Available for pre-order…

The latest volume of poems from my friend and colleague David Dodd Lee, entitled The Nervous Filaments, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The book will be released on March 9.

bat country (revision)

bat country

It’s a familiar story—

sky eats airplane, spits out
fuselage,

somewhere in the Carolinas

a farmer’s tobacco field bursts
into flames.

Black feathers fall.

What I’m Reading

Every once in a while, I feel the need to stop reading poetry for a little while–to cleanse my palate, if you will, or temporarily ease the ‘anxiety of influence’ that Bloom wrote about. Sometimes, it really is necessary to take a step back, or at least I’ve found that it is for me, because Bloom is right–whatever poet I’m reading at any given time finds his or her way into whatever I’m writing at the moment. Sometimes I like to believe I’m writing without any apparent influence, though I’m discovering that might not be possible–more on that in a bit.

So I decided this time that I was going to read the entirely of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time before reading another word of verse. Admittedly, I started reading Proust solely so I could understand this Monty Python sketch, but now it’s become more of an exercise in discipline. I’m about to start the penultimate volume of the novel–only about 1,000 more pages of Proust to go. I’m beyond ready to read some verse again, but I will follow through…

As to what effect this ‘palate cleansing’ has had on my writing, I have noticed a couple of things. The first is that my subject matter has changed somewhat–I’m writing about my family now, which is something that has been strictly off-limits in the past. But I’m also seeing that since I’m not reading poetry, the music I’ve been listening to has become the dominant influence in my writing, particularly in terms of the rhythm. So while my experiment in writing without influence has been a bit of a failure, I think I’m writing better–and more interesting, at least to me–poems than I was four months ago before I started reading Proust.

anodyne (revision)

* poof *

a city called coma (draft)

* poof *

Fiction Reading @ IUSB – Frances Hwang

Frances Hwang, author of Transparency
Monday, 11/23 at 7:30 p.m. at IUSB

Frances Hwang’s story collection, Transparency (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company, 2007), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award.  She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University.  Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.  She teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

What I’m Listening To

I can’t exactly explain it, but even though I’m a pretty staunch non-theist, I have a soft spot for Christian metal–Underoath, Norma Jean, The Chariot, The Devil Wears Prada. I don’t know…

Anyway, I really liked Flyleaf’s self-titled debut, so I full well expected to like Memento Mori, too. But it’s even better than I expected–hopeful and majestic and uplifting. Vocalist Lacey Mosely doesn’t do the screaming she did on their first album, but she still has more voice than anyone would ever expect out of her tiny little five-foot-nothing frame. This is a shoo-in for my year-end top ten list, probably even top five…

‘letterbomb’ (draft)

* poof *

‘a slight case of overbombing’ (draft)

* poof *

‘dreaming in dog years’ (revision)

*poof*