The Sept. issue of The Believer contains a fantastic interview with scientist Richard Dawkins by poet and philospher Troy Jollimore. My favorite nugget is this section on the differences between metaphorical and scientific understanding:

BLVR: That made me think again about what makes poetry poetry, and I think there’s an interesting thing that can be said on an abstract level, which is that I think poets have a conception of truth that is different from what philosophers have and what scientists have. Philosophers and scientists tend to think of truth as converging, so that ultimately all the theories come down to the one truth that accommodates everything else. Whereas if we think about metaphorical truth, as poets do, we don’t think of metaphorical truth as necessarily converging. We don’t think of the latest metaphor as replacing the earlier ones. We think more of adding metaphors, and so you just come up with a new one, and now we see an aspect of the world that we didn’t describe before.

RD: Yes, I’m sure that’s right, but maybe truth is not what we’re talking about anyway there. In the romantic period, poets came close to despising scientific truth, didn’t they? [People] think science takes the joy out. Well, I wrote a book called Unweaving the Rainbow, which took on Keats’s idea of the rainbow being unwoven. It’s a view that I could never view with much sympathy, because it seems to me that the more we understand, the more beautiful it becomes. Richard Feynman, somewhere, talks about seeing a red flower and how you might think it’s beautiful, and wax beautiful, wax poetic about it, but he sees a greater beauty because he understands why it looks as it does. There is a level of beauty in understanding, and scientific understanding when you really get it is aesthetic; it is among the highest aesthetic experiences that you can enjoy.

The section exemplifies why I love most of the interviews in The Believer — because they’re never interviews per se. There are few questions and even fewer answers. The interview, then, becomes a simple record, a transcript of two brilliant people riffing on mutual obsessions.

Only an excerpt of the interview is available online. Buy the issue to read the rest.

Oh, and Jollimore’s first book of poems is Tom Thomson in Purgatory.

All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his beliefs. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance court in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolomaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer the reliable citizen’s terms, let him call the tune and make excuses for Yeats. 

‘Well,’ we might say, ‘when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stories about fairies from servants in his grandparent’s house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of identity for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world view of the country people. It was a conscious counter-culture act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.’ To which the citizen replies, ‘Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.’

– “Yeats as an Example?” from Preoccupations by Seamus Heaney

“Hart [Crane], as I later discovered, would have been meditating over that particular poem for months or even years, scribbling lines on pieces of paper that he carried in his pockets and meanwhile waiting for the moment of genuine inspiration when he could put it all together…. Hart tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place with a Cuban rumba and a pitcher of hard cider…. He drank in Village speakeasies and Brooklyn waterfront dives; he insulted everyone within hearing or shouted that he was Christopher Marlowe…. By the following afternoon all the outrageous things he had done at night became merely funny, became an epic misadventure to be embroidered—‘And then I began throwing furniture out the window,’ he would say with an enormous chuckle. Everybody would laugh and Hart would pound the table, calling for another bottle of wine. At a certain stage in drunkenness he gave himself and others the illusion of completely painless brilliance; words poured out of him, puns, metaphors, epigrams, visions; but soon the high spirits would be mingled with obsessions—‘See that man staring at us, I think he’s a detective’”

—Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. The website was created by Dustin Kidd for American Studies at the University of Virginia.

“Hart Crane had an infuriating way of writing a poem. Typically, after drinking copiously, he would put a 78 on a hand-cranked Victrola and play it ‘a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times’ while alternately banging away on a typewriter and loudly declaiming the same line of verse repeatedly. To his friends’ horror, the Victrola was indispensable — Crane claimed it gave him ‘intimacy with la Muse’—and he peremptorily refused every polite request to change his habits or at least to confine his cacophonous writing sessions to daylight hours.”

—Brian Reed,
Hart Crane’s Victrola. 
Modernism/Modernity—Volume 7, Number 1, January 2000, pp. 99-125

I’ll admit the websites are a little sketchy; that’s what you get when try to link to actual books from the internet, but the stories were too good to pass up.

