Elsewhere

Three More Poems before 2010?

2009-12-03T06:54:00.003-05:00

Kani Doraku Restaurant, Osaka, July 2005

Fresh Takoyaki, Dotonbori Street, Osaka, July 2005

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November 19th? Has it really been so long?

Due to some holiday travel plans, we're celebrating Christmas a week early here, meaning the Thanksgiving-Christmas rush is even rushier this year.

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I've been busy working on a book review. This is a lengthier piece and my first foray into reviewing fiction, so in certain ways I'm learning as I go.

I'd never appreciated this before about reviewing poetry: in most cases, you don't have to worry about summarizing the story. And while I know in my head that book reviews are first of all fuctional writing, rather than writing meant to last (though they can; see: R. Jarrell), still I tend to wordsmith my reviews nearly to death. The microreviews I've written for Boston Review I tinkered with as if they were prose poems.

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Speaking of fiction: Ian McEwan has a new story in this week's New Yorker.

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And check out Sweet Juniper, the blog of a photographer living in Detroit.

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Maybe also speaking of fiction? I read the first couple pages of Sarah Palin's book this weekend, standing in Target. My wife was shocked to see this, but it's like seeing a car crash: you have to slow down and take a look.

My first reaction: gotta have a ghost writer. (I know -- of course she does.) The book opens with Palin at the state fair, holding one of her kids -- maybe the one named after a high school math class? Trig? -- and she says he "pinches" a bite of cotton candy and sticks it in his mouth. Way too interesting a word choice.

***

I'm up for Mary's Three New Poems by the End of the Decade Challenge, if it's okay to count poems already started.

I have three (or four) rough-ish drafts I have left sitting on my desk too long. Not Donald Hall put-'em-in-the-drawer style, waiting to be sure they're good... just too busy to get back to them with much focused attention.

One has to do with the restaurant and edible item pictured above, along with Basho and a quote I'm remembering from either Martin Amis on Philip Larkin or Adam Gopnik on Abraham Lincoln.

Admittedly, those are two subjects not often confused!

Center for Book Arts

2009-11-19T10:01:00.003-05:00

Great reading. Great, great reading. Details -- and pix -- to come.

In the meantime, if you have a chapbook manuscript, you should submit it to the Center's annual chapbook contest. They produce beautiful handmade letterpress chapbooks. I got to look at some of the past years' winners' and judges' chapbooks and they really are works of art.

Here are the details:

The Center for Book Arts’ 2010 POETRY CHAPBOOK COMPETITION
The Center for Book Arts invites submissions to its annual Poetry Chapbook Competition by December 1, 2009. The winning manuscript will be chosen in April 2010 and will be awarded with the publication of a beautifully designed, letterpress-printed, limited-edition chapbook printed and bound by artists at the Center for Book Arts. The edition is limited to one-hundred signed and numbered copies, ten of which are reserved for the author and the remainder of which will be offered for sale through the Center. The winning poet will also receive a cash award of $500, and a $500 honorarium for a reading, to be held at the Center in the fall of 2010. This year’s judges will be Terrance Hayes & Sharon Dolin.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please submit a collection or sequence of original poems or a single long poem not to exceed five- hundred lines or twenty-four pages (no translations). The cover page should contain, on a single detachable page, the manuscript title, and author’s name, along with address, phone number, and email. The author’s name should not appear anywhere else. A second title page should be provided without the author’s name or other identification. Please provide a table of contents and a separate acknowledgements page containing prior magazine or anthology publication of individual poems. Please note that the five-hundred lines or twenty-four page limit does not include the cover page, title pages, table of contents, or acknowledgements pages. Manuscripts should be bound with a simple spring clip.

NOTE: Poems may have appeared in journals or anthologies but not as part of a book-length collection. Reading Fee: Please send a $25 check payable to The Center for Book Arts.
Please Include: A #10 self-addressed stamped envelope for notification of the winner. Manuscripts will not be returned.

Deadline: Manuscripts must be postmarked no later than December 1, 2009.

ABOUT THE JUDGES
Terrance Hayes is the author of Wind in a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002) and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classics, 2005 and Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in a range of journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Tin House. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family.

