.
In this group, I become a dealer of the heart.

My friends are talented and smart. The women
there aren’t broken or conceeding. Conceited,
yes, but bearable through winters now and then.
Friends can’t console, women slowly defeated.

Break a couple rules, and leave. Easily replaced.
Move out west to Oregon with people I can trust
I think, never able to rinse out Ohio’s bitter taste
and soon I’m homebound, running as if rehearsed.

Years go by and I can’t even write my own name
without flinching. First to be honest and respectful,
second be good. Blink, the boat is gone. My shame
I hope goes with it, and like it: bobbing and frightful.

***

For today's prompt, write a letting go poem. The poem could be about letting go of a relationship; it could be about letting go of anger; it could be about letting go of a tree branch; or it could even be about, yes, letting go of this April challenge. There are so many things we can let go.

Poetry Month Day 29 - And Suddenly

2010-04-29T20:04:00.005-06:00

(UPDATE 4/6/10: This poem was revised for the Top 50 poems of April contest, presented by Poetic Asides and Writers Digest). Like most drafts, the original is somewhere safe but out of sight.)

And Suddenly

you’re tracing ampersands in the dirt with your toes.
Summer comes, and with it a melody in your heart
about how long we’re going to last like a featherweight
counts the rounds. Instead of waiting for the judge’s
scores, you pack your makeup bag and board a bus
for somewhere colder, better to your luck.

Were you bored, or afraid? As tide this night erases all
your punctuations from the sand not scrubbed by
the alligator drags his belly through the muck, coffee
stronger than you liked takes its route through the throat
that speaks of you. Would it sicken you to find your
crushed butt still resting in the ashtray? It sickens me.

Everything human makes a spark. Everything human
dies. Near the river there’s a house I thought we’d share.
Its shingles are the broken teeth of a harsh winter,
its windows are smashed by kids who went there
with their spray cans aimed intent on professing
childish loves. I would have taken you to the dark
river-bitten nail of land and let sunlight disinfect
what others put inside you—the hard question marks
and vain exclamation points. I wasn’t ready to lose
the toenails digging commas in my calves or the elbow
that you’d rest at night on my sternum. An egret lands
on shoreline and, gulped up, warms the gator’s stomach.
We were like that for each other in one brief period.

***

For today's prompt, I want you to take the phrase "And Suddenly (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Some examples: "And suddenly we were lost," "And suddenly over," "And suddenly banana," "And suddenly sudden," "And suddenly the poem I was writing turned into a killer robot," etc.

Poetry Month Day 28 - Venice, Louisiana 2010

2010-04-28T19:41:00.001-06:00

Venice, Louisiana 2010

Dark feathers burden the shoreline—
so easily we see the end of the world.
Our feet rest on its precipice of weeds
and litter (junk of make-out rendezvous
and shrimp-boaters docked and antsy).

You were the one I thought capable.
Not just another smart girl made up
of bad decisions, of costume jewelry
the lies you wear around your neck
professing someone’s false intentions.

I would have taken you to the dark
bitten nail of land and let sunlight
disinfect what others put inside you.
I would have scrubbed you bones
as easily as you scrubbed me from

your life. Panic is a tire tears shells
to dust. As much as rain falls here,
you know how much I’ve learned
to look down for what this weather
does to worms. Evicts from homes.

***

For today's prompt, write an end of the line poem. Maybe the narrator of your poem is at the end of his or her line. Other possible lines that have an end: assembly lines, phone lines, power lines, rail lines, graph lines, dotted lines, waiting lines, lines of poetry, etc.

Poetry Month Day 27 - Homily

2010-04-27T14:34:00.002-06:00

Homily

One day the pure-hearted con men of New Orleans
whose limbs bake in the misplaced sunlight
of a galaxy gone wild will make a fortune fortunate
enough to last past spring. The fresh seared lamb
and crushed cayenne burning on their lips,
the fresh wine bottles clanking from paper bags
like teeth from a preacher's mouth.

***

Wow! After today, we'll be a mere three days from the end of this challenge. Today is a two for Tuesday prompt, so you've got two options:

Write a hopeful poem.
Write a hopeless poem.

Poetry Month Day 26 - More than Five Times

2010-04-26T13:57:00.001-06:00

More than Five Times

more than five times slept on your couch
more than five times dug fingers in tobacco pouch
more than five times looked at your photos
more than five times ached for more cosmos
more than five times drank at bars alone
more than five times craved a snowball cone
more than five times asked what comes
more than five times tasted haitian rums
more than five times missed my father
more than five times asked why bother
more than five times missed who I was
more than five times did what a good man does
more than five times hated women, men
more than five times mourned my gift for sin
more than five times loved a child’s laugh
more than five times witnessed aftermath
more than five times thought about the park
more than five times scraped skin on bark
more than five times missed climbing trees
more than five times cheering for Drew Brees
more than five times stared up at the sun
more than five times wished that I was done
more than five times grown basil and thyme
more than five times lost hours on bad rhyme
more than five times thrown a good fish back
more than five times read stars in native zodiac
more than five times left the windows up
more than five times worried crease from pants
more than five times impressed a girl to dance
more than five times flowers bend from shade
more than five times bills have gone unpaid
more than five times watch too much tv
more than five times dread eternity
more than five times seared a hunk of meat
more than five times hear people on the street
more than five times bought myself a friend
more than five times learned how that will end
more than five times picked a fight to lose
more than five times gave up smoking, booze
more than five times supremed citrus fruits
more than five times laced up dirty boots
more than five times cooked that girl a meal
more than five times never copped a feel
more than five times wished we’d never met
more than five times hasn’t come true yet
more than five times fought the boll weevil
more than five times cast a vote for evil
more than five times girls act like a friend
more than five times move on in the end
more than five times dirge of broken hearts
more than five times patron of the arts
more than five times no time for your drama
more than five times did wrong to my mama
more than five times rooted for the underdog
more than five times black eye for my litblog

***

For today's prompt, write a "more than 5 times" poem. Of course, I'll let you decide what that means. Maybe you'll write a poem about something the narrator does more times than preferrable; maybe you'll write a deja vu poem; or maybe you'll just write the same line and/or stanza more than 5 times. I just know that multiple poets recently said the "More than 5 times" subject line would make a great prompt, so I'm listening to the group. Have at it!

Poetry Month Day 25 - I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost

2010-04-25T18:56:00.006-06:00

(UPDATE 4/6/10: This poem was revised for the Top 50 poems of April contest, presented by Poetic Asides and Writers Digest). Like most drafts, the original is somewhere safe but out of sight.)

I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost

Maybe Berryman was happy there, as his poems
suggest he’d sit under this tree Ohio keeps alive
opens its mouth to fall air and exhales orange leaves.
Maybe I was happy there too once. Some nights
it looked as though I walked alone and talked
of fire burning up an old friend’s arm or chassis
rusted through to windshields kids busted for kicks
in the swamps behind my house. While colts
and mares gallop royally through those Ohio fields
I laid in bed and let the louder ghosts of Kenyon
College stroke my hair asleep. Before my first real
northern winter came, I sat on a thunder-gutted stump
and was glad. As someone who is gone from there,
I recollect the good. As someone who is not a ghost,
I don’t haunt. Am haunted. Spent years searching
for that book of poems James Wright hid inside
a crevice of stone to let me know he really wrote
those lines for me. Never found it. Never heard him
sing except a VHS the library gave out. His fingers
fought the hemlines of a too-small sport coat
as smoke strangled his tongue. In my time there
a lovely drunk girl thought me decent, wound up
in my bed. I held her, but she wouldn’t hold me back.
As someone who is not a ghost, I know that ghosts
are loved. Now nothing holds me back from telling
anyone who wants to hear that the ghosts of Kenyon
sing their best in springtime, sound less exhausted.
What now can I sing about? failing out? Sunset glows
too far away. I rode with ghosts, ghosts led me astray.

***

For today's prompt, write a poem inspired by a song. Be sure to include the song and artist (if known) with your poem, so that we can all make our own mix CDs to write poetry. And so I've tabbed five from a quick scan of my iTunes.

Shortlist for PAD # 25:
Jason Molina -- I've Been Riding With the Ghost
Nirvana -- All Apologies
John Hartford -- First Girl I Loved
Iris DeMent --Our Town
Eddie Hinton -- Dreamer

Poetry Month Day 24 - Even

2010-04-24T11:30:00.001-06:00

Even

In his life there was a great leveling. Financial success
provided him the chance to buy a house that could impress

those in-laws that already loved him, keep his lovely wife
from leaving even though she never planned on life

without him. A steady hairline, glances at the gym
were confidence enough to satisfy the vainer parts of him.

All this and his bets panned out. The friends he chose
in college, the over/under college games, and the pros.

Lovely as she was her ovaries were shot. Further tests
revealed his swimmers had the stamina of war protests.

Adopted Chan, he never said to word to both of them
and wasn’t seen again once the ivy league accepted him.

Dogs and cats and parakeets, all dead. A pig named Dunce.
Digging yet another grave, he remembered being lucky once.

***

For today's prompt, write an evening poem. My initial thought is that this poem would somehow involve the night, but upon further reflection, I guess it could be about evening things up or something.

Poetry Month Day 23 - Voltage

2010-04-23T15:10:00.001-06:00

   Voltage

Ohio light danced in my hand one autumn
before the whole state turned gray & brown.
Spent nights listening to mucked gutters freeze
from my attic bedroom, windowless & small.

You call it lightness Professor Calvino. I say voltage.

