So today is a day off...for everybody but those of us fortunate enough to be poets at the University of Iowa. Though Labor Day, Monday is also workshop day and thus, far too important to skip, even on the event of a federal holiday. This fact upset my father-in-law yesterday, and he kept coming back to it while we spent a Sunday at his house. "So wait, you're really going to school tomorrow?" And then when I'd nod "yes," he'd look away in disgust. This disgust, though, was focused on many things and not just the fact that I had to go to school; it was also the nail in the coffin for school being a waste of time, it was the fact that we drove all the way up there just for the afternoon, it was that, in no possible-to-imagine way, was poetry more important than a day the man was willing to give you off from work.

A few additional things that happened yesterday:

• I realized that reading Oppen in bed is a horrible place to read Oppen.
• I fixed a bike.
• I ate awesome chicken parmesan with homemade marinara sauce that used garden tomatoes and freshly picked green pepper. Awesome.
• I got two phone calls from McNally after 2am. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and believing that he had no idea I would be in bed then...I'm usually not, but as I mentioned, today's a work day.
• A friend of my dad's told me how he was going to kick his son's ass, "but maybe I won't...he thinks I will though, so that gives me the advantage, right?"
  
• There was a totally wicked harvest moon in the early evening. Pictures of which turned out looking like nothing more than an orange dot and not at all like this other picture of a harvest moon, which would be okay, this picture looks pretty professional, but c'mon camera, you gotta do better than that if you want to stick around here.
  

Our apartment is full of bugs. Crickets, mostly. But also spiders. And flys. There are many things one can do to eliminate bugs from an apartment. I do none of those things. Though, sometimes, I do their opposites. There are open doors. Dishes in the sink. A log of one day old goat cheese. I once woke up with an indiscernible dead bug stuck to my hand. This was yesterday. It was gross.

I've had two classes now, with Elizabeth Robinson. She is a very rad lady, who writes some very rad poetry. You can listen to some of that here. There's something to be said about a teacher who kicks off class by having her students fill out the Poetry as Magic Questionnaire. Rad.

Workshop is going alright. I feel, but am certain that it's all in my head, that my poetics and ideas about how poems should and can work, are different than all the other kids in my section. Week One was a bit of a disaster. I opened my mouth at completely inopportune times and most of what I said was unfortunate, at best. I am looking forward to this week's poems, though, as my first run-through of the material appeared to be a lot more interesting (which isn't to say, that I believe my poems to be more interesting than anyone else's...in fact, I don't believe that all). A few of the poems have stuck with me for few days now, which I think is a good sign.

In order to celebrate the weekend I'm going to my in-laws house to bbq. While all the other people I interact with became displaced when the moved to Iowa, I came home. That excited my family tremendously and to an extent, me.

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Yeah, that's awesome. You wanna know what's not awesome? Missing the first big meeting of the really prestigious writing program that you don't deserve to be in in the first place and then confusing Cole Swensen when you show up for the class you thought you'd registered for, but had actually just place held and were supposed to sign up for at the meeting, but didn't 'cause you weren't there...SUCK!

Have you ever fully realized your situation and then looked around, the whole time thinking, "what the fuck did I get myself into?" Within seconds of my first class starting, every bad feeling I'd ever had towards poetry in academia came rushing back in all its rawness and badness. "What the fuck did I get myself into?" Plus, my feet hurt...I don't own sensible shoes.

You know what I really hate? Not being the guy who knows what's going on. You know what I hate even more? Literary criticism.

Today, we were asked, first thing, to write a sentence on our poetics and then to boil that down to a few words, and then again to one word. This is what I wrote, but was too embarrassed to say in class (thereby, leaving me squirming in my chair blurting out, broad and vague to the point of idiocy, statements that I didn't really believe):

Sentence. Poems should cut open cats and show you their lungs...a revelation.
A few words. Cat lungs.
One word. Meow (sigh).