Sharon Dolin’s fourth poetry book, Burn and Dodge, won the AWP 2007 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2008. Her other books include Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004), Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Heart Work (1995). She currently teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in dozens of journals including Barrow Street, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Court Green, and The New Republic.

Send Entries to:2010 CHAPBOOK COMPETITION The Center for Book Arts 28 West 27th St., 3rd Floor New York, NY 10001(212) 481-0295 or visit www.centerforbookarts.org.

See You There?

2009-11-17T19:39:00.003-05:00

If you're in NYC tomorrow night and looking to hear two kick-ass poets and possibly enjoy some wine and cheese, I hope you'll swing by the Center for Book Arts at 6:30 p.m.

Center for Book Arts - Broadside Reading Series

Presents

Poets Chase Twichell & Leslie Harrison

Introduced by Matthew Thorburn

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 6:30 pm

28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor

Suggested admission for all readings: $5 members / $10 non-members.

A reception accompanies each reading. A limited-edition letterpress broadside of work by each poet is produced by an artist at the Center.

Chase Twichell. Leslie Harrison. Poetry will be in the house.

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By the way, I noticed that it was just over two years ago that I mentioned how fun it would be to host a reading at CBA.

Note for two years from now: it sure would be fun to win a Whiting Award!

Poetry for Economists

2009-11-13T06:41:00.002-05:00

Let's peek into the pages of my favorite "newspaper" for some poetry news...

Whatever people think of Mr Blair, making him president would have signalled that the EU wanted a spokesman with direct access to world leaders. Mr Blair’s apparent demise as a candidate (British officials loyally insist he still has a chance, once EU leaders ponder the unpalatable alternatives) signals the opposite. So does the rise of such alternative frontrunners as the Dutch or Luxembourgeois prime ministers, or the current darling of the corridors, Herman Van Rompuy, a clever, Haiku-writing ascetic who is prime minister of Belgium.

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And here, translated a la Google, are P.M. Van Rompuy's haiku!

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IROM CHANU SHARMILA, 37, a poet and aspirant suicide, was this week unable to attend a cultural festival held in her honour in Imphal, capital of India’s north-eastern state of Manipur. She was in hospital, being force-fed lentil soup through a tube inserted into her nose.

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And this is my kind of special issue: Indiana Review puts out the call for submissions for a special blue-themed issue. Not the blues, necessarily, but blue.

I'd know just what to send, except I already published this poem here.

From the Fiction Shelf

2009-11-05T07:19:00.005-05:00

In the past week, I read back to back -- and without consciously planning this -- two novels centered around a death or disappearance. One you've surely heard of, and one probably not: Unending Nora by Julie Shigekuni and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Each of these books maps the fallout from these losses and shows us the holes left in the lives of the dead/missing characters' family and friends, though in very different ways.

In The Lovely Bones, the narrator, ninth grader Susie Salmon, is raped and killed in the book's opening pages. She then narrates the novel from (for the most part) heaven. This creates, in a very weird way, a kind of happy ending/uplifting narrative for the reader, since as much as Susie is dead to the family and friends she leaves behind on earth, for the reader she is alive in the telling of her story -- both what happens on earth without her and what she experiences in her afterlife.

Having a dead narrator is an excellent conceit -- one you might also recall from the movie American Beauty, among other places. At first, I thought the book would be a kind of supernatural catch-the-killer chase story, led by Susie's younger sister. I was looking forward to that, but this thread gets let go after a while and never really gets picked up again. The lead detective here, even if it is the 1970s, seems too disconnected from the police in any other city or state, and unable to do much to crack the case.

Then later in the book, a sort of magical realism sets in -- just briefly, though -- and while it has been set up with hints and nods earlier in the book, it still felt a little out of place here to me. But I read this book in two days -- in airports and on airplanes, traveling home from a visit to Michigan -- and recommend it for just such purposes. This is what I think of as smart popular fiction, like Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: beach or airplane reading for English majors.

Having wanted to read this book for years, I finally did after seeing a preview for the upcoming movie adapatation. This was news to me, but The Philadelphia Inquirer ran pictures of the location shoot last year.

