Sweeping the Leg Since 1977

AWP Panel Proposals Gone Wrong

2012-02-23T13:14:00.019-05:00

Here follows a list of panel proposals I’m thinking about submitting to AWP (or maybe its alternate in a parallel universe). Co-presenters welcome!

1) Napalming Bridges: What NOT to Do in Response to Rejection Letters

2) Olympian Restraint: How to Avoid Poking Students in the Eye After They Say Their Five Year Old Sister Could Write Better Than Raymond Carver

3) You Saw My Blinker, Bitch!: Incorporating Will Smith Lyrics into Your Pedagogy

4) You Really Hurt My Feelings But Hey, It’s Like, Whatever: Shrugging Off Negative or Non-Existent Book Reviews

5) I’m Going to Garrote You with Your iPod Cord!: Curbing Extemporaneous Technology in the Classroom

6) I’m Not Homeless, I Promise: Male Creative Writing Professors and Their Facial Hair

7) Dude, I Know You’re High: What to Do With Students Who Are Staring at Their Hands and Giggling

8) Are You Gonna Finish That?: the Ethics of Softcore Plagiarism When You Overhear Someone Say Something Really Cool That You Just Know They’re Never Going to Put in Their Own Writing, Anyway

9) Stickers and Cupcakes: the Cornerstones of Any Memorable and Effective Lecture

10) Wrong Way Down a One Way Street: How to Gently Change Subjects When a Student Answers a Question By Telling Long, Complex Stories About Relatives and Friends You Don’t Know, Beginning with "This Reminds Me Of..." Followed By, "You Probably Had to Be There..." and Several Minutes of Additional Storytelling

11) Do What I Say, Not What I Do: a Guide to Surviving Typos in Your Syllabus and Lesson Plans

12) Caffeine and Chainsaws: How to Motivate Aspiring Writers… and Yourself!

13) Um… Security? Fuck. Security?!: Confronting Students You Haven’t Seen In Months Who Might Actually Be Crazy People Off the Street

14) I’m the Guy Who Sent You Those Poems You Didn’t Want… So, How You Been?: a Pragmatic Guide to Conference Networking

15) Dude, You Kind of Stink: Drawing the Line on Hygiene in the Classroom

16) Christmas in March: How to Use Office Supplies to Print Off Your Own Manuscripts… and Not Get Caught!

17) Hey, Everybody, Look at the Dancing Bear!: Coping with Technology Malfunctions in the Classroom

18) Look Up, Dammit! I'm Missing Reruns of Battlestar Galactica for This!: on the Benefits of Maintaining Eye Contact During Public Readings

19) Help Me Help You: How to Increase Appreciation for Constructive Criticism Using Magic and a Small Animal Sacrifice

20) Sport Coat and Jeans: Cost-Effective Attire for a Creative Writing Instructor in the 21st Century

21) No, This Isn't Him But I Just Found This Cell Phone Lying in the Alley and There's Broken Glass Everywhere... Oh, No... Better Call the Police!: What to Do When A Student's Phone Rings During Class

22) Thirteen Ways of Padding a CV: How to Take the Simplest Things You Do and Make Them Sound Really Goddamn Impressive

23) Oh, You Bought a House AND a Cup of Coffee?: How to Talk to Tenure-Line Colleagues Without Weeping

24) Staring at the Wall Until it Becomes a Window: on Maintaining a Positive Attitude as a 21st Century American Writer

25) Are You Fucking Serious?!: Keeping Your Cool While Negotiating With the Insurance Company Over the Cost of Your Anxiety and/or Depression Medication

26) Is That an Apple or a Volkswagen?: Coping With Sleep Deprivation and Mild Hallucinations During Finals Week

27) Tweet This!: Self-Restraint in The Age of Social Media

28) There is No Santa Claus: Responding to Enthusiastic Students Who, When Asked About Their Career Goals, Declare Their Intention to Make a Living Off Writing

29) Please Note That This is a Simultaneous Submission: the Benefits and Pitfalls of Romantic Relationships Between Writers

30) Dear Editor: a Guide to Impressing Your Family and Finally Assuaging Their Fears Over Your Career Choice By Appearing in the Local Paper

31) Five Thousand Years, Huh?: Coping with Creationists in the Modern Composition Classroom

32) Coffee, Whiskey, and Pot... Oh, My!: Coping Mechanisms of Modern Writers (Or So I Hear)

33) Bow Ties are Cool!: Crafting Clever Writing Prompts From Doctor Who Episodes

34) Hi. Yeah. You're Kind of a Dick: Maintaining Polite, Professional Conversations with Insufferably Pretentious Writers (breakout session)

35) OK, Bring Me a Diving Helmet, a Wrench, Two Zeppelins, and a Nail Gun: Working Steampunk Themes into Your Office and/or Classroom Decor

36) Your Love is Like the Moon/I Hope I See You Soon: Aspiring Writers and Rhyme

37) I Am a Snowflake on the Painted Eyelash of the World: Ego in the Modern Writing Workshop

38) Jack(be(an (haPPy)-man in tHIS/Y[ewe] stalk) upuupUP: a Guide to Faux-Experimental Writing

39) Wikipedia and Youtube: a Writer's Best Friends

40) Meanwhile, people/come flooding into the suburbs: a Guide to Recognizing and Avoiding Unintentionally Sexual Line Breaks

41) So You Want to Wear a Beret and Shop at Goodwill: Getting an MFA in Poetry

42) Wanna Get an Organic Smoothie and Discuss French Theorists?: a Guide to Awkward Flirtation Among Writers

43) Oh, Please, Applause is Just So Totally Derivative: How to Appear Kewl While Expressing Childlike Delight Over Good Literature

44) Stick Me With a Pin Until I Tell You It's Tuesday: the Unconventional Sexual Habits of Writers

45) Seriously, If You Call Him Jack, I Will Literally Beat You With a Chair: Naming Your Characters in a Modern Story or Screenplay

46) Helter Skelter and Twilight: Reclaiming Catchy Words and Phrases that Have Been Unfairly Appropriated By the Sniveling Lapdogs of Hell

47) Some Dudes Like Dudes, Get Over It: Dealing With Classroom Resistance to Homosexual Writers

48) Be Smart. Be Funny. Don't Be a Dick: How to Maximize Brevity When Describing Your Pedagogy to Potential Hiring Committees in a Hypothetical, Perfect World

49) I Can Say You're Awesome Or I Can Say You Suck, But Dammit, I'm Gonna Say Something!: Writers/Professors as Representatives of the Universities Where They Teach

50) No, But I Really DO Like Sushi, Boxing, and Miles Davis!: What to Do as a Culturally Sensitive, Liberal-Minded, Straight White Male Academic When You Realize Everything You Like is Actually Kind of a Cliche, But Hey, You Like it Anyway

51) Yes, I Know It's Wrong, But I'm Fucking Hungry: How to Avoid Arguments With Militant Vegetarian Colleagues

52) Humblebrag: How to Praise Your Writing and/or Publishing Prowess Over Social Media While Simultaneously Appearing Rebellious and Self-Deprecating

53) Yeah, at That Last Meeting, We All Discussed Why We Don't Like You: Paranoia and its Function in the Modern Writer's Psyche

54) You Know Who's REALLY Like Hitler? Hitler: Rebutting Wild Exaggerations in Composition/Argument Papers and/or Socially-Minded Poems and Stories

55) Is That You, Falstaff?: Calling Out Fellow Writers Who Greatly and Habitually Embellish Their Accomplishments to Impress Young, Attractive Undergrads

56) Emergency Room... Wait, Didn't I See You at the Mall?: Encouraging Good Attendance in English Classes

57) OK, Ginsberg, You Rock But... NAMBLA?!: on the Difficulty (and Occasional Necessity) of Separating Writers From Their Writing

58) Go Eat Some Jell-O and Look at a Tree: Discouraging Self-Indulgence and Suicide Among Writers

59) Persephone Who?: on the Use (and Overuse) of Literary Figures in Writing

60) Damn, I Bit My Tongue and it Really Hurts!: Remembering that Despite Contributing a Verse to What Whitman Called "The Powerful Play," We're All Still Something of a Beautiful Disaster

I have the oddest dreams of anyone named Michael Meyerhofer.

2012-02-22T12:29:00.002-05:00

OK, so last night, I dreamed that I was on the latest installment of MTV's "The Real World" (which, I believe, was being filmed on a gigantic airship). I was the oldest person there and hated the people so I decided to quit.

On my last day, we were all watching the news and learned that Obama had changed his middle name to Donovan due to increasing public pressure. I was disappointed.

On the way to the airport, I realized I was only wearing a towel.

There was also a bit about trying to work out but I couldn't find two dumbbells that were the same weight, and something about one of my housemates staging a fight between two live scorpions.

Oh, and skydiving. At various points throughout the dream, we were skydiving.

Interpretations welcome.

Book Review: "How to Say Goodbye" by James Valvis

2012-02-21T01:52:00.003-05:00

Poets often complain that poetry itself has a dismally small audience. Well, part of the reason for that is that we don't have nearly enough poets like James Valvis! While there's room out there for every conceivable style and aesthetic, I think it's safe to say that Valvis is something special: a poet who can speak to virtually any audience, who balances emotional resonance with technical craft, humor with intellect, and can turn a phrase (or a story) with astonishing sleight-of-hand.

I first came across Valvis's poem, "Woodwork Redemption," some years ago and ever since then, I have been teaching that poem in my classes as a perfect example of a lyrically taut narrative whose use of near-perfect line breaks and careful attention paid to the count of stressed versus unstressed syllables works magic with the reader's expectations.

Those are fairly technical elements, though. So, while I think it's safe to call Valvis "a poets' poet," these are also poems that can be enjoyed by virtually any audience. And that's Valvis's strength. He takes a medium often overrun by egotism and navel-gazing pretension and interjects a refreshing dose of humility, humor, and grit. Even his most autobiographical poems manage to be self-reflective without being self-indulgent (a tough feat to pull off) and continue to haunt the reader long after the page has been turned. The key, I think, is Valvis's ability to tap into universal human experiences not be being vague or lyrically obscure, but by presenting detailed scenes with such finely crafted attention that we feel like we ourselves are in Valvis's shoes, watching his mother (wife of an abusive alcoholic) glumly shuffling her losing Bingo cards ("Waiting"), or Valvis himself as a child, taping his bat with Scotch tape and so becoming the object of neighborhood ridicule ("The Wizard of Odd").

Valvis handles all his subjects--including aging and divorce--by blending academic wisdom with the tousled grace of a stand-up comic. For instance, the before-mentioned "The Wizard of Odd" is simultaneously sad and walk-into-the-wall funny, while other poems express jaw-dropping tenderness to leave even the most seasoned, cynical reader of poetry speechless. Valvis is also the patron saint of the Hail Mary twist ending. For instance, in "Lifting," we see the narrator trying to get back into the swing of things in the gym, working out next to a bodybuilder with arms "the size of a horse's neck." The bodybuilder seems to regard the narrator smugly but after a quick exchange, our expectations are totally turned on their heads. Then, in "A Halo of Smoke," we see the narrator's dying father still refusing to quit smoking, joined by a reluctantly resigned narrator who then hears the mother coughing in the back room--a simple but gut-wrenching metaphor for an entire marriage and a single line that crafts immeasurable sympathy for a figure who isn't even mentioned until the final line of the poem.

Readers of poetry (like readers of any other genre) are human beings, meaning they're susceptible to being wooed by fads and charmed by those who favor style over substance. James Valvis's "How to Say Goodbye" isn't a flashy book in terms of stream of consciousness rambling or hipster gimmicks, but in terms of talent and craft, this book is heads and shoulders above virtually anything else on the market. Valvis's work reminds me of some of my favorite books by Stephen Dobyns, George Bilgere, Tony Hoagland, and Dorianne Laux. What's stunning, though, is that "How to Say Goodbye" is his first book, even though the poems within have been written (and many of them published) over many years. In other words, the craft and care that went into this book is simply astonishing and quite frankly, you could add a zero to the price tag and it would still be worth every penny.

Writing on the Wall: the Perils of Self-Publishing

2012-02-09T10:46:00.009-05:00

One of the most awkward things I feel I have to do as a Creative Writing professor is discourage my students from self-publishing. I say awkward because I know very well how impatient we writers are, how exciting it is to share your work with an audience, and how my warning sounds a bit like the town in Footloose that won't let the kids dance.

I really, really, really hate doing it. It makes me feel anxious and honestly, slightly ill--specifically because I know it hurts a few students' feelings, since they themselves have self-published or are considering it (and in many cases, they're fantastic, promising writers), and it probably makes me look like a grumpy, judgmental crusher of dreams, rather than somebody who's genuinely trying to look out for them. But I do it anyway cuz, dammit, that's my job!

And here's an example of why. I saw the ad for the Emerging Writer's Contest from the wonderful and well-established magazine, Ploughshares. From their own guidelines: "We define an 'emerging writer' as someone who has yet to publish a book, including chapbooks, eBooks, and self-published works, in any of the content genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, or fiction."

In other words--if you self-publish, or rush to publish a collection (because you're in your early twenties and shouldn't you already have a few books out by now?!), you can't enter this. And this isn't the only example.

There are the Fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, specifically for those who graduated with their MFAs but haven't published a book yet.

There's the Yale Series of Younger Poets--and you're eligible so long as you're under 40 and, again, you haven't published a book yet.

And, of course, there's the Walt Whitman Award, another career-making opportunity for those who haven't published a first book.