I started re-reading Noah Eli Gordon's "The Frequencies" today. I haven't read that book in 5 years and think the last time I tried I was too ignorant and not at all literate enough to do so. My notes in the book are trite at best and are clearly clinging to the easiest phrases and images in the poems. Now, it almost seems easy, especially for a Gordon book. It is my opinion, that NEG is very much a language poet, only, with a penchant for odd, occasionally impossible image. "Frequencies" is not that kind of book. To be fair, this was early in his publishing life, but to read this book now and realize that a good chunk of MFA students are now doing exactly this kind of thing makes you see just how ahead of the curve Gordon usually is. He's like the Jay-Z of poetry, by the time you start writing prose blocks, he's "Off That."

Whilst on the subject of hip-hop, beat-boxing is totally rad and I wish I was better at...or at least had a comfortable place to practice. Seriously, where does on practice beat-boxing?

These are things I bought at Goodwill the other day. If you happened to have dropped off a sweet Sears typewriter or a frog mask in the last few weeks, thank you for totally making my month.

I think the class I'm teaching this Fall is going to totally kick ass. I've given myself all the room I need in my syllabus to change directions, move with the students' interests, and basically make things up as I go...which is really where my best teaching comes from, and I hate being roped in by syllabi that I wrote months before the actual class takes place (just because it interested me on August 16th, doesn't mean it will still interest me on November 21st).

A and I finished unpacking yesterday. The apartment is finally put together (almost) and ready for you to stay, if you are so inclined. You should come. It'll be sweet. I'm an above average host and I make a good pot of coffee. We could sit around the kitchen table and chat...over coffee, of course, and we could talk about how much we miss lightening bugs, or any number of other topical current events. I really miss lightening bugs and enjoy coffee.

The move to Iowa City is complete. Well, Coralville, actually. They named a street after me, or at least after the French-Canadian me. Everything in Iowa City is 5 min. away. Target, 5 min. Prairie Lights Books, 5 min. Coralville Lake, 5 min. Everything in Chicago was 30-60 min. away. Everything. I think I like it here, at least in a timely way.

I registered for classes yesterday, making this whole thing official. This whole thing officially scares me a bit. I'm taking a scary workshop with Cole Swensen, a scary class on Modernism and Mysticism and another scary class having to do with poets and their respective poetics. I hope this works out like most scary things and wind up not being scary after all...but sometimes things really are scary. That scares me most of all...

My reading back on July twenty-something went pretty well. I was nervous and I think that showed, but afterwards my father-in-law, whose knowledge of poetry extends only as far as that he knows I do it, told me he really liked my poems and even recited a few lines back to me. I'm really tired of the pompous grandeur of poetry readings and I work hard to be the exact opposite of that...but even that has a touch of bullshit in it.

I read Frank Stanford's selected poems last week after having gotten it back from the friend I lent it to the day I got it last October. I think you should read it too. The upside is how totally awesome most of the poems are. The downside is that the section titled, "Unpublished Poems," should have stayed that way. I mean, within the context of a book that is a "selected" previously unpublished poems have no place. Have you ever seen Michelangelo's David? Having those poems in this collection is like the hallway leading up the sculpture that is lined with partially finished statues...when you're expecting the masterpiece, who gives a fuck about the pieces the artist didn't even see all the way through. There was a reason Stanford didn't publish these poems, so why include it with what is supposed to represent his best work? Right?

I also finished James Tate's selected. I love James Tate and thus, I love this book, but it did get me wondering about the validity of "selected's" winning prizes. This book won the Pulitzer of poetry as well as the WCW Award. Though I think Tate deserves these awards, giving them to a book of his selected verse is totally bogus. It would be like giving the Beatles a Grammy every time a re-packaged greatest hits comes out! It just seems bullshit to me is all...

Anyway, there were a few other things I was going to tell you, but I forgot what they were.