Unending Nora, in contrast, offers no such uplifting narrative or comforting views of any afterlife. In this novel, the title character, thirty-something Nora Yano, suddenly goes from drifting through her life to running off the rails, by way of a strange ailment and an ill-fated romance, among other things, and then one day just disappears. Gone. Without a trace.

This woman who seemed an odd, unremarkable third-wheel to her two close friends, brainy Melissa and beautiful Caroline -- and more or less inexplicable to her parents and even her church pastor -- turns out (once gone) to have been the center of gravity around which these and other lives revolved. As the novel shows how life goes on, more or less, for each of the other characters, we see again and again how this missing woman was once the key to meaning in their lives.

With the multiple, overlapping narratives of these and other characters, this novel gives you the density and scope of real lives -- and, like real life, offers little comfort and not much in the way of tidy resolutions.

I'll have more to say, in print, about Unending Nora, so for now I'll just recommend it very highly. (Shigekuni's two previous novels are on my "To Read" list now too.) This fine novel was just published by Red Hen Press and is available in all the usual places. Please check it out.

Get Your Free Sample

2009-10-28T20:21:00.002-04:00

I feel like the guy handing out free samples of cheese at the market, but what the heck...

You can now read the opening couple pages of Disappears in the Rain on the Parlor City website. Just scroll down. (DITR is a long poem, with about five stanzas per page, so the dashed lines show you the page breaks.)

Then scroll back up for the guidelines for this year's -- the second annual -- chapbook competition, aka the Stephen Dunn Prize. The folks at Parlor City produce really sharp-looking chapbooks -- perfect-bound, with full-color covers. Really they look more like skinny books than what you probably picture when you hear the word "chapbook."

Softly, As in A Morning Sunrise

2009-10-28T06:47:00.003-04:00

Stuart Greenhouse gives Disappears in the Rain a big thumbs up too. How about you?

And I'm right there with him about the amazing Kate Greenstreet, whose blog I still miss and whose The Last 4 Things is top of my bookbuying list. And Ana's book I'm looking forward to, too.

***

I wrote a poem yesterday for an old friend's 60th birthday. It was fun to write something fun -- rhyming couplets, inside jokes, a punchliney ending. I'll be delivering it this weekend.

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This article isn't new, but it's new to me: Howard Norman follows Basho's trail in Narrow Road to A Far Province, for Nat'l Geographic.

Check it out. There are some wonderful photos in there by Michael Yamashita.

November To-Do List...

2009-10-25T17:39:00.004-04:00

Clay Matthews takes Disappears in the Rain out for a spin. The verdict? "If you read the book, wonderful things will happen to you, I promise."

If you're on the fence, I hope these kinds words will push you over. I have a handful of copies left at the moment. You know what to do. I hope you'll do it.

***

I have three events in NYC in November. If you're around, it'd be great to see you at any or all of these...

November 11 -- 7 p.m.
Reading at the Old Made in Williamsburg

Probably the most unusual place for poetry I've read in... I'll be reading at this vintage store with poet Meghan Punschke and fiction writer Meakin Armstrong. This reading of art-related work takes place in connection with a show of paintings, "Duets: Compositions by Joseph Ellis and Essye Klempner," also on display in the store.

441 Metropolitan Avenue
G train to Metropolitan Avenue; L to Lorimer or Bedford
www.oldmadestuff.com

November 18 -- 6:30 p.m.
Broadside Reading Series at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan

I'll be hosting this event -- a reading by two of my favorite poets, Chase Twichell and Leslie Harrison. Chase is the author of half a dozen acclaimed poetry collections. Leslie's first book, Displacement, was published this year. A wine and cheese reception will follow the reading. And a $10 suggested donation gets you a signed letterpress broadside of one of the poets' poems.

28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
N or R train to 28th and Broadway; 1 or 9 to 28th and 7th Ave.
http://www.centerforbookarts.org/

November 22 -- 4:40 p.m.
Reading at the 440 Gallery in Park Slope

I'll be reading in this storefront gallery with prose writer Helen Benedict and two other writers TBA. Last time I read here, W. and I found a great burger place nearby for dinner afterwards.