"Of course love conquers all that jazz and
good men do die young you young feller
and love without whiskey is too great a task
for me a man not the son of God."
                                                           And my
mother is a widow. My mother is a widow,
but you can't remember your own son, Grandpa.
You here, Professor Calvino? My mother
gives me voltage:
                              I can see dawn rise like
mid-surgery complications.
                                               I can see Uncle Timmy,
two weeks after the storm happy to find work
for the first time in months shocked to death
by a livewire, shot off a ladder just like Grandma
in her attic, both cooked like torn beef.
                                                                    Voltage,
Professor Calvino, like I'm taught, moves the body
& permeates the mind. Grandpa, damn old adages;
I want to laugh good and be done with living.

"You can't find Jesus in a strip mall church, son, but
if you look close some moments in life dance naked
                            All well and good Grandpa, but
you can't remember moments anymore. You asked my
mother how Kenny (my father and his son, Professor)
was doing. You called me Billy when you saw me.
I found you crying in the garage clutching a photo
of my father in your hand. You did not know him,
did not know why you cried clutching what remains.

You call it lightness Professor Calvino. I say voltage.

"I think them alligators want us dead, Billy.
I think they did something to my boy Kenny.
You remember when he fell off that church?
Think it was them gators pushed him off."

Are these images vivid enough, Grandpa?
How about you, Calvino? I hope you like them,
I hope they last a while in your head Grandpa.
I hope they make the grade, Professor.
I wouldn't want these images to be forgotten.
I wouldn’t want to fail.

I know my cousin wouldn't want Uncle Timmy
to be forgotten. I know I don't want him lost
either. No misgivings about him being here,
being in this poem I wrote alone, near tears.
Calvino, I looked my cousin in the eye knowing
his dad died three days to the year of my dead dad
and he tried to hug me like we used to when
we still had fathers. But we weren't men then,
we weren't men without our fathers.

You were used up by the time you lost my name.
You lost my name before I knew I’d never be the same.
I can't grieve these things anymore. My limbs won't.
You call it lightness Professor Calvino. I say voltage.

***

For today's prompt, write an exhausted poem. The poem can be a first person account of your own exhaustion, or it can describe the exhaustion of someone (or something) else. Heck, I guess it even could be about exhaust, huh?

Poetry Month Day 22 - Resurrecting Fish and Other Mysteries

2010-04-22T19:02:00.001-06:00

Resurrecting Fish and Other Mysteries
from Emily Zeller's fish project

She makes an incision from gut to gill. The fish
is hours dead, yet its eyes still warble and twitch
with water’s harsh stars. Her scissors are silver,
which the woman who relayed death’s antidote

insisted she use. Grass is kissed with solar flare
and snipped. They smell rich as the reeds used
to make that first papyrus, to write the first tales
of resurrection. It hasn’t begun to stink. Scales

the color of blood (or mercury in moonlight)
emblazon its back. Cloth that covers the ground
is stained with human touch, as is the white twine
seals the steel-revealed gut as guts dry nearby.

Within an hour swimming again, unaware grass
unnatural to its belly rallies fins through current.
Alive like this, the stars have given back an angel
to the battered waves they love to shimmer in.

Knees in dirt, the resurrector only feels her hands
reverberate the squirming snapper that she made
alive, her gut twitch wishing for a patch of grass.

***

For today's prompt, write an Earth poem. You can decide what an Earth poem is. Maybe it's a poem about the planet; maybe it's actually the lowercase earth (a gardening or burial poem?); maybe it's just a poem that happens on (or to) Earth; maybe it's even written in the voice of extraterrestrials (that might be fun). No matter how you decide to roll with it, have a very poetic Earth Day!

Poetry Month Day 21 - According to the Drunken Elders of my Past

2010-04-21T15:48:00.002-06:00

(UPDATE 4/6/10: This poem was revised for the Top 50 poems of April contest, presented by Poetic Asides and Writers Digest). Like most drafts, the original is somewhere safe but out of sight.)

According to the Drunken Elders of my Past

When you like a girl you tuck your shirt in.
Buy your beer as cheap as possible.
When the flood came you slept like a baby
in our skiff, and the moon was a rabid dog
eating raindrops from your face.
A paddle works in most fights.
A shirt lasts past getting full of holes.
Before swimming at night, take a flashlight
and shine the water for alligators.
Their eyes burn like the ends of cigarettes.
The earth yields what you put back into it. Make lists.
Beer and fish belong in separate ice chests,
but if your bait works better than you thought
try to keep the fish from where you drink.
A good motor leaks a little oil.
A good boat sinks close to shore.
Blackberry, honeysuckle make good wine.

After we die, you're on your own.
***

For today's prompt, take the phrase "According to (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Example titles might be: "According to Bob," "According to these instructions," "According to the government," "According to the sun," etc.

Poetry Month Day 20 - Orpheus Gets to Stepping

2010-04-20T14:43:00.001-06:00

    Orpheus Gets to Stepping

Do it right this time, he tells himself.
It’s been like this for years. He chops the woods
until they look like hell—no easy task

for someone with his tender hands
once calloused only with the plague of duty
to an instrument. As a youngster,

something in him let him sit and hours play.
Now his mind is lost there in those woods.
Its Orpheus again at the first step,

heading up, trying this time to not look back.

His heel will fail him once or twice.
Sometimes just a sound will earn a twitch.
Each time he turns rewards himself

another hundred thwacks of the switch.
He’s lying to himself. He knows the cause—
he holds her hand and doesn’t feel a soul.

He did that too. He blamed the devil,
blamed the girl. But always back he turns
to blaming just himself. A deer in the distance

shakes a hunting party and Orpheus turns

to see it scamper through what brush remains.
Thwack thwack thwack and back he goes
to step one. Sometimes there he turns,

other times he makes it to the final step
before his nature, curious and strong,
propels and wills him to look back to she

who vanishes at a single glance. Her face
is the shadow introduced to light. Thwack
to stomach her descent. He hasn’t learned

he’s not kind of man who can’t look back.

***

Today is a two for Tuesday prompt. Here are the two options:
    1.    Write a looking back poem. There are a few ways to tackle this one, I guess. The narrator could be reflecting on the past or literally looking back (like over his or her shoulder).
    2.    Write a poem that doesn't look back. This poem would be kind of the opposite, I suppose. Narrator who refuses to look back or who is literally looking forward (or I suppose another option even is that the narrator is blind or something).
Of course, if anyone has an interpretation that falls outside of my suggestions, then feel free to run with them. I always encourage poets to bend the prompts to their will.

Poetry Month Day 19 - Geoff Munsterman

2010-04-19T23:25:00.006-06:00

(UPDATE 4/6/10: This poem was revised for the Top 50 poems of April contest, presented by Poetic Asides and Writers Digest. Like most drafts, the original is somewhere safe but out of sight.)

Geoff Munsterman

I do not live for the rivers or the breeze
and I do not live for the trees. Spring comes
and crawfish sacks with it. Soul of wit
I seek and yet my life provides no brevity.

At night the streetlamp undoes darkness
as best a moth-haunted halogen can.
I work the lines, try to make from creaks
and chirps something beautiful when heard.

Vices ward the worrier in me. The warrior
as well. Do not be glum, my lovely reader.
Branches read like braille the frail exhales
of lungs as schoolboys like me fray and claim

to know enough. It’s been like this for years,
and will be in the final hours of my life
when nearing death I’ll beg a spectre
give me one more day. Time, the glorious

angel of degradation, incinerates my logic—
brevity and wit are everywhere. Two things
I’ve been known to feel and will feel to the end:
there is only love. The absence of.

***

For today's prompt, write a poem about somebody and be sure to include the person's name in the title of your poem (no reason to hide the person's identity here). Write a poem about Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, your next door neighbor, your child, or the person standing behind you. I guess you could even technically write a poem about yourself (just make sure you include your name in the title).

Poetry Month Day 18 - To the Iowa Writers' Workshop

2010-04-18T13:17:00.001-06:00

To the Iowa Writers' Workshop

What I don't want to be. What you can't say.
What you say sounding like the year before,
and the year before that, and always perfect
like a painted corpse cool inside its casket.

I am not elite enough to distill my experience
into a dust jacket, to write like someone else
whose experience appeals to other readers.
I am not elite enough to live and die in Iowa.

You who have never had sex, never pulled
your groin running to the mailbox for a check:
you are the voice of your generation, lines
cleaner than obsessive compulsive fingernails.

I truncate my speech enough to make it lose
all meaning. Then, with a final line, I'll try
to vivisect my reader with a glance at words
not boiled down to sounding nice. O Iowa,

you do not make a poet what they don't want.
Emerging from your workshop without ill
are those who went in having something
worth a damn. Congrats on getting it out,

your book no better than a roadkill deer.
I'm steeped like a teabag in the real world
with my wallet empty and my toes curled.
I do not have your contacts. I persevere.

***

For today's prompt, take the phrase "To (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Some examples: "To the left, to the left," "To write or not to write," "To Kill a Hummingbird," "To the Doghouse," etc. There are so many possibilities.

Poetry Month Day 17 - Don't Be Cruel

2010-04-17T11:02:00.001-06:00

Don't Be Cruel

Cumulus fidgets its pyroclastic mask
as daylight darkens under cooling ash.

Kissing you once felt like that; kinetic
whimper of soft, temp-dropped flesh

meshing into mine who now burns
lonely, loud. Fire, I've only watched

you lick the windows of a dead house,
the planks of wood we doused in gas.

You've snaked your way through core
and fizzled shards into our atmosphere.

I've snipped pernicious moments off
the branches of my oaken memory

but know only fire wipes them clean.
Ash masters breaking up before me.

***

For today's prompt, write a science poem. Science encompasses a lot, so your poem doesn't have to be scientific to still be a science poem. For instance, you could have a poem titled something like "The Science of Love," and then examine a relationship. Voila! A science poem! Of course, it'll be interesting to see how many poets talk about volcanoes and single cell organisms, not to mention finding out how many "mad scientists" are out there.

