Notes from a Brooding Poet

Unfinished Business

2007-07-05T07:39:00.000-04:00

To my mind, the previous post was the last of the project. At present, I'm planning to keep this blog up—even though no further updates will occur.

If you'd like to keep track of what I'm doing, please visit my personal website: leskay.net, which should have occasional news and perhaps a link to a publication every once in a while. Or, if you're simply itching for some great poetry and fiction, check out Ward 6 Review.

If you've not read every post, I'd encourage you to poke around. Perhaps, with a bit of browsing, you'll find something moving or useful to you. There are precisely 100 entries now on a variety of poetry-related topics….from submissions to seemingly random thoughts, and analysis of a few poems I've enjoyed. Feel free to comment on anything, particularly if you find my notions wrong-headed. I'll still watch the comments and add my own thoughts as time and appropriateness allows.

My hope, of course, is that you've enjoyed this little jaunt into the mind of a struggling poet and that you might find a few words of value to you. With this, I'd like to leave you with a revision of the poem "Cryptozoology". I still don't think it's done, but it's closer:

Cryptozoology

Mornings before I woke, father would be up by five,
sitting at the kitchen table, brewing blended coffee,
boiling water, and spreading mustard (or was it mayonnaise?)
on thin slices of white bread for a baloney lunch.

He would open two paper packets of instant oatmeal,
pour their dried flakes into a bowl dolloped with margarine
and baptize the concoction with boiling water.
Every workday for fifteen years, this was his breakfast.

Hollandaise sauce was as likely as holding hands with a hobbit.
Elaborate omelets bursting with ham were rare as Sasquatch sightings.
Lattes were serpentine tales from Scottish lochs.

Now, I can’t remember a single conversation
we had before he drove twenty miles to cut cardboard all day.
Maybe he told me tall-tales about a bear his grandfather
killed with a ball of twine, a duck whistle, and a bottle of moonshine.
Knowing me, we probably talked about the Diablo
I thought I'd buy when I was old enough to work.

Most days, though, he'd let me float through the ocean
of sleep, spotting narwhals and megamouth sharks
from a bathysphere of bunched up blankets.
He wouldn't wake me until he had to.

Since then, I’ve seen a skeleton of Homo floresiensis.
I've pictured tiny hands reaching forth to grasp mine.
I've learned that, sometimes, nothing is better for breakfast

than oatmeal.

What Is a Poem?

2007-07-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

My wife, my sister-in-law, and my sister-in-law's children sleep scattered throughout my house. Dixie, the Jack Russell, barks into the distance at an unseen threat and grabs a branch from a peony bush in her muzzle, shaking it in a show of strength. Archie trots around the edge of the yard, looking to join the fray.

A firework pops in a distant yard. The neighbor's dog barks in response.

My dogs, it seems, weary. They need water. A nap. A woman walking a dog I've never seen strolls down the right-of-way that edges my yard. My dogs explode in growls and barks with as much fury as the finale of a fireworks display.

The robins chirp above the commotion of Archie's instinctual anger.

We all, I do not doubt, have a different notion of what is happening. Even my dogs, in their submissiveness, will never understand the semi-pastoral way in which I've imagined this morning. But you—who may be thousands of miles away and separated from this time by hours, days, months, or more—can.

Such is the miracle of language.

Yesterday, I took my mother to the bus station so that she could return to her home in Dallas. I waited with her for the bus to load. Behind us, an Amish (or perhaps Mennonite) family waited to board.

I've road more bussess than I'd care to admit, but I'd never seen an entire family of Amish, only young men exploring the wider world. Yesterday, I saw three generations of the same family, waiting for the bus. I'd like, of course, to know their story. If this were a poem or a story, perhaps I'd invent one after spending a few hours research ensuring that my notions where feasible. However, such speculation is beyond my purposes here.

A grandmother, I think, held an infant girl. The infant's tuft of bright blonde hair was tucked beneath a tiny black bonnet. Nestled in the crook of her grandmother's arms, she looked about with delicate blue eyes. Her dress, no larger than the slipcover for a throw pillow, was a dark, vibrant blue, unlike anything I'd ever seen. Her sisters, standing beside their luggage, looked around as if trying to take in everything, which for me must have seemed utterly banal: the neon, the video games, the people and their vast variety of skin tones, pre-manufactured t-shirts and jeans, and inflections of language. They too wore dresses that seemed to me more vivid than the most complex graphics on the latest video game. One wore a green dress, well-pressed, that might let you think you could smell pine needles rustling in a light breeze. One wore a tan dress, and despite the way we typically think of tan, I suspect that there are artists who might cut off their ear for the chance to replicate that color on canvas.

They wore, in short, familiar colors that I'd never seen.

In college, I picked up a poster from the AWP conference in Pittsburgh. I think it was an advertisement for a press, perhaps Copper Canyon or Coffee House . Poetry: The Unsayable Said.

For a long time, that seemed a fitting description of poetry to me. I hung the poster at home and in an office where I worked. I stared at it, thinking.

At this point, I could posit any number of definitions about what a poem is. But, I've spent more than a year telling you, in one way or another, how I define a poem, the process of creating one, and how to support that process. You should see, I hope, that such definitions evolve (or perhaps devolve) constantly. More, I think such definitions are deeply personal. My notion of what a poem is and what a poem should do, may not agree with your definition. Now, tell me yours. Or better, show me.

I wish you the best of luck. I hope that someday you will write poems that, like those of Robert Creeley, a young student will encounter one day and only to muse about the nature of poetry, and much, much more. I hope that your desire to write makes you a better reader. I hope that, in poetry, you can find a few moments as meaningful and fulfilling to you as a bit of affection from a pair of tiny dogs is to me.

Many Volumes, Many Voices

2007-07-02T14:02:00.000-04:00

Last night (or was it the night before?) I had a dream that an envelope arrived. Inside was a slip of yellow paper in blurred, blue courier type, like a telegram from another dimension. The message, at first read, was as cryptic as hieroglyphics before the Rosetta Stone was unearthed. Smudged typos. Distorted syntax. I read it several times before realizing what it was. An acceptance to Poetry (I thought). Of course, I shouted for my wife so that I could tell her the news. And that's when I woke.

At the moment, Poetry doesn't have a single one of my poems. They do have a batch of Michelle's poems. Now, she has a better chance of letting loose an excited yell that fills each and every room of our Tudor-style home.

Despite its relatively conservative editorial slant (from the perspective of poetics), Poetry remains among my favorite literary magazines. How could it be otherwise? Although the circulation doesn't compare to The New Yorker or People, no small literary magazine can compare.

***

A siren wails into the distance. Birdsong breaks against the rhythm of the wind in the sweet gum. Archie and Dixie sprawl in sun, squinting in my direction.

Inside nephews and a niece savor canned ravioli on a respite from a marathon of children's movies and cartoons. My sister-in-law, following a day of back-straining yard work, lounges with her children on the sofa. Laundry tumbles in the dryer downstairs. Michelle is off at work.

My mom, between intermittent interruptions, reads a book beside me. The wind, cooled by a cold front, blows through the leaves.

A burst of cicada song trills from a neighbor's back yard, and is gone.

This is sort of a pastoral.

***

If you tried to count the number of books you've read in your lifetime, would you even approach the truth? I have no idea how many books I own, let alone how many I've read. I've read hundreds of journals, and intend to read thousands more. I've read hundreds of submissions and will no doubt read hundreds more. Yet, I still feel as if I don't read enough. I'll never, no doubt, read enough. There simply isn't time.

***

There are a handful of journals (like Conjunctions) to which I do not ever plan to submit. And there are a handful of markets to which I plan to submit annually, at least until they decide to take a poem or two. Today, those journals include: Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, and The Paris Review.

I'm sure, from my reading, that I have poems that might fit each journal. The editors may continually disagree, but when I send a submission, I feel relatively comfortable with the notion.

When I lived in San Francisco, I submitted one story to Zyzzyva. Since they only take work from West-Coast writers, I was thrilled by the opportunity. I still read the journal when I can.

***

Many of my favorite poets are relatively minor. A few look to be major poets of their generation. Each time I crack open a volume of verse, I have the opportunity to learn something about craft (and occasionally about life). Few experiences are better than finding an unexpectedly lovely poem in a crevice you'd not yet explored. Over the years, my expectations have shifted. I once imagined myself a soon-to-be major poet. Now, I expect myself to be an interesting minor poet—perhaps like Roussell—with a peculiar following. In truth, after my wife, a few friends, and I have slipped this mortal coil, no one may ever read a single one of my poems. I have no qualms with this notion. My poems (and my wife) might disagree.

But, personally, I'm simply thankful that in the quest to write good poetry, I've discovered the intimate intellectual and emotional intensities that can come with the reading good poetry. Hopefully, you've discovered this as well. Certainly, there will always be someone whose verse makes every syllable you write seem like a beggar in tattered clothes. Certainly, you will find poets whose relative fame perplexes you to no end. It doesn't matter.

Just take a look at a literary journal or a recent book, and maybe, just maybe you'll find one poem that makes you catch your breath and say, Aha! Now this is poetry!

***

When I was in graduate school, I think I had unrealistic expectations of what a poet should do. A poet, I thought, should be part psychologist, part philosopher, part mystic. Most days, I'll scoff at such ideas. Today, I'd prefer to enjoy them and envision that oeuvre.

That is how I like to imagine myself, sometimes. It is a sort of pastoral.

I hope that someday, you write poems like that—or better, that you write poems as you imagine poetry could be.

Timeliness

2007-06-30T09:30:00.000-04:00

My mother arrived for a bit of a surprise visit late Thursday night. I've not seen her for a while, not done the child's duty of trekking across country for a visit since moving to Ohio. There hasn't been time enough, money enough. It's good to see her, but the timing was awful: the in-laws, excepting Michelle's father, arrived Friday evening for a week-long visit.

Timing is often everything.

***

When I was on the cusp of my teenage years, I read an edition of Poe's collected works in my mother's apartment. Life would never be the same.

***

Last night, I tried to teach my nephew and my niece a little about chess. Neither is ready yet to imagine the board beyond the pieces, where lines of force matter as much as position. They are still learning to move. They have not yet grasped the importance of opportunity.

***

Goose bumps prickle the hairs on my arms. Wind sounds softly through the canopy of the sweet gum that shadows the back porch. Our dogs sniff through near-wild foliage. The rain, for the moment, is gone. A neighbor edges the sidewalk in front of his house with a weed whacker. The grapefruit-sized motor whines. I think of motorbikes dusting through slaloms, careening from beveled mounds of dirt. I always wanted one as a child. What boy doesn't?

Life will never be the same.

***

Three weeks ago, as is our custom, Michelle and I drove to Florence, Kentucky to peruse one of the enormous chain bookstores. On the two small bookshelves for poetry, I found a crime novel in verse. Others, it seems, have similar notions about what poetry can do.

Perhaps I should have worked more diligently on my verse "fictions." Perhaps, now, the seeming newness will be dulled. Perhaps those poems are not as important as I had thought. Perhaps they are not important at all.

***

Regrets can handcuff you to the past.

***

In college, I think Michelle always suspected that she was out-of-sync with the times. Perhaps her rightful place was as an ingénue in the 30s. Such disjunctions in self-image and time are not uncommon. The zeitgeist at any given moment is notoriously difficult to describe. I used to think my poems more suited to the milieu of modernism.

***

Often, I worry over my time. A conversation about amphibious cars may seem a waste. There are always more important issues to discuss, unless you are a builder of amphibious cars.

***

My mother is outside with me. She is reading her Bible. Proverbs.

***

If you give a man a book, he may read it. If you teach a man to write, what have you done?

***

Timing is everything in business. Writing is a business. Damn it.

***

I'll never be able to read everything I want to read. Volume precludes it. I'm already lucky to have read more than many, far less than a few. When life ends, I suspect, I'll still have been lucky. Regardless of what becomes of my career(s).

***

I've only scratched the surface of what poetry can mean and how it can matter. It's up to you if you want to go further. It always has been—even as a small child when you first read Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss.

***

The dogs are barking. Dixie howls for play. I return her invitation. She grapples with my arm. Soon, I'll head upstairs to wake my wife. This is time I would not sacrifice for anyone—even Shakespeare.

Responding

2007-06-29T09:25:00.000-04:00

As promised, you'll find my response to the "Oatmeal" assignment of a couple of days ago. Have a look at the poem. Enjoy it if you so choose. But, keep in mind that this is an early draft and, to my mind, not quite finished.

At a glance, it seems to me that I took the middle-ground between the Jim Daniels and the Galway Kinnell poems by aiming for something whimsical, which still explicates a speaker's relationship to another. But is the poem successful? Would it stand out from hundreds of other poems on a similar subject? Would you, as a reader, be drawn back into the poem, allowing it more than one read? Is it memorable? More so than the latest American Idol?

Consider for a moment or two what you would do if this were your poem. What would you do to improve it? Are any words extraneous? Is anything missing? Could any of the line breaks be improved? Does the rhythm falter in any spots?

If this were your poem, what would you do next?

Cryptozoology

Mornings before I woke, father would be up by five,
sitting at the kitchen table, brewing blended coffee,
boiling water, and spreading mustard (or was it mayonnaise?)
on four slices of white bread for his baloney lunch.

He would open two paper packets of instant oatmeal,
pour their dried flakes into a bowl dollopped with margarine
and baptize the concoction with boiling water.
Every workday for fifteen years, this was his breakfast.
Hollandaise sauce was as likely as shaking hands with a hobbit.
Elaborate omelets bursting with ham were rare as sasquatch sightings.
Lattes were serpentine tales from Scottish lochs.
Lunch at a restaurant was less likely than cornering a chupacabra
that could be tamed with handfuls of chocolate.

Now, I can't, for the life of me, remember one conversation
we had before he drove twenty miles to Fort Worth.
Maybe he told me tall-tales about a bear his grandfather
killed with a ball of twine, a duck whistle, and a bottle of moonshine.
Maybe I've made too much of this poem up.
Knowing me, we probably talked about the Diablo
I thought I'd buy when I was old enough to work.

It doesn’t matter.

Most days, he'd let me float through the ocean of sleep,
spotting krakens, narwhals, and megamouth sharks
from a bathysphere of bunched up blankets.
I wouldn't surface until I absolutely had to.

Since then, I’ve seen a skeleton of Homo floresiensis
and pictured its tiny hands reaching forth to grasp mine.

Breaking into Poetry

2007-06-28T18:27:00.000-04:00

Dixie, our Jack Russell terrier, normally functions as the most effective alarm clock I've ever owned. Inevitably, between 7 and 7:30, she sits on the bed whining for me to wake so that I can escort her outside into the cool morning air. Today, perhaps because I was up so late, she let me sleep in.

To me this was an inexplicable surprise. Now, of course, I'm ever-so-slightly behind on my plans for the day (write, write, shower, eat, revise, clean), but I can't help feeling that she's given me the smallest of gifts—one for which I ought to be thankful.

Last night's rain has thundered its way further east along the Ohio, but the air remains heavy with moisture. The sky is as gray as an idea of loneliness, and the dogs are exploring our slick and muddied yard.

Perhaps it was on a day not unlike this when I first typed out a line of maudlin verse. I think, after all, it was summer, and such weather, to the very young, might seem a fine excuse for melancholy, and of course, poetry.

If I recall correctly, the line breaks in those first poems were easy to come by. I just broke on the end-stopped rhyme. Anywhere a couplet rang to a close (regardless of how many metric feet had passed), I'd break the line and move on. The only other technical detail I can remember from those poems is that one of them, amid all of its awfulness managed to rhyme "monkey" with "latchkey." I still like that rhyme, perhaps because I'm a big fan of simians.

A couple of months ago, my wife commented on her own difficulty with line breaks, which strikes me as a technical difficulty that all of us, since the modernists, have struggled with in one way or another. A few weeks later, I offered a few suggestions to her about how the line breaks in a handful of poems might be improved. She was uninterested.

But then again, why should she have been interested? On what criteria did I base my suggestions?

Honestly, I can't remember. My suggestions were likely the result of my own personal aesthetic, my own "sixth sense" of where a line should end. Sure, I've been writing poetry for years, and I can be successful with that strategy given the climate of literature these days. After all, how often do you stumble across a sonnet in a literary journal? An alexandrine? Free verse is the primary mode of our era, and in such a context, there's no fixed prescription for whether a line should break
here
or there.

For me, this has often enough led to avoidance of the question. More, I think such anxiety (along with my respect of tradition and desire to prove to myself that I can do it) may explain why I have a deep affinity for formal poems and alliterative verse. There your line breaks are predefined. A good poet, of course, can still manipulate language so that the line break remains a point of emphasis, but, by and large, once the meter has run its course, you can move on.

Yet, despite its central position in the craft of poetry, I can't recall much emphasis on the use of line breaks in college or graduate school. Sure, we learned the difference between and enjambment and end-stopped, but much of what we learned came through practice. Gentle suggestions from professors or peers were often dotted / about my manuscripts. / / More, by reading widely, / one can glean / in certain poems / why a poet chose to break a particular / line where it was broken.

Let's backtrack for a moment. Why am I "breaking" the above lines as I am? Notice, in this instance, that the line breaks precisely follow the syntax of the sentence. W.C. Williams would, no doubt, approve. So essentially, those line breaks emphasize the syntax of what's been written, highlight natural pauses, and breaths.

But what about the break after "particular"?

To me, this serves two purposes. First, it's a kind of shift in the overall rhythm of the poem. End-stop after end-stop can become tedious. See, for example, a few hundred pages of Alexander Pope. Second, the break emphasizes for the eye the word "particular" and to a lesser degree "line".

Now why would I want to emphasize those two words?

If you're working in free verse (so to speak), every line break you choose should be intentional. It should be there for a reason. In practice, of course, very few of us have the mental acuity to consider all possible variations and meanings implied by a line break. Consequently, I don't want you to approach your next poem with a long laundry list of things you need to accomplish with each line break. Don't let these considerations stand in the way of your writing, use them to augment it. And remember in
revision, one can always adjust the
elements of a poem that aren't quite right.

Let's continue.

Notice all the space I've left on the right-hand side of the page by offering a couple of line breaks, as examples? What does all that emptiness signify? What does the lack of the constant syllables mean? Does it signal anything more than Look, this is a poem?

So, clearly, the line breaks of a particular poem suggest meaning visually. If you've not done so already, have a look at the work of e.e. cummings and Stephane Mallarme. The work of both poets actually uses the page as a sort of canvas (leading us to concrete poetry and reminding us of a few incidental poems by George Herbert, such as "Easter Wings"). Mallarme in particular thrives on white space, letting his lines dance around the entirety of a page, so that the gaps themselves accrue their own kind of meaning.

But both of those, ahem, gentlemen are extreme cases. Generally speaking (and exceptions do remain in contemporary poetry) our use of white space is not as ambitious. Rather, we need to consider, what's the difference between a short-lined poem and a long-lined one? How do such choices affect the movement of a reader's eyes and how he or she perceives the meaning of a poem? What's the difference, to a reader, between lines of a regular length and lines of varying length?

Order? Chaos?

When I was in graduate school, I handed in a poem about drinking alone in a bar. Quite a subject, right? Luckily, I think, the poem is buoyed by a sense of macabre humor that runs throughout the poem, and believe it or not, the professor suggested using line breaks as a way to emphasize that humor.

And why not? Think of your favorite knock-knock joke. Now why is it funny?

Humor, like line breaks and rhythm in poetry, functions by setting up expectations and then eschewing them. For example, take a look at the line breaks in my second "poetry" section above. Who breaks a line on "the"? Or "in"? Did I really want to emphasize those words?

Well, yes, actually, I did. Such peculiar enjambments, I'd wager, gave you pause as you read them, particularly given the context in which they are placed.

I've only just scratched the surface of how line breaks can contribute to the meaning of a poem, but for now I leave you with these few thoughts:

The dogs are sleeping on the sofa
behind me. Thunder shakes
the westward wall of my office.
My wife, I hope, will be home
in minutes. Drenched cardinals call.

May the spaces in your poems
fill with the rhythm of your breath,
familiar as the scent of summer rain.

Now then, how else could you arrange the lines of that little "poem"? Which do you like better? Why?

Oatmeal

2007-06-28T01:13:00.000-04:00

I'm stranded in the living room, mesmerized by television. The dogs are curled together on the corner of the sofa sleeping off a frenzy play inspired by my imitation of a chimpanzee. Michelle is sitting on the porch swing outside, reading a science-fiction novel.

It has been a good day. For no particular reason.

On such a day, when an early morning thunderstorm ebbed into a sun-filled day and a two-hour nap capped the day's work, could you imagine yourself sinking into blissful sloth with the merest whisper of conscience being squelched by the notion that nothing worth writing about crossed your path for the entire day? Nothing inspired you?

Once, in a graduate poetry workshop, a peer, who happened to be far more fit than the majority of students in that class, turned in a poem straight from the weight room, about a dumbbell. Now, I can't remember the poem itself or comment it on its quality. I do, however, remember that someone in class thought such content was not the purview of poetry—as though only love, death, and getting laid were acceptable. In retrospect, it seems entirely possible that the poem was, through indirection, about such themes. I don’t know.

Regardless, I remember becoming vaguely irate. Who, after all, were they to tell me what poetry could be? What I could write about? I defended the poem's right to exist and will continue to do so.

The subjects for poetry, you see, are like oxygen. They are everywhere and they, in some way, sustain us. If you can find such inspiration in a gym, a rumpus room, an electronics store, or even a launderette, brilliant!

Of course, if you believe that, you have to question the notion that an average day could bring no inspiration. Think, for example, of oatmeal. What could be more boring? Nevertheless, I've read two poems that use the image of that bland, clumpy substance to marvelous effect.

Consider the poem "Unfolding" by Jim Daniels. To summarize badly, the poem is about a relationship that's destined to break up and, incidentally, the loss of pet. Of course, that summary does no justice to the poem. Imagine for a moment if you decided to write a poem encompassing those subjects. Thinking about how I would fare is worse than listening to Radiohead without a handful of Prozac handy. As I've mentioned before, everyone writes about their pets and some point, typically leaving behind a few trite lines mired in uncommunicative bathos.

Yet Daniels knows this. In the second stanza, he suggests why: "You can't explain about your pets. / People just nod and change the subject." With this acknowledgement, which follows a terse, matter-a-fact description of the speaker's reaction to his dog's dying, the speaker also seemingly changes the subject, offering other ways to describe the relationship:

What country were we living in,
hacking through the tangle of phone lines
and junk mail? We kept our hands in our pockets.
We wore each other's faces on our watches.

and continues on to gloss the inevitable reunion and break up. The poem is an excellent example of a simultaneous narrative at work. Rather than simply describing the turns of the speaker's relationship with a girlfriend, Daniels also focuses our attention, ever so briefly, on another relationship, letting us, as readers, draw our own conclusions about how those two narratives inform each other.

In the final three lines of the fourth stanza, we have three staccato-like sentences. The narrative about the dog re-emerges with the speaker implying, but never directly making, a comparison between the keepsakes. Here, proximity works as a kind of figurative language:

Five shoeboxes full of letters.
I kept them under my bed.
I still have my dog's collar.

Now, look at the penultimate stanza:

Listen, all I can say is
she had oatmeal for breakfast!
Oatmeal! I could almost taste it.

I've carried this image with me for a while now, going so far as to prevent my wife, Michelle, from throwing away a packet of instant oatmeal because it reminded me of this poem. The final line seems to me a perfect execution (and perhaps a simultaneous rebuke) of T.S. Eliot's notion of the objective correlative.

Indeed, in the context of the poem, "Oatmeal!" does fulfill Eliot's criteria that "when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." As readers, we could almost taste the oatmeal ourselves. More, we can sense the impulsiveness, delight, and apparent intimacy engendered by that young love. Oatmeal, of all things, becomes more than a simple, warm, and hearty meal to start your day (though I suspect Daniels would like us to keep such associations we might have with oatmeal in mind). It becomes a sort of symbol of both age and, well, love.

Nevertheless, don't think that it's necessary to utterly transform the way a reader thinks about a typical object in order to write about it. Consider, for example, the poem "Oatmeal" by Galway Kinnell. Like the poem discussed above, the theme involves loneliness. However, unlike Jim Daniels' "Unfolding," Kinnell uses the image of oatmeal in a manner more consistent with our expectations of that breakfast with a ". . . gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate . . . ."

From that banal beginning (gorgeously described), Kinnell takes us on a flight of whimsy, imagining himself dining with John Keats because ". . . it is not good to eat oatmeal alone." Yes. That John Keats.

I'll not take you through a close reading of "Oatmeal" as I did with "Unfolding," but take the time to read the poem closely on your own. Enjoy the appropriate little jab at Wordsworth and the close contemplation of poetry itself that Kinnell brings to this imagined dialog. Note the long, flowing lines that evoke the rhythms of the Bible, and finally notice how, from something as simple as a bowl of oatmeal with skim milk, Kinnell manages to work his way to a discussion of the sublime.

Something worth writing about, it seems, crosses our paths every day. To celebrate this fact, I'm planning to write my own "oatmeal" poem over the next week, and I'd like to encourage you to do the same. When I have what I think is a competent draft, I'll post it here, sacrificing notions of publication in a little magazine some day to let you see a brief glimpse of process at work. I can't promise that the poem will be good—only that I'll try.

I hope, if you want to write, you'll do the same.

For now, all the sentient beings in the house, except me, are sleeping. I'll join them shortly. Outside, a bank of cumulonimbus clouds blows in from Indiana. Perhaps my dreams will be thick and lumpy, too.

Suggestions

2007-06-26T11:02:00.000-04:00

There are several good reasons not to be a poet. Although I'm tempted to enumerate the handful that flash across my mind or mention the few that have made me actively contemplate whether or not I cared enough to continue thinking of myself as a poet, I think the reasons you would list would be far more valuable to you.

Go ahead. List them.

***

In college (where so many of my stories take place), I first read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I was struck and oddly emboldened by his suggestions that one ought not to write poetry if one can avoid it.

Ich Muss.

More, I adored that book for a while. It set a path out for me, despite the limited interest I have in angels. I gave the book to a dear friend (apologizing for the sexism that seeped through the poet's prose). I have no idea, even now, if she read it. More, I sometimes suspect she followed Rilke's advice the way one would follow some stricture from a holy text and, like the young poet to whom the letters were addressed, decided that her inner life was nothing like the Bohemian modernist, that life could be lived more fully without the constant need to write, or that she had nothing to say.

***

As this project probably makes clear, I no longer agree with Rilke. One can simply decide to become a poet, put in the work, and perhaps, leave the world something lovely. After all, one can decide to become an engineer or an accountant. Why should poetry be any different?

If you think you can write, and if you want to write, try it. But steel yourself against rejection because, at times, you might feel that you’re trapped in a deluge of those little slips.

Go on try it.

***

Let's not make ourselves false promises, unless we need to. Only a few poems written each year will survive time's onslaught. Perhaps you can write one of those poems, eventually. The odds are against it. Even still, there are several good reasons to be a poet.

List those, even if they seem silly, and perhaps you'll see, as I have, that the pleasure of a finely wrought line, a glistening idea, or a simple smile from a reader is well worth the hassle. Perhaps you'll see that you (like all of us) have more to say than anyone could have imagined.

Single-Mindedness

2007-06-25T13:56:00.000-04:00

The near rain and occasional showers of the past few days have vanished like a dream. The backyard is a quarter acre of sunlight in which Dixie lazes. Archie, doing far better now, is curled on the sofa in my office, reluctant to stir from sleep. I spent the morning shaping stray thoughts into something like a poem, and for today at least, the result pleases me. My stomach grumbles, needing sustenance. I hope to carve enough time from the march of hours to read a little, write more, and maybe watch a film. But we shall see.

Lately, with an eye toward graduate school and visions of the impending riches from my fledgling poetry career, I have in all likelihood, thrown myself into one too many projects. I suspect, sometimes, that such pluralistic obsessiveness is not uncommon. More, sometimes I think that this is just a peculiar aspect of my personality: I need, for some reason to multitask to prevent boredom while simultaneously needing a glimpse into single-mindedness to excel. Both explanations may be true, but sometimes, I wonder whether or not such constant busyness might be detrimental to those around me and how I interact with them. Or maybe, I'm simply lining up excuses for failure, as failure is, more often than not, the lot of the life's work I've chosen.

***

I have heard (and read) that the university I attended for my Bachelor's degree has one of the highest workloads anywhere in the country. Consequently, while there, I learned (quite by chance) the fine art of procrastination. Most of my friends, likewise, learned the advantages of deferring the inevitable and how to strive under an almost unimaginable level of pressure for something as risk-free as an academic curriculum. All of us discovered that we excel under deadlines. We thrived on caffeine-fueled nights, and a few us, myself included, mastered subtleties of explication when explaining to professors why, precisely, a term paper was late.

For me, this peculiar blend of procrastination and faith in my ability to wriggle my way out of any mess lingered on for years. As did my faith in my ability.

***

As a writer, there are infinite ways in which you can sabotage your own work. Tens of thousands of options allow you easy access to rationale. Don't proofread what you submit. Don’t read aloud what you submit. Don't fret about deadlines. Don't fight your tendency towards procrastination.

The list goes on longer than a 15-minute pop song.

***

Today, I got another rejection. I’m concerned that my last batch of submissions may not manage more than a single acceptance. This is disconcerting because we're so often unable to see the totality of what any single editor sees. Maybe the journal, for some reason, received an envelope stuffed with poems from Nicki Giovanni, Robert Haas, or Jorie Graham. And come on, who would you print?

Instead, I'm mired in my own context. These poems are important to me. For the most part, they are "finished." They are the core of my first book, a book that should begin to establish my reputation.

Sound familiar?

***

I've brought Dixie inside into the cool air conditioning. She's curled on a dirty blanket on the sofa in my office. Archie sleeps above her on a mound of comforter. It's funny, but those dogs don't look for ways to fail, as we do. Sometimes they do fail. They may be reprimanded, but they know, without question, even when their tails dip, that we love them. Why is it so difficult for us to offer the same courtesy to ourselves?

Stepping in the Same River Twice

2007-06-24T00:40:00.000-04:00

I.

Night has fallen with no rain. My wife is inside, flipping through cookbooks in search of something for a late dinner. I’m sitting outside surrounded by mosquitoes while the puppies, full with their dinner, sniff around the yard. Archie is just visible at the edge of the patio. Dixie, staring, as if into the stars that break through clouds above the honeysuckle, stands beside him, her spots blurring into the darkness of night. Our fluorescent porch light staves off the darkness, offering a semblance of safety.