440 6th Ave. (between 9th and 10th Sts.)
F train to 7th Ave.
http://www.440gallery.com/

This one's for all you University of Michigan alums out there.

2009-10-10T12:16:00.006-04:00

"And that's true too!": Professor Ralph Williams lectures on Shakespeare, New York City, October 2009

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My old buddy Buddhaweiser and I met up at the Hilton -- home of AWP NYC! -- bright and early last Sunday for a day-long program called One Day University. It's a series of lectures by top professors from around the country on a wide range of topics.

For instance, Andrew Delbanco, of Columbia University and NYRB fame, spoke on Melville and why Moby Dick is the greatest American novel. And a very smart guy (whose name I unfortunately didn't write down) gave an interesting talk on the great successes of Apple, Google and Pixar -- and the unique business cultures behind them.

But we were there to see one man: Professor Ralph Williams, he of the big hand gestures and endless memory for literature. Between us, Buddhaweiser and I took something like six or seven courses with "Old Williams" during our undergrad days, including (for me) his Shakespeare course. English 367, I think it was.

At OneDayU, Williams (who just recently retired from Umich) lectured on Shakespeare and "why he still matters." In a brisk 50 minutes, he squeezed in numerous anecdotes, references to probably 10 plays and several of the sonnets, dramatic quotations from the same, and even managed to get through all five -- yes, you bet he had them just like always -- of his "rubrics" for the lecture.

A few highlights...

Williams talked about Shakespeare's rich language, how many words he introduced into English (either from other languages or making them up), the now common phrases that originated with him ("All's Well that Ends Well," et al.) and how Shakespeare is, as another critic put it, "the rain forest of the English language."

He also discussed the brilliance and depth of Shakespeare's moral imagination. That is, the risks and the genius that go into creating such convincing, relatable, realistic portraits of evil as Iago or Richard III.

And how in Shakespeare so much can turn on a tiny action or inaction: for instance, a character not reading a letter, or someone misunderstanding of what someone else was implying, with deadly consequences.

In terms of pure and sweet nostalgia, I was happy to see Williams act out certain lines from King Lear, such as Gloucester's plaintive "And that's true too!" which I remember from his lectures circa 1995. And to see the hands -- even bigger than I remembered; he might have been a grand stride pianist! -- in action. And so glad he still -- as always -- began by counting off his rubrics for us, to give a lay of the land in terms of where we were headed.

At 68, he is still spry and lively on the stage, as much actor as literary scholar, with that vast memory of lines and scenes at the ready for instant recall. It was a pretty sweet time.

***

Another highlight of the day was Vanderbilt professor Michael Rose lecturing -- which really entailed singing, yelling, dancing around, joking and sweating profusely -- on the surprising connections between The Beatles and Beethoven. Specifically he talked about Paul McCartney's "Hey Jude" and the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

If you're ever on the Vanderbilt campus, you really ought to crash one of his lectures.

(Chair that) Disappears in the Rain

2009-10-07T11:27:00.004-04:00

Next time I'm in Tokyo I want to sit here:

This is Tokujin Yoshioka's "Chair that Disappears in the Rain." It's a piece of public sculpture made from a block of "astronomical observatory-quality" glass -- and is situated on a street in the Roppongi Hills section of Tokyo, where anyone can sit on it.

Here's more info on Roppongi, other public sculpture there, and this cool chair.

Book Covers

2009-10-06T13:07:00.000-04:00

And thanks to poet D'Anne Witkowski for rescuing a left-behind copy of Subject to Change.

She has some kind words to say about my poem "The River." And some not so kind words about (no surprise) New Issues' cover designs.

Probably the less I say about that, the better. And yet, looking at their covers, circa 2004 (when my book was published), I felt I came through better than most. And unlike D'Anne, I do like my book cover.

More recently, I also thought Sandra got a sharp cover for her book, Theories of Falling. I'm not posting any other New Issues covers here, but we all know there are some clunkers in their catalog.

It makes sense to give all your books a recognizable "look." That's a part of branding -- something we do with our brochures and other marketing materials, for instance, at the law firm where I work. But maybe it's time for a rebranding? That's something else we've done at the firm, with good results and responses.