“No, well one of the things that’s very curious is that I seem to have two methods of writing. One is the craftsperson method, which now seems, because I haven’t done it a while, very dear to me, in which the words are labored over; and a sense of agency is created by that process. You actually have a sense of yourself as making the poem. When you write very rapidly, when I write very rapidly, I lose that sense that the poem is mine. I can’t think where it came from. But it’s usually done quite quickly, and altered very little…. [There are some poems] that were over and over and over revised; taken apart, put together again, but in a very compressed period of time. And then there are poems in which there are recalcitrant words, phrases, things that I feel could be better…. 

I think that it’s—in saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible. I am endlessly irritated by the reading of my poems as autobiography. I draw on the materials my life has given me, but what interests me isn’t that they happen to me, what interests me is that they seem, as I look around, paradigmatic. We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality. We all, at some point, love, with the risks involved, the vulnerabilities involved, the disappointments and great thrills of passion. This is common human experience, so what you use is the self as a laboratory, in which to practice, master, what seem to you central human dilemmas.”

–Louise Glück, in an interview with Grace Cavalieri for the radio series “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” during the Library’s bicentennial celebration in 2000. 

For more: “In the Magnificent Region of Courage: An Interview with Louise Glück”

Our thanks to Sandra Beasley for serving as Unstressed’s first guest editor this past week. You can read more of Sandra’s musings on her own blog, Chicks Dig Poetry. And may we also recommend her book, Theories of Falling.

Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin reviews Insomniac, a new nonfiction book about sleep disorders. The book gets poor marks for writing, but the review collects several tidbits about insomnia from it:

What we do know is what happens to a person when they can’t sleep. In extreme cases, like with fatal familial insomnia, a genetic disorder that comes on in middle age, a total lack of sleep can kill someone in about a year. But for those who are merely not getting as much sleep as they need, doctors find decreased levels of growth hormone and increased levels of cortisol. After a week of sleep deprivation, a previously healthy man or woman can become insulin resistant. Their memory, ability for creative problem solving, motivation to complete tasks, and learning potential all suffer. Long-term insomnia puts you at a greater risk for osteoporosis, heart disease, weight gain, and diabetes. Knowing all of this, by the way, does nothing to help soothe you when you wake up at 3 a.m. again.

I’ve tried to write several poems about insomnia, but my efforts all pale to Plath’s entry on the subject, aptly titled “Insomniac:”

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Perhaps it is appropriate that on my last day of guest-blogging for Linebreak (a pleasure–thanks, Editors, for having me), it is a quiet poetry day. No drafting, no sending out, though I think there will be some of that tomorrow. On Thursday, a five hour drive to Greensboro for a reading, but not today.

So I am sipping on a Bell’s Amber Ale (in what strange world do bottles of beer have cranes on the label?) and listening to Joan Osborne cover “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind”–oh, wait–ITunes, you Jukebox devil–I am actually listening to Cassandra Wilson cover “Love is Blindness.” I am still wearing one of my endless supply of fringed shawls, because the air on my walk home had that peculiar September crispness. (And–yes, now it’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” courtesy of Dusty Springfield herself, because no cover could ever compare.)

Following last night’s Lincoln tribute I have a hankering to go back to Walt Whitman, but I know I won’t find the time tonight, and that makes me a touch sad. Once upon a time I can remember looking at one of his hand-edited “Leaves of Grass” manuscripts in the rare book holdings at the University of Virginia. He had crossed out all of his pronouns to make them more neutral, less male, substituted “one” for “he.” Whitman was sure he would not join the canon if his works was viewed through the prism of being gay. I remember squinting through the glass, looking at those scribblings, and wondering if I would be trying to draw a line between (or through) the public and private. If my work would ever get far enough out there for anyone to care.

