Look at book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith’s new clothbound series for Penguin, then start justifying to yourself why it’s totally ok to buy books you already own.

Cons: Friends will make fun of you for owning doubles.  Future investment in drool cups will be necessary.

Pros: *drool*

I’ve Got A Hamster Stuck In My Craw

Intricate Snoozing

Diaphanous Succubus

Book No One Will Read and Other Whinings

My Mom Works at Wal-Mart, Bitch

Theory Goggles and Beer Goggles make Marjorie Perloff Look Like One Sexy Ho

The Onion Inside My Heart Will Make You Cry If You Cut It

Beaver Cycle

Microphone for Achilles or Why I Am Not A Rockstar

That Roastbeef Sandwich Hit The Spot, Son!_

Being asked to blog this week took me a bit by surprise. See, I’m one of those (I’m suspecting) not-so-rare creatures whom the rest of the writing world hears little about: I’m a writer who no longer writes. Poetry–it’s been a couple of years since I wrote any and at least five since I felt like a “working poet.” PhD dissertation–abandoned, half-finished. Last blog-post–over a year ago. Freelance work–dried up a few months ago. I have stopped trying to figure out why it happened; this bit of blogging is perhaps an experiment to see if I can reverse the trend.

What does a non-writing writer do? Here’s a handy list:

* Rediscovers metal, as in heavy. As in 1980s–thrash, speed, and death.
* Launders diapers. Folds diapers. Lots of diapers.
* Plays German boardgames. Er, rather, acquires German boardgames and looks for people to play with him. Recommendations: Carcassonne and Hive.
* Watches vampire movies.
* Makes a mean vindaloo.
* Spends far too much time on Facebook.

And I do a fair amount of reading, though these days most of it is from the laptop screen.

Daniel Nester’s piece in The Morning News manages to capture my feelings about poetry, po-world, po-biz rather nicely: Goodbye to All Them.

Joseph Massey has received plenty of critical attention for his minimalist poems, most recently collected in Areas of Fog, but I’ve always enjoyed his less-well-known IM messages. Here are a few:

A bit of impromptu verse:

plan: slather / my knob in spicy / sugary beef sauce / and then call the cops / because it’s going to catch fire / and ignite my entire Tori Amos / world in flames of flavor / I savor your terrorist titties / and buckle and break like the foundations / of a bombed building

A dialogue:

Joe M: Did you see my post this morning?
TonyR: no
TonyR: i will look now
TonyR: very nice
TonyR: you look good in that outfit
TonyR: last night Jess Mynes called John Weiners “the gay tony”
Joe M: What was the connection?
TonyR: my magnificent poesy
Joe M: I don’t see the similarities.
TonyR: that is fine
TonyR: you may dis me if you like
Joe M: It’s not a diss!
TonyR: by the way, i bought this book the other day:
TonyR: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1906002010/ref=pd_rate_rs/104-8867643-0433557
Joe M: If I had to pick poets that you remind me of, I wouldn’t pick Wieners.
TonyR: it is better than any book of poesy
Joe M: That looks like a fun read. One for the shitter.
TonyR: oh yeah. it’s huge and comprehensive
TonyR: though it’s not very well-edited
TonyR: it contains typos and factual inaccuracies
Joe M: Wieners was very invested in the idea of being a poet as some exalted almost otherworldly duty. You don’t have that attitude.
TonyR: i am invested in being a poet as a quotidian task
Joe M: But he was very frank in his personal poems, the sexual frustration and self-deprecation — I can see that connection.
TonyR: it is a berriganish attitude without the IMPORTANCE
TonyR: i’m gonna start a metal band
Joe M: Call it HELL HAMMS
TonyR: YES
TonyR: our mascot will be a big cuddly bear with a pentagram shaved into his chest fur
Joe M: I love it. I want to be the tambourine girl.
TonyR: You may!
TonyR: hey do you mind if i publish this conversation to one of my clogs?
Joe M: I don’t providing you say something very flattering about my diminutive verses.
Joe M: *mind
TonyR: okay. i will.

Collected wisdom:

I love birds. I dislike bird-like dumb ass people.

*

Mike Joyce is an avaricious monkey.

*

I love Bill Murray. I had a dream about him the other night — he just walked up to me, told me he likes my poems, and gave me a free laptop.

