duh!

Why didn't anyone tell me I was being a moron? Cadaver Dogs was not available through the library because it just came out. Why did I think it had been out for a while?

*

I found a spider on me while I was on the el today. Ever since, I've been having that creepy-itchy feeling like I'm covered in bugs. Ew.

*

What if I stopped blogging? Would I miss it? Maybe I'd write more letters. Maybe I'd write more poems.

I'm not going to stop blogging, but this is something I think about from time to time.

*

Plowing through my reading list. Love Denise Levertov even more than I thought. Love Charles Wright less. Feeling somewhat "eh" about Karen Whalley. Having trouble spending time with my library books. They're just so heavy and unbendy. Mary Oliver and Mary Kinzie are both pissing me off a little bit. (In related news, why do how-to-write-fiction books seem so much less preachy and finger pointing than how-to-write-poetry books?)

*

Since moving happens in less than a month, I'm trying to eat all my frozen and canned food instead of going grocery shopping. I may be a bit of an apocalyps shopper, bc I definitely have a lot of non-perishable food around. But June is really not the time to be eating non-perishable food. I want watermelon and zucchini and sweet corn (fresh, not canned!) and plums and artichokes... You get my drift. Canned pineapple and frozen brussel sprouts will have to do. I'm being practical.

*

I get to see my momma and my pops and my seesters in less than two weeks!! I wanna go now! (Don't tell, but I'm looking forward to driving with the windows down and the radio up almost as much as I am looking forward to seeing my peeps.) I'm going home for one of my nephew's graduation parties. I just looked at the graduation announcement which reminded me I graduated 10 years ago. How and when did I get this old?

*

I've spent the last 2 hours (minus the time I just spent here) trying to decide what I was going to try to accomplish tonight. Talk about Epic Fail.

Library vs. Everything Else, Round 2

In continuing my library experiment, I went to the public library around the corner (yes, literally around the corner, 1/2 a block from my front door) and rented some movies. I then promptly canceled my Netflix account because with Netflix, I was getting 2 movies a month for five dollars, and at the library I got 3 movies all at once for zero dollars. I thought this was smart and economical. Until I returned my movies today and went looking for more, and discovered that the selection sucks. On the other hand, you can put things on hold at the library, which is kind of like the queue on Netflix, so I guess in the long run, I'm still saving $5 a month.

However...I still like to buy books. I went to Borders today because I had a gift certificate. Gift certificates are great except when you spend twice as much as the gc is worth. It's not that hard to do math in my head, but it is hard to decide which books I want to read--er, own.

Anyway. Here's what I bought today:

Mary Oliver, Dream Work
Denise Levertov, Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems
David Lehman, Great American Prose Poems
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

I promise myself and my bank account and my sagging bookshelves that I won't buy any more books this summer. Unless, well, unless I just have to have them.

Library Avoiders Anonymous

I have a confession. I hate libraries--especially university libraries. Part of it is that the library is always the last building on campus to be updated or renovated, so the chairs are always broken and skanky, the carpet thread bare, the thermostat always wrong, and I'm sorry, but the Dewey Decimal system is totally bizarre. Oh, and the books--with those awful generic covers, usually in the ugliest shade of green or orange possible--why, oh why do they do that? I know, students can't be trusted not to mangle the real covers, but--ugh!

But more importantly, I like to buy books. I'm not easy on them. I like to curl the front cover around when I'm reading, I like to dogear pages and make notes in the margins, and with library books, I just can't get comfortable.

This is why, for the last ten years, I have only borrowed library books when I'm writing papers--because you don't want to get comfortable with those books anyhow. I've developed quite a book-buying habit over the last few years, though, that is getting difficult to accommodate both financially and spatially. So...I borrowed a couple of books from the library yesterday, just to read them. This is purely an experiment. If I can't comfortably snuggle into bed with Whitman's collected poetry and prose, well, then, it's back to Borders for this girl. We'll see.

distractions

My sister is making me read this. I'm half-way through the third book. Alternately bored by the writing and caught up in the teenage romance. But man, what a break after the dense reading I had to do over the last semester.

Oh, and then there's cable TV. I don't have it, but I'm staying with my boyfriend for a couple weeks over break and when I'm not reading about teenage vampires, I'm watching reality TV and reruns. Sigh.

Wanna Trade?

So, I was just organizing my poetry shelves when I realized I have two copies of Anne Winters' The Displaced of Capital, and I was wondering what I was going to do about it when I had the most brilliant idea...

Anyone want to start an "oops, I ordered it twice" book trade? I know I'm not the only one who binge-orders at Amazon without the benefit of a list.

Don't Cry for Me

I'm going to see Evita this afternoon. I've lived and or gone to school in Akron for almost a decade, but I think this is the first time I'll be going to EJ Thomas for anything other than a high school graduation (a lot of Akron public schools use it for commencement). I need to get over to the art museum sometime soon, too. They have weird hours and whenever I want to go, they're closed.