A few miles away, lights are everywhere. The summer fairs have begun. The Westside fair, with its whirling carnival rides, smoldering grills, and milling crowds, churns on towards closing. Until tomorrow.

Michelle needs help in the kitchen, so I retreat inside to the dining room. The dogs wait patiently for their treats and then vanish into my office, which is now one of only two rooms in the house that still needs to be cleaned. The lights flicker as the air conditioner kicks on. My wife takes a break from cleaning to contemplate a decorating idea for the living room. Dixie howls from my office. She and Archie are at play. Michelle howls in counterpoint, stalling the dog’s play for a moment, until Archie, growling, goes after Dixie, and Michelle feels compelled to join the fray.

They are, I suspect, making up for lost time. On Friday, while Michelle’s father and his twin brother visited our newly polished home, I took Archie to the vet to have his stitches removed and hear the results of his biopsy. Good news. The tumor was a histiocytoma. It was benign and the resection had clean edges. Perhaps Archie’s luck has changed—even if he doesn’t think so after his third surgery in such a brief life. But now, there are no more torturous t-shirts and no more seemingly draconian restrictions on what Archie can do (aside from those imposed by Dixie and for the good of the household).

I’m tempted to end here, on that note of something like joy, but for today, despite a general sense of happiness, that seems disingenuous. Let me begin again.

II.

Country rock twangs in from the living room. A xylophone, recorded years ago in Texas, jaunts along a major scale and mingles with the plaintive melody of a hollow-body guitar. Michelle has almost finished cooking a late dinner. Archie, who is no longer trapped by the indignity of a t-shirt, lays patiently in the hall, waiting on his share. Dixie slips in and out of sleep as she curls near my feet on the dining room rug.

Lately, I’ve been reading John Ashbery’s Other Traditions , a little Derrida, and a smidge of Foucault. Much madness of late, I suppose. Of course, it has affected my poetry. I find myself worrying less over images and searching out big ideas that I’ve not yet seen explicated in one form or another. Oddly, this month, I’ve written eight such poems, which seem to me to bask in the shadow of Ashbery’s influence without plunging too deeply into the near hermeneutical mysteries that seem to make his work so difficult for so many. Yet, clearly, if I’ve managed so many poems in such a short time the ideas are either smaller than I’d first imagined or I’m cleverer than Michelle (and the dogs) ever suspected.

Now, we’ve finished our dinner. The lights on the summer carnival are dimmed for the night. I’ve felt a few drops of moisture glance across my skin. I’m having trouble believing it will rain.

For the past few days, I haven’t had time to write. Michelle’s father and his twin brother arrived for a visit on Wednesday night and stayed through Friday morning. Consequently, the early portion of the week was dedicated to making the house seem spotless. Now, only our bedroom upstairs and my office need a good cleaning. Laundry still lurks in the basement, and the yew bush out front could use a visit from the hedge trimmers, but the house resembles what Michelle must have been dreaming of for months of our mutual inaction.

While my father-in-law was here, he helped me unclog a sink, reset the garbage disposal, and install new sconces above the fireplace. He, his brother, and his sister, who also lives in Cincinnati, spent the whole of Thursday together. They drove to Indiana to visit the cemetery where their parents are buried. They circled Cincinnati in search of minor shopping deals. More, they spent time together, without children or spouses, for the first time in many, many years.

Yet, even after a weekend like that, I suspect he still wishes that he had spent the time elsewhere.

On Friday night, the same night his granddaughter was tapping her way through another dance recital, he arrived home after the four-hour drive back and learned that a long-time friend, long suffering the indignity of cancer, had slipped away. It was not unexpected. Only a week ago, he’d refused to get out of bed, as though the fight itself had worn him thin. My father-in-law had gone to his house, cajoled him from bed.

III.

On occasion, prose still seems, regardless of your ability, deeply ineffective. To me, in such moments, poetry, despite its limitations, can come closer to capturing the symphony of emotions, often in counterpoint, that leaves us gasping for the right words. I’ll not argue, of course, that it’s a substitute for the weight of a loved one’s hand or the simple fact of someone else’s breath sharing the same room. Yet, there’s a reason why, with each holiday, we reach for greeting cards and their mediocre verse. There’s a reason why poetry, with its perpetual seeming uselessness, seems to survive. Everyone, I believe, has at one point in their lives been moved by a poem—even if the poem is nothing more than an adolescent’s take on existentialism.

I’m not happy with what I’ve written. I’ve approached the topics twice and found my skills lacking for the day. Perhaps, you’ll disagree, and find something lovely, here or there. But would that change my opinion?

If this were a poem, I’d set the piece aside, let it float somewhere in the recesses of my mind for a while. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a month. Maybe years.

I’d return, like a young adult returning to her high school, hoping that I could see the sentences, the ideas, and the images anew. Then I’d wield my word processor like a scalpel, excising adverbs and articles. I’d tighten (perhaps) the imagery, so that the metaphors, in one way or another were consistent. I’d eliminate those images that seemed redundant to the imagination, and I would try to look at the structure of the piece, locating those moments when the argument (for there is always an argument) breaks down, meanders, or skips ahead like a first-grader who is too clever for his own good.

Often, I’ll fiddle with the language here and there, checking the rhythm with scansion, looking for motifs (whether they are as simple as iambic pentameter or as complex as something Gerard Manley Hopkins might have imagined) that I can use at key points in the poem. I’ll search out repeated ideas or unnecessarily abstract words and weigh the benefit of keeping such an untoward word in something so small as a poem. And once I think I’m close, I’ll read the little beasty aloud, waiting like an over-cautious driver for potholes that slow my progress.

Of course, this, I suppose, is how I imagine my process. Like our lives, the truth of revision is both simpler and more complex than I can convey here. I often trust my gut and my ears. They’ve been around, after all. More, I’ve not listed myriad thoughts I’ve had and do have about poetry. I’ve not even mentioned the aesthetics of line breaks.

It takes practice.

IV.

How would you revise this little essay? What would you say differently? Would your answers to those questions depend on your mood? The weather?

The dogs, at last, have curled on the sofa to sleep. Michelle is lounging in the next room watching television. The revelers at the Westsider Fair have headed home or to bars and diners around the city. The briefest sprinkle of rain has ceased. My muscles ache from a long day of planned and unplanned excursions. On the other side of Ohio, my wife’s family has perhaps found a respite from their grief in a night of sleep. The house is clean, though cold. The lawn, at last, is mown.

If only we could revise our lives as we do our poetry.

I hope you see why it matters so much that we can.

Necessary Repairs

2007-06-18T14:32:00.000-04:00

Rachel Ray, the thirty-something Martha Stewart of the new millennium, is discussing something I'd probably find meaningless on a television behind me. A gentleman to my right breathes loudly through his nose as he peruses the splayed pages of some mass-market paperback. A few feet away, a salesman jokes about shipping issues. An announcement for "Tim" blares through an intercom directly over my head. Over the edge of my laptop screen, I can't escape the black mesh grill of a fireplace. A secretary in high heel s clicks by, cupping a stack of paperwork in her arms. I'm trapped here. Waiting. For two hours.

This is the well-lit interior of an auto dealership. Brand new waxed cars gleam under stage lights. A salesman's tennis shoes squeak on the tile, where all the autos are displayed like zirconium.

***

Last Thursday, as I drove for food, I noticed intermittent squealing from the left side of the car, like a pig being chased through the slop by a 10-year-old boy. My first thought (first thought, best thought?) was that the brakes on our subcompact sedan needed to be replaced. Michelle, on the other hand, assumed that it was a worsening of the minor air conditioning issues that have plagued the car since I bought it. But, as the car warmed up, the noise would vanish, suddenly. Brakes, suddenly, no longer made sense to me. I started thinking aloud, bouncing ideas off my wife, listening intently to the sounds of the car in motion, hoping to replicate the sound once it had vanished, and hoping, as a child of divorce longs for a revival of his parents' vows, that the sound would vanish for good when it reappeared. After much thought, a conversation with her father, and a somewhat misleading conversation with a serviceperson at the dealership, by Saturday I'd concluded that the serpentine belt needed to be replaced. This explained why the sound would go away. Rubber, oddly enough, expands when heated.

But the belt didn't look too bad. Yet.

More, Michelle and I were planning to journey to the eastern edge of Ohio in honor of Father's Day, and on Saturday morning after a brief stop at the dealership to make sure the car wouldn't leave us stranded on a two-lane stretch of highway where the only sign of civilization was the road itself (it probably wouldn't), we loaded the puppies and our luggage into the car and made our way.

At first, the car seemed fine. The only sounds were the familiar rubber-band whir of the four-cylinder engine and the rush of wind through cracked windows—until we stopped for gas.

At a truck stop somewhere between here and Columbus, the high-pitched squeal began again. We waited, patiently, for it to stop and pressed on to the border of Columbus where a cafe would welcome our frayed and frazzled nerves. Michelle, at this point, decided that she didn't want to risk the possibility that the serpentine belt would snap, sending all the accessories on our car into chaos, stranding us at the whim of unfortunate chance. We wanted to phone her parents, but Michelle's cellular wasn't charged. She rushed into Target to buy a charger for the car, and we stopped for a fattening of fast food as we waited for her phone to charge. We called, offered our apologies (mediated somewhat by the fact that her father will visit in a couple of days) and turned back home.

***

The dogs, when they realized we'd gone that far only to return home, seemed perplexed and exhausted. We ate and then slept deep into the evening. We'd journeyed from Cincinnati to Columbus for a couple of coffees and a quick jaunt around a Target.

***

Today, I drove Michelle downtown to work, came back home, sat outside with the puppies, and took care of a little business. Now, I'm trying not to eavesdrop on a conversation between two friends who happened into the same dealership. One man is finishing his basement, complete with a bar and bathroom. I'm just hoping to make ends meet this month and looking forward to the painful exodus of a few hundred dollars because the brakes are worn thin as wafers. How long to go now? An hour? Two?

***

Yesterday, I asked my wife, for no particular reason, which of the poems I've written recently she most enjoys. She couldn't answer the question. After all, she's read many of my poems over the past month, but would she be able to differentiate the newest poems from those that had been reworked?

I doubt anyone could.

So, I made a list and discovered that I've actually composed far fewer new poems than I'd first suspected. Instead, I've focused much of my recent poetry efforts on the process of revising. I've been running my own little repair shop, ferrying in lyrics and narratives for their own necessary repairs.

***

I've returned with a just-washed car and phoned Michelle to tell her the damage. The puppies, as ever, were pleased to see me. A brisk wind blows across the yard, jostling a butterfly seeking pollen near the edge the back fence, where Dixie stalks through thick clover. Archie is sprawled on the dog bed that's softening the concrete for him, drowsing in the humid heat. They say the temperature will soar into the 90s by midday.

***

For me, much of the flurry of revisions that has taken place this year has been a direct result of wanting strengthen my chances for application to a PhD program and the oft-discussed decision to work on a book project or two. One project—a chapbook—has necessitated revisions simply to allow the poems to fit within the whole. The other project—a book-length manuscript—served simply to highlight how much stronger many of the poems I'd selected for the collection could be. On the website for Ausable Press, the editor Chase Twichell, who is a very good poet, writes “If you know that some poems are stronger than others, then your manuscript is not yet finished. You'll only damage your future chances by sending work that is unripe."

Although I may not agree with everything Twichell offers in his advice, I agree with the vast majority of it, and that sentence, in particular, stopped me in my tracks. That sentence, I suppose, is why what I'd once envisioned as two manuscripts has been sliced and rearranged into a single manuscript.

Now, the most recent poem in that manuscript is at least three months old. A handful of the poems have been knocking around one hard drive or another for about 10 years as I sought to get the poem "just right"—or at least right enough for me. More, although it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that I considered the effectiveness of each poem every day for each of those 10 years, such a notion is probably closer to the truth than I'd care to admit—to you or to myself. I want, however, for you to keep in mind how arduous the process of revising a single poem can be. For the most part, I've lost track of how many times each piece has been revised, but I imagine that each poem has been through at least twenty drafts, and in some of those poems, the need for further revision gnaws at me like a juicy secret about a coworker.

At the moment, such talk seems vaguely overwhelming, disconcerting. But take a moment and think of your favorite poet. Go back and read one of her poems. A poem you adore. How much time, do you suppose, was invested so that the imagery worked? How much time was taken so that the rhythms never (even for the briefest of breaths) falters?

***

Perhaps it's a bit cliche, but poems are little engines of language. You can't have one misfiring as a reader guns the gas. You can't worry whether or not the brakes will work as the reader cruises downhill. You have to take your poems into the shop, once in a while, and see why they aren't running like you want. Look at the gears, the machinery, and see if that explains why editor X might think you're offering up a lemon. Tomorrow, I'll show you how I dirty up my hands with each service call.

A Bit of a Dickensian Duality

2007-06-15T15:04:00.000-04:00

The morning has already slipped, somehow, away from me. Archie is on the mend, aching to play again, to chase Dixie, the mighty Jack Russell, across the shaded grass. Archie and I are sitting outside, surveying the yard with our distinctly different gazes. His head swivels toward each unusual sound until he explodes from his haunches and runs to the fence to bark a warning at a passerby.

My muscles ache slightly, and my eyes feel a bit bleary. I'm regretting, ever so slightly, having jumped from bed at 7 in the morning, when Archie, having jumped down from bed for a quick sip of water was whining at the foot of the bed, unable yet to make the leap.

Yesterday, I let myself get immensely distracted by a bit of good news in the mail: an acceptance to one of the 40 submissions I mailed out. When I saw the tell-tale self-addressed stamped envelope, I simply assumed it was another speedy rejection. When I tore open the envelope, however, I didn't find my returned manuscripts. I didn't find a thin strip of colored notepaper. Instead, there was only a single sheet of colored letterhead. I opened the letter, glanced over its contents and started shivering with adrenaline. They took two poems. I phoned my wife to tell her the news, and sat outside on the front porch smoking until the dogs yelped for my attention. Even though I'm not earning a penny from that publication, my body must have felt as it would feel if I won the Kentucky Powerball and never had to work another day of my life. After taking a few moments to settle myself down and sharing the news with Michelle, I had to share it with more people. I emailed a friend in New York. I emailed a former professor.

Then, after trying, futilely, to return to the short story I had been working on, I gave up and phoned my parents. I reasoned that I would have to tell them soon, and what kind of call would it be if I waited until this Sunday, when I'm planning to phone on Father's Day? So I talked with my father and step-mother for a while, letting the conversation go where it would, letting the tingling from my scalp settle into something more sedate, letting the sudden rush dissipate back into the nothingness from which it had come.

Then, I drove down to visit my wife at her office downtown. By the time I got back, I realized I'd neglected to eat, so I stuffed myself on leftover Sloppy Joes before settling into a long nap with the puppies on the living room sofa.

Today, in contrast, the mail brought a different sort of news. Again, one of the Star Wars stamps I used for the last batch of submissions graced the exterior of an envelope. It was another SASE bearing another answer. Darth Vader's helmeted face gazed up from the corner of the envelope. The envelope, like the one from yesterday, was too thin. Could this be, I wondered, yet more surprisingly good news?

Nope.

My manuscripts weren't returned, but the envelope contained nothing more than a typed rejection slip and an envelope soliciting both subscriptions and donations. Nothing was handwritten on the note. There were no glimmers of hope to ease my maudlin mood. My work simply did not meet their editorial needs at this time. At a future time, or at some time 20 years ago, when I was on the precipice of puberty, the slip implies that my poems might have been appropriate. Of course, this is a falsehood. As an occasional editor, I've fantasized about what a wholly honest rejection slip would look like. I've imagined reading such notes: I've read this before, handled more competently; I can tell you have an MFA, but no thanks; You haven't read our magazine, have you? Please cross us off your list of future submissions; We strongly advise that you read anything other than your own work, written in the last 100 years; What? And of course, the simple, elegant, No.

I do not doubt that if conventions of politeness were not vital to the continued existence of a society as complex as ours, I would have received almost all of those rejections at least once in my life, and I expect to get far more in the future.

After spending far too much energy thinking about it, I'm taking today's rejection as a simple No. Yet, despite clear expectations that the simple No's will far outweigh those surprisingly exciting moments like yesterday, this one still stung. Perhaps, in retrospect, it stung because of the rapidity with which the response came. My wife even suggested that they hadn't read my poems. While possible, I seriously doubt that any literary magazine that takes a semblance of pride in what it does would ever make that mistake. As I've written elsewhere, there are any number of reasons why that No might have arrived in my mailbox today. But an explanation doesn't take away the fact of rejection or the vaguely disturbing notion that after almost 12 years of trying, my ego and my hopes are intimately tied to the response of an editor (or a reader) who may or may not know more about poetry than I do.

I'd like to tell you that over the years, it becomes easier. I don't know if this is true. More, I'd like to tell you that the percentage of rejections plummets as you become more and more successful, that soon enough you'll be sending out all of your poems to fulfill solicitations, and rejections will be a thing of the past. I think this is true for a tiny portion of poets. Even poets who have been nominated for the National Book Award will receive notes back from friends telling them that a particular poem isn't right for the readers of a particular journal.

I'd like to tell you that, as the rejections have piled up, my emotions have been galvanized like steel beams, that I'm no longer affected by the opinions of others, that I trust in the quality of my own work, the potential for my own genius, the certitude of my own peculiar poetic vision. Of course, like so many of those rejection notes we're all bound to see, that would be a lie.

More, I don't think you've come here for unctuous platitudes or Hallmark-inspired missives from some imagined front. You've come here, I hope, for the smallest sampling of truth.

And the truth is, sometimes, I still ask my wife to coddle me when a rejection slip arrives. Sometimes, my ambitions falter, and I let myself spiral into unwarranted negativity. The truth is we all suffer sometimes. Sometimes we are the roots of our own suffering. The world may well be an illusion.

Still, sometimes, I let myself suffer. Sometimes, I know that these infinitesimally small wounds are part of the life I've freely chosen.

Sometimes, it's good to remember that, yes, I still care and that someday is still out there, waiting for me to arrive.

Connectivity

2007-06-14T09:48:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, I stumbled across a notion for a chapbook collection. Despite the myriad other tasks I could be undertaking, like working on a collection of Texas stories, continuing research into one of the two papers I'd planned to write by summer's end, or submitting the handful of polished poems that haven't already been sent to magazines, I let myself inhabit the imagined life of poor Sandra Edwards. I contemplated the arc of minor and major tragedies that shaped her fictive life. More, I "recovered" a few poems I felt certain would best be left to rot in a cardboard box in the basement. Poems, once soaked in what seemed to me the stench of youth, became, to me at least, far more poignant after the notions they contained had been stripped of the burdensome "I" that strolled through my college and grad school years. I actually liked some of these poems again.

Of course, you should know by now not to trust a poet's thoughts on his most recent work—particularly when the work has yet to be tested by the submission process, but perhaps one day you'll be able to gauge the worth of those poems for yourself.

This morning, with strange dreams, which I'm attributing to reading Foucault before bedtime, rustling in the crevices of my mind, I thought momentarily of returning to those poems and writing a brief narrative of a childhood illness during the late 60s, but my Internet connection is down.

Think about that for a moment.

In high school, when I first started writing something that resembled a poem (think very loose trimeter with an aaaaa rhyme scheme), I had no idea that the Internet even existed. It did, of course, but I'd never seen it. HTML, if it existed, was nothing more than a language for organizing law books, not the ubiquitous and largely invisible grammar that underpins so much of how we now encounter our world.

I wrote those poems on an electric typewriter—one complete with corrective ribbon. Thankfully, not even a single line of those attempts remains.

When I reached college and decided to study Creative Writing, the poems got better, and for reasons I can't completely detail, I started composing all first drafts (and sometimes many more than that) in longhand. Then, when I liked a poem enough, or when one was due for class, I'd type it up in one of the many computer clusters on campus. I didn't own a computer until I reached graduate school when my uncle sent me an archaic PS/1, and even then, I only composed a handful of poems, which were more experimental than my usual fare, onscreen.

Now, by contrast, I write everything on my laptop—from simple missives to friends to notes about poems or stories I plan to write. Hardly a word leaves the recesses of my imagination without the assistance of this computer. This computer is my quill.

I often think, fleetingly, of the way technology intersects with our lives—technologies like the pencil or even language itself. I wander at how so many of us, particularly in the "Western" world are so utterly divorced from what was once, for thousands of years, our only means of survival. We do not reap what we sow. We reap what has been sown for us, sometimes thousands upon thousands of miles away. The complexity of such arrangements, given how our ancestors lived a scant 200 years ago, is utterly mind boggling.

How many hundreds of people must work to ensure that I can savor a single Chilean grape on a December day?

So many technologies have been, I suppose, absorbed by our flexible natures. Our minds, I suspect, work differently (not necessarily better) than those of our ancestors. How does my life, here under the shade of a sweet gum tree, differ from the lives lived by John Clare, Leigh Hunt, or Letitia Elizabeth Landon?

How do the lives of my readers differ from the readers they sought?

For a moment, my Internet connection was up again. I could look up, in seconds, representative poems of the Romantics above. I felt, in a peculiar way, properly connected to the world. I could have done, in a few minutes time, research enough to make write a believable account of a childhood illness when we had fewer vaccinations. I could have figured out the title of a brilliant book by Walter Ong, S.J. that discusses differences in the way oral, typographic, and secondary oral cultures use language.

Alas, my Internet connection, for the moment, is as tenuous as the life of a secondary character in a murder mystery. Though, at some point today, I hope, it will be restored. The world as I experience it will be returned to order. I will feel connected again. I will allow myself to be, uniquely, a poet of the 21st century, leveraging myriad peculiar technologies to write poems in our own peculiar way.

Still, I doubt I'll ever lose this niggling desire to imitate, in my own small way, the poems of John Clare.

Actions Speaking

2007-06-12T14:20:00.000-04:00

Dixie is sniffing around the edge of the yard, scavenging for a sweet gum twig or a fallen tulip, stalking stray moles or chipmunks who errantly wander into the open. I am sipping weak, caramel-flavored coffee from a black Disney mug. Archie is sitting at the edge of the patio, his tail crooked sideways. His creased ears flop across his tiny forehead like fallen leaves. He is in pain.

From somewhere beyond the grove of vine-like trees that line the edge of our backyard, a male voice echoes. Archie and Dixie spring to action. Hair bristles on the back of Dixie's neck. Archie waddles to the edge of the fence, stares toward the voice and begins barking a broken warning. Dixie howls, growls, and runs along the fence barking.

There is no other sound. The dogs quiet. Archie rests on his haunches staring out the side fence. Dixie stares out the front fence. A sparrow chirrups. The upstairs air conditioner rattles its filtering hum.

The voice sounds again. It is the gas man, making his rounds, calling out for entrance into an old garage, a chance to read the meter. He is circling the neighborhood, soon to arrive. Archie, resting again on his haunches, his tail still coiled like a broken slinky continues his barking, continues to do what he sees as his job, continues to protect his house, his pack, from anyone who might intrude, who might be unwelcome.

It doesn't matter that yesterday morning Archie was in a crate at the vet's office, waiting for minor surgery. It doesn’t matter whether or not the biopsy of the small lump that the veterinarian removed from the left side of Archie's trunk comes back negative. It doesn't matter if I've forced him into a tiny dog t-shirt that he seems to loathe, just to protect the stitches that have closed the incision. Archie has a job to do.

Yesterday, as I drove Archie to the vet, catching thick traffic on the sloping curves of Montana that stretched several miles along I-74, I quelled a storm of mounting imaginings about his upcoming surgery, by listening to NPR and a story, like this one about the differing expectations from workers from Generations X, Y, and Z. The commentator suggested that, unlike our parents, we choose to define ourselves in terms other than what we do for a living. According to the story, our "real" lives are lived during evenings and across the expanse of the weekend.

Even though I fall into late Generation X, and I imagine that my wife thinks of her work as an interruption from what matters to her, I still find the notion almost antithetical to the way I think. Of course, I never thought of myself, exclusively, as a copyeditor, an instructional designer, or even a teacher. Instead, I always maintained the notion (even if it may have been slightly delusional) that I was working dual careers, with poetry and fiction as the worst-paying second job imaginable. Nevertheless, those money-making jobs, to this day, play a massive role in my own self-definition. I am, alas, a copyeditor. More, from that simple description, I suspect you could envision pages upon pages of prose describing my character. You would not, of course, manage to capture the totality of my psychology with those pages, but I have no doubt that you could glean far more insight than you would from a brief conversation with me about motorsports.

More, like Archie, who knows instinctively that his job is to protect his yard and his house, I feel as though I know, instinctively that my job is to write, to manipulate language, to observe the state of the world, to consider what I see, and to communicate those thoughts.

I do not doubt that this is an illusion. After all, when I began my freshman year in college, I was certain I wanted to be a medical doctor. Then, after miserable results in freshman chemistry, I was certain I wanted to be a physicist. More, if a poker tournament happens to be on ESPN, it is not difficult, despite my limited knowledge of the game to imagine myself as professional poker player.

Even still, two weeks ago, I sent out 40 submissions to literary magazines. Amazingly, I've already gotten one rejection. Since I chose to send my work to some of the best literary magazines in the country, I don't know what to expect. Who knows, maybe all of the poems will get placed. Maybe none of them will.

For now, it doesn't matter. It's time to wait, to have patience. I'll keep working on the poems and stories at home. I'll keep coddling Archie as he tries to sleep through much of the pain that must radiate from the incision site. I've learned this much, at least. Without patience, which often seems in short supply these days, I'd never reach my goals. Without patience, I'd agonize over the results of Archie's biopsy, perhaps sacrificing the attention he needs now. And every once in a while, I wonder if that isn't everyone's job—to have patience, to know when we need to wait and when our waiting should be done.

Five Senses?

2007-05-25T00:48:00.000-04:00

Feeling drowsy and slightly dizzy, I stepped outside onto the porch, and sat in the wooden swing we were given last Christmas. The soft hum of the streetlamps pouring amber light onto the sidewalks, the chirruping din of crickets, and the creak of the swing’s spring were the only sounds. I rocked back and forth, gazing at the seemingly arranged shapes of an old oak's canopy. I thought, intermittently, of poetry, of John Ashbery's singular take on language and the dialogic interplay of voice that informs his poems, of his (difficult) influence on my own poetry, of the manuscript that I reordered today, and of the near-infinite possibilities for misinterpretation our language allows. I though, too, of climbing upstairs and tumbling under the comforter to sleep, as the dogs have already done.

A black shape flew towards my face, as I sat swinging, and then veered left, its wings splayed like a butterfly, off the porch and over the driveway. It was fist-sized. It bristled the thin hairs on the nape of my neck. It was a bat.

I imagine now that the bat had pinged me with its sonar, mapped out its world of obstacles, as it circled sources of light, sounding for the buzzing insects on which it preys.

***

This afternoon, as I sat outside on the patio, moving this poem or that poem hither and thither, our dog Dixie barreled around the corner of the house, batting a prune-sized blur of gray fur between her muzzle and her paws. It was a mole. The mole, in what must have been a furious burst of adrenaline, dodged the last of Dixie's deadly blows and scurried into a gap between our air conditioner and flowerbed gravel. Dixie, aided now by Archie, the ever-loyal Italian greyhound, snorted into cracked earth, plowing her paws through yellowed grass and fallen spring leaves.

I imagine now that the she was sniffing out the crevices and gradations of soil, mapping the flight of the mole through corridors of its own burrowing.

***

Many times before today, I've stared at a manuscript contemplating the appropriate order. As a senior in college, I organized my one section of my senior thesis by focusing on the narrative arc of a first-person speaker. The second section was a very long poem (long enough for its own manuscript), and the third section was simply a handful of persona poems. At least, that's how I remember it now.

At the University of Miami, I don't recall having any trouble with organization. Like Dixie and that bat, I must have relied on some intuitive sense of order, some way to map a progression of thought.

Last year, when I attempted to gather two manuscripts worth of work, one was organized through a thematic notion of opposition, and the other was organized by the increasing potency of the pharmaceuticals from which each poem took its title. Since deciding that both manuscripts would take an enormous amount of work to complete, I decided to take my best work, and organize that, with significant rewriting into a manuscript. The initial attempt at establishing an order went well enough, but never felt quite right. I was like a bat without its sonar or a dog without its scent. I couldn't seem to map the contours of the world I wanted to convey.

In the manuscript, myriad shifts in tone, point of view, setting, and technique made the manuscript seem clumsy. Luckily, I found this article (http://www.awpwriter.org/careers/jlevine01.htm) on the AWP website. Although I tend to chafe at generalized pronouncements like "no adverbs," I found Levine's article immensely useful. Unfortunately, I noticed a few common phrases for closing poems and a tad more redundancy in imagery than I otherwise might have noticed.

But now, the cartography has begun in earnest. Perhaps, after all, being lost, at this moment, was a good thing for me. Rather than trusting my instincts completely, as Dixie would if she ever got her teeth on my manuscript, I've actually begun to think of this task as an extension of the poetic process. Here, I have the opportunity to let words interact through proximity, to echo themes, and skew them through the correlation (and occasional conflation) of the next poem's intent. Now, this is more than a mere manuscript to occupy my time, more than a thesis. It is, I hope, the prodromal phase of a work of art. Now, I am mapping the connections I see in my own work, to chart my own definition of what a volume of verse might be.

***

The bat escaped. The mole escaped. Now, I will make my escape.

A Not-So Freudian Slip

2007-05-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

A breeze too light to cool sways leafy shadows across the patio. The sun is high, stifling, even though the sky is thick with cauliflower-shaped clouds. The dogs circle the yard, fresh-cut, slowly. The air conditioner pants, as if needing a sup from a cool spring. I walk to the edge of the patio, filling their blue plastic dish with water. The robins, all around me, twitter call and response.

I’ve accomplished much today, but little writing—yet. A thick sweetgum branch that collapsed onto the patio under the weight of icicles earlier this year has been quartered into logs. The kitchen is, at last, relatively clean. A good friend in the Czech Republic has been sent a long, rambling letter with advice on publishing (persevere). And I have slept in the muggy heat while listening to Liverpool fall behind AC Milan in the European Cup.

I love football.

Soon, my wife will be home. Soon, the garage door will swing up and open, and she will ascend the steps from the basement, clutching an iced mocha from Starbucks, to meet me, and the dogs, outside. The dogs will swarm her like hornets. Dixie's stub of a tail will beat furiously as she thrust her dust-covered paws up onto her momma's legs, leaving silver-dollar-sized prints on Michelle's slacks. Archie will prance at the edge of the fray, waiting his turn for attention, as his question-mark-shaped tail waggles back and forth with the fury of a conductor coaxing the ferocious notes of a Beethoven symphony from his orchestra. And when Michelle has settled Dixie down, my wife will lift Archie into her arms cradling him like the Madonna with Child.

