Listing obsessively.

Twice now I've tried to get a list published on the McSweeney's site. Twice they've rejected me nicely: "Hey, great! No thanks." Here's the latest list, as yet un-McSweeney'd:


Most Alarming Things to Cats

Dishwasher (fill cycle)

Vacuum cleaner

Electric guitar

Man riding lawnmower down middle of street

Whistling tea kettle

Three-legged dog ringing doorbell, pretending to be flower-delivery person, then massacring cats inside

Garbage truck backing up street

Veterinarians running amok with giant Q-tips

Raccoons at back door


Another favorite on the McSweeney's site: Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond. The one about the birds in the air conditioner is pure genius.
- posted by Amy Miller @ 9:49 AM

 
You Hope Your Friends Will Understand

Lisa says she’s lonely, blogging here all by herself. I said I’d keep her company. I am a person of her word. My word. Whatever.

So I’m thinking about poetry and moving. It’s not like gardening and moving, where you leave your herbs behind and hope the new tenant will water the dianthus. Being a poet and moving from your home is more like ripping a plant out whole and hoping it will survive the new climate. You pack your little pot of poetry into the car, settle the cats in the carriers, and speed off to parts unknown, the poems rooting and re-rooting on Highway 5. You hope you’re not moving to the Land of Doggerel, or the Village of the Damned Bad Poets, but there’s no way of knowing.

You also will find yourself torn from your moorings as a writer and a peer. Your friends, your enemies, the people whose writing you admired, the people whose writing you despised but who made good brandy Alexanders, all those people are behind you now. What they thought of you -- that you were a snob, you were a dear, you couldn’t escape your bad breeding -- all that is now wiped clean as you begin with a whole new set of people. Those you once hoodwinked -- the people who thought you were qualified to teach that class -- are now miles behind you, and you wonder if the new people will see you coming, will know from your shoes that you didn’t finish college.

You want to find yourself a garden and hide away, and send out occasional missives wrapped as little poems. You’d like to have that kind of time. But of course that is a Narnia-like dream, and you, in fact, have to work for a living. So you’ll be scraping ice off your windshield like everyone else, forgetting the lunch you left on the counter, putting off phone calls to your relatives for one more day as you toodle on down to the office. You hope the work won’t drain your soul; you hope it sustains you with just enough ideas and cash so you can go home in a semblance of peace and put some rice in the pot and settle down with a pen and maybe write a few books before you die. And you hope you won’t think too much about the dying part, planted as you are in this new soil that promises so many shoots and buds of spring. You hope you’ll love the summer, and mourn its passing with autumn’s great crackle of leaves. You hope you’ll make it, hope that happiness is indeed a moveable feast and a main course where you’re going. You hope your friends will understand and visit and write.
- posted by Amy Miller @ 4:38 PM

 
I am a very old fashioned grrl, ya know, so this is a big deal. My maiden blog. I have to say that I have composed many-a-blog in my head since the-person-who-goes-unnamed-around-here invited me or threatened me to write on this page, but the setting up an account thing has been a big impediment for me. If I could have plugged a fire wire into my ear and thought-written a blog, you may have read entries for me on the subject of poetry and:
open mics
Costco
Donald Rumsfeld
the N.R.A
chores
public television
Donald Rumsfeld’s mother
Donals Rumsfeld and guns
more chores
other nightmares

But—luckily I suppose—I could not plug much at all into my ear, so you missed it. And I really will work on the letting go of things I cannot control. I examined the list above, and I know Rumsfeld is not in my power to control. I understand he does not care about me. I know it’s not a healthy relationship. I just worry about him is all.

But back to poetry. I don’t get out as much as Amy Mac, so I can’t write about festivals and residencies, but I did go to the dentist yesterday. Not as interesting as some poetry festivals, but, let’s face it, more interesting than others.

Some notes on poetry and dentistry.

1. I know what of I speak. I am a dentist hussie. I have trouble committing to a dentist, and consequently I have wide experience.

2. I don’t know why I have trouble committing to a dentist. When I was a kid, we had one dentist my whole life and he was very nurturing, interested and patient, and maybe no other dentist has compared well. Also could be that a visit to the dentist being such an intimate act, I feel kind of dirty afterwards, and I have to break it off.

3. But poetry is the breath of life, they say, and you do need teeth to read the stuff, so a good dentist and a good oral hygienist are essential to the life of a poet.

4. Never, never, never tell your oral hygienist that you are a poet. In fact never tell anybody at all that your are a poet.