Why do we blog? Why do we read blogs? Everyone has their reasons, but for me it is these little snapshots: vulnerable, behind the scenes, human. I don’t go to blogs for the details and dates of poetry happenings, though many post as if a blog is an electronic bulletin board. I don’t go to blogs for criticism, theory or reviews, though they are aplenty.

That said, sometimes a casual space has generative power–whether it be your blog, your kitchen table, or your walk to work. On my way to the office this morning I found myself thinking about how many of the core dichotomies of poetry could be expressed in terms of the organic versus the structural. That’s not the perfect way to phrase it, I fear, but 1) blogs are not for the perfect, and 2) “organic versus the inorganic” has a whiff of judgment that doesn’t work any better. So, forgiving my admittedly flawed premise, I throw these questions out there for you to ask yourself:

-Are formal aspects the loom the text is woven across, or the skeleton upholding the flesh?

-Do you regard poems as gems to be polished and ultimately mounted, or plants to be cultivated and ultimately abandoned?

-Do you advance poetry along a ladder of promotion, or do you encourage poetry to replicate itself as if a genetic strain?

-Is your ultimate legacy as a poet measured in pages, or in faces?

Like all poets, I take any excuse to navel gaze, to consider in what crazy ways I could change my life. I was surprised by the ways my answers have changed since the student-me pondered Whitman-under-glass in Charlottesville. But I’m keeping my answers to myself. Until next time we meet, dear Reader…

A long excerpt of E.J. Trelawny’s visceral account of the death and cremation of Percy Shelley

After the fire was well-kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.

The heart, which largely survived the fire, was later delivered to Mary Shelley.

Reporting his death, the Tory newspaper The Courier wrote: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.”

“At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I am able to start writing…. Usually, of course, one starts at the beginning and works through to the end. Sometimes, though, one starts with a certain line in mind, perhaps a last line. One starts, I think, with a certain idea of thematic organization, but this usually alters during the process of writing….

I never write when I’m drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn’t like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn’t like slavish devotion—then she lies…. Poetry is not self-expression. Each of us, of course, has a unique perspective which we hope to communicate. We hope that someone reading it will say, “Of course, I knew that all the time but never realized it before.” On the whole I agree here withChesterton, who said, ‘The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.’…. [O]ne mustn’t be bohemian!”

You caught me: the ellipses, for the most part, signal where I’ve taken out questions. For more: “The Art of Poetry No. 17: W.H. Auden” in the Paris Review. The interviewer is unidentified. 

They’re arguing about poetics, narrative, and Christian Wiman over at the New-Poetry mailing list. (See the “poetics is childish” thread.)

A PDF excerpt of Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields by Ashley Capps

One of the best first books I’ve read in years. And the excerpt includes my favorite poem from the collection, “God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake.”

The paradox of blogging: when we are doing the most we could write about, we have the least time to write about it. Today I spent 90 minutes in front of an undergraduate class, answering questions. To walk into a room of 35 students and see your book sitting in front of each of them is a bit staggering.

If I were a more poised person, perhaps I would have decided long ago which were my vetted, “safe” answers for interviews, and which were answers to steer from. But instead I tend to answer things on a gut-level. Which makes for quick turnaround. And answers that will possibly haunt me in my old age. Some things I learned from my own Q&A:

-The second section of my book has discernible anger. I’m secretly proud of this, actually. There should be more anger in poems. This also elicited the quotation (on the topic of heightened rhetoric) “I’ve never actually asked anyone to make the bitch of me in a relationship…”

-If you use someone’s proper name in a poem, readers notice.

-Clarity is a good thing. No need to apologize for it. It doesn’t mean your poem is a simpler poem, or a less-beautiful poem.

-My favorites from the book are other people’s favorites.

-If you like my book too much, i.e. multiple re-readings, the cover may split away from the interior pages. Ack. 

-In every audience, there is that one person who really, truly, wants to talk about sonnets and sestinas.

-If they ask if you want a chair, don’t bother. If you start out on your feet, you’ll stay on your feet.

