Tylenol Cold doesn't work

I have a cold. A bad one. Like a fire-breathing dragon. Except I don't like dragons. I'm 27 not 9.

M is at Hobby Lobby. The two beasts (dogs) are chewing on bones at my feet. They don't listen. Ever. But they are beautiful doggies. Mostly friendly, potty-trained, and sociable doggies.

Have I mentioned I have the death-flu?

I have an essay to write. A book review to write. Several books to read. Poems to write. Poems to workshop. A class to prepare for. DEATH FLU!

So some good news. I've been assigned English 3670: Advanced Poetry Writing for my teaching duties in the Spring. I a very, very excited. And honored to have been chosen. I thought for sure I'd have to teach a year of English 2660 to earn the right to teach 3670. Anyway, I've chosen the readings for the course:

F. Daniel Rzicznek Neck of the World
Jorie Graham The End of Beauty
Stephen Mitchell, trans .The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Richard Hugo The Triggering Town
Handouts, printouts, etc of other poems, essays, and columns

I am very excited.

My Bears are 3-5. Not good. About a 8% chance of making the playoffs. Not good.

The BoSox won the World Series. Cool.

A bunch of ms deadlines approaching. November 1st is a big one. I should probably get on that.

Winter Wheat is fast approaching. I highly recommend you come. It's always fun!

Okay, I should get back to researching. The doggies are getting restless. So maybe I'll just forget this whole writing gig and become a full-time dad. Shit.

platypus's (platypi?) are poisonous

I've been tagged. Thanks, Jeff! Good to see you on the blog! Hope fatherhood is everything you thought it could be and more.

Below are listed the top 106 books listed as "Unread" in Librarything. No one seems to know why 106. It is what it is.

The Rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.

The Books (by title):

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment *
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude *
Wuthering Heights *
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote *
Moby Dick
Ulysses *
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations *
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels ******
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury ******
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners *
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


I find it funny that the HTML coding for books you've read and didn't like is "(b)(s)" (replace ()'s with <>'s...). Irony? I think so.

I tag the following: Mary, Nin, and Brent.

if i am sutured, tell me

A good guy, a poet, a Wick Chapbook winner, a Bowling Green buddy, and a helluva complainer (politics, poetry, music, movies, you name it, he bitches about it), has some new poems here. Check 'em out.

Oh yeah, his name's Matt McBride.

~

So I'm writing these new poems lately. They're weird. I like the process. It's collage-like. But the connections the lines make to each other are not collage-like. I blame this on two poets that I've been reading a lot of lately: Peter Gizzi and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. [And the Modernists... mostly Moore and Frost. But that's a whole different discussion for a different time.] Anyway, these poems are disjunctive, they're lyrical; they're introspective; they're vacuous; they're fragmentary (sometimes); they're self-distracting; they're not anti-narrative, but they aren't narrative either; they're formally distinct (from my previous work anyway): columns, prose and verse stanzas mixed in one poem ala Hass; and they're completely, utterly not about my father. In short, I have no idea what the fuck I am doing.

I have my first one-on-one with Bill (NEG told a hilarious story about him last night!) this evening. He's been a good critic in workshop, but I am definitely looking forward to getting his take on my stuff in a more comfortable situation. I think he holds back his negative/constructive criticism in class sometimes. I mean, shit, my poems, the ones I workshop anyway, suck sometimes. Isn't that the point? Why bring a good poem to workshop? lest you wanna show-off.

Okay, back to these new poems. And Philip Larkin tonight? Or NBCs new fall lineup?

hell buggy and chariot bats

So Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson read at WMU tonight. Both were great. The work they read from Figures from a Darkroom Voice, their collaborative book-length poem, was particularly enthralling. I'm not saying I didn't think I'd like it, but hearing them read it in tandem, collaboratively, as the book was composed and was meant to be read, was really fantastic, eye-opening even. Of course both poets read from their own work as well, and both gave great readings. I got to know them a little after the reading by drinking some beer at AC's house. Long story short, I look forward to running into these guys many more times in years to follow. Hopefully I'll get to read for them and enthrall them the way they enthralled me. And if you haven't read their work, check it out. Lots to enjoy.

Oh, and Rilke is a potty-training genius. She rocks.

we interrupt the scheduled program...

Everyone, meet Rilke!! She's our new pup. She's a 10-week old Weimaraner puppy. She's the new addition to our family, the big big news. We picked her up this morning, and she's already becoming fast friends with Bella, our 1.5 year old mini-dachshund. It's hard to snap a good pic of her; she's very energetic and a bit clumsy. Her legs are so long!

Will post more pictures as I get them... if I can get Rilke to sit still!

cellular:cellular

BIG, BIG NEWS!!! It's a personal news thing, has nothing to do with poetry, but it's BIG!!!

Will post more tomorrow when it's officially official.

In other news, rediscovered my love of this book this afternoon. Not that I'd really lost it.

Ordered these books this afternoon: 1, 2, and 3 (in which he writes, "Beauty is for beginners." I love that). Can't wait to read them. I'm hungry for them, like a wolf.

Time to watch a movie and try to contain excitement over aforementioned news (which when I first heard of it didn't excite me at all, as my friend AC can tell you).

BIG, BIG NEWS!!!!

I'll have the poo-poo platter, please

The Cubs lost Game 1. Game 2 is tonight. I predict a Cubs' win. Let's say, 7-3. And Ramirez will go yard. As well Soriano. D Lee will go 1-4, and Lilly will strike out 6.

Got a poem accepted yesterday by the grand folks over at DIAGRAM. I'm very, very pleased by this. I love that mag and have been sending to them for a long time. And the poem they took is one of the pivotal poems in the new version of the ms. Very excited.

Lots of reasons to be tired today.

I don't like scanning poems. I can see why scansion is important to understanding metrical poetry, but I find the task dull and uninviting. Still, I must persevere.

I think M and I are finally going to see the Western shore of Lake Michigan on Saturday. "South Haven is beautiful," says everyone here at WMU. So we must go check it out. I'm hoping for a nice fish dinner, too. Though M just wants to look at the lil shops and whatnot.

I'm finally starting to get excited about some of the recent poems I've written. I just wish that excitement could last longer each day, that I could enjoy it more wholeheartedly.

I will try.