In fact, there are tons of first book prizes out there, plus plenty of emerging writer awards (just Google "first book prize" or "emerging writer contest"), all of which can not only get you published but be a big boost to your career. In the case of some, it's OK if you have already published a chapbook so long as it's under a certain number of pages and had a small circulation. In others, even that that will disqualify you. In ALL cases, though, it pays to take a deep breath, do your research, and weigh your options.

And don't forget--while poems in a full-length manuscript can previously have appeared in journals or chapbooks, it can't go the other way around. In other words, poems in a chapbook (self-published or not) can't be sent to most journals, since they want First Rights. That's just the way it is. And if you ignore that, you're showing contempt for the very journals you want to publish in.

Of course, if you aren't concerned with entering contests, don't particularly care about winning a first book or chapbook prize, and genuinely prefer to go the more "underground" route, that's perfectly fine. You still have to understand First Rights as it pertains to journals, but besides that, you're free to do whatever you like. Here's the thing, though: at the very least, you should know what you're doing, weigh the potential costs and benefits, and make an informed decision. Otherwise--again--you're disrespecting the biz by demonstrating that you don't even care enough to learn its most basic rules before you break them.

And to my students who have self-published (or are considering it), it's not that I don't support or believe in your work. Actually, it's the exact opposite. I believe in your work so much that I want to see it get the biggest audience it can! If I didn't, I'd just smile, pat you on the back, and secretly be glad that another potential competitor just sold him/herself short.

Make it New?

2012-02-07T15:43:00.005-05:00

The other day, a student asked me--in light of all the literature, music, and film that's been made--how do we go about contributing anything new? Once my brain was done doing the Dance of Joy (which I learned off Perfect Strangers for whenever a student asks a serious and thought-provoking question), we sat down to try and hammer out an answer.

First, this brings to mind Ezra Pound's oft-quoted motto, Make It New, a concept so ubiquitous that one need not even know who Pound was (fascism and all) to get the idea. So I suppose the big question facing any modern writer/artist/filmmaker is, quite simply, what they mean by new. If the goal is simply to be stylistically unique, to write down something that has never been written before, that's easy. Anybody with an email account and a junk mail folder filled with deliberately eye-catching but syntactically gibberish spam messages knows what I'm talking about. On the other hand, if the goal is to come up with something both unique and effective--that is, effective in conveying content that can be basically anything but should at least transcend two dimensional capitalist impulses like buy this or click here--then it becomes a bit more tricky.

A bit, but not a lot--because we also have to remember that inevitably, we are unique amalgamations of every other writing style that we've ever seen and liked (or disliked) coupled with an equally unique equation of goals, motivations, humor, insecurities, quirks, idiocies, and spurts of brilliance. So to some degree, making it new simply means rebutting Ecclesiastes--there is nothing new under the sun--with the obvious: well, it's all new to me. All subjects, thoughts, acts, impulses, and passing fancies are fair game, whether we've previously read about them or not. So making it unique is "simply" a matter of refining your own aesthetic--your own style--and getting it down on paper, then polishing it to what you consider to be the best of your ability. From there, as far as readers and publishers go, we just let the chips fall where they may.

Along the way, though, there's the inevitable temptation (especially among intermediate writers) to be stylistically provocative--an oxymoron, I think, since stylistic disagreements never excite or offend half so much as disagreements over actual content. In other words, if style is the mouthpiece of content, obviously, you have to actually have content. Otherwise, you're kind of a dumbass.

Then again, in a world where even those living in industrialized countries in peacetime are still falling in and out of love, having breakdowns, and getting drunk to celebrate or anesthetize their senses, there's something fundamentally pathetic about a writer who has absolutely nothing to say and hinges completely on their ability to present a new style or play on words--which, without the burden/blessing of even the most seemingly mundane content, is really just a dancing bear act, anyway.

Advice to Writers: Stay Home

2012-01-17T04:28:00.004-05:00

Given the obvious solitude of writing, much has been made—and rightly so—about the benefits of establishing a sense of literary community, a kind of sangha from which all established and aspiring writers can benefit. A key element of that sense of community is public readings, the chance to connect with an audience, to move or be moved by something as paradoxically simple and transcending as language. Everything has its limits, though, so tonight, I thought I’d offer some alternate advice: stay home.

Focusing on open mics in particular, there’s a reason why they have a bad reputation. It isn’t just that you’re more likely to hear less polished writing (although that’s obviously a part of it). The main problem is that open mics are a lightning rod for people who care far less about writing than they do about looking sexy in their brand new flannels and piercings. They are to sincerity what trust fund babies are to economic humility. And whenever it becomes more about presentation than substance, the work suffers.

That’s not to say that there's something inherently wrong with readings. I’ve been to some that quite frankly changed my life for the better, and I’ve given some in which I’ve felt so profound a connection with my audience that I can’t imagine being anywhere else. But there’s such a thing as skipping a step, and that happens whenever we think more about the mic and less about the page.

So, again, here’s my not-so-humble advice: stay home. Don’t call anyone. Don’t text. Don’t update your Facebook status to say what you’re reading, or how many thousands of words you’re going to write today. Just leave your ego in a shoe box, sit down, and read. And write. And if you look down at your first draft and think it’s golden—well, you’re wrong.

Put it through another draft, then another, then another. Craft every word, every line break, every syllable. Break the rules, if you want, but know that you’re breaking them. After all, this is serious business. You’re crafting a religion here. Fill it with humor and joy, laugh your ass off, but don’t take it lightly. Use alliteration and connotation to fuse your writing with a subconscious sense of harmony, of rhythm that is the chief apparatus of an affecting poem, anyway. Craft it the way a sculpture leaves fingerprints in the down-turned hand of a piece most people will only see at a distance.

Because, in addition to ego, the biggest enemy of an aspiring writer is the gimmick, a technical or stylistic bit of flare that’s designed to draw in the audience, to make them laugh or impress them with some raw turn of cleverness, but upon careful scrutiny, possesses no depth whatsoever. Put another way, the best writing is done on a kind of Zen-like autopilot, but that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook when it comes to revision, or having some idea of why we did whatever we did. It’s fine to leave off a comma or break on an article or describe the butterfly’s wings as the color of menstrual blood, but by God, you better at least try to have some idea in your own head (even if you can’t articulate it) why you’re going to leave it that way. Because that’s what separates true writers from monkeys typing Shakespeare, but more importantly, it’s also what sets up the writer to achieve a kind of homespun enlightenment and catharsis from their own piece—which gets us back to the solitary element of writing.

Billy Collins described the ideal poem (in his opinion) as an Eye Chart--that is, it starts clear (capital E) but gets more complex, more detailed, more enigmatic, as it goes, until the final line feels right, even if you can't exactly say why. What's important, though, is the attempt. It's simply too easy to write something funny and/or clever, then pronounce it finished without putting it through a few (or a few dozen) rounds of scrutiny.

So, again, from time to time, stay home. Read. Write. If you’re popular in the local writing community, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you should also regard that popularity with a certain measure of skepticism. The last thing any of us need is someone who can’t wait to tell us how great we are. Be lonely. Be angry. Be frustrated. Those aren’t bad things; those are merely the other side of the coin, reflections of the raw drive that propels us towards whatever kind of beauty and clarity that poetry can accomplish in the first place.

A New Years poem from "Damnatio Memoriae"

2011-12-31T17:27:00.003-05:00

FATHER TIME AND BABY NEW YEAR

There he goes, toddling off-stage

with that gnarled scythe resting

crosswise a sash in last year’s fashion,

his dripstone beard, his great

nose like a pilgrim’s plough-blade.

And here comes his successor—

a drooling infant dressed in a top hat

and star-spangled diaper,

blissfully unaware how he will age

three months each day in office.

Father Time could say something.

He could warn the poor toddler

of the need to arm himself,

to get a handle on more than his bowels

if he wants to hold this mess together.

But Baby New Year just grins

like a pacifist and the old man departs,

yielding at last his gothic hourglass

of sand made from the bones

of dinosaurs, sea cows, Babylonians—

all that expires under Time’s watch.

Meanwhile, the Dutch launch fireworks,

the Greeks bake coins in cakes,

Japanese monks ring temple bells

and the Scots gift coal and shortbread.

But here, we Americans just kiss

and kiss while that old drama plays out

on confetti-fogged billboards,

the tips of noisemakers blaring up one

strangled, universal note to the sky.

Neil Diamond Taken Literally

2011-12-10T17:30:00.003-05:00

In 1971, Neil Diamond gifted humanity with “I Am... I Said,” a metaphysically complex song about a supernatural being seeking to recover from loneliness and partial amnesia by enlisting the help of sentient furniture in modern day California.

While the first two verses of the song are commonly misunderstood to be about a New Yorker feeling out of place in LA (L.A.’s fine but it ain’t home / New York’s home, but it ain’t mine no more), a quick comparison to Exodus 3:14 (This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me onto you) reveals a more intriguing and likely possibility: the narrator (hereafter referred to as the Diamond Prophet) is in fact an embodiment (or at least an emissary) of God, a kind of messianic figure sent to minister to the entertainment industry.

Given that most profanity takes the form of some kind of blasphemy, this hypothesis fits quite well with the Diamond Prophet’s unwillingness to engage in colorful language (And I’m not a man who likes to swear). Yet the narrator’s repeated need to remind himself who he is (I am, I said… I am, said I) hints that he is suffering from partial amnesia, perhaps even a kind of identity crisis brought on by his transference from divinity to the shortcomings that accompany mortal form. That would also account for his problematic and incomplete grasp of English grammar.

Perhaps most fascinating, though, is the Diamond Prophet’s repeated pleas for help from clearly sentiment furniture: “And no one heard at all / not even the chair”. The possibility of the furniture (hereafter referred to as Sentient Chair) possessing auditory abilities clearly indicates some kind of supernatural intelligence; more intriguing, though, is the question of WHY the chair refuses to listen… and just what kind of consolatory abilities does Sentient Chair have in the first place?

Here, as should be expected of such fine storytellers as Neil Diamond (he says the song took four months to write), the lyrics are tantalizingly silent. Yet subtle clues persist.

The fact that this song was published by Prophet Music Inc. (loosely associated with MCA Records) indicates that the songwriters and performers therein are casting their lots not with Sentient Chair, but with Diamond Prophet instead… which might even hint at a previously unknown cosmological tension broiling between gods (or god-like beings) and sentient woodwork. As such tension can often be the seed of greater conflict, we can further speculate that further Neil Diamond songs might have chronicled the approaching civil war.

And since woodwork obviously can’t carve itself, we might even theorize that the Diamond Prophet (or others like him) actually created the Sentient Chair—perhaps as a kind of cosmological plaything—and now desire a more meaningful relationship that Sentient Chair is unwilling to provide.

But there is more to this story than the conflict between Diamond Prophet and Sentient Chair. In a later verse, Diamond Prophet actually addresses the listener:

Did you ever read about a frog who dreamed of being a king
And then became one
Well, except for the names and a few other changes
If you talk about me, the story's the same one

If we assume for a moment that the Diamond Prophet achieved his supernatural nature simply by wishing, we are left to ask what he was before his transformation. Since the song only makes mention of one other being, we are left to ponder an alternate theory: that the Diamond Prophet was himself f a piece of furniture (perhaps a table) and his complex relationship with Sentient Chair reflects hard feelings stemming from their different paths in life.

1971 was a big year. The U.S. ended its trade embargo with China. Cigarette ads were banned on TV and radio. Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub. It was a very confusing time. But we can say with certainty that our great musical artists were there, as they have always been, to raise the bar and help shepherd us through.

Tribulations of a Comp Professor

2011-12-05T11:15:00.004-05:00

I love my job but inevitably, every composition section contains at least a few instances of the following:

Prologue (Day 1)

Stress the importance of due dates, revision, that writing is a process, and that attendance and participation aren't synonymous. Also, teach a quick lesson on how to write a formal email to a professor, airing a grievance or asking for a favor.

Act I (throughout semester)

Present students with frequent opportunities for conferences, feedback, extra credit, etc. The ones who take greatest advantage of these opportunities are the ones who don't really need them.

Act II (two weeks before Finals Week)

Email several students who are in danger of not passing the course, warn them, tell them to talk to me ASAP so we can see how they're doing, see if they can still squeak by, etc.

Act III (one week before Finals Week)

None of said students show up to class and none respond to the email.

Act IV (Finals Week)

Said students show up late and despite having the instructions read to them four times, and posted on the overhead, they do the final incorrectly, then swagger out of the classroom with a final scowl of grumpy derision.

Act V (End of Finals Week)

Said students fail the class.

Epilogue (two weeks later)

Respond to a flurry of frantic, punctuation-free emails from former students who want to know why they failed and if there is anything they can do to pass the class.

Dorianne Laux's "The Book of Men"

2011-11-05T14:42:00.004-04:00

All too often, contemporary poets fall victim to the belief that they must over-elevate their diction and earn points for being clever before they're allowed to relax a bit and simply be honest. Dorianne Laux is a poet who has the guts, the heart, and the lyrical chops to do otherwise. She is one of the best living poets and The Book of Men is one of her best collections.