*

measure_elvis: You’re a tactless prick, Bob.
TonyR: why is that tactless?
TonyR: i am merely stating fact
measure_elvis: Well, explain why you requested Def Leppard to be playing from that Hilton hallway boombox when you went into a closet with Eduardo and tongued the lisp out of him?
measure_elvis: Facts, just facts.

*

This fruitcake has put me in a philosophical frame of mind.

***
More to come, after I finish this True Blood marathon.

We’ve managed to twist Anthony Robinson’s arm to get to him to blog for us here at Unstressed.  Robinson is the author of the chapbook, Brief Weather and I Guess a Sort of Vision, available from Pilot Books.   According to Robinson, he lives but doesn’t work in Eugene, Oregon, where he has spent far too many years of his life.  He used to write poems, used to be a graduate student, used to be a writing instructor and academic advisor, sold antique books for a spell, and now he spends most of his time Netflixing and hanging out with his daughter. He’s currently looking for a way back “in” to poetry.

Check out Robinson’s poem celebrating metal god Dave Mustaine first published here on Linebreak.

Find him here on You Tube.

Read my favorite Anthony Robinson poem here.

Today’s mail brought an invitation for your humble editors to nominate poems for the 2009 Pushcart Prize — a first for us here at Linebreak. While we kick around ideas, I thought our readers might offer some additional wisdom. So I open the question: Which poem published this year on Linebreak would you nominate? Refresh your memory in the archives, if you like, and leave your answer in the comments.

Sandra Beasley writes a lovely essay about her recent visit to the Jentel Residency, and in defense of artist colonies and long walks and creative navel gazing overall.

How afraid we are of losing time! As if we can’t afford to write poems that won’t endure. As if the road can’t include both blackboard-jockeying and troweling cement. As if a few years spent on workshops, post-workshop pubbing, and rubbing elbows with professors you pray might blurb you—and I, too, went into debt for my MFA—wouldn’t have been spent in some other way equal parts tectonic and navel-gazing. Backpacking in Europe. The fixer-upper house. A rock band. An MBA.

Reading Radar is a new mashup that combines the best seller lists from The New York Times with reviews and sales data from Amazon. The result is a site that instantly places popular books in context. It is subtle and brilliant, and gives me an idea for two or three new poetry-related mashups.

Which is exactly what I need, don’t ya know — a few more ideas for web sites.

Update 5 p.m. This got me thinking about whether best seller information is even available for small press poetry books. Yea verily it is, from Small Press Distribution.

Update 5:08 p.m. You guys know what a mashup is, right?

Many thanks to the editors of Linebreak.

”The memory’s like a train. You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away.”

Tom Waits: Time

No subject matter is undeserving of poetry’s attention. Ideally, something interests or inspires us, acts as a springboard, or we become fascinated with a figure or theme. When our ideas find us, when we’re truly connected to them, poetry can attend to anything— science, history, other mediums— in unexpected ways, making it a necessary aspect of the human story. Less than ideally, we feel like we’re writers and we should be writing, and we cast our eye around until it lands on something we can write about. There are a lot of disconnected, forgettable works built on interesting foundations.

In “How Lies Grow,” Maxine Chernoff addresses one of the great conflicts of motherhood with wit and economy. I was a long, long way from being a mother the first time I read this poem, but it’s never left me. Conversely, since becoming a mother, I’ve read dozens of poems about motherhood that I couldn’t connect to at all. Something authentic shines through a poem that insists upon being a poem. I’ve learned from my own unwillingly fallow times that ideas hammered into replicas of poems have only the thinnest veneer. And I’ve learned as a reader that even when I don’t particularly care about the subject, if the poem generates the kind of heat that only a genuine impulse creates, I can still care about the poem.

Maxine Chernoff
How Lies Grow

The first time I lied to my baby, I told him it was his face on the baby food jar. The second time I lied to my baby, I told him that he was the best baby in the world, that I hoped he’d never leave me. Of course I want him to leave me someday. I don’t want him to become one of those fat shadows who live in their mother’s houses watching game shows all day. The third time I lied to my baby, I said, “Isn’t she nice?” of the old woman who’d caressed him in his carriage. She was old and ugly and had a disease. The fourth time I lied to my baby, I told him the truth, I thought. I told him how he’d have to leave me someday or risk becoming a man in a bow-tie who eats macaroni on Fridays. I told him it was for the best, but then I thought, I want him to live with me forever. Someday he’ll leave me. Then what will I do?

