Accommodatingly

Cappie delights us by forcing a game five. (Geno, as usual when he’s the guest commentator, predicted the plays, sometimes minutes before they took place.)

I’m now blogging here. Please send suggestions if you have them, even if they seem unrelated to poetry. Yes, it’s a lit-blog gig.

I have new poems here, one about a kitchen tool, and one about Robert Lowell flying over Connecticut. Well, maybe it’s secretly about Walter Mondale Robert Lowell. Or is it about Chris Dodd Walter Mondale?

I also praise Elizabeth Treadwell here.

Nathan got discombobulated this morning because we rolled in through the back door at day care and he was shocked to find himself in the day care room: we walked all the way down the long hall to the front entrance and then re-entered the day care center through the correct door. It’s like watching a well-made television show and not wanting to miss the credits. Or something. In any case, our little guy quickly recovered: he clearly likes having some playmates there.

From Jordan, the most disgusting way to make yourself finish a long piece of writing– and one of the most effective.

Steve has been holding down the blog-fort for a while. I’ve been too consumed by household stuff to think of sitting down at the computer to post. Today the distraction of television presented itself, wresting me away from the process of putting together Ikea furniture.

Which brings to mind this exchange:

Nathan: Kee-ya! Kee-ya! Kee-ya!
Steve: Did you go to Ikea?
Nathan: No.
Steve: Who went to Ikea?
Nathan: Mommy!
Steve: What did Mommy get at Ikea?
Nathan: Daddy!

Dan came over with his son Louie this morning, bearing yummy scones for breakfast and, as an added bonus, beautiful purple and yellow tomatoes (perhaps in an homage to the Vikings?). We ate the tomatoes tonight with freshly-made mozzarella from the Belmont Farmer’s Market and basil from our very first box from Boston Organics. For $37 a week, they will be delivering a great big box of organic produce to our door! Definitely one of the perks of moving here.

It’s been strange reading and listening to coverage of the bridge collapse. We drove over that bridge several times a week, usually on my way to and from work and often with Nathan in tow for day care. Very scary stuff.

Consider this post a placeholder, to let those of you who have expressed your concern know that we have moved into our new place. Belmont, Mass. is pretty without being glitzy– we live right next to a big shiny pond, with walking trails and its own flock of geese; the pond is, in turn, right next to the high school, which could mean some heavy traffic when school begins. (It also means that when Nathan and I visited the post office this morning, we rolled the stroller over an entire block of sidewalk painting celebrating the Belmont field hockey team.)

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Jessie’s sister Robin and our trio of nieces (Robin’s kids) are here: they are, as always, enthusiastic re: playing with Nathan. At the moment they have him surrounded, and are asking him, politely, to knock down towers of blocks.

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More news as it happens. Oh, and Sara asked us to note the new site for her series: QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place. Consider it done, and check it out.

The Movers Who Pack have just left. Tomorrow morning the Cat Movers and the Movers Who Load All Our Stuff Into a Truck arrive. Our house– that is, the one we’re losing leaving– has all its furniture intact but all our smaller belongings packed and sealed in durable cardboard, except for the stuff I’m taking in our car and the stuff I’ll be using (tomorrow, when the house is truly empty) to clean it. It’s a truly melancholy feeling to sit in an empty-but-not-empty house and blog. I miss Jessie and Nathan. Our cats are confused and restless, but they’ll survive. (Geno and LaBelle spent the hours of packing, as intended, locked uneasily into the spacious laundry room; Cosmo escaped and cowered under furniture upstairs– the combination of tension and roundness in his body when he’s freaked out and hiding reminds me of those enormous, solid balls of rubber bands.) It’s like Thom Gunn’s 1960s poem about cats exploring an empty house, except in reverse. I’m glad we’re using a Cat Mover.

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Unexpected literary discovery occasioned by our move, part xliv: the ninth issue (from 2001) of Mark Nowak’s journal Cross Cultural Poetics. I regularly disagree with his approach to literature-in-general– though I always admire his labor activism– but this issue is a gem: part of a long poem that ended up in Mark’s good first book; Elizabeth Willis with a smart essay about folk culture, the Thirties, the Sixties and Niedecker; Eric’s articulately admiring review of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You; and a striking, sharp-tongued, convincing personal essay by Tisa Bryant, of whom I had never before heard, about her early life of blue- and pink-collar jobs.

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Bryant appears to be part of a Bay Area circle of queer-positive youngish women writers– sort of a next-generation Kelsey Street Press crew?– who like fragmentation and “experiment” but also like passionate lyricism: it’s the same scene that seems to have welcomed Liz Waldner, whose poetry I like an awful lot, and Elizabeth Treadwell, whose poetry I sometimes like (and, of course, some other writers whose work I don’t like).