I adore my dogs.

For Michelle and me, personifying our dogs is easy. Perhaps too easy. Archie, the Italian greyhound, is a mere 10 pounds. Many human infants weigh more than him at birth. Dixie, likewise, weighs about 17 pounds, maybe a little more. At the height of winter, I even torture Archie with disturbingly adorable sweaters because his fur is so thin. More, we often refer to them, jokingly, as our children, and familial terms like "Momma" and "Daddy" pepper our references to and about the dogs. We think of them as part of our family—an integral part.

Nevertheless, at times I suspect I can see that ineffable otherness in Archie’s tiny brown eyes. I'll see Dixie leap three feet into the air trying to maul a sparrow from the sky. I'll catch Archie burrowing his head into a patch of dust from which a tulip once sprouted, sniffing and snorting at the lingering scent of a mole or a chipmunk. They are, unmistakably, dogs.

Every day, I do my best to allow them access to that nature, within reason. It's why I spend so much time outside when the weather allows, and more, it's why, in this space, I've described my dogs as tiny gladiators and described their games of chase and their "fights" at length. As long as nothing is killed, neither dog is hurt, and the yard stays relatively manageable, why should I worry if their behavior diverges immensely from what I would expect of actual "children"?

Yet, yesterday, as I watched Archie bow to Dixie, I found describing their play absurdly difficult. Easy tropes like "fighting" or my teasing association of my tiny dogs with "gladiators," which I've used before, seemed contaminated by the recent news of Michael Vick's potential involvement in dog fighting. I actually wondered whether someone who doesn't know me and hasn't seen the full context of this project might misread a previous description as something similar to the felonious and deeply disturbing activities associated with Vick.

Today, such a notion disturbs me immensely, although a month ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about the language I used.

More, although I won't indulge a peculiar temptation to invoke Derrida, such concerns about the way in which meaning can shift or be interpreted differently by different readers are crucial to writing. Indeed, to my mind, poetry often functions on a connotative level, working with the penumbra of a word's meaning, the variety of associations attached to any single word, or the (de)stabilization of meaning that context makes possible. And finally, consider the power of connotation: The dogs on the Vick property fought like soldiers on a battlefield, charging toward death; my dogs fight as children at play do, meaning no harm whatsoever to the other member of their pack. I find the lack of concern over the well-being of the dogs on Vick's property reprehensible and hope those responsible face the jail time their due; whereas, my actions are based solely on concern for the well-being of my dogs.

And the word "fight" contains, in some ways, both notions.

Transformations

2007-05-22T13:41:00.000-04:00

Dixie, our snarling Jack Russell has just rolled Archie, our prancing Italian greyhound in a patch of dust. His once off-white fur is speckled with patches of grey-tan filth. After I shout “Easy!” in an effort to protect him from her occasionally overzealous play, both dogs speed across the tall grass, veering down the slightly sloped yard into the open, spotted with morning sun, before circling back to the patio, where I am sipping weaker than normal coffee, trying to organize my day in my head.

Inside, the dishwasher is running—hot water and dish soap splashing away the crumbs of our recent lives. My wife, having woken me early because the car was low on gas, has already begun a day staving off clients who fail to read directions.

I catch myself yawning, again. Trying to take in as much air as my body will allow. No reason for such weariness.

Dixie howls a taunt at Archie. They prance about the yard again, Archie trailing Dixie by several lengths in a race he'll never come close to winning.

***

In the middle of last week, we drove four hours to the Eastern edge of Ohio, where my nephew, at the age of 10, was confirmed into the Catholic Church. Michelle was his sponsor. And although I should know better, as the bishop anointed the boy with oil, I could not help but hope for some visible, marked change. I could not help but long for the form of the ritual to enact upon him and the 60 other children who partook in this rite of passage.

Perhaps, when the Bishop placed his hand upon the boy's forehead, something more than mere formalities spoke to him. Perhaps something ineffable in him changed. But, he was still a 10-year-old boy, and at the reception that followed, he made that fact clear.

***

On Thursday, after my nephew and his siblings had long since departed for school, my wife, her sister, and I left the dogs in the care of my father-in-law, and ventured back to Pittsburgh. We began the day with coffee at an old haunt on Craig Street and ventured through several of the small shops while I waited for an appointment with Jim Daniels, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who helped with my senior thesis nearly ten years ago. It was good to be back.

After dropping me off between Schenley Park and the edge of campus, Michelle and her sister continued their tour of Pittsburgh with a jaunt to Shadyside, another series of small shops, and yet more coffee at another old haunt. Whereas I walked back into the halls where I'd studied for my undergraduate degree and explored the new facilities my alma mater has for Creative Writing.

***

Perhaps unwisely, my wife and I drove back home that night, making it to the Western Hills of Cincinnati around 1 AM the next day. Since then, I've not been sleeping well. My legs have been aching as if I had the flu. The peculiar buildup of lactic acid has finally subsided. The world is returning to normalcy after a long and lazy weekend. More chores. More writing. A single cloud in a pale blue sky.

***

While I was eating lunch with Jim last week, the conversation sprawled across topics, pausing now and then to linger on an anecdote, a snippet of work, or reflection. At one point, the conversation veered into discussions of very long poems, and he mentioned his continued interest in simultaneous narratives as a technique he'd used to compensate for a lack of metaphor in his poetry.

To me, this raises an interesting question: what, precisely, do you think of when you think of poetry? Do you think of a poet as someone who gushes similes and metaphors the way a teenage boy might gush about his girlfriend? Or do you think of someone attuned to craft, chiseling away with every technique she can muster—all to find the precise few words that make a poem? Did Basho ever use a metaphor?

***

This morning, after pumping gas, I drove my wife on her morning ritual to the nearest Starbucks. I think, though she normally uses that drive as quiet time to herself, my wife enjoyed having me along as her day began. As we approached our destination, the sun, bright orange, floated just above the horizon. I tried to point to it, hovering between two fast-food restaurants, but by the time my wife looked, a building had already obscured it from view, as happens every day, at sunrise.

Trace Evidence

2007-05-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

Tree-bending wind rustles the quietude of a sunny late-spring day. Dixie, who has been limping occasionally for the past three days wanders the fence line in search of something (or someone) to unleash her howling and flies across the backyard, greening her feet in cut grass. Archie lounges by the backdoor, waiting for Dixie's call to arms or to be led inside where I'll retrieve a treat from a foil bag, and he will dance for his food.

At the moment, I have too much to do. My family is leaving, midweek, on the long drive across Ohio. I need to make preparations. After deciding, a few months ago, that I should apply to PhD programs in Creative Writing, I have GREs to consider, a statement of purpose to craft, and a critical paper to write, or rewrite (as the case may be). More, there is writing to be done. My book of short stories has been neglected for so long that I sometimes imagine it rising up like a wraith from the binary textures of my hard drive only to swat at me with a long, cold claw as I sleep. My manuscript of poems still needs more polish and each of the poems needs to be shown the door, so that they might cavort in distant inboxes, vying with hundreds of other like-minded poems for the attention of an editor's eye. Alas, there is also work to be finagled. An application here or there, with the aim of imagining a hearty savings account from what seems thin air.

Sometimes, I suppose, one must simply focus.

A month ago, after an evening of rain, I let my dogs out for the morning, and Dixie sniffed out a bright red vinyl purse, abandoned in a patch of overgrowth just beyond the edge of our fence. I stared at the purse for a moment, trying to figure out what the object was and what it was doing on my property. I leaned over the fence and opened it, looking for some form of ID. The purse was empty. I wondered how the purse had arrived there. I constructed scenarios. Narratives. A purse snatched from some unsuspecting woman. She would have screamed as the mugger darted downhill under flickering streetlamps. She would have wept, feeling herself violated, as the mugger emptied the contents of her purse, tossing her make-up and chewing gum into the street like nothing more than refuse. She would have been cradled back into the bar on the corner so that she could phone the police, as the mugger rifled through her wallet, taking cash and credit cards, and discarding everything, even the photographs of her nephew’s graduation, as trash.

And now, after trying to be a good Samaritan, my fingerprints were smudged all over the purse.

I phoned the police and left the purse tangled near the fence.

Thankfully, the police did not come for a couple of hours. No one, of course, was any danger. No crime was, at the moment, being committed. I'd hope in a city this size that such a call would take a while. Yet, dispatch did call me to let me know they hadn't forgotten. Someone in uniform would arrive soon enough. I spent the time showering and thinking of how the investigation might unfold, considering how this could change the way I thought about my neighborhood, my home. I imagined the police arriving in droves. Perhaps they would cordon off the walkway with yellow crime scene tape. They would don gloves to dust for fingerprints as I sheepishly explained how I'd contaminated the evidence by handling the coarse vinyl. Perhaps.

When a policewoman finally pulled up in her squad car, she was alone. I took her to the side of the yard and pointed out the purse, explaining that I'd looked inside it, but found no ID. She asked me to step aside, reached toward the fence, and grabbed the purse, which she took to the trunk of the car.

And that was that. A report of found property. No need to speculate.

In retrospect, it seems apparent that, under my wife's influence, I've watched far too many crime dramas. In retrospect, it seems clear that, even if you do not believe that writing can effect change in the world, you must acknowledge that writing can change the way we interact with that world. And, to my mind, that's more than reason enough to write a poem, to hope that it is read.

Shroedinger's Cat

2007-01-26T15:27:00.000-05:00

When I was a child—a very small child—I frequently walked across the street to the convenience store on 6th street near downtown Irving. I remember crouching near the floor, staring at the magazine rack and counting what little was left of my allowance. Of course, I wasn’t staring at Car and Driver or Soldier of Fortune, which would fascinate me as I approached my teenage years, nor was I gawking at The Atlantic or Harpers, which holds my fascination now. Instead, I was gazing, with the same glazed eyes you’ll see on any child on the toy aisle of any department store at the comic books lined up on the bottom shelf.

Like virtually every other male child, I loved comic books. Perhaps my love wasn't as involved as that of Michael Chabon or the hundreds of thousands of people across the world who attend comic book conventions. Nevertheless, I still remember fondly those moments when I had enough allowance left to buy a soda and the latest Power Pack. No doubt, there are myriad reasons. Perhaps I was drawn to the presence of the extraordinary in ordinary people, like my father or our neighbors. Perhaps I was drawn to the crystal clear demarcations between good and evil, the elegant simplicity of a morality play. Perhaps, I needed to cultivate the spaces in my imagination for pure escapism. I don't know.

I do know, however, that aside from a peculiar fascination with the Green Lantern, my favorite stories involved alternate realities. Of course, every comic book is a depiction of an alternate reality, but I'm referring to those story arcs that delved into history and altered it to provide us with another possibility of what our world would be like. Through such comic books, I had the opportunity to imagine what life would be like if Germany had won World War II or if a handful of fledging British Colonies in the Western Hemisphere had lost their Revolutionary War. Even now, I remain fascinated by stories, like Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, that explore what could have happened.

***

Lately, I've been overly anxious about these initial rumblings toward a writing career. Money has been tight lately. I haven't had any paying work for a little while. I find myself worrying whether or not the investment of time is worth the hassle. I find myself thinking about what I ought to be doing, rather than soaking in the hot bath of the present. More, when a writing day goes poorly, I berate myself until I feel overwhelmed by the seeming failures of my life.

Of course, if I dwell too long, there are friends and acquaintances who, by one measure or another are more successful, but inevitably, my mind nevertheless wanders to those myriad "what ifs."

What if we'd stayed in San Francisco? What if I'd already finished that novel draft that may or may not be corrupting on my hard drive? What if I'd simply abandoned these dreams of poetry and fiction and focused on my professional career?

I think that, at times, all of us are guilty of such imaginings. We picture ourselves as we may have been if a single decision—like whether or not to kiss someone—had been handled differently. Our personal histories, like those of societies, cultures, and the world in general, are constantly subject to such speculation. This is why those alternative histories found in comic books are so intriguing—they demonstrate that possibility that everything could be different, occasionally on the basis of the smallest change, the smallest detail that might otherwise go unnoticed.

***

One of the greatest regrets of my life, thus far, is the way I responded to a partial draft of a story wrote around Christmas time the first year we lived together. Rather than simply pointing out some of the fascinating details she'd captured and letting her know I couldn't wait to see the completed draft, I offered a few criticisms I thought would be constructive.

She hasn't worked on a story since then.

To me, that time period seems like a brief and unique period in our lives, one in which my wife actually allowed herself to dream big dreams. Perhaps, after all, she would be a writer, as she'd imagined she would be as a small child, and as, in college, we both assumed. In fact, her career path seemed utterly clear to me: she would find some administrative job whilst slaving away in stolen moments to produce a novel of uncompromising genius.

Later, by the time we were both in our 30s, I would run into her at an AWP conference, and we'd catch up over drinks, laughing at the way we behaved around one another in college. This, of course, is an alternative history, and not at all what happened.

Instead, we both followed life's own peculiar momentum. My planned teaching career never got further than an adjunct position at a community college, and her professional development was mired in a bad administrative job back in Pittsburgh.

Yet, for a few brief moments in California, she let herself bypass the doubts and indecisions that plague most adults, most of the time, and she wrote a few marvelous paragraphs.

***

I like to think sometimes of alternative histories where my wife has already won a Pulitzer. I like to contemplate the brilliant possibilities. After all, if one errant decision, 20 years ago could so profoundly affect our lives, I know that, around the corner there is a decision that could profoundly affect the next 20 years.

For now, I'm trying to keep this simple notion in mind anytime that anxiety strikes, for risk, alas, is part of the equation. And, regardless of the outcome, I'll not confine this kitten of a writing career to the paradox of what might have been possible just yet.

Fire and Ice

2007-01-24T22:57:00.000-05:00

I woke up early this morning after falling asleep near nine o’clock last night when the President was due to begin his State of the Union address. Yet, even with what would seem enough sleep, my eyelids feel like flypaper and my back has been transformed into an enormous throbbing ache. This morning, light flurries covered the footstep-mottled snow from Sunday with fresh powder. Everything was aglow with the reflective light of the morning's snow.

Now, Dixie is wandering the perimeter of our backyard, as Archie nuzzles against the comforter on the other sofa. My wife has just phoned, having forgotten her lunch, so, in a few minutes, I'll be off in our dinged-up gold Escort, sliding across the streets on balding tires to have lunch on the other side of the Ohio River.

Although I'm looking forward to a brief conversation with my wife at what seems an unusual time for me, I'm also weary and concerned about writing time. The morning, as ever, was spent minding the dogs, while surreptitiously catching up on a handful of emails. Oddly, last week was incredibly productive. I drafted three short stories—all of which have more potential than the majority of stories I've written in my life. But to get there, I'd settled into an odd rhythm.

Each day, after waking a bit too late, I would mind the dogs, getting in a writing exercise or two between emails with my wife and jaunts outside to tire the puppies. Some days, I'd even remember to eat a modest lunch—a sandwich, a bowl of cereal, or some form of pasta left over from dinner. Then, at last, around 1:30, I'd saunter off to a local cafe for hours on end.

***

That is not what happened today. Instead, exhaustion caught up with me, and I lazed on the sofa with the dogs for a two-hour nap, dreaming of vistas now forgotten. I woke just as my wife arrived home and read and read, in search of something akin to insider advice on the publishing industry.

And now, here I am, approaching the end of the day, lamenting the seeming lack of writing accomplishments as though it were a moderately serious injury, like a sprained ankle that would keep me off my feet for the better part of a week. Why?

***

In college, I took to writing in a cafe near campus. The cell-sized establishment, thick with smoke, catered to students from the nearby campus. I would sit there, sipping a hot coffee, lighting cigarette after cigarette, while contemplating the next tiny line to scribble along the lines in by black hardcover journal. But as I look back on that time period, imagining myself, a friend or two or five is always present. Perhaps someone sits across the table from me, reading a thick textbook for a class on Information Design. Or perhaps, across the aisle, a group gathers around a surprising trick in a game of bridge. Regardless, there is always the presence of others in these memories.

When the cafe, inevitably, closed, we were lost. There was chatter of transforming one or another friend's houses into a make-shift coffee house, but that didn't happen while I was still in school. Instead, we found another establishment where the smoke would fill the rooms, where we could write papers, poems, or stories, and where a game of bridge or spades was almost always ongoing.

At times, I miss the camaraderie of those days—so many of us gathering together like a gang. The endlessly foolish possibilities of youth constantly simmered beneath the surface. Greatness, it seemed, loomed at every corner, to the point where I started to get pissed if anyone called me a genius.

***

Last week, while at the cafe I now frequent, I made the acquaintance of an elderly man. For Christmas, his daughter had purchased him a new, black laptop, sleek as ice on an unsalted winter road. He needed help connecting to the free wireless and then logging onto his email account. In return for that smallest of favors, he played me a few tracks of a jazz CD his son had helped him record. He played the alto sax, long ago, with a series of long sustained solo notes, that trilled upwards and downwards with a gentle lethargy that sounded nearly pre-bop. More, he told me tales of a Cincinnati from long ago, when he had more work than he could imagine, and how each night, as he played his wife's favorite song, he would wrap his arms around her, cradling his saxophone behind her back, and dance the melody into those smoky clubs.

It shames me a little to say this, but part of me, longed for the solitude that I so often seek out in cafes now. I engross myself in the silence of chatter, and the act of actually leaving the house makes it easier for my psyche to think of the task at hand as work—even if the payment for such exertions remains constantly delayed. I take those two to three hours and focus on my current project without worrying over the dogs, jostling between emails, and quick glimpses at CNN. I manage, lately, to move ahead.

But through happenstance, I lost a day of writing.

I suppose, in many ways, this is the precarious position of the writer. We need both to experience, whether through reading or active engagement, the world. We need, also, to lock ourselves in a figurative hermitage, where writing, and writing alone is primary.

***

My wife is sleeping soundly on the sofa, with the puppies. I have a few moments now to gather my bearings and set out into the frightening landscape of a glowing white page. Emptiness everywhere, waiting to be filled with verbs, nouns, etcetera.

Pearl Diving

2007-01-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

Today, for me, was a frustrating day.

For the past week, rather than toiling away at Ward 6 Review any number of poems, or the novel I've long been promising myself I'll finish drafting someday, I've been spending stolen moments at a nearby restaurant—typically two or three hours just after lunchtime—to pound a few haphazard paragraphs toward a collection of short stories. Until today, the time has been stunningly productive. With no dogs to fret over, no chores staring at me, no television masking the silence I seem to fear each day, and no Internet to peruse, I've managed first drafts of a handful of interesting stories.

Alas, today, I got off to a late start, uncertain which of a number of half-finished drafts I'd tackle. I spent several minutes working with a list, a few minutes staring at a seemingly worthless free-writing exercise where my mind wandered to places that could be only be of interest to an intellectually challenged actuary, and a few minutes trying to take stock of where that aforementioned collection stood (123 pages of double-spaced prose, much of it in need of fairly serious reworking). Of course, such work is worthwhile. We all need time to mark our surroundings before treading too deeply into a dark wood. We all have those lulls in imagination where ideas that once seemed to bloom so frequently that many would rot before they could be properly plucked are nothing more than the sound of a rake scraping the dust-dry earth. Alas, I wanted a story for the day.

Eventually, I did manage to eek out the first few paragraphs of a story, but the narrative—from voice, to setting, to plot—was more forced than a Rush Limbaugh smile would be at the Democratic National Convention.

Perhaps I let such minor failures bother me perhaps too much. But that perpetual annoyance drives me. Now, as it nears 11 at night, my wife is sleeping on one of our sofas. Dixie is curled beneath a blanket, propping her head on Michelle’s leg. Archie, after fighting sleep briefly like an infant, has clambered under the comforter to my left to sleep. The television, at long last, is quiet. The heater shudders and thumps to life. Warm air blows through the vents. In the distance, I can just hear the sound of the washing machine churning a quick load of laundry with filmy soap. Here, at last, is quietude. My mind, at last, feels at ease. I feel, for the moment as though I could write absolutely anything, and you would believe me. I feel, if only for the moment, as though I could dive into the deepest crevices of my imagination, those fetid places reeking with the mildew and mold of shame or regret, chip away at the cracking surfaces and come forth, breathless, with something tiny, glittering, a jewel of sorts—just for you. Perhaps, in a few minutes, I'll step outside into the heavy wind, feel it rush against my face, letting my back tense and uncoil with shivers. Perhaps I’ll gaze out at the hillside where our house rests, studying the sameness of the crested roofs, imagining one or another lifted to the Black Forest, as if for one of Grimm's tales. Perhaps, I'll simply flick on the TV and laugh.

I'm not sure yet.

And even though it occasionally feels ulcer-inducing, it's nice to know I have that option. And so do you.

Each night, after work.

Each morning, after you wake.

There are moments scattered throughout the day where you could lapse into something comforting, like a bowl of rocky road ice cream, or you could step, one foot after the other, into the dark of your imagination, curious about what you will find.

Resolutions

2007-01-17T12:15:00.000-05:00

Outside, it is freezing. The hill of my backyard is covered with crystals of ice and hard as stone. My fingers ache still, from a few minutes outside with the dogs. Dixie remains outside, stalking bluebirds and cardinals, there vivid plumage bursting from bare branches like hallucinations.

The long-delayed winter in Cincinnati has finally arrived. Inside, I bundle under a blanket with Archie, our smallest dog. He nuzzles against my side, keeping me warm. It's a new year. Sixteen days into a new year. So many days lay ahead in that space of time delineated by the circling of the sun. So many days remain. Three-hundred-and-forty days stretching forth like a blank canvas. Each new year, like so many of you, I make resolutions. Inevitably, the most of the resolutions—aside from those of the requisite quit smoking, eat better, and get more exercise variety—revolve around writing. Some years, publication has been the goal. Some years, the completion of a long dreamt of novel. Some years, I've had to resolve, merely, to write, to force myself to sit at a desk, on a sofa, in the kitchen, or at a cafe a brisk walk away long enough to let the words flow over me like rain.

In previous years, I've failed miserably at keeping such resolutions. Distractions abound. I've had my guitars to blame, the television, and the constant siren call of video game systems. More, I've given in to the desire to eat, drink, and carouse with friends. I've let the pursuit of a lover seem, for a few moments at least, to be the most important work in my life.

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these pursuits. Without sacrificing a few moments here and there to the adoration of those we love, a novel or verse of poems might spill forth from your pen, but would you be happy? More, there's a reason why millions of units ship each time a new video game system ships. And of course, who am I to say, like so many others before me, that television is a plague against our intelligence? Regardless of the truth of such a claim, it remains, for many, their primary way to glimpse the world around them.

For a writer, of course, it's different. The passive engagement of television or video games seems far more insidious. Yet, each day, I still flick on the cable and listen to a morning sports program, as though I couldn't bare the silence. Even now, the television is thumping along as background noise—doubtlessly slowing my progress.

Archie is awake again and needs to be petted. Outside, Dixie is cavorting in warm sunlight, chasing her ball, gnawing on golden shafts of bamboo. The crystalline splotches of frost are melting from the lawn, leaving nothing of last night's light snow. Soon, like every last resolution I've made, the frost will be gone.

Yet, I'll still look forward to the year and to filling those seemingly empty spaces with possibility. This could be the year that more stories land, that more poems are published in journals with larger and larger circulation. This could be the year when I finally have something to shop to agents. This could be the year when, at last, I decide that the dream is nothing more than a dream. Who knows?

Still, I'm delighted by the possibilities and, as it seems every year, overcome by hope. I realize, of course, that we ought to make resolutions we can keep. I could resolve, simply, to continue writing and to continue down the path. Perhaps, just through fastidious striving I'll manage to get a manuscript looked at by a few publishers. Perhaps, I'll even manage a few publications that make me gloat a little. Perhaps again, I'll turn to more effective ways to make money out of concern for my family and admit that, for the moment, my writing isn't good enough. But, as I jot these last few sentences, it occurs to me that I don't want to dream small. Life, despite is complexities, is already small enough. No, instead I want my dreams to fill billboards in Times Square. I want my fancies to rove far and wide, like salesmen for pharmaceutical companies. I want, for the moment, to make resolutions so enormous that simply keeping them will be an accomplishment. So, I'm resolving to finish three books this year and have them in the mail being perused by agents and publishers. And, who knows, if all goes well, the royalties will start trickling in and I'll be able to afford, um, more expensive coffee.

Inevitability

2006-12-08T12:10:00.000-05:00

Outside, the cold is shiver-inducing. Patches of snow cover the yard. Yet, in the distance, songbirds still twitter from perches in bare branches. The neighborhood dogs still howl against the wind. And inside, the sunlight still falls through the windows above our mantle, throwing patches of bright onto the coffee table, the area rug.

I've not been writing enough lately.

Stopping and starting. Now and again. An occasional line. A few moments staring at an old story.

Most days, of late, I struggle with the dogs—Archie, once again able to run; Dixie, as ever, the bane of his brief existence.

Most days, I stare at my email, looking for rejections or the occasional note from a friend. And, when the rejections arrive—festooned with the inevitable form letter—I search for markets where the poem might be a better fit. On occasion, I'll decide the poems shouldn't have been in the mail in the first place.

***

Now, the dogs have crawled from beneath the comforter where they slept away much of the morning. Archie and Dixie are involved in supervised combat.

Since Archie's surgery, I've become much more protective of them, knowing that there's a distinct possibility I'll only make matters worse. I never leave them alone together—unless they are sleeping.

Now, Archie bows to the floor, craning his neck, so that his nose slides beneath the sofa. He sniffs furiously, as though he might find something magical hidden among the dust bunnies on the hardwood floors.

Perhaps one day, he will.

***

I spent the morning, trying, first to gather my bearings. I was itching to write, but uncertain what path to follow. Should I work on the myriad poems that need improvement? Should I finish a short story about the night before a wedding? Should I work a story I wrote years ago with the intent of polishing the prose enough so that I'm comfortable sending it out? Or should I work on my long-delayed novel?

Ultimately, I simply delayed the decision, returning to this project for a respite.

Yet my thoughts wandered, and I let them. They inevitably strayed to thoughts of money. Finances, which always seem stretched thin by generosity at this time of year, are a constant source of consternation.

And why wouldn't they be?

I found myself wishing that I'd made different decisions with my life: I imagined myself as a stockbroker, finely coiffed in silk tie and three-pieced pinstripe suit. I imagined myself pitching split-fingered fastballs for a university in Northern California, brushing the dust from my uniform. I imagined myself picking up my guitar before flashing a bonded smile at a thronging crowd.

Perhaps this penchant for imagining things is one of the reasons I think of myself as a writer.

If only imagination were enough. Better to picture myself picturing a pencil in my hand, filling in the circles on a lottery ticket that would insure a life of luxury, with no worries about whether or not a particular bill will be paid in a given month.

***

More often than I'd care to admit, doubt about my ability creeps into my mind, shadowing every word I type. I wonder whether my poems are good enough, whether I have the discipline to continue composing them. I wonder whether I'll continue to develop my skills as a fiction writer, whether that long contemplated first novel will ever be completed and worse, whether it will be read.

I feel like someone standing in the cold without a hat or gloves—the blustering winds stings against your face. You bunch your hands into your pockets, searching for some semblance of shelter.

***

When I was in college, I remember thinking on a summer day, as I descended the stairs at work on the South side of Pittsburgh, that fate had something wonderful in store for me, that my path was destined for greatness.

Perhaps it is. Who knows?

Perhaps—remember this—my life (like yours) has already been touched by greatness. Perhaps, after all, that feeling of fate that felt linked to the slant of sunshine falling through the windows that day has already been fulfilled. Perhaps, there is greatness in loving your wife. In caring for your family, your friends. Even in coddling two tiny dogs to the point that their needs often come before your own.

Perhaps.

***

Most of the time, I can remember that such thoughts have nothing to do with writing. Writing instead is a process. Writing is about audience—however narrow or broad that audience may be. Writing reminds me that nothing—with a few notable exceptions—is inevitable.

Now, I'll take the dogs outside into that bitter cold. I'll head out for a little while, taking a break from the same spot on the same old sofa. And when I return, I'll light a fire, listen to Christmas music and think faraway thoughts as my hands tap out scenes, one word at a time.

In Medias Res

2006-10-19T13:13:00.000-04:00

The respite from rain has ceased. The skies are occluded by slow moving clouds emptying swaths of rain onto the hills of Cincinnati. I'm tempted to conflate the dreary weather with my mood, but honestly, do I feel like a chill wind? Do I feel like wet, vibrant leaves gathering on suburban lawns?

It has been a difficult week—for me.

But my mind is still aflutter with thoughts of fiction and poetry, alighting here and there.

More, both of our dogs are curled asleep on the sofa beside me and I have a day before in which I can contemplate literature and take seemingly insignificant steps—deleting sentences, crossing out cliches, and rearranging paragraphs—to add my voice to the constant conversation of the world's literature.

It is not so bad.

***

On Tuesday night, Michelle and I were lazing on the couch, indulging ourselves in a little mindless television. We let the dogs cavort upstairs in the wide-open spaces of our attic bedroom. Archie, our Italian Greyhound, appeared as if from nowhere, at the foot of the sofa. His right hind leg was pulled up to his side as he stumbled forward on three legs.

Michelle picked him up, coddling him for a moment. Together, we ran our fingers along his leg, looking for something bruised or broken, but he never once lunged with a bite. He never once whelped in pain. He just let us move our hands across his leg as though nothing—aside from the constant shivering that might have been simple fear—was wrong.

All night, Archie kept his right hind leg off the ground. We watched him, concerned. But figured it was just a bruise or a slight sprain. Something Dixie had done to him by playing a little too rough.

We went to sleep.

***

What is the proper order here?

When you write a poem, a story, or even an essay, it's often easy to follow the clock of your memory. Wind it back to what seems the beginning and go from there. In their epics, of course, the Greeks eschewed such notions—always jumping to the middle of the conflict, allowing the epic to unfurl both backwards to the beginning and forward to the end.

In The Odyssey, what does this tell us about causality?

***

Sometimes, I suspect it's difficult not to view one's life as a kind of epic poem. Like Stephen Dedalus, perhaps. In contemporary terms, perhaps a melodramatic mini-series is more appropriate.

Regardless, we constantly look at our own lives through the lens of narrative. We constantly rewrite and revise the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

I am still looking for the words to describe Archie's injury. Part of me wants to blame myself for not watching the dogs more closely. Part of me wants to blame Dixie, our Jack Russell Terrier, who is perhaps twice his size.