The thing is: when Parlor City Press gave me a free hand to select the cover art for Disappears in the Rain, I was surprised to see how much reasonably-priced stock photography is available out there. Check out iStockphoto, for instance. And you can check out the cover image I chose below.

It can actually be quite inexpensive -- in the neighborhood of $100 or less -- to buy the rights to use an interesting photo on the cover of a 1,000-copy print run of a book. Probably not news to any designers out there, but a nice surprise to me.

If you happen to be friends with a talented up-and-coming photog, you might negotiate an even lower rate -- or, better yet, be a good friend and pay her or him the hundred bucks.

Anyway, D'Anne's post just got me thinking about book covers -- along with what Lorrie Moore said about never liking the cover of Anagrams. And here's hoping my book #2, wherever it finally lands, will have a brave face with which to go out into the world.

UPDATED: Reviews and Readings

2009-10-05T20:59:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note: if you're interested in scoring a free copy of Disappears in the Rain and sharing your thoughts about it, there are review copies available at:

Coldfront

Pleiades

Rattle

and of course

The Chapbook Review

If you're interested in reviewing DITR for another publication, please contact me to arrange for a review copy. Thanks.

UPDATE: How could I forget? There's also a copy up for grabs at Gently Read Literature.

What are you waiting for?

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And I'm putting together some readings, mostly in NYC at the moment: Brooklyn in the fall and spring, and hopefully Manhattan and The Bronx (Go Bronx!) in the spring as well.

If anyone can help me set up a reading in Staten Island, I'd be very grateful. Then I could say I've read in all five boroughs.

Morning Thoughts

2009-10-02T06:58:00.002-04:00

Hard to believe it's October already. Not hard to believe I keep saying that every month. Pretty sure the older you get the faster time moves. A lesser known clause in the Theory of Relativity?

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Every so often someone complains there are too many MFA programs, too many MFA graduates. But when I look at the poets in my class at The New School, only about a third of them -- that's roughly four out of 12 -- are still writing, so far as I know. (And one has switched to fiction.) And I don't think any of them are pursuing teaching jobs at the college level.

Maybe that's atypical. Or at least, it surely varies from school to school. Especially if you have a roster of classmates like Rick Barot did.

Anyway, feels like there's a hidden statistic here. Or part of the story that doesn't get as much attention. Not that I want to read this particular story yet again....

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Did you catch Chase Twichell's "Weird Hotel" on Poetry Daily this week? And are you coming to the reading?

A tangential thought: I love how the exclamation point works in this poem. For years, I thought that was the one piece of punctuation that doesn't ever belong in a poem.

Wrong! More recently, I've come to appreciate them and even use them, from time to time.

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Poetry in The New Yorker: you know, they used to publish so few good poems -- poems I thought were good, I should say -- I actually used to cut those rare poems out.

But interestingly I have vivid memories of reading certain poems there -- poems I read more than 10 years ago now. Like Seamus Heaney's "The Sharping Stone," which I practically memorized after first seeing it (and clipping it out from) those pages. And "Who She Was," the first poem I ever read by David Lehman.

There was also a John Ashbery poem, circa 1997, I clipped out and taped up on the bathroom wall in my apartment one summer.

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Here's the blog of Tim Soter, a Brooklyn-based photographer you ought to check out. The photographs are really interesting. I like the series shot in Italy. And take a look at the one-eyed cat (or is he winking? -- no, probably not).

Also, I enjoy reading well-written prose about a particular subject that I frankly don't know much about.

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Just received my copy of Here is A Pen, an anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. This chapbook was published by Achiote Press for a Sept. 17th reading at UC Berkeley, to help raise money for Kundiman.

I love supporting poets -- and poetry organizations -- by buying their chapbooks (hint, hint) and there is lots to like in this collection of voices and poems.

Thank You / Reading Report

2009-09-29T18:27:00.007-04:00

Thank you so much to everyone who ordered a copy of Disappears in the Rain. I'm really happy to have this poem out in the world as its own little stand-alone book.

I've been making daily lunch-hour stops at the post office to mail them off, and would happy to keep doing it. There are still some copies left if you're interested.

