My summer class started two weeks ago. It's on post-modern American novels. The books are good. The class discussions seem aimless. My guess is no one understands the critical readings, and we've quickly figured out that it's easy to get off topic and stay off topic if we use words and phrases like "fragmented history" and "post-modernist ideals." I say "we" because I'm in the class, but it's aggravating.

The book review should be posted either today or Thursday. Yay, name in print.

I haven't been sleeping well the last two weeks. It's not without reason; I have a health issue at the moment. Exhaustion is a funny thing. Being chronically tired must be what a runner's high feels like--you don't realize you're not sleeping anymore, and you're just in this untouchable place. I organize things. I think about my exes and how we've reached the point where if one of us dies, it's irrelevant to the other. The other perhaps wouldn't even know. Isn't that ultimately where we've always wanted to be? Better places and all.

I'm not a runner.

Not much new

I've been juggling a lot of things lately. That's not new. Work full-time, career planning full-time. I can't say it isn't satisfying. I had a mid-twenties crisis the other day, thinking I need to screw around more, but then I remembered it's awesome having my shit together.

I'm waiting to receive a book that Ploughshares arranged to have sent to me for the book review blog. I've never reviewed anything before. Should I admit that? I've been reading tips and do's/don'ts. I've been practicing with my books; it's hard. But it's what I want to do. A lot of writers plan to teach. I think that requires a level of dedication and selflessness that, frankly, I don't possess. I've always wanted to edit, and since reading an article about the number of writers submitting to literary journals being far more than the number that subscribes to said journals (a point with which I both agree and contest), and which proposes that we review a book for every 10 places we submit to, I've decided I'm going to be an active book reviewer.

Fingers crossed.

I don't like having my toes touched. I've stepped on so many.

Is there a try?

Nasty things I proofed this week:

"This Carolina First branch felt a little like a 'redheaded stepchild' of TD Bank, and that impression did not make me want to do business with them."

"Not to be crass, but as I was leaving, I was wondering of perhaps this was Staci's first day and that she had recently worked at a corner feed store. I really can't stress enough how disappointing this shop was."

I have a lot of work to do. Semester ends in 2-3 weeks. New vegan baking recipe book just came in the mail. Long foodie summer ahead of me. Long lovely summer.

I have a lot of work to do.

Things I saw in the last week

1. A dead squirrel sitting against a tree while its squirrel friend/lover/family member sniffed, nudged, and gently bit it, checking for life.

2. A woman seizing in Sweetwater.

3. A wild turkey in the city. (Well, it was in Brighton...the quiet part with some trees. But still pretty urban.)

4. The sun, pad thai, passion fruit sorbet.

It occurred to me that what I thought was my first official poetry submission is actually my second. Oops. But first as a serious writer!

[It's disheartening that I wrote "righter" originally.]

My poetry pool is shallow. My poetry garden is barren. I need poetry seeds. What else?

Spring played a trick on us and pretended to be winter for a day. We all laughed and laughed.

Eat Cake

I don't know how to talk about fiction and make people give a shit. So I'm just going to talk about fiction. This book specifically.

The plot: "Fleeing to London from America after the spectacular collapse of her family, Tanya buys a house, builds a business, and finally begins to conquer her addiction to sex. Then the gorgeous Eleanor enters her life. El is a talented artist, perhaps a great one, but vulnerable and chaotic. Tanya decides that what El needs is a safe haven. But in Sandra Newman's rollercoaster world, nowhere is safe, least of all home..." (from the back cover)

This is how it begins:

"We met her when she crashed our party.
I had just bought a house and Todd decided that before we cleaned it up, we ought to have a party for our rougher, druggy friends, the Hackney crew. All the junkies, squatters, failing students, all the people who might hit an artery or run amok or die at someone's party. So you couldn't ask anyone except the kind of rabble you don't even want in your house, OK.
Except, I did tell this one CFO from work, Mark Keynes--who I'd run into at a Plan 9 gig once and we had kind of bonded. Like, got throwing-up drunk but didn't fuck then. So, he's alpha at my work, he does karate, he's attractive--I would blurt shit at him just to say something. I blurted, oh, this party cause I bought a house cause I'm so fucking brilliant in so many words. But I added that he shouldn't come, I didn't want him there. He laughed and said that he was 'uninsultable'.
Then, catastrophically, he came, but."




