Waiting for Martin

Playing with the digital cam at the Harrisburg train station as I wait for Martin's train to arrive from New York. The snow at this point is mildly hazardous. . .

Waiting, #2

Still snowing. Glad I got to the station early.

Still snowing in Harrisburg

As it turned out, we drove home through the worst conditions I'd ever been out in. Windshield freezing over, terrible visibility, a downright damn-frightening trek back to Lewisburg. Martin confessed the next day that he had been "a little" rattled during the drive.

Back to DC

I'm starting to feel like DC is my adopted home--three readings last year and another one coming up this weekend, at the Lavender Languages Conference at American University. I'll be reading on Saturday with Jeff Mann and Robert Giron, so please say howdy if you're there.

Weeks pass

Weeks pass and suddenly I realize how long it's been since I sat down to write. Tinkering today with a poem draft that's going nowhere, though it started with two promising lines. I'll get there, but probably not today.

Not as much snow as predicted, but enough to delight Sadie and confuse the cat, who now refuses to step out the back door. Brilliant sun right now, snowmelt dribbling from the eaves, wind whisking ice crystals in a constant flux. I feel like I'm inside one of those tacky snow globes, except it's all so beautiful and sparkly: the air is like champagne.

Still job hunting. No adjectives available.

Reading old correspondence, missing old friends: Nels Highberg. Brent Goodman. Roger Ceragioli. I lost touch with each of you, and wish I hadn't.

Fine Poet, Fine Book

Run, don't walk, to your local bookstore to order Jason Schneiderman's debut collection, Sublimation Point. I read the manuscript last year, but it's so much better to now hold this fine book in my hands. I keep coming back to the poem "Now," in particular: quietly conversational yet relentless in its pursuit of laying bare the speaker, the subject, the moment: this is good stuff. Congratulations, Jason!

Here's the poem:

NOW

We leave the subway together,
it's night, and I wish we'd gone to my place.
I say, it's happening, now:
People are coming out of the darkness,
the same darkness we walk through,
with knives and guns and disease.

We turn the corner and you say
Say men, you mean men are pushing men
up against the trees and down against
beds and sideways into tiled walls.
Say men, you say, you mean men.

We are coming to your building,
and I say, Men, yes, I mean men.
Men are forcing their way into each other,
following each other into bathroom stalls
and bedrooms, hiding in parks,
forgetting to be scared,
infecting and infecting and infecting.

We are in the elevator and you say
Say me, you mean me.
Say he pushed me against the bed
or the tree or the wall
and infected me. Say I am infected,
you mean me.

We are here. I am undressing.
I say, You, you are infected and
he is always fucking you.
He is with us in the parks and the clubs
and this bed. I mean you.
I mean him. I mean now.

Quick Word on a Terrific Fiction Writer

I'm cleaning out my office this week--blehhh--and ran across a copy of a story that was submitted last fall to West Branch. We didn't take the story, but once in a while a terrific writer rises from the slush pile to grab me by the ears and make me wish I could do more than send a nice "sorry" note. Chris Torockio is one of those writers. I just love his work, and I hope that we'll get the chance to publish one of his stories while I'm fiction editor. He truly deserves to be better known.

Campus in Fog

I took this photo in mid-November: it's the view directly across from my office at the Stadler Poetry Center.

Eight Hundred Books

For the past few years, I've worked--in various capacities--at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell. I first came here in '94, as a "June Poet" (a Fellow in the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets)--a great program that I've since had the joy of teaching in. Anyway, the Stadler Center has its own poetry library, a small eclectic collection of mainly contemporary poetry. It had some gaps back then (there are still some gaps now, but the new director, Shara McCallum, is working on filling those out). As an obsessive book buyer, I had a few extra copies and started donating them back in '94 after the June Seminar ended and I went back home to Houston.

When we moved to Lewisburg a few years ago, I brought along roughly sixty boxes of books, and half of those had to stay in storage. There's only so much space for bookcases in our apartment, and though I had six bookcases full of poetry in my office last year, next year I'll be in a much smaller space. So even though I've been donating books pretty regularly since '94, this past year I did some major thinning--and lugged in donations every week.

I like to think that there are plenty of other book lovers who keep a running database of their collection. (If not, I've just confessed a bit too much, but oh well.) So it only took a few minutes to scroll through my "books" spreadsheet the other day and tally up my donations to the library: over 800 books to date.

