Meet me here this week.

Sometimes I write really bad poems and then stash them away in the dusty corner of my computer files and then find them again and read them as if I'd never written them. I don't remember writing this poem last February, but it makes me laugh.

You died in a way
no one else ever died:
your bones began
to snap, one
at a time,
one every second.

This process took
3 minutes and 36 seconds
because you were a perfectly average
human being.

I'm preparing for the big AWP trip to NYC. I bought a few boxes of TLC granola bars, but already ate 3 of them. I might have to get more. Other things I've done to prepare are mostly for the sake of Octopus. We'll have a table there at the bookfair. #457. Come say hello and be nice to us. You may get something for free. Or one of us may hug you. And smell your hair a little. We'll have some advanced copies of our first full-length. Julie Doxsee's Undersleep. They won't be quite officially out, but these are some sneak-peek copies. They look exactly like this:



We'll also have a few of Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's Document, a few of Jonah Winter's Book Reports, and a few Octopus #8 chappie sets.







Also, if you come to the table, you may have a chance to meet Dwight Gooden.





And Thursday night (Thursday night!) CD Wright is going to represent Octopus Magazine #10 (almost ready to launch--so close) and Julie Doxsee is going to represent Octopus Books in the baddest reading at AWP this year. There will be other painfully good readers there too. Trust me. I'll be there. Let's meet there. Ok?

Today, in class, I was looking through one of my student's iPod playlists.

Student: C'mon, I know you like Boston.
Me: Why would you think I like Boston?
Student: Because they sing "More Than a Feeling."

Check out what Press Press Press has been up to, pick yourself out something nice, then bring some Press Press Press money to NYC next week, k?

Ye olde Emily Danforth and I will be putting on a nice little poetry reading show for you on Friday at 4pm at Sur Tango Bar. Emily promises she'll be especially pioneery.

So much to do before next week's AWP conference. Next week! Sheesh. The octopus crew is getting together tonight to pound out some product for you at the book fair.

I'm going to the post office today to do some poem send outs. To journals that still take hard copies even. My own poems, collabies with EKF, and translies of AS!

I'm reading the new issues of Fence, Phoebe, and Denver Quarterly. And Claire Becker's Untoward, and Fredrick Nyberg's A Different Practice (translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida).

O Clean Part,

Thursday night I had not-small Margaritas with Michael, played Second Samurai II with Avishay, and watched/listened to Ande, Mathias, and others in Man's Last Great Invention.

1. A photo of some of my hand, my green hoodie and my t-shirt.



2. This is the first cover of Jonah Winter's The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear, his chapbook from last year's Octopus #8. We ended up going with another cover, but I wanted to show you because I think it's really cool. And it's a hand.

3. Sometimes I get powerful cravings for the following food items, but yet I do not eat either very often: a. a very large bowl of peanut butter captain crunch, b. a BLT.

4. I shaved my beard this weekend, despite my seasonal plan to wait until St. Patty's Day. I feel like a failure. Also, I'm getting a haircut today.

5. Our microwave is broken, so Wayne, the microwave repairman, came over yesterday. He had long hair and a mouth-smothering mustache. A one-act:

Wayne knocks on the door. I open the door.
Wayne: So, you got a broken microwave, man?
Me: I do. The kitchen is over there (I point toward the kitchen)
Wayne: (setting up his laptop computer on my stovetop) So, man, your microwave is broken right?
Me: Yes. I told the person on the phone what the exact problem is. Do you have that in your notes or should I go through it again with you?
Wayne: (looks at his notes on his computer): Says here you got a broken microwave, man.
Me: (a very long monologue regarding specific microwave concerns which I will not include in detail here)
Wayne: Yeah, sounds broken, man.

As a reward for working hard your first week back at school, The Clean Part will drop a killer reading on you. Start the semester out feeling good about yourself.

Saturday. Sheldon Art Gallery. 7 pm. Free.

Claire Becker. Lily Brown. Steve Langan.

Maybe you'll win a pie.