Sarah Sloat has three new poems in the latest issue of Apparatus Magazine. Sarah’s poem “Ghazal with Heavenly Bodies” appeared on Linebreak last year, and she did a stint as a guest blogger for us in February.

Tensions and dichotomies are memorable. Happy melodies with sorrowful words. Sometimes memory is faulty, and all we take away is an impression, a fragment, a feeling or a phrase. We remember things wrong. We think we love a poem, then we figure out we don’t. Or, we continue to love it because we once loved it. Our response changes when our situation changes.

When the women poets I studied with were becoming women poets, there weren’t a lot of women poets. Thanks to them, however, it didn’t occur to me that being a woman presented any obstacles to being a poet. Elaine Equi’s work would occasionally hint at these hurdles, and it would occur to me to be grateful for her. Having a woman poet for my first workshop teacher was probably a lot more important to me than I can even know.

I think of Elaine’s poem, Three Deaths, again and again. It appears in The Corners of the Mouth (Iridescence, 1986), possibly the first book of poems I owned that was written by someone I knew personally, and certainly my first signed book. I looked at the poem again after 10 years or so recently, and I found that all I really remembered was the last section. The language has a flatness that makes the pain with which it trembles all the more moving, and I think that tension between tone and content is what vaults it into the stark clarity of the unforgettable.

Elaine Equi
from Three Deaths

3.

My father was a samurai
that killed over 9,000.
He wore his armor to the
dinner table.
Grown men wept
at the sight of his mustache.
My mother committed hari-kari
rather than face him
without a son.

But instead of being angry,
he called me Chicken Little.
My nursery was guarded
by nine dragons
of gold and jade for good luck.
When I accidentally fell
into a pit of hot coals,
my father sat before a statue
of Buddah, trying to
strip off his own flesh.
The neighbors lost respect
for him and said he was bewitched.
Even over a male child,
such grief was considered excessive.
But for a girl, for girl,
for a girl—they clucked.

As you’ve probably already noticed, Carolyn Guinzio is guest blogging here at Unstressed this week, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Carolyn is the author mostly recently of Quarry, a collection of poems that David Shapiro described as “truth-telling, emotional, and fragile with sudden storms within.” A previous book, West Pulman, was released in 2005. She’s contributed two poems to Linebreak — “Counting” and “Shack & Creek” — and other poems are available at 42opus, Blackbird, and The Raleigh Quarterly. Welcome, Carolyn.

Sometimes ideas arrive fully formed, as if they were accessed in sleep. Maybe the intuitively written poem comes from the same part of the brain as the content of our dreams. Maybe poems that access intuitive magic use the same process as remembering a dream. These poems insist upon their own trajectory, and it requires a certain fearlessness to let what seem eccentric turns stand. There is a tendency to revise the memorable qualities out of a poem, out of fear, timidity, a desire to control. We want to use our minds to write; we don’t want our minds using us to write. The danger is in ending up with something controlled, beautifully structured, smart, and completely forgettable.

This obscure Frank O’Hara poem vibrates with intuitive energy. It takes two surprising turns at the end that, I think, lift it into the realm of the memorable.

Frank O’Hara
Prose for the Times

Yesterday I accepted an invitation to a party. But I had no sooner arrived and let my coat tumble, exhausted, onto a bed, when a perfect stranger whom I immediately and unwittingly admired asked me if I were a poet.
Many guests crowded around the two of us, as at a wedding. “I suppose I am,” I said, “for I do write poems.”
“Well write one now, will you?” he said, smiling fiercely, faces aureoled at his shoulders and elbows. A few tendrils of hair escaped the opening of his shirt, fled upward to his neck, and they were not the color of his eyebrows!
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like one just now, if you don’t mind,” I said, thinking of many things, chiefly, perhaps, of childhood, when I would make myself vomit so I wouldn’t have to go to parties.
“Well, what makes you feel like writing one?” he said, and kicked me in the balls.
Ugh!
As I hobbled to a chair, however, I managed to somewhat regain my composure. “You needn’t be afraid of me,” I said, turning. “I don’t love you.”

