Accommodatingly

Another new post on the literary-professional-poetry blog, where posts wholly literary, professional, poetry-related, or academic will henceforth go. (This one’s a thank-you to recent poets who read here, to the former student who sent me a really promising book, a heads-up about my upcoming event in Glasgow, and a plea that you-all help me avoid plagiarism.) Matters personal, fun, music-, house-, Nathan-, or basketball-related, in addition to matters unclassifiable, will continue to result in posts (albeit, alas, infrequent) here.

By the way, Close Calls, the book, is now out!

Nathan really, really liked the pizza we ended up having from his birthday. So did we. We recommend Stone Hearth Pizza, a regional chain which claims to use almost entirely regional ingredients.

I’m in no position to recommend– but thought you-all might want to know about– new work of mine: on Governor Blagojevich and Alfred Lord Tennyson at the Poetry Foundation, on Jordan Scott in the new Believer, and a couple of poems (about Nathan, in part) in the Columbus-based litmag The Journal, which I think I’ll be reading more often in years to come.

Also, Molasses Flood!

Ten days ago we were in Puerto Vallarta. We recommend it.

Five days ago we were in Connecticut for Christmas. It is a very good thing that we can now see Jessie’s family without having to board (or pay to board) an airplane. There was warmth. And fun. And presents, especially for Nathan (see below).

Three days ago we were watching Dan Zanes’ holiday show with Nathan in New York. We recommend that too. He’s got several musicians from Semitic traditions who seem to have joined his entourage since his last album: there’s a singer whose bio calls her “neo-Hasidic” and who adapts Jewish festive and liturgical tunes, and several Arab-American players, including a guy with a buzuq. We liked the buzuq, but what I still want is a melodica. I’ve wanted one, vaguely, ever since I saw one in the Heavenly stage show…

But it’s churlish to complain about instruments we don’t have, at the moment, since Nathan got so many new ones for Xmas/Hannukah, which he has now arranged to his liking, now that (today) we are re-established at home.

He’s got a purple microphone with its own stand! and an electric keyboard just his size! And this ingeniously designed toy trumpet, which is actually a bath-safe plastic pan-pipe! Our living room has really turned into a music room. Which is good. I have become “Drummer” (as in “Drummer! Daddy Drummer! Can you play the drums now?”) which is good, except when it’s a bit rude. We’re working on the rude part.

Three pieces of text online you should probably read:

(a) the LRB’s Lanchester on video games. Yes, they are art.

(b) the Poetry Foundation’s staff year-end best-of list, which includes the inevitable (Jack Spicer, George Oppen), the international (my former student Hannah Brooks-Motl, whose work you should clearly watch out or, picks Robert Minhinnick), and the heretofore almost-unknown.

(c) the nation’s preeminent women’s-sports journalist explains why people keep doing things they don’t really love, and why, sometimes, they later decide to stop.

When you get done reading those things, there’s always my fake Virgilian ode to last month’s election, now with a quasi-permanent online home at InDigest, a web-mag I’d be reading even if they had never published me.

It’s called Close Calls with Nonsense, not coincidentally named for my forthcoming book about contemporary poetry. You can expect to find my impromptu thoughts on contemporary poetry– and on other contemporary bookish matters– there, starting with this neat Web discovery. Sometimes posts there will be posted here, too; sometimes not.

Nonliterary matters– Nathan’s accomplishments, basketball milestones, travel notes– will continue to turn up on the accommodatingly blog, when they turn up online at all.

Design and formatting on the new blog, of course, all done by Jessie, without whose labor, attention, and design sense I’d still be using only 12-point Courier on white backgrounds for everything. Which might look neat for a while but would get got old fast.

Coming soon: a new blog for me– some overlap expected with this one– for literature-related musings, with links to my writings online as those writings appear, and other stuff related to my next lit-crit book, which now has an Amazon page. Dig the cover!

I’m in the middle of Jenny Davidson’s YA novel, The Explosionist. It’s a lot of fun– even more so if you notice the way her eighteenth-century expertise informs the world she’s built for the book, noticings that the younger parts of her intended audience won’t mind if they don’t pick up (and will feel pretty special if they do). It is, in a way, set during the Scottish Enlightenment… and yet, really, it’s set in an alternate-history Scotland where Napoleon, 200 years ago, won the Napoleonic Wars.