There is only one ethical thing to do this Saturday. And to find out what that is you must meet me at Cup of Joe (102 Main Street, Cedar Falls, IA) on that day at 8:00 in the pm. There you will be instructed. There you can learn to live your life in a manner unlike Sarah Palin. There you will experience poetry.

Aaron McNally. BJ Love. 2 grown men wanting to convince you that they are actually bears from outer space...who write poems...and then read them aloud.

C'mon! That sounds interesting, right? You should come! You should come! You should come!

Addendum: Reading Octopus 12 is also quite ethical.

We are 2 dinosaurs, however fiberglass

HEY! If you live in Iowa, or the even the greater Midwestern region, I've something for you to do Saturday night. One of my bestest and oldest friends, Aaron McNally and I are reading at Cup of Joe around 8:00 and it would be awesome to see you. You see, Aaron, a bit of legend 'round these parts, is leaving for Kansas City in a few weeks and wants to tell you bye. You should do that for him...it's the nice thing to do (p.s., my nephew Eli and I made that picture together...it's the first of what I hope to be many collaborations).

Also, new H_NGM_N! AND I've got a poem in it! Exclaim? Here's the deets:


OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT --->


Like, it's night time & there are these two guys & they're all like, I'm gonna break into this BANK, yo. To steal the MON-ey. And the other guy is like, yo, what about the H_NGM_N? Like for realz? And the first guy is like what - that tired old washed up old guy? Like no one has even SEEN him for like YEARS or something. Guys probably dead.

http://www.h-ngm-n.com

And the second guy is like yo. And so it was that there were guys straight up robbing banks all over the city & when I say bank I mean JOURNALS PUBLISHING BAD POETRY & then there's like this quick cut, right, where you see like SOMEthing on a balcony or some junk, like high up like looking down all bad@$$ & then these two guys are like about the break into the bank still? By which I mean BAD POETRY RUNNING RAMPANT all up in the grill of the fair city? And what?

http://www.h-ngm-n.com

So that's it man. It's like yo - H_NGM_N #8. SWOOP. And like everyone thought he was dead & yo & like that was it? But he's here & cleaning house & by house I mean THE LANDSCAPE OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY & by cleaning I mean like straight up cleaning.

So it's like not only for you but for the city & banks & POETRY & also for yourself that you must needs click yon link & spread the word that, like, if you were afraid to go out at night? Or read poetry? There is no more reason to fear ever now:

http://www.h-ngm-n.com


yrs ever & always -

n8 & crew

I don't know what it is about summertime sky, but I can't stop taking pictures of it.

Went back to Chicago last weekend to visit some friends and because Anne and I have never been so bored and because it's only a few hours from here. We did some stuff, most of which was this fad called, "hangin'." We almost got caught in a gang war and I slept the best I have in weeks. Do they make white noise machines that sound like buses, kids rapping and drunks yelling at everything? I need one of those.

I also went to the Seminary Co-Op bookstore and picked up Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Tupelo book. I've read it a few times so far and believe it to be totally rad. It sounds weird to say, but the poems feel organic...more so than his previous collections. The flow of the book as whole is dead on and even within the "fragmented" sections the poems are little like walking through a steady rain as opposed to the lightening storms in his Iowa book.

I've had the really odd circumstance, for me, anyway, of having been solicited for work lately. Ultimately, I think this is what every poet hopes for; not having to research journals, painstakingly piece together a submission and spend months hoping for the best. Instead, they contact you asking for poems and you slap a little something together for their project and a few days later...voila! Anyway, it's been really awesome and I've got four more poems coming out and I couldn't be more grateful to the editors who have contacted me.

Things to peep:

dear camera #9

Ekleksographia #2

A quick post to announce the next Further Adventures title, "Bee-Stung Aviary" by one Mr. Eric Baus. It is so fantastic that I've decided to use it as the first stand alone FA title. No combos this time, my friends. Nope, this time you get page after page after page of Eric Baus.

I'm hoping to have it done (again with artwork by Dan Perry) in about a month, so be on the lookout.