Poetry Month Day 16 - Death Exercise

2010-04-16T14:37:00.001-06:00

Death Exercise

Ever tell you about the mean, one-legged drunk
who'd kick from his barstool schooling youths?

Ever tell you about the girl I took to junior high
winter formal formally made a cold case last year?

Ever tell you about Cousin Eddie sinning in LA
lazy to the moment that trucker crushed his skull?

Ever tell you about Uncle Danny banding hundreds
in plastic, asking nurses mess his morphine drip up?

Ever tell you about Mae Rose risen from the dead:
her white gown dances around her ancient thighs.

Ever tell you about Vaughn the rocker, his heroin
habit, heart like a rabbit in the convenience store?

Ever tell you about Sid? Some say his sister didn't
miss clipping his bike on purpose. Bent wheel spins.

Ever tell you about Forrest? The dog's jaw clamps
& don't let go. A shovel to the neck he don't let go.

Ever tell you about Delila, sick of her trailer living,
her rough husband, her kid? Pills jive the sink drain.

Ever tell you about Winifred or Fred for short?
Because I don't know. Only her ex-boyfriend do.

Ever tell you about Andy the dramatist? He pissed
his money then the pisses pants, jumps off the bridge.

Ian Lilly I know I mentioned. Never saw the truck
ate him like a trash compactor. Alcohol a factor.

And my father, he's a big chief in this tribe of dead:
he tell them not to quit their holler shuffle stomp.

What about that house he build? It gone. What about
that son he raised? He comes back different, ill.

***

Maybe it's a little too close to tax day, but today's prompt is to write a death poem. You can write about a specific death or consider death as an idea. In the tradition of Emily Dickinson (and other poets), you could even address Death as an entity. Or you can surprise us with a different spin on the subject.

Poetry Month Day 15 - Deadline

2010-04-15T19:36:00.002-06:00

Deadline

His heart was like a clock whose battery had died.
Slow at first. The second hand unable to climb
against the gravity. Then the minutes slowed.

There was a deadline that he had to meet
he didn’t even know about—and this is true
of all of us. There is a date tattooed to your blood

when Death, the bitter taxman, comes collect.
Some skirt the law, some pay before its due.
His Samsonite is heavy with all your wasted time

and every promise kept, every wish that you repeat
but never get. Scream all you want, the sparrows
drown you out, impartial creatures sour as lime

to those who fail to break the law above the law—
the juried moment of your fall. Blood seized inside
his skull, and he was gone. Greeted by an auditor.

***

In this neck of the woods, today is known as Tax Day. Luckily for me, I'm one of those people who races to finish my taxes in February. However, that doesn't mean life is not without deadlines. In fact, I have several breathing down my neck today, which is appropriate for today's prompt.
For today's prompt, write a deadline poem. You can interpret what a deadline poem is however you wish. Maybe it's a poem that laments the idea of deadlines. Maybe it's a poem about someone intentionally missing them or who never has problems with them (I wish I were that person). Regardless of how you take it, remember that you have until tomorrow before another prompt will be posted. Consider that your poetic deadline.

Poetry Month Day 14 - Honey Island

2010-04-14T19:05:00.001-06:00

Honey Island

Lanterns on the levee look like stars—
wind lighter than the makeup on her cheek
makes them jiggle and sway.

Music loud enough to drown mosquitoes out.
Music good enough to make us fall
in love, but you know better.

You’re up before the sun, shucking
blackberries from the dark. Sugar for coffee
ferments with them, makes a meal

stains your smile and mine, worse than
wine we’re drinking later in the orange tent
and kissing. That night I dream

the wrinkles aging on your face,
your knees unapologetic with arthritis,
and how much I will love you even then.

The island bridge is up. It’s hot and egrets
dip and warble as stakes of sunlight
pitch the day.Bulkheads keep

erosion out and I know if I
were brave enough I’d ask you be my heart’s
tin and shell and clay barrier.

The earth sinks underneath our feet
but you prefer to feel destruction as tall grass
and sand between your toes.

All roads are dead ends with the bridge like that.
I say as much, and tell you you should go
before the ferry landing gives up for the night.

Without you lanterns are bulbs in paper shells.
Somewhere you are happy, mad at me
because I stayed, sinking.

***

For today's prompt, take the phrase "(blank) Island," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. You could do a well-known island, such as "Treasure Island," "Ellis Island," or "Total Drama Island." Or you could make up the name of an island. Or you could even have a long drawn out title, such as "You'll never get me on an island" or "If I were on a deserted island."

Poetry Month Day 13 - 'The Lovers' of Kenyon

2010-04-13T17:07:00.001-06:00

Here is my explanation:

      So the exercise for day 13 was a love poem, and after days of toiling over the exercise I ended up with nothing. Fact is, I've struggled throughout my writing with the love poem. Some people (mainly 14-year olds) can write one without even thinking and, while I love love poetry and am glad that 14-year olds put their feelings into words, I do not have the skill. I tried an anti-love poem, but the "I don't love the idea of love' poems are not something that's interesting in me. I believe I have the capacity for love, and in fact believe I have a lot of love to give to someone. But I don't think I can write a love poem right now: I don't have a girlfriend, I don't have a wife, and for the first time in a very long while I'm not obsessed with a girl who can't be convinced that loving me is a good idea. I love my friends, I love my family; I am cheesy in the fact that I believe in not only the concept, but the institution of love. I like Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan films, I like buying girls I'm dating flowers, cards, and candy.

So instead of writing a new love poem that's bad or full of cynicism, I'm reposting an older poem I wrote when I was in love. It's an ekphrastic poem I wrote based on a sculpture in Ohio and I've always had a fondness for it. I'll take this one time to bow out of an exercise, and won't for the rest of the month. I'll also be posting poems for the days I missed. Hope you enjoy the lovers as much as I did, drunkenly climbing on them at 2 am when I was more worried about being flagged by campus security than getting frozen to the metal sculpture. Here you go:

“THE LOVERS” OF KENYON COLLEGE

I contort in dark and light, pervert spine
as we pervert delusions of true love
fed to us and younger lovers line
by line. Create with me the image of
the pains that come, the bending that we do
for an increment of other’s touch. Reprise
the role of man who can remain a true
participant. Deny the loss. Your eyes,
the inch of skin your fingertips provide
that I can’t see, your cold skin unfelt. Sent
from casts a pair that refuse to ever slide—
suppose with me that it’s enough to want.

Please think of me and stay in your formed place
if in some haunting memories you see my face.

*

Artists with agendas make women with your shape,
    they capture, distill, snare your blown hair
just out of reach from me but never them. Wear
    your garments tight around your curves, nape
exposed to those not posing, not looking to escape
    like me, my shadow out of view. Not given eyes to stare
at me who also cannot look. I have form; the air
    I sense, the leaves falling on my false drape.

I know you well enough to need to run away—
    this is the promise of emotions turned
      to statue, cold and calculated art.
I know you well enough to want to stay.
    I am not a lover spurned,
      I am a lover made without your heart.

***

Two for Tuesday time!

Here are today's two prompts:

1. Write a love poem.

2. Write an anti-love poem.

Poetry Month Day 12 - New Orleans

2010-04-13T00:31:00.001-06:00

New Orleans

The situation is this: I’ve loved you since
that first ferry ride from Algiers Point.
In high school kids would drive the bridge

to shake a little ass and scam a beer,
but I spent hours studying your tongue—
the culture of a place with more than one
community. City kids with plans to leave

would always have a place to land when
plans would kick them, beat them down.
Never looked better in that half moon sky

than when I worked the summers there
at Faulkner Books in Pirates Alley scaling
ladders for a first edition Glass Menagerie.

The shade of your balconies like parole
releasing from the sun’s harsh knuckles
me—a kid who fell, and falling harder

when mother cooked the bar I read at
jambalaya and the poet owner liked so much
her recipe, he vowed to publish in his quarterly

Sitting in the Tulane hospital garage,
you sang to me as father readied
for his surgery “you will not lose,
not if you use your heart.” I laughed

Too long I’ve been a tourist, always
outside looking in and surfing couches.
You adopted me, but like most fosters
fought to call you home. Until today.

***

For today's prompt, pick a city, make that the title of your poem, and write a poem. Your poem can praise or belittle the city. Your poem could be about the city or about the people of the city. Your poem could even have seemingly nothing to do with the city. But the simple act of picking a city will set the mood (to a certain degree), so choose wisely.

Poetry Month Day 11 - The Last Cigarette

2010-04-11T12:04:00.002-06:00

The Last Cigarette

The doctor asked if I was serious
about living to see my thirties—
if only I could run, if only I could
sneak to the garage where nurses
puff to shake their tasks a moment
and take my pack out, let smoke
soothe as always all my stresses.

The doctor stresses that my life
must change—give up smoking,
give the coffee up, burger runs
at 3 AM. In my pocket a crushed
Marlboro, but I’ll never smoke it.

Harder quitting coffee, biscuits—
my fingers prefer holding pens.

***

For today's prompt, take the phrase "The Last (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make that the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Some examples: "The Last Train," "The Last Kiss," "The Last Time I'll Give Directions to a Complete Stranger," "The Last Dance," etc.

Poetry Month Day 10 - Bad Dreams

2010-04-10T21:19:00.002-06:00

(UPDATE: A revised version of "Bad Dreams" can now be found at Undead Poets Society)

Bad Dreams

               “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell,
               and count myself a king of infinite space—
               were it not that I have bad dreams.”

—Hamlet

Two years we watched our neighborhood collapse—
playgrounds barren, all the swing sets taken down.
The cops go mad. Sixteen children in a year, cut
like paper dolls; no leads except the body count.

