Five poems of mine just appeared this morning at talking about strawberries all of the time. Many thanks to Malcolm Curtis for giving them a home.

(One of them had already been rejected twenty-five times. Is it weird that I was secretly disappointed that I’d finally broken that streak?)

My poem, “Leaving the Story Unfinished,” has just appeared as part Dusie’s long-running Tuesday Poem series.

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.

I mailed out the first batch of chapbook orders last week, and I’m ready to open it up to people beyond my newsletter subscribers.

Visit this Very Secret Page for instructions on how to buy a copy.

To mark the day her eyes closed and mine stayed open: Polly

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.

This is your periodic reminder that I have a newsletter and that now might be a good time to subscribe.

Some above/ground author activity…

I’ve just learned the formidable Otoliths has ended its run after seventy issues.

Few lit mags have published such a dizzying variety of work while also maintaining such an unmistakable and singular vision. Its intrepid editor, Mark Young, is a wonder.

A poem of mine, “Four Lessons” has just appeared in the fabulous Guesthouse. Many thanks to Jane Huffman for including it among such excellent company.

“Four Lessons” is from my book, Vessels, which will be published next year by Unsolicited Press.

Now might be a good time to sign up for my (infrequent) newsletter, Three Things.

Something just happened and, honestly, it’s taken me a few days for the reality of it to sink in. It’s of no consequence to almost anyone else, of course, but it’s rather a big deal to me.

Last week, I signed a contract with Unsolicited Press, which will be publishing my debut book of poetry.

More details soon, but first I need to attend to my chapbook, which will be coming out early next year.

I spent the better part of 1992 through 1994 writing thousands of lines in iambic pentameter. Maybe it’s time again. 2023, the year of blank verse?

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.

Apparently, some foolish press has committed the grave tactical error of accepting a manuscript of my poetry, going so far as to claim they will actually publish it.

Why would anyone do this? I have no idea. Were they hopped up on pain meds? Did they lose a bet?

Publishers are inscrutable and are often motivated by strange, dark urges. Best not to dwell too much on their disquieting perversions.

In short, my debut chapbook, This Folded Path, is forthcoming from above/ground press.

Details to follow!

Toni Morrison (via):

We have to stop loving our horror stories. Joyce’s Ulysses was rejected fourteen times. I don’t like that story; I hate it. Fitzgerald burned out and could not work. Hemingway despaired and could not work. A went mad, B died in penury, C drank herself to death, D was blacklisted, E committed suicide. I hate those stories. Great works are written in prisons and holding camps. So are stupid books. The misery does not validate the work. It outrages the sensibilities and violates the work.

Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History:

…I take notes on four-by-six index cards, reminding myself about once an hour of a rule I read long ago in a research manual, “Never write on the back of anything.” Since copying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller the better, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s own mind, so to speak. Eventually, as the cards fall into groups according to subject or person or chronological sequence, the pattern of my story will emerge. Besides, they are convenient, as they can be filed in a shoe box and carried around in a pocketbook. When ready to write I need only to take along a packet of them, representing a chapter, and I am equipped to work anywhere; whereas if one writes surrounded by a pile of books, one is tied to a single place, and furthermore likely to be too much influenced by other authors.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil, the terrible boredom of pain.

(see also)

Walter Ong, Orality & Literacy:

To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness…. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.

Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others:

Even “having no meaning” is a way of meaning. The absurd is one of the extremes that meaning reaches when it examines its conscience and asks itself, What is the meaning of meaning? Ambivalence of meaning: it is the fissure through which we enter things and the fissure through which being escapes from them.

Meaning ceaselessly undermines the poem; it seeks to reduce its reality as an object of the senses and as a unique thing to an idea, a definition, or a “message.” To protect the poem from the ravages of meaning, poets stress the material aspect of language.

Some years ago, when I was young and impressionable, a knowledgeable academic said to me, “There are two interesting things in the world — integration and disintegration — and they are equally interesting.” My response was the nineteen-thirties equivalent of Wow! — I felt I had learned everything worth knowing, if I could just hold onto this formula.

More and more, I have come to realize how wrong it is. Integration and disintegration are not equally interesting. Pathology is not as interesting as health, the journey to chaos is not as interesting as the journey to order. The poet may — in fact must — plunge into disintegration, pathology, chaos, maintaining as best he can his own freeboard, his balance — but it is the return to the surface, the return to sanity, where the experience may be recorded, that confirms our interest. Ishmael survived the sinking of the Pequod.

—Paul Metcalf, “Where Do You Put the Horse?”
(Collected Works Vol 3, pp 49–50)

Bonus! Now that this rare series has been reissued on DVD, be sure to check out the bonus disc of Deleted Scenes & Bloopers: Songwriting! Sylvia Plath! Bob Dylan! Cults! Hot dogs!