In the meantime, check this out...it was this beaver's dying wish.

The new issue of Matchbook is out, and that bird wants you to order one, maybe more. I don't know, it's hard to read birds. Well, not that bird, he's got big white letters across his chest, but you know what I mean.

FK has managed to round up a great group of poets: Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Garth Graeper, Susan Briante, Matt Hart, Fred Schmalz, Brenda Iijima, Kyle Schlesinger, David B. Goldstein, Cherie Weaver, Matvei Yankelevich, Hoa Nguyen, Philip Dacey, Megan Gannon, Miles Waggener, anna olivier, Ana Bozicevic, Paul Killebrew, Nate Pritts, BJ Love, Dale Smith, Farid Matuk, Mathias Svalina, and a scratch and sniff gallery of sensory abstractions.

Wait. Did you see that? I think it said, BJ Love. That's me. That's awesome. I'm really stoked to be involved with this project. In this way. I helped Friedrich with issue one; called for submissions, layedout and threw in my two logistical cents, but because I was so involved I didn't feel comfortable submitting then.

You should buy a few, give them to friends and relatives. Buy a few more, save them for yourself. Do this all here.

A few days ago my father-in-law found a machete at work in amongst some returned pallets from South America. He called it a knife. A friend of his swears there's blood stains on it. I carried it around all day yesterday. I think I like myself with a machete. Sometime, in the future, I want somebody to be talking about me and go, "You know B.J., right? The guy with the machete?"

These are things I've machete sliced:

1. Large bottles of Mountain Dew (as seen in the video above)
   
2. Apples being tossed in my general direction
3. Empty cans
4. Full cans
5. A hedge my mother wanted trimmed
6. A sign my mother no longer wanted
   
7. A 1/2 inch tree limb that was looking at me funny
8. Every reason I had to not own a machete
   

A few interesting machete facts:

• Some tropical countries have a name for the blow of a machete; the Spanish machetazo is sometimes used in English.

• Danny Trejo plays a series of characters named Machete in Spy Kids, Grindhouse and finally into a planned feature film named for the character, Machete.

• After hardening, many blades are tempered to maximum toughness, often nearly spring tempered. This also makes the blade relatively easier to sharpen.

I've been reading Alex Lemon's "Hallelujah Blackout" the last couple of days. It's good, but reads slightly disjointed. The range of styles Lemon uses (and has mastery of) is broad, but stacked next to one another in a text, the variations are often jarring. Before I go any further I want to emphasize that I really like every poem, it's their ordering that miffs me. For instance, Lemon writes some poems in an open, dreamy style where words and ideas are cross-hatched into a larger picture. Lemon also writes in wispy conversational style that could very well be your best friend describing his day. What becomes difficult is bouncing between these two (and other) styles, especially since the rules that the poems rely on change from one page to the next; empty space means one thing here and another over there, punctuation, capitalization, etc.
What this really got me thinking about, though, is the importance (too much?) I put on coherence within a manuscript. I like the idea of grouping similar poems into sections, or even writing poems with repeated ideas with the hope that a larger narrative emerges. My favorite examples of poets who do this are Matthew Rohrer, Mathias Svalina, Zachary Schomburg, Jack Spicer and Frank Stanford...each poem in their books is like another ingredient in a recipe; eggs, flour, sugar and butter...cake! And though in many cases the poems don't always look or feel like each other, there is always something tying one to the other, so that, when you finish the book, you are left with the feeling that you've read a book of poems and not a collection of poems.
Alex Lemon's book did not feel this way to me...in fact, it read a little more like samples of an Alex Lemon yet to come. So much so, that as we are perusing the poems, you almost need to stop and sniff a coffee bean between each one. Some of my favorite poems ever have been written by this man, so the jarring variety of styles was never too much to keep from carrying on, hoping that the next one might be a new favorite. But therein lies the problem, it became to easy to disregard the "book" and only focus on the poems...which maybe isn't a problem, I don' know.