I’m in Harvey Hix’s new anthology, intended to introduce US poets to Northern Ireland! It ends with William Meredith’s fine sonnet “The Illiterate,” but most of the people in it are my age, or not much older, or a bit younger. So far I like it. Best discovery: a poet about Bikini Atoll by Quan Barry.

I’m also in a recent, though no longer the current, LRB, writing about Frank Bidart. People should read him.

Academic parochialism watch, vol. XXVI: this Monday I had a long conversation with a student (one of my senior thesis writers) about the changing job market for receptionists: they’re still in demand, but it’s not clear where they belong, or what sort of enterprise fits them best. We were talking about these sorts of receptionists, people who study reception: not until after she left did I remember that, to almost all Americans who recognize the term, “receptionist” would mean something else.

As some of you know, these are my favorite receptionists. And speaking of My Favorite… did you know Michael Grace from My Favorite had a new blog? There’s a new band, too, called Secret History, but it looks like they have yet to release anything… I’m looking forward to the EP (same name as the blog) called Desolation Town.

And speaking of indiepop reception history– I discovered this summer that Mary Wyer, half the songwriting duo from Even As We Speak, had a newer (not truly new) indiepop act called Her Name In Lights. They sound superb (and a lot like EAWS, with the same sweet voice and the same caustic undertones) on the Internets, but my attempts to order their record have so far been balked… developing…

I had the idea that I’d spend the morning writing letters of recommendation, and instead spent the morning cleaning out hundreds, yes, hundreds, of old emails, making sure I knew what recommendations I owe and for whom and when they are due. It’s much, much better than not knowing. I’m starting to think that John Freeman’s forthcoming book (click here for his take on Jarrell, then scroll down for his own book) will have something to say to me.

And speaking of people with something to say to me: Boston-based poet and critic Dan Pritchard reviews my critical book about adolescence.

Election euphoria still hasn’t worn off around here, I think: said euphoria hasn’t even been derailed by the repeated, and scary, realization that the economy is in the tank– and that the economic collapse explains the size (if not the fact) of the good guys’ win. Time for a letter to Pollio, while the hope lasts.

Quasi-regular posting here could well resume after the election; right now, whenever I look at a computer, I’m either preoccupied with things I actually have to do, or else twitchy and frightened. Yes, we’re ahead, we’re ahead, but stuff could happen! Some one-day samples are tighter than the previous day’s samples! Pennsylvania won’t actually go for Obama by double digits! Stuff could happen! Yikes!

More seriously I am worried about last-minute surprises, and about the robocalls which have been flooding key states; will robocall slime outweigh the vast advantage Obama has in enthusiasm and volunteers? I and many other Dems are having flashbacks to Kerry, who was “supposed to win” due to his slim lead in key states despite trailing by a couple of points in national polls: we remember that he almost did win (while losing the popular vote, as McCain surely will), but more than that we’re just having bad flashbacks.

I felt a lot better yesterday after, unable to do much else in any free moment but twitch and worry, I decided to make some phone calls for Obama. You can do it from home! (And you can do it pretty late at night, even if you live on the East Coast– you’ll be calling Montana or Nevada!)

Fortunately the only thing I must do professionally between now and the time that polls close on Tuesday is… write half a lecture about Robert Lowell. Which should be fun.

I’m in the current LRB on Frank Bidart, though you may need a subscriber log-in to read the piece on line.

Nathan is typing on the cardboard “computer” Jessie made for him. Cutest bedtime comment this week: “You know, kangaroos can be friends!”

Two poetry books I’m enjoying, by people I’d never heard of, books I might or might not write about in a couple of weeks, but books worth your time: Mark Irwin’s concisely lyrical Tall If,and Gary Copeland Lilley’s bluesy Alpha Zulu, which includes poems set on nuclear submarines.

Next Thursday (two days post-election) I’m reading in Ann Arbor. See you there?

My Pindar is up at the Poetry Foundation site. (I’m not a classicist– far from it– but I play one on the Web.*)

The Fresno Bee, paper of record (at least en ingles) for the region where Juan Felipe Herrera grew up, runs a story about him because I reviewed him.

Jenny has more to say about indexing, and about, er, um, me.

Jacket magazine reviews my book of poems. Thanks, Michael Aiken!