Other things you need to know about this book:

-It's brilliant
-Lots of cursing
-Lots of sex (more specifically, fucking. See also, pedophilia, incest)
-Lots of murder (and details)
-"Art"
-Drugs
-It will probably ruin other books for you


Other things I'm going to say:


I had a fiction workshop with Sandra Newman at Temple some years ago. Only, I didn't know who she was and I didn't care much for the workshop. (It was before I realized I'm a poet, so I just didn't get it. And, she perhaps wasn't the best teacher...that's ok to say because of what I'm going to get into:) I assumed she was some weird writing teacher--like the ones who teach to support themselves (99% of all writers), but perhaps wouldn't have to teach if they were good writers. (You would be hard-pressed to find a faculty member at Temple who is worth reading. So I also assumed you teach because you suck.) But she was a writer-in-residence and, after the class ended and I got curious, she became one of my favorite writers. She wasn't teaching because she sucked.

I've read both of her novels--The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done and Cake. I read the former in 3 days, which wasn't a tall order because some of the pages had just a couple sentences on them. The latter I had to order from the UK, as it doesn't appear to be available in the US. I read about half of it and then fell out of it. Her style is sometimes hard to get into, at least in this book. It's somewhat stream of consciousness (or it feels that way). Sentences/paragraphs/pages end in the middle of a thought, sometimes continuing on a next page or after an aside. The narrator is an American living in London, as are a few characters, and it seems the dialog plays with that. The narrator has these parenthetical asides that can go on for a page or more, and she sometimes interrupts herself with them. The chapters are short, usually a few pages, but sometimes 1 or 2. I initially found it hard to connect with the characters and the story as a whole. I just didn't feel invested in it. But I gave it another shot, and having read half of it once already helped. I think I had to learn to appreciate the idiosyncrasies. The humor is dark and subtle. This isn't your typical novel. Not even remotely.

I submitted a packet of ten poems for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. I had planned to apply, then planned to wait until next year (when I would hopefully have better material), then decided to apply after my dad said he'd been praying so hard for me and essentially he won't accept any reason I have for not applying. He reasoned that if they offer this every year, and it's free to apply, I might as well go for it. It's 15 grand, after all. So I scraped together ten poems, some old, a couple still in the revision phase. This is why I don't have high hopes. But, who knows. After reading a Ploughshares article by Christine Sneed about how long it takes to get any recognition as a writer, I realized I need to get started now. I have a long life of rejection ahead of me. Fellow writers will understand this as realism, whereas everyone else will think I'm being melodramatic and pessimistic.

I don't know what I want to be.

(what I want) I'm no longer clever.

Bloom

I just made my first poetry submission to Poetry magazine. This quote popped up after I made the submission:

"If you are interested in writing well, in working at being a better poet, then the most important piece of advice that anyone can give you is that you have to read recent poetry."

-Wendy Cope


I wish Emerson would put this to practice. No offense, Yeats. (Or Eliot, Pound, Plath, Stevens...)

That quote is keeping in line with a 2005 article I just read on the Poetry Foundation's website called "No Experience Necessary," by Christina Pugh (a 2000 Emerson grad and awesome poet). One of my biggest obstacles as a poet is recognizing/accepting/believing that I am a poet. I never feel like a poet. I don't look like a poet. I don't talk/read/act like a poet. I often feel like I don't have the experience to be one, and with my life revolving around work and classes that I don't give a shit about (i.e, Teaching College Composition), I also often feel like I'm not living the right kind of life with the right kind of focus that will get me any of the said experience I need to be a poet. But what I got from Pugh's article is that maybe all I need to do is keep on reading, keep on writing, and the rest of my life doesn't really matter. There's no right or wrong way to be a poet.

(Unless the "wrong way" is being self-deprecating, but isn't that also the "right way?")

Accidental Poetry: 5

From a couple things I proofed today:

"If answere was no known the answere said so."


"The fresh hello as I entered thedoor by the teller.
Then the personal banker stating that TD bank was implementing their products and telling me she some information and wss studying it closely before the June 1 final changeoverl She then loooked straight at me and said whe would honestly answer or not answer at all."

Dad's culinary legacy

Randy (my brother): I'm making my first attempt at meatloaf lol

Me: How's it working out?

Randy: It'll be done in 30 mins. Then we'll see.

Me (90 mins later): How was it?

Randy: Not bad. Not dad's though. I need to do some tweaking.

Me: Did he tell you how to make it?

Randy: No. All the times I made it with him he never measured anything. So there's no real way to mimic it.

Me: He should be able to estimate, though.

Randy: Nope, he goes by terms like, "a light coating over everything."

I have this way of glorifying Hell that makes me wonder why I ever stopped being friends with Satan.

Accidental Poetry: 4

By Alyssa, via email:

"Also, I just accidently clicked something & got a message about a pop-up being blocked, & it said Grr! & the whatever about a pop-up blocker."

Accidental poetry: 3

A thing I proofed for work today:

"I was helped right away with upstanding service like information provided to my inquire on a CD account and may take advantage of good service as a customer would do it with the customer service they provided."

Homesick

I remember you better than you were, and I remember me happier than I was. For no discernible reason.

The thing about leaving well-enough alone is, I never do it.