When I was a kid, my mom had a CD of Andrew Lloyd Weber's greatest hits. I used to know the whole thing by heart. But I've never seen any of his shows.

Sometimes, Varley talks about living in NYC and going to shows on Broadway. I can't imagine living a life where going to Broadway doesn't involve plane tickets and lots of planning. Have you read Varley's books? I loved A Company of Three but haven't read the others yet. I hear she's going to be signing The Cure at AWP.

I started The Road this morning. It reads like a giant prose poem, which, in my opinion, is a really, really good thing. I'm only about 20 pages in, though, so I'll reserve judgement for later.

Jason Bredle's Standing in Line for the Beast pretty much rocks. Everyone talks about how funny it is, but when I finished, I was sad and lonely. Okay, so I'm pretty much always sad and lonely, but what I'm trying to say is that it wasn't as silly as some make it seem. In her foreward, Barbara Hamby says, "These long loopy poems make you laugh out loud and then crumple your heart like a Dixie cup." That's what I'm trying to say.

There was something in that foreward that bugged me a little, though. Hamby wrote: "[These poems] do not come from ... a breathless world where people are just too sensitive or confused or mired in their childhood for words." I can't help feeling like she was talking about my ms, which is sensitive, and confused, and mired in childhood. I guess i won't be entering any contests Ms. Hamby is judging.

PS - The 10 day forecast has already changed. Next weekend will be warmer than it is now, but not 50.

non-commital

For some reason, I'm finding it very difficult to stick with one book until it's finished (except books I have to read for class). Right now, I'm somewhere in the middle of:

• Neon Vernacular - Yusef Komunyakaa
• The Little Book of Guesses - John Gallaher
• Clueless in Academe - Gerald Graff
• The Demon and the Angel - Edward Hirsch
• A Company of Three - Varley O'Connor
• Gathering the Tribes - Carolyn Forche (imagine the accent mark, b/c I don't know how to make one)
• Nickeled and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

The worst is The Demon and the Angel, which I started sometime in August. I imagine I would be enjoying all of these books a lot more if I would just spend some quality time with each one individually instead of haphazardly grabbing one off my desk when I have time to read.

*

I tried to have a discussion with my students about gender roles today. Well, I did have a discussion with them, it just didn't go the way I imagined. I thought it would be pretty standard for people younger than me to have at least borderline feminist thoughts about marriage and gender equality, but they don't. We started off talking about men & women's roles w/in marriage, and probably 2/3rds of my students said a traditional division would be best. Then I asked them about Hilary Clinton, and no one thought America would benefit from having a female president (no mention of her actual qualifications, just her gender). When I asked them why it mattered that Clinton is female, the answer was pretty much "because it does."

Now, I'm not a politically minded person. I don't follow it all as closely as I should and certainly don't get fired up about much. But I was shocked to see that even the few students who were against traditional gender roles in their personal lives thought that a woman president would be bad news. I guess I'm more of a feminist than I thought.

106

I’ve been tagged.

Below are listed the top 106 books listed as "Unread" in Librarything. No one seems to know why 106.

The Rules: Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (hated it - don't know how to strikethrough)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


Pretty sad. I've only read 17. This is why I need a PhD.

Hickory Dickory Dock

Holy Crap. Week 4 is half-way over. My thesis is due a month from today. I seem to have lost the ability to complete anything on time. I have shit-tons of poems to get in the mail, but it is taking me for-freaking-ever to get myself organized and ready to print.

On the upside? I wrote a new Donny poem today. And I am in a remarkably good mood.

I need a day off. A real day off. Where I don't have a to-do list and I allow myself to chill out without feeling guilty. I think it will be well into November before I get one.

Aahhh, the life of an academic. What am I signing myself up for?

I think I'm going to go outside, enjoy what may be one of the last warm nights of the year, and read Baptist Confidential by Thomas Dukes. (Oh, how I love knowing people who write books. I said, "Dr. Dukes, I heard your book came out." and he said, "Yes, let me go get you a copy." )

a confession, a rant, and a ramble

Kristy loves her blog, but I'm obsessed with mine. I'm a little embarrassed every time I look at my archives and realize that I post almost every day, sometimes more than once a day. It seems to be the ultimate form of narcissiscm to think people actually care what I have to say that often.

And then I get annoyed when everyone else doesn't blog as often as I do. I need something to read! As if the 300 and some books immediately to my left don't count as reading material. What can I say? I like to know what poets who actully get published on a regular basis think...maybe they'll rub off on me. Maybe, by reading some editor's blog, I can figure out the right poems to send. Maybe I'm just lonely and should start calling my friends when I have the urge to commune with my psuedo-internet-friends. Maybe.

***

Also, I've been seeing a lot these days about people being anti-MFA, and frankly, it annoys me. All right, hold on. I'm not saying if you want to be a writer you have to get one, I'm just saying, if you don't want one, can't afford one, or whatever, stop telling people who do, and can, that they shouldn't. Doing this was absolutely the right decision for me and if I wasn't here, I'd still be working in HR, trying to write a crappy romance novel, and I wouldn't have ever realized that my real passion is poetry.