This is not about me. This is about building a decent collection of contemporary American poetry that will benefit students for the forseeable future. I encourage my students to use this space, to hang out and read in the poetry center. And during the June Seminar, our little library is pretty much ransacked, with piles on the desk and floor to be reshelved. It's great to see the collection filling out, and to know that it's being used. We even have a grad assistant who logs each new book into a (yes!) database. So if you ever find yourself with an extra clean copy of a poetry book, let me know: we'd probably love to add it to our library.

Bookshelf

What I'm reading this week.

West Branch interns

Tyler Mills and Drew Calvert, who just finished up a great semester interning with West Branch. Thanks, guys!

NMP/DIAGRAM - Chapbook Contest

So I'm at my office on New Year's Eve, no big deal, it's always been a sort of non-holiday for me, and to take a break from sorting and filing students' papers I wanted to plug Ander Monson's faaaabulous e-journal, DIAGRAM. The new issue (4.6) is just up.

I taught Michael Sowder's A Calendar of Crows in my intro cw course this fall (instead of using an anthology for the poetry unit, this time I taught six chapbooks--much fun!); this chap won the first NMP/DIAGRAM open competition and I liked it so much I entered the following year (and won) (ahem). So please do spread the word about the chapbook contest: the deadline's April 15th, and the prize this year is a whopping $1000. Click here for guidelines.

Okay, back to finishing up the work they paid me to do . . .

Mug

Half-smiling at Hairy John State Park, fall 2004.

Surprise Invitation

So I'm checking my webmail this morning and there's an invitation from Ellen Lewis to be interviewed for the next issue of her literary magazine, Sunspinner. Ellen had been given a copy of my chapbook, The David Museum, last year, and she had some very nice things to say about it, even quoting back a couple of lines that "resonated." I was--I am--truly moved that the poems reached beyond the (imaginary) queer circle I (imagine to) (sometimes) write in (from). Of course I will say yes to the interview: number one, I'm a Leo, and though I halfheartedly shush my own delight at being praised, the truth is that duh, I'm a Leo; number two, I'm genuinely delighted that someone out there found the poems and connected with them.

But I'm also thinking about (imaginary) boundaries, and how I call myself a queer writer: no new ideas here, nothing about identity that hasn't been (re)hashed by more articulate minds than my own, except that it seems appropriate to ponder why I choose this label. Two thoughts for now:

1) It saves time. If you're reading one of my poems for the first time, and it's about tree frogs or freeway spinouts or stealing daylily seeds from my neighbor's garden, it's important to me that you know that my "queer sensibility" shaped that vision just as much, though possibly less emphatically, as it shaped my poem about eating grapes out of someone's tushy on the kitchen table.

2) It's a matter of, well, community. I believe that if we recognize and commit to one another, everyone wins. I'm acutely aware of my identity and position in terms of privilege (educated white male, working at a swanky private college, decently published so far) as well as challenge (gay in a predominantly straight setting, advancement limitations at this institution, literal fear of how I'll pay the rent). So I like to look around, keep my nose in, so to speak, and check out other poets, especially newer, "younger" writers (whatever that means, since I'm by no means "established"), and specifically (since I don't have funds to launch the new lit journal or the new poetry series or the three or four anthologies that are backing up my Dream List, I'd better narrow the scope of where my energy's gonna be focused) queer writers. More on this later (i.e., what, specifically, can one underpaid adjunct do to promote & assist other writers) (and why you should care) because it's after nine and this old dog needs to walk home and spend time with the Husbear.

Supple Amounts

So I was teaching a couple sections of composition at a nearby campus this fall--it was my first semester there and I was feeling a little apprehensive, in that "Johnny, take the keys. . . hey, you can drive, can't you Johnny?" kind of way, especially after finally talking with another adjunct who crowed that he had boiled his essay grading time down to eight minutes, whereas I was still taking twenty--and next morning, rushing myself through the zillionth informative essay, I ran across this sentence: "So it's important to drink water in supple amounts."

Well yeah, I laughed, then circled the word with a question mark beside it, and moved on lickety-split, but days passed and those dumb words kept coming back to me, and every time I said them they just got yummier on my tongue, mmm, supple amounts. Maybe she didn't mean ample. Maybe she was onto something deeper and more subtle . . . Naaaaah. But like a bystander at a car wreck who slips a popped-off hubcap into his knapsack, I swiped her phrase. And bumped her grade by half a letter.