The ice cream vendor’s temper suffered. No kids
turning blast pops into blue and orange tongues
sent him to his workshop, drunk and screaming
nights at the abandoned power plant. The cops
on Elm Street went through hell—we blamed
the Springwood Slasher on their incompetence.

Our children snatched while skipping rope
are later cradled by the cold coroner’s table.
Housewives close their kitchen windows tight
and rock the bottles that replace their kids.

The prosecutor given Krueger’s case assured
he’d rot behind the bars of Ohio Penitentiary.
Prepared to hear about his nun mother raped
in Westin Hills, his alcoholic foster dad nasty
with the belt. Instead, was sloppy paperwork—
a judge’s unsigned warrant. We wanted him
to burn—our faith in law mutilated like his
little victims, spilled insides black and red
he played with like pieces on a checker board.

Gas cans doing what the justice system can’t,
we went on with our lives. Surviving children
blocked the horrors out, sang amusing rhymes
to jumprope to. Only dreaming mothers knew
our happy street would never be the same.

***

For today's prompt, write a horror poem. Make it scary. Make it cheesy. Make it funny. Whatever you do, link it somehow to horror. Who knows? Maybe someone will write the next great raven poem.

Poetry Month Day 9 - My Hands

2010-04-09T09:55:00.002-06:00

My Hands

My father died and I dragged my hand
against the stone after one professor
told me about how Alan Shapiro held
his brother’s death inside a handful
of poems. Left hand’s middle knuckle
red and bumpy when I scrubbed it
hard on Kenyon’s Ascension Hall.
Blonde hairs subdue large forearms
that I’m told rival the cartoon sailor’s.
At the shoulder stares a dead man—
no nose, no mouth; eyes like a moth
attracted to the flames of inked blood.
Shoulders of a fullback, a long neck
like a turtle, the girl said. Her mouse
voice dribbles from my crusty ears.
A round face, and round gut, my eyes
racing always from carpenter bees
to an old woman tugging on her shirt.
Wear a frown, black frame glasses.
Both are relics like my rough knuckle
of Ohio; the optometrist and barber
who heard a south Louisiana boy
request for ‘the James Wright’ look.
The frown from leaving, believing

I had nothing left to do but go home.

***

For today's prompt, write a self-portrait poem. Other artists study themselves to create compositions (not all of them exactly flattering either), so it is only natural that poets, who are word artists, write self-portrait poems from time to time. In fact, some poets make self-portrait poetry "their main thing." For at least today, make it yours.

Poetry Month Day 8 - Maul

2010-04-08T22:12:00.001-06:00

Maul

Elegy for the southern, an elegy for you.
Steel hinges rust their cardboard coffins.
An arsenal of unloaded caulking guns
rest under three windows. Spiderwebs

of light escape a window ledge rests
jars of nails and seven pencil boxes
bleached on job sites, and each pencil
knife-sharpened and flat. Chewed-up

is the countertop, the filled cabinets
spilling with nailguns, apoxies, wasp
hives, and mud. Sawdust suffocates.

Sawhorses lean contrariwise against
igloo coolers filled with lifejackets.
Memory, a maul, violates this place.

***

For today's prompt, pick a tool, make that the title of your poem, and write your poem. There are the more obvious tools, of course: hammer, screwdriver, wrench, etc. But there also less obvious tools and/or specialized tools available as well. Before attacking this poem, you may want to just think about the various possibilities first. Or just write.

Poetry Month Day 7 - Until Shadows Fall on the Porch

2010-04-07T15:42:00.001-06:00

Until Shadows Fall on the Porch

Coffee at the coffee table, the brassy taste
of an unclean self-cleaning oven smoking

instead of my mother. The dog plops down
waiting to chase lizards and bees, to warp

the cool patch of grass. No talk radio news
from New Orleans, no noticing how much

the crape myrtles grew that night. Sunlight
misbehaves like a child learning the phrase

watch this, as a comic copying his in-law’s
catch phrase. The biscuit pan tambourines

from its brothers; the mug I’m assigned to
makes a brown ring. Even the windowless

bathroom bristles with too intense sunlight.
Make a sliver of shadow I can write from,

give my mother a peaceful place to enjoy
her mentholated. Birds come and munch
the seed we set out; give us shade enough.

***

For today's prompt, take the phrase "Until (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and write the poem. Possibilities include: "Until we meet again," "Until tomorrow," "Until monkeys fly out my butt," or even "Until blank" (why not?).

Poetry Month Day 6 - Flight, from Goya

2010-04-06T15:51:00.001-06:00

Flight

Pretending I’m a ghost the way I know,
I don a sheet and bend my waist to show
a proper knowledge regarding the dead—
Mother taught that below their shrouded
head they carry all the errors of the past
and wonder just how long it all will last.
This is how mother taught me to pretend,
but other children floating on the wind
intrigue a sleeping dog to raise his ear
not enough to make new dreams appear.

(Using "Flight of the Witches," by Goya as my prompt.)

***

For this prompt, write an ekphrastic poem. According to John Drury's The Poetry Dictionary, ekphrastic poetry is "Poetry that imitates, describes, critiques, dramatizes, reflects upon, or otherwise responds to a work of nonliterary art, especially the visual."

Poetry Month Day 5 - All Apologies

2010-04-05T16:10:00.001-06:00

All Apologies

Coughed hard while pissing, felt the stream
slicing through urethra like a knife as blood
began to join urine and the withered semen
from last night’s late masturbation marathon
brought on by wild girl infomercials looped
until you have no choice except to desecrate
your mother’s couch, the afghan mawmaw
knit for mom back when she was a bride.

My bloody urine stains the bright bowl pink
and even though I know the cause (cough)
I think a second about the places my dick
was last seen by another person: halloween
last the girl who sucked hard enough on it
to constrict the blood my prostate cramping
worse than any after-eating swim, lundi
gras the trumpet player dry jerking it raw
with her fist fat and tiny like gary coleman.

These events too far in the past, I repress
any thought of STDs. I coughed too hard
while pissing. No worse than biting your lip
or maybe sitting on your balls. Leave it pink
to let my mother think some college girl
and I got lucky, then real unlucky afterward.
She’ll either ask, or never mention seeing
blood and I can’t wait to find out which one.

***

For today's prompt, write a TMI poem (or too much information poem). As with all prompts, there are a number of ways to come at this one. You can make it about gossip or revealing too much personal information. You could write an information overload poem.

Poetry Month Day 4 - The End of Bradstreet’s Life

2010-04-04T21:27:00.001-06:00

The End of Bradstreet’s Life

Devout throughout, she gave up worship
and goddamn any one of you who do
wrong by a woman lost so many them
grandbabies and kept on living, even
when her son took off for the caribbean
and left his bride who failed to give
an heir could survive a year to die too
while Mistress Anne was forced to watch
after a life a several healthy children.

She worshipped plenty, she was done.

Her own health failed her. One night
her house burned down, all the poems,
letters, journals penned since Tenth Muse
burning with it. Her friends cast out
for being witches, devil worshippers.

She worshipped plenty, she was done.

Her old sweet father who outlasted
a quiet and strong mother, who remarried
a girl his daughters’ ages, and died.

She worshipped plenty, she was done.

Her husband Simon always elsewhere,
her sister dead for all she knew
sent out to die pregnant in the woods
for being like that monster Hutchinson.

She worshipped plenty, she was done.

She’d been the first Puritan woman
to meet Natives, to publish poetry
from The New World, maybe the first
to marry in a strict religion someone
that she loved. She didn’t outlive
any of her children—not a first, but
rare back then. She didn’t want to die
so many times the first and still a fool.
She worshipped plenty. She was done.

***

For today's prompt, write a history poem. This could mean a poem about your country's history, the history of an event or a tool, or even your own personal history. Hey, you could even write about the history of a relationship. The history of everything is fair game. Have fun!

Poetry Month Day 3 - Partly Animal

2010-04-03T14:42:00.001-06:00

Partly Animal

My lizard brain requests I kill that girl
or sever ties to anyone I’ve ever hurt.
Monkey brain loves milk, hates shrill
noises, bright lights: NYC, to be blunt.

The monkey brain the part of me that
wants to hurl my poop at Bristol Palin
types, and scream whenever Bristol’s
mother squawks and runs her mouth.

The lizard brain the part of me that
likes the cold, that thinks in dreams
about the dark and dampest past.

The human part makes light of these
and more, and faster, and dreams
about a future where the animal
in me comes out at parties only
and not in quickly written poems.

***

For today's prompt, I want you to take the phrase "Partly (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make that the title of your poem, and then write the poem. For instance, your poem might be titled "Partly Cloudy," "Partly Crazy," "Partly Out of Touch," or whatever.

Poetry Month Day 2 - Crooked Letter Crooked Letter River Kid Blues

2010-04-02T14:21:00.001-06:00

Crooked Letter Crooked Letter River Kid Blues

My brother told them it was time to head back to the camp.
They didn’t listen. They were having too much fun. He said
they had to turn back, didn’t tell them he could taste in air
a water spout emerging from the gray clouds above them.

Until he had to fish their bodies from the lake, his friends
thought him a spoil sport who never went beyond a line
that kept him out of jail more than twice, kept him without
a pellet rattling behind his right eye. Broke some bones
of course, but never had one severed by a country doctor
hoping he can save the leg by losing the lame foot. Doesn’t
have to blink a porcelain pupil out at night. Works the river.
At one point they all did—ferrymen who could get the hang
of a ratchet bar, or being told to paint what’s been painted.

One time he turned hearing a boy light up a cigarette and saw
turning only the smoke; the boy, the cigarette gone down.