Okay, so it is expensive. My education is costing me about as much as a small house on the poor side of Akron. But my education is going to last a hell of a lot longer than that house. And it won't get termites. Bad analogy, I know. But it's an investment--in me. Not in my career, b/c we all know how lucrative that is going to be. I think it's better to be poor at 26 and loving what I'm doing than it was to be financially stable at 23 and completely lost emotionally and mentally.

So, if you're a writer and you're lucky enough to find a community of writers that you respect, you're lucky enough to have the discipline and the time to study the craft and practice and revise on your own, then congratulations. I needed structure, guidance, and support. Not deadlines...those are arbitrary. I can give myself deadlines and I can follow them, but if I wasn't in school I'd just keep writing the same thing over and over again because I couldn't figure out on my own what wasn't working.

Really, I think the whole debate is about as stupid as whether chocolate or vanilla is better. It's a matter of opinion, and I get mad whenever I hear people spouting off opinions as fact. (Pot & kettle? Perhaps)

And that's enough of that.

***

I've been reading a lot this week, along with my crazy fluke of prolificness. Joy Harjo's She Had Some Horses, Philip Levine's What Work Is, and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Do you hear "which one of these is not like the other?" from Sesame Street in your head? Me too. But I decided my persona reads Hemingway, which means now I have to. I read The Sun Also Rises when I was a junior in high school and loved it, but when I took a Hemingway and Fitzgerald seminar in college, I felt like Hemingway paled next to Fitzgerald and didn't enjoy his stuff very much. So I'm going back to it, to see what I might have missed. I like that it's quick reading, but still it's not coming to life for me. Maybe the memoir isn't the right place to start. It seems I can sum it up like this: "went to the cafe. went to the track. talked to gertrude stein. went back to the cafe. talked to another famous writer. had sex with my wife. went to the cafe." There are some interesting moments when he talks about writing, but for the most part...eh.

I've always felt like a little bit of a fraud because I don't like most of the fiction that English majors are supposed to rave about. Vonnegut? He's alright. Faulkner? Never finished anything I was supposed to read of his. Sentences and paragraphs are not synonyms. Henry James? I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than pick up The American again. I did love Steinbeck's East of Eden, but wasn't nearly as impressed with The Pearl. Grapes of Wrath? Haven't read it. Why can't I get my head around the stuff I'm "supposed" to like? Is there something wrong with me, or does everyone else just pretend to like it? Am I the only one who's no good at faking it?

A week without blogging...

is like a week without, well, nothing much really. I didn't even notice it had been that long. I've been really busy getting ready for school and such.

I read Jeannine Hall Gailey's Becoming the Villainess and Simone Muench's Lampblack & Ash this week (thanks to Mary's great reading list for Poetry of the Body). Really enjoyed both books, and I've started picking up on how other poets write narratives without sounding prosey (my biggest problem--I think), so hopefully this means as I embark on my thesis writing, I'll be writing less prosey narrative poems, and lots of 'em!

There are 25 kids signed up for my Comp class this semester. Last semester, I had 16. I'm a little intimidated by this number. And bummed out, because I think my super-cool, high-tech classroom may be too small for this many students. We'll see on Wednesday, when they're packed in like sardines and sitting in the aisles between desks. I don't want to give up my plethora of white boards and fancy-schmancy projector/AV system, though, so I'm going to be mean and try to get half of them to drop (insert maniacal laugh here).

I'm excited for AWP. Some friends and I are going down early to explore Hotlanta and surely get into trouble. I hope we can find Virginia Highlands and the cool Irish pub I went to the last time I was down there...but it was a few years ago and I am directionally challenged, so we'll see. Luckily, if I do get into any trouble, my cousin is on the Atlanta PD, so maybe he'll keep me out of jail.

I must, must get my submissions out on Tuesday (why does Monday have to be a holiday? I need the post office!) or I will put them off again until it's too late. 2007 must be the year of publishing for me, or my future will start looking a little bleak.

I'll be updating to the new blogger soon. Seems I'm the last one and I can't comment on anyone's blog anymore. Means you all probably can't comment on mine. Wish me luck.

diversion

Trying to catch up on some reading responses I've been putting off all semester...and I need a break, so here I am.

I went to Borders today. Had a $50 gift certificate and managed to spend $50.90...how good am I? I bought Louise Gluck's Wild Iris, and two books that I'm hoping will help me put a new spin on my family poems: Don't Know Much about Mythology, and Grimms' Tales for Young and Old. I'm hoping to find some stuff about sisters in the mythology book--since I have 4, I've always thought something with the fates or the muses in a sister poem would be cool--and who knows what in the Grimms' fairy tales. So much cool stuff about family, gender roles, coming of age etc. in those fairy tales...especially before they were watered down for Disney. Now I just need to find the time to read them.

But back to the more pressing work...right now I'm writing a response on Philip Levine's "What Work Is".