But we've not reached the beginning yet.

***

On Saturday, rejection after rejection seemingly tumbled from the heavens like hail. I did not react well. Instead, I kept thinking about endless rhetoric I've heard. The Internet is changing publishing—with lower cost publishing virtually anything can be published.

I kept asking myself why my flawed poems have yet to catch this wave. Is it because such sweeping generalizations miss the particulars of publishing a poem anywhere? Or is it because my poems just aren't as good as they should be?

My wife had to cheer me over diner food.

***

Where is the beginning?

We've learned that when Archie was born, his hind knees had a congenital defect. The tendons between two of his leg bones are not straight. Instead, they angle across the joint, resulting in more pressure and a likelihood that the tendon could pop loose from the groove where it lays. And his tiny knee cap floats from its normal position—painfully.

Typically, this condition, called meida patella luxation, manifests itself gradually. Yet, with Archie, some sort of trauma on Tuesday exacerbated his condition. Archie will need surgery.

In the meantime, there is nothing I can do for him, aside from being here for him, restricting his movement as much as possible, and providing him with a little pain killer when he needs it.

***

I want you to think for a moment about ordering. Why do we make the decisions we do about ordering?

And how have I done today? Are all of these disparate parts connected?

Can you see how one thought is strung together with another—the way a tendon connects two bones, the way a difficult day can help connect a couple, the way a line connects to the next one and the next, turning, here and there, toward the end?

Archie will be fine by next month. I will be fine. We will be fine. And this knowledge, I suppose, is a kind of beginning. Isn't it?

Prodigal

2006-10-06T20:40:00.000-04:00

When I first started this project, I intended to write an entry each day for a year. When I described my aims to a friend, he suggested that it seemed destined to be an "interesting failure". Now, months later, his prediction has come to fruition. Yet, I do not regret a single moment, nor do intend to stop writing here just yet. After all, in writing, sometimes your failures will teach you more than any success ever could.

As with anything, the business of life—fixing furnaces, ferrying tiny dogs to the vet, driving across the state for football games, driving around Cincinnati in search of restaurants, and earning a dollar or two through business—has stood in the way.

More, over the past month, I've focused more and more of my waking time to Ward 6 Review, while working more on other business. Consequently, although I'm hesitant to admit it, my writing life has begun to resemble the life of a low-level bureaucrat in a Kafka novel. Mainly, I move papers about—except there is no paper.

***

Now, it's autumn. Splotches of amber and burnt orange have tumbled from the sweet gum tree to flutter in a chill wind across back yard's still green grass. While driving through the Western Hills or out to the Mount Airy forest, I've been struck by occasional bursts of color: a single tree standing against the yellow-green of surrounding shrubbery, looking as if it had caught fire.

Inside, it's chilly. I'm anxious to turn on the heater—even though the air conditioner has only recently stopped its constant humming.

Baseball's last hurrah is the afternoon's background noise. Archie, the Italian Greyhound, is curled asleep near my abdomen as Dixie wanders in surprisingly warm sunshine that's bathing the back yard.

Soon enough, neither dog will want to go outside.

***

Since starting Ward 6 with my wife, I've thought more about my own poems and how they might appear to an editor of an online journal or little magazine. I've invested the time to research a few markets properly and sent out the contents of both manuscripts. Thirty days of waiting has been punctuated by excellent news from Tar River Poetry and Word Riot, as well as four rejections and a deeply annoying email from editors who had opted not to accept electronic submissions, despite what their guidelines had said.

Thus far, the waiting has gone well. With each rejection (and acceptance), I've immediately sent the poems that were not taken to another market.

Persistence.

***

My wife is due to return from work soon. Looking back at what I've written, I know that I can do better. The lyricism and insight that I longed to chisel into this little vignette appears only as the slightest flicker of shadow—here and there.

But how could it be otherwise? Writing, more often than not, is about failure and fortitude. Countless talented students of writing will find happiness elsewhere. Countless young poets will send off their poems, expecting—as I once did—instantaneous praise. Few poets deserve such praise. Rather, success is built upon failures: the failures of ambition, the failures of luck, the failures of timing, and the failures of placement.

For me, I've learned from those failures, and more, I've learned that, in truth, a rejection isn't a failure. It's just a rejection.

***

Now it's autumn. The air outside is crisp. Crimson sweet gum leaves dot the lawn. My wife is home—I think about lighting a fire and warming some apple cider on the stove, but I won't. The dogs are sleeping now. Dixie, our Jack Russell is cuddled in her crate. Archie, with his ears pricked up, is burrowed half-under a blanket, nuzzling my leg.

I'm glad to have returned.

Because I Know I Shall Not Know

2006-08-22T11:50:00.000-04:00

This morning the mosquitoes are particularly ravenous. Red welts rise on my ankles as the puppies survey the perimeter of our property and the cicadas again greet the morning sun that ascends into a deep blue sky.

The day has only just begun. A cool breeze shakes the potted dahlias, seared brown by summer sun. Birds, in the distance, belt out tied notes over the churn of a lawn mower in a distant neighbor's yard. Today is a day of a promise, a day of fulfilling promises made. There is writing, marketing, and web design before me, yet I cannot help but look backwards into the brief sleep that my dogs, as ever, cut short.

***

Last Sunday, while driving back from the Kroger where I often procure coffee, someone with a sonorous voice read snippets from Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." I started my day with the poem, wondering at the way Eliot's rhythms, folding and unfolding upon itself like a verse from Genesis hold together the most abstract of ideas. While reading the poem, I caught myself contemplating whether or not I'd accept such a poem as an editor. And, truth be told, I seriously doubt it. There is too much abstraction, too much of Eliot's near hopeless reaching. Perhaps, I might even have accepted part II, where the wonderful imagery of the juniper tree first emerges while shying away from the rest of the poem with its abstraction and mild form of proselytization.

Of course, this is all idle speculation, but let's not shy away from idle speculation just yet.

***

To me, one of the most useful experiences for my development as a writer was reading the annotated drafts of Eliot's "The Wasteland". You can, of course, see the development of the poem and how a morass of disparate thoughts came together as one of the most powerful—if difficult—poems in the English language. Seeing the work of such a poet in manuscript form—covered with corrections—can do wonders for a young poet. You have a chance to see the process of writing at work, to witness the fact that poems do not tumble from the heavens, like manna, fully formed as works of art. You can see the give in take of the poet's intelligence and witness the profound impact that both Pound and Vivian Eliot had on his work.

For me, whenever I think of those myriad corrections, I'm always drawn to a comment made by Pound. "Damn Perhaps-y" he wrote while crossing out one of the many instances of the word that began a line in "The Wasteland." Eliot, of course, used that correction.

Sometimes, I wonder whether or not those two monsters of modernism made a mistake there. I do not doubt that my thinking is skewed by living 80 years after the fact of that poem's composition, but it seems to me, that, so often, we must dwell in the space signified by that word: "perhaps". I wonder what might have happened if Eliot had left us that space—let us dwell for the briefest of moments in uncertainty.

***

In graduate school, I suppose I cultivated a deep affinity for the modernists. Even now, when I list my favorite poets, only a handful of English-language poets who were not of that era bear mentioning: Plath, Schuyler, Ashbery, Simic, Rexroth, Dickinson, Coleridge, Blake, Hopkins, and Shakespeare. Of course, there are other poets who have meant (and still mean) a great deal to me, but if pressed, I could survive on a desert island with just those ten poets. Still, if given a choice, I'd rather have a suitcase full of modernist classics: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, HD, and Hart Crane.

Yet, despite the profound influence of those modernists on how I approach a poem, my poetry remains oddly postmodern. Occasionally, a poem might be invested with ambition like that found in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," but I've yet to write a long poem that truly pleases me. More, there was always, that overvaluation of self that's difficult to escape in your youth—even if I imagined that "I" as a Prufrock-like character.

***

In both college and graduate school, I used to joke that my first book would be the best first-book since Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. Now, of course, I doubt this. Nevertheless, in graduate school, that was the aim I worked toward—often finding myself overwhelmed by my own ambition.

I remember thinking how difficult writing poetry suddenly seemed—one had to be conversant in philosophy, religion, psychology, and the long-and-storied traditions of verse in the English language. Now, I suppose this is true, up to a point, but focusing on syllogisms or re-reading Kierkegaard misses the point ever so slightly, doesn't it?

***

Poetry, I suppose, is much simpler than that. All great poets, regardless of whether or not they've read Derrida, make memorable lines that others will long to read. They craft language to share something—often something outside of their reader's realm of understanding.

If you read, "Ash Wednesday," I suspect you will be moved—even if you are not an Anglican, like Eliot. Even if you're not a Christian, like Eliot. Even if you've never uttered the Lord's Prayer. And it is not the religion that moves us. And it is not the intellect behind those thoughts. And it is not the symbolism of Mary's colors.

***

Outside, the sun has dissolved the last of the clouds. Archie, our Italian Greyhound, is sleeping soundly on the sofa behind me. Dixie, our other terrier, barks into the distance, protecting the perimeter of her home. The day goes on. Everywhere there is poetry.

Plans

2006-08-21T09:26:00.000-04:00

A chill wind blows across the backyard. A few blocks away, the first school zone lights of the fall are flashing. My wife, up early this morning, is already on her way to work with a cake to celebrate an employee's birthday.

The weekend, already, is gone. Not surprisingly, I accomplished far less than I'd planned. At least the lawn is well-coiffed. Ward 6 Review, in some respects, is functioning smoothly, and I managed to get enough sleep over the past two days. Now, I am simply waiting for fall to finally arrive, so that I can shut off the air conditioner, watch the leaves turn, and spend weekend afternoons snuggled on the sofa as the sounds of football mingle with the soft breath of naptime dreams.

With the onset of fall, my mind inevitably turns back to college, to graduate school, and to the career path I'd once imagined for myself. Life has its own peculiar momentum.

Near the end of my tenure as an undergraduate, I got the letter on which I had pinned all my post-graduation plans—acceptance to an MFA program in a state that was never touched by winter, with a fellowship. I'm not sure what would have become of me without that letter. Naturally, I went to a bar to celebrate.

Everywhere around me, other English majors were sending out resume after resume, nervously plotting the first few steps of their professional lives. Some would send out hundreds of resumes with nary a response. Others would pack their belongings and return home for a few months of free rent while trying to sort out the shape their future would take. For me, it was merely a question of waiting.

Over the summer, I stayed on at the chemistry journal where I'd done intern work and waited for August to arrive, feeling a near desperate pressure to leave Pittsburgh as soon as possible. On the first of August, I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Miami and what I must have imagined was the first step in a long and illustrious academic career.

Perhaps, someday, that bus ride will feel like that first step I'd imagined it to be. Perhaps not.

Now, I can remember the shock of seeing palm trees for the first time—the way their utterly foreign outlines stood crisp against a clear blue subtropical sky. As long as I lived in Florida, that slightest feeling of unease never left me. I was always, I suppose, a bit of an interloper in South Florida. I never really belonged there—not even on that final day when my parents arrived in their Ford F150 to haul me and boxes full of books back to Texas.

What went wrong? How could I have gone, in the course of two years, from a brash undergraduate ready to take on the world to a sulking fool with an MFA and no discernable job prospects?

And what's changed, over the ensuing eight years, to make me feel again like a young poet that can—in the limited way that poetry offers—conquer the world once again?

Now, I'm sitting outside, writing this for the handful of people I know will read this message and the thousands I believe will someday see it. I am not, as I once would have, writing for critics or for posterity or for some distant abstraction like truth. I doubt, sometimes, whether or not I'd be capable of making that statement if those long ago plans—concocted while sitting in that bar, slightly drunk, showing off my acceptance letter to anyone who cared to look—had come to fruition.

I could, I suppose, be on a tenure track somewhere, contemplating the upcoming deluge of new students with the fall semester. I could be sitting in a backyard somewhere, just as I am now, contemplating my own thoughts as they appear on the notebook in front of me, but would there be puppies in that yard? And would they be as filthy as mine are now, having rolled around in the dirt as they played on and on in endless combat?

Rejection

2006-08-18T10:41:00.000-04:00

The summer morning is so thick with humidity I may as well be swimming. Dixie, our Jack Russell, and Archie, the Italian Greyhound mix, are sniffing about the backyard, enjoying these last few hours before the sky grows too heavy with moisture and opens into rain. In the distance, a neighbor is mowing his lawn, as I should be. A semi, shifting through several gears, lugs its way up the hillside of the busiest street on the block. The mosquitoes are still out, threatening.

Lately, organizing my time has become much more difficult. Ward 6 Review requires a substantial investment, and for this past week, I've had more freelance work than normal. Now, as the cicadas trill in the treetops and sun eases up to burn through mottled clouds, I think it would be easy to stroll, simply, into the house, flick on the television, and lounge the day away on the couch. But there is still work to be done.

Yesterday, I spent the whole of the day, rereading submissions and writing brief notes of rejection. I tried, all day, to keep my own experiences in mind, and to add a personal touch to each note, but by the end of the day, the paragraphs were running together, and I fell into those same formulaic phrases that have graced tiny slips of colored paper that arrive in my own mailbox.

And of course, there are reasons why those formulaic expressions exist. While I completely understand these reasons now (would it not be cruel, after all, to tell someone, likely with skewed views of the quality of their own work, “try harder, read more”?) the notion still irks me. Yet, I realize that once we launch the first issue and our advertising budget kicks in, the situation will be much worse—particularly without assistants or interns. I'll have no choice, but to resort to form letters or spend the whole of my free time jotting notes for some vaguely noble purpose when I could be writing or cuddling with the puppies for a luxurious afternoon nap.

***

When I was in graduate school, I still had that unshakable faith in just how remarkable a poet I would be. Sure, by now, I recognize how vaguely delusional that might have been, but at the time, I was reading philosophy, poetry, fiction, and anything I could get my hands on that would help that weirdly adolescent goal of changing the world while getting famous.

One weekend, when I phoned my parents back in Texas, my father told me that my aunt's father-in-law had passed away. The next day, between classes, I phoned my aunt's mother-in-law. I had, of course, wanted to somehow use all of that poetic talent to ease her burden somehow, to soften the blow of losing her longtime spouse with the alchemy of a few chose phrases.

But there were no words.

How could there be?

I was reduced to platitudes and the faint hope that the echo of my voice across hundreds of miles of telephone wire might be solace enough for that moment. Some great poet, I thought to myself, stumbling through familiar words just like everyone else.

Since then, I've known more loss, as we all must. And to my mind, there is never anything to say—the alchemy is just a dream. There is nothing, other than the fact of one's presence that can ease the rending away of someone dearly loved.

***

Last night, while driving home from the daily procurement of coffee, I found myself thinking of the infamous rejection slips from the now-defunct kayak.

A professor in college had once had the kindness to show us—his students—the mountain of rejections he'd collected over the years. While sitting in his living room, we passed around a handful of examples, and I fell in love with the rejection he had from kayak. Indeed, in moments when I ought to have been reading or writing, I've occasionally found myself lamenting the fact that I never had an opportunity to earn my own rejection slip from kayak.

I wondered, as I paused at a malfunctioning traffic light in White Oak, what could Ward 6 do to make our rejections sting slightly less and provoke that same peculiar interest that kayak had for me?

It's too late now for some of the early visitors to our site, but with my wife's help, I'll figure something out.

You see, there are moments when the platitudes just won't do, and alas, there are moments when they are all we have.

I don't think something as silly as a rejection should be one of the latter. After all, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other journals out there that may not agree with me.

Patience

2006-08-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

In Northern Kentucky, my wife is sitting on a runway, having gone through the more stringent security measures just enacted by the TSA. In contrast, I'm sitting in my wrought-iron chair of choice as our two dogs wander through the tall grass of our backyard, small butterflies weave about the neighbor's yard, and cardinals twitter from the highest branches of the rose of Sharon that obscures our fenceline from passersby.

In mere moments, the airliner where she sits reading a recent literary novel will lift into the sky and veer east, out over the chopping waves of the Atlantic, before banking toward South Carolina. She'll land at the tiny airport in Charleston, search out colleagues, before taking a shuttle to an exclusive resort on the Barrier Islands where two days worth of business meetings await her.

Now, with solitude, broken only intermittently by the puppies, I can focus on crafting one or another works is into my own facsimile of a masterpiece. I can devote hours to the marketing of the online journal we're building together. Or, I could lounge about, unaccustomed to her absence, flicking through empty channels, until a meaningless football game finally begins.

***

A cool wind fills the morning air, rustling the sweet gum tree overhead. The mottled sky blocks out the sun, threatening rain. I slept diagonally in our bed last night, nestled between the two puppies, and surrounded by a wealth of pillows.

I chose to watch the football game. Yet, despite the comforting sounds of the crowd and the thudding hits from on the field (just a few miles away, perched on the banks of the Ohio), I recall little about the game. Instead, it was background as I surfed aimlessly around the Internet, searching for something, and waiting, I suppose, for a voice—mediated by technology—to filter through and, somehow, remain with me.

Eventually, I turned to a manuscript of my poems. I read through the work, looking for lines that could be improved and trying to discern which poems were the weakest and to correct them. The book was better than I thought it would be, despite myriad flaws.

***

The canines are cavorting about the yard, savoring the coolness of the summer morning mist. Archie is sniffing the dirt around the sweet gum tree that was once covered with hosta. Dixie is peering out at the yards behind our house, where a rabbit earlier dashed across the thick green grass. We are waiting.

I, personally, am anticipating a full day's worth of contract work. The puppies, I suppose, are awaiting the arrival of squirrels that they can attempt to corner.

As I think about that collection, I suspect that I could gather up the poems and send them all off to be read. If I chose the markets carefully, I imagine the majority of poems would be taken to be posted on the Internet or for a tiny print run in this or that literary journal.

Given, this may be an example of that necessary self-delusion a poet needs to keep writing through difficult years, but let's assume for a moment that I'm correct. Imagine that all 45 poems could be published in one venue or another by the end of the year. Sounds great, right?

So why am I so hesitant to send out a batch? I could argue that prestige is a factor or that I'd prefer to make the few thousand dollars that would be vaguely possible if the highest-paying markets would take those poems. More, I could admit, simply, that it's fear of rejection masquerading behind nobler ideas.

While I will admit that these factors are likely spicing the stew of my contemplation, they do not constitute the broth of this decision. Instead, I think the quality of the poems is my foremost concern. You see, poetry, to my mind, is a bit of a collaborative process. Each time I read a poem, regardless of who penned the initial incarnation, I must filter those combinations of phrases through my own experience, my own psyche, my own relationship with the world. Misreading—at least compared to the author's likely original intent—is a marvelous part of the process—two minds, straddling space and time with the sound of a few syllables. As a reader, I appreciate those poems, like Robert Frost's "Birches," that allow the reader's intellect to participate deeply in the formation of meaning, but don't necessarily require it. If you look at Birches (and much of Frost's work), you can easily read the poem as a folksy anecdote—and nothing more—but still enjoy the poem. If you care to, however, there are layers of meaning to traverse.

By contrast, a number of my poems seem to lack that invitation for further study. How does one make a poem that can offer a simple interpretation without the poem becoming so trite that it isn't worth more than one read? How does one make such a poem with enough clarity that an editor, with a cursory read, will move your poem out of the slush pile?

I don't think there are any easy answers for those questions. If I tried, I'd be offering formulaic nonsense—like someone selling a real estate course through an infomercial. Instead, each of those questions must be answered separately with each poem. And, if I answer each of those questions for each of the poems in my collection, perhaps they will be slightly easier to place, but more importantly, perhaps they will be read more widely and enjoyed by more people. And that, frankly, is all one can ask of their poems.

E Minor

2006-08-09T12:17:00.000-04:00

The morning is waning away. Across the street, a leaf blower roars furiously in intermittent bursts. The dogs, jangle this way and that, barking. I'm sipping fairly expensive coffee, enjoying the textures, and subtleties of flavor. The August sky above Cincinnati is occluded with clouds. Our near-antiquated air conditioner churns loudly to my right. Archie is sniffing at the ground near the sweet gum tree, as though he were contemplating digging up the entire tree.

And I'm weary.

This morning, the dogs woke me by dashing up the stairs and nuzzling against me in bed. They had some assistance from my wife, of course, but for a long moment, I did not feel like emerging from the cocoon of the comforter. Instead, I simply lazed there cuddled next to my dogs until Michelle reminded me they hadn't yet been out and I had horrible flashbacks to a similar morning a few months ago when Dixie ended up in our bed without first making a pit stop outside.

After taking the dogs outside and checking my email, I drove a few miles to procure the coffee I'm now savoring and the customary iced mocha for my wife. In the car, alone, I listened to a recently purchased album by a band that's been described as vaudeville punk. While listening to the fifth track—which is told from the point of view of a friend of a woman in a horrible relationship from which she simply can't extract herself—a tear trailed down each of my cheeks.

Perhaps, this is just a side-effect of recent moods—not enough sleep and not enough productivity, but I doubt that serves as a sufficient explanation. The fact of the matter is simply that pop songs occasionally have the ability to touch us deeply. And I think that song touched me in such a way.

Now, I won't claim that this makes for a great song—even though I'm currently quite enamored of the album in question. However, I would like you to think a moment about this. How many pop songs have made you cry? Can you even name them all?

I can't. Granted, this may say more about me than the current state of pop music, but I do think that the "poetry" of pop songs combined with the plaintive chords of a piano playing in minor key can have a powerful emotive effect. More, I think that the artifice of music in our culture, for some reason, does not begrudge us the peculiar emotional release of such music. How else can you explain the vast appeal of a band like Radiohead?

Now, consider literature. How many stories or poems have you read that have led you to weep? I'm guessing that you can count the number of works on one hand—maybe both hands if you're a fairly emotional person with an excellent memory.

Personally, I can only remember weeping when I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and perhaps when I read Night by Elie Wiesel. I can't remember a poem that made me weep—although I remember countless that have moved me. What about you?

More, I have managed to write one unfinished story that managed to make readers weep. Yet, the reviews from those readers (friends only) are a bit mixed. When I first showed that story around, searching for feedback, I was stunned by the response. The fact of tears actually made the story much more difficult to revise. In fact, a year an a half later, I still haven't managed the task. Instead, I sent it off to The New Yorker assuming that the visceral response of some readers would certainly be replicated on the editors and result in a pleasant payday for me.

Wrong.

You see, overwhelming tears wasn't the only response. At least one person felt manipulated by the story. Another seemed disconnected enough from his emotions to workshop the piece as though we were still in college. So clearly, the story still had flaws. In fact, with more distance from the story, I recognize many of the flaws and will work to correct them someday.

I want to focus on that notion of manipulation, however. Naturally, any poem or story is designed to manipulate emotions. If a poem did not engage your emotions why would you read it? But where is the line between manipulative maudlin sentimentality and great literature like the memoir Night?

Well, unlike my story, Weisel’s Night engages our intellect. When I wept over that book, it did not seem to be an effect of the writing or the style. I did not feel as though the writer wanted me to cry. Rather, the writer was there with me, somehow managing to describe ineffable horrors. Weisel did not make me cry; he let me cry.

Perhaps, in a larger scheme of things, this is mere hair splitting, but I think it points to the expectations that readers have. For the written word—even a tiny poem—readers have far different expectations from what they expect from a song. With a song, like that track 5, it's a bonus if my intellect happens to be engaged. With the written word, on the other hand, if a writer can't engage one's intellect, then it's mere hack work. It might sell to Hallmark, but the majority of people I know will dismiss the work as a waste of time.

And there's the catch. The intellect and our emotions are often so very opposed that finding a work that engages both—powerfully and effectively—is near impossible. How do you do that?

In all honesty, I'm not sure. But, with each poem, and each story, I try. I work with sounds, structures, and metaphors, using every feasible technique I can master simply to match the sound of a piano chord in a minor key.

Frostbite

2006-08-08T14:48:00.000-04:00

Dixie, our Jack Russell Terrier, woke me and my wife up at 6:30 this morning, with a series of whelps from downstairs. There was nothing wrong. She just wanted outside for a bit of play. Now, she is stretched out on the grass, soaking up morning sun. Archie is inside, alone, hesitant to move from a favorite spot on one of the ragged sofas.

As for myself, I'm again sitting under the sweet gum tree listening to a choral of cicadas, birdsong, and late-morning traffic, contemplating how to approach the rest of the day. Hopefully, by the time the sun sets over Cincinnati, I'll have written a few words that delight my ear.

Yet, sometimes, even a few measly paragraphs can fill like a trek to the South Pole. You make endless preparations—outlines, notes to yourself, arrangement of your desk, a pot of fresh coffee. Then, you settle in your favorite chair, coffee steaming beside you, almost ready to work. But then you pause for a moment, and check your email, just to make sure you haven't sold a slice of your time to someone else. All clear, so you take a deep breath and get to work, right after you check the news on CNN. And ESPN. Now, while you're at it, you may as well look in on your fantasy football team and make certain that everything is in order for the upcoming draft.

Finally, your preparations are complete. You've donned your metaphoric snow shoes and are ready to trudge into the vast white emptiness of a blank page. But wait, it's been an hour and you've already drank your coffee. You could use a refill just to get the old mind cranking. So, you wander into the kitchen, pour yourself another cup, and return to the office to settle in your chair with a nice steaming cup of Sumatran coffee.

But wait, what was the idea for that poem? Where was I in my manuscript? Perhaps you'll open up a new document at this point, fiddle absent mindedly with the fonts, subtracting and adding serifs before finally settling on the font you almost always use anyhow. Or perhaps you'll open an old file, hoping to be stunned by its quality and to find a work-in-progress that you can continue into the afternoon.

Then, the phone rings (of course). Your spouse wants to say hello or tell you about the deer she saw wondering by the side of the road through suburban streets. You could use a break, even though you've yet to jot down a single word, so you take her call, and then wander to the kitchen where the donuts on the counter are just too tempting.

Soon, the morning has slipped away, and you are beginning to doubt that you can achieve the simple goals you set for yourself earlier this morning.

Does any of this sound familiar?

For me, the past few days have taken on that kind of shape. I've been mired in a bit of a lull and have had trouble focusing on any one particular task for an extended period of time. I think, for a writer, such inattention can be hazardous to your career. Yet, I don't personally think that one or two days of laziness can signal the untimely demise of your aspirations. In fact, I believe that years and years of laziness can settle over the careers of even the best poets.

For me, I've been constantly emerging from long periods of idleness where life's other demands like finding love and earning a living robbed energy from the seemingly less pragmatic goal of publishing poetry. I've spent years of idle time immersed in one duel or another with a video gaming system. I've wasted countless hours looking longingly at creature comforts—like a $50,000 convertible—that aren't exactly congruent with the lifestyle of a poet (or a novelist).

In the 10 years between now and graduate school, I learned that discipline is far more important than talent. Indeed, even if I'm as talented as I think I am on fantastic writing day when the words seem to fall together seamlessly, like the tide washing across the coastline, I know that isn't enough. It may sound trite, but you do have to believe in yourself. More, you have to believe in the work you are doing and provide the work with ample time—regardless of how you come across that time. And when you find that time, you have to utilize.

For me, discipline has been the most difficult challenge of my sapling career. To be honest, I'm not horribly well organized, and as I've said before, one of my favorite past times is sprawling on the couch for a nap with my two dogs.

Yet each day, I set out to explore the figurative Antarctica of a blank page. I struggle to convince myself that, even with a mere handful of readers, the trek that I’m about to embark on will not be a fool's errand. I pack my figurative supplies each day and set off into the snow.

And when I fail—and I do fail—I try to learn from the day's events and begin making preparations for that next excursion. So, now, having returned to the page, I'll keep working until the sun has set. I'll take a few moments, here and there, for a snack or to coddle the puppies. I'll take another breather when my wife returns home from work, but for today, at least, I'm suited up, exploring a barren wilderness, and arranging syllables with the odd mixture of folly and faith that seems vital to continuing. I'm placing one snowshoe in front of the other, one word, the next word, and so on.

And that, for the moment, is all it takes.

Petty Business

2006-08-05T11:42:00.000-04:00

A police siren screams down the street, past our backyard. The puppies jangle about beside the fence line searching for something to growl at. Saturday. The incessant heat of earlier in the week has subsided. A cool breeze wafts in from the west as another airliner overhead pierces the constant hum of cicada chatter. Michelle is upstairs in the corner of our bedroom that's become our office. She may be crafting a work of genius, reading fiction submissions to Ward 6, reading one of my newly organized manuscripts, browsing through iTunes, or playing solitaire. I'm not entirely sure.

I've been up since Dixie, the Jack Russell, woke us with her warbling pleas at 7:30 this morning. Most days, she's more precise than any alarm clock. Yet, even though I've been up for three hours, I've been mired by thinking. I did manage to drive a few miles across the sloping hills of Cincinnati and Cheviot to procure enough coffee to snap me from the sleep-induced daze that is threatening to return, and I did manage to check the variety of email accounts I keep, but I've yet to confront the task that seems to be knotting my back with stress: business.

Ah for the life of a freelancer! You can spend an entire week waiting for work, scouring contacts for work, soliciting strangers through the Internet for work, and contemplating any variety of hair-brained schemes to get work only to find that the work you wanted on Monday has arrived on Saturday, when you'd prefer to be walking the city streets in search of a bookstore or an as yet undiscovered bistro.

Alas, as a freelancer (at least in the beginning), you have to seize the opportunities you have. Some of us learn this the hard way. Others, I suppose, stumble from opportunity to opportunity, taking advantage of whatever luck they see while finding ways to make that luck happen. To everyone else, such people must seem blessed or lucky or immensely talented. Perhaps, this is true, but I suspect there is more to the story.

You see, in graduate school, a few of my peers had far more success than I did. In fact, ten years later, this is still true. For a number of years, I would occasionally run across the name of a former classmate in a literary journal or on a website somewhere, and I'd feel that inevitable twinge of jealousy. More, I would reflect on my life thus far, and fall into a funk about my seeming lack of success that must have resembled depression from the perspective of my friends.

Of course, I knew, even in the midst of the wallowing, that such sour grapes were pointless. Brooding about the success of others will not help you revise a poem or bang out the first few pages of a short story. Instead, the best you can hope for is that such thoughts don't make you question your resolve—that you don't look at the success of others as some sort of tacit indictment of your own career.

Imagine, for example, that you're in a workshop and preparing to discuss a poem from one of your peers. You launch into your critique, full of bravado, and certain that you can help her make the poem far better. Now, imagine that after the final critique has been offered, while the class prepares to move on, your peer informs you that the poem has just been accepted for publication in The American Poetry Review.