A few weeks ago, in the archives of this blog, I came across an old first draft of the table of contest of The Man Suit. I liked remembering my vision for the book long before it became a book. I don't even remember some of those poems that eventually got cut. I'm at that same stage again with this new manuscript. So, here goes:


Scary, No Scary
Table of contents

Scary, No Scary

●

The Histories: 1977 – 1987

●●

New Kind of Night
New Kind of Tree
New Kind of Light
Your Limbs Will be Torn Off in a Farm Accident
Falling Life
Look Through a Complex Eye and See 1000 of Everything
The Abandoned Hotel
The Black Hole
I Know a Dead Wolf We Can Climb Inside and Beat
I Find Your Beating Heart Half-Buried
This is Not Fog This is Cobwebs
I Give Birth to a Girl Named Carver Who is So Tiny I Can Barely See Her.
I Lose Her Immediately.
I’m Right Here I’m a Kind of Lamp
Autobiography
Dead Hummingbird Problem
More and More Jaguar
This Growl is Not Yours
I Was Surrounded by a Mob of People
The World Became Too Large So It Was Divided Into Many Smaller Worlds
The World
Love is When You Build a Boat from All the Eyelashes in the Ocean
Asleep or Worse in a Boat
New Infinite Plain
Landscape (Lava)
The Black Hole
This is What You Need to Know About the World, Pretend Son
Invisible and Not Invisible
Landscape (Breadth) or When I Find My Animal Light, Mom, I Will
Convince Myself it is Beautiful

●●●

The Histories: 1988 – 1997

●●●●

The Histories: The Chair Age – The Ghost Age
The Old Man Who Watches Me Sleep
Woman Tied to a Tree
I’m Sorry I Missed Your Birthday Party
Two Meteorite Theories
We Volunteered to Fly the Spaceship
The Sawing in Half
You Must Choose Between Floating Eternally in a Buoyant Cage
of Hummingbird Bones in a River of Lava or a River of Blood
The Darkness and the Light
A Horrible Flood of Lava
Goodbye Lesson
Sin and Forgiveness
The Fire Cycle

●●●●●

The Histories: 1998 – 2007

A 1994 newspaper clipping I found stapled onto the bulletin board of my old high school swim pool.

I took my dad to a college basketball game last night, and out for some beer and wings before hand. I had the Arizona ranch flavor. He had the chipotle bbq. It was father/son sports night. Creighton won. We had a good time.

Dave and I got back into the office routine yesterday. It felt good. Typey typing away in the lamplight, listening to D typey type away. He got an Origami one-a-day calendar so we played with that for a little while. I think we'll try to keep it up, the origami, so if you find an origami pelican or crocodile in your mailbox this year, it was from us. And you're welcome. D made a 2 parted dog, a fox, and a two-dollar suit to clothe our little naked David statue. I made a nightingale. All this AND I put up my new Bridges of Portland poster gifted to me by Emily. You should come visit sometime. Maybe I'll tell you all about the bridges of Portland.

If you've purchased a chapbook from Octopus Books, you've probably noticed it comes to you packed in a few pages of old, often culturally insensitive, mid-century children's books, or in pages of old science textbooks. I sometimes fall in love with these pages and they're hard to give up. Today, I came across one that I was unwilling to give up. There it is. Mmmmm. It's so true. So factual. So informative and helpful. My favorite part is the last two lines. I love how the anus is just "another hole...back where we sit." I like how it kinda suggests that the anus is the forgotten hole--the hole we sometimes don't give enough credit.


I couldn't never write a poem as perfect as this. And, oh, that diagram at the bottom. If I ever start another press, please please remind me that it should be called Intestines Bladder Bladder Anus Press.

Tonight I went to the grocery store. This is what I bought:

Litte chewy sticks for the dog
shredded mozzarella
pizza sauce
whole wheat english muffins
toilet bowl cleaner with bleach
diet coke 24 pack
miller lite 18 pack
baking soda
3 bananas
1 grapefruit
4 tangelos
1 spanish onion
1 red bell pepper
1 can pork and beans
2 cans chili beans
1 jar of habenero salsa (hot)
1 pint of chopped tomatoes
1 lb ground beef (sirloin)
sour cream and onion pringles
TLC granola bars (peanut butter)
Nutri-grain bars (vanilla yogurt)
sugar free jello pudding cups
many many frozen lunches (Lean Cuisines and Smart Ones mostly)

On my way home my Here's Where the Strings Come In cassette warped. This is the second Here's Where the Strings Come In cassette of mine to warp. The first one finally warped two years ago (after about 9 years of pretty consistent service). I need to get another one. I will add it to my list. I have a week and change before school starts back up again and a lot of stuff to do--much of it Octopus related. We have to get stuff ready to put on the Octopus Books table at AWP in NYC and we have to get issue #10 of the magazine up by then too. So. It just now occurs to me that this entire entry is probably completely uninteresting to anyone but me.

The Suit cracked this year's list at Pegasus in Berkeley and, from what I can remember, it isn't even on an eye-level shelf. If Clay does the reverse alphabet on that display watch out.