The questions were great, though–quirky, engaged, genuine. When everyone has read a common text you can make very detailed references. To ensure everyone had read the text (no offense, but we’re talking undergrads, just getting back into a school year), the professor had actually given a quiz on my book the week before. A quiz! I suppose the key would be asking for analysis of the objective factual/mythological elements (Orpheus, those barrel-bound folks going over Niagara Falls), versus asking “So, do you think the speaker actually cheated on her boyfriend?”

When the conversation veered toward the dividing lines between private and public narrative, I told the students that any contemporary, American first-book poet who doesn’t admit to the litmus test of “Will this book make my mother cry?” is lying. I also said I hate prompts, rebel against prompts, think that prompts render the poem not-entirely-mine, and therefore useless to me, nine times out of ten. Prompts are the lifeblood of the undergrad workshop. Filter. Must. Learn. To. Filter.   

My payment for the visit was a bottle of water. It is a glamorous life I lead. I came home to see my book reviewed in the latest copy of Allergic Living. That’s right: I’m next to What Else to Eat: The Dairy-, Egg-, and Nut-Free Food Allergy Cookbook. They photoshopped my cover art onto a generic “book” template for the illustration, which means it looks like Theories of Falling came out in hardback. Not that I am complaining. There are thousands of copies of this magazines out there, on the waiting-room table of your local doctors’ offices. Who knows? I could become a Christmas gift.

After touching down to pick up mail from home, it was off an evening titled “Rise Up and Hear: Honoring Abraham Lincoln’s Legacy.” Cosponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation; hosted at the Department of the Interior. Featuring readings by Dana Gioia, Robert Pinsky, Kevin Young, and (this is where it gets surreal) Joan Allen and Sam Waterston. Poems Lincoln either loved–or inspired–by Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and so on. 

Free wine. Sculpted, dramatic auditorium. Classy reading. But I have to say, which gave me more buck for my day in terms of poetry? Those 35 students in an Indian-Summer-hot classroom. Bottle of water in hand.

If you’re unfamiliar with the poetry of Weldon Kees, first read this excellent seven-page primer by Anthony Lane in the archives of The New Yorker:

He somehow considered it his duty, as a scion of the Kees Manufacturing Company, to wrest and tamp his miseries underground—a guarantee, needless to say, that they would eventually explode. There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair.

And then go and order the collected.

While you’re waiting, get started with “1926” or “For My Daughter” or, even better, “Robinson at Home.”

Two animated interpretations of poems by Billy Collins: The Dead and Forgetfulness.

The Dead – Amazing Animated Poetry from nurserywork on Vimeo.

Forgetfulness – Billy Collins Animated Poetry from smjwt on Vimeo.

This is how you know you are, if not old, at least older than you used to be: you are anxious to leave a perfectly good flip-cup tournament to get back home, where your half-finished sestina draft awaits.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to write, and failing. (How about a sestina on pot-likker? The tea rooms of Atlanta hang open like mouths…) Teaism’s upper floor had not one, not two, but three small wailing children, and the miso sauce on the sweet potato salad was greasy. (A sestina on the better woman? She knows each olive’s name as she pits it by hand…) The cafe at the Phillips Gallery had locked up its outdoor patio, and the tea-bag of chamomile was pathetic after being spoiled at Method. (A sestina on the Pacman frog? I want to choke-choke-choke the field mice down…)

When you’re trying to write, and failing, every small irritant is magnified. That blister on my left foot sticks to my sandal. This legal pad’s binding isn’t as good and gluey as the last one. It’s too hot in the sun. It’s too cold in the shade. I shouldn’t have eaten that handful of pecans after lunch. When is the last episode of The Wire going to come? How am I going to make a living as a writer if I can’t complete one lousy poem?