How would you react?

Personally, I don't imagine that I reacted that well. But why? After all, she had the initiative and courage to submit her poetry widely. I, on the other hand, was concentrating on my studies and aiming to make each poem as perfect as it possibly could be. In other words, I wasn't prepared to have my work out in the public, being evaluated. So, why, should I have been jealous? She was, after all, only seizing an opportunity.

Personally, I've been more adept at letting opportunities slip away, at least until recently. Now, I think I understand a bit more about how to make those opportunities.

Branding

2006-08-03T23:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I took the day off. Aside from a few requisite emails inquiring about the status of a little freelance work, I did not write a single sentence. More, I did not read a single paragraph that was not associated with one of my primary obsessions: the NFL.

I'm waiting on baited breath for the football season to start and am even excited to see the first football game of the preseason this weekend. I admit it's a problem, but what a wonderful problem to have. I've spent the morning in what seems a dallying mood—despite a few important emails and a fair amount of time spent tidying the house as though I were a housewife from the 50s. In fact, while waiting for work that seems less and less likely to arrive today, I've been hanging out in the kitchen, watching daytime TV.

Aside from the soap operas, daytime television is populated with talk shows and a shocking variety of "real-life" court shows. There is a deep and abiding sadness that seems always near the surface when you watch daytime television. Former friends sue each other. Former drug addicts tell their stories before a studio audience. But the commercials are worse, far worse. Infomercials tout supposedly secret ways to make more money than you can imagine buying and selling real estate, but you have to buy a course. Technical schools for automotive repair, business administration, and medical administration offer shortcuts out of working class poverty. And every other commercial, of course, details how to keep you floors glistening or skin soft as silk. I suppose, in some ways, those hours while most of the world is meant to be working reveals much about what's important in our culture.

***

Lately, when I think about poetry, my mind wanders toward terms like marketability. I contemplate whether or not this poem or that poem can find a readership. I think about how to make Ward 6 an attractive destination to readers who might not otherwise spend much time perusing poetry.

As much as I hate to admit this, such thoughts aren't completely out of character for me. Working late one night at the computer clusters in college, I ran into a fellow English major and stepped outside for a smoke. At the time, I was working on poem about—of all things—the cruelty of some criticism. Alas, the poem was far from perfect in its execution, but that didn't stop me from showing it to my friend during that smoke break. Indeed, if I remember correctly, I somehow went from his comments on the poem into what must have been some sort of manic riff about my intention to be a famous poet who was unafraid to sell out.

This daydream plan, alas, has proven far more difficult to execute than I imagined. Perhaps there's still time.

***

When I first started sending poems out to various literary magazines, I simply let the poems speak for themselves. I never included the simplest cover letter, thinking that no editor could fail to see my poetic genius. Within a few months, I reasoned, my poems would be gracing the pages of The New Yorker, New Letters, and The Paris Review.

No such luck. Now, imagine for a moment that I actually was the budding literary genius that all young poets must occasionally imagine themselves to be. Would my chances of acceptance have improved?

Sure. But, to my mind, with all due respect to the above-mentioned magazines, my chances would not have improved by a great deal. You see, for all its noble aspirations, poetry remains a business. In a lot of ways, of course, it isn't exactly a viable business, but an editor must consider details like circulation, and for now, a name like John Tate or John Ashbery, is certainly more likely to sell a magazine here or there than my name—regardless of the quality of the poems. More, I doubt very strongly that those poems stood out from the rest of the slush pile. There was no glitz, no glamour, no high-budget special effects to interrupt the monotony of one of the assistant's days. Of course, given the format, no literary magazine genuinely has time to give a poem the kind of reading it deserves.

***

When I turned 30, fear of time prompted me to send out a massive flurry of submissions. That process, however, was entirely different. I included cover letters.

Now, most books on writing or poetry provide copious examples and details about how precisely to construct a cover letter. And they are, I suppose, functional, adequate, and most importantly, professional.

But, what if, your most professional letter says, in essence, I went to school, but I'm still sort of new at this whole poetry thing, and please publish me, so I can have some semblance of the career I aspire to?

Yeah. Good luck.

A cover letter is more than an extra sheet of paper to make you sweat your postage. A cover letter is an opportunity to open a dialog with whoever happens to be reading it. More, a cover letter is an opportunity to showcase those mad writing skills you've been honing.

Seize that opportunity. For me, I took a slightly off-kilter, vaguely manic approach to those letters with the primary intent of making whichever reader happened across one of them smile. And, I think it worked. Of course, it's vaguely possible that my letter is posted on bulletin board at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Hilda Raz, has scrawled across the bottom something like, "never publish this guy in Prairie Schooner."

But I'm comfortable with that risk. You see I had a blast writing those letters. They reminded me, for the briefest of moments, why I started writing and that, frankly, I'm not bad.

So, next time you submit, try it. Try crafting a cover letter that is a minor work of art in itself. Oh, don't agonize over it in the way that you would carefully consider each and every syllable of a poem, but use your voice and take advantage of your style. I suspect, that it might go a little way toward establishing the "brand name" of you.

Excuses Etcetera

2006-08-02T03:45:00.000-04:00

Outside, the sun is bearing down as the temperature crawls slightly down from a triple-digit precipice. The dogs sprint around the backyard, circling the sweet gum tree before bolting down the hillside to the mulberry tree near our neighbor's yard. The constant symphony of cicadas fills the air, and sparrows twitter an occasional whistle in what seems perfect counterpoint.

Michelle arrives home, and we laze in front of the TV, watching a favorite sitcom. Perhaps tomorrow, I will think of these moments as time squandered, but for now, I'm vaguely happy with the way my work is progressing. I leave for fast food, listening to the chugging guitar strums of a New York-based band, bobbing my head to the flittering hi-hats, and singing along with strained nascent vocals. I return home to eat the greasy food, as the puppies clambered for a morsel or two or people food, staring at both me and Michelle to see which of us would break first. Then, I sprawl out in the guest bedroom to watch an evening's worth of poker and boxing as Michelle laughs from the other room at another sitcom she's been renting lately.

Over the past few days, I've ferreted through the many poems stored on my laptop, and culled a few of them together into a couple of collections. I don't know whether or not either of the temporary manuscripts will stand up to my own critical scrutiny, but I hope that at least one book can withstand multiple revisions and the long, arduous process of submissions.

For me, these are the third and fourth "manuscripts" I've had. In college, I had my honor's thesis, which lacked the cohesion of an actual book—although, as I remember the "collection," it came close. In retrospect, of course, I'm actually quite happy that nothing from that period—other than a self-published chapbook—ever became public. I do have a few poems, written while I was in college that have stuck with me. I still think they're publishable, despite a little evidence to the contrary, and plan to include at least one poem from that time period in my first book of poetry.

The second manuscript I put together was actually my master's thesis. At the moment, I think there are only two (or is it three) copies of that document in existence. One resides in Miami and the other one is in the possession of my primary advisor. I do not doubt that there are quality poems in that manuscript or that, if I had more patience and a stronger stomach for rejection when I was in my early 20s, I would have gotten it published it by now—and regretted the decision a few years hence.

Not that I never sent those poems out—I did. Scattered about the country are a dozen or so editors that have seen poems that, if I had a choice, would not have my name attached to them. Of course, none of them will likely remember a single line or a single phrase.

You see, about a year after graduate school, I moved back to Dallas and into a second-floor studio apartment with bright blue carpet and a bright blue balcony overlooking the parking lot. The apartment was about a mile from one of the projects where my mother lived when I was younger, and about a mile and a half from the nearest coffee shop.

Since I was working a temp job at the time, I didn't yet have a car, and rode the bus on a circuitous route down Northwest highway to the building of a motor oil company that had just been acquired by their sternest competition. Each day, I'd spend the 45-minute bus ride to work reading Kierkegaard, the Poetic Edda, or some volume of contemporary poetry or fiction that had caught my eye at Half-Price Books. All day, I'd fill boxes with file folders, tape those boxes, inventory files, shred paperwork, and do whatever other miscellany was necessary while employee after employee picked up their last day's pay and I kept on working, until the building was empty of everyone other than myself, another temp, and the woman who gave us our orders.

Each evening, I'd stand on the corner, thinking about music or poetry, and wait for that same bus to take me back to my neighborhood in North Dallas. Sometimes, I'd exit the bus early and stroll up Greenville Avenue for a spot of coffee or to pick up a few groceries. Always, I wished I had a car.

If I ended up at the cafe, I'd sit down to write, scrawling one thing or another in a notebook before walking home with a cigarette as my only company. At home, I'd either watch a movie and crash on the semblance of a bed I had, or I'd flick on the old 386 desktop and type away at a few poems, revising and saving what I had.

At some point, during that year and a half, I did manage to submit a few poems to a variety of literary journals. I remember waiting anxiously for a reply, as though I'd asked a girl out. Each time an envelope arrived with my own shaky ink address on it, I felt giddy. I'd run up the black metal steps, fumble with my keys, and tear open the tiny missive, brimming with both certainty and hope.

Inevitably, I'd find my poems, neatly folded, with a bright colored form rejection slip. Alas.

Of course it stung, and at the time, I pinned far too much hope on a hand-written note from one editor.

Yet, after that first flurry of rejections, I didn't send out any poems for about six years. Instead, I ended up in California, chasing the dotcom dream, working odd hours, and writing in furious spurts between my day jobs and my romantic life.

In retrospect, I do not doubt that rejection had more to do with my inaction than I'd care to admit. Even now, given relatively ample time, I'm hesitant to submit my best work. Of course, I have myriad excuses—some of which are even valid. I'm uncertain about which markets to try. I'm uncertain how many poems I have that are—to me—finished. I haven't decided on a marketing approach for my cover letters. I have other projects that need my attention more. I don't have any stamps. My printer needs ink. Etcetera.

I suppose, in all honesty, that if I'm only writing poetry for myself, than these excuses are fine. I may as well wait for my perfect book of forty or fifty perfect poems to be completed. I may as well fiddle endlessly with one poem for months on end until it glitters like a rhinestone. I may as well wait for that book that's certain to win the Pulitzer.

If, on the other hand, I truly write poems so that they can be read and enjoyed, I have to suspect that I've done a tiny portion of the world a disservice. I should have already taken the rejection lumps I'm about to receive. I should have already signed a copy of my book as many as 50 times.

Unless you submit, of course, there's no way to know for sure. Now, which poems did I want to lose for 3 months to Poetry first?

Bread Crumbs

2006-07-29T10:37:00.000-04:00

Early Saturday morning and no one else is awake. The dogs are stirring. I've opened their crates, but after adjusting to my presence, they've opted for another in their daily series of long naps. The house is shiver-inducing, and after smelling gas again on Thursday, we must survive another weekend without hot water.

If I knew any curses in Arabic, I'd undoubtedly insert them here, just as I reference the "home warranty" company. Of course, living without hot water is just a minor inconvenience. Sure, speaking with customer service and trying to convince them that there actually is a problem with my hot water heater (and not the ventilation system) has knotted my stomach and made me a little bit anxious about the always-present possibility of one sort of ulcer or another, but my family's problems pale in comparison to many of the difficulties with which I grew up.

By worldwide standards, I suppose, my family was wealthy. We never had major issues with food. There were nights when we had bologna for dinner and weeks where groceries couldn't be bought without credit, but I never went hungry. I never waited in the long lines to see a doctor at the county hospital. I never worried about having new clothes or new shoes when I needed them. We never had our electricity disconnected, and we never had anyone knock on our door with the intent of repossessing our car, our furniture, or our television.

In retrospect, this might be a miracle. I honestly don't know if, had I been in my father's position, I could have managed it. But I do a fair job of helping my wife manage our family—even if it is a bit discomfiting on occasion. In fact, despite my current semi-sabbatical from the corporate world, I constantly contemplate the future of my family. I can't remember the last day I "took off." I accept weekend freelance work at the drop of a hat. I write as much as I can handle. Plus, I am constantly trying to shape the ghost-like apparition I think of as my career.

On some days, when I'm not actually strapped to my laptop, clicking away at a paragraph, a line, or sentence penned by someone else, I ask myself whether or not the risk I'm taking is worth it. And make no mistake, working from home on a freelance career, an unfinished novel, a few volumes of poetry, and an online literary magazine is a risk. What if I'm not as good as I think I am? Worse, what if there's no market for the material I create—regardless of its quality? What if I simply don't have the stamina to execute each task? What if I bounce from project to project, following the whims of creation, but never complete a task? What if my business acumen is simply lacking and I send each finely honed manuscript to inappropriate markets?

Perhaps some of these nagging questions seem familiar to you. Perhaps, as I had for years, you've often contemplated freelancing. When you're sitting in a cubicle under the constant hum of fluorescent lights, I think it's difficult not to imagine a life where sneaking a nap at 2 in the afternoon wouldn't get you fired. I do it all the time.

Of course, the problem is that each time I take an afternoon nap, it's because I'm exhausted. Either one household crisis or another has drained my energy or I've already spent between 4 and 6 hours on the assemblage of tasks before me each day. Those naps make an additional 6 to 8 hours worth of work possible. But try explaining such rationale to someone who's working for someone else—or your parents.

With all of these doubts, why do I even bother?

Because, frankly, they're just doubts. If you let yourself be paralyzed by such doubts, then perhaps writing isn't the career for you. If you let the doubts affect the way you write, rather than relying on the interplay of your intelligence and the words themselves, perhaps you might be better suited to trying your hand at haberdashery.

For me, such doubts are a roadmap to the territory of poetry. Without them, I would be lost. They circumscribe the space in which I work. They remind me, incidentally, of my fears and my ambitions.

Perhaps, like other writers, I should simply ignore those doubts and move on with the business at hand. Yet, I find a kind of comfort in staring them down. I realize that there may come a time in my life when the doubts become too loud or incessant to ignore. I'm fairly young after all. My finances aren't too bad. And I know I have at least some talent.

For now, each time a doubt bubbles to the surface like sulfurous fumes from some unseen volcanic seam, I use that doubt. I may speculate about why that particular doubt surfaced, but invariably, those doubts take me back to the page. I may alter my approach slightly. I may take a day or two away from the particular project that elicited the doubts. But invariably, I resolve to work harder, and I'll keep making that resolution until it isn't humanly possible to work any harder.

Perhaps this is merely the curse of a protestant work ethic, but to me, without the oft-disturbing single-mindedness of a professional, it's easy to get lost in the dark wood of literature.

Swimming

2006-07-26T11:23:00.000-04:00

Wednesday already—and the week seems to have started only now. I'm sitting outside, sipping on premium coffee from a local gas station and thinking about my day. After a weekend filled with gas-fume drama, two days of frustrating freelance work copyediting the script of a writer who couldn't tell the difference between a participle and a party, and a long night where my wife suffered through a mild but discomforting illness, I have the entire day in front of me to use as I see fit.

There are no vets to visit, no repairmen to call, no children to entertain, no scripts to scrutinize, no emails to compose, and no websites to be built. The day belongs to me and my dogs. For the moment, the dogs—both Dixie and Archie—are sniffing around the backyard in search of tiny morsels to broaden their palettes. Piles of just-pulled Johnson grass lay scattered about the yard. Birds trill songs from our neighbor's sweet gum tree. The hum of cicadas lolls from distant treetops. The morning sun burns damp from yellowed stalks of grass.

***

I’ve retreated inside to the air-conditioned cool of our 50-year-old house. The dogs are sprawled asleep on the office floor, stretched out as though they were ready to burst into a run. They’ve exhausted themselves with dashes across the yard, trailing an airborne football and intermittent confrontations with each other of bared teeth and slapping paws. The sound of wind, traffic, and cicadas seeps in from outside, and my computer's cooling fan whirls as I type. There is no other sound until Dixie stirs, rattling the tags on her collar for a moment.

***

There have been moments in my life when I would have abhorred such silence. The stereo would need to play continuously or the television would have been flicked on to stave off any notions of loneliness.

This morning, such quiet seems a blessing. I can listen as thoughts form on the page before me. Words become sentences. Sentences become paragraphs. One idea builds upon another and another.

***

In graduate school, we tried to teach our students that writing was more than a simple skill or simply a requirement needed to earn your diploma. Instead, we tried to demonstrate that writing is process through which you can evaluate and shape your own thoughts. We argued that, in most cases, it was impossible to know what you actually thought about something until you wrote it down.

These letters are such peculiar tools. What other tool could actively change the very nature of how you think?

***

During my senior year of college, I lived in an attic apartment a few miles from campus. The nearest bus stop was about a quarter mile of steep hills from my where I lived. Each day, after class, I spent the time walking uphill from the bus stop to my apartment contemplating poetry.

When I think of that image of myself, it seems I was always contemplating poetry. When I was not writing poetry, reading poetry, or working on the sundry classes required for my degree, I was often contemplating it. I thought about how poems worked, what made a poem, and what precisely this thing called poetry was.

Ironically, I still think about such things. There are no clear answers—at least none that can be articulated easily.

***

Defining poetry is a bit like catching a trout with your bare hands. If you think you have a grip, the little beast will, undoubtedly, shake itself free and disappear upstream. Now, I like the notion. I'm comfortable knowing that my knowledge is limited and always will be. I realize that poetry, like a trout, won't stay in the same shallows for long. Nevertheless, despite the never-ending change, poetry, to my mind, has always been able to replicate that sense of quietude. It has always offered us a portal into our own thoughts, the sound of cicadas humming.

Ward 6

2006-07-23T14:08:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting outside beneath the shade of the sweet gum tree. The air conditioner rattles in front of me, like a wild animal with an injured leg snarling out at the world. Our dogs, Archie and Dixie, are supine on the sun-drenched slope of our back yard. Dixie squints into the distance, as though surveying the wilderness beyond the back yard for the slightest sign of danger. Archie twists his body around a dried-out twig of Johnson grass.

Inside, my niece and nephew are captivated by cartoons. My wife and her sister are tidying the house for the imminent arrival of their mother, who is returning from a respite with her sister in a small town in Indiana.

I've spent the morning, after procuring coffee, perusing the seeming plethora of email accounts I use, hoping to find a poem as polished as a gem or a story that crackles like thunder.

Last week, rather than devoting what spare time I could find to poetry, fiction, or contemplative essays, I delved into the world of the Internet and emerged with this:

Ward 6 Review

Ward 6 Review is my attempt to produce an online literary journal. I've probably invested a few hundred hours into mulling over the idea, selecting a domain name, finding hosting, and designing the website itself. I've also spent a fair amount of time contemplating how to spread the word about the journal, increase its visibility, and manage to convince poets and writers around the globe to send in the highest quality work possible.

I want to turn Ward 6 into something phenomenal, and although I've started along a path that I think will work, it's difficult not to fret about the energy, the money, and the time that I've sacrificed to this notion.

So why am I doing this?

Clearly, an enterprise like Ward 6 won't turn into the next Salon or Slate. It will not, in all likelihood, turn any sort of profit. More, being the managing editor for an online journal won't help the career I envision for myself as a freelance writer and novelist. In fact, it will, take time away from me that I could devote to those pursuits.

The answer, to my mind, is two-fold. Incidentally, I think that the experience will prove useful to me. I'll learn, once again, how difficult the other side of the submission process is. Perhaps I'll be able to sympathize with those tired editors who will read my submissions and better understand how to market my own work. The primary reason, quite simply, is that I love literature. For the moment, I can afford to provide a space where great works can be shown to the world and hopefully, in some small way, this will prove meaningful.

Think, for a moment, about why you write. What better service could I provide than the opportunity, however slight, to be heard, to be read, to have your name seen?

Now, like a farmer, I'll till the soil, fertilize it, and pray for rain.

Vanishing Act

2006-07-23T02:30:00.000-04:00

A piano chimes along the melodic line of a pop song, hammers hitting string in some studio long ago. Though it's approaching 1 in the morning, my wife is sitting at the dining room table, playing gin rummy with her sister, one of her nephews, and her niece. The dogs are milling about. I imagine the confused computations that crunch through their tiny brains. Do they wonder why everyone is still up?

My sister-in-law arrived with her two children and her dog, Gromit, on Thursday. Since then, the weekend has been filled with the kind of minor conflicts that could one day be the fodder for great literature—but only the fodder. I spent much of Friday waiting for work that would never arrive. Friday night was spent fending off the incessant requests of my nephew for another video game until my wife finally offered to float the boy a loan. Our living room has filled with the faint sulfuric aroma added to natural gas. The children have argued over a magenta crayon and the color of the word "magenta" while I attempted—foolishly—to sleep. A plumber we found through our home warranty has checked out our water heater—only to declare that the problem was neither covered by our warranty nor something he could fix after 5 minutes of gazing into a corner of our basement with a flashlight. I spent much of the morning on the phone with someone in India trying to resolve a technical issue with a new piece of networking equipment. I spent much of the afternoon on the telephone with the home warranty people. In between the periods of drool-inducing Muzak, I drove my wife for coffee twice and off to a local discount retailer to drop a fair amount of cash on art supplies intended to keep our niece and nephew occupied, creative, and relatively quiet.

For a few minutes here and there, I've had a little time with the dogs and the barest minimum of time to myself. Now, the office door is closed. Outside, cicadas sing. I long for the impossibility of a hot shower and catch myself fantasizing about Monday when, hopefully, the necessary repairs to our hot water heater will have been made.

But, at this moment, I've managed to vanish from the puppies, my wife, my sister-in-law, my niece, and my nephew. For now, I'm happy with the slightest falsetto ringing out from my stereo and the soothing rhythm of arranging words on a page.

***

I must admit, of course, that part of my frustration at the day has nothing to do with the myriad small conflicts listed above. Instead, I've been pining for this moment, for the quiet contemplation that comes with writing. I've been longing to steal a few moments for myself and to devote them to a kind of ordering of my world. The knotted back and churning stomach of business is now a memory. The clenched teeth of the uncomfortable anger that children miraculously engender have been replaced by the faintest of smiles. For me, writing, I suppose, truly is therapeutic.

In the past, I've railed against the idea that positing one's own problems (which are seldom as bad as we believe) as fiction or poetry. Yet, that's precisely how I came to poetry (blessed adolescence). I think, ironically, that many of us who are drawn to writing in the first place develop some aptitude because of difficulty communicating. With words, I suppose, there is a measure of control that is so often missing from our everyday lives. If you dislike a sentence or a line, you can simply strike it and the phrase is obliterated. You can labor over such works, varying the tone with the slightest shifts, diffusing your images with the slightest of colors. You can select the sounds that you find most appealing, providing someone, somewhere with a series of pleasing syllables to utter under their voice as they read to themselves in the imagined environ of a cafe, heavy with the scent of morning coffee.

***

Often, life will intersect and interrupt with what you write. Regardless of whether or not you imagine moments from your own life as the raw material for a collection of poems—many around you may. More, time can be a killjoy. You can stare at your clock and notice that it's creeping past 2 AM or you can keep pushing yourself into the night, just for the sake of those few moments when your sense of self seems to dissolve into the rhythm of the words that appear upon your page. You can find the time somehow. And, if you're anything like me, this may not be healthy.

***

Today—after my first headache had subsided and before my second started bubbling in the cauldron I sometimes fancy bubbles just beneath my skull, I phoned my father. We had a long, marvelous conversation. I can't remember the details and can only vaguely remember the subjects that we touched upon. It isn't important. What is important, at least for my purposes here, is the way that conversation made me feel.

I was on the phone for almost an hour. Neither one of us really asked anything of the other. We simply listened and told stories about our lives for the past week. I talked about the house, and the problems I'm having. He listened and offered a kindly word of advice.

I didn't mention my novel, which is momentarily stalled in the fifth chapter. He didn't mention any of my writing. Yet, when I think of my father, I think of someone who is almost absurdly supportive of my writing. He, I think, understands that it's important to me. He also encourages me, now and again, with the best advice any writer can receive: sit down and start typing. Still, those incidental mentions of writing have been filling my father's ears for more than a decade now. And, to be frank, there isn't much to show from those years of thinking of myself as a writer or a poet or whatever. Now, I know why.

But what I don't understand is how my father had the wherewithal through all of those years to keep encouraging me simply and bluntly. He never, I suppose, thought that such a path would be easy, but he never, to my mind, has doubted that I could do it.

I think, if you're a writer, you need people like that in your life. You need people who can see how absurdly important writing is to you and can offer those tiny morsels of support without praising you a dog owner would praise a puppy that finally managed to show him that he needed to go outside.

You need people who will allow you a few moments of selfishness each day. You need someone who will understand why you would type for hours just to find those few seconds of quiet joy when the words tumble from your fingertips, and you know, somehow, that they are right.

Hucksters—One and All

2006-07-14T00:52:00.000-04:00

The entire family of my wife, my dogs, and me is outside waiting for someone from the gas company to arrive. Today, Michelle detected the faintest of odors in the living room near the front door and window. Hopefully, it's nothing major, but everyone is healthy and the house has not blown up—even though I suspect the leak may have been present for more than just today.

Dixie—despite the tenderness of the incision on her belly—is meandering about, contemplating a gladiatorial confrontation with Archie. Of course, I have no doubt that she'd win, but on her vet's orders, she doesn't need to be engaged in such activity.

Within a few minutes someone from the gas company arrives. He walks around our house, from the basement to the garage and back to the living room, following the path of natural gas. He holds a little yellow device attached to a long snake-like tube. It takes samples from the air, checking for gas. He doesn't notice the smell. Even though Michelle and I both seemed convinced of that slightly noxious aroma they add to natural gas to make what normally is odorless become a lingering presence in the room.

But it was nothing. A false alarm. A trick, perhaps, of our combined imaginations. Or perhaps a plastic bought thoughtlessly at the local convenience store has slipped under the sofa. Or the scents from the storage room beneath the porch are seeping into the living room. I don't know. I only know I felt a bit foolish following the man around, surprised that there was nothing to find and thinking that it had been a waste of time.

Long, long ago in a state adjacent to the one I live in now, a fiction teacher told me that the stories that I'd been handing in for workshop weren't really stories. Nothing happened. There was conflict, I suppose, but no building action, no resolution.

I'd set up confrontations, but crawfish my way out of them. I'd describe an ominous setting, but take the reader to a party instead. I'd build characters on the precipice of irrationality and let the run away from conflict to cower in bathrooms. I think, even now, that life is like that. The potential for conflict is everywhere around us: honking horns and morning traffic, puppies with tender incision scars growling at a passing rottweiler, the scent of gas in your living room. Yet, for the most part, we manage to avoid confrontation. We seldom fling curses at the convenience store clerk who is in the back room smoking rather than fixing the nachos we thought we needed. We seldom succumb to our lizard-brain instincts to pummel the person who cuts in line in front of us at the gas station. We seldom let tense conversations with our significant others erupt into escalating brouhahas that end up in a division of mutual properties. Yet, isn't that the space that fiction (and to a large degree poetry) occupies?

Poetry, of course, has a long tradition of narration. And, to me, narrative poetry needs to follow many of the same strictures as fiction. You need to have a clear, consistent voice. There needs to be building action and a climax (or turn if you like). The characters need to be more than thin cutouts that would work for a booklet of paper dolls.

Why do we read such things? And why wouldn't we read a story about an average guy with an average life who consistently hovers around conflict?

Think about it—which poem would you rather read—the poem where I phone the gas company and sit outside waiting for half an hour or the poem where I phone the gas company, head outside, when my cell phone rings, and I answer it, not thinking about the potential for a spark until after that potential is realized?

If this were a story, which would you rather read? Why?

Coddling (2 Days)

2006-07-13T03:33:00.000-04:00

Rain taps against the sidewalks outside, trickling from the rain gutters, splattering against the leaves, and cooling the air with wet. Dixie, our Jack Russell Terrier who underwent a successful surgery yesterday, has been groaning off and on throughout the morning. Now, after perking up enough to wag her tail and lick my face a little, she’s curled up beside me, sleeping. Archie, our Italian Greyhound, is wrapped in a blanket a couple of inches from her, after spending a few minutes outside in the rain.

As for me, I've spent what time today wasn't spent nursing Dixie contemplating the notion of starting an online literary magazine. Granted, there are thousands (or more) of sites floating in the ether of the web, but is there room for one more? And would it be worth my time? And what would I name it?

***

Last night, I decided to buy myself a domain name and procure hosting for that oft-contemplated literary webzine. I spent hours contemplating names, imagining logos, icons, and design elements. Plus, I spent hours searching the Internet for a hosting company that wasn’t too horribly expensive but offered features enough for me to build that hypothetical website without learning far more HTML, hiring someone, or buying a ton of software.

Around midnight, I thought I’d found a good deal based on the description on a particular company’s website. I entered my info, read the terms and conditions, and clicked the submit button.

As soon as I had enough information to get to the control panel, I was there, cruising around and looking for the tools that had lured me to that particular host. I even went so far as to set up three email addresses: one for me, one for my wife, and one for future submissions. But when I looked for anything to help with the design of web pages, I found nothing. Instead, every last icon was grayed out and unavailable for the plan I'd purchased—even the items that were touted in bright blue print elsewhere on the company’s website. When I chatted with the folks at customer service, they were polite enough, but informed me that I'd need to upgrade to a plan that cost almost twice as much to see those services.

Bait and switch.

I cancelled the account and asked for my money back. I assume that they'll keep that promise, at least. I also made a report to the Better Business Bureau. Actually, that's the first time that I ever felt angry enough to file a complaint—even though I tend to see hucksters and scam artists everywhere. So, I suppose, when I was certain that I someone tried to rip me off, and not just suspicious, I filed a complaint.

The whole process, a cocktail of unbridled enthusiasm and hope at a new undertaking mixed with fountains of disappointment, kept me awake well past any reasonable bedtime. And I was expecting business that morning.

***

The dogs have been crated for the night. Archie, the Italian Greyhound, whimpers in his birdlike way. Dixie has looked at me with pleading eyes for much of the night—much of it due to the soreness of the incision from her surgery.

I have spent the day waiting for work that never came and coddling my dog. I managed two naps on the sofa—one in the early morning and one through the late afternoon. During both naps, Archie curled in a crevice at the crook of my knees, and Dixie sprawled across my torso, carefully adjusting her weight so that no pressure fell on the stitches and the reddened skin they hold together.

For brief intervals, she behaved as though nothing were wrong. She gnawed for a few minutes on a favorite rope, gulped down treats of shredded cheese, and stalked June bugs on the front porch. Yet, today, she's spent far more time acting as though she were in serious pain. Worse, the pain makes her shiver with fear if she thinks Michelle or myself want to examine her wound or pick her up or do anything she might perceive as threatening.