In the very first poem, Staff Sgt. Metz, Laux demonstrates her uncanny knack for heartfelt narrative: “Metz is alive for now, standing in line / at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear / and buzz cut, his beautiful new / camel-colored suede boots” (17). One could easily write an entire review addressing the craft, social/political commentary, and deliberate pacing of just those four lines! What’s most striking about the poem, though, is the narrator’s way of stepping onto the stage while still allowing us to keep our focus on the character of Sgt. Metz, which is exactly where it should be: “I can see into the canal in his right ear, / a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head / toward the place of dreaming and fractions, / ponds of quiet thought.” This is where Laux shines: her subtle humanism, which is all the more striking because it comes from such an uncompromising voice.

There is plenty of subtle social and political commentary in this book, though that commentary comes, as it should, through the lens of personal experience. And when Laux does shift toward the overtly autobiographical, she does so with elegance and lyrical brevity, as exemplified by poems like Mother’s Day:

I passed through the narrow hills

of my mother’s hips one cold morning

and never looked back, until now, clipping

her tough toenails, sitting on the bed’s edge

combing out the tufts of hair at the crown

where it ratted up while she slept… (75)

Even as she portrays the awkward mortality of the child caring for the parent, though, Laux’s poem echoes with tenderness, measured humor, and redemption: “She’s afraid…. I help her / with the buttons on her sweater. She looks / hard at me and says the word sleeve. / Exactly, I tell her and her face relaxes / for the first time in days.”

Some of these same themes resonate in Lost in Costco, a poem that seems at first to be about an elderly, likely senile mother wandering off and getting lost in a typical American superstore crowded with “cheap jeans, open bins of discounted CDs,” and “buzzing fluorescent lights” (55). Yet the poem takes an interesting turn wherein the mother is found by a piano, “[taking] requests from the crowd.” This segues beautifully to the poems’ closing, wherein the narrator remembers being a child and asking the mother to play certain songs, identified by humming “a few bars,” trusting that the mother would play the right song though she had “so little to go on.” This moment—both self-indicting and celebratory of an ailing mother’s love and humor—is about as good as any I’ve ever read on the subject of aging.

Then in Fall, one of the final poems from this collection, Laux performs the kind of lyrical magic trick that got many of us interested in poetry in the first place. She pretty much manages in six lines to sum up more or less every vying school of poetic, religious, and philosophical thought, while still illustrating how goddamn silly and reductive they all are:

I’m tired of stories about the body,

how important it is, how unimportant,

how you’re either a body

hauling a wrinkled brain around

or a brain trailing a stunned sheen

of flesh… (82)

Laux’s poems are Confessional at times, especially in their unflinching examination of the body, yet her tongue-in-cheek ruminations on human nature remind me of the so-called New York School. That’s an academic point, though; ultimately, what matters most is that these poems manage to be lyrical and uncompromising while also being insightful, tender, and immensely forgiving.

Personally, I define a “successful poem” as one that's entertaining to read, sounds good (with is shorthand for “It has richly textured use of alliteration, assonance, and the cadence of stressed versus unstressed syllables”), has some sort of intellectual/emotional depth behind it, and like J.D. Salinger said, makes you wish the writer were your friend. I've never met Dorianne Laux in person but The Book of Men (like her last book, Facts About the Moon) makes me want to buy her a drink and just sit and listen to whatever the hell she has to say, because odds are, it will be something worth hearing.

2011-10-17T20:32:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to send an e-shout out to the very fine folks of Rochester, NY (especially Kitty Jospe, Donna Marbach, John Roche, Tom Holmes, Ann Putnam and all the members of the Just Poets group) for hosting me and helping celebrate the release of "Pure Elysium." I had a great time! Your generosity and enthusiasm are truly inspiring. I'd also like to thank the guy at the airport who ran after me and gave me the boarding pass I'd dropped, and airport security for not tasing me after I packed entirely too much liquid into my carry-on bag.

We Don't Read and Write Because It's Cute

2011-09-29T17:02:00.002-04:00

I love getting my students' opinions on assigned readings because it gives me a chance to gauge how well they are or aren't absorbing the material and style of a given piece. At the same time, I try to remind myself that if I don't like every single thing I read, I can't expect my students to like every single thing I assign, either. As a general rule, though, I find it hard not to take it personally when students say that a certain piece was boring. Essentially, that translates to "Even though I didn't care enough to put much effort into deciphering this, I've concluded that you wasted my time by assigning it."

Then again, I remember years ago when I was a student, browsing through assigned books or essays and honestly thinking the same thing from time to time. So does the fault belong to the literature or the reader?

Well, first, we have to bear in mind that everybody has their own style, their own aesthetic. Put another way, if we can't all agree on something as trivial as the best kind of pizza (extra pepperoni from Pizza Hut, or if you happen to be in Iowa City, Falbo's double-decker stuffed crust), how are we going to agree on literature, movies, and music?

Let's cut to the chase: it's easy to conclude that we're supposed to read assigned material because our instructors have some nebulous, geeky, oddball enjoyment of it coupled with a maniacally cackling desire to bore the living hell out of us. Easy, but wrong. Even if we don't like everything we read--and honestly, I probably only like about 1/3 of what I read--the reason we do it isn't just for kicks. Sure, good writing should be entertaining, but there's an unspoken truth behind all humanities courses, and from time to time, we need to be reminded of it.

The real reason people write, the real reason why people like me ask you to read: you're mortal. Everyone you love, believe it or not, may slip away from you at any given time. From car crashes to hangnails, bad things happen. Good things are coming, too, but so are plenty of awful things that we simply can't avoid forever. The choice, then, is to stick our heads in the sand and depend on ignorance to save us (which it never does) or keep our eyes wide open and weather the storm.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that in 100% of the cases throughout human history, literally going back for tens of thousands of years, the people who aren't prepared, who don't have some minimal level of maturity and self-reflection, who aren't at least slightly able to step out of their own skin and empathize with others, even those they disagree with... well, those are the people who have the worst responses when bad things happen.

That doesn't mean that you're only a worthwhile adult if you have a healthy knowledge of the lessons presented in Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" about the real life-and-death need for individuality and self-expression, or the paranoia, bigotry, and immaturity associated with the attempts to ban works like "Cather in the Rye" and "Howl" just because they make weak-minded people uncomfortable. No, I'm quite sure that good, mature people existed for thousands of years before Walt Whitman wrote of the evils of slavery or Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, and countless other warrior-poets revealed that contrary to romantic opinions, wars actually kinda suck.

BUT if we can internalize the lessons given to us by tough-as-nails geniuses throughout the ages, from Christ and the Buddha to modern writers, musicians, and artists, we'll not just be better equipped to deal with a Tuesday morning fender-bender or the loudmouth bigot falling off his barstool; we're also less likely to lose our minds when a buildings blow up or a spouse's biopsy test comes back as malignant. The real point of literature, art, music, philosophy, etc., isn't to show off how goddamn clever we are. It's to keep us from stuffing people we don't like into cattle cars. It's to arm us against the unknown. It's to simultaneously deepen our emotions while thickening our skin. And here's the bonus: it also makes us far, far more capable of living rich, worthwhile lives.

You can't put a price on that. But you can buy it for a few hundred bucks and a few hours of your time each week.

I'd like to think that I still managed to learn at least some of the lessons in the books I've failed to read over the years; on the other hand, it probably took me longer. Think of literature as a key, if you like, or a doorway. Every single time you actually use it--whether it's an essay by Howard Zinn talking about the true history of the U.S., or a Marie Howe poem elucidating the seemingly trivial but quietly revelatory nature of our daily lives--you're getting stronger. You're getter harder to manipulate, less likely to lose your shit when you don't get a promotion or the water heater breaks down.

And I guess that's why it bothers me when students say that they find something boring, because even though I respect their honesty and they're perfectly within their rights to feel that way (hell, sometimes, I agree with them!), it also means that they haven't internalized a given lesson and unless they learn it elsewhere, they're at slightly greater risk than they might otherwise be. And I worry.

Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules for Writing

2011-09-17T19:25:00.003-04:00

One of my intrepid students mentioned these in her journal response to a famous Vonnegut story, "Harrison Bergeron," so I thought I'd repost them here, too. Cheers.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

So you Hate Unions and Welfare, Huh?

2011-09-09T10:04:00.005-04:00

Every year around election time... and, well, all other times... there's a big segment of the American population who takes it upon itself to tell the rest of us exactly what they think is wrong with this country, and almost universally, two of their chief answers are unions and entitlement programs. Usually, this is around the same time that I feel my blood pressure skyrocket and the little historian inside me reach for a crude spear fashioned out of a broom handle and a piece of broken glass. But let's deal with entitlement programs first.

The chief criticism of welfare, food stamps, etc., is that they promote laziness, i.e. that Americans need to get back to that Golden Age when we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. Interestingly enough, I have yet to hear a definitive answer on when that Golden Age actually was, but the implication seems to be that it was either around the 1950s or perhaps all the way back to the good ol' 18th and early 19th century, that being the dawn of our nation and our Founding Father's hay day.

OK, again, let's look at this backwards. Were the Founding Fathers (note: I didn't say Founding Mothers) all self-made men? Eh... kinda. Most were moderately wealthy, white Europeans who came here to get richer, but they also happened to be a pretty intelligent and relatively moral bunch, so things worked out... well, that is, they sort of worked out, so long as you weren't: 1) Black, 2) a woman, or 3) a white man who didn't own property. Oh, and if you were a factory worker in those pre-union days, as illustrated by the Triangle Fire and Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," factories were about as safe as dark alleys strewn with landmines and used needles. But that's nothing compared to the cards you were dealt if you happened to be born a Native American, or even a white person with a severe disability.

If you think the good ol' 1950s (you know, before Civil Rights was something we really considered) were so rosy and utopian, think again. Just because problems aren't talked about doesn't mean they aren't there, so I have to ask if anybody is really naive enough to think that spousal abuse, child molestation, sexual discrimination, and racism just spontaneously developed the decade after, thanks to the Beatles and color television.

Which brings me to entitlement programs, aka the most common scapegoat for the Hasty Generalization fallacy. Let's cut right to the chase. Are there people who take advantage of entitlement programs? Yes. Are there bad union members? Yes. But does that mean that either are morally bankrupt? Well, let's ask the single mom trying to feed her kids, or better yet, the kids who won't have to worry about being sent down mine shafts to gather coal without so much as a headlamp and a mask.

There's a statistic that I just love: contrary to stereotypes, on average, people on welfare actually have 1.7 jobs and 40% of them have two jobs!

But let's assume for the moment that entitlement programs really do promote laziness (which they don't). Even then, getting rid of them is the last thing we'd want to do! As any sociologist or member of law enforcement will tell you, desperate people are simply more likely to do desperate things, as a product of human nature, and I can't imagine anybody more desperate than someone who is starving or in urgent need of medical care. So unless you want to euthanize all poor people in the country and/or make gun ownership contingent on income, something must be done. Nobody likes to come right out and say this but entitlement programs don't just help the good, hard-working people who happen to fall on tough times; they help everyone by giving those with nothing left to lose one less reason to launch a French Revolution on gated communities and country clubs.

Here's another statistic I... well, I can't say I love it, but it's definitely worth remembering: as of 2007, the top 1% of Americans have 34.6 percent of the wealth. Perhaps more pertinent, though, the bottom 80% only have 15% of the wealth. Now, if you're like me, your brain shuts down when you hear statistics, so let's make this more manageable. If you had a hundred people and a hundred dollars to distribute, that means one guy would get about 35 bucks, nineteen people would get about $2.63 each, and eighty people would get 19 cents each.

Am I implying that each of those hundred people should get an equal share? No, of course not! You need competition for a healthy economy... but as we're clearly seeing now, competition isn't a silver bullet, and neither are tax breaks for the top 1% (though closing loopholes and getting rid of sweatshops would certainly help). Besides that, we as adults would do well to remember that life isn't an either/or scenario. We don't have to choose between a few people getting everything and everyone getting the same, since both scenarios are ridiculous. There are about a zillion middle ground compromises. But until we get those ironed out, doing away with entitlement programs and lambasting unions is nothing more than poor people being tricked by Machiavellian politicians and talk radio hosts into dropping their pants going you-know-what in their own overcrowded, dilapidated nests.

On Banning Books

2011-08-25T18:20:00.008-04:00

(Props to the fine folks at Atticus Review for publishing this essay, as well.)

A New Jersey high school is in the news for book-banning this week. Full disclosure: I haven't read the book in question (Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami) so I can't say subjectively whether it's a good or bad book, in my opinion. On the other hand, that doesn't really matter, and here's why.

I suppose it could be a sign of parents taking an interest in their kids' education when they go to school boards to protest the assigning of books they don't like. But I don't recall teachers ever going to parents' places of employment and telling them how to do their jobs, or storming into churches and interrupting sermons to offer corrections and counter-arguments. Education isn't a democracy; it's a benevolent dictatorship. That's nothing new. It's always been that way, pretty much since the beginning. And that's good news!

I don't know about you, but I don't want everybody voting on whether or not doctors are right in their diagnosis, or this or that way of doing things is the safest on an auto assembly line. As a rule, we leave questions up to the experts of that given field... at least, we're supposed to. Sure, it doesn't always work perfectly (what does?) but we have plenty of checks and balances in place.

Any educator is all too familiar with the miles and miles of red tape, committee oversight, reports, detailed justifications, and peer reviews that go into pretty much every aspect of teaching. If you're a teacher, in addition to teaching, you often deal with the feeling that you're being watched, judged, constantly assessed and reassessed... And that's probably a good thing, too, because it keeps us honest.

That being said, I've been talking to my poetry and creative writing students this week about why contemporary poetry is so different from the poetry they read in high school. There are countless possible reasons for this but the one I think most likely is that in general, high school teachers shy away from assigning controversial material, even though it might be of greater interest to their students, to avoid pissing off drive-by parents.