People ask me how to know when a sestina draft is going to “take.” There are some appropriately craft-based markers: sound, flexible end-word choices, the potential for a twist as story tires in stanza four. But the truth is that my best indicator comes much sooner, at the end of line one. As I pen in that final syllable of the first ten I either grin to myself–quick, involuntary–or I don’t. I either get a little crush on the poem’s starting premise, or I don’t. And if there’s no crush, I won’t make it all the way through. Sestinas are just too damn tiring. They are the jigsaw puzzles of the poetry world.    

So it wasn’t until around 4 PM, three lousy and abandoned drafts in, that I wrote a first line and thought. Yeah. Yeah. But I only had a couple of hours to work before a best friend’s going-away party beckoned. Jump-cut to flip-cup at the Bottom Line, complete with tournament brackets and a DJ spinning the sweet sounds of 1998 (“Hypnotize”? Anyone?). Five longtime friends in matching blue t-shirts bearing the proud logo of “Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Anyone?), lining up cups of Bud Lite on a table carefully primed with cup-slop to increase the surface tension.

And one grumpy poet standing off to the side, fidgeting with her shawl. Missing her sestina. Because as annoying as those little formal bastards are, they are also addictive. You can’t leave one half-finished. Nor can you talk about the draft, because talking about it might smother it. Nor, for that matter, did my friends come to the Bottom Line to talk enjambment. They came to sing along, very loudly, to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Which is not only an equally honorable pursuit, but one far more apropos for a Saturday night.

That’s the thing about poetry: sometimes, it makes you sooooo lame.

Sunday Morning:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkness among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Last night’s reading for the What’s New in Poetry Series–with Dorine Preston and Terita Heath-Wlaz–was great fun. Let’s be honest: this is not always the case. Sometimes there’s feedback on the mic, or a dead crowd, or a snobbish headliner. When there are three poets, each position has its own perils. The first reader has to break the ice. The second reader feels pressured to keep it short. The final reader has to ignore yawns and quiet exits.

But last night, everything went…exactly as it should, really. Bruce Covey was a gracious and welcoming host, Dorine’s humor and energy lent momentum to everything that followed, and Terita’s work–which is just getting reintroduced to the world, after eight years of radio silence–impressed me with its determined, resonant strangeness. I liked the layout of the room: a hodgepodge of upholstered seats in concentric arcs, that provided an engaging visual field from the podium. Even the empty chairs had personality. And Sean, the guy who worked the counter at Method tea house, made it out.

After the reading we headed down to a local pizza joint for a round of beers (I had a house specialty, the ”Dirty Turtle”–Guinness layered over Terrapin Pale Ale) and some random conversation. Among the topics: NPR, half-faked knowledge at cocktail parties, California culture, how to tell if your Mac is REALLY broken, and book contests. I cannot emphasize how important these later-night conversations are to a poet on the road. I’ve done readings where commuter logsitics dictated that within ten minutes of the event ending, I was standing alone in a dark parking lot. That’s just not how it should be. Hanging out with other poets and hearing about their geographies, their struggles, their tech expertise (or lack thereof), their particular way of making a living, always broadens my sense of what my options are. It’s worth more than any honorarium.

Now I am back in Washington, with the aforementioned deadlines still looming. But at least I made a little headway on a sestina while in Atlanta. Also read Mark Strand’s essays on Edward Hopper’s paintings (illuminating, in all senses of the word), Cecily Parks’ fantastic first book (Field, Folly, Snow, part of the VQR series) and the last issue of Black Warrior Review. To write, first we must read.

On the post title: Whenever I travel on planes, I always later find crumbs in my bra. Sometimes I haven’t even had a meal that would logically *generate* crumbs. I blame the airline industry.