***

Life has a habit of interloping on dreams and ambition. I suppose it should be impossible to write poem or contemplate a story when someone (or in my case something) you love is in pain. A simple touch or the mere fact of your presence can sometimes mean so much more than a few measly words might ever mean. Personally, I'd rather be a good person than a good poet, and in many ways, I suspect the former is more difficult to achieve than the latter.

But then again, I like to imagine that there are moments in everyone's life when something like a poem might help make that simple touch or the fact of your presence easier to manage. And, if I'm wrong in this, I may as well stop writing.

After all, I could make a decent living penning the fluff in a corporate newspaper or copyediting financial reports.

Bravissimo

2006-07-10T12:10:00.000-04:00

The wind sways the stalks of the spiderwort and rustles through what hair I have. It is cooling on a summer morning. Archie is laying in sun at the edge of our backyard, staring at me as I type. He seems vaguely lost without Dixie here to bat him around.

The vet's office just phoned. Dixie's surgery is done and she is doing fine. Now, I must wait a few scant hours for her to recover enough to come home. Then, Michelle and I will have to be as vigilant as secret police, watching her every move so that she doesn't slow her recovery with an ill-advised leap from the sofa onto Archie's head.

Luckily, the World Cup is over now. Consequently, other than writing and business, nothing will prevent me from devoting my full attention to the dogs while Dixie recovers. Even though I did not watch the entirety of the Cup, I did spend many, many hours watching the action on the pitch from somewhere in Germany. Now, the Italians have won. My wife, who we both think of as Italian although she is adopted and her father is of German stock, took the news with a knowing smile, as though an Italian victory was the only possible outcome.

In deference to fate, I spent a couple of hours on the Internet looking for Italian poems. Oddly, despite the fact that the English and American tradition of poetry is derived from the work of Greeks and Romans, I've encountered very little Italian poetry via translation other than the obligatory Dante. More, from my brief searches, it seems to me that the influence of French and Chinese poetics had a much more profound effect on American poetry in the 20th century. Of course, my knowledge of contemporary Italian Literature is limited at best. I know of Eco and Calvino, so I won't claim my impressions are anywhere near informed.

Yet, I did manage to find a few poems, translated into English, that struck me as admirable, and in honor of the Italian victory, I'd like to talk about one of them today: “Kafka at Bologna” by Gregorio Scalise.

At first glance, the poem reminds me of the work of Jorie Graham. Unlike much of contemporary American poetry, the poet does not seem to fear the use of abstraction or rhetorical techniques. Although there are moments of stunning concrete imagery, the poem does not move from image to image, crafting a delicate personal narrative, as you might expect from an American poem. Instead, a philosophical thread seems to provide the cohesiveness of the poem.

And it is the imagined thread of Kafka’s purpose.

Yet, even as the Scalise’s narrator flits through history referencing philosophy to prepare his argument with lines like: “the season opens with a polemic/against the Stoics but the day is against/those arguments:…” the poem never dissolves into pure abstractions. Instead, the poem offers moments of concrete imagery, like “the name that persisted/as far as the border with the rain” before veering again toward abstraction.

Throughout the poem, that play between the abstract and concrete imagery, seems to echo the narrator's argument, as well as the dialectic of Kafka's work itself. Consider, for example, these lines:

He can only be received again:
his alter ego in this projection
transforms the forest into a cultural zone:
among the nocturnal gestures
a virtuous exercise can be narrated
in common words: the swallows come
to visit Kafka's body.

Here, perhaps, we have a brilliant encapsulation of the writing process—complex “projections” narrated into common words. I adore these lines and doubt, as with the entire poem, that I can do them justice.

Scalise, with Kafka as a guide of sorts, wrestles with history and the nature of society and writing throughout the poem. With the final lines:

The altar boy walks between dialectic and
structure: he shakes the branches at
sunset, unaware that nothing is a syllogism:
and an insidious pair
leads a central idea to a baroque cart:
because of his solitude
he only lives twice.
The distance conceals those motives,
the defects whirl in the air,
he had conceived an important project
but saw his intentions vanish.

And here, we see the point. Our generic altar boy, symbolic of societal organization, youth, and religion “shakes the branches”. He leads us to the central idea, corrupted, dissolving with “distance” as “defects whirl in the air” until “intentions vanish.”

Amazing. I doubt, very seriously, that I've done the poem any justice, but as you head off toward other tasks, consider this question: what makes this poem worth reading? How does Scalise manage to weave multiple arguments and perspectives through the fabric of the poem without the poem itself falling apart?

Oh, and one last thing: congratulations, Italy.

A Lovely Line

2006-07-10T02:58:00.000-04:00

I'm off to sleep soon. I need to be up early to drive Dixie, the Jack Russell Terrier who must dream of a career as a miner, to the vet for surgery. Again, I'm not sure what happened to the day. Each action, from mowing the lawn to napping on the sofa, seemed vital. Yet, tomorrow is already closing fast like a semi in your rearview mirror on a mountain pass and my only brush with writing was a few hours spent organizing a series of poems that may one day be a book.

Tonight, after I had my fill of television, I ran across this line by Edith Sitwell:

"See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:"

It's from her poem "Still Falls the Rain." I think it's a lovely line that I wanted to share—even though I'm not entirely sure what draws me to that line. Perhaps it is the seemingly simplistic repetition of the word "see" or the seeming typo in the middle of the line, which could be a tacit acknowledgement of our comparative imperfection. Then again, maybe we can blame the unexpected use of the preposition "in."

What do you think? What makes this line worth reading, 64 years after it was written? Could you do the same?

Faith

2006-07-06T12:09:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting outside, my laptop splotched with shadows and pockets of light from the canopy of the sweet gum tree. A citronella candle flickers beside me, but I have been bit by four mosquitoes so far this morning.

Archie and Dixie dash about the yard, honing their gladiatorial skills in case the need for actual combat arises. They return to the patio, clustering near my ankles—but then zoom into the yard.

But in the summer humidity, they tire quickly.

Over the long weekend, Michelle's family came to visit and I had a few hours worth of copyediting to dull my senses. With the frenzy of cleaning before their arrival, the traditional grilling of hotdogs and hamburgers, a few hundred tosses of the football to my nephews with a little help from my niece, a few hours helping my father-in-law find the oil filter on my latish-model subcompact sedan (above the axle, a few inches from the front-right wheel basin), a family game of Trivia Pursuit, a day's worth of freelancing work, and a near complete immersion in a hand-held video game system, writing temporarily garnered far less attention than it normally warrants. I was, I suppose, on a vacation of sorts.

Even with a lifestyle like mine, which for the most part is devoted to the craft of writing and the faith that my fiction (and maybe a little poetry) might sell well enough to keep me out of the corporate job market for good, finding the verve to write each day is difficult. If you add a fulltime job, a heated relationship, or a dash of devoted television watching to the mix, it's easy to imagine those dreams of penning the next great American novel or a slim volume of stunning poems simply fading away like those hormone-drenched visions of a white-picket fence life with your first boyfriend or girlfriend.

More, writing, unlike any other art, uses the raw materials of syntax that virtually anyone—even a child—understands. So, why should we be surprised if it sometimes seems as though everyone thinks they can write? Of course, as with basic mathematics, not everyone has the same facility for manipulating phrases or conjuring metaphors. Nevertheless, as a writer, talent should be the least of your concerns. Myriad talented poets never publish a single poem. Whole galaxies of writers brimming with a remarkable facility to craft a sentence never publish a single story. The writers who succeed, it seems to me, are those who can sustain themselves for years on something like faith. They are the writers who practice their devotion daily; who cast out the doubts of rejection and the false confidences of praise in favor of a few stolen moments cloistered from the world, muttering finely honed phrases; who read their own stories again and again, with their red pens poised over the body of the work, just as Abraham stood above Isaac, ready to sacrifice his son for the greater good.

Although you'll find countless discussions and explorations of religion throughout world literature—from John Donne to William Blake to Gerard Manley Hopkins, I do not mean to suggest that writing must explore that aspect of the human experience to be successful. Instead, I only want to suggest that—to succeed—a writer must have a kind of faith in himself that resembles religious devotion. You must believe, against any possible evidence, that you will succeed. More, you must find a way to act upon that faith in yourself, integrating it into the very fibers of your life, the rhythms of your day.

As for myself, at this moment, I believe.

Parallelism

2006-07-01T01:37:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, my favorite magazine was the now defunct Omni. As a repository of science fact, science fiction, and the occasional foray deep into questionable scientific ventures like ufology and cryptozoology, it, along with Scientific American and 3-2-1 Contact, served as the template for my dreams.

***

On the way to buy coffee, I started thinking about the barista at the store we frequent. He's slightly older than myself and scheduled for exploratory surgery over the weekend. Quickly, he is learning how heavy a word like malignant might feel or how light the word benign can be. I hope he isn't forced to twist his tongue around words like "cyclophosphamide" or "doxorubicin."

***

I never read fiction as a child, even though I remember countless hours at the local library under my father’s watch. I always wandered to the non-fiction section of children's books and perused the wildlife sections—focusing inevitably on the section reserved for snakes. Freudians might have you believe this had something to do with sex. Personally, I wonder how Freud could have failed to notice the endless fascination most young boys have with those creatures that make their parents squirm. Perhaps, my obsession had more to do with learning to face fear.

***

After a fairly long conversation with the barista, where I offered the best platitudes I could manage and did my best, simply, to listen, the conversation followed a trail of cigarette smoke back to his days in college. Cigarettes were sold in the cafeteria. He'd studied International Relations, but money ran dry a semester short of graduating. I told him he should finish—take a year of evening classes at one of the schools around here, then look for a sales job.

***

One day, when there were still swings on the set behind the brick apartment complex where I grew up, I sat on one of those blue plastic swings talking to my friend. We were, I assured him, going to be scientists. We could work in the same lab. But we both needed to study hard. I was, I think, 11.

He's an electrician now. I'm a writer.

***

On the way home, I thought about the barista again, stung a bit by his absence—even though I expected it today. He was having surgery. The lump on his shoulder was biopsied. The spot on his chest will be the subject of a CT scan in a few days.

I drove the usual route home, singing along to a pop song, and smoking another cigarette. I'm not certain when I decided to become a doctor, but I know when I changed my mind. I dropped chemistry my first semester of college. I just couldn't understand basic solution chemistry.

***

In fleeting moments, I wonder how much longer it would be even vaguely feasible to take the MCAT and apply to medical school. I wonder what life was like for William Carlos Williams, and if he thought, even for a moment, that the aims of his two professions are sometimes the same: to help us with our fears and to comfort us when no help can be had.

Lately Blues

2006-06-29T01:40:00.000-04:00

Outside slivers of lightning divide the sky and cool, cool rain tumbles, intermittently, on the sidewalks and stalks of wild grass in our overgrown lawn. Dixie, the Jack Russell terrier whose lineage we’ve begun to suspect, is laying on the spread out comforter, her head propped near the base of the faux arts-and-craft torchiere near my office closet. Archie, the sickly Italian Greyhound who has inexplicably stopped coughing, is sprawled on his back on the sofa in the living room next to my wife, who is watching one or another decorating show.

Now, the rain is nothing more than a few drops of dew on the yew bushes that line the front porch. The neighborhood is as quiet as a daycare at naptime. The murmur of traffic on far off streets drifts along with the whispers of crickets.

Where have I been?

It has been three days since I sat here contemplating the shape of my night, thinking of poetry. Since then, I've struggled through the barrage of acronyms, jargon, split infinitives, dangling participles, and comma splices that is copyediting; I've attended a baseball game where the oldest professional franchise in the country lost to a cellar-dwelling team from Kansas City; and I've almost slammed my head against the wrought-iron patio furniture with enough force to jar myself out of the moss-covered ditches where my novel currently festers—not that I recommend or actually practice anything resembling self-flagellation (other than copyediting).

On the other hand, here is what I have not done lately: I have not managed to write a poem; to clean out the sink or my coffee pot, both of which are becoming threatening enough that I may leave the light on in the kitchen over night; to mow the lawn, which is now sprouting wildflowers, clovers, and toadstools; to do a load of laundry for myself; to venture forth into the wilderness of Cincinnati to see live music at the best festival the city holds each year; to shop with my wife for enough groceries to supplement my all-cereal diet; to shave my head again before 3/4-inch strands revolt against gravity with posture more perfect than most of my body can manage.

More and more, I'm realizing that such sacrifices are simply part of the writing life. There is only so much time in the day, after all, and, like 80% of the world, I enjoy sleeping and watching the World Cup—often simultaneously. Consequently, I make choices, every day, about what I want to accomplish. Often enough, even with those choices, I don't accomplish what I set out to do, and unlike most aspiring writers, I don't, at the moment, need to work 40 hours a week. More, the goals I do set and sometimes reach are—compared to corporate work—minimal. If I write a total of 1,500 words in a single day, including this project, I'm thrilled. I'll stroll around the house as though nothing could ever be wrong (until tomorrow), smiling in what my wife must think resembles a creepy imitation of a beatific smile on the lips of a saint painted by Titian.

Yet, I think, the sacrifices a writer must make run deeper than what I've managed to communicate so far. Often enough, when I think I should be tapping away at my keyboard, furrowing my brow to find the next line break, I'll waste minute after a minute checking a variety of email accounts, hoping for a bit of email that isn't an advertisement for Viagra or a thinly veiled attempt by a Nigerian twenty-something to convince me to buy him a Cadillac. Despite the constant presence of two dogs who are almost as attached to me as they are to sleep and the company of my wife for most of the week, I still find this lifestyle lonely. I still long to be somewhere else—like a cocktail party where the only sound that rises above the chatter of conversation is the clinking of martini glasses.

Yet, if asked to imagine a perfect day, there would be words upon words firing the synapses in my brain, shooting electrical impulses up and down my spine. There would be the constant click of the keypad clattering on in time to the swirling sounds of recorded guitar that fill my office.

I contradict myself, I know. Sometimes, happiness is a contradiction you understand.

Real Spaces That Aren't There

2006-06-25T02:41:00.000-04:00

What has happened to the day? Already it's late—far later than I suspected it was. Yet my wife is still awake for some peculiar reason. And she's cleaning. Perhaps someone has laced Cincinnati's water supply with a mind-altering substance of some sort. If this were so, the streets outside would be brimming with panic-stricken zombies, would it not?

Outside, instead, the Ohio streets are quiet. The crickets chirrup rhythmic intonations into the night. Our air conditioner whirls away, its slightly off-center fan rattling with each revolution. A jet, from departure point unknown, passes overhead on its way to the sprawling international airport in Northern Kentucky that my wife sometimes vanishes to for three or four days.

I'm really not sure what became of the day. My wife, at one point, managed to convince me to embrace procrastination for the sake of a little nostalgia in the shape of the first Harry Potter film. Business remains undone and a handful of chores—like mowing the lawn, changing the oil in our car, and scaling a small mountain of dishes—seem as though they might sprout arms, legs, and a baseball bat and threaten to smash my kneecaps up if I don't straighten out my act.

I did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time on Zoetrope.com. If you've never visited, it is an interesting site that offers a workshop-like environment where you can critique poems, stories, screen plays, and myriad other artistic works and peruse comments on your own work. The range of talent and experience is very, very impressive. You'll find, on occasion, professional writers looking to hone this or that side project. Indeed, I believe several published novelists are active on the site. In addition, you'll find numerous people who have not had the opportunity to study the craft—either through their own reading or through a writing program.

Like an academic workshop, one of the best things about such a site (and there are myriad others out there if you look) is the practice of reading and commenting. You have the opportunity to develop your own critical skills while, hopefully, helping someone else do the same. For me, I tend to find the critiques I offer others far more helpful than any advice I receive on a particular submission because, well, not every comment proves useful. You might, for example, read comments from a reviewer who doesn't know what a zinnia is, and inexplicably, doesn't decide to look it up. More, such sites do not rely on people who will be graded for their ability to comment on your work. Unlike a class at a local college or a community-based workshop, no one on the site is actually obliged to comment on your poems. Consequently, you end up with a mere handful of reviews—of varying quality.

The worst thing about such sites, however, is the potential for procrastination that they represent. Chatting on discussion boards or flipping through a variety of poems and stories (that aren't yet polished enough to be published) can whittle away at writing time almost as fast as an evening with DVDs and a large bucket of popcorn.

All in all, however, there may be better sites out there (feel free to leave suggestions), but I like Zoetrope. I keep my expectations in check and try to limit the amount of time spent on such a site (i.e., not writing). I think, with such an approach, it's a valuable tool, as long as I remember that my name, not reviewer X, will travel with any poem I write.

After all, if I agreed with everything some poet or poetry student told me, my brain would be muddled mush by now—nothing more than a breakfast for Ohio-based zombies.

Community

2006-06-23T19:17:00.000-04:00

It’s only 4:30 on a Friday afternoon of cool rain and gray skies. The puppies are grappling behind me yelping and snorting as snippets of pop music play from four corners of my office. Michelle, who left work early in the dashed hope of finally procuring an Ohio driver’s license, has vanished from the first floor of our house.

Over the past few days, I’ve spent an inordinate amount time searching the Internet for poetry readings somewhere in the greater Cincinnati—all to no avail. I’ve located one or two locations that held readings weekly before this brand spanking new millennium with which we’ve all been blessed, but I can’t seem to find a current series.

In some ways, I’m tempted to explain the apparent absence of such events by pointing out Cincinnati’s location in the cradle of the Midwest—perched between Kentucky and Indiana. Yet, there is a world-class art museum, a fine symphony, and a near top-notch ballet. So, I hope.

Perhaps, in the coming days, I’ll be able to report that the poetry scene here is vibrant and thriving, bringing community poets together with the poets based in the various universities. That’s how the small, but extremely supportive scene was in Pittsburgh. Writers groups mingled with the academics, and always, it seemed, there was a reading to go to somewhere within walking distance of Squirrel Hill. Back then, I was utterly immersed in that scene. I read my own poems in my own melodramatic fashion more times than I can remember. I still have pages covered with footprints from my histrionics in the midst of a reading.

***

When I lived in Dallas (the second time), I never sought out those experiences. I think, I went to one or two poetry readings. I was the guy standing at the back for one or two poems before turning away to spend my time on more interesting pursuits—like drinking, or drinking coffee. I did, however, give one reading with a colleague from work at a Borders in the far north of the city. I think 10 people came, and I worked with 8 of them. The others, of course, came to see him read.

In San Francisco, surprisingly enough, I never took advantage of the literary community there. I saw, I believe, two readings—a mediocre night of performance poetry that was made far more pleasant by the copious amounts of beer present and a jam-packed reading by Irvine Welsh which was made slightly more frightening by the copious amounts of beer present.

***

In some ways, I think that both approaches to a literary community are valid for a serious writer. The support, the exposure to new ideas, and the chatter about all things literary can certainly benefit you and your writing. At the same time, I believe that there are moments in a writer’s life when it’s better to be a ghost in the social world.

Sure, we all need the society of friends, loved ones, and the occasional stranger, but at certain points in my life, I’ve looked forward to leaving work and heading straight home, where a flickering computer screen waited for me. Of course, this may help explain why my career is where it is right now.

Better not to write in a complete vacuum, but too much conversation and you’ll end up founding a movement.

Fruits

2006-06-23T03:06:00.000-04:00

Rain drips from the broad green leaves of the catalpa tree in our front yard. The neighborhood is silent, save for jostling of wind and rain brushed leaves and the sound of the storm slicking the streets.

Michelle and the dogs are upstairs, asleep, perhaps stirring ever so slightly as the rain patters down against the skylight near our bed. I am tired. Today, for the most part, was an exercise in frustration. Much of the day, I sat here in this office, as the dogs bolted back and forth across the slight descending hill of our backyard, pausing now and then to growl at each other or an errant squirrel chattering down at them from the relative safety of tree-top branches.

In this office, filled with sun, I spent much of the day trying to think like a first-generation Chinese-American from Connecticut who moved to San Francisco in 1998. I had her voice for a moment or two, but the textures and the variations in syntax escaped me for the most part. Still, I kept trying, frustrating myself with my inability to find a rhythm I had discovered about a month ago.

Strange, but in many ways, this was the whole of my day. Of course, I spent stretches of time snoozing with the puppies. I used a few minutes here or there to rub the delicate space behind Dixie’s floppy canine ears. I spent a few minutes tossing a squeaking red plastic ball for Archie, watching him hop on his hind legs toward the ball in my hand. And I spent a few evening hours with my wife, eating dinner and watching a DVD of The Thin Man.

***

Regardless of what else I may think about the day, my mind keeps circling back, like a shark that can never stop swimming, to the subtle variations in syntax I just couldn’t manage.

Syntax, of course, is vital to writing, but in an essay, a proposal, or even a memoir, the use of syntax is, typically, little more than a stylistic choice. You can use the shape of your sentences, the interplay of complex, compound, and simple sentences (and sometimes fragments) to reflect your own voice. In poetry and fiction, however, syntax seems to me to mean so much more.

Consider, for example, the case of the persona poem. Imagine writing a poem from the perspective of an 18th century courtesan. How would your language change? Would you modify phrases differently? Would you be satisfied with simple, direct statements of the Hemmingway ilk? Or would your sentences loll on and on, couched like gilded patterns in red velvet, as threads of thought wound from participle to participle?

More, in a poem, you have those nasty line breaks to navigate. Should this line be enjambed? Should the line be end-stopped? Should a sentence flow from line to line to line like one of the complex metaphors that glisten from Satan’s slithering lips in Milton’s Paradise Lost?

Oh, there is much to think about!

But, somehow, you will know. You will find the rhythms (one hopes) that cling to the content you are trying to convey. You will know the phrases that can be elided and the participles that can be dangled—against reason—to convey the simulation of speech from a particular person at a particular time in a particular place.

The key, I suppose, is to listen.

Prescriptions of Self

2006-06-22T03:17:00.000-04:00

At some point during the five-year period I lived in the Bay Area, I stopped thinking of myself as a poet. Even with that decision, I never stopped writing poetry. I would dash off a poem every now and then—something long-winded and esoteric or something simple driven by an image, like the sad shape of a cello held between a woman’s legs.

In fact, with the death of a laptop, I probably lost a handful of good, salvageable poems. Remember, back up.

At that time I was, of course, more free to pursue activities like dating, drinking, and a wholly unhealthy absorption in the world of PlayStation gaming. I gave up on the notion that I could publish a few poems here and there and make a clean re-entry into academia. I focused on my professional life, mired in the corporate world, and when I had the time, turned my attention to fiction. I managed to fall in love and out of love and in love once again with the woman who is now my wife.

In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure if I changed those career plans or if the sheer momentum of my life helped with the decision. Life, after all, has a momentum all its own.

Nevertheless, during that time period, I suspect that all of my friends, when they thought of me, thought of me as something of a poet. Even now, I hesitate to call myself that. At a party or a chance meeting with a stranger in a street, I'd never describe myself as a poet. I'm more than happy with the title writer—even if, on darker days, I question the accuracy of that title for the time being.

In graduate school, the poet Carolyn Kizer came to Miami to read for us. I met her just outside the elevator on my way to check my mailbox. The director of the program introduced me to her, saying, "This is Les. He's a poet."

I said hello with my head bowed, looking at the white linoleum tiles that covered the entirety of that building and sort of shook my head. "Well," I said. "I wouldn't say that just yet."

Now, I'm still not sure I'd say that. I write poems. And since turning 30, I actually try to publish those poems—sometimes. Still, it's difficult for me to think of myself as a poet. And why should I? After all, if I'm just someone who writes poems now and again, it's so much easier to remember that all of those cliches about the necessity of melancholy or the travails of being a poet are just poppycock. Me? I'm just someone who loves words like "poppycock."

After all, was Edith Wharton a poet? James Joyce? D.H. Lawrence? Borges?

Phantasies

2006-06-21T02:34:00.000-04:00

Today will be the longest day of the year. Since it's well past midnight, and I've yet to sleep, I can believe it.

Tonight, I'm up late for business reasons. My wife, Michelle, has just descended the stairs from our bedroom, bleary-eyed, clutching Dixie away from her body. Our poor little Jack Russell just had a minor accident in her crate. Perhaps Dixie cried, but not loudly enough to wake Michelle from a well-deserved slumber. Then again, it's possible, Dixie simply nursed too much on her water bottle. Whatever transpired, she’s now curled on the sofa, recovering.

As for myself, I'm in my office, listening to pop music and contemplating how to emerge from a recent rut in my writing. My top-secret novel has momentarily stalled because I can't decide whether or not to put a key character to a series of seemingly awful travails. A story I started with the sole purpose of entering a Glimmer Train contest sputtered when I couldn't decide on the precise nature of a secret the protagonist will soon uncover. Worse, I have been unable to write a poem.

Of course, as always, there are extenuating circumstances. Archie was ill, and his suffering served to obliterate my sleep schedule with the efficacy of a pound espresso on an empty stomach. Then, I've had a surprising (for me) amount of business with which to contend, and I'm beginning to suspect I'm losing those fights. Plus, this past weekend was sacrificed for a Father's Day trek to the other side of Ohio.

In short, I'm currently trying to recoup a semblance of what I call normalcy after last week.

Naturally, all of this existential bellyaching is little more than a litany of excuses. Life interferes, sometimes, with writing. Such is life (feel free to insert your favorite cliche for such a sentiment here).

I do think, however, that those excuses amply illustrate one of the reasons why so many people aspire to be writers and so few actually succeed. Indeed, for me, such quotidian interruptions combined with intermittent ambitions for success in the corporate world help explain why ten years after I'd assumed I would have first found some measure of success with my poetry, I'm still working to make certain that a handful of people who have never met me know my name and admire my work.

I, in all honesty, do not know what the future holds. I worry, sometimes, that I'll wind up with a series of unfinished projects—all victim to my apparently lofty critical faculties and the simple intrusions of everyday life. Most of the time, though, I let myself dream. I let myself muse about the tingle of angry adrenaline rushing down my spine as I read the first review of my first slim volume of verse. I allow myself to contemplate the specter of me growing gray in a tweed jacket as I sit before students at a university somewhere, who look up at me expectantly as I draw Freitag's triangle on the blackboard.

Alas, we have only so much time in our lives. Since today is the longest day of the year, I think I'll just break out of my rut.

Practice Makes Permanent

2006-06-20T01:56:00.000-04:00

When my wife was a small child, she had a coloring book that showed every profession she could imagine. There were images of a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a dentist, a pilot, and, of course, a writer. As my wife tells it, she thumbed through the book, studied all of the images in their outlines and chose, as if to foreshadow her own destiny, to color in the lines of the writer’s desk, his jacket, his chair, his well-coiffed head from which those literary ideas would emerge, and of course, his typewriter. She filled in the lines carefully, circling the crayons around and around for the smoothest possible blend of color. She stayed within the lines, as best she could, steadying her hand against excitement now and again to avoid straying outside the lines.

When the page was filled with the brightest colors possible, so that the writer’s smile seemed to her almost to gleam, my wife was finished with the book. She did not move on to the doctor or the lawyer.

Because, even then, she knew.

***

This past Saturday, I drove my wife, our niece, and my wife’s sister south along the eastern edge of Ohio to an enormous high school in the middle of farm country. Our niece had her first dance recital. Personally, I’d never been to a dance recital before and had no idea what to expect. My wife, on the other hand, had participated in countless recitals, having studied ballet from a time when she was too young to write full sentences until she left home for college. Still, I don’t even think she was prepared for what we saw.

The program, such as it was, consisted of more than 50 performances by a variety of girls of different ages and abilities and one tiny boy in a tumbling routine. Our niece participated in two routines—one for ballet and one for tap. Thankfully, her second routine was just after intermission, so the family was able to make a quiet escape shortly after her ballet piece.

Prior to Saturday, I never thought I’d see anyone dance to “Little Red Corvette” while wearing ballet shoes. I never thought I’d see anyone tap dance to the “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” I never thought that a dance school would focus on teaching the one-handed cartwheels a high school girl might need to make the cheerleading team. I never thought that routines performed at any school for dance might resemble any kind of routine you’d find at a strib club at the edge of town. And yet, that is precisely what we saw. And it was mind numbing.

Of course, in the midst of that four-hour ordeal, we witnessed the most curious of phenomena. The youngest of the dancers—no older than 6— broke their slow, confused steps once in a while with sideways glances to the teachers showing the steps in the wings. They tried, in their multicolored, sequined outfits to synchronize their movements, but every once in a while, when one of the little girls had trouble telling her left from her right or missed a shuffle here or a missed plie there, they would fall out of synch and continue dancing—only to leave the stage to the smiles, camera flashes, and applause of the audience.

We, the audience, forgave these smallest children their missed steps.

***

When I was in 6th grade, my Reading class wrote stories near the end of the term. I don’t remember why writing a story was part of the curriculum or what our stories were meant to entail. I do, however, remember small slivers of the story I wrote. Set in a random metropolis, the tale followed the exploits of a superhero and his sidekick; they were, if I recall correctly, some errant combination of Superman with Batman and Robin. I cannot, for the life of me, remember what ferocious animal-like names I gave these characters. More, I cannot remember what type of foe they had to face. But they did face their foe—tragically. The ending, I suspect largely because I didn’t know how to end a story, was likely the bleakest ending I have ever written: the young sidekick perished in battle. And that was that. No foreshadowing. No denouement. No examination of the consequences of the lad’s death on his erstwhile benefactor.

He was dead. And that’s all there was to it.

In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t phone my father. Why wasn’t I called into the office and sat down before the school counselor? Why didn’t she smile at me from behind a stack of papers that only served to make her look busy, and ask, point blank, is there something going on with you at home? Is there something you’d like to talk about?

I suspect, very strongly, that a child writing such a story nowadays would be faced with a series of questions, and perhaps, a prescription or two to keep things ticking as they should. Still, you have to admit, I did write a story with an ending. And endings are difficult.

***

Poetry is, I suppose, something we expect children to read. Even from the first moments a child is read to (if he is lucky), a child will delight in the sonorous words that fall from the lips of his mother or father. Although he will not know what to call it, a child will giggle at the use of a pun or imitate the play of consonance and assonance in a favorite line. A child, among other children, will continuously play with words, belting out rhymes as she skips rope on the sidewalk outside her family’s home.

What happens between those moments and adulthood to make our view of poetry any different? Do we somehow lose touch with the innate metaphoric qualities of language the moment we realize the moon is not, in fact, made of cheese?

Why do you suppose so few adults read poetry?

Escapism

2006-06-16T01:19:00.000-04:00

Since Archie’s most recent illness, our Italian greyhound has been given carte blanche by the vet to eat people food—as long as it is bland. Consequently, this week, my dogs and I have had markedly similar diets—excepting the caffeine of course.