I think it's worth pointing out that virtually no one protests when students are assigned a certain play that depicts premarital underage sex, murder, and suicide... namely, "Romeo and Juliet." Why? Well, because it's Shakespeare--which is really just a cop-out way of saying that the language is different, that Shakespeare didn't use certain words and descriptive styles deemed offensive by people who generally don't like reading, anyway.

I view angry parents protesting the reading material of their dear, innocent children the same way I view those few college students I've had protest their (usually already generous) grades on papers, wondering why they got a C or D just because they were two pages short of the minimum page requirement or they had typos in practically every sentence. In other words, they insist, "I didn't get the grade I deserved!" at which point I think, "How the hell do you know? Are you the expert here?"

We Americans have an odd habit; we tend to think that free speech means we deserve equal time and respect for our opinions on topics about which we know next to nothing. That's not how it works. Free speech doesn't mean, for instance, that we allow the creationists to take up half the semester with their ideas, then allow the students to make up their own minds. It means creationists can talk in church or stand on the corner with their crayon signs and say whatever they want, and we won't shoot them. It means I can write a blog, and you can tell me I'm nuts, and we vote for whatever political candidate we want or slap a bumper sticker on our cars. That's it. And, sadly, that's more than a lot of human beings have, and something the rest of us take for granted. But I digress.

We educators often say that we wish parents were more interested in their children's education. That's half-true. What we're really saying is that we wish parents were better at parenting. Grade school and high school teachers wish so many students didn't arrive at school dirty, hungry, and malnourished (and some of them with unexplained bruises). I wish I didn't have so many college students who had little or no grasp of history, grammar, and self-reflection. And we all wish there weren't so many young people still clinging to their parents' notions of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other such nonsense (some of which went out of style centuries ago). But that's life. Educators deal with as best they can, and more often than not, they capitulate when the proper response would be, "I'm here to help your son/daughter, not you. Leave my office and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."

I suppose this all comes back to the American tendency to view education (like so much else) as a kind of drive-thru window. You pay, you tell them what you want, you wait, and they hand it to you. If you get something you don't want, you complain, and they have to fix it. Right? Wrong.

I'm a firm believer that to be a good teacher, you should care about your students as human beings--which sounds obvious, but isn't, because it requires getting rid of a lot of aloofness and detachment and genuinely paying attention to their reactions, questions, and concerns. Teaching (like parenting, I'm sure) is hard work. But shame on anyone who takes the easy way out, who makes up for regular neglect by skimming a book and raising a fuss, motivated less by concern than pride and unexamined insecurities.

Now, I'm not saying that good, sincere parents who have a genuine disagreement with teachers have to just keep their opinions to themselves. But there's a big difference between, "Hey, I had a couple concerns and was wondering if you could give me your point of view," and "You're pushing your extreme leftist agenda and trying to make my son/daughter into an ultra-liberal/gay/lesbian/terrorist/terrorist-sympathizing anti-capitalist hippy and you should be fired/burned at the stake!"

Here, I'm not focusing on that New Jersey school in particular, since I obviously wasn't at the meetings to gauge the level of discourse, but on the subject of book-banning in general. I doubt many schools ban books for kicks; they do it because the board members and teachers and principals are getting angry, semi-incoherent phone calls and emails at all hours, and angry the-world-is-ending editorials are showing up in the local paper.

"But wait," someone might say, "what if an assigned book actually does encourage some kind of amoral behavior? Do we really want that kind of trash being read by impressionable youths? Wouldn't that march our whole society one step closer to the precipice of disaster?"

Answer: calm down.

Consider Mein Kampf, probably one of the vilest books ever written. Are there bad people who read that book for inspiration? Sure. But would the average "impressionable youth" be corrupted by it? No. Hatred and bigotry, like basic stupidity, are the anti-thesis of self-reflection, contemplation, and maturity. Put another way, bigots are stupid, and almost as a rule, stupid people don't read books, let alone understand them. Bigots have to be spoon-fed their daily portion of malice and fear, which is why they're almost always drawn to some charismatic jackass who cherry-picks passages from a religious or patriotic text, ignores the rest, and convinces a bunch of lonely cast-offs to give him their bodies, futures, and credit card numbers. But again, I digress.

My point is that we have much less to fear from a book... any book... than, say, the music our kids listen to or the movies and TV shows they watch, and quite frankly, I don't think we need to be afraid of those, either. Besides that, good art, real art, should shake people up. People need to be kicked out of their comfort zone once in awhile. 90% of education and maturity consists of getting people to question their beliefs and really reflect on them, even if they wind up holding the same views by the end. Because at least they've thought about it, they've appreciated (at least a little) the complexity of any given issue, and that kind of recognition is our best weapon against the kind of ignorance that would encourage book-banning over book-reading (or book-debating) in the first place.

Writing While Teaching

2011-08-17T18:22:00.003-04:00

Here are some random thoughts on the issue of trying to find time/energy to write while teaching four classes.

Since none of us are inexhaustible, it’s tough to strike a balance between the energy we put into our own writing and the energy we put into our teaching. However, I think there’s a tendency to unnecessarily separate the two when, in fact, each can assist the other. Put another way, if we sharply distinguish our writing selves from our teaching selves, I think it’s actually much more likely that we’ll run out of steam and feel like we don’t have enough time or energy for either.

Good teachers are invested in what they're doing—not just because it’s better for the students but because in the long run, it helps us by creating a more congenial, less stressful classroom environment. Likewise, writers aren’t just writers when they’re sitting at their desks, but also when they're waiting in line or stuck in traffic. If we're going to draw inspiration from the news, or mythology, or our own imaginations, why not draw inspiration from the 75-100 human beings we see 12 hours a week?

Our students (good or bad) are part of the world we write about, so teaching them is actually (in my view) a chance to observe a lot of people of different beliefs from many different backgrounds, a lot of stories, and put all that raw data to good use. It’s a chance to make our jobs as writers EASIER by getting some of the reflection work done before we actually sit down to write. I don't mean that in the sense of being a literary vulture, fiendishly waiting for a student to give up juicy details of a trouble past so we can steal them for our own writing. I just mean (as cheesy as this sounds) allowing our students to broaden our understanding of our society, our country, our world, which in turn can greatly inform our own work as academics, since our own work is probably striving for some kind of elucidation, anyway.

Besides that, being writers ourselves sadly doesn’t add more hours to the day, so it still comes down to basic time management. Setting aside huge blocks of free time probably isn’t going to work since those huge blocks of free time probably don’t exist, anyway. Instead, write when you can, whenever you can, whenever/wherever you can find the time and energy, even if it’s just jotting down a thought on a note card (or a Smartphone) or more likely, just thinking about our stuff and going over lines and thoughts in the car on the way to work, or asking ourselves while addressing a student’s question, “How does this issue reflect my own thoughts and research?”

If it doesn't, maybe it should. Just my two cents.

Meyerhofer Poems on Verse Daily

2011-08-09T23:34:00.003-04:00

OK, so I suck at self-promotion and Scrabble (the latter is just a random ironic fact about me) but I'm working on that... so here are some poems that Verse Daily has been kind enough to reprint over the years. If you like what you see, do me a favor and help pay to have trees reduced to pulp and covered in symbols inked in a hopefully meaningful pattern. Then find me so I can say thanks.

Dust
The Birthdays of Ex-Lovers
Skandha
Diagnosing God
Iconography of the Heart
The Trouble with Hammers

Songs Taken Literally: Meet Virginia

2011-07-10T16:37:00.006-04:00

In 1998, a rock band from San Francisco, California (as opposed to San Francisco de Macoris in the Dominican Republic) unleashed "Meet Virginia," a compelling geopolitical and psychological case study of an alternate reality in which the United States is a monarchy and Virginia, a former princess suffering acute depression and personality disorders, is determined to seize political power through exercise.

Virginia is clearly obsessed with being "the queen," yet the fact that her mother "works on carburetors" indicates that her family's royal status has been revoked, probably in an coup d’état that took place during Virginia's youth. This rebellion was apparently bloodless since many members of the royal family were left alive, though the motives and nuances of said conflict are deliberately left open to interpretation.

Rather than bore us with overly expository narrative, Train wisely alludes to internal familial strife with the line, "Her brother is a fine mediator / for the president." This subtly provocative line hints that her sibling is in fact collaborating with the very political powers that overthrew their family! This is especially striking when one considers that the before-mentioned political powers have sentenced the deposed royal family's patriarch to "wrestling alligators" in some kind of gladiatorial-type setting, thus "Meet Virginia" also speaks to themes of honor, courage, and familial loyalty.

Virginia's own goals are often subject to intense doubt and contradiction; for instance, she "wants to be the queen" yet periodically screams, "I don't really wanna be the queen," hinting that while she craves great political power (perhaps to avenge her father and kill her brother), she also fears what the ruling political powers may do to her if she fails.

I will not waste time elucidating the obvious parallels between Virginia and Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as her indecision is concerned.

Rather than become the figurehead of an underground movement, or attempt to break through the apathetic labor philosophy of her spirit-broken mother, Virginia hits upon a curious strategy: she begins "[wearing] high heels when she exercises," a move that hints at self-loathing (reminiscent of self-flagellating monks in the 13th and 14th centuries) coupled with an acute need for higher endorphin levels to combat her growing desire to commit suicide.

On the surface, Train seems to be hinting that Virginia is a deeply disturbed and unreliable figure, but upon closer study, we realize that she "loves babies and surprises." This adds significantly more dimension to her character and hints that there is much more to her than meets the eye. For instance, she is obviously crafty, in that she deliberately neglects her appearance (especially her hair, which is "always a mess"), probably to project helplessness and lull her enemies with a false sense of security.

Virgina also possesses a startling capacity for courage in that, like her father, she "never compromises" (unlike her mother and brother, who seem outwardly content to betray their family lineage) and openly speaks over the telephone (which is surely bugged) about how she disapproves of the ruling political party. This could be a dubious decision reflecting her rapidly deteriorating psyche, though I believe there is another, far more intriguing possibility.

Train informs us late in the song that Virginia also possesses "magic" intuition and that the "shape of her body" is "unusual." While this hints at a number of possibilities, the most likely would seem to be that Virginia possesses supernatural characteristics, perhaps to a degree that the ruling political party--and even those members of her own family who betrayed her--are, in fact, acutely afraid of her.

The fact that Virginia is still alive hints that her potential for rampant murder is either not fully appreciated, or else the ruling political party is incapable of destroying her--either because she wields enormous support with the laypeople, or because she is, in fact, invulnerable to many forms of conventional attack.

There are also hints that Virginia's powers have not yet achieved their full potential, which might be another motive behind her exercise: Virginia's supernatural abilities are enhanced through physical pain, with the help of sleep deprivation ("she only drinks coffee at midnight"). While we cannot say for certain if these latent powers exist in the other members of her family, the fact that her father has not exhibited them despite being subject to gladiatorial combat would hint that Virginia is one of a kind. In fact, in all likelihood, she is some kind of mutant, a Christ-like figure destined to abolish democracy and restore this alternate reality America to a monarchy style of government.

More telling than the political ramifications of this song, though, is its close attention to character development. Train again displays their knack for making unbelievable characters more believable by giving Virginia distinctly human traits (loneliness, self-doubt, latent maternal instincts, etc). They also add additional depth by daringly incorporating themselves into their story.

Virginia is stated to find the narrator (presumably Train's lead singer, Patrick Monahan) beautiful. In the second verse, in fact, Monahan momentarily confuses himself with his own fictional character when he confesses that he "smokes a pack a day." Given the sheer volume of literature detailing the dangers of smoking and the difficulty that smokers have in quitting, plus the various characteristics of Virginia herself, it is no great leap to suggest that "Meet Virginia" also functions as an allegorical representation of Monahan's desire to quit smoking and perhaps undergo a sex change.

Some critics might find fault with a singer equating his nicotine addiction and possible sexual confusion to a supernatural, former noblewoman engaged in a psychological and geopolitical struggle where the stakes are literally life and death. However, I applaud Train’s bold, multi-dimensional approach to song-writing and wait for the day when such close-minded countries as Australia will allow this kind of edgy, Shakespearean songwriting to peak higher than #91 on the charts.

Atticus Review

2011-07-06T19:17:00.005-04:00

Hey, I just wanted to take a moment to plug Atticus Review, a weekly ezine that seeks to publish great stuff from new and established writers. We've already published stuff from J.P. Dancing Bear, Kirk Pinho, Steven Gillis, David Musgrove, Mike Hampton, Diana Salier, Todd McKinney, Matt Mullins, Djelloul Marbrook, and many others. In short, we basically fucking rock (and not just because I'm one of the editors). Feel free to take a look at the latest issue, if you haven't already. Oh, P.S., the other editors slipped in one of my own poems, so feel free to read that, too. ;)

Random Musings from the Road (eh, kinda)

2011-06-25T04:15:00.001-04:00

1. Thank you, Allison Joseph and SIU, for inviting me to Young Writers! As always, I was amazed by the caliber and questions of the students. Any time I have students asking me not only about publication and writing suggestions but if I've read a certain poem by so-and-so, I know I'm in the right profession.

2. Thank you also to Peter Lucas, editor of a certain badass journal named Prime Mincer, for buying me more drinks than I deserve.

3. Tomorrow, I'm driving up to Dekalb, Illinois, to continue the book tour and read for the House Cafe. I'll also be assisting such fine folks as Gillian King and Clint Cargile in their own young writers workshop, NIU style!

