I wrote the last poems for Vessels in June of 2021.

But I feel like I finally finished the book this week when, after reviewing the galley proof, I submitted the last edits and my final About the Author and Acknowledgements drafts.

It’s all extravagant press junkets and groupies from here on out.

This was long overdue. I deactivated it last November, but turned it back on a few weeks later to save my following/follower list. Then it lay dormant & forgotten for most of the year, except for some DMs to people who were still nowhere else & who were seemingly impervious to email. It’s time.

My wife and I met thirty years ago today.

I was invited over to a friend’s apartment to meet her — and she ignored me the whole time. No hello, no eye contact. Absolutely nothing. She was utterly unapproachable. Instead, she spent the evening in the other room, forehead-to-forehead with her friend, discussing and analyzing a VHS tape of the modern dance concert she’d choreographed a few weeks earlier. And I could see instantly how smart, articulate, beautiful, and, most of all, strong she was.

We began dating eleven months later, and married eleven months after that. Twenty-two months that seemed, at the time, to span thirty years. And now, thirty years that seem, at times, to have spanned barely twenty-two months. Well, that’s time for you.

Some stories belong to the breath, not to the pixel and keyboard. Some stories need the counterpoint of digressions and indignant amendments, of interruptions to refill the wine glass or the bread bowl, or to choose more music, album by album. They need the bustle and patience of a long evening, the wood and steel rhythms of a well-provisioned table.

So: to hear the rest of the story, you’ll need to be seated across from us, favorite beverage at your elbow, and all the time in the world. And perhaps a story or two for us in exchange.

My author copies of This Folded Path have arrived from Ottawa!

Now I’m just working out how to take money from those of you who wish to buy a copy directly from me. Paypal will probably be involved. Stay tuned.

My chapbook came out yesterday, and a problem with being an older debut poet is just hitting me.

Almost everyone I’d like to share the news with is long dead.

My parents, most of my teachers, all my mentors. The twentieth century has been dying for years; this week I feel freshly re-orphaned.

Obviously, this is not to diminish how great it’s been to share this news with all the people who ARE still here, but it’s all the more bittersweet because it makes me realize how many others have already gone…

Also… I may have a list of the dead, but I’ve lived long enough that there is also a list of the dead-to-me. This is bittersweet in a different way, but it also brings a grim satisfaction that I never have to deal with any of them ever again.

So that’s been my week.

New from above/ground press: my chapbook, This Folded Path.

You know that scene where Faye is mailing letters and she hears “That Thing You Do” on the radio and she and the bass player run down the street screaming like lunatics and then they all dance around Patterson’s appliance shop?

Yeah, that.

Details to follow.

Well. Isn’t that just some of the best news I can’t tell anyone yet.

🎙️ I’m this week’s guest on Micro Monday podcast series.

I know, I know: fifty-four minutes isn’t exactly “micro.” Well, after the main interview, we talked for almost forty extra minutes about Until the End of the World, which we’re both very big fans of.

And “cinephile”? Oh I don’t know. I think of myself more as a song & dance man.

After six years on a shelf, my old Olivetti has a room of its own.

We just moved into our house.

We just bought a house.

I’ve been reassessing my “Finished” program, and I think it’s time to make a few changes.

First, I’ve long been aware that I tend to re-read books in the fall more than I read new books, so I am anticipating a decrease in my willingness to tackle new work. I’ll still be reading some new/unfinished things, but not at the expense of re-reads.

Also, I feel as though I have achieved the root reason for doing this: my poetry TBR shelf is now just over a third of what it was at the end of 2018.

And instead of weekly updates, I’ll be going back to a monthly update, like I did in April. So this will be the last update until the end of September.

This is the first week that I haven’t finished reading any book of poetry, and there are several reasons for this.

First was an influx of new books (and not just poetry) that I bought last week during Sixth Chamber’s last week of business, which swamped my TBR pile.

Second was two long nonfiction books I’m reading, both engrossing; one of which I’m sprinting through the last 100 pages. I’ve therefore been juggling the two to the exclusion of poetry.

Third was that I’m trying to finish several poems of my own which are still in draft, and I’ve been finding it hard to read poetry while also trying to write it. (This isn’t always true for me, but it has been recently, for whatever reason.)

Last was the death on Friday of WS Merwin, which meant any other reading was put on hold as I pulled my Merwin off the shelf to revisit his work.

In light of the appallingly large number of unread and under-read books of poetry currently glowering from the two full shelves behind me, I have resolved to finish reading two books of poetry each week this year. I’ll be keeping track of what I finish with this tag.

For quite a few reasons (which I won’t bore you with), 2006 was the worst year of my life, and it ended badly. I am heartily glad it’s over, even if a year is an arbitrary demarcation. All that was bad about 2006 fell within the human universe, and such demarcations, tho arbitrary, are also within the human universe. I am therefore confident that the latter will have a real effect upon the former.

I am thankful for the good things that happened during the calendar year of 2006, even tho I could count them on one maimed hand. I am taking seriously the notion of the “new year’s resolution,” never having done so before, and one of my resolutions is to step to the side of polarities. Black-and-white, for example, is a polarity; but to introduce “shades of grey” simply defines a new polarity of “black/white” v. “greys.” Instead, I resolve to look for a meaningful third space.

Also, I simply have a thing against the number six, and I’m glad to see it go.

Walter Ong, Orality & Literacy:

The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.