Three days ago, my wife sent me off to the supermarket to stock up on fresh produce that we’ll probably never use and a variety of bland foods like bread, hamburger, cottage cheese, and chicken, which was purportedly for the dogs. When I first entered the supermarket, I found myself deeply perplexed. Even though I went to the closest store in a particular chain, the arrangement of the aisles was the opposite of what expected. The cheeses were to the right and the produce was to the left—quite unlike the layout to which I’m accustomed. Strange how quickly we become creatures of habit.

Anyhow, the first section I noticed when I entered the store was the book and magazine section. For a supermarket, this particular store has quite an impressive selection of reading materials. Of course, there wasn’t any poetry, but only a fool would expect that. More, there wasn’t much in the way of “mainstream” literary fiction. Instead, shelves and shelves of dark cherry-stained wood were lined with genre fiction: crime fiction, romances, westerns, science-fiction, horror, and African-American literature.

Why—other than those tacky Hallmark volumes whose covers heedlessly abuse floral prints and the occasional Maya Angelou collection or Garrison Keillor anthology—isn’t poetry so easily marketable? Sure, there’s “cowboy poetry,” which any CEO of any print and media conglomerate can understand, but aside from a few examples here and there, why is the development so different?

What happened?

I think, sometimes, that poetry would be much more widely read, and perhaps, much more enjoyable if we gave into those escapist impulses that give us westerns and spy thrillers. Clearly, the reading public has reasons for selecting such fare. There is, like it or not, a reason why Danielle Steel’s novels always end up being filmed.

Imagine what such poetry would look like. Imagine a poem with villains in black cowboy hats. Imagine a poem encrusted with ill-begotten diamonds and pearls. Imagine a poem that journeys to the edge of the universe against the logic of physics.

***

Yesterday, on the way back from procuring coffee from the supermarket whose layout is my flawed mental map of that particular chain, I heard an interview with Donald Hall—the new poet laureate. Of course, he had an opportunity to read several poems, the most striking of which was, to me, “Weeds and Peonies.” I adore that last line. Yet, in the interview, our new poet laureate said a few words about the composition of that poem that, quite frankly, disturbed me. By Mr. Hall’s own admission, the “you” is his late wife, Jane Kenyon. More, Mr. Hall claimed that he wrote the poem merely for therapeutic reasons.

I don’t know why this bothers me so much—after all, the poem is marvelous. I can’t deny that. But, nevertheless, I remain flabbergasted by the continued prevalence of that confessional mode.

***

Obviously, I’m missing something. And if you look at Hall’s poem, you’ll see what it is. Perhaps, you’ll see why so many people (and there are many) love poetry. Perhaps you’ll feel the marvelous kinesthesia of your mouth working to find meaning if you speak the poem aloud. Perhaps, like me, you’ll simply be delighted by peonies.

Why I Write Poetry

2006-06-15T05:46:00.000-04:00

I have been up all night doing contract work. Despite everything I may say here, it was a brutal reminder that not everyone can write, regardless of hours upon hours of instruction. This is a good thing. Even after taking the majority of a year off, a writer still has bourgeois skills for which businesses will pay.

Outside a chorus of songbirds practices complex counterpoint as the night sky suffuses with the subtle shifts of light that signal dawn. Dixie, my beloved Jack Russell, is asleep on the crimson comforter in a corner of my office. My wife and Archie, the sickly one, are upstairs sleeping through the constant hum of the window-mounted air conditioner. Soon, I will shuffle into the living room where I can plunge into the thick cushions of a sofa and sleep an hour before my wife wakes. Soon, the seeming travails of the night will be nothing more than memory.

Right now, I can feel my eyes drooping more and more with each syllable I struggle to find. Right now, I can feel the joints in my fingers thicken with fatigue. Right now, I am convinced that this is the best of all possible worlds. Right now, I am convinced that my experience tonight is nothing near unique. I contain entire continents in the vestiges of my imagination. Just like everyone else. Just like everyone else.

Shantih shantih shantih

Slants on Process

2006-06-14T02:39:00.000-04:00

My writing life has grown stagnant as an algae-covered pond. The undulating snakes and teeming fish of my imagination have been smothered by a thick coat of reality. Of course, I’m being melodramatic. But the last few days, due to circumstances just beyond my control, have been less productive than I would prefer.

I haven’t made my word count in my top-secret novel since Thursday, and I wonder if I’ll a chance before this Thursday. More, since then, I’ve only managed to work on one poem: a pantoum of all things. Like the villanelle, a pantoum uses repetition of lines in conjunction with a fairly simple rhyme scheme. More, like the villanelle, it is a circular form that, essentially, ends with the lines that began the poem. At the moment, I quite like the little beastie. Of course, in time, that love will fade and I’ll be able to recognize it for the date to the prom with a bucktoothed, pigeon-toed, alcoholic cousin who smells of turpentine that it actually is. In the meantime, I’ll take some solace from my lack of productivity in the fact that I’ve been able to write a villanelle and a pantoum in the space of two weeks.

Although I’ve worked for most of my writing life to be a fairly adept formal poet, I’m still surprised by the recent flurry of poems written in form. Sure I’ve had a plan for about three years to write this form and that form for a particular project of verse, but as the fact that I’m over thirty and less than 100 pages into a first draft of a first novel should indicate, I’ve never been adept at following through on those grand schemes that come to mind. Once, during my second tour of life in Dallas, I planned to launch a webzine, not unlike the New Yorker, focused on the arts and nightlife of my hometown. And even though, I was making such plans at a time when people still believed that the Internet could make you rich, the notion never left the planning phase. Now, as I approach middle age, I’m becoming more and more convinced that one of the myriad secrets to success in literature (aside from knowing Oprah Winfrey personally) is simply having the wherewithal to follow through with your dumb ideas.

I’m not sure what corner of my brain triggered this sudden burst of formalism, although I am fairly certain that it wasn’t the scent of vanilla. I am, however, also certain that such work is not yet another of my dumb ideas. Perhaps the collection for which the poem is intended may one day seem like another point on that timeline of dumb ideas, but working on a formal poem—even one that may never see the light of day—will help me further develop my ear and, ironically, should help hone the skills for crafting a competent poem in “free verse.”

You see, for me, writing in any kind of form is deeply different from my normal writing process. I do not follow the runaway train of my thoughts. I do not focus on the “poemness” of the object when revising—focusing on alliteration, assonance, and consonance with tiny spices of rhyme to make sure that the lines are more than broken prose. I do not scan the piece in search of something like a meter, since a meter has been built into the first draft. I do not worry over the use of prepositions. I do not linger over entire stanzas, poised to strike the delete key in search of some essence of thought.

Although it is not as convoluted as the bizarre falsification as Edgar Allen Poe’s claim in the essay The Philosophy of Composition that we should begin each poem with its ending, I think that my particular way of composing a formal poem is a tad convoluted. First, I have to decide, as I have recently, that I want to write in a particular form. Then, since my memory is shot, I have to look up how to write that form (unless it’s a sonnet). Generally, I’ll use Lewis Turco’s New Book of Forms, which is a fantastic catalogue of forms in English—many of which seem never to have been used by anyone other than Lewis Turco, who peppers the book with examples written by “L.T.,” “anonymous,” “Wesli Court” (an anagram of Lewis Turco), and a variety of poems from earlier epochs that illustrate. Then, after I’ve refreshed my memory, I get down to the business of the poem, starting with a line—most likely in iambic pentameter—that seems vaguely related to whatever subject matter interests me at the moment. I find that, if a rhyme scheme is involved, the remainder of the initial draft is dictated largely by my effort to find rhymes that aren’t idiotic and will work with the content.

Now, it is late, and the dogs and my wife are sleeping well—I think. Archie has spent the entire day trying to remove the bandage covering the catheter in his front leg that the vet left in—just in case he needed more hydration. With my wife’s help, I removed it this evening and re-bandaged the tiny wound. Archie struggled against my embrace, snapping at me occasionally if the pain or the fear became too much.

Tomorrow, I suspect, he’ll spend much of the day trying to rip off his new bandage, and I’ll spend much of the day commanding him to leave his leg alone, until my wife returns home from work. Then, I’ll work for money, lamenting the lack of time for following the ideas that part of me—a part I’m learning to ignore—clamors on and on about it being a bad idea.

Caesura

2006-06-12T23:40:00.000-04:00

Morning came early today with the whimpering of Archie, who apparently is quite ill. Outside, Venus flickers above a bank of grey clouds as hooting of owls mingles with the trilling scales of some daytime, avian genius.

As for myself, I’m up again after three hours of sleep, waiting by our Italian Greyhound to clean up after him if need be and coddle him if he stirs with a groan. I’ll take him to the vet as soon as possible, although I’m still wavering whether or not to simply dash him off to the veterinary emergency room. For now, he is sleeping, curled behind me on a comforter that will need to be washed before the day is done. So, rather than disturb him with unfamiliar places and people prodding him, I’ll simply wait until he can see his usual vet. Archie certainly needs the rest. I do too; I’m already exhausted, but there’s no time for that.

None of this bodes well for the day’s writing, but I’ll keep on, hoping for an exquisitely long afternoon nap. After all, when I lived in San Francisco, there were a number of nights when I worked through the night as my wife slept a few feet away in our studio apartment. And given a real choice—bolstered by pecuniary stability—I would never have done that work. So, today, one would think, I can manage when the work is so very vital to me.

***

Now, as the day approaches its end, I realize that little writing has been done. My dog, however, had to be dropped off at the vet this morning so he could be given intravenous fluids and an antibiotic. I’ve spent the day wishing for sleep, but constantly driving to one corner of Cincinnati or another—all so that Archie could get treatment and food that won’t upset his belly so. I wonder if writing poetry isn’t a bit like that longed for sleep today. When I revise, at least, it is.

I spent today on the edge of sleep, just as a poem which I’ve worked on for a decent period of time spends days, perhaps even years, on the edge of completion. The goal of perfection, it seems to me, remains always on the horizon—always a mixed metaphor away from completion.

***

For me, poetry is a sequence of one abandonment after another. Each time I sit down with the goal of revising a poem, the end result is the same: I will walk away from my notebook or my computer—sometimes to continue with the business of life and sometimes to fall asleep on the sofa with the puppies—dissatisfied with the state of whatever poem had captured my attention for a few hours.

Later, I return, determined to make things right by the poem, but I realize this will never happen. Always, there is a phrase in a line that just doesn't sound quite right or there is a metaphor that reaches a tad too far in its comparison or there is a single detail marred by an imprecise word. Often enough, though I hesitate to admit it, I’ll stumble across an effect that doesn't seem to hinder the poem, but is beyond my understanding.

***

At this moment, I can, at long last find sleep. The puppies are tired after an exhausting day, and Michelle has just climbed the stairs to her bedroom. I could stay up, taking advantage of exhaustion’s peculiar knack for dredging up images and ideas that would otherwise be left unturned, but I’m satisfied with the day. After all, when my wife and I returned to the vet this evening to pick up Archie, his tail was wagging.

A Present

2006-06-10T02:04:00.000-04:00

The new Atlantic just arrived today. It is a welcome balm to the morning’s irritation. I spent the whole of my morning trying to sort out a scheduling mix up with a copyediting client. Great fun. Such moments have, occasionally, made me contemplate the idea of taking a part-time job at a gas station. I could do a simple job, do it well, and watch the Midwest and its vehicles roll past. I could observe the world from a vantage point that few people—at least few people with the leisure time to read literature—ever have the opportunity to witness.

Of course, I seriously doubt I’d ever take a job like that. I did it once—out of necessity—when I foolishly failed to find a job after graduate school. Back then, I think I made about 7 dollars/hour. Every once in a while, I’d managed a 60-hour workweek that netted me about as much as I’m expecting for a lazy week spent mostly working on a top-secret novel. You see, there are benefits to getting older and being middle class.

In fact, I sometimes wonder if my parents can even fathom what life is like for me now. My father—true to his protestant upbringing—worked diligently for his entire life. He served in the Air Force, worked as book binder, and then worked 20-odd years as a die cutter. His work was tedious, brutal, stifling, and dangerous, yet never earned as much in a month as I can make in a week (if I actually worked for a week). Nevertheless, he always kept me well-fed, always kept a roof over our heads, always made sure we had transportation, always made sure I had my own spending money, and somehow managed to take me to a few baseball games when I was a child. And for some reason—perhaps because of how very precocious I was as a child—I always assumed that I would go to college.

Now, because of what he did then, it’s possible for me to sit here on the patio and think, “I’d like to be a millionaire some day,” without chuckling to myself at the idea—even though I’m taking time off to pursue literary ambitions. Either that top-secret novel will actually turn into a publishing contract and (let’s not kid ourselves) a portion of a nice middle-class income that Michelle and I can invest or I’ll simply work harder at freelancing until I have enough clients to provide a steady income. My father, on the other hand, will only reach that financial plateau if my step-mother hits the lotto. Frankly, I hope she wins someday, even if I don’t see one penny of the windfall. After all, I don’t personally know anyone who deserves such luck more than them.

I think if I mentioned all of this to anyone who went to college or graduate school with me, they’d immediately form a perception of my father. They might assume that he wasn’t well-educated or that he didn’t have the talent to work his way, from the bottom-up, into middle-management and beyond. They would be dead wrong. In fact, I suspect, often enough, he was the smartest person at the places he worked. Yet, he never got a promotion to an office job. He always wore a blue shirt with his name stitched above the left breast pocket.

My father, who simply never had the opportunity to attend college, is, I think, among the smartest people I know. He was smart enough to volunteer for the Air Force at a time when being drafted into the Army might have significantly shortened his life expectancy. More, he’s among the very few people whose advice I always trust—not only because it comes from a place of genuine concern but also because it is consistently sound. Plus, he reads more than anyone I have ever known—with the possible exception of my wife.

I remember, as a child, that at bedtime, when I went to say goodnight, I would always find him sipping on a tall glass of milk and reading a novel. Now, I suspect he still reads a few chapters before bed each night, and I suspect that he will continue to do so until he no longer has the strength to focus his eyes.

Nowadays, with so many other distractions, I wonder how many readers like him will be lost. Will the Internet, satellite television, and personal gaming systems lead to the demise of such average readers? Will there be a day when the audience for fiction—like that of poetry—consists largely of students, other practitioners of the craft, and those who either love us or pretend to do so?

Personally, I doubt it.

You see, when I applied to graduate school, one professor gave me a recommendation so glowing that, if you were to read it now, you’d suspect I paid him. When I showed the letter to my father over Christmas break, he took the letter to work and made a photocopy of it to keep. That day, I think he showed everyone. He showed the secretary. He showed his boss. He showed the people on the floor who stood up all day facing cubicle-sized pneumatic machines with razor-sharp blades a letter written by a poet about a young poet he admired. And my father was proud.

To me, that story demonstrates how much respect remains for literature today. It reminds me that people are still impressed by the word writer—and even by the word poet. The challenge is to write poetry that isn’t laconic, ironic, or simply moronic. The challenge is to write poetry that an intelligent person—like my father—who has no use for ontology, who has no use for the thinking of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Sartre, or Lancan would appreciate. Some times, I think that contemporary poetry has failed miserably in this respect.

Then again, when I opened this month’s Atlantic, I went straight to the poem. The poem “Arabic” by Alexander Nesmer—who was an undergraduate at Yale when he entered The Atlantic’s Student Poetry Contest—succeeds. I think my father would like it.

For me, I still intend to write poems that my father would find difficult—though I know he’d try. But, to be successful, I think I need to write more than just a handful of poems that my father would photocopy to keep in the living room, showing them off if company arrived, his face beaming with pride, and with the knowledge, I hope, that every lovely word would not be possible if I had not inherited or absorbed his love of books.

Axiomatic Run Down

2006-06-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning at 9 to the sound of whimpering. Archie the Incredible Italian Greyhound needed an escort outside. At the moment, he and Dixie the Dastardly Jack Russell are locked in mortal combat. They dart about the yard circling the widow's tears, diving through the hosta, and crashing through the daffodils. Their mouths hang open, ready to snap, as they lunge in the direction of one or another with a come-get-me growl or a bring-it bark.

Slowly, they tire. The air fills with the chattering tweaks of birdsong and the slow measured clacking of my keyboard. The air is damp and chilly. Yesterday, thunderstorms soaked the soil and filled the sky with the clatter of thunder. Now, both dogs mill about on the patio, taking slow gulps of water then filling their jowls with kibble. Their once white fur is speckled with black soil from the flowerbeds and dotted with violet berry stains. Archie hovers near the backdoor, as though he’d liked to shoot up the stairs to the kitchen and curl somewhere in the living room for a long sleep, but for now, none of us are going back inside.

You see, this morning, Archie had problems. At first, when I took him outside, he seemed fined. He went about the business of relieving himself and then convinced me to let him back inside. When I returned inside, after watching Dixie for a few minutes, I discovered that he wasn't fine. Archie, the perennially ill puppy who is cursed with allergies—just as I was when I was a child—was having gastrointestinal difficulties. Sadly, the poor little lad could not hold it long enough to be taken outside, and the result is now engrained deep in the carpet fibers of my office. To make matters worse, as he tried, with his tiny puppy mind, to avoid the wrath that he must surely expect for such indiscretions, Dixie wanted to play. She attacked him, thumping him to the ground, not quite realizing that Archie was having trouble with his belly.

Now, as he yips at a nearby lawnmower, he seems furiously happy. I’m hoping, for his sake and for the sake of my bank account, he simply ate something last night, like peanut butter or cheese, that did not agree with his digestive state.

Who among us cannot relate to Archie's pathetic state this morning? Who among us has not spent the morning wishing that our bodies would better behave? Who among us has not gone on with the tasks at hand even as we wished that the feasting of the previous day had never taken place?

Indeed, during my sophomore year of high school, among the many afflictions of an upper respiratory nature, I was stricken by an affliction similar to Archie’s. Yet, in all honesty, I don't remember the actual illness. Instead, I remember that Christmas break was approaching and that I simply missed the end of the semester. More, those absences brought the total to something like 30 or 40 over the course of November and December. When I returned to school in January, my history class gave me a large, hand-made get-well card. Class time was obviously used to make the glitter-filled keepsake (which I've long since lost), and even at the time, I was embarrassed beyond words. I never actually told anyone why I’d missed so much school, but clearly, I did not have the sort of life-threatening illness they must have imagined. To this day, people from high school probably still believe that I made a remarkable recovery from scarlet fever, cholera, or perhaps lupus.

I think, in large part, I simply didn't have much direction in school. I simply went to school then went skating or sat in my bedroom tapping away at the Nintendo. I wasn't a great student—mainly because I lacked motivation. And, often enough, the idea of staying home watching TV was far more appealing than the notion of walking to school.

The next year, everything changed. I participated in Academic Decathlon, a competition consisting of seven multiple choice tests, an interview, a speech, and a very brief quiz taken in front of an audience—all over the course of two days.

Of course, that activity made missing long stretches of school impossible, so it was well worth it. More, with Academic Decathlon, I actually tried. I became a better writer and more self-confident. Like most people my age, I was accustomed to using the five-paragraph form for an essay. Although I now understand why this technique is taught, and have actually taught it myself at a community college, for some reason, in high school, it never occurred to me that an essay could be written in any other way. As odd as it sounds, I just assumed that you needed five paragraphs to support any kind of thesis. So, when I started writing the speech I was disconcerted to discover that I only needed four paragraphs to convey my thoughts. I panicked. I asked my English teacher for her advice, and she told me that if anyone could do it, I could. And I did. At the ensuing regional competition, I think I earned a gold medal.

I think, at the time, it was exhilarating that such a task could be executed differently, that I could, if you will, break the "rules" about essay writing I'd learned and still compose something that was effective.

Indeed, much of what is taught about writing is based on rules. To begin with, you learn the basics of grammar and sentence construction. You learn that fragments should be avoided at all costs. You learn that all paragraphs need a topic sentence. You learn that an essay consists of five paragraphs. But, eventually, you learn that all of these rules can—and should—be broken.

Poetry is no different. If you study poetry in a workshop setting, you'll learn the imagistic credo to "show, don't tell." You'll learn to position your speakers in specific settings. You'll learn to avoid mixed metaphors. You'll learn how to write metronomic sonnets or villanelles with feet that fall perfectly along an iambic path.

At some point, after you've learned all these rules, you'll notice that Emily Dickinson sometimes mixed metaphors to stunning effect. You'll notice that, sometimes, as in the work of Ashbery, and sometimes Stevens, abstract language can convey ideas that simply can't be communicated through the accumulation of details. More, you'll notice that much of the auditory beauty of Shakespeare's sonnets comes from subtle variations within the meter.

To me, those rules are a bit like that meter. For the most part, I abide by what I’ve been taught. I realize, that like Archie’s crate, those rules are designed to keep me safe, comfortable, and out of trouble. But, like Archie, much of the time, I want to break out, run around the house, and tear things up.

Games of Chance

2006-06-08T03:00:00.000-04:00

Today, I won the lottery, sort of. According to an email I received, likely from Nigeria, and most definitely a new twist on the 419 scam, I won the online version of the UK National Lottery.

So far, I've won that particular lottery four times. A few weeks ago, I even won it twice in one day. What are the odds….?

***

Near the end of my senior year in college, the English Department had a reading for creative writing students at the university's Woman's Center. Of course, at the time, I was more than eager to read my poems publicly and took the opportunity to sell a copy or two of the chapbook I'd put together with the help of a friend and the staff at Kinko's. For a few weeks, that chapbook was vital to my existence. Each 5-dollar bill I could finagle for one of the gray-covered, typo-heavy collection of 16 poems meant lunch at the Chinese food cart on campus. Sadly, at that event, I think I only sold one—to the Department Head.

Later, after everyone had read and begun to mill about over beverages and potato chips, I ended up in a conversation with the English Department's secretary. I remember her as being a wonderful woman—always helpful, always kind, and almost always smiling. Yet, that evening, she leaned in to speak to me, almost whispering, and told me that one of the Creative Writing Professors had told her that I was "the best they had."

***

I have no doubt that, at the time, at least some of my professors believed that to be true. After all, their letters were good enough to get me into grad school with a fellowship. I must have been doing something right. For a while, I think I held onto that notion, almost cradling it like the memory of my first kiss, rather than a bit of hearsay that made me feel good about myself. More, I think that comment—likely nothing more than an offhand remark based on my performance at the reading—affected my perception of myself. Suddenly, there were expectations.

That summer, I used to joke (I think) with anyone who dared call me a genius (I swear it did happen once or twice—though perhaps that was sarcasm). I felt deeply uncomfortable with the notion. I still do. Yet, at that point, I also felt that there was some merit to such a label, and it frightened me.

This, I suspect, is largely because it never occurred to me to do the math.

***

Clearly, the professor meant that year—not ever in the storied history of the university. So, if you figure that about 10 years of students make up a generation, that’s 9 students right there who could be far superior talents to me. More, consider how many universities in the United States offer creative writing programs. According to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, 310 colleges offered minors or majors in Creative Writing in 1996—the year I graduated. If we assume that half of those students focused on poetry and we multiply that by the 10 years it takes to make a generation, then approximately 1,550 students between 1991 and 2001 were the best poets in their year in their English Department. And remember the numbers are growing.

So, as you can see, the comment—even if it is more than mere hearsay—carries far less weight than I attributed to it. Such praise or encouragement from a professor does not automatically open doors. It is not an edict from the crested peak of Mount Olympus that cannot be ignored. It was, after all, just an opinion—an opinion which leaves open the possibility that nearly 1,500 people of my generation received similar training and had similar talent.

Plus, I’m fairly certain that I wasn't even the most talented poet in my class. I think that might have been my wife.

More and more, success in literature seems to me a bit like hitting the lottery. What are the odds….?

***

Nowadays, if someone told me that I was a genius, I'd probably just blush and say thank you. In fact, I’d much rather have someone say to me: I loved that poem or That was a damn good story.

Luckily, I've had experiences like that, and I see no reason—other than a flight into the Covington Airport errantly colliding with my office—why I won't hear similar things in the future. And hopefully, someday, you'll have the opportunity to agree or disagree vehemently with such assessments.

Of course, I'd still like to win the lottery, but not the UK National Lottery, the Ohio Lottery, or even the Power Ball. No, I'd like to win the publishing lottery. I'd like to find myself an agent that could start a bidding war over a novel by an unknown author. I’d like to say hello to Oprah on that fateful day when she introduces me (and my book) to her audience. Then, and only then, I could retire this notion of being a writer and spend my time playing Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments. I think I'd need a nice pair of sunglasses for that.

Now then, what are the odds…?

There Is No There, There

2006-06-07T01:51:00.000-04:00

I have a headache and it is already 9 o’clock. Archie is lounging on the area rug in front of me. Dixie just leapt onto the sofa to greet Michelle, who has just walked in from the front yard.

Today has been absurdly difficult (for a poet). I woke early, at 6:15 this morning. Rather than crawling onto the sofa and cuddling up with the puppies to add a couple more hours to the four I slept last night, I chose to brew a pot of coffee and throw myself into the day’s task. Alas, those tasks still have not, as yet, been completed. And now, I'm waiting for the casserole that Michelle, in true 50s housewife fashion, is baking. The television is playing and now the dogs are pummeling each other, barking now and again between the swats of their paws and snaps of their jaws that comprise their combat.

***

I’m still trying to find my rhythm for the day, to feel comfortable in my skin as I clatter away at the keypad, but the headache seems intent on cracking those plans like ceramic dropped on a tile floor. Worse, my eyes are beginning to ache with exhaustion, and my neck is cracking like kettle corn on the asphalt ground of a summertime carnival.

Archie is lingering at Michelle's feet whining catlike noises in an attempt to convince her to share some of her casserole. Unfortunately, the dish contains diced onions, which of course are toxic to dogs. At last, he, like Dixie, has lain down on the sofa and is drifting off to sleep.

***

Now, midnight is approaching and I can feel exhaustion seeping into my arms and legs. Two moths that darted inside toward the light are flitting around above my head, and sleeping dogs are pressed up against me.

I've struggled all day to focus, to follow the rhythms of my breath, to link one paragraph to another, one image to the next. I'm frustrated with myself. Michelle has just carted Dixie off upstairs, and after a low moan, Archie has propped his head against my leg.

***

Last night, around this time, I wrote the first draft of a villanelle and emailed it to my wife so that she could read the poem at work in the morning. Of course, when she saw it, she read the poem and sent back her comments. Not surprisingly, my wife is a kind critic to me. She quibbled with one detail, but found the rest of the poem lovely. Perhaps it is. I, however, suspect that there are, at the very least, a few feet that will disgust me, a word choice or two that is not precise enough, and a number of rhymes that could be better. Luckily, at the moment, I think the refrain works and that is, in my limited experience, the most difficult task when composing a villanelle.

***

Nowadays, my wife is always the first audience for my poetry, unless I read the poem aloud and one of the dogs hears me mumbling. For the most part, I know what to expect from her and this is wonderful. When my own critical voice turn their volumes up to 11 (because it's louder than 10), the encouragement and support she provides can be priceless.

And now, I'm not sure I can imagine writing poetry without her comments mingled with occasional adoration. Sure, I could ask her to be more critical and take a red pen to each document I send her. She could, I do not doubt, spend a few minutes and eliminate all that is extraneous and highlight everything that is suspect. But, in many ways, I suspect that asking her to find a critic's hat (which must have feathers) seems vaguely cruel. After all, she knows that, with patience, I can better each poem I write, and more, when she reads a poem that first time she reads it. She enjoys the poem as a reader would, not as a student or peer or critic would. And I love her for this reason (among many, many others).

Of course, to be honest, she might just like me a lot.

Now, it would be absurd to suggest that you should run out and get married if you aspire to be a poet, and although the sheer absurdity is almost enough for me to suggest it anyhow, I'll stop just short. You should have early readers for your work—and know what to expect, what to ignore, and what to add.

After all, why does one write a poem?

***

My headache still has not subsided. So, rather than suffering any longer, I'll climb the stairs and collapse into my bed for a long sleep.

Jug Jug to Dirty Ears

2006-06-05T19:35:00.000-04:00

After reading Ulysses, T.S. Eliot remarked that Joyce had “single-handedly killed the 19th century.” I first heard that quote in college, although I’m not sure where. Back then, I used to contemplate how pleasant it would be to follow suit and figuratively kill the 20th century. I liked to imagine taking my pen up like lance and charging headlong, unthinking, until the canon itself was torn asunder with cutting metaphors and pointed similes. Perhaps, in some ways, my ever-looming ego still longs to slay that wicked century and steal off with its pot of gold.

But, as I’ve grown older, the notion seems more and more absurd. Who could possibly kill a century like that one. It was a century whose very modus operandi consisted of laying its own entrails bare. Everywhere, it seems to me, was the evidence. The history books for the time will be tinged with the crimson of actual spilt blood and shadowed by the ever-looming presence of utter annihilation. It was a century of inflation, of political murder, of global pandemics, of ever-shifting borders, of ceaseless strategic war, and of a new kind of horrid crime. But lest we forget, it was also a century of prosperity, of penicillin and polio vaccines, of democracy finally approaching its promise of a government by the people regardless of color or creed, of technologies so complex and intricate that we could dot the skies above us with countless satellites for our phones, our televisions, and our computers.

It is a century that, through necessity, led us to endlessly reinvent ourselves, endlessly killing off remnants and vestiges of ourselves in the service of one ideology or another.

It is a century of marvelous, failed ideas.

In literature, well, "western" literature at least, it was the century of the late Victorians, the Moderns, and the Post-Moderns. Countless schools ranging from the Imagists to the Surrealist to the Beats to the so-called New York School and the seemingly movement-less miasma of today, graced us with their insights into poetry and its composition.

Somewhere, amid this sprawling description of the past century, is the kernel of post-modernism. I’ll not try to define the term here, other than to say that in the field of literature, it is that which followed the modern. It is the mode that built upon those first fretful steps into verse libre while abandoning, in the face of the history surrounding it, the quest of the modern for absolutes.

Doubtless, this definition is simultaneously sufficient for my task and woefully inadequate. You, without doubt, could posit countless definitions of post-modernism that more succinctly capture its essence. But, alas, it is a term which is notoriously difficult to define. It is as slippery as a wet garter snake.

As for myself, I hate it.

One night while I was in college, I went to dinner with a poet who was a year ahead of me in college. Shortly, she’d be off to graduate school, where she’d do wonderful things. We went to a lovely Middle Eastern restaurant that was no more than a mere minute away from campus. Occasionally, it occurs to me that this may have been a date, albeit a bad one since the notion hadn’t exactly crossed my mind.