4. While in Carbondale, I had the pleasure of meeting up with not one, but three former students from my SIU days.

5. I decided that my sword collection was growing too large so following the events in Dekalb, I will be making my way to Elgin, IL, to drop off a zweihander, a Swedish saber, and an arming sword. In other words, I've been driving for three days with three really big, really sharp swords in my backseat.

6. Dear New York, in the words of George Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." In other words, you did the right thing, and that's always something, but you took your sweet time about it. Thus I award you 50% credit.

Poetry Invention Exercises Generated by Insomnia

2011-06-17T01:36:00.002-04:00

Michael Meyerhofer

Fall 2011

24 IDEAS FOR DOWNRIGHT BAD-ASS POEMS

Here are some basic (but not necessarily easy) exercises to get the ball rolling. In many cases, these exercises prohibit you from using certain words in certain poems. This is not to say that a love poem can’t contain the word “love,” for example; this is just an exercise designed to force you to work harder on your descriptions and pack more punch into your lines.

1) Write a love poem in which the following words do NOT appear: love, heart, soul, moon, eyes, clouds, rain, blessing, dream.

2) Write an ode to a body part or a physical activity not normally praised or discussed. For inspiration, listen to “Ode to the Tampon” and “Ode to a Composting Toilet” by Sharon Olds, “Ode to My Socks” by Pablo Neruda.

3) Eavesdrop on someone’s conversation and/or jot down the actual phrasing of a piece of conversation that struck you as bizarre, wise, stupid, or funny. Write a poem in which that exact phrase appears. Put italics around it if you’re writing a narrative poem that contains a quote or conversation.

4) Pretend you have deeply wronged someone you love (or draw on actual experiences of such an event). Be as specific and detailed as possible, and try to make it clear to the reader that you’re contrite, WITHOUT using the following words: forgive, forgiveness, mercy, please, plead, beg, mistake, sorry.

5) Write a poem narrating your day. The events described can be dramatic or mundane, serious or comical; but include as many images and sensory details as possible. Be specific. Avoid heavy-handed philosophical musings and no “moral of the story!”

6) Write a poem in which all the action revolves around one central image or metaphor. Examples: “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman, “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins.

7) Write a poem in the voice of someone who is dying, or about someone who is dying, without ever actually telling the reader that the poem is about death.

8) Write an erotic poem that isn’t sexual. In other words, write a poem that contains vivid physical descriptions and details about some kind of physical activity WITHOUT deliberately or accidentally using sexual connotations.

9) Write a poem about a physical event that is in no way sexual, but use words that have a sexual connotation, in order to give the poem extra energy and sensuality. Push the envelope; make sure it’s obvious to your reader that you meant to do this and didn’t just mess up.

10) Write a poem either about or from the perspective of a villain. Try to make them sympathetic to the audience WITHOUT making it too obvious what his/her crime was.

11) Write a poem in which you greatly vary your sentence length. For instance, maybe some sentences are just one line (i.e. they incorporate end stops) whereas other sentences are enjambed and continue for several lines. Don’t just do this randomly; try to create some kind of dramatic or narrative effect. Remember, longer sentences with lots of enjambment tend to sound a bit more narrative, reflective, descriptive, pastoral, relaxing, etc. Short sentences, on the other hand, tend to build tension by sounding more frantic clipped (for the same reason that “obscene: words are often one or two syllables, and we yell “Fire!” instead of “My friends, note the combustion event taking place all around us!”).

12) Write a Prose-Poem. In other words, write a poem that looks like a short paragraph, in which you don’t care about line breaks, but in which you still try to make the language of each and every sentence as poetic and descriptive as possible.

13) Write about something that literally or figuratively scares you. Note: if you don’t feel uncomfortable while you’re writing it and/or you don’t feel uncomfortable showing it to others, then you haven’t done the exercise properly.

14) Write a poem that seems to be poking fun at a serious topic, but has some serious lines throughout, then ends on a serious note. Example: “Suicide Song” by Tony Hoagland.

15) Write a poem that uses form in an unconventional manner. Examples: “Read This Poem from the Bottom Up” by Ruth Porritt, “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” and “Buffalo Bill’s” by e.e. cummings.

16) Write a poem making frequent use of anaphora—that is, a poem that exactly or more or less exactly repeats a given phrase or structure. Examples: “The Matter” by Kim Addonizio, “Library” by Albert Goldbarth.

17) Choose a topic you know very little about, do a small amount of research (thank you, Wikipedia!) and write a poem about it. Examples: “Petroglyphs” by George Bilgere, “First Motor Vehicle Fatality in America” by Ron Egatz, “The Five Stages of Grief” by Linda Pastan, “In Praise of the Potato” by David Williams.

18) Write a poem in which the drama or message hinges almost entirely on the last one or two lines. Examples: “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright, “The Surgeon” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Cobweb” and “Rain” by Raymond Carver.

19) Take the first one or two lines of a poem by an established poet, use them as the first two lines of your own poem, and write the rest of the poem. When you’re done, go back and change (or even cut) those borrowed lines. For more on this, listen to “Litany” by Billy Collins.

20) Write a poem that risks offending a sensitive audience, but do NOT do so purely for shock value. In other words, have some sort of reason or point (other than just following the assignment) for what you’re doing. Examples: "Practicing" by Marie Howe, “By Their Works” by Bob Hicok, “Fixation” by Ron Padgett, “A Day in the Life” by Marge Piercy, “Suicide Song” (again) by Tony Hoagland.

21) Write a poem openly praising or condoning something that isn’t necessarily illegal, but also isn’t actually something you personally believe in.

22) Write a poem structured like a letter to your parents or some other important person in your life. Say whatever it is you’ve been dying to say. Be specific so an outside reader could tell what you’re getting at. More importantly, though, be as blunt as you like. Remember, the subject of your poem doesn’t ever have to see it if you don’t want them to.

23) In the first half of a poem, directly address a poet or writer that invokes a strong personal feeling (aka someone you like or someone you hate). In the second half of the poem, adapt that poet/writer’s voice and respond.

24) Write about a place you have never visited, something you always wanted to do but never did, or something that you wish had happened but didn’t actually happen. Start off by vividly describing this place or event, so the reader will think you know it firsthand. Do a small amount of research if necessary. Then, in the second half of the poem, pull the rug out from under us. Make it clear that you never actually saw this place and/or this thing never actually happened, but you wish you had. Option: add a third stanza rectifying the first two. Example: “Like Riding a Bicycle” by George Bilgere.

Book Reviews

2011-06-12T15:09:00.002-04:00

I get a wild hair and write some book reviews from time to time, which Rattle has been kind enough to publish on their E-Review site. Feel free to take a look, should you feel so inclined. I recommend browsing their archive of other reviews, too. Really good stuff!

Overtime by Joseph Millar
The Origin of the Milky Way by Barbara Louise Ungar
Far From Algiers by Djelloul Marbrook
American Future by Peter Bethanis
Zephyr by Susan Browne
Octopus by Tom Hunley
The Selected Poems of Li Po (translated by David Hinton)

Chapbook Released!

2011-06-04T10:34:00.005-04:00

Woke up to some fine news from the even finer folks at Palettes and Quills: my fifth chapbook (with cover art by Peter Davis) is up for sale on Amazon! I'll also have copies for sale myself before long, so hit me up if you wanna have your world rocked (that's what SHE said!). Or order it if you just can't wait (you can also get it directly from the publisher here).

Thanks again to Donna Marbach (the series editor), Dorianne Laux (the contest judge), Peter Davis (swell guy, poet, and the before-mentioned cover artist), and you (friends, students, colleagues, potential readers, Homeland Security, etc).

Mathematical and Prophetic Reasons to Buy My Books

2011-06-01T15:46:00.004-04:00

At first, I was a little bummed when I saw that my last book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was only ranked #634,135 on Amazon. Then I realized that these numbers (6,3,4,1,3,5) collectively add up to 22. And 22, reversed, is... still 22. In other words, it's a numerical palindrome.

The word, palindrome, obviously contains "palin," which could be a cosmological reference to Sarah Palin. I think it's safe to say that Sarah Palin has never purchased any of my books. So if you want to be in the same club as that notorious poetry-hater, Sarah Palin, that's fine. I guess. But I don't think any of us want that.

Also, if I may proceed with another humble observation...

I'm currently 33 years old, which is 11 more than 22, and as we all know, there are only 10 commandments in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. 11 is more than 10. So in a very real sense, my second book could be seen as a bold continuation of the word of God.

So you see, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by ordering a copy. And while you're at it, pre-order the next one, too.

Random Musings Over a Can of Pringles

2011-05-24T19:54:00.003-04:00

Regular readers of my blog (I'm kind of a big deal in Nova Scotia) are probably aware that, among other things, I have a blog. Sometimes, I post entries in said blog. I just realized I hadn't done so in quite awhile--which is odd, since I've had an eventful past few weeks, training for the Kumite and being named Time Magazine's Man Most Likely to Create a Quantum Singularity by Staring Really Hard at a Doughnut Hole.

Anyway, I've also been working on the second novel in my series. My goal has been to write a rough draft of one chapter each day, or do one chapter's worth of editing. I stuck with that for about five days, then leveled out a bit. Another of the many problems I have is that I forget to, you know, take breaks. Well, and my medication, but that's another issue.

In other news, I'm still doing that thing where I exchange childishly hopeful application materials for rejection letters from university hiring committees around the country. But my third poetry book, "Damnatio Memoriae," should be out soon--along with "Pure Elysium," my fifth chapbook. I have a couple readings lined up this summer and I'm still hoping to take at trip back to Iowa and inhabit a space/time similar to those humans with whom I have a biological relationship.

Has anybody been reading up on past (obviously failed) doomsday predictions? I get a real kick out of these. I admit it: I watch those ubiquitous Nostradamus specials on the History Channel, even though they're what I like to call "fucking stupid." My favorite thing is how these wannabe-prophets have to backpedal, claim they either forgot to carry the two in their calculations ("No, it'll be NEXT May!") or God must have changed his mind. Which is itself a somewhat disturbing thought. From an Old Testament perspective, God’s mercy is a lot like that new dog that throws up on your favorite rug. Sure, it eats half of it back up, but that’s hardly cause for celebration.

On that note, which is my way of feigning transition when really these two things are in no way related, I'm going to use my cell phone workout app to burn some over-flavored coffee calories, then try and write something. Ah, America...

On Mothers' Day

2011-05-07T05:20:00.001-04:00

My mother died a week before my twentieth birthday. She was forty-seven. I’m thirty-three now. I still remember the color of her hair, the impish curve of her smile when she knew (or thought) she was right, although I often feel like I’ve forgotten the exact sound of her voice, that daily cadence our lives had before she slumped in the early morning hours from a heart attack while the rest of us slept.

I write this not to solicit pity for so universal an event as the sadness over a parent’s death, but to point out that I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a certain awkward nostalgia whenever Mothers’ Day rolls around.

Maybe it has something to do with suddenly being neck-deep in emails with subject lines like: Show your mother you love her with a bouquet, a spa treatment, a ceramic angel, or any one of a thousand other gifts you could give to your literal maker so she won’t think you’re an ungrateful SOB!

Just this evening, I got to thinking how unabashedly rude we’d call it if someone—anyone—we knew showed up on our doorstep and squealed Happy Fathers’ Day to a household still mourning a dead father, or Happy Valentine’s Day to a woman whose husband had just died of cancer. Somehow, though, we cut advertising companies slack, even though their irrefutable purpose is just to bet on the odds, to tug the viewing majority’s heartstrings into spending more money.

Am I pleading for a world in which faceless corporations give equal time to the grieving? No, of course not. The past we long for probably never existed, anyway. No, I’m just saying that whenever the holidays roll around, we owe it to ourselves—maybe not as citizens or consumers, but at least as people—to remember those who might not feel as we do, and more importantly, those who do not have what others won’t know to (or maybe necessarily can't) appreciate until it’s gone.

Is it Gutsy to State the Obvious?

2011-05-06T00:25:00.005-04:00

I know I'm far from the first person to weigh in on this, but Representative Steve Simon definitely makes an interesting point here. While I don't really think of myself as Christian, Simon offers a pretty unassailable rebuttal to Christians in general, especially those who use cherry-picked Bible passages as an excuse for prejudice and legislative gay-bashing.

Looking over the internet discussions related to this video, I'm glad to see that literally hundreds to one, most Americans are praising Simon's comments. Calling these comments brave leaves me feeling a little unsettled, though.

Maybe we Americans are too quick to attribute courage to those who simply state what’s morally and logically obvious. On the other hand, we're still far too squeamish when it comes to attributing ignorance, immaturity, and cowardice to those who deny it.

I've spoken before with smart conservatives who deride the Republican Party's position on gay rights but insist on remaining in the Party for purely economic and political reasons. Is this logically and morally sound? Put another way, should an economic conservative with moderate to liberal social views (in other words, a literate person with morals) tolerate their own Party being overrun by Birthers and homophobes? In a word: no. In two words: fuck no!

Any self-respecting economic conservative should be fighting ten times harder than liberal/independent/bleeding hearts like me to get their own Party in order. That's not a request. This isn't kindergarten hand-wringing; I'm just stating the obvious and if you disagree, you probably belong in a cave, clutching your stone-tipped spear and shitting with terror whenever it thunders outside.