Inundation is inevitable—they say, and are right. He moves
upriver from the town we didn’t drown in. He raises two
with the river girl he married after finishing high school.
Her trashy romance novels flutter from the porch. I think:
how many rich kids from the school up north would fall
into the river, fall for this mother once was holy, beautiful,
fall for the old trick of trashy romance novels set out to make
them rich kids think she isn’t bright as them. Even brighter.

There’s too much riverwater in my veins for me to pass
for anything but parish bred. My bayou-blistered back
feigns melanomas. My knuckles rough as any river oak.
I wore a tie once; it felt worse than a noose. Even poems—
which altogether need more car chases and explosions
for the world to look at them again—are better drawled.
The one professor who scolded me for listening to meter
with a southern ear—choir as two, as “kwy-errr” and not
“choir” as one, as “kwi’r”—taught me I couldn’t hear it
right. What I learned was I just have water in my ear
no sloshing brain around can get it out. Brother’s ears
dripping tailgate parties at the capitol, his babies’ cries.

***

For today's prompt, write a water poem. The poem could be specifically about water or just include water somewhere within the poem. You could even write about water-based phenomenon, such as rainbows or water spouts.

Poetry Month Day 1 - Lafayette

2010-04-01T17:01:00.001-06:00

Lafayette

The dog behind the paper wall that separates my room
from the room my neighbor fucks her boyfriends in
barks whenever trains pass, and trains backed up miles
anticipate his low howl becoming drool-dripping barks.

At least the junkies keep away until she slips her beast
his hot dog dosed with Tylenol so Tony, or Pete, or Jim
can come and wind the work shirt from her shoulders.
Mornings hear them pissing—a sound only men make.

The hooker at the Piggly Wiggly asks I be her friend
and she’s not joking. Maybe we could see a movie
and sex is offered, but more than that she wants sex
with someone nice to her for once. Buy eggs, leave.

The idiotic student doesn’t spell Louisiana ever right.
He’s from Lousisiana, goes to school in Lousisiana,
and will never leave Lousisiana. Am reminded how
I misspelled February until ninth grade. Born February.

The UL grad kids never want to talk to me, but talk
about the poets that I know as friends, or if not that,
have had a cup of coffee with and shown my work.
And except for two or three, they write like hacks.

The strays who stink my fingers with their dark fur
are hit when cops see biking black men hustle rock.
Dead before I ever get its body to the vet—lost first,
then stopped and served a ticket as it bled to death.

The ghosts I trust and ghosts I don’t showed up late
to Ohio. In Oregon, they hushed up and sunbathed.
In Lafayette they died a second death of strip malls,
bad bartenders, con-men you can’t trust even a little.

To say 'I hate you, Lafayette, I hate your fucking guts'
is not enough. I pay my ticket, skip rent, head south.

***

Today is day one, and for some reason the number one made me think of "One is the Loneliest Number," by Three Dog Night. That's what happens when I create prompts while listening to the oldies music channel, I guess. As a result, the prompt for day one is to write a lonely poem. The narrator could be lonely. Someone or something in the poem could be lonely. Or the poem itself could try to evoke a feeling of loneliness for the reader. Or, as in challenges past, you could take the poem in a completely unique direction.

Wrapper

2010-03-30T17:45:00.000-06:00

by Jesse Rosenbluth

It took enough hard falls down mud shafts under sun that, sweating; the river rose upon us, took our shirts off in dark peels and snapped us into trundled shapes along the banks.

I’m squatting pocketed in my shirt where I keep my clean ribbon lines and planes from twisting away in chokes and knots, between two erected masses of elm encumbered with creepers and poison ivies. I’m crouching, holding in on the bruised wrapper of a limp shirt, staring myself away in moving waters.
I’m subdued in the thick slough of river as a reflection swallowed under.

Seeing him wear out space with a soft belly, that sure pot of gumboed words he keeps, pushes me into the shallowest shade of passing color, quickest to cool and flashed into heat. I watch him rain heaviest and first to touch the waters, with that soft push leaning forward, pressing open a milky cut of skin like trout flesh, pale and white, wet through his wrapper.

He scrapes the tips of his veins open sliding in otter ways over stone, bringing out bright pink and red scales to the surface of his belly. He slaps them with palms and fingers and I watch the wound fan across his side, overflow, and leap into the air before settling along his thighs.
I stand taut on a high banked ruin fishing a dirty patch of calm with my eyes, I shutter when I see the scales turn out of the waters haloed in a rinse of fine light, thinking of how they rub me, dull me, stand off of me.

91.9 FM

2010-03-29T17:51:00.000-06:00

by Sarah Kemp

1
Good evening, Gambier,
I’m your host, hostess I mean,
Sweeter than cake or cherry ice cream,
And what a sorry state that we have here.
It seems that all our voices have gone
Inward, brooding to ourselves.
I can hear you catalogue yourselves
And the bodies you inhabit (spawn
Of a country like themselves, lands
Too withdrawn to howl,
That have forgotten how to draw an owl),
And I have a list of fresh demands.
They’re manageable. Bear with me. Breathe.
God help me, I will make you scream and swear and seethe.

2
I will make you scream and swear and seethe,
Ladies and Lords, for here’s the news today,
Things aren’t as they once were. Oh say
It ain’t, pray beneath your breath, show me your dismay,
Teethe on the agony of change.
My first demand is that you see
That nothing will ever be
The same. Pay attention! You exchange
Your tall tales, laugh, conceal
Behind a smile and drink away the great fall
Or the greater flood. I once knew a man who could scrawl
These things out of you, make your pain real
To anyone who would listen. But he is gone now,
Your complacence seems foregone now.

3
Your complacence seems foregone now, but!
Lords! Ladies! Seems is not is.
Pop quiz:
You have suffered, yes? What?
I’ll smack away that smirk, this isn’t a contest.
So you have. So have we all. My second
Demand is this: don’t brag, but command
Some kind of grace about your Midwest
Pain, and make of it something beautiful.
I know you have it in you, Gambier!
This place used to be the frontier
Of the beauty looms, with our agonies as wool.
Don’t wallow. Your cherry hostess does, O my audience,
And the only thing for it is a good defense.

4
The only thing for anything is a good defense,
So Be Prepared. Show me your scouting fingers!
Good. Now, go out to those woods where silence lingers
Even when your branch-crack steps incense
That murder of crows. (Always with the crows.) Remember
This land is not yours, and never will be,
But for four precious years, you can take me
Walking in the graveyard, or send embers
Into the trees, and then piss the fire out. Treat these places
Dearly. Better men have lived here
And have fought and written their lives here,
And you, Lords, are at the hind end of the races.
(The only real wilderness we knew here was each other,
too dangerous to navigate. Could we even have reached another?)

5
(Could we even have reached another?)
What’s that, Gambier? Oh, nothing,
I was talking to myself, bee stings, hot springs,
A boxing ring in a bare garage. Rather
Than ramble, take my fourth demand
And think long upon it:
Love each other, then try loving yourselves. (Pit
The listeners against themselves, play a song, and
Maybe they won’t hear the thunder of my thinking,
And my rumination on my sins of ignorance,
Lust, neglect. Maybe there’s a chance,
But in my experience you have to die to be redeemed.) Sing,
O Kansas, of the wayward son, and how he will carry on.
Caller, you’re on the air. Your name is John?

6
Your name is John? No? Well, now it is,
And what’s that you want to know from me?
That? Well, see,
It’s complicated, convoluted, damnit none of your busi—
Ness, really. He loved me and I treated him like shit.
I do this a lot. I’m a foul creature, you know,
All muses are demons, and so forth. Slow
Down, John. Oh. He was a poet, lit
From within with something he could not contain,
So it came to us in verse and laughter,
Rousing speeches, word games. After
He left, I mourned. No, idiot, he wasn’t slain.
He’s down in the bayou. I know, same thing.
(I remember us sitting in the basement, on rusty bedsprings.)

7
(I remember us sitting in the basement.) Ding ding,
Caller John, your time is up. Thanks for playing. Now!
(I see the switchboard is lighting up. How
can I continue decreeing without declaring
myself as the kind of thing poems are made on,
art on my clavicle, stanzas on my spine,
an epic on the imagined points of my hips. I’m not divine,
I’m a blank slate, a thing to be a pretty pawn
In so many dreams. [Vain declarations, you will be my death.]
But I am so unaware of the reach of my breath, or the arc
Of my actions and how they are seen. I am a spark
But I am in the dark, always, unfit for sympathy.
Woe is me, right? But apology is not enough,
And I cannot say goodnight until I’ve broken out the harder stuff.)

8
I’ve broken out the harder stuff, my Gambier,
And a shot spreads on the floor for my injured and the dead.
Yes, I talk to the absent far better than the living. I dread
Your faces, your derisions, and your praises. But hear,
And sing, Gambier, for a poet you lost who loved you,
Who heard the wild refrains and made them flesh
And was all of our voices, singing out at once. I will refresh
Your memories, for he is alive and well and screw
The unbelievers, he is luminous. I see the morning
Creeping through the window, and my time is slipping,
And I am running out of words. Gambier, the saying
Says all the best heroes die when the dying’s good, poof, vanishing,
But he never vanished, and he has a voice, bright and strong and clear.
Good morning, Gambier.

25 February 2009

The Fuck-Up

2010-03-28T17:40:00.000-06:00

by Rachel Rosenberg

Other people, he thinks, see a dropout, a failure.
A poet with a talent, a true voice, a sarcastic style
steeped in darkness and crushing blows of words.
Whose voice died and refuses to live again.

Life is a darkening pool, a shrinking platform.
Life is small and I am large (and petty)
and I keep losing things off the edge;
years, and girls, and notebooks full
of stunning verse. Epic.