If there were some way– a pill, perhaps– I could prevent myself from following poll numbers and other micro-level, insusceptible-to-my-action political news right now, I would accept it (I’d take that pill). As it is, the micro-following of micro-political news, while it’s probably bad for my writing, my life and our household, does mean I can enjoy, even before it hits the airwaves, wonderful pieces of televisual rhetoric like this one, from an ad released today.

Also televisual, and also wonderful: Sesame Street videos, some new (Norah Jones on the letter Y), some with added nostalgia points. Nathan and I especially like, so far, the sock-puppet-ish Sesame Martians, who say “yep yep yep” and think telephones are people too. No, not those Martians, and certainly not those Martians– though they make as good an excuse as any to note that this book holds up extremely well. I wish somebody had released it in the States. And I wish I didn’t need sleep– but, really, I do.

*Readers much older or younger than I am may not recognize the allusion to a TV ad from the early 1980s; odd, and sad, what seems to stick in the mind.

Summer school is over! I’m sure I would teach either class again– but perhaps not both at once. We wrapped up Intro to Poetry by spending the morning looking at MSS in Houghton Library. Robert Browning’s handwriting was small, neat and legible; so was Keats’, at least on what looked like a fair copy of “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” It looked a lot like the version we know, except that “fair serene” came later: here the line was (if I remember correctly) “Yet never did I know what men could mean.”

Jordan praises the current scoring system for gymnastics, and I’m convinced. Ron Silliman praises something called Theory, and I am surprised to find that I largely agree! I praise Juan Felipe Herrera, in a piece that has generated some neat positive feedback and at least one blogger’s disbelief.

Jenny indexes her book. That’s not the way I did it…

Nathan, seeing me eat gooseberries last week, and then learning their name, told me “They go quack! quack!” He’s also started to say, at the start of a mealtime, “Thank you [or "Thank you, mommy"] for making dinner,” and when he’s done, “I’m all done” (pushing himself away from the table, or walking away and then) “It was really good though.” Could our little guy be more adorable?

No, we have not taken a sudden dislike to blogging– we’re just so busy we can’t see straight. Some snips, some clips, some briefer-than-brief news:

For about a month now every object that comes into Nathan’s hands has turned into a guitar: this week he seems to have decided to play his real (toddler-sized, or ukelele-sized) guitars, and to turn other objects into drums. It gets out physical energy, but will it lead to a real drum kit, if it continues? If so, we’ll have to finish the basement by the time he hits fifth grade. He also, as always, loves dancing: watch him dancing at Uncle Jon’s wedding, and dig the nonpareil glee.

Book blogging continues to expand– partly through Jessie, and partly not, I’m discovering book blogs way faster than I can read them. Check out this Brooklyn bookstore book blog, which I encountered via Tom Rayfield, the person who is not me and yet has written a book called Parallel Play.

Also in the book-blog world, but in another corner entirely: Harvard’s Houghton Library, which collects rare books and manuscripts (they own tons and tons– Keats, Empson, Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, etc. etc.) has a modern acquisitions blog. Who knew?

I’m in the current London Review of Books, discussing Philip K. Dick and (less extensively, alas) James Tiptree; alas, too, non-subscribers can’t read it online. (You may just have to read the print version. Horrors!)

I’m in the current Believer praising Jenny Browne, potentially the only poet who cares more than I do (and I know that she cares more than I do) about the San Antonio Silver Stars. (In my defense, I began to write about her poetry, and had decided I liked it, before I had any idea that she cared about them.)

I’m also at Beacon Broadside today, celebrating GLBTQ poetry, and proud to be there. (There’s a poem in the new Yale Review, too, but the current t-of-c isn’t online.)

I’m told that blogging makes people feel better, but that hours staring at the Internet makes people feel worse, and that there are studies out now that prove both. I believe it.

I had nothing to do with this impromptu banner art, but having seen it, I almost wish I did.

We are going to hang out with Nathan at home for most of the summer (he’s taking a break from day care, i.e., school, and we’ve arranged our schedules so it makes sense, for these two months alone). I’m happy we’re going that route, but happy, too, that we can stop by school frequently (his school seems to want us to do so) in July and August, so that he can hang out with his friends. I had no idea that toddlers could be so extroverted– or, simply, so much fun.