When George W. Bush was president, crazy rumors abounded that he'd actually conspired to bring down the World Trade Center. While some crackpots bought into it, the vast majority of liberals and independents (very few of whom liked G.W., by the way) readily spoke out to debunk the so-called Truthers' claims. Thus, the Truther movement gained virtually no political traction and even among liberals, Truthers are the object of open ridicule.

Where, then, is the Republican decry of legislative gay-bashing? Whenever some far-Right politician toddles out with the usual crackpot blather about "defending the family" from the Gay Legion of Evil, the better elements of the Party respond with deafening silence. It's the same deafening silence, by the way, that was shown by sensible Republicans whenever those now-disgraced Birthers spoke up at those infamous town hall meetings. If you're conservative, and that doesn't trouble you, it should.

Now, to be honest, I'm about as likely to vote Republican as I am to start believing in the Laffer Curve. There's nothing objectively wrong with conservatism; I just don't happen to agree with it. But I can at least respect a conservative who openly renounces gay-bashers, Birthers, and the like, and firmly opposes them, damn the political consequences. Does that take guts? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Maybe courage is just the absence of cowardice and drooling ignorance. At any rate, it's the right moral stance and someday, maybe the Right will realize that.

What Goes On Behind the Curtain

2011-04-15T16:42:00.010-04:00

Here's something I wrote up for my poetry students. Props to Judy Jordan for first forcing me back in grad school to think consciously about how sound impacts a reader.

*

We've talked a bit about the psychological impact of sound as it relates to poetry (in other words, how different sounds, on their own, invoke a certain subconscious feeling).

Basically, this is an extension of what happens when we listen to music. This is a hard lesson to absorb but paying attention to the frequency (high, medium, low) of your vowel sounds can help you work your magic on the reader's subconscious. You can also invoke that through the use of "high, medium, or low" alliteration and/or imagery. More on that later.

Let's look at this from a purely musical angle. Using this link, click on a box from each column to play a note. Boxes that are higher in the column produce higher notes, and vice versa. Mess around with this. Your goal: produce a sequence of notes that sounds melancholy, or downright sad, versus one that sounds more uplifting.

Once you've done that, look at the placement of those notes. You'll probably notice that a melancholy tune starts low or high, goes high, then ends lower. That last part creates the descending emotional feeling that can sound sad, or bittersweet, melancholy, etc. On the other hand, an uplifting tune might be all over the place but probably ends on an ascending note, and may have higher notes throughout.

The $50,000 point: it's entirely possible to replicate this with word choice. It's not easy, but it's what distinguishes lyrical from tone-deaf poetry.

Now, you may be thinking that if there are only 3 basic vowel frequencies (high = E and I, middle = A and Y, low = U and O), how can you get that kind of range? Well, first thing’s first. If you want to write an uplifting poem, basic limitations of language and spelling won’t let you use only words that have E and I vowel sounds. So don’t go nuts. You’re just going for a simple majority here. Also, you don’t have to restrict yourself to vowel frequencies. Mix in images whose denotation and/or connotation furthers what you’re going for.

So in practical terms: if you want an ominous poem, back up your lower frequency vowel sounds with some ominous imagery. Or maybe you use uplifting imagery but low vowel sounds to create a trapped feeling, a tension between the two. If you want a derisive and slightly hopeful poem, maybe you use ominous connotations but higher vowel sounds (or vice versa).

On the other hand, an uplifting poem with high frequency vowel sounds AND uplifting imagery might seem a bit cheesy—meaning, it doesn’t have enough grit in it, so throw in some lower frequency vowel sounds and less cheery imagery. And it's also worth pointing out that a poem with high frequency vowel sounds AND "happy" imagery can't really invoke a negative feeling, EXCEPT the feeling that it's cliche and/or cheesy, and two dimensional.

OK, now consider alliteration. Obviously, a hard K sound invokes a different feeling (all else being equal) than a smooth S sound. So if you want to invoke a soothing, steady feeling, you’re probably not going to use lots of hard alliteration (hard K, hard G, etc). On the other hand, you might use lots of hard alliteration if you want to build suspense, make things seem a little more chaotic.

Think of all these different factors (the psychological impact/connotation of your word choice, vowel sounds, and alliteration) as ingredients. How you mix them is based entirely on your lyrical aesthetic.

As with anything, there are plenty of exceptions to the rules. In fact, you might do exactly the opposite of everything I’ve said and still get from A to B with good results. Either way, though, developing an ear for this will greatly help your writing (whether you’re talking about poetry or prose) and I’d wager that on a subconscious level, this is exactly what all great writers and songwriters are doing.

Epically Badass Sample Poems (and you can tell Jesus I said so)

2011-04-14T23:53:00.006-04:00

Here are some sample poems from my new book. Note: all proceeds go toward building the super-dimensional fortress I'll use in battle against the fiery squadrons of Xenu (trust me, you'll thank me for this later). FYI, the pre-order sale (aka the Grand Mustering of the Terran Armada) will be going on until the end of April. Then, my friends, stock up on canned goods and nail down the furniture cuz this shit's getting real.

If Bon Jovi's "I'll Be There For You" Were Taken Literally

2011-04-12T13:54:00.005-04:00

In 1988, a long-maned band named Bon Jovi released a song called "I'll Be There For You," about a narcissistic divine being who offers to resolve his romantic conflicts with a river goddess by damning the entire human race to instant and inescapable destruction.

The song begins innocently enough. The narrator (we'll call him Demi-God #1) sings: I guess this time you're really leaving / I heard your suitcase say goodbye. The mention of the departing woman's talking suitcase foreshadows the odd events to follow, while also hinting that this is an old argument. This may be Bon Jovi's way to tying the song to the Mayan belief that the world has actually been destroyed and recreated three times (though I'll Be There For You focuses primarily on the destruction part).

In response to the observation of Demi-God #1, plus the ominous proclamation that said heartbreak has literally lacerated his heart (though he apparently has the power to instantaneously heal, like Wolverine), his partner (hereafter referred to Demi-God #2) coldly answers that true love is suicide. This tells us something about her character but more importantly, it serves as a subtle clue that these demi-gods are, in fact, mortal beings. One might even surmise that they can only be killed if/when they give in to their romantic longings (like Hancock).

The first clue to the dubious powers of Demi-God #2 come in the next verse: You say you've cried a thousand rivers / and now you're swimming for the shore. (I believe it's safe to conclude that the narrator remains Demi-God #1 throughout the piece.) By way of ecological reference, the Nile discharges about 300 million cubic meters of water each day. Since a cubic meter equals 7.481 gallons, we can easily estimate that the tear ducts of Demi-God #2 could release as much as two and a quarter trillion gallons of water!

However, there are two potential points of contention here. First, no time frame has been given. While two and a quarter trillion gallons of water is quite a sizable amount in any circumstance, it could be that these tears were released over thousands of years (indicting both the staying power of her grief and the past apathy of her mate). Second, it must be pointed out that Demi-God #1 adds this qualifier: you say. Since it's doubtful that one could fail to notice such a spectacle, we might further surmise that either Demi-God #2 is lying or Demi-God #1, for all his power, is blind.

Also worthy of mention is the fact that Demi-God #2 is swimming for the shore though the literal deluge created by her own grief. This has obvious parallels to the flood mentioned in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as other texts of the ancient world. From a scientific standpoint, the results of such a deluge would prove disastrous to land-based life, especially if we assume that the tears of a divine being move at greater velocity. Given that there are approximately 700 sextillion gallons of water in the ice caps, a mere 2.244 trillion gallons would not cover the earth, but it would most certainly cause extensive flooding to coastal regions, resulting in massive loss of life, property, and wars sparked over competition for remaining resources.

It comes as no surprise that Demi-God #1 shows very little concern for the welfare of Earth's land-based inhabitants. In fact, he points out that he, too, has been left drowning in [his] tears, which is another clue to his own mortality, and might even indicate an output of tears equal to Demi-God #2. That means that due to the romantic quarreling of these two super-beings, the inhabitants of planet Earth would have 4.5 trillion gallons of supernatural saltwater to contend with.

Demi-God #1 goes on to say that he has prayed to God for assistance (presumably in halting the recurring lacerations in his cardiac muscle, rather than intervening to save the billions of others who are suffering imminent death), further evidencing his lack of omnipotence. Perhaps most disturbing, though, is the chorus that follows, wherein Demi-God #1 confesses his desire to change himself into oxygen and power the respiratory functions of his beloved, while also offering to remove the sun from its current location at the center of the solar system, as a demonstration of his affections:

I'll be there for you

These five words I swear to you

When you breathe I want to be the air for you

I'll be there for you

I'd live and I'd die for you

I'd steal the sun from the sky for you

Words can't say what love can do

I'll be there for you

I think we can safely surmise that Demi-God #1 has no intention of actually delivering the sun into the hands of his beloved, since divine beings so obviously tied to the element of water might instantaneously evaporate in the presence of nuclear fusion. Relocating the sun to almost any other position in the cosmos would still have a damning impact on Planet Earth, though. Humans, animals, and planets would freeze to death almost instantly. Even microbial life would be unable to survive.

Some might find it romantic that Demi-God #1 is willing to sacrifice so much to demonstrate his affections. However, the selfishness of his actions casts a rather dubious shadow over his affections. Remember, he will not be the one who experiences the sheer terror of an abruptly dark sky, followed by the collapse of the atmosphere and an in-rush of freezing-cold space air. We should also bear in mind that later in the song, Demi-God #1 again expresses a desire to change his form--this time to wine, which could hint at alcoholism (either his own or that of his beloved, in the latter case making him an enabler).

Surprisingly, the cosmology presented later in Bon Jovi's epic becomes even stranger: I know you know we've had some good times / now they have their own hiding place / Well I can promise you tomorrow / but I can't buy back yesterday. We can interpret a great deal from this. For one, the memories of these demi-gods do not seem to function as ours do. In fact, their memories seem to have both mass and a singular self-awareness resulting in their desire to escape the minds of their makers and hide to avoid recapture. Were this true, one could easily imagine the horrible psychological effect it would have, not to mention the strain it would pose on a relationship!

Equally worth of mention is the fact that while Demi-God #1 can control the events of the future, he cannot engage in the odd system of bartering set up to repurchase events of the past. While this cosmic bartering system receives very little mention in the song (even less than the mention given to the Nephilim in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33) one could speculate that this a further check on the power of these demi-gods, perhaps even indicating that they are "fallen" in some way.

One should not assume that Demi-God #1 is completely without compassion, though. He openly declares his wish to be his beloved's valentine, signaling an intimate familiarity with the traditions and cultures of homo sapiens. Though Valentine's Day was first established by Pope Gelasius the First in 496 A.D., it did not become associated with romantic love until the life and writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, about nine hundred years later. From this, we can deduce the setting of Bon Jovi's cosmological epic: sometime between the fourteenth century and the present, though the use of Baby as a term of affection strongly hints toward the latter.

Despite the egregious, self-destructive, and primarily psychotic depiction of these demi-gods throughout the majority of this epic, Bon Jovi chooses to end on a wholly unexpected and provocative note; Demi-God #1 follows a blistering guitar solo by expressing his sadness that he missed his beloved's birthday and wishes he'd been there to see her blow those candles out. Granted, this is followed by yet another recitation of his willingness to relocate the sun and spell the doom of all living creatures on earth, but divine beings who celebrate with birthday cakes could be Bon Jovi's subtle way of indicating these demi-gods' latent humanity. It could even be the songwriters' intention to indicate that each cycle of destruction and rebirth brings these demi-gods closer not only to romantic reconciliation, but psychological and emotional maturity, as well.

Clearly, Bon Jovi's I'll Be There For You functions as a complex cosmological epic with extensive reference to the creation myths of ancient cultures, and in so doing, may also act as a subtle critique either of divinity itself, or at least our concepts of divinity. It is quite refreshing to see such a complex intellectual undertaking in the realm of rock and roll. I hope you will agree that this multi-dimensional, lyrical rock ballad warrants further study in homes and universities across America.

Swell deal on my new book!

2011-04-03T20:14:00.000-04:00

For those interested in pre-ordering "Damnatio Memoriae," my third book/eighth collection, you can get free shipping *and* 50% off another press title if you order during the month of April. Just visit the press website here. Fair warning: the book is absurdly funny, mildly offensive, ridiculously lyrical, and yes, downright sexy, if I do say so myself!

A Poetry Invention Exercise

2011-03-28T14:26:00.001-04:00

Here's a little exercise I wrote up for my poetry students...

Especially when you have a specific story or message in mind, it’s easy to forget that good writing also has to contain some kind of rhythm and music complimenting some interesting leaps in imagination.

1) So for practice, begin by listing some 1 or 2 syllable words you like, then come up with words that have the same beginning and ending sounds in the reverse order. Examples: cedar and repose. Fort and tariff. Risk and killdeer. Russet and tier. Donkey and yield. Feel and leaf. Fumble and bluff.

2) Come up with a few words that have the same internal sounds but different connotations. Examples: gloom and boon. Glow and drone. Bastard and happy. Jewel and coup. Rigor and cigarette.

3) List a few nouns and join them with seemingly unrelated adjectives. Examples: naked sunrise, screaming whisper, cellophane skyscraper, paper temple, lonesome anthill, purple stoplight, raspberry wrath, plexiglas salvation, disjointed symphony, prehistoric tuxedo, oscillating freeze.

4) Now, take something from #3 and turn it into a simile describing a seemingly unrelated noun. Examples: the setting sun blinked like a purple stoplight, she was lonesome as an anthill, typewriters rang like a disjointed symphony, he wore the earth like a prehistoric tuxedo.