And if you came over from Facebook or an email link and are looking for the chapbook info, it's right here.

***

From the Department of Cool Stuff: I went to hear Lorrie Moore read from The Gate at the Stairs last week at the Union Square Barners & Noble. Thus ended her long reign at the top of my list of People I Have Always Wanted to Hear Read (And Still Never Have).

Plain and simple: I really enjoyed the reading. I like hearing someone's writing, whether poetry or prose, in the writer's own voice. She read about 10 pages from early in the new novel, which I'm now reading -- and which I "hear" in her voice as I read. Which is exactly why I like hearing writers read. I'm about 90 pages in and really liking it.

As I imagined, Lorrie Moore has a very wry sense of humor and deadpan delivery -- think of a female Steven Wright -- which I liked, especially in her comments and asides during the reading. Of course, in the world of her stories everyone seems to be constantly punning and playing on words, with the new book being no exception to that. This can sometimes seem like too much (does everyone really talk like that all the time?), but I got the sense that she probably does a lot of that herself.

Her As to the audience's Qs after the reading felt more than a little flippant. Partly, that goes with her sense of humor, I guess. Also the conditions were not so great. For some reason, B&N had the air conditioning cranked up to meat-locker level. And the mic was buzzing and humming, which led her to tell a funny story.

I had trouble with a microphone at another reading once, she said. Eventually I realized it was a reading light. But the people there were nice. They didn't say anything about it for quite a while.

And of course, people always ask fiction writers the same awful questions. What's your writing process? Who are your influences? And then the inevitable question preceded by two or three long sentences referencing other writers, critics or reviews to show off how smart the questioner is.

Lorrie Moore (whose first name is actually Lorena) said she was towards the end of a long tour for this book, because of which her answer to the writing process question was "I don't remember."

And I didn't ask -- because this isn't a question -- but I kept thinking about the worries she might have had, publishing her first new book in nearly 10 years, especially following Birds of America, which was such a knockout. The crush of expectation, which for poets is mostly unimaginable.

I stuck around afterwards to get the new book signed, plus my prized first edition of Anagrams, that heart breaker. The B&N staffer at her elbow -- the very cheery young woman opening all the books to the title pages for her -- remarked on the "original cover" of that first novel of hers, which looks verrrrrry 1980s, and Lorrie Moore said, "Oh, I've always hated that!"

She sounded to me the way I imagine Mr. Swan sounding, in Bishop's poem "Santarem," who sees her prized wasp's nest and says, "What's that ugly thing?"

Now available...

2009-09-23T20:49:00.002-04:00

Alrighty, my chapbook is now available. As you might imagine, this is a limited-edition kind of thing, so you won't find it at Amazon or B&N.

But if you're interested, you can get a copy from me -- signed, if you'd like -- via the PayPal button at the right. It's $10.

***

Here are the specs and a few kind words:

Disappears in the Rain

Winner of the First Annual Broome Review Chapbook Competition

Parlor City Press
32 pages, perfect bound
ISBN: 978-0-9841867-0-9
List price: $10.00

Disappears in the Rain is a single long poem that unrolls across the pages like a scroll painting, juxtaposing fleeting yet resonant impressions from a journey through Japan. Written in a loose version of the renga form of linked verse, Disappears in the Rain has been beautifully produced as a limited-edition chapbook by Parlor City Press.

Disappears in the Rain “touched me in its simplicity, its perfect naturalness, its lack of artifice, its unity of vision, in short, in its being absolutely genuine.”
—Stanley H. Barkan, Competition Judge; Founder, Cross-Cultural Communications

***

I think the PayPal button should be working, but let me know if you have trouble. (I'm new to this.) I figured I'd add a button for Subject to Change, too, while I was at it.

And last but not least -- I like to make trades with other writers, so if you have a book or chapbook of your own and would like to swap, shoot me an email.

Thanks for your enthusiasm and support!

It's Here!

2009-09-20T20:34:00.006-04:00

It's here, hot off the press: my new chapbook, Disappears in the Rain. Big thanks to Andrei Guruianu and everyone at Parlor City Press for their fine work on this project. It looks great!