We were seated at a small table near the aisle and, of course, the conversation turned to literature. I think, at the time, and perhaps even now, she was better read than me and seemed to my mind brimming with theory that she would later deftly work into her poetry with a wry ease that still strikes me as admirable. For my part, I declared over couscous and hummus that I, quite simply, hated post-modernism. In retrospect, the comment was likely nothing more than an ignorant boast.

I still, I suppose, had no idea what post-modernism was, even though I confronted it every day in the architecture of the campus, in the work of my professors, and in the slow, measured lines that I myself was composing. Only later, much later, did I realize—with a shock akin to sticking your finger in a light socket (and yes I tried once when I was three)—that I could best be described as a post-modernist. Alas, it’s true of everything I write. My work is self-reflexive, punctuated by meager attempts at irony, and unabashedly derivative. My work is mired in fin de siecle melancholy, even though the end of the century has, well, already passed.

Yet, even though I’m more familiar with the term and better versed in the continental theories that were so lately in vogue, I’m certain that I hate post-modernism. Sure, I bandy the term about with affectations of learning—mostly with the purpose of teasing my wife. More, there are countless authors and poets—many of them tidy examples of a kind of a post-modern paradigm—who I adore. Take Ashbery, for example: amid his endlessly shifting moods and ever-so-slippery pronouns, Ashbery continuously inundates us with references. Daffy Dick, Elmer Fudd, and the Comte de Lautreamont end up equals in the wandering psyche of his speaker(s). How cool is that?

Still, I weary of identity as a political force. More, I tire of the notion that my work—or anyone’s work can be so loosely codified. I despise the notion, which post-modernism (and its theories) seems to posit, that we have a reached a point where our work can only be described as a reaction to what has already been written. I bristle at the idea that there is nothing new to write, that there is not a theme which has not been tackled by some writer, most likely Shakespeare, in a manner better than I could possibly imagine. Personally, I’d like to imagine a poetics of possibility, a poetics that does not simply repeat the same tired themes, or buckle at the impossibility of ever communicating clearly without error and without misinterpretation to anyone other than the ego of the poet. I’d like to imagine a poetics that recognizes the limitations of language, embraces them, and goes on about the business of poetry: reflecting the world through its own unique artifice.

Now, my wife is in the next room watching reruns of a sitcom. The puppies have come in from outside and are curled on the crimson comforter behind me nestling against one another. Earlier in the afternoon, Dixie interrupted my writing with a bark that mingled with a yelp. I heard both aggression and pain—although I’m not sure if either was there—and walked over to check on her well being. I found her bowing, as though for play, and yipping at a tiny cardinal whose feathers were still fuzzy. Dixie bounced around it, barking, and I chased her away, shielding the tiny bird with my body. I drove the hatchling, like cattle, with a stick toward one of the honeysuckle trees near the back fence of our yard and then coaxed it onto the perch of that stick without ever laying a hand on the small, vulnerable creature. I lifted the stick into the honeysuckle, and left it in a bundle of branches. The cardinal chick tilted its head, staring at me, uncertain whether to consider me a threat. It chirped and chirped, again, then leapt ever so slightly and flapped its tiny wings furiously to move a few inches to the next branch. Hopefully, the bird will survive—even though I have my doubts. Imagine the sound of the song that bird will sing if it survives. Do you think, even for a moment, that the creature would care where the song came from? It knows, without thinking, that the song comes from the breath from beneath the hollow bones of its heaving chest.

A Garden Among Forked Paths

2006-06-05T03:37:00.000-04:00

The weekend is essentially over, and as I sit in office, with the puppies sleeping on separate sofas as my wife reads a thriller of some sort late into the night, the scent of wood burning in my neighbor’s fire pit wafts in through the cracked open window that looks out over our backyard.

This afternoon, when I stepped outside for a moment to check on the canines and ensure that they hadn’t finally clawed their way into their own version of The Great Escape, I found both puppies darting into and out of the flowing daffodil and bamboo foliage that lines the rear wall of our house. They sniffed fiercely at the ground, shaking stalks of Ohio spiderwort as they weaved through the greenery and circled half-buried flagstones, and dashed past the trunk of our magnolia tree. They were, apparently, hunting rabbits.

They hurtled about in their commotion, sniffing furiously and letting low tumbling growls escape from their tiny diaphragms, and as I watched in fascination as they plunged again into depths of foliage, a small brownish rabbit with specks of black fur all along its coat hopped hesitantly along the edge of the flower bed and then nestled, in plain sight to me, between two earth-scraping branches of a hardy weed. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, the rabbit did not stir. Its black, pebble-sized eyes stared up at me, unblinking. Yet there was not a single twitch of movement.

The dogs hurried about, oblivious to the rabbit’s escape and tactical retreat into camouflage. They bounced over the foliage, scraped at bits of fur, and sniffed along the patches of soil where they first spotted the tiny creature. Fearful for the rabbit—no more than a baby—I called to the dogs, “Dixie! Archie!” I called to them again, clapping my hands until they looked up and then I hurried them inside where my wife was eating dinner.

All day, I have felt like my dogs must have felt. I have been circling around a goal, edging closer and closer until night fell. You see, I copyedited all day. Instead of focusing on poetry, my thoughts on poetry, or even a good novel, I strained my eyes against a computer screen to make certain that phases and subtypes were spelled properly. The work was, alas, tedious.

As night fell, I finally finished, and managed to jot down a few lines of what seemed a clever poem, but now seems to me to be the worst type of first draft. Indeed, I think by tomorrow that poem will be torn to shreds with the same lack of compassion my dogs would have shown that tiny rabbit. I also managed to stare a bit longer at pages and pages of prose, and this pleased me. Hopefully, I can say the same tomorrow.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel I spent the entire day on circumnavigating the edge of a goal, of a wish fulfilled, of a tactical decision made deftly. Night, now, is slipping away. Michelle has joined the puppies in slumber. My back aches, and I know that I am up far too late.

Perhaps, this feeling of incompleteness is a bit like reading Borges, or like a character in one of his “fictions.” It is on the edge of reason, on the edge of reality, but only just so.

I’ve been speaking endlessly here about the necessity of reading, but have I yet mentioned fiction? I think, typically, many poets fail to see how valuable fiction can be to the development of one’s poetry. After all, many of the same techniques—and concerns—found in fiction are unavoidable. A first-person speaker, for example, can’t have direct knowledge of another character’s thoughts. The speaker must glean those thoughts through indirection or simply describe the movements, the gestures, the words of another character, allowing the reader to draw her own conclusions.

Likewise, if your poem tells a story—any kind of story—then you are bound by the construct of plot. There will be a beginning, middle, and end. The plot may be labyrinthine, but there will always be a beginning, middle, and end—not necessarily in that order.

More, I think that in modernist and contemporary fiction you can find worlds upon worlds of overlapping ideals. You can experience places unimagined. You can find enviably brilliant similes, like Gogol’s comparison of cockroaches to raisins in Dead Souls, and if you have the wherewithal to read Joyce, perhaps you can ask yourself more questions about poetry: What is it? How did it get here? Where is it going? Indeed, huge passages of Ulysses read like perfect alliterative verse. It hurts my head.

Personally, I consider Kafka, Borges, and Angela Carter to be among the most important influences in my poetry. In fact, I’d argue that a single story of Borges has likely had more impact on how I approach a poem than the entire oeuvre of W.S. Merwin—a poet I admire immensely for his utter originality, deft use of imagery, and penchant for elision that somehow heightens meaning. Yet a single one of Borges’s stories (and even his essays) opens up entire worlds while exciting your intellect with an electricity so violent that I sometimes wonder if it couldn’t explain the phenomena of spontaneous human combustion. Consider, for example, “The Garden of Forking Paths” or “The Library of Babel.” The stories are so carefully crafted that even the meticulous footnotes referencing works that may—or may not—be extant in our world lend credence and power to unbelievable tales. And who among us has not, at one point, felt utterly lost in a book, as Ts’ui Pen’s novel would have us be?

Ah, you see, there are many paths through the garden. One fork leads here, another there. One allows you to see the rabbit hidden near a hole; another does not. One path is festooned with spring flowers; another brings only the harsh snows of winter. The hour grows late, and I am weary. I sip on my tea, but it is cold now. And, at last, I realize the goal around which I’d been circling. Tomorrow is trash day, and I have forgotten.

Pastoral

2006-06-02T16:50:00.000-04:00

This morning, the doorbell woke me. The dogs bolted upright from the couch, growling in their precocious ways, as though they could actually frighten a stranger at the door. Outside on the porch, a repairman, protected from the rain by a thin, hooded raincoat, held a replacement engine for the burnt out fan on our air conditioner. As he practiced his trade out by the back door, I wandered into the kitchen with the puppies trailing me, brewed a pot of coffee, opened a tube of crescent rolls, and arranged them onto a small cookie sheet to bake what I assumed would be breakfast. Then, just in case either dog realized that they really could injure a stranger, I corralled Dixie and Archie into the dining room and blocked off all access they had to the outside world.

When the coffee finally finished percolating, I drank my first cup and waited for the repairman to finish the ineffable machinations of his work while the puppies flitted about confused by their confinement. When I checked on the crescent rolls, I saw pasty-white bits of dough scattered about on the cookie sheet. I had forgotten to turn on the oven.

Fifteen minutes later, after the repairman had loaded his equipment back into his truck and headed out onto the slick hilly streets of western Cincinnati, I checked on what might best be described as my brunch. Now, judging from the photograph on the cardboard tube of those crescent rolls, you’d expect to find flaky, golden brown, croissant-like rolls rising in your oven. In fact, I imagined for a moment that they might taste something like the light, buttery croissants I used to order with a latte or two at Boulange de Polk when I lived in San Francisco. Instead, I found several dark brown clumps of triangular flatbread. I ate this ill-conceived breakfast with real butter and a French jam that my wife seems to prefer while sitting in my office and attempting to ignore the pleading eyes of the puppies. At least I got the jam right.

The rain has subsided slightly. There is not a trace of blue in the skies above Cincinnati, and a slight mist still covers the bright green lawns of the tract housing that has been made unique by years of occupancy. I’m sitting in my office, trying to ignore the clatter and whelps of puppies playing with squeaking plastic balls on the carpet near my feat. I’m listening to yet more pop music and letting my mind drift to the melody of a hand-picked guitar.

After a couple of months of boxes scattered everywhere in my office and a couple of months of very close scrutiny of our growing dogs, this room has become a sanctuary for me. Granted there aren’t any padded walls, built-in library shelves, or a constant supply of free lattes, but I am, at the moment, sitting in a place that feels conducive to writing, where, for some reason, I’m not distracted by the constant draw of television or the lure of a curling into the thick comforters on my bed. Instead, I can listen to a song or two, grab a cup of tea, and contemplate the next step in my long and illustrious career. Plus, I think this space is tax deductible.

Of course, this room does have its drawbacks—like being interrupted once in a while by a puppy that managed to eat into a cushion, an errant root, or a little too much people food and having to clean up after the error.

Yet, having a place—whether it’s a cafe, a library, a corner of your bedroom, or an office—where one can go to focus on craft is invaluable.

When I was in college, I did the majority of my writing in coffee shops filled with more smoke than three-alarm fire. I carried this habit with me, settling after moving to Miami and then Dallas for the tables on the patio of a particular corporate chain of coffee shops.

To me, coffee shops are a fantastic vantage point from which a poet can look out into the world. You can—when the mood strikes—join in on a conversation and learn something about a topic you’d never wondered about, like working for a modern-day railroad. Alternatively, you can focus your attention and let the world around you dissolve into a soothing hum of background noise.

When I lived in San Francisco, I found a cafe that I really adored. It was a brief walk from my apartment, served decent coffee and relatively good sandwiches, had a literary-sounding name, and didn’t seem to mind if you leeched a little power for your laptop. While there, I started a novella about a hopeless, obsessive “poet” with peculiar notions about what poetry means. At this point, I don’t plan on even taking a visit to the extant pages of that little project; nevertheless, in my mind, that novella and that coffee shop are inextricably linked.

One day, as I was settling into the morning, wondering what other mishaps my erstwhile poet could stumble into, a woman in a dirty sweat suit—clearly among the city's many homeless—came into the cafe. She asked for a glass of water, but was refused by the proprietor—who had every right to refuse her, business being what it is these days. She didn’t take too kindly to this—after all, who would? She started shouting at him, pumping her fists into the air. He asked her to leave and she did, angrily. But she stood out on the sidewalk, protesting his treatment with a barrage of swear words. The proprietor threatened to call the police. She responded, go ahead. She wasn’t on his property any longer. Then, the businessman went behind the counter, filled the metallic pitcher normally used for steamed milk with water, and dashed out to the corner where the woman was standing. You want some water, he screamed, here’s some water. Then he tossed the entire contents onto the woman and made some comment about her being filthy and needing a bath anyhow.

I just watched in horror. When the fracas was over, I gathered my belongings and left, never to return, even though I’d been to that cafe every day for the past two months.

Sometimes, I still miss that cafe and the environment that it gave me. Mostly, when I think of that cafe, I think of my unfinished novella and the peculiarities of human nature.

Archie is curled in a corner, sleeping. Dixie is in the other room, lounging on the sofa. Quiet music surrounds me. The birds outside are singing for what seems like the first time today. We have air conditioning again. And everywhere, conflicts are waiting to be resolved.

Burrowing

2006-06-01T15:54:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, my sinuses are clogged like the plumbing of a convenience store on the wrong side of town. A mere 18 hours after proclaiming that even illness wouldn’t keep me from writing a few words that will one day be read by someone other than my wife and a handful of trusted friends, I find that the fates in their churlishness have chosen to mock me. Granted, I’m not clutching at the knotting muscles of my stomach or sweating so much that fever-induced visions of Kubla Khan are bound to glitter up my typically banal dreams like a secret stash of costume jewelry in the underwear drawer of an elderly Southern woman who has lived out her life in the exclusive company of cats. But I do feel off-kilter enough to wander what the probability is that this mounting pressure in nose, throat, and forehead could lead to an actual explosion.

Alas, if I worked at Wal-Mart, I’m certain I’d have stood in a thirty-minute shower to loosen the congestion, dressed myself slowly, and driven to work to risk the contagion of my peers. Of course, by my own standard, such a comparison means I have to write.

At the moment, I’m sitting outside brushing tiny insects away from my laptop while vaguely policing the dogs. Dixie, our Jack Russell Terrier, has her mouth agape, as Archie, in a playful mood, growls and lunges in her direction beneath my legs. Earlier, I stepped inside to prepare some coffee and when I returned outside, I found that Dixie had burrowed a sizable hole into the soil beside the back door that has been moistened by the incessant drip of the air conditioner upstairs.

Oddly enough, both dogs are sneezing occasionally, and Archie is still struggling with his allergy-induced cough. Yet, if I could channel their energy today with minimal loss to the laws of thermodynamics, I suspect I could heat and cool my house for the remainder of the year. Apparently, if they worked at Wal-Mart, they’d have gotten ready by now as well.

Even still, I had difficulty getting started this morning. I had trouble waking and the ideas that were forming in my head are best left there. So, as an antidote to the general malaise of a pleasant still-spring morning, I wandered into my office and pulled The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry from my desk and thumbed through the back pages where you can find selections from contemporary poets who are just now reaching the age of 50. Of course, the version I have was published in 1988, so at that point, those few poets were in their 30s—very young and very accomplished.

Imagine, for a moment, being talented and successful enough as a poet to be certain that—through the Darwinian miasma of literary politics, poetasters, and other assorted academics—your reputation had grown enough that you were already on the precipice of canonization before the inevitable midlife crisis fantasies of fast cars or torrid affairs had taken hold. Such poets must have been infinitely peculiar children.

Perhaps, if you’re young enough, you believe that such success is inevitable for you and that your poems, unlike those of your peers, are bound to be widely anthologized and taught within the span of a few years—perhaps months. Perhaps you even imagine yourself to be a singular literary talent, like Arthur Rimbaud, whose approach to poetry could very well revolutionize the composition of verse. Personally, I hope you’re right, and if you are, I look forward to reading your work.

However, if you are wrong, as I was, I hope that the cascade of rejections doesn’t frustrate you. I hope the setbacks of experimenting with your voice and your technique don’t leave you grasping for other ways to fill you idle time. I hope the experiences of life itself do not impede upon your dreams as they will for so many who say, at some point in their youth, I’d like to be a poet.

In fact, I think that perseverance and patience, though easy to overlook, are as important to any kind of success as love of literature and any innate talent you have. Indeed, I know countless people who wrote lovely poems in college and demonstrated enough talent to forge a career in poetry (assuming they wouldn’t mind teaching of course). And although I’ve googled what names I can remember, I have yet to find a single mention of those names in concert with poetry. Perhaps, I just missed one or two names or perhaps I will one day see those names. For the most part, however, I know that many people I studied with in college with have gone on to focus on careers in other fields and the unique contours of their own family lives.

As for me, I’m still nurturing my poetic goals. I’m still reading what poetry I can, always keeping my eyes open for a delicate line by a poet whose work I should explore more. This morning, as I flipped through the stained and dog-eared pages of that well-used Norton, I came across the selection of Paul Muldoon’s poems. Although I’d heard his name, often in the same breath of other Irish poets like Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, I’d never paid much attention to Muldoon. To me, rather than highlighting the apparent shortcomings in my reading, my ignorance of Muldoon indicates the sheer volume of good literature that is available to us. Indeed, if you were to start now, focusing solely on the so-called classics, I seriously doubt you’d read them all. And if, through endless nights of reading by candlelight, eschewing all other print materials like newspapers and magazines as well as the time vortex of television, you probably wouldn’t like yourself much. Your relationships with actual human beings would suffer, and you probably wouldn’t have time to do the dishes or even the occasional vacuuming. Yet, even if it is a Promethean task, if you care about literature, you’ll read as much as you can.

Of course, the great thing about that reading is that sometimes you’ll stumble across a poet you’ve neglected and discover a distinctive voice that beckons you to read more and more of the work. The small smattering of poems, of course, is just a beginning, and I’ll be looking for a more recent book or two the next time I make it to an appropriate store. At the moment, though, I’m intrigued by the poem “Brock.”

It’s a lovely little poem with a ballad-like style that reminds me, in some ways, of Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Randall Jarrell, and perhaps, Phil Larkin. The poem delicately walks a line between the historical and a confessional mode that seamlessly links the personal (through relatives in this case) to the tragedy of World War I. More, in some ways, I think the poem is a more powerful anti-war piece than Randall Jarrell’s famous “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Indeed, through a hyperbole linking the lives of infantrymen to badgers (also known as “brocks” in Muldoon’s lexicon), Muldoon offers a possible explanation to the “how” implied by Jarrell’s starkly grotesque imagery. Furthermore, the hyperbole suggests a fairy-tale-like tone, slightly reinforced by the seemingly simplistic rhyme scheme (aabb). Here, in the first stanza, you can see how Muldoon establishes that fairy-tale-like tone and the virtuosity of his rhymes:

Small wonder
he’s not been sighted all winter;
this old brock’s
been to Normandy and back

I’m thoroughly impressed by the slant rhymes at work here. Throughout the poem, the rhymes are delicate and almost imperceptible. In fact, if you read through the poem quickly, I think it might be easy to mistake these lines for free verse.

As the poem continues, we witness all manner of badger-like behavior throughout the trenches and foxholes of early 20th-century France. Yet after we encounter “…badgers keeping badger-slaves” Muldoon allows us, via a first-person speaker, to see the humanity underlying these tales in the briefest vision of a grandfather “carr[ying] bovine TB” and the speaker seeing “[his] father in his Sunday suit….patrolling his now-diminished estate,” so that the war, after diminishing its participants to a badger-like state, lingers on in the consciousness of the living for generations.

What a remarkable poem.

At the moment, a robin is perched on the neighbor’s fence with its beak gaping open, looking askance at our Italian Greyhound. Archie, in response, growls and barks at the beaked menace while wagging his tail. My throat feels constricted by pressure changes and pollen, and I am tired. But, by the same token, today I am thankful for my dogs, for the peculiar children throughout the world who will one day do great works, and for the poetry of Paul Muldoon. Perhaps, someday, somehow, someone will say the same thing of your poems on a cool cloudy day when she’d much rather sleep.

Sick Day

2006-05-31T14:32:00.000-04:00

It’s nearly noon and these are the first words of the day. On some days, when I’ve got the slightest headache, a touch of allergies, and the sticky buildup of summer dirt and sweat clinging to my arms like a second skin, it’s difficult to concentrate. Of course, on some days, when I feel good enough to be prancing about the block like a thoroughbred racehorse festooned with roses after the Kentucky Derby, I still have trouble getting started.

Since my schedule still orbits like a cold moon around the planetary path of the puppies, I often have to spend a significant amount of time coddling them before I can settle down in front of the computer. Once there, like everyone else, I spend an ample amount of time clicking through Yahoo and ESPN to keep abreast of the latest news, err, entertainment. Then, I still have to take a few minutes, which can easily morph into hours, surfing the blogs and litmags that I enjoy. If you add a handful of minor business ventures, query letters, and the requisite housekeeping to the list of accomplishments, it is not that hard to imagine a day, once looked forward to, devolving into a muggy nap on the sofa as I wait for the air conditioning repairman to phone. Plus, on some days, like today, I end up feeling like my writing is a little off the mark, as though my superego finally noticed how often I wander over to the sprawling cage where my id stalks the edges of light and dangle bits of food in its direction to convince it to speak. Fearing an escape, perhaps my superego has tossed a heavy tarp over the cage, blocking off all light.

Of course, if Freud’s theories were traded on NASDAQ, they’d be penny stocks in danger of delisting. I realize that the process of cognition and cognitive development is both more complex and simpler than Freud’s trinity-like construct would have us believe. On a CAT scan, of course, finding the superego isn’t any easier than locating the soul. Yet like the soul, I think the descriptions are occasionally useful. How else can you write mixed metaphors that no one else in a workshop will notice?

Now, the dogs are circling between the antiquated fence that cages them and keeps them safe and the newly arrived wrought iron patio furniture where I am sitting. They look both tired and restless, as though they’d like to be able to lie down on the cool concrete beneath the table while digging up dandelion roots or sniffing out the fallen berries that I just discovered in our backyard. Dixie the smarter of the two has foraged a twig of some sort and sprawled on the concrete near the back door to finish eating. And I can relate. Today, I feel both tired and restless. I’m ready to take on the world, right after a nap and a few hours lost to the oblivion of the PlayStation console upstairs.

Yet, right now, I realize that the problems of a writer are actually fantastic problems to have. Perhaps my dilemmas aren’t as interesting as those of Brad Pitt or LeBron James, but by the same token, when I wake up in the morning, I don’t need to shave and shower so that I look presentable in a bright blue Wal-Mart smock.

I think that, as you write poems, such perspective can actually help immensely. If I were commuting each morning to a discount store, fretting over whether or not the 20-cent spike in gasoline prices would force me to cancel a long-promised excursion to King’s Island for the kids that I’d been saving toward for four weeks, would I worry that my prowess for stocking shelves seemed a little off kilter today? If I were a cashier with a cracked nametag that I’d repaired with a layer scotch tape, would I fret over the way this sticky heat has clung to my skin?

It’s pleasant to have the problems of a poet. Sure it’s been romanticized again and again. All those writers are crazy, poverty stricken, rebellious fops who don’t fit in with the rest of the civilized world. And sure, once in a while, the cliche is true, but come on, walk away with an English degree from a respected university and your life will be, in many ways, far easier than it otherwise could be.

Nevertheless, I want to clarify something for myself: writing is work. Although I haven’t, to date, been fantastic at following this advice myself, I honestly believe that if you feel good enough to drag yourself to a day job, you ought to feel good enough to jot down a few lines of poetry or a few paragraphs of prose. After all, if you wouldn’t call in sick to a grocery store, why would you call in to your life’s work?

I’ll tell you a secret now. Intermittently, over the last two years, I’ve been working on a series of poems unlike anything I’ve ever written and, shockingly, unlike most of the poems I’ve seen written. For the time being, the project is low on my list of priorities, but every few weeks an idea will come along that belongs. When I think about the project, I find myriad reasons to find a book of matches and carry the manuscript pages into the backyard as tender for a marshmallow roast. The poems—regardless of quality—seem near impossible to publish. I’ve only found two or three very small markets where a published poem wouldn’t stand out like a boil on the gargantuan face of a movie star in a sappy romantic comedy. More, the poems are difficult. Most of them are suffused with multiple voices, and worse, build upon each other to carry readers into an ethereal, melancholic world that is punctuated by moments of paranoia and resignation. When I think of sending these poems off, it is far too easy to imagine an editor who hasn’t yet had enough copy skimming through a few lines, stopping before the third stanza, and mumbling to herself, “what the hell is this” before tossing my submission back into the slush pile.

Yet, at the same time, I believe—whether through delusion or a kind of faith in my talent—that one day those poems will be important—maybe even as important as the work of Wallace Stevens. I imagine students in college classrooms everywhere thumbing through the book as a student in the back of the room mumbles to himself, “what the hell is this.” I imagine PhD students, eager to start dissertations on early 21st century poetry, confronting my book only to reconsider their choice of topics.

Perhaps, in a way, these useless fantasies sustain me as I toil away making my poems better and better. Yet, I honestly believe that—even if I don’t manage to publish a single poem from that collection—those poems will be more than worth writing. They entertain me immensely and my wife likes them—a lot.

And so what, if on one particular day, the rhythms in my poems sound like a coughing dog? Revision is always around the corner, and I’ll never know how good a day’s work was until long after the day is done—unless, of course, I don’t apply myself and succumb to the doubts that buzz around like summer insects on the last front porch in a neighborhood whose light is still flickering. So, for me at least, as long as I can make it to my computer, there won’t be any sick days for the foreseeable future.

Pip's Fortune

2006-05-30T16:33:00.000-04:00

My wife has taken the day off, and after a flurry of post-guest cleaning, she's now watching a horror movie and relaxing with the puppies, who had seemed to have exhausted themselves galloping around the backyard. Yet, after a respite of carrots, water, and lounging on an area rug inside, both dogs have uncorked reserves of energy that I no longer seem to posses.

Outside, the muggy heat and scorching sunlight has chased the residential wildlife under canopies of shade—even though it's not yet June. As for myself, I’ve spent much of the morning wandering between the backyard and the basement, searching for warranty documentation, and trying, without luck, to phone someone to service our smoking air conditioner.

At the moment, my brain feels almost as crispy as the wiring in our air conditioner. My thoughts, sadly, are not even muddled. They are simply non-existent. There is nothing here other than the ache of sleeplessness in my eyes, the chorus of the background music, and the chatter of the ceiling fan overhead.

Yesterday, as I thought about the upcoming day, I certainly didn't expect to be reminded that—even in summer—exhaustion, ennui, frustration, and dashes of melancholy can fill a house as quickly as ants can cover a discarded bratwurst. I don’t know, honestly, what I expected from today, but this isn't it.

Of course unmet expectations aren't all that unusual—are they?

After graduate school, when I had finally found my own studio apartment in north Dallas, which was literally on the other side of the tracks, I spent a few weeks gathering poems onto the hard drive of an antiquated 286 that was nowhere near "Y2K compliant." I printed about twelve, wrote four very dignified, if stilted, cover letters, folded the poems into thirds, and sent them off to readers and editors of some of the best literary magazines in the country.

Unfortunately, poems—even though thousands upon thousands of your readers are poets—are seldom, if ever, read solely for their craftsmanship, and I do, honestly, believe that those poems are well crafted. The language is interesting, tight, and complex. It's clear, I think, that a reasonable intellect is struggling with and against difficult questions of "human experience." More, I think the poems display a smidge of technical virtuosity. And at that time, I thought they were perfect. I expected the readers and editors to notice the quality of those lines immediately and to open up the pages of their respected journals for my crystalline beads of wisdom. I was certain.

Yet, 2-3 months later, the rejection slips—all unsigned—came trickling into my mailbox. I waited, still, holding out hope that one or two would be accepted and suspecting that such a publication would change my life through the ineffable force of actually having my poetry read by, well, hundreds of people. When that last self-addressed stamped envelope finally arrived, I tore the envelope to shreds, like a cat tearing into the side of a sofa, and yanked out the small brightly colored slip of cardboard paper that was printed with black ink and the larger white sheet of paper that seemed somehow more promising. The colored note was, of course, a form rejection slip, and the white sheet was, of course, a subscription form to the esteemed quarterly journal. I’ve always found the inclusion of these extra scraps of waste paper deeply fascinating. How often, honestly, does this sales technique generate a single subscription? Couldn’t those journals wait a month or so, until the sting subsided a little bit, to pitch the poems and stories that are, according to the editors, superior to your work?

Anyhow, when I saw that rejection note, I was furious—for the poem. Perhaps that reaction was merely a set of mental aikido moves designed to protect myself from the vested interest I have in poems I’ve written, but I’m not certain. I was, nevertheless, offended that the poem hadn't found itself a home. I questioned the quality of the journal, the knowledge of the editors, and the care that the readers had taken in perusing my manuscript, and I held a grudge, on behalf of a single poem, for years.

Now, I've forgotten which journal irked me so, and I've reread the poem with far, far more time cushioning any attachment my ego had to the poem. I think, now, that the poem was well crafted, but I see little reason why it would stand out from the mass of competent verse that must funnel into whatever literary journal that was. In addition, I now realize that literary quality—as much as it should be—is not the sole and only criterion for the selection of a poem in any literary journal. Editors read far too much work, leaving little room for the kind of quiet contemplation that a good poem actually deserves. Furthermore, editors are looking to create a journal that can be sold, so a poem that's different enough from the overriding aesthetic of a particular issue might not be included. Finally, as difficult as it may be to believe, editors are actually people too. They have bad days when the neighbor's dog spent the night barking at a rabbit just beyond the fence line. They have days when home life feels a bit like the jaw-of-life ripping through the roof of their sedan. They have moments where concentration lapses and they wonder what the next episode of Lost will be like.

In short, inheriting Miss Havisham’s wealth—even if, like Pip, you deserve it—is not always as easy or likely as it may appear. But, there's always a metaphorical fortune out there for you somewhere—if you're willing to hunt for it. Read widely, becoming familiar with as many journals as you can. If you can afford to, subscribe to a few journals that always seem to publish work you admire. And most importantly, work on your poems until you can't make the little beasts any better, and do anything you can to make yourself feel better about the long, tedious process, even if it means waiting by a rotting cake in your wedding dress. That’s what I’m doing.