Write me elegies. Write psalms
to my living memory. Watch them rot.
Put them to dirt and watch them rise.
I'll stand laughing, a darker shadow in the dark.
Darker still. Me and my shovel, we stand
with reds, records, a pen—
cut down.
Laughing with bubbling slaughter that is not murder,
but freedom.

Life by the gulf has a texture.
Up north is full of bland monsters,
dry killers who can give me a minute
but not a break. The word “tragedy” means nothing to them;
They never lived it.

When broken, run.

When I come to live with some friends for the summer,
we meet in the living room and write poetry together, setting
each other exercises. I write about the city and he fails
to write about loss; his father, his home, and now
his chance at getting a liberal arts degree.

Boy drummed out of school, runs west.
Sits in stony silence six months, brooding.
Pen stays down; life flattens.
Knife chops and peels, hands swell with steam,
crack with heat and work ethic, split shifts,
heart-deep resentment simmering,
abandoned to boil.

Hatred never becomes fire, not in my belly.
It's a swamp, growing some parts of me,
sinking others.
Currents slow to crawling, suffocating gasses rise.
I itch with failed attempts.
When everyone around you gets a fresh start together,
and moved on, watch your fresh break fester.
Itch faster. Take nighttime drives, smoke packs,
consider not getting off at this exit;
consider not going back to this new home.

We hit the hotcake house at 4am, watching
fry cooks leaning over the stove. Hungry hospital
interns wiping syrupy hands on scrubs, groups
of shouting drunks reading each other menu items,
and a shady trio; a man in leather and two ladies
in string-tied tops and hot-pants. The fuck-up eats
his grits and bacon, I browse through my short stack
and pull out a notebook. The diner fills and slows.

Can't write. Can't write, can't breathe. Heart
slows to thudding crawl, speeds to racing yell.
Night stops being dark, sunrise shrugs and leaves.
Rain, only rain, interminable, intolerable.
They were weak. I am weak.
I couldn't wait to run again.
Time to go. Hop a bus, ride all night.
Change across a continent. Don a new time zone.
Ride five more buses, staring at dirt caked on window glass.
Unsleeping, unresting, unwithering.

We both left the same week; I went back to school,
he went home. Down South, back to his mother,
his legacy, the only place he ever felt he belonged.
Phone conversations run halting, grim.

The delta stretches forth the future,
a smell of righteousness rising from the dirt.
World is potent, at home the flavor pops.
The notebook fills, lacy cursive left to right.
Get it together; never let it go. A death grip.

Life (in (Parenthesis)) : [Semiotics] (and Syntactics) of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

2010-03-05T22:18:00.000-06:00

[Macalister’s boy took one of thefish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body(it was still alive) was thrown back into the sea.]

(Chapter VI, To TheLighthouse)

Two sentences make up Chapter VI in the thirdsection of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The first sentence statesa minor character’s act of fish mutilation while the second describes itsreturn to the sea. Even though this passage about Macalister’s son, a minorcharacter in the novel as a whole, provides little relation to major remainingcharacters like James, Lily, or Mr. Ramsay, the intertwining complexity andsimplicity within these two sentences relate well to the sentence structureWoolf creates for To the Lighthouse.

In the first sentence, Woolf confronts the readerwith the muted cruelty of a boy cutting a square out of the fish by usingstrong verbs such as “cut,” and “bait.” Woolf’s specificity of “cut a square”suggests a careful attention whereas saying, “cut a chunk” implies sloppyindifference. The order of facts also lends itself to our understanding ofWoolf intends for the passage. If the first sentence read as follows: To baithis hook with, Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out ofits side, then the focus of the sentence leans towards the justificationinstead of the act. Instead, Woolf places the weight of the action onMacalister’s boy and the weight of the emotional attachment on the fish.

The second sentence differentiates itself from thefirst in two fundamental ways: the use of the passive verb was thrown, and theparenthetical (it was still alive). The passivity of was thrown removes thepower of the act from whoever performs it. If the sentence read: “Macalisterthrew the fish (it was still alive) back into the sea,” the action, which canbe interpreted as either cruel or merciful, has a performer. Instead, themutilated body of the fish (which one can assume rests on the threshold betweenlife and death) seems and receives the treatment of a mere afterthought fromMacalister’s boy.

Woolf orchestrates this treatment with the passiveverb. The parenthesized portion of the sentence also orchestrates a mood forthe sentence. Without the statement it was still alive, the release of the fishlacks some of the coldness its life contains. The life in parentheses hereallows Woolf to switch tones in the middle of her sentence without redirectingthe mechanical tone of the passage. If the sentence read: It was still alivewhen Macalister threw the fish back into the sea, the sentence focuses on thefish’s life where the life in parentheses, much like referring to the fish as amutilated body instead of a mutilated fish, shifts the focus on the body.

At its core, the sentence reads something like: Thebody was thrown. The impersonal nature of body coupled with the passive verbcreates a mechanical coldness. By injecting the interjection of (it was stillalive), Woolf reintroduces the idea of life and transforms the sentence intoone describing the duress life must endure. Another concern in this passagespawns from its use of brackets to contain this short chapter. By bracketing,what does Woolf intend to do? How do these marks of interpolation add to theparticular scene in which they appear? What does it mean to have an entirechapter in parenthesis or bracket? Does the tone change in a bracket as opposedto a non-bracketed sentence? Finally, what does the image of the square cut outof the fish leave with the reader? Does this square relate to brackets? Whatabout Virginia Woolf’s squarish model for the shape of her novel?

The violence of the first sentence comes in a novelabundant with violent thought: Jasper’s love of hunting, Mrs. Ramsay’soverwhelming feeling of injustice in the world, and the bloodlust James directstowards his father. In “The Window”, Rose helps her mother choose what jewel towear for dinner, Mrs. Ramsay looks out to see the two rooks, Mary and Joseph:

There, she said, stopping by thewindow on the landing, there they are again. Joseph had settled on anothertree-top. Do you think they mind, she said to Jasper, having their wingsbroken? Why did [Jasper] want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled alittle on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did notunderstand the fun of shooting birds; and they did not feel . (81)

Here the cruelty towards animals persists. Unlikethe one of the fish Macalister’s boy mutilates, the rooks have names and Mrs.Ramsay’s question presupposes that Jasper wishes to break Joseph and Mary’s wings.By halving the quotation, Woolf isolates the breaking of the wings much as shedoes with parentheses. Jasper’s viewpoint towards Mary and Joseph differsgreatly. To Jasper, Mary and Joseph exist solely for hunting. As for theirminding the pain of a broken wing, Jasper concludes that the rooks cannot evenfeel pain. While the reader could construe Jasper’s crass blindness as childishinconsideration or perhaps Woolf uses Jasper to illuminate the crass blindnessWoolf refers to in the third section.Mrs. Ramsay certainly feels a cold crueltyin the world in sentences like: With her mind [Mrs. Ramsay] always seized thefact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the (64)Here the main figure in the novel feels and describes what can be used todescribe the general tone of the two sentences about Macalister’s boy and thefish. Small actions, images, movements, and motivations make up the first andthird section and it is with images such as the fish that Woolf can conveyfeelings such as the one Mrs. Ramsay describes. The compactness of thebracketed section captures suffering, death, and a lack of reason.

It is with this in mind that we look at James andhis hatred towards Mr. Ramsay. Four pages into the novel, the ultra-closeomniscient narrator relates James’s reaction to his father’s dismissal of thetrip to the lighthouse:

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would havegashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, Jameswould have seized it. (4)

Unlike Jasper or Macalister’s boy, James comes to violence with extreme malice.James hates his father and wishes his death. Here the crass blindness appearsnot in James but in Mr. Ramsay. His nonchalant negativity dredges this type ofincendiary reaction from his child. Such were the extremes of emotion, Woolfwrites, that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts. The lack ofrecognition Mr. Ramsay demonstrates through his actions and words enrage James.It is in this vein we see a character like Macalister’s boy; a fishhook pulledfrom a gill, a square cut from a mutilated fish.

The brackets and parenthetical in the passage aboutMacalister’s boy and the fish are not the only instances where these marks ofpunctuation appear. Woolf contains whole chapters within parentheses just aseasily as she contains them within brackets. Within parentheses, Woolf placesbrackets. Within brackets, Woolf uses parentheses. Martin J. Gliserman noticedand wrote of this pattern in his book, Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Bodyof the Text. In this book, Gliserman clarifies the method of a pattern:

Abstractly, the pattern concernsSOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING ELSE, schematically: [A (B) A]. At issueare the possible relationships of the middle to the frame. (113)

This something as Gliserman refer to it is, in the case of sentence two inchapter VI, life in the middle of a cold, impending death. One interestingtrend with the brackets revolves around the idea of emotional distance inconflict with the emotional proximity of the parentheses. In the case of thefish, the bracket describes a fish becoming bait for more fish. It is not untilthe parenthesized section introduces the idea of the fish being a livingcreature that the reader feels the emotional cruelty the non-parenthesizedsection provides. Throughout the book, parenthesized interjections delve intothe psyche of the character or sometimes do as little as add another detail toa scene like a revision. If the parentheses show emotion then brackets distancethemselves from emotion. One of the most memorable examples of a bracketedsection comes in Time Passes: when Mr. Ramsay stretches out his [Mr.Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, butMrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, thoughstretched out, remained empty.]

