Over at Phantom Limb is an excellent and very alive poetry collaboration between Wendy Xu and Nick Sturm.  Those two must have energy to spare…Please send some my way…

And this at Jellyfish, from Mike Wall. Mike was a student of mine back in the Heartland days. My all-time favorite in-class moment came courtesy of Mike. The assignment was to recite sonnets; Mike picked that Billy Collins poem “Sonnet”. When he reached the turn where Laura tells Petrarch, “to put down his pen, / take off those crazy medieval tights, / blow out the lights, and come at last to bed” Mike snapped the button on his belt buckle (which appeared to be an actual belt buckle from a car circa the 70s), let his pants drop, and delivered those last lines–deadly serious–in a pair of boxing shorts covered with red hearts. Genius.

And the following readings upcoming:

Feb. 8th: w/ Becky Hazelton (her manuscript Fair Copy just won the Wheeler Prize from OSU Press), The Foxglove Gallery, Milwaukee, 7 pm.
Feb 15th: Beloit College, 7pm.
Feb 16th: Illinois Wesleyan University (time TBA)
March 1: The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct. (in the historic Dearborn Station building), Chicago, 6 pm. (This is the A Face to Meet the Faces book launch party!)
March 2: Fine Arts Building, Curtiss Hall, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 7 pm.

That last reading is the Barn Owl Review/Diode AWP offsite reading, which will also feature Jason Bredle, Traci Brimhall, Peter Campion, John Gallaher, Brent Goodman, Sandy Longhorn, Erika Meitner, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alison Pelegrin and G.C. Waldrep. WOW…

Got an email today from Sean Bishop about writing a poem a day for the month of February. There are many things one could do everyday for a month (let your mind wander…slower…s-l-o-w-e-r) but writing a poem a day is no easy feat. Which is why I think I’m saying “yes”…I’ll post my less-embarrassing efforts.

It’s Monday. I’m feeling a little blue…

The first came from Diode editor Patty Paine, who has nominated my poem “The Unquiet” for the 2011 Best of the Net Anthology.

The second was from Oliver Bendorf, a MFA student studying poetry at UW-Madison. Oliver, on behalf of Devils’ Lake, wrote a quick recap of the Wild Young Voices reading I was a part of yesterday with the fabulous poets Seth Abramson and Lauren Berry, and the writer Chris Mohar, who read a moving piece of non-fiction about vegetarianism, deer-hunting and a son’s relationship with his father.

I’m reading with the ever-awesome poet Ed Bok Lee this Tuesday night at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. 7 – 8 p.m. in the Kopp Student Center.

On Wednesday night, I’ll be in Iowa City, reading at the Prairie Lights bookstore with the dear heart Adam Fell. Also 7 – 8 p.m.

Another fantastic Wisconsin Book Fest concluded this weekend. Didn’t make it to as many readings as I would have liked, but I did check out Erika Meitner on Saturday night. He latest book, the cool-titled Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, is a blast. I love how so many of her poems are unabashedly conceptual, yet her use of formal devices is always in the service of the narrative and moments of lyrical intensity. She has a faith in language that I have found is often missing from more “experimental” poets who are also preoccupied with the conceptual. Do check out this book…

Someone asks about influences, my favorite poets. I mention the usual suspects—Dickinson & Whitman, Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria,” Denise Duhamel & Dean Young. But it was comics—comedians—that hooked me on language.

When I was a kid my older brother would have to tag me along—mother’s orders. My brother had this friend; we would go to his house because he had one of those basements teenager’s dream of. Wall-to-wall carpets, cool posters, a Nerf hoop, wide-screen TV with Intellivision, beat-up bean bag chairs & a grungy oversized sectional sofa you could dive into. And the parents never came down. But most important was the record player & tape deck. I remember being swallowed up in a bean bag chair, totally mesmerized, listening to George Carlin’s A Place for My Stuff, Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy, & this Richard Pryor cassette worn so thin the only way to rewind it was with a pencil by hand.

Even then, as a kid of 9 or 10, I sensed that what those comics were achieving had everything to do with structure. Like poetry, comedy is about timing—the ordering & strategic release of language within a form.

Because it’s related, I tell the story of Mr. C & The Little Jimmy Notebook. In 10^th grade, a serious oversight by school administration allowed me & a handful of other extremely obnoxious trouble-making sophomores—sophomores who had no business being in the same class together—enroll in the same class: Mr. C’s “Creative Writing”. Little Jimmy was a boy we invented; basically he was a porn star with a retarded imagination. The Little Jimmy Notebook! We surreptitiously passed it back & forth, adding to & one-upping one another’s scenes with a ridiculousness borne of spectacular immaturity. One day when I was working on a story with a Christmas theme—something with a “Yule log”—Mr. C came up behind me & snatched the notebook from my desk.

