One of my best friends is getting married soon and has entrusted me with reading a poem in his wedding.  This is very, very cool, but it’s also really terrifying, because they’d like me to read one of my poems.  I do not make it S.O.P. to deal with the reader with utter sincerity, but the occasion demands it, so I have been out of my element a little.  The challenge, intellectually, is really enjoyable, but I have a tremendous fear that the poem will end up not being very good (despite the fact that the bride and groom chose it from a selection of poems, not all of which were mine).  I think in the elaborate, fearful fantasy I have been busy constructing, not only do I arrive at the ceremony with a poem that seems workable only to have it be total gibberish when I go to recite it, but the recitation is so awful that it causes the floor of the church to shatter and all of the wedding-goers to tumble into a pit of damnation, which, obviously, ruins the wedding day for the bride and groom, who not only never speak to me, but get a legal injunction barring me from ever publishing the poem, which wouldn’t seem probable anyhow but in the hours after the wedding-goers are swallowed up, I revise the poem and the revision is really, really good– it’s the poem I would have wanted to read at their wedding in the first place.

Unrelated:

• OK, so Scrabulous for Facebook is gone, but you can still play and get notifications by e-mail.  Daniel Wallace told me this.  I am so on… none of the Facebook alternatives has brought me quite as much joy as Scrabulous.  I just really like that interface.
• Speaking of which, Ladybug and I appear to be headed to a board game night tonight.  She does love board games, my wife.
• To anyone who doesn’t understand Twitter, let me just say this: when you’re writing a poem a day, Twitter is the best thing in the world, because you have all of that information, all organized chaotically, all of the thoughts complete and at the same time incomplete.  Could you ask for a better way to launch a meditation?

Further unrelated:

A couple of days ago, I linked to a 43 Folders post about Frank O’Hara and a series about making the time you need to be creative.  Merlin Mann hasn’t stopped thinking about carving out this space in his life (well, he’s on to attention in general, but what do you need attention for, if not to do the important things, and aren’t the important things almost always creative?), and he said something recently that I adored and wanted to rebroadcast:

Here’s the thing. It’s like being able to see The Matrix; once you realize the control you can choose to exercise regarding your attention, you’ll start to see all the unnecessary waste that everybody else thinks is unavoidable, natural, and even healthy (“I NEVER shut off my BlackBerry!”). See? Now, you are the weird one. Weirdo.

Yes, yes, yes, this puts into words a feeling I have been having very strongly in my life.  I’m by no means a zen master of my own attention, but I have been working as hard as I can to get there because it’s necessary for me to continue the creative life that I want to have.  I have been at the point where I have wondered if I lack empathy because I simply cannot imagine why other people aren’t working just as hard to control their own inputs and experience the rediscovery of purpose that accompanies.

• I have seen a couple pictures of Katy “I Kissed a Girl” Perry and I think she looks way too much like Zooey Deschanel.  I liked the idea of “I Kissed a Girl” a lot better when Jill Sobule did it.  Oh, wait, I didn’t really care then, either.  Kiss whoever you damn well please.
• Ladybug and I were watching Mad Men on DVD and we both felt the urge to drink more.  I had whiskey and she had something with Kahlua.  If we’d had cigarettes in the house, we would have smoked them, and damn, I hate cigarettes.
• Bull City Press has a brand new look on the web!  Our incredible intern, Jordan Wingate, redesigned the whole thing and it looks light years better than the old site.  Plus, you can now buy the newest issues of Inch… Jordan is not just our intern, he’s also a reader for the fiction you see in Inch.
• I am getting my contact list organized so I can be a better correspondent.  Or, at least, I hope to be a better correspondent.  So, if you have moved and you think you might one day like mail from me or from my press, send me your new address.
• Inch #8 is for sale now!  Did I tell you that?  You can buy a single issue, but you know, we like it better if you subscribe for a year.  It’s only four bucks plus a dollar for shipping.  Seriously, you can’t even go out to eat for five bucks.  Unless you go to Taco Bell, at which point your body is paying such a price for the food that you probably should have spent your money on a subscription to this little magazine!

43 Folders has been doing a series on making time to make things, and followed up today with a post about Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.  Productivity blog + poetry?  I think I may have just had a geek nirvana moment.

Kenneth Burke called literature equipment for living, and O’Hara never put his away. He was always making. Sometimes poems, sometimes friends.

He has a slim book of work called Lunch Poems, and you might think of that as his primary mode of composition. While out walking from the museum to get lunch, he’d do a poem. Maybe he’d type it up and stick it in a drawer later.

I think that may be an oversimplification of O’Hara’s process, but who can say for sure?  What is certain is that O’Hara had a true gift for capturing the beauty of the colloquial and trivial, and it’s no coincidence that he was a poet who remained immersed in the world of work, firmly rooted in the everyday experience and not some artistic or romantic ideal, remaining engaged not to promote his work but to create it.

But in case you were, I am in Myrtle Beach for Anthony’s bachelor party, and the most trouble we have gotten in to so far is buying Rock Band and playing all night.  Tame by any standards, but far more fulfilling than our aborted plan of hiring some strippers to come play Rock Band for us.

I’m setting up next month’s edition of The Grind, in which an intrepid group of poets produces a poem a day for a month and sends it to everyone else in the group.  It’s harrowing, it’s rigorous, it borders on insane, but since the initial group (Matthew Olzmann, Ruba Ahmed, Zena Cardman) did it back in October, it’s become a tradition– it has run continuously since then with a rotating cast of characters.