“My writing process is a bit odd, because I work with lots of fragments (from different poems) for a long time before anything coheres into a presentable piece. I may start with a line that I know will appear in the middle of the poem, so I write it down in the middle of the page (college-ruled notebook paper, usually). Other lines may gather around that original, or I may skip to the beginning and work until I am stymied, at which point I will turn to another collection of fragments-too early to honor them with the term ‘draft –and work on them until I reach a dead end there, too. The process is similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and yet I don’t skip around willy nilly–I’ll tend a particular corner of the poem-to-be until I’ve exhausted both it and me. In time–days, weeks, months–a draft will emerge, and then another, and another, until I can see the entire picture, and then the polishing begins. It’s a nerve-wracking way to work, because I have to dwell in possibility, walking through the valley of the shadow of failure, for a long time before anything happens that others could call Process. But I’ve found it’s the best way for me to cultivate the unconscious connections a bit longer, and it often happens that several poems will complete themselves in the charmed span of a single week.”

–Rita Dove, in an interview with by Robert McDowell for Poets.org.

For more: “Poets at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation”

In her introduction to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin writes that “[B]ecause Anne wanted to open All My Pretty Ones with a terse elegy for her parents, one shorn of all autobiographical detail, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’ went through innumerable revisions before arriving at its final form… .” 

You can hear a recording of one of these “innumerable” drafts here.  The text of the final version can be found here. I recommend listening and reading simultaneously.

I am writing this in the Method Tea House, located in Atlanta; I’ll be reading at Emory later tonight as part of Bruce Covey’s What’s New in Poetry Series. I am trying to ignore the fact that the guy behind the counter is reading my book. 

This place has only been open a month, and it has that incredible young-business-owner vibe. Everything is sleek and polished, cool but mellow. They steep everything on the spot, by hand. No blenders, no high-fructose syrups. They fold shapes into the cappuccino foam. They are proud that each of their three international coffees came from a particular farmer in a particular field. They don’t mind that I’m sitting here for hours, writing away, nursing a pot to tea refilled four times over. “That will be three-hundred-and-twenty-one pennies,” the guy said, ringing up my order. And when I bashfully admitted that the poster on the community bulletin board was advertising…me (I haven’t gotten over the gee-whiz of that), he asked for my take on James Dickey and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I should probably be in on the MARTA train right now, making my way downtown to the High Museum or Art, or the Aquarium. In the theoretical, these two-day trips for readings are a chance to play tourist; I’ve got no one’s whims to cater to but my own. But instead I find myself wanting to find a local coffee or teashop, hole up, and use the time for writing. Maybe this is how one really gets to know a city, one indie business at a time. Absorbing the accent, the style of dress, the little differences in how someone says “thank you” or “excuse me.” The legendary friendliness of Atlantans is no fiction. On the train from the airport, a woman spotted my suitcase and asked if I needed the phone numbers for local taxis. Twice I’ve waited in a line only to have the person in front of me spontaneously say “you go ahead.”

I won’t lie to you. I feel lucky today. I’m in a pretty southern city, getting paid to read poems tonight, sleeping in a hotel on someone else’s dime. I visited an undergrad workshop yesterday and spoke with some degree of (pseudo)authority about how a first book of poetry can make its way into the world. My editor just wrote to say that Allergic Living (that’s right, as seen on your doctor’s waiting room table) has a little review in their new issue, and a university has just written to ask if I will come visit this winter.

But good lord, the juggling. A childhood friend wrote to ask about having dinner, and I looked at my calendar only to realize that I’m totally tied up for the next month. Fourteen days of travel, three classroom visits, three readings. Like every other poet I am eyeing fall contest deadlines–the thing about the second book is, it is even harder to publish than the first–and I need to write two more pages of material to meet the page minimum for a September 30 deadline. I’m overdue on assigning book reviews at my day job as a magazine editor. I’m overdue on sending a column in to the Washington Post. I’m overdue on being a civil, sane human being to the people I love. So I feel lucky but also, overwhelmed. 

Everyone needs a method to their madness. The guys at this shop take a simple, sloshy source of caffeine–something people burn, gulp, take for granted–and make it an art. So I am following their lead. Instead of hitting the “must-sees” of this city I am stopping to unfold my filter, heat my water to just the right temperature, and steep in the quiet of uninterrupted worktime. Wish me luck.