The new issue of jubilat found its way to me this morning. I'll be finding my way to the toilet shortly. The toilet is where I do the bulk of my reading these days. It's the only place in my in-laws house that I can sit, have a bit of peace and loose my bowels.

My car was in the shop for 4 days and they didn't do anything to it. Yesterday I got tired of waiting and walked down there, went back behind the garage and took my car back. I don't know the legality of that particular situation, but 4 days for an oil change and a new tire seemed a bit much...that, and I'm a renegade.

I also got paid for my unused vacation days at work. I didn't know I had vacation days so I'd managed to accrue almost a months worth. I'm not unemployed, I'm on vacation...for one more week. Then I'm unemployed.

Last night I used every PayPal cent I had to pre-order a limited edition hardcover copy of Zachary Schomburg's new book. It's called Scary No Scary and you too can get it...but first, you must go here, because I can't do it for you. I would, in fact, The Man Suit has been my gift of choice for the last two years, but I think you should give it a shot yourself.

I'm reading in Cedar Falls, Iowa on July 25th. Details are forthcoming, i.e., do not yet exist.

I'm still looking for a place to live in Iowa City...have you heard of one?

On Tuesday, a big storm blew through the neighborhood, the poor bird above never realized that. I burried it. I think it was a bluejay, but I'm no orinthologist.

The most amazing thing about moving out of Chicago is remembering that there are such things as skies and they do super-cool tricks. These are just a few of the tricks they were doing last night.

In a Big Country

Iowa, on occasion, can fill you with awe. Clouds can be this pretty and then two hours later drop tornadoes like Mike D drops rhymes. Awesome...

In Iowa I drive like an asshole. In Iowa there is ample parking. In Iowa it only costs $28 to go to the vet. In Iowa you watch little league baseball games and tell kids to keep with it, turn hard and use two hands. In Iowa there is such a thing as fried cauliflower. In Iowa you finally have cell phone reception but still go outside to talk. In Iowa everybody wonders what you're doing there. In Iowa you tell them without actually answering there question. In Iowa your dog takes naps under trees while still, technically, on walks. In Iowa it is possible to buy 12-packs of Miller Lite tall boys without knowing it. In Iowa, after a few weeks, people will ask you to tell them again what you're doing in Iowa. In Iowa you always tell people to come and visit because there is no way to understand Iowa unless you're there, which is to say, come visit me in Iowa. In Iowa I will always have a place for you to stay.

Cannibal Books has a sale, you should check it out.

Moved away from Chicago this weekend and these are the things I was made to leave behind:

1. Hyde Park Records
2. Seminary Co-op Bookstore
3. Friends
4. The Blue Line
   
5. Reckless Records
6. The Med
7. My Apartment

My cast came off and what fell out was this:

CAConrad from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

RLM#9...go.

This is the sound of one-handed typing...shhh

Eileen Myles hates poetry...and so do I. Well, at least what the wider public's imagination conjures when they care to think of of poetry. I hate being embarrassed, or even conscious, of people's reactions when I tell them I'm going to study poetry. I also hate having to talk to people about Maya Angelou. I hate Maya Angelou and am tired of working real hard to not make you feel ridiculous for liking Maya Angelou. And though I agree with most of Myles' post, I hate when people bite the hands feeding them. I hate the commercialization of the MFA, but I love that I'm getting one and so, anything I say towards that has no credibility. I respect Eileen Myles...think that she is the last great bastion of punk sensibility in poetry, but c'mon, you can't rail against literary journals and be associated with the only one sold in most B&N and thusly, the most recognized journal in our culture. That's like the rich guy telling you how to be a better Christian...

Anyway, I packed up all my books last night. Six boxes of nothing but poetry books. It was like the time I transferred all my cd's into those travel books and realized for the first time that I'd accumulated over 900 albums; storing them differently changes your perspective, and clues you in to just how mad you are about certain things.