5) Come up with some two syllable words that have both syllables stressed. These words add extra punch to your sentence. Examples: Riptide, whirlwind, whitewash, spendthrift, whiplash, toothpaste, snowmelt, ragtag, cupcake, laptop, stonewall, slapdash.

Now, try weaving these together. With your words for #1, don’t just put them side by side. Put them a few words or even a whole line apart. This creates a subconscious feeling that your lines are connected by an internal rhythm. Don’t worry about literal meaning yet; you’re just trying to clear up your creative lens and hammer out some lines that have a sense of rhythm, music, and raw imagination.

2011-03-18T10:13:00.000-04:00

Well, I've had a pretty good run of luck lately! My third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest and will actually be coming out pretty soon. Also, my fifth chapbook, Pure Elysium, won the Palettes & Quills chapbook contest and should be coming out even sooner.

Meanwhile, I'm having one of those oddly wonderful teaching days. In my morning Composition class, I gave them a long list of famous quotes to analyze--partially as an exercise in rhetoric and brainstorming research topic ideas, but mainly just because I like to get them talking about whatever the hell interests me (in this case, quotes from Alan Watts, Einstein, and The Catcher in the Rye, the fact that there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe,etc). In a few hours, I get to show my poetry class a Kim Addonizio video. They're reading "Tell Me" right now and if their journals are any indication, most of them are really diggin it!

In other news, my girlfriend is insisting that I need a Twitter account. I can see her point and I think I could even bring myself to engage in such things, were it not called tweeting. (I realize I'm probably the four millionth person to say that, but dammit, it bears repeating).

2011-02-14T14:58:00.000-05:00

If you're like me (and who isn't?), you like to spend your down time on the internet, making nerdy and/or offensive tee shirts. I was just sort of playing around, then realized that the Mr. T shirt might be the greatest thing I've ever created. Then I cried. OK, not really, but hey.

2011-02-12T13:54:00.000-05:00

So I've decided that I really need to have more exciting dreams. The only I just had involved me deciding how many printer ink cartridges to buy. This was followed by a segment in which a hiring committee said they wouldn't give me a tenure track job because I had TWO MANY books and I started hyperventilating or something. At least in the last segment, I stumbled into a room at AWP (which looked suspiciously like the study in the house where I grew up) where old blues legends were playing. I sat awkwardly in the corner in listened.

2011-02-08T14:20:00.000-05:00

OK, so on the heels of my last post, I was sitting in my office feeling slightly sorry for myself when I got some good news. I can't share the specifics quite yet but I should be able to in a few days. In the meantime... back to grading! Oh, composition papers, how we are intertwined.

2011-02-07T05:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I've returned from AWP in DC with a bad case of STMDM (Spent Too Much Damn Money). It was a bit of a rushed trip and is often the case with AWP, I didn't attend nearly as many readings or meet up with half as many old friends as I'd originally hoped/intended. Still, I had the privilege of seeing some very talented writers and lifting glasses with fine company, plus I had what I hope was a good interview for a university position, so we'll call it a success.

I returned in time to besmirch a tower of paperwork and instead tinker with my latest three (yup, three) poetry manuscripts. They've earned kind rejections and finalists/semi-finalists from contests from Autumn House and the Akron Series in Poetry, but so far, remain homeless. So I pulled out the seams and did some reordering, plus a host of line edits along the way. Then I spent some time preparing to send them out again (with a break to watch the fun yet unapologetically gratuitous Spartacus: Blood and Sand with my girlfriend).

As I type this, I notice the quarter-moon scar on my left knuckle, about the size of a quarter, echoing the argument I recently lost with a broken glass (I wanted it clean, it wanted to see what my knucklebone looked like) and realize just how bad I am at keeping this blog thing updated. One would think that a two hour wait in the emergency room, plus taking out one's own stitches with a rusty toenail clipper (hey, I washed it first!) would be blog-worthy. Must do better.

In other news, I want to transition back to AWP and say that I had a great time talking to Peter Lucas, editor of a new and very promising journal called Prime Mincer. The journal is also edited by an old friend from grad school, Amy Graziano, whose poems are finally starting to pop up all over the place (as they should!). Speaking of Prime Mincer, I highly suggest everybody take a look! They're open to poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc. Also, Peter Lucas mentioned that you can submit multiple genres if you care to. Which will segue somewhat nicely to the next paragraph, beginning with the sentence...

So I've been trying to write creative nonfiction recently. By "recently," I actually mean "from time to time for the past eight years." Like my fiction (such as it is), it's something I tend to do over breaks, when I have the time I need to really shift gears. Otherwise, I find that my poems actually crystallize a bit better when I'm busy, dashing between classes, trying to remember which damn sport coat isn't supposed to be matched with which pair o' shoes, etc. (Thanks to my friend, Kellie Weiss, for writing down a cheat-sheet on that one!)

Well, I can see that the sun is coming up and I'm supposed to teach in a few hours, so I think I'll take my insomnia-riddled ass back to bed for awhile. Talk to you soon, blog. This time, I mean it.

2010-09-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

The following started off as a sternly worded email I wrote for some disruptive Composition students after a particularly hard week, then somehow morphed into some kind of Composition manifesto. Anyway...

Pulling Back the Curtain: an Open Letter to Composition Students

On the first day of class, I asked you to consider why you are here. Technically speaking, you're probably taking this class because Ball State University requires you to do so. In other words, you take English 103 so that you can take English 104, so that you can complete your other CORE courses and proceed with your chosen major (which may or may not have been chosen for you), with the ultimate goal of graduating with your B.A... which is really just a prelude to grad school, maybe an internship somewhere, maybe getting married and/or starting your own company (if you're lucky).

OK... but why? All pretense aside, what's the REAL reason you're here?

The general view of academia in the United States is that adults must develop, refine, and practice their communication and critical thinking skills if they want to get anywhere in the business world. In other words, you're here so you can learn how to write better memos to your boss and/or employees, not stick your foot in your mouth during board meetings, etc. But is that all?

Hell, no. Education is about something much, much more important. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Put more bluntly: ignorance is pathetic. It's cowardly and will haunt you all of your days, contaminating every single thing you say or do. Furthermore, browse any history book and you'll notice a disturbing pattern. When introspection and critical thinking go down, so too does general happiness; meanwhile, the body count goes up.

Education is and has always been the ultimate weapon against ignorance, the one thing that makes us more than the sum of our parts; it is also what shakes us to the core, what regularly fills us with doubts and uncertainty, what makes us uncomfortable--but that's actually a good thing because it also puts us in a position to question what we're told and, if we're worth our salt, reach a higher plane of understanding.

Does that mean we always have to agree? Absolutely not. I'd be bored to fits of rage by a class in which all the students agreed with me--just as I hope you'll have the courage to not always surround yourselves with people who agree with you, to consider (if only for a moment) the views of people you sternly disagree with, if for no other reason than it will make you a better human being.

But this isn't a trade school and I'm not here to coddle you or help you learn how to write a convincing business memo or draft a better commercial for your marketing class (although if you learn that along the way, great). I'm here because there are things I know that you don't. I could probably be out there making six figures, clawing my way up the corporate ladder to a beach house somewhere; instead, I'm making less than a manager at a fast food restaurant, specifically so I can have the opportunity to try and prepare you for what's coming.

Some days, maybe it seems like all we're doing here is discussing hypotheticals or watching videos, analyzing the costumes people are wearing, guessing what so-and-so said in a board room during casting calls, etc. Not so. Whether you're conservative or liberal, male or female, regardless of color, major, religion, sexual orientation, or hair length (thank God mullets went out of style!) what I REALLY want you to learn, and to practice, and to take with you for the rest of your natural life, is the critical thinking and introspective skills that will keep you from being manipulated by an endless parade of politicians, corporations, and everyday citizens who make money (or just get their kicks) off convincing you to vote, or think, or act against your best interests.

So there it is. The way I see it, if I don't occasionally make you want to pull your hair out or ransack a hotel room like you're a roadie for a rock band, then I haven't done my job right. But it's a two way street. If, throughout readings and conversations encompassing wars, human rights, consumerism, propaganda, identity, and even metaphysics, that longing to be a part of something greater than ourselves... clips, essays, stories and poems written by people who have been everywhere you've been, who have wondered and gone through everything you have or ever will, who are part of a literary canon you are encouraged to join every time you sit down at your computer or pick up a pen... well, then you're probably in the wrong class.

2010-07-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess if I'm going to have a blog, I damn well better start posting some poems now and again!!

FOR HELEN

Turns out the gypsy-haired woman
who led the evening workshop up in Chicago
was a Holocaust survivor. I didn’t know
until someone told me after. How odd, this guilt,
like this was some kind of test I failed,
proof that I am not so observant
as I’d like to think I am, just another fool
imagining I know something about suffering.
No cinders in her stare, no flintlock in her voice
as she posed a different word for forgiveness.
Not even a chimney ashing winter sky
in the white noise between her line breaks.
She brought a poem about flowers—
petunias, marigolds, birds of paradise leaning
from the jaws of a ceramic vase,
flower boxes blooming like open coffins.
It was late. I was tired. She seemed to me
like an old woman who had been
writing about flowers for a very long time.

2010-07-07T20:45:00.000-04:00

A little good news… Just got another short story accepted! This one is a kinda Zen/sci-fi thing about rich people paying to experience sensory deprivation in space. It’s forthcoming in Encounters Magazine. That same press previously published my novella, Taliessa’s Wish.

In other news, I'm pretty sure that Yahoo's OMG! (much like E!) exemplifies everything that is wrong with American culture.

2010-06-08T21:22:00.000-04:00

Me again (what, you were expecting someone else?!). I thought I'd post the link for a little blogtalk I did with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and Shome Dasgupta. Thanks to the fine folks over at Splinter Generation for having me! And thanks to Shome for his fine prose and smart commentary.

2010-06-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

Hey, folks! Should you find yourself otherwise unoccupied this sunny Tuesday in June (or whatever day you happen to read this), feel free to take a gander at my new poem, "Number Twenty-Five," in the latest issue of Anti-Poetry.

And definitely check out the work of the other poets: Stefi Weisburd, Karen Schubert, Matthew Olzmann, Luke Noonan, Kelli Anne Noftle, Ashley Anna McHugh, Rick Marlatt, Greg Kosmicki, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Dan Kaplan, Peter Bogart Johnson, Brent House, Elizabeth Hildreth, Will Grofic, Melaina Elise Evans, David M. deLeon, Jenna Cardinale, and the ever-great Tom C. Hunley.

2010-05-28T20:28:00.000-04:00

Moving Day has begun!! Well, Moving Evening, since I just got the keys about an hour ago. Like most moves, this one is progressing at the approximate speed of zombies climbing ladders. But hey, at least I'm not rooming with Sarah Palin (just trying to think of random things that would suck)!!

2010-05-27T03:47:00.000-04:00

So I'm moving on June 1st (or a bit sooner, depending on how soon the landlord gets me the new keys). In general, I regard moving the way the Texas School Board regards evolution--that is, I understand that there's substantial evidence that it exists, but I prefer to pretend otherwise. This should go down in history as World's Easiest Move, though, seeing as how I'm only moving to a bigger apartment exactly one floor down from where I live now. Also working on some new poems--although I guess I can't post them here if I want to send them out to journals, too. ;) First Rights 'n' all. So in the meantime, here's a random picture.

2010-05-20T00:49:00.000-04:00

I have a few new poems in Poetry Quarterly, should you find yourself bored. Mine start on page 44.

2010-05-19T08:50:00.000-04:00

I'm up early... well, early for me... after a long night of preparing contest submissions to send out. I'd hate to actually stop and calculate how much I spend each year on entry fees (although the IRS would probably appreciate that).

In other news, I took a break and watched "The Unborn" last night, which I'd like to go ahead and nominate for Worst Horror Movie of the Past Five Years, and Not in a Funny Way (WHMPFYNFW for short). It had all the necessary elements, including:

1) A heroine who seems remarkably unaffected by her haunting, an example being that the sudden appearance of her undead brother only prompts her to look slightly pouty and go jogging.

2) An absentee father who apparently goes on a month-long business trip (minus his cell phone and access to email) during what appears to be the prime season for rampant demonic possession.

3) College students inexplicably living alone in creepy Victorian mansions.

4) The completely unexplained and unaddressed appearance of random creatures--apart from the before-mentioned undead brother--including: a) weird bugs, b) small dogs with their heads upside down, c) some sort of tentacle thing that attacks the heroine through a hole in a bathroom stall... no, really!

5) No police involvement whatsoever.

6) A college professor of an undisclosed discipline who apparently knows all things relating to the occult.

7) A botched exorcism.

8) Frequent webcam chats about how this whole haunting thing is just SO uncool!

9) Mousy best friend and ineffectual boyfriend whose solution to the possible mental illness and/or demonic haunting of the heroine, coinciding with several murders and supernatural phenomena, is to go clubbing.

10) The following line, meant to imply that the heroine must kill a ghost that a [random gypsy] holocaust survivor tried unsuccessfully to kill once before: "You must finish what began in Auschwitz." Wait, what? Talk about a line that could be horribly misinterpreted!

2010-05-17T00:04:00.000-04:00

Well, I couldn't think of anything important to say so... um... here's a picture of a rhino.