***

I'll put some ordering info up here shortly, in case you're interested. And I'm planning some readings: so far, one in the fall and one in the spring, both in Brooklyn. Well, it's a start...

Mystery Tower

2009-09-08T21:29:00.003-04:00

View from a Metro North train window, August 2009

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I caught sight of this very interesting looking tower while riding Metro North home one afternoon when the 1 train was out of comission. This terrible shot -- taken with a BlackBerry camera -- is the view looking across the river to the upper east side of Manhattan, from approximately the Morris Heights stop in the Bronx.

Any NYers, or others familiar with this terrain, know what this is? I'm guessing it's part of a college campus or maybe a church, but I really don't know. I'd like to go investigate.

***

Speaking of interesting landmarks, looking into Rachel Wetzsteon's poetry led me to google up the location of the namesake of her latest book, Sakura Park, which I'd mistakenly guessed was in Japan.

Of course, "sakura" is Japanese for cherry blossom -- something I'd forgotten I knew until I googled. And I was already thinking, Oooh, someone else writing poems set in Japan, how excellent!

Turns out it's much closer to home. This upper west side park gets its name from the 2000 cherry trees that Japan gave to New York back in 1912. A field trip is definitely in the offing.

You Heard It Here First

2009-09-03T22:37:00.002-04:00

Orlando, Florida, January, 2009

***

Any time we find a Ms. Pac-Man, we have to stop and play a few quarters' worth. It's my wife's all-time favorite.

Are there words that just irk you, for some reason? "Poetics" really irritates me these days.

I know it has its own meaning, distinct from simply saying "Poetry," but still. Feels pretentious.

And what's the deal with Slate dropping their "Today's Papers" feature, in favor of some kind of blogfeed thing?

That was my bread-and-butter first thing to read every morning -- in lieu of an actual paper.

Unintentionally rough:

From a description of a used copy of a poet's book for sale on Half.com: "Only read once. Not all the way through."

Here's my idea for a can't-miss New York restaurant: an Italian-Mexican fusion place called...

Que Pasta

No Reason to Keep This A Secret

2009-09-01T13:56:00.002-04:00

When the Center for Book Arts asked me to organize a poetry reading for the fall season, I was delighted. (I'd been hoping they'd ask -- and they did!)

And when program manager Sarah Nichols told me I could invite any two poets I wanted to come read, it didn't take me long to decide whom to ask. I knew right away. And happily, they both said yes.

If you're close enough to join us, please mark your calendars for...

The Center for Book Arts
Broadsides Reading Series

Poets Chase Twichell & Leslie Harrison
Introduced by Matthew Thorburn

Wednesday, November 18, 6:30 pm
The Center for Book Arts
28 W 27th Street, Third Floor
New York, NY 10001

For the reading, the Center's artists design and print letterpress broadsides of a poem by each of the two poets. They do beautiful work.

I'm looking forward to this! Hope you are too.

Here's to 10 Years

2009-08-31T21:44:00.004-04:00

Chinese New Year, Flushing, Queens, 2005

***

Today marks 10 years of living in the Greater New York City Area* for me. Thank you, New York, for welcoming me and keeping me happy here. As I wrote a while back, I think after 10 years here you can simply say you're a New Yorker, if you want, rather than saying you're from wherever you were from first.

A little history... In 1999, I was fortunate to have two MFA program acceptances to choose from: the University of Virginia and The New School. Friends and family back home in Michigan at that time had not even heard of The New School. Lots of "As opposed to The Old School?" jokes got bandied about.

And so, for reasons of prestige, very generous funding, big name faculty, quality preparation for a teaching career, positive career next-step-ism in general, personal pride in going to a school people have in fact heard of, and what I believe (still sight unseen) to be a highly bucolic setting, the choice ought to have been a no-brainer.**

But forget all that, I wanted to move to New York. And so I arrived one hot afternoon, via Newark Airport, at the corner of 33rd Street and 3rd Avenue, my new home, with a suitcase in each hand. Frankly, from my University of Michigan alumnus, practical midwestern state school outlook, The New School MFA Program was a disorganized, artsy, New Yorky mess. I did wonder just what I had gotten myself into.