[New York, 1952]

“Memorable” is a quality that may have nothing to do with greatness. Where does “memorable” fall in the hierarchy of value? Some poems, like certain aromas and weather, remind us of something, they connect to our personal history, an event or specific time. But there must be more to it than that, since only a tiny percentage of what we encounter achieves the status of “memorable.” The poems we remember best may not reflect our aesthetic; they may be the only poem we know by that writer; it may only be a certain line that sends the synapses firing.

The first poetry reading I ever went to was in a bar on Belmont St. in Chicago. Elaine Equi, my first poetry teacher, took the whole workshop to hear a few local poets. Elaine has written some memorable poems herself (one of which I’ll post later this week). I heard a lot that night, but this piece, by Lydia Tomkiw, is the one I never forgot. I don’t know if the “Paul” in the poem is Paul Hoover, but signs point to yes. Lydia was a student in his undergraduate workshop at that time.

Hearing a poem read aloud adds to the experience (see Linebreak), but many of my own memorable poems were first encountered on the page. The common thread running through the pieces I think of first is place and time: They’re written by the poets I encountered when it was first becoming clear what poetry really was, and what it would mean to me.

Lydia Tomkiw
Little Dead Body Poem

How right you are, dear Paul, that
We hear of famous people’s deaths while on vacation.
Perhaps it’s so that their funerals are not too crowded,
With their loyal fans being out of town and all.
Those celebrities are pretty clever.
I’ve heard that somebody is born every eight seconds,
so I presume that someone dies every eight seconds,
Just to keep things even;
It makes me feel shortchanged when I read the obituary page—
Someone’s holding back information.
It also prompts me to flip through the telephone directory on
Sleepless nights, saying over and over again,
“Yup, you’re all going, every last one of you...”
Wow, heaven must be a big place.
I don’t know too many dead people, but folks tell me I’m young.
When my grandfather died, he was laid out
In the Bub Funeral Home, and I was secretly glad Mr. Bub did not
Change his name to something more romantic
When he went into business.
I just wish it was less memorable.
My high school locker partner, Ned, worked part-time
For a mortician. Imagine dressing dead people,
Straightening their ties, fluffing up their hair
So you can afford to take a girl to the movies on Saturday night.
That’s love. That’s adolescent desperation.
I would have been honored to go to the movies with Ned and
Have him buy me popcorn. Instead, I went out with a boy
Who died. The hardest part for me was knowing that
His body did not just dissipate on the bed the minute he died. I
Think that’s what keeps me off of suicide: the idea that something
Is left for someone else to clean up. How rude and inconsiderate—
It’s a pain to take out the weekly trash, let alone figure out what to do
With over a hundred points of flesh that’s about to go bad.
It would be even worse in India where there’s a religious sect
That believes you can’t desecrate any of the elements with the dead—
They can’t be buried or burned, they can’t be cast out to sea,
So they’re taken to the top of the Tower of Silence
Where they become the vulture’s problem.
How’s that for passing the buck?
No, when I go, I want to go clean, convenient, leaving no mess
As if I vaporized while taking a shower,
As if I moved to Antarctica leaving no forwarding address.

first appeared in COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW

From Zadie Smith’s “Fail Better,” a commuter-length essay you should go read each and every word of:

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language.

Via someone’s Twitter feed, and my apologies for not remembering whose.

Not exactly new at this point, and not directly related to poetry, but things magazine’s linked guide to a book of design-related blogs contains enough new reading, screencapturing, and photo logging to keep you blinking into an LCD for the next year. If you only click one, make it I Love Typography.

Dan Brady of Barrelhouse asks which writers and publishers in the indie lit community are consistently pushing things forward, and nominates a few of his favorites in the process.

In my neck of the woods, Matt and Katy Henrichsen run a reading series that always brings together an eclectic mix of new and established poets. Their press, Cannibal Books, puts out beautiful handmade chapbooks and broadsides as well.

If you’re not already familiar with it, The Museum of Online Museums from Coudal Partners is a fascinating way to bypass your work day. The museum lists more than 180 online collections of artifacts such as B movie posters, stewardess uniforms, and Fanta bottlecaps, to name just a few of my favorites. It’s like a Pez Dispenser for the brain. And Pez is yummy.

The online poetry magazine Slope has reopened for viewing with a collection of poems and other materials by Heather Christle. The editors promise “more poets, projects and presentations to follow, both slowly and soon.”

Junot Diaz describes the five-year struggle behind his first novel. Things got so bad at one point that he made plans to return to school to start another career. Via Maud.