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2006-05-24, 7:07 a.m.:
So, what does one read when one is laid up? I decided: Campbell McGrath, baby, Campbell McGrath. Also: most anything with the word "howl" in it. I'm still hoping to begin tackling White Noise. I mean, momentarily. It's right here - I just have to pick it up and start to read. Looks like, in the meantime, I may be translating again, though. For moolah. This is not a bad thing, either. My full-time "babysitting" is costing us an arm and a leg. And the grey matter here turns more and more to mush with each passing day. I'm hoping Campbell McGrath can go some ways toward changing this. 1 comments
2006-05-22, 1:10 p.m.:
Well, Lascivious Green Lie picked up three poems over the weekend, and Spamigator Masturbator picked up two. The Western Transylvanian Reserve Acerbic Polytechnic Institute Review wrote this morning to say they were picking up my extended sequence based on a reimagining of the Bay of Pigs standoff. cummings AND goings has picked up eight poems of one line each. Lilah May: Voicings has picked up ALL my sonnets for its next theme issue ("rendered fats") - well, all two of them. Ja-jenga is picking up five poems I wrote in a fever, and will print them in red ink. COFFIN MASK is picking up four poems I have yet to write, but they will be damn good. Faltering Lass wants to pick up everything else I write this year, as long as it's written in HTML or on windowpanes in flower-petal dust. I may yet publish three chapbooks and a full-length collection by year-end - all ready to be snapped up by The Lemon Cake Review, which has been cyberstalking me. All in all, a good start to the publishing summer. 0 comments
2006-05-19, 9:30 a.m.:
From the NYX obit for Stanley Kunitz:Mr. Kunitz wrote slowly, usually on an old manual typewriter, sometimes holding on to a poem for years before letting it go. He preferred to work at night, perhaps reflecting the restless nights he endured as a child. He insisted that the secret to his longevity was his attitude: "I'm curious," he told People. "I'm active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis." 0 comments
2006-05-19, 9:05 a.m.:
Articles like this one drive me crazy ("A Hideout of His Own," NYX, May 18, 2006):Men are faced with "the problem of carving out a space in what has, for many of them, become foreign territory" (David Halle of UCLA) ... And from Christina Hoff Sommers: "Women can't fully understand why men need to be alone and separate," she said. But out of "affection and respect for manliness," she added, "we tolerate it." The need to be "alone and separate" is not restricted to men. Nor the need for a room-of-one's-own, a hidey-hole, a sanctum sanctorum. Right now I'm at the point of trying to teach a 2-year-old how to share while balking myself. I don't want to share my toys. I want to keep my beloved things and one part of myself under lock and key, and retire to my sanctum whenever I feel like I do on days like today: Don't talk to me. Let me be. Let no one look at me for at least two hours (two days, two weeks ... ?). 1 comments
2006-05-16, 9:35 a.m.:
Kunitz dead, not unexpected. But sad news to hear nevertheless. Yesterday, impossible day as it already was.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end. 3 comments
2006-05-13, 9:58 a.m.:
Read the first poetry again. A few pieces by Christine Garren in a Greensboro Review lying around here. I still don't have much of my mind due to meds I'm on for pain; fatigue. The dictum is, I believe: The more tired you get, the more tired you get. Or: The more you lie around, the more you need to lie around. Yep. I've had some lovely care packages this week, have paged through countless People's, picked up off the couchside table many, many times the library book Under the Banner of Heaven then put it back again presently (unread, unread). I am working my way through the comic book Chewbacca more slowly than anyone in history has certainly ever read a comic book (TPB). I decided to shake things up by ordering White Noise, Underworld, Independence Day, Blood Meridian and The Satanic Verses - all classics I've not yet read. Poetry and I are on a little break, though I do have some pieces out right now. I'm not thinking about them, and I'm not thinking about whatever works in progress are in progress (or "progress"), and I can't say I'm really worried that this is a bad thing. It's possible I need the vantage point of several months on these things. And there's certainly no shortage of other things to wrestle with at the moment. Or wrassle with. Can't wait for summer: visits from new baby Ossie and his family; first visit to Cape Cod and a long-awaited trip to New England and a chance, finally, to visit Salem Village places, the musem and the like; the hot, oh the hot - and maybe a beach, just maybe? And I get my cast off. And I get my cast off. And I get my cast off. 1 comments
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