But in retrospect, I learned a lot, and read and heard an amazingly wide variety of poets and other writers. (I completed my unofficial Master of Contemporary Literature Equivalency Program at The Strand, with the KGB Bar and numerous other poetry reading venues serving as the language lab.) I found what was -- for the me I was back then -- an unlikely sense of at-home-ness in this city, and during that time wrote about half of the poems that would become my first book.

Ten years later, it's impossible to know what my life would have been like if I'd chosen differently. But I can guess. I would not have written the poems I've written, though I would have written others, no doubt deep under the spell of Charles Wright. I would have tried my hand at teaching, and probably be a teacher now. I would have applied for those post-MFA fellowships -- the ones I felt I couldn't have left New York for, had anyone asked me to -- and maybe even been fortunate enough to spend some productive time at Stanford or up in Wisconsin, working on my first book. I would have had to buy a car.

I would almost certainly not work in legal marketing. Probably I would not even know such a field exists. And I would not have met the woman who'd become my wife, which was easily the very best luck of all the very good luck I've found in New York.

Thank you.

_____________________
*Including one year living in Jersey City, NJ, which, together with Hoboken, I consider the sixth borough. That year was maybe the most focused writing year I've had here -- or anywhere -- as living in my part of Jersey City, circa 2002, was the urban version of heading off into Thoreau's woods, albeit with cable TV.

**Gregory Orr snobbily told me as much, long-distance from Charlottesville, when I told him I hadn't quite decided yet.

Piety One Way

2009-08-26T09:22:00.000-04:00

New Orleans, March 2009.

Some Days You Just Have to Ring the Bell

2009-08-25T09:25:00.000-04:00

New Orleans, March 2009.

Still No Cigar

2009-08-20T09:24:00.002-04:00

But this kind of news is very encouraging, especially in the dog days of August when everything seems humid, sweaty, smelly and generally not worth going outdoors for.

And especially when it's the newly rejiggered, reworked, revised, refined, reordered, re-edited and re-named second book manuscript.

New moniker: Every Possible Blue.

Happy Thursday, everybody. Keep cool!

Weary Traveler / New York Bits

2009-08-17T22:02:00.004-04:00

An unexpected pain-in-the-neck commute to and from work is nevertheless a chance to pick up a little NYC history lesson -- and a statistical one-up on the Boston T.

***

And I got the chance to do a little walking this evening -- also unexpectedly, but not unwelcomed-ly, since no matter how hot it is outside, it's hotter on the subway platforms -- in what hipper folks than me have labeled Upstate Manhattan.

That's one good thing about New York -- if all else fails, it is pretty much all walkable, from my point of view (and point of office).

***

I even saw a possible chance to expand my "Poets for..." photo series, spotting a hairdresser's that shared a name with a poet I've seen read recently.

But I'll have to go back on a cooler day to snap that!

***

Okay, my turn to pull one of these: I have cool news I can't/won't reveal just yet. This is fun!

Suffice it to say, I've been asked to curate (love the verb) a reading this fall at a very cool NYC venue.

And suffice it to say, I thought immediately of the two poets I'd most like to introduce and hear read there. (No offense to the rest of you!)

And, mother of all good fortune, they both said Yes.

***

I guess I'd have to say, in retrospect, I'm surprised a facade (or more) hasn't fallen on the 1 tracks before now. The stations all the way between 125th and 231st really run the gamut from dingy-and-dirty to what-a-f***ing-mess.

It's pretty pathetic the difference compared to the midtown and downtown stations or, say, the Columbia University station.

***

While we're on NYC, Ben McGrath has an interesting and entertaining profile of Mayor Mike Bloomberg in this week's New Yorker. I'm with the guy who says, I don't think it's right to fiddle with term limits, but then I also don't see anyone else I'd rather have as our mayor.

***

And last but not least, at the end of the month I'll celebrate -- break out the hats, the party horns -- 10 years as a New Yorker.

I believe at the decade marker I have to turn in my "Misplaced Michigander" credentials and start working on my NY accent.

Happy Birthday!

2009-08-17T10:23:00.002-04:00

Happy Birthday, Kind of Blue. You're still my all-time favorite.