a bunch of stuff

Saw my good buddy on a different corner today. He does get around. Same outfit, same message.

I have found a summer job, a perfect temporary position that pays in the realm of above the poverty line. Even at part time I find myself tired at the end of the day. Naturally I choose to blame work and not the fact that I spend all night reading, engrossed in much more interesting things than the function of work.

I ordered Chinese delivery for the first time in about ten years. It is such a lovely feeling. Hope it arrives soon.

I finished the Simic book, and was so pleased with it. What an interesting man. I brought up my semi formed ideas about current generation self confessional poetry to a friend of mine this past weekend. It is an interesting topic to consider. I just received class course offerings for my MFA program, and one of the poetry workshops was focused on first time books. Ah, the choices. It was such a grand moment. Everything is pulling together.

I will be visiting the school this next week. I am giddy with joy at this prospect. I certainly wouldn't want to be around me right now if I weren't me. The joy is sickening.

666

Today, at a busy intersection near the mall, a very interesting scene unfolded. An older black man was walking up and down one side of the street with a bullhorn. And a ventriloquist dummy. And a billboard on his back, which I was only partially able to read, that said something about Ronald Reagan being the devil and God's wrath. To top this all off, he was underneath an enormous black umbrella. It wasn't raining.

I did want to know what he was saying, but I felt disinclined to turn down my music.

simic

I'm currently reading Charles Simic's memoir A Fly in the Soup, and it has me thinking again on some issues I have with contemporary poetry. Simic lived through some incredibly adverse situations in war torn Yugoslavia as a kid. These experience enrich his life perspective. This shows in his poetry. He is one of the most influential poets (among a plethora of others) I think we have seen in contemporary poetry. And so I worry.

Poetry that comes from his generation is infinitely more worldly and contextualized in a sense of deeper human trauma. Love becomes enormous - because to love when death is at every corner is an awe inspiring thing.

Then we have my generation. What have we lived through exactly? Poetry turns inward on itself and there comes another bout of self confessional poets. Not that this is bad in any sense. Some of my favorite younger poets are self confessional in a way that touches on the world and their place in it. But I can't help but be reminded of the romantic poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron) who were truly just so enamored with themselves and their feelings and experiences in a sensory manner, that I wonder if we are entering another era of the self examinatory poet.

Obviously this generation will be much more concerned with repression than flowers and woods and other Wordsworthian themes. The repression of the self and the instability of the future seem to be emerging themes. Who are we and where are we going?

And yet, poets like Levine who ask those same questions are not really self confessional, but rather observational and emotively charged to aggressively seek change, not recompense. And that is what I fear new poetry may lack. The ability to step outside one's experiences and to look at things on a larger scale and then be able to step right back inside oneself and have a sense of understanding. Simic writes how he understands it is all just circumstance that he was the one on the other side of the gun, but it could have just as easily been reversed.

And so we get great stories of how Simic meets Richard Hugo and they discover that Hugo was dropping bombs on Simic's street when he was five years old. And they transcend that. They become friends. How beautiful is that?

uh, houston, you've got a problem

Just got a nice letter from the admissions office at Houston letting me know that they've received my application (odd, considering I mailed it in December), and that I should be hearing from the creative writing department as soon as they've made their decisions (even odder, since I've already received an unsigned rejection letter riddled with typos and misspellings sometime in March or thereabouts).

Huh. Well now.

In other news, I spent my first Mother's Day weekend being wished a "Happy Mother's Day!" at every store I went to. A few clerks quickly amended this when my bewildered, unfettered womb began sending panic signals to my face. "If you're a mother!" Oh God. I've reached that age. The age when people assume someone this age should have birthed a kid or two.

Huh. Well then. . .

to the slaughter

I've been killing adorable, fluffy, white bunny rabbits lately. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The type that are just so cute and innocent you can't help but want to pet them, and then overcome with the baseness of human nature, you hold them down, wiggling, and lop off those tiny heads with imploring eyes.

Love is a complicated thing.

graduation

Well, I doubt that you will hear it elsewhere, so it is my supreme pleasure to report that Senator Bill First was indeed heckled at graduation during his incredibly boring speech. Ah, it was so worth graduating to hear that.

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Well, job prospects are looking up, the family has left, and there is still cake in the fridge. Beer too. Which does one go for first?

I had no idea that graduation would come with so many perks. Dinners paid for, presents, loads of praise for finishing college, etc. I had been very reticent about this whole procedure but now that it is over, and I didn't trip or doing anything embarrassing, I rather enjoyed the whole shenanigan.


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Started reading Lord of the Rings last night. So far so good. No complaints.

stuff

Just finished reading Natasha Trethewey's stellar book of poems Native Guard. First book of poems of the summer for me, and it was well worth it.


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It is strange to have nothing to do. Have applied for summer jobs, waiting on calls. Will call tomorrow to follow up on a few. This inbetween period could be productive, but is bogged down by the uncertainty. Graduation looms ever nearer, family coming in. Shall be interesting.


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Haven't written a new poem in weeks. Plenty of them seem to visit me in my sleep, or when I am reading, but I haven't been compelled to actually commit them to paper. In some ways, this fosters the idea that they are indeed the best poems I have ever conjured. Surely. I have no way to prove otherwise.

waxing sarcasm included below

Well, my first (and likely last) editing job is officially over. Have I been paid? Negative. Did I initiate the 'break-up'? Affirmative!

Bad writing is depressing enough without dealing with a prima donna. "You changed what?! Yada yada, ramada, tostada, oli-ada...some more here, a little more there...dippity do dah!!!"

Yes, that's right. I added some clarity to your sad little story.

It isn't that I am bitter. It is that I was stressed working for this person, and this person really has no idea how poorly of a written story it was. And still is. Sometimes we can only patch the wall so much before it falls down anyway. Consider the wall tumbling, fella.


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This of course means I am now unemployed for the summer. Um, help? I have been looking to enlist a sugar daddy only to find no applicants. (One friend told me if I had any idea how little sugar he had I wouldn't be asking.)


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Graduation is officially on May 7th, and to my supreme joy, I have found that my keynote speaker is Senator Bill Frist, the soon to be Republican Presidential Candidate. By supreme joy I mean something along the lines of:

- nails on a chalkboard

- the taste of chalky medicine

- like a really loud and obnoxious alarm clock that goes on and on and on

- like a Pauly Shore movie

- like hearing that Cher is on the tenth year of her super last good bye tour ever, before the real last good bye tour

- like stubbing your toe on a bedrail that is also rusty, requiring a tetanus shot given by Nurse Ratchet on a bad day when her coffee was a little too strong

- like the moment you find out that Clark Gable had halitosis and then you forever recall the scene where he is so close to Vivien Leigh, and she is trying to fight him off but gives in to a long, slow kiss, and you know deep down inside that what she is really thinking is my god, someone get him a breathmint

- like waking up to find Dick Cheney in your bed

In short, supreme joy.


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Ugh.