Here we learn of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in a cold,emotionless manner. Her death comes like an afterthought to the image of Mr.Ramsay stumbling through the hall. The only emotion comes with rather suddenlybut instead of conveying sadness conveys the suddenness the reader experiences.Her death is sudden in every sense of the word, for Mr. Ramsay, the reader, andin the book itself. Her death feels like another chunk from the ten-year periodof Time Passes, even though she stands as one of the most prominent figures inthe first third of the novel. Perhaps Woolf uses brackets to emphasizesuddenness and parentheses to introduce emotion, but in the case of Mrs.Ramsay, the only bracket that can contain her importance both physically andemotionally for the character of To the Lighthouse exists not in thenovel but in Woolf’s model for how to write her novel.   The shape of To theLighthouse (fig. 1) looks like two squares connected by a thin rectangle.This rectangle echoes the sharp shape of the bracket. Either way, the model forthe novel provides a shape that mimics the very passage many times examined inthis paper.

If we think of the potential lifespan containedwithin To the Lighthouse from the oldest character’s first memory to theyoungest character’s last moment alive and beyond, innumerable decades, years,hours, minutes, and seconds exist. Nothing of any heightened dramaticimportance happens in the beginning and ending sections of To the Lighthouse;nobody dies, nothing malfunctions, no war, no storm; just a collection ofthoughts, words, and actions.

Considering how in-depth Woolf goes when describingthe thoughts, words, and actions of one day in the first section and thethoughts, words, and ideas in the one day of the third section, we see howthese squares are more or small chunks taken from the span of their lives. Forboth days, the figures in the window (Mrs. Ramsay and the lighthouse) connectthe days, but the power of the power of the book comes in its dissection of thetwo days. Multiple points of view describing one moment, person, image, etc.give the reader a multi-layered perception of the scene. It is this idea oftaking the square chunk of the one day and manipulating it to its fullpotential that parallels to the square chunk of the fish.

In any other novel, a reader could write off twosentences about a boy getting bait for his fishing hook from a fish’s side. In Tothe Lighthouse, we can take nothing for granted. Complex simplicity weavesthe world of To the Lighthouse from the first sentence to the last.Attribute this tapestry to Woolf who, like a riverbank, directs her streamof consciousness and keeps it from meandering. The only overflow occurs in thelush burst of beauty in the language and imagery. Her deft molding of languageand punctuation allow her to add and amplify certain mood, images, and ideas ather discretion.

Who Will Unscroll the Hurt

2010-03-02T12:20:00.000-06:00

"She had a certain smile that would have bought her the world had the avenue of regard been wide enough for her." Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah died yesterday. I never met the man, but sometimes meeting a person's acolytes is enough to make you respect and love a person with enough talent and charisma to not only affect the people who you care about as writers (and people) but to eventually be affected.

I never met the man, but I remember in high school when Ed Skoog bestowed the gift of Airships on to me, and hearing stories from Barray Hannah at Montana being godlike in his inspiration. I remember skipping out on evening traffic to devour the book, to live in his sentences in a little New Orleans coffee shop. I remember the sentences his formed in my head not yet ready to cultivate and deliver on its own. Titles more than anything jumped from that collection: "Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet" or "All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail" that made you want to read the story. From there, first sentence, first paragraph, first page.

I remember cornering Tom Franklin at a reading for him and his wife at Faulkner House Books telling me to read more Barry Hannah. He and I finding a copy of "Airships" in the store as he shared like a giddy school kid his favorite parts about it. The titles he gleefully pointed out to me, the ones that grabbed him somewhere deep. He harped on "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt" for a while, because harping on it was the only way he could make me understand Barry Hannah's genius. "Unscrolls," he said, "what an amazing think to do to hurt, with hurt." When he read from his work, I heard the same caution and care he saw in Airships applied to his own story. It's the same care Tom Franklin probably applies to his marriage, to his being a father, to his drinking.

One time I read to a sick friend as he laid in his bed adorned with girlfriend and dog. Captain Maximus meant enough to me that I wanted to share it with someone, and who better than someone without the physical health to escape? I don't know if Joel even liked the stories, but like me he was given Barray Hannah first through word of mouth and then through the words and stories he made.

This relationship changes with people you meet. Steve Miller and I both encountered the same acolytes of Barry Hannah, and therefore had similar experiences. Knowing about Barry Hannah was like knowing a secret, or being somewhere on the same day without having ever known each other.

Twenty-Five

2010-02-25T02:21:00.000-06:00

Lately I have been craving to hear people say words beautifully. Reading them isn't enough. I got some flack from people when I maligned my not publishing a book before turning 25, and that's fair enough. Most people never publish a book, or if they do it isn't until they are in their 30s or 40s. Most don't publish books until they've earned MFAs or PhDs, and some don't publish even then. Getting a book out there usually involves knowing the right person or being in the right situation (you know the right people because you are the right person, your university or college has a press or a friend does, or both.)

My complaint comes in the fact that I knew people, smart and influential people, who showed interest in my work. I even had a publisher slide a contract to me in a coffee shop, offer an advance. Another publisher told me that if I fleshed out and resubmitted a manuscript, I was assured publication. It isn't a common occurrence to have either of these things happen, and I didn't think I was taking them for granted but now admit that I did. I thought that my work needed to mature, that it was too wild, too unpolished. That I wasn't ready. And I've spent each moment since those offers proving my own point.

I now have two manuscripts, and no offers. Shun is a book that marks a period of time I no longer relate to, but within its pages are poems and stories I still feel deserve to be discovered. It took writing the first book to know what needed to happen in Delta Dawn, but the execution took longer (took more than time) than I'd hoped.

There are writers who publish early. Frank Stanford published The Singing Knives at 23. James Wright managed his Prize-winning The Green Wall at 30. At the same age, Robert Lowell won the Pulitzer. I am neither as smart or as talented as these men, but I'm also not an alcoholic, bipolar, or suicidal. Maybe if I was one or even all three of these things, I'd be published before 25. But not happier.

I'm not saying that I needed it, or even wanted it. Honestly, if I wanted it I probably could have had it. Only the book wouldn't have been good, I would be miserable, et cetera. Just an innocent moment of my crossing another missed goal off my list.

Now I'm shooting for thirty.

p.s. Any females in need of a husband, portly, who won't nag you for sex, likes cooking and taking out the trash, doesn't have buddies who will come over for poker night and smoke cigars. Willing to give up dreams, like your mother, agree that your co-workers/boss is an idiot, tell you you look sexy, watch your shows. Willing to dress as you see fit, comb my hair to your liking, shave face regularly. I have a clean driving record, no priors, no crazy exes. Have a mother who is 1 for 1 in the being nice to daughter-in-laws. Nobody is getting any younger, so let's do this. Can't afford your match.com profile anymore, write to: geoff.munsterman@gmail.com.

2010-02-24T11:28:00.001-06:00

BURN

2010-02-13T15:29:00.001-06:00

terminal termite leaves EKGS
tub-rust page rifle rice red beans deer
hide hide hide r u n rust river riot
w a v e s tumble tyrant choke cistern choke
tristram hisses hiccup master custardboy choke he say
cha-ching! paint-ruined shirt on a birth day demon
divorcee in a blue dress hustle them poolsharks
hurricane NASH night terror terrebonne drills bit by bug
dumped no dredge diggin’ forbidded din diskette full
of mistakes manure my flower scentax take a gravedigger
bigfoot monster truck river rat Morgus the Magnificent
penny nickel doubloon double over chest hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy apathetic grinners see u latuh
ALLA gators pace made right Wright s p e a k s OHIOAN
gators got Shelley bit out eyes guess he wasn’t
the Byronic man: nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh
all joking aside a simile estrogen effluvium
my daddy never much liked words
much I hate mustard like he hated simile as
he took a hatchet to Eddy Haskell’s foot in
POINT A LA HACHE bald bastard baits
battered shrimp kids wives everybody do the simile
speckled trout Detroit or bust liquid muskrat
rabbit trap thibodaux Saints sawbones
sawdoffs salvae-shun on your mark get set burn
torch tires glass a channel solar panel for a sex machine
give me liberty or give ‘em belle chasse
bride hunt beautiful wide kissed a cistern cyanide cap
chevron plant BP versebar crane factory cutting crane
concrete plant plantlife creole save it for later, alligator
channel friend butcher at balestra’s cuts meat for biddies,
smokes chuck quarter pound pivach boudreaux & thibodaux
walk into bar few lucky ones to git out belle chasse burn it down
the high school burn it down the branch library burn it down
my house, father-built afresh caress distress burn

Deny My Heart

2010-02-08T12:58:00.000-06:00

    On the 25th of September in 2006, I was still living in Gambier, Ohio. I had learned a few weeks back that I wasn't going to graduate, nor was I going to be allowed to complete my honors thesis. Since school became my lowest priority (for better or worse) I took a delivery job one day a week at the Gambier Grill. For the most part it was a sweet gig--rich kids tipping and only a few hours of work a week. I'd bank on good nights $200 dollars, which I discovered is a good week for most Papa John's delivery men. That night in September was the first time since Katrina the New Orleans Saints played in the Dome. There was a live concert featuring U2, Green Day, and Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews. My cousin and his family went to the game. I, on the other hand, drove up and down the tiny hamlet I'd adopted as my home delivering chicken tenders, garlic cheesy bread, and Neapolitan pizzas. Most of the game I heard on the radio in my beloved minivan, Patsy. Sometimes, when picking up the food, I saw glimpses of plays. Curtis Deloatch recovering the blocked punt in the end zone, a Mike Vick sack (which is still one of the prettier phrases rattling in my skull). The game ended in triumph, with the Saints crushing the Falcons.

    Later, my shift ended. Wearing my Saints hat earned me a little extra coin than usual, and I'm guessing the Cheshire grin I wore the whole night didn't hurt either. The ho-hum phrase "Same ole Saints" was replaced with "This ain't ya daddy's Saints!" I went home to a party of kids I didn't really know drinking illegally and trying to sound like the smartest person in the room, but none could challenge me on the turf of happiest. While none of them really cared about football, and especially not Saints football, it didn't matter. For a brief moment, Gambier and New Orleans seemed as one place; the landscape of beer bottles and bonfires merging with blondes and good jazz.