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Here’s a set of Bryant’s prose poems. And here’s a neat interview conducted this year.

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UPDATE: our grief and condolences to Mrs Coulter and Lee on the loss of their, and our, favorite Moo Cat. You can’t play with her anymore, but you can still look at the sweet photograph.
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As I type, Cosmo has emerged, warily, from his hiding place under the futon. Good for him. Hey, Jordan has a blog!

I just realized that Mary Lucia’s interview with Douglas is on the Current website. Listen!

New work from the two of us elsewhere on the Interwebs:

At Babble, Jessie considers the Terrible Twos (and insults my dancing, but, you know, she’s right).

At the Poetry Foundation, I offer up a rap Pope. Not for eighteenth-century specialists, I think; more for people who have never heard of Mr. Pope but might like him a lot if they found a way in. Do let me know if you find errors. This means you.

I have spent part of the day overwhelmed by sadness, nearly to the point of emotional paralysis, over leaving a place where we have so many good friends, and so many reasons for sticking around the Twin Cities as long as we did. I bet the sadness dissipates soon after we get to Belmont, especially since I think we’ll be coming back every so often to see our friends here.

I spent a much happier part of the day reading Douglas’ book. It looks like one of the books I’ll be writing over the next few years is an introduction to twentieth-century poetry from around the English-speaking world, aimed at students and others who read poetry avidly but don’t know Marianne Moore from Nicholas Moore, or Edward Thomas from Dylan Thomas from R. S. Thomas.

Douglas’ book (so far) looks like a perfect example of how to write for such an audience (it’s also funny, where funny is appropriate).

So does Alex Ross’s book, though there I’m only about on page ten.

Do you live anywhere remotely near the Twin Cities? If so, do not under any circumstances miss Thursday’s comics-and-subcultures-and-graphic novels event, a public conversation involving Douglas Wolk and Austin Grossman.

Douglas is the author of Reading Comics, a forthcoming critical guide to the medium, which Douglas discussed in Salon. He also wrote a good book about James Brown and several thousand insightful reviews of records, comics, performances, equipment, Burning Man festivals, and some other stuff.

Austin is the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, a novel about superheroes and supervillains that’s the most fun I’ve had in a while: it’s like a literary novel set in Astro City. (If you know Astro City, you know that’s high praise.) Austin also enjoys some reputation as a designer of video games, including what I’m told is the highly acclaimed System Shock.

The free event takes place at 7:30pm this Thursday June 28 at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (click the link for directions). We’ll see you there!

Once you finish Douglas’ and Austin’s books you may be seeking summer reading: I recommend chasing your adorable toddler around the room until your eyes glaze over and you can’t read anything

Sara Ryan’s absolutely perfect second novel for young adults, set in Portland, Oregon…

Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds, an informative book about online gaming aimed at non-online-gamers, now supplemented by his cool-looking Synthetic Worlds Initiative; and…

Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, a nearly-perfect work of Afro-Caribbean coming-of-age science fiction, which I’ll likely be teaching this December (note that this is not a general Nalo Hopkinson recommendation).

As for poetry… well, stay tuned.

…for Mark!

Slightly more time to read today than usual, with the result that, hey, here are some neat new pieces of (prose) writing you can read by clicking the links. They’ve got nothing to do with one another, but something to do with me, or with us…

Barbara Fischer on teaching contemporary poetry. What if there were important propositions on which Brooks and Warren and Charles Bernstein would agree?

Kara Jessler and Melissa Meltzer on the cultural transformations wrought by Sassy. I think it’s the best of many pieces out there on what that anomalous, fun, mass-marketed magazine meant. Funniest line: “Encouraging impressionable teen girls to crush out on guys who couldn’t commit, who were sad and wanted you to cheer them up all the time, and who only really loved you if you understood his references to Rickenbacker guitars and Steady Diet of Nothing: Thanks a lot, Sassy.” According to the helpful wiki, this bright-blue site (which may be a parody or a fake) is the lost “last” (never-published) issue produced by the original (Christina Kelly &c.) team.

If you watch Heroes and wonder where Zach (Claire’s friend) went, here’s the ugly answer.

Archambeau covers British Poetry Wars, with cameos from Keston Sutherland, J. H. Prynne, and, apparently, Marvel’s Captain Britain.

Best of all: Republic of Heaven is back. Hi, Mrs. Coulter!

I will be reading poetry, and talking about poetry, for the Friends of the St Paul Public Library in– you guessed it– St Paul, on Thursday Feb 1 at 7pm at the Hamline Midway Branch, 1558 W. Minnehaha Ave.

I’m pretty sure Eric “Rain Taxi” Lorberer will be joining me. Mark your calendars, if you have calendars!