2010-05-16T23:55:00.000-04:00

I find it very odd that it takes time to get used to summer. This is--what?--my second official week of "vacation" and it still feels a little odd not to have to rush off to campus each morning. I'm gradually getting back to what must be my genetic norm, though: staying up until 7 or 8 in the morning, sleeping until sundown, getting up, drinking lots of coffee, writing, working out, starting the whole process over again, etc.

What's maybe even weirder is that I really don't think of summer as a vacation (although I probably would, if I were still doing factory work and suddenly had three months off). I like to keep busy and I don't really think of writing and even the dreaded submission process as "work."

Aside from writing new stuff as/when I can, I'm trying to get as much stuff out there/under consideration as possible. The other night, I spent about eight hours sending out poems and flash pieces, which I might do again tonight.

Oh, I was bored earlier so I went to Starbucks and read the latest issue of Bellevue Literary Review. Really good stuff! I actually found a lot of poems and prose pieces (fiction and non-fiction both) that I can probably use for Composition and Creative Writing next semester. I'm thinking of finally dragging myself into the 21st century, teaching-wise, and putting all my teaching materials up on a blog. I should add that I'm thoroughly gross and usually get my lesson plans done a month or two early. On the other hand, if I don't, I'll worry and obsess about it until it drives me nuts.

OK, that's all. Will post more when I actually have something important to say. ;)

2010-05-11T21:05:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd try and make up for my long absence/e-laziness by (re)posting a few poems. Here are a couple from Splinter Generation. The Revision first appeared in Rosebud; Oasis first appeared in New Millennium Writings.

THE REVISION

I decided to take your advice
on my poem. The penultimate stanza
has been shifted to the end.
I now describe the Jehovah’s Witness
using third-person omniscient.
You were right, by the way,
about my reference to Theodote,
not to mention that line
about eating a plate of hot wings
just to try and feel something.
Yes, Iowa really does have dogwoods.
Yes, Yo-Yo Ma really forgot
his own cello in a Manhattan cab.
But I meant it as a compliment
when I called you ergonomic.
No, you’re right about me
needing to think less about circumcision
and more about white dwarf stars,
which are really just diamonds
ringing like Tibetan gongs in the deep.
Even so, I want to tell you
about the hiccup in my aorta
when you stretched tonight, your thumb
between stanzas, nose-ring
catching the moon… well, just so.

OASIS

I spent most of this day trying to decide
whether life is more like a lacuna or a palimpsest
when I realized I would be better served
at that bar down the street—the one
with swords and deer skulls hung on the wall,
the pretty waitress who has never heard
of J. Alfred Prufrock, retired old men
propped against their pipes and beer steins.

I confess, I find it hard to mourn
the loss of polar bears without first toasting
the extinction of soda jerks and Christ,
the fact that what happens in poetry
still stays in poetry, Vegas be damned.
And the bearded boy from my Comp class
who stalled a bullet with his skull,
who left more than his heart in Afghanistan.

Let there be pretzels and microwave brats.
Let there be coasters for Irish beer
imported from some factory in China.
Let there be cigars that go well with cognac
in a town that serves no cognac,
one shot called the Mind Eraser followed
by another called the Non-Metaphorical Sunset
and its sour chaser, All We’d Die to Forget.

This one, Ode to Dogs, was part of a chapbook from Codhill Press and won the James Wright Poetry Award from Mid-American Review:

ODE TO DOGS

I am tired of hearing about dogs
used as metaphors for the uncivilized.
Imagine a world in which humans

possessed at least twenty times
as many olfactory receptors,
able to distinguish the tang of cancer

rising musk-like from the bedsheets
next to a smoldering ash tray,
able to detect that one drop of blood

in every five quarts of water,
to know what you did last night
no matter how many times

you soap-scrubbed the evidence.
It does not take savagery
but more love than we can muster

to lick the hand you've sniffed,
to love despite the perfume of sins
we wear each day like a halo.

Here's one I published on Juked awhile back:

The World's Oldest Dildo
by Michael Meyerhofer

Long before the Shroud of Turin
or an Antikythera Mechanism
drawn up swamped with sea-rust,

nearly three hundred centuries
before Tutankhamun's death mask,
this polished siltstone relic

found its way into a German cave.
Sure, it's worth a snicker, imagining
Ice Age couples with sex toys,

but still it strikes me as quaint—
hunched shoulders carefully sanding
out every potential snag, a mate

smirking across the campfire,
a hide hung over the cave-mouth.
How to know that the wind outside

would go on howling that way,
so many ages of chariots and gore?
That the stars were just stars,

that no gods hurled the lightning
or left berries under the ice?
Let's give it a test run, one of them said

in a series of Ice Age grunts,
and through no miracle but their own,
they crafted heat to melt the glaciers.

Plus a couple from Diagram--Iconography of the Heart and Elegy for Roxana Rivera.

Iconography of the Heart
by Michael Meyerhofer

We see it haunting lockets, cards,
carved into the breasts of trees
or fingered into fresh cement,
this shape of what does not exist:
two upside-down teardrops

fused at the ankles, their cries unheard.
In red cardboard, a vault for chocolates.
Synonym for affection at the end
of an erotic letter, soggy with lavender.
What everyone searches for

and promises, yet cannot recognize—
the engine that stretches in rain
or breaks like hopelessly precious china,
the pieces skittering across
the dull white floor of the ribcage.

Oh, the heart is not symmetrical,
not an arrowhead angled safely down,
but a meaty crimson fist that swells
like a bladder, about to explode.
Like the part of the beast we discard

or a star a trillion miles away,
seen by us only after it goes nova,
casting itself in death across the wastes
in rainbow arcs of fire—something
we'll wish upon, ages after it's gone.

Elegy for Roxana Rivera
by Michael Meyerhofer

One of our last afternoons together
you were trying to explain something:

how in your old LA neighborhood
whenever someone died, family

and friends would construct an altar
of candles, pictures and poems

overlooking the stained concrete
where they fell—how after awhile

you said, so many altars flickered
across lawns, streets and curbs

that from the air, they must look
like constellations. You said

you wondered what they made:
just as I wonder now about

the roses left naked and tattered
in the ditch, the lights that go

untended as our own conversations
turn inevitably to other things.

I would like to say we tattooed
your body like a hunter across the sky

but at best we leave you
an hourglass of cooling stars

as we take the pens for ourselves,
living exactly as you would have us.

Another from Pedestal:

Lincoln
by Michael Meyerhofer

When, in the thirty-sixth year of his death,
they moved for the tenth time his casket
to where it lies now, seeded under concrete,
workmen opened it one last time
to make sure it was him—and there he lay,
pungent to be sure, but the same
stubble and mole, unruly dark hair, closed
eyes. Behind the right where
Booth’s bullet stalled, halfway through
the gray sadness of Lincoln’s brain,
a slow mortal wound so that weeping men
carried him out into the D.C. rain,
across the street to a bed he could die in,
no amount of prayers or pleading rousing him
for so much as another last word,
his docile repose nearly then like it was
when they cranked open that casket lid
to find his face gone brown—a grace
from that assassin’s bullet, bits of bone
bronzing his cheeks with unhealed bruises.

Finally, here's a kinda sci fi-ish one off Astropoetica:

BPM 37093
by Michael Meyerhofer

Separated by fifty-odd light years
from the Star of Africa
lies a celestial jewel 2,500 miles across,
carats on the order of ten billion
followed by twenty-four more zeros.
A smoldering white dwarf
like our own pyrite-colored sun may be.
Proof that after a solar relationship
ends, like most relationships,
with a fiery, bloating rampage
followed by a crash-diet
down to blistered, white-hot corestuff,
the leftover carbon crystallizes
into a two-septillion-ton rock
set in an orbital band of dark ether.
Scientists learned this, they say,
because diamond-stars ring like gongs,
yielding signals that pulse
like the quintessential last word
of bodies long-since scalded to cinders.

2010-05-11T19:16:00.000-04:00

Here are a few pictures from the Rhino Poetry Forum, where I recently gave a little reading and workshop. Thanks to Helen Cohen (pictured) and the rest of the Rhino staff and workshop for having me! P.S. I know I look enraged in the second picture but I promise I wasn't; that's just my baseline expression.

2010-05-11T16:42:00.000-04:00

Oh, and here's some links to fantasy/sci-fi stories I've published throughout the ages ("ages" meaning the last year or so).

"Mission Fail" on Planet Magazine

The Hero's Wife," also on Planet Magazine

"Career Day, 2136 A.D." on Absent Willow Review

"A Merchant's Luck," a novella on Bewildering Stories

2010-05-11T16:09:00.000-04:00

Oh, I almost forgot! My poem, "For My Brother," won the 2009 Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest from MARGIE, judged by Sherman Alexie. A nice little feather for my cap--more importantly, though, the poem gave me a chance to write about my brother, something I've wanted to do for awhile. Since MARGIE has already posted the poem on their website, I guess I can go ahead and post it here, too:

FOR MY BROTHER

I.

Again I return to that leaning barn of whitewash
and wind-warped rafters, weathervane that never spun,

rim-rust that rejected our free-throws and hovered,
a ratty halo, over the tenuous forts of February—

so much repacked snowmelt shadowed by that
squatters’ shack where they fought over how long

our mother would outlast a rural doc’s diagnosis.
When in my seventh year they came with stretchers

and sirens, we waited in the truck. You distracted me
with the atlas from the glove box, how finely it unfolded

like all the tomorrows I sensed were not to come.
But it’s the barn I remember, whistling like a cavity

at the end of our drive. And most of all, that you
heard it, too. That you heard it, but did not flinch.

II.

Ragweed that grew around silos, dead snakes
between turnip rows, the gnats who rose in waves

from the knife-edge of sun and field: all these
went before us. So, too, she who clipped coupons

and made us wear our stocking caps no matter
how it mussed our hair. Brother, I lied when I said

I didn’t notice the baby’s fist of your lymph nodes,
over-swell of white blood cells roused to fight

what isn’t there. This is the only way I know
to repay you: to hide my dumb lies, and this poem,

and these pagan tears, until the last barn owl
shrivels to dust and it no longer matters to do so.

2010-05-11T15:56:00.000-04:00

Yup, it's official. I still suck at blogging. Luckily, I'm a regular Viking when it comes to Being Awesome! Since that might be a matter of opinion, I'll wait a few minutes for anyone here to disagree.

...

Well, it's official! I'm awesome, by unanimous vote. OK, what's happened since I last typed here? Well, I was on Verse Daily a couple more times: Skandha and Diagnosing God.

Still teaching at Ball State University, still questing after that ever-elusive tenure line job and 2/2 teaching load, etc. It's summer now so I'm mainly concentrating on: 1) watching re-runs of "Rome" and "Spartacus," and 2) sending off submissions.

I have two more full-length poetry manuscripts done, polished, ready to go. It seems kinda silly to start on Book 5 when I'm still trying to get 3 and 4 published, though, so I'm tinkering with a little fiction right now. I actually have a fantasy novella forthcoming in a new journal called Realms. I pretty much have enough sci-fi and fantasy published to put together a short story collection, although there aren't many avenues for that.

More importantly, I'm looking to further my financial problems by investing in more edged weapons. This one's a beauty, albeit waaay out of my price range for now.

2009-07-11T08:18:00.000-04:00

It's been a couple years since I posted here... I guess that means I suck at blogger. Well, in the meantime, my second book, "Blue Collar Eulogies," has been published by the fine folks at Steel Toe Books and is available now on Amazon. I also have a website (finally) at Trouble with Hammers (thanks, Ryan Salway, for putting the site together, and Jared Sexton for the title, which comes from one of my poems). Check it out! :)

2007-09-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

I just started a new teaching job at Ball State University. It's a bit different than SIU, but cool. I'm teaching four sections of Comp, all in computer classrooms. "Real Courage", my third chapbook (fourth collection) won the Terminus Chapbook Prize (judged by Thomas Lux) and should be coming out soon. It's named for the title poem, which is a joke about a constipated cross-dresser battling vampires.

I had a piece taken by Ploughshares recently, along with some more stuff in Margie and Asimov's. I'm also going on the Georgia Poetry Circuit early next year, which I'm pretty damn excited about. Otherwise, I'm very excited about finally (at the age of 30) clawing my way over the poverty line. To celebrate, I bought an HDTV (thus replacing the 18-inch I used until it wore out), and a Roman gladius... which I should probably say more about, but I always have trouble completing sentences that contain the phrase "18-inch" somewhere therein.

OK, that's all.

2007-07-17T01:59:00.000-04:00

OK, so I suck at blogging... Let's see; well, here's what's happened in the meantime:

My poem, "Ode to Dogs", won the 2006 James Wright Award from Mid-American Review.

2006-10-21T18:54:00.000-04:00

I like it when good news comes in twos... I was surprised to find out today that my poem, "Diagnosing God", won the 2006 Laureate Prize for Poetry from National Poetry Review. The editor was understandably a little concerned, since I also won the Annie Finch Prize from the same journal, but both contests were judged blind (not to mention separately) so she went ahead and graciously awarded me the Laureate Prize as well, in spite of the coincidence. Woo hoo!! :)

2006-10-19T16:01:00.000-04:00

I just found out that my poem, "The Trouble With Hammers" (which won the Annie Finch Poetry Prize from National Poetry Review, judged by Bob Hicok) is on Verse Daily today! Not a huge deal, I guess, but this represents the loss of my "Verse Daily cherry". ;)

2006-02-02T00:52:00.000-05:00

I checked Amazon.com today, and to my disbelief, my chapbook is ranked #1,153,118 in sales!! Yippee!! Take that, John Grisham!!