    I really never experience such a yearning to be home when I was in Gambier. My first semester was an awakening in a lot of ways (the ghosts in Ohio don't have anything to say to me) but I delved into the task of work and school. Sophmore year, when my father died, I got to go home, but never enough to miss it. Honesty dictates that I say now that being in Gambier during that time of grief was both a great blessing and a terrible curse: I wrote a lot and shared many important moments with some fantastic human beings, but I also didn't get to give and receive the kind of consolation that losses like that require. Junior year brought Katrina, my brother's wedding, and a hell of a lot of sacrifice to stick around. I wasn't my best post-Katrina, but most people gave me a pass in terms of the being a decent human being department. I scorched a lot of bridges, for my and others' safety and made many new ones that (in retrospect) weren't as firm as I'd believed.

    I miss New Orleans. Even in Portland, even now in Lafayette, I miss the city. You can't go home again, which is true, but the little victories in life (and the big ones, like say, SB XLIV!) can take you there in ways you can't imagine. More than missing the city, though, I miss the person I become when I'm immersed enough in the elements that make the city great. Good bars and coffee shops that yield surprisingly fulfilling conversations with total strangers. The community of poets and writers who band together like survivors on a life boat all in the name of words. The plucky strength despite constant doggedness (which each human should strive to embody as much as the city of New Orleans). In this environment I thrive like nowhere else, and visiting the place is like going to a monument's guest shop and looking at its postcards--being there and never experiencing it.

    In a lot of ways, this blog has changed. I feel redeemed now, which is a goal I felt only a degree could earn for me. In the swampland, I've achieved the summit of what I'd sought to accomplish for myself in the next few years: write again, care about poetry again, quit denying my heart the care and joy that it deserves.

    Redemption, in the end, isn't about meeting goals or righting wrongs. It's about being okay with what went wrong, moving forward peacefully into a future that tumbles forward no matter how much you wish to turn it back. Time is the great flood that no sandbag can defend; its waters lap at your door and seeks entry into your shelter. I know now that there's no stopping it, and no real use in regretting it. But, if you are going to live with regret, best to do so with the constant knowledge that your heart has other plans. You will lose and gain hope--you will lose and gain everything for that matter--you will lose when it matters, and you will win sometimes when I matters most. Redeeming moments come in the form of big and little victories that teach you the value of hard work, and that no amount of hard work can pay off all the time. Luck is clutch like that, giving every moment of your life a sense of valor if you handle loss honorably.

    So the Saints won. I'm overjoyed and speechless. I'm excited to celebrate as much as my heart will allow. Moreover, I'm excited for the celebrations coming in 2010 and beyond. Under any devastation, despite utter inundation, you can always come back. Right now I'm loving life, tomorrow may hold total despair. But none of it has killed me yet, and nothing stops the writing long enough to matter.

Til next time.

Decisions

2010-02-04T15:01:00.001-06:00

You are going to meet people and end up in situations that make you regret the decisions you've made.

Conan O'Brien's Harvard Thesis

2010-02-02T02:45:00.000-06:00

I've had a few friends email me their senior theses this week, but I'm left to

remember one in particular, the introduction and conclusion of which I include

below:

March 1, 1985

The 'Old Child' In Faulkner and O'Connor by Conan Christopher O'Brien

INTRODUCTION

How do we relate to our myths? The question is asked by almost every
culture at some point in its history, not to find out specifically where
it has been as much as to locate itself in the present. The legends and
beliefs of our origin are compelling because they invite comparison. They
tempt us towards self-examination because -- at a distance -- they appear
so starkly absolute and resolute: so resolved. In a Utopian view of the
past many anxious questions arise about the present. Are we as good as our
fore-fathers? Have we made progress? Have we fallen? The farther we move
away from the past the more it commands our attention and forces us to
re-negotiate our personal and cultural identity.

The American South has undergone such a period of self-examination in the
early and mid-20th century known as the Southern Literary Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, historians, fiction writers, and sociologists
began to search for a sense of regional character by sorting through the
stories, ideals, legalisms and codes of the Southern experience. The
search invariably forced these intellectuals to decide which visions of
the Old South to keep, which to abandon, and which to re-write. The
answers have varied widely but the essential question has remained the
same: How should the South's notion of what it was determine its new
identity? The purpose of this thesis is not to find the answer but to
examine the power and prevalence of the question.

W.J. Cash argues that the South is a child, indulging itself with
comfortable myths of innocence, while C. Van Woodward maintains the South
is apre-maturely aged region, stripped of its childhood legends by a
series of bitter, awakening defeats. Although they disagree, both men
associate the South's old myths with the metaphor of childhood. This image
seems appropriate because children need to forge a sense of self and they
rely heavily on myths for spiritual sustenance. In their years of rapid
growth children thirst for beliefs and ideals as a foundation for their
newly-forming identity.

This association between childhood and myth can also be used to analyze
Cash and Woodward themselves. As intellectuals of the Southern
Renaissance, they too are feeding a New South's craving for
self-definition with myths and revisions of myths from the Old South. As
writers from the first prolonged period of Southern self-criticism, they
have the child's impulse to organize, choose, and interpret past lengeds
in order to construct a new identity. This analogy holds not only for
historians but for Southern fiction writers of the Renaissance as well.
According to Louis Rubin, these writers intensely re-examined their
region's character and were disturbed by what they found:

"These new writers were, in short, modern Americans who were Southerners;
and because that identity posed complex problems of self-definition and
was fraught with incongruity, discrepancies, oppositions and divisions,
and loyalties and contradictions that were rooted in the circumstances of
their time and place, their writings probed beneath the everyday surfaces
to get at the universal human problems of definition . . . "

In their child-like forging of identity, these writers encounter
traditions unique to the South which contrast with many ideals of the New
South. The most obvious of these problematic traditions is that of racism.
Most Southern Renaissance writers have had to question how the racial
tension in the South's history affects the New Southerner in his youthful
state of self-definition.

According to Lilliam Smith, this racist tradition has marred the
Southerner, but specifically it has damaged the children of the New South.
Smith argues that all Southern children are "stunted and warped" by racial
conflict and that it "cruelly shapes and cripples" the personality of the
child. In her shocking image of a child "crippled" and distorted by this
Southern tradition, Smith is really symbolizing the dilemma of many
Southern Renaissance writers. In their child-like state of forming a self,
these writers are tortured by the contrasts between powerful Southern
traditions and the need to abandon or re-write these traditions in the
forging of a New Southern identity. These Old South myths of honor,
invulnerability, racism, innocence, and bravery can distort and "cripple"
the writer during his formative stage of identity construction. The
distinct relevance of this warped child image to Southern intellectuals
raises an important question: Have other writers of the Literary
Renaissance voiced their innate sense of discrepancy through this image of
a warped child? I believe that they have.

I have found that several Southern Renaissance writers have articulated
their regional sense of contradiction through what I have termed literary
progeria. Progeria is an often fatal disease that strikes children and
ages them pre-maturely. In the works of several Southern writers the child
protagonist becomes "old" long before his time because he is tormented by
the same anxiety over myth which troubles Cash and Woodward. In an effort
to construct an identity the child is drawn to past myths and builds the
foundation of his character on archaic beliefs. The result is that this
child caries the vast experience of these myths as burden; he or she
becomes an "old child" who tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his elderly
identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child"
who tries unsucessfully (sic) to reconcile his elderly identity with the
modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" symbol in
Katherine Anne Porter's _Pale Horse, Pale Rider _ as well as in Caron
McCuller's _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ and _A Member of the Wedding_,
but these authors do not explore the symbol extensively enough to
establish its characteristics and thematic significance. Both William
Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor do develop the "old child" symbol
extensively, however, and although they differ in their specific fictional
concerns it is clear that the image emanates from similar regional
instinct. Each author places the "old child" in the center of generational
argument over the value of past myths and the child, unable to reconcile
opposing views, represents experience and thus an anguished state of
conflicting loyalties. The extreme generational attitudes towards myth
resemble the same extremes Cash and Woodward delineate in their argument
over the South's relation to the past. The myth Faulkner's children turn
to is the myth of the Old South and his "old children" suffer from a
spiritual progeria. O'Connor adds a second layer of significance to the
symbol by incorporating the myth of Christian redemption and this
increased complexity produces in her children both a spiritual _and_ a
physical progeria which borders on the freakish.

By establishing a close correlation between such disparate Southern
Renaissance writers as Faulkner and O'Connor we can begin to appreciate
the power of the "old child's" significance. This is not a paradigm which
has been examined in detail in the critical literature, but the motif
merits our closer examination -- first because it is a figure which recurs
throughout the literature of this period and second, because the "old
child" represents these Southern Renaissance writers need to dramatize the
the bitter argument that rages within them.


. . . .

Excerpt from THE CONCLUSION

. . . .

Flannery O'Connor's fiction also explores this distinctly Southern paradox
through the symbol of the "old child." Like Faulkner, she creates child
characters who are disillusioned by the inactivity and lack of belief in
their parent's generation and subsequently construct their identity on the
model of an elderly figure, only to suffer a tug of loyalties between the
past and the present which embitters the child. The difference with
O'Connor is that the discrepancy she seeks to capture is not between the
Old South and the New South but between the Christian promise of
Redemption and a modern nihilism and as a result her "old children" suffer
both a spiritual _and_ physical progeria. Her "old children" are more
freakish and grotesque than Faulkner's but they still emanate from the
Southern question of how to incorporate past myths in articulating an
identity in the present. . . .

**