While he read I imagined my imminent suspension, the phone call to my mother (my poor mother!), the cops, the FBI, the front-page of the local paper in all capital letters: “LOCAL IDIOT SHAMES TOWN”. Mr. C’s bald head turned red. He flipped the notebook back on my desk, then stood there considering what to do, a very long & pregnant pause where I felt doom & the blood pounding in my ears. Finally he said: “Well…At least you knuckleheads are writing.”

It was the best thing he could have done. He was right: we were writing. For most of us it was probably the first time since grade school that we’d written for our own pleasure & entertainment. I think of that day as a lesson in poetry—like the best comedy it should transgress, it should feel a little bit wrong & exciting like troublemaking, an arrow shot into the quotidian, something one does when one is expected to be elsewhere & doing something else.

Here’s my poetry manifesto for the week: A poem poems aboutness like memory weirds a teapot.  

I’m reading this Wednesday, October 12, at 12:30 p.m. in the River Valley Community College library in Claremont, NH, just up the road from my hometown of Newport.  River Valley has an announcement on their homepage with a link to my bio.

I’ve been slow to blog lately.  Teaching two 8 week accelerated composition courses will do that.  But I can’t complain.  The students are lively.  And the weather here in Madison has been gorgeous–cool nights, near summer-like days.  All the trees blazing yellow.  I’m finally finding some time to read and write–and notice things!–like how the lakes at night here in Madison bend the city’s light so it’s like the city is dreaming, navigating out over the water…

It’s a start…

In the meantime check out Daily Poet Factory-Machine: the work of Brad Liening.  I met Brad last weekend at a reading he gave here in Madison.  He was bout 7 seconds into his first poem before I rushed the table to buy his book Ghosts and Doppelgangers.  Hilarious, smart and perversely sincere.  It’s my new favorite…

Pretty cool, huh?

Alright Madison!  Ranked 17th in Bloomberg’s list of America’s 50 Best Cities…

At least I have that in my corner, a super-cool city.  Because right now the poetry writing is slow. This happens; the semester gridlocks with prep, assessments, insomnia, too much caffeine, dirty diapers, rebel assaults, cannonballs, lots of YouTubing Pixies’ videos, this monkey’s gone to heaven, the general energy required for teaching (and teaching well hopefully, though I do so these days on precious little coherence in my own thoughts).

I did however Skype recently into a high school in Seattle–the Seattle Academy–at the invitation of one very cool and innovative teacher: Ms. Lauri Conner.  Conner has been running a series–Words On Wire–for some years now. Her students asked lots of smart questions about process, technical choices and aesthetic awareness. Frankly I was jealous: the closest I came to poetry in high school was writing things like the dark vortex of my soul in a notebook (basically I was ripping off  The Cure) and talking to some guy with the words Easy Rider tattooed on his face outside Coronis Market.

What else?  I’m reading two books: Anna Karenina (slow going, 10 pages at a time, but wow!) and all the way home, a truly elegant, energetic and poetic memoir by David Giffels, who it seems has fuel to burn.  Both these books remind me that the timer is on, that we get only so many minutes to create and live.

In the meantime, live a little: check out the goodness over at the NEO MFA’s Official Unofficial blog.  There’s a list of recent tweets to the right; one says to write a poem to your nemesis in the form of a “happy birthday” card. My nemesis for today: grading.

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.”

“…art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things…”

My latest “First Takes” feature over at the Southern Indiana Review looks at some choices poet Becky Hazelton makes in her very excellent poems “Actual Animals” and “Animal Heart”.

Meanwhile over at Hunger Mountain, my poem “Dog Days” gets a shout out in a short piece on craft called “On Poetry: Sine Waves,” by Seth Abramson.

Last Friday night, 90+ people came out for the Monsters of Poetry reading I was a part of with Adam Fell, MC Hyland and Stephanie Anderson.  Adam called it a “destructively good” time.  Adam in particular was sublime.  He read his poem “Reckoner,” which incorporates music.  I’ve seen Adam use Radiohead and “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins–both excellent choices.  But this last reading he used Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike”.  Which was perfect.  And amazing.  So here it is, to help get you over the hump:

Which of these best describes this photo?

Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.    -Emily Dickinson

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.  -Emily Dickinson

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.  -Walt Whitman

Be curious, not judgmental.  -Walt Whitman

I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.
-Hart Crane

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
-e.e. cummings

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
-T.S. Eliot