I traded e-mails with a friend who is finishing up 31 in 31 for July, and has found what many of us have, and what keeps me coming back: the process is liberating, despite all its constraints.  Here’s what I said to her in a moment of clarity:

Well, congratulations on 31 in 31!  It’s no small feat, which you’ve obviously intuited not only from the work itself but from the attrition rate within the group. It’s a worthy and commendable thing that you have carved out the time for your craft, however unpolished those drafts are… And, of course, revision rocks and is the best reason to be a poet.  Think of all the raw work you can now revise.  When this process works, it really works… When you go back to these in a couple months, you will see connections and obsessions that will frighten you and enchant you.  The desperation involved in producing something daily is really instructive.

Most people choose to try it in February, since February only has 28 days, or in April, because it’s NaPoWriMo.  But we’ll go whenever.  If you want in on August, let me know before tomorrow night and I’ll include you in the introductory e-mail.  But remember: the only unforgivable sins are missing a day or dropping out.

I don’t get the notion that in order to be considered for the office of Vice President of the United States, you have to make a big show about how you aren’t interested in holding the office.  I mean, Hillary did that, but you know, that’s her prerogative because she thinks Obama will be a shitty (not to mention black) president.  She still thinks she was wronged somehow that the American public did not choose her.   But the rest of the jokers whose names are being bandied about, they didn’t run.  They have no conceivable reason to not want to be Vice President unless, y’know, they actually don’t want to be Vice President.  But this kind of noise just makes me tired of being American: “I haven’t sought it, I’m not running for it, I’m not asking for it. I never asked anything of the campaign. I didn’t endorse him to get anything. I endorsed him to help him.“  Why not just come out and say, “But if he asked me, I’d say hells yes and gladly serve under the exceptional human being that is Barack Obama, and if he doesn’t ask me, I’m still the Governor of Virginia and kind of a badass in my own right”? A little truth, please.

Also, is this the guy who thought the Internet is a series of tubes?  Did anyone notice that the media is now burying the fact that the guy is a Republican when he’s crooked, but displaying in line 2 of the story when he’s a Democrat?  Is that because crooked Republicans aren’t really newsworthy these days?

Also, please note: Dale broke the Internet.  It’s his fault.  This happened right after he started a game with me.

MFA/MFYOU

When will the annoying to-MFA-or-not-to-MFA prattle end?  Everyone in a MFA program is awful and MFA programs just take your money, you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, only real experience and heart can make you a writer and no amount of MFA will give you that, people with MFAs have a stranglehold on every conceivable publishing avenue, there is a secret syndicate of MFAs who were responsible for the Bay of Pigs and seek to destroy everyone who’s ever put pen to a piece of paper that wasn’t an application to an MFA program, blah blah blah.

Still, the idea behind this new online journal is kind of cute– the editors are a married couple, one enrolled in an MFA program and one working full time.  And to their credit, they don’t seem to skew in one direction of the MFA-or-no nonsense: they want top-quality writing from both ends of the spectrum.  It’s out there, so it just depends on where they solicit and how they market for submissions.  However, take a look at this statement from the website:

So what’s the difference between these two separate paths? What do you gain from an MFA program and what do you gain from doing it on your own? That’s what we hope to find out, and document, on this website.

If they’re successful in finding good writing from both populations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to.

Call me old-fashioned, call me naive, but I just don’t get back tattoos.  I mean, what’s the point of spending the cash on the ink if you don’t ever get to see it.  Also, getting a tattoo with text on your chest.  It just seems like for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading it backwards.  Yeah, it looks cool in photos, but you probably see photos of your chest a lot less frequently than you see your chest in the mirror after a shower.  Unless you’re Tupac.  I bet he saw a lot of photos of his chest.

The list of things I accomplished today is mundane: read some more of a novel, mowed the lawn, steam-cleaned the carpets, watched a movie and some of a television show.  The details are pretty inconsequential.  I won’t look back on today and think that I accomplished anything of note, and by next weekend I probably won’t even remember what I did.  In a couple of years, I may make it back to this blog post and wonder why this is, but today was a pretty good day.

I presented to teachers today.

It did not suck.

Please understand that this was kind of important, as my last presentation to teachers was such a god-awful disaster that I seriously considered leaving my job.  I was entirely sure that I had lost any and all of what made me worthwhile in my current position.

Everything we do, if we are to get out of bed in the morning and interact with others, requires a little bit of ego.  Not a ton– though I am an egotistical sonofabitch by most standards– but enough to get out there in the world and not have it crush you like the cockroach you are.  (Feel free to swap “you” for “me” and “I.”)  But for a couple days after one ill-fated presentation, even that took monumental effort.

I used to have no problem with standing in front of a group of people and talking, either about things that I know well or things I know nothing about.  Somewhere along the line, that changed; it took a turn for the worse.  And it’s not all groups; I was able to present my class at school to my peers, a group of people I have tremendous respect for, and my teachers, whom I adore and would never want to let down.  That was no problem at all.  In fact, I looked forward to it.

I wonder sometimes if this is a sign that I am so far removed from the classroom that I know in my heart that I’m less qualified to talk about things than most.  I am feeling that way, even though I was teaching at the college level only a year ago.  But K-12 is a different animal, and it requires a different understanding.  If you have not taught K-12, you cannot actually understand… but then, I suppose what I fear is that I have not taught K-12 in so long that I cannot actually understand either.  That’s disappointing.  And a little scary.

So it was nice that today did not suck.  But I am not out of the woods yet.  I need to find my way back into the school environment for a little while if I am to continue to do my job well.