5. Never tell an oral hygienist anything at all. They only want to put their hands in your mouth and hear you grunt. Do not answer any questions. Do you really care if she thinks you are hostile? Pretend you are shy.

6. But do ask your oral hygienist lots of questions. Oral hygienists have surprisingly interesting lives. Few children aspire to the job, so these people landed here by circuitous routes. They ooze human experience.

7. Few situations in life allow us to see another human face to which we are not related in such proximity. (Speaking of oozing). Open your eyes, and see humanity, steal imagery.

8. All dentists are noisy breathers. This is an observation based on my vast experience. It could also be the title of a poem. You may have it. I have no explanation for this breathing. Maybe because they sit right beside one’s ear, one just notices this.

9. Dental equipment makes for very good metaphors. Ask the names of things, and write down the names when the hygienist leaves you alone for a half hour at a time. A metaphor that goes “your cruelty sucks at me like that sucky thingy they put in your mouth when they clean your teeth” is not as good as “your cruelty is a cuspidor.”

Love to you all.
- posted by lisa oritz @ 6:02 AM

 
Well, it certainly appears we have abandoned our blog. I have allowed the "doughboy effect" (see below from Feb) to occur, and I must say that I feel bad about it. It was the gentle prodding with bad poetry from our illustrious webmaster that has me out here with nothing to say, but I am at least out here dammit.

I did have one thing to get off my chest...it concerns thoughtlessness. I won't mention any names out here, but in general folks if you are asked to read at a poetry forum as a featured reader that has an open mic afterwords then by all means please stick around for the other poets. I was at a reading recently where the poet brought in about half the large crowd in followers, enjoyed a good reading, got the requisite applause and admiration, sold a few books and then split along with his/her "entourage" without so much as a thank you or goodbye. The empty table (actually not empty, someone had gotten this poet a glass of wine so it sat there along with a pen and an empty sack that had held books) was conspicuous throughout the wonderful open mic readings. Perhaps the poets limo was waiting and running up a bill, or they just had to get back and see the season finale of West Wing, but there is really no excuse here aside from some kind of emergency (if that was the case forgive me...consider this generalized) So in ending this little tirade I beg of you poets who are asked to be featured someplace to show a litte class and support the poets who supported you. And if you are a "fan" then don't be a turkey - hang out and you might hear the next Homer arise from the masses.
- posted by Robert @ 9:43 AM

 
There once was a Saturday Poet,
but nobody ever would know it.
He wrote no reviews,
and so did he lose
all respect. How a poet can blow it.

- posted by Post @ 2:42 PM

 
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." - Oscar Wilde
- posted by Post @ 12:09 AM

 
I guess I am writing out here right now because I feel guilty for not writing in here before, at least for over a month. These blogs (still hate that word) can be like those old Doughboy swimming pools though. You know the big round ones that are often found in midwestern backyards. Everybody is in there splashing around and having good family fun when it goes up, but over time green stuff begins to grow on the vinyl sides, the outter part gets a bit rusty, kids turn into teenagers and get busted groping each other below the water's surface, pretty soon that ol' Doughboy is all alone out there waiting for a duck or something to keep it company. Well, I am not going to let this happen to our little place here, I will keep coming back no matter how bad the drabble I leave behind.

On life, things are good. I just read a book called "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. At first I thought it was just a shallow review and cliff notes for people who give a shit about where they are, but actually it is really an interesting review about how we know what we think we know. And it's nice to see credit given in this shallow society of ours where an actor, a mimic, gets more fame and fortune for playing a Nobel prize winner than the actual Nobel prize winner could ever hope to see. It is going to generate some poetry - already wrote about water being 3.8 billion years old. That's right, the glass of water you chugged today is old old old - and there is a lot of interesting tidbits that tie in there. Also today I grossed out my friends with an idea about how to reward a certain gesture, but I'm really not responsible. It's my brain, and I still haven't quite figured out how to use it properly. Anyway, have a nice whatever you are doing now and hope to see you at Il Picollo in Burlingame.
- posted by Robert @ 8:09 PM

 
Riding the BART train home from work the other night, I saw a poster for The Lion King ice-skating extravaganza. I sat there, cold and wet on that rainy night, and I thought, I wish I'd written The Lion King. Brian Boitano's skating it in arenas all over America! It's on a stamp! Lion King party napkins! Ka-ching -- that's bucks for me every time.

I figured if I'd written The Lion King, I wouldn't be riding BART on a stormy night. Nope, I'd be living in the hills above some great city, drinking cranberry martinis in my jacuzzi, looking out over the lights of civilization and thinking, "This is good."

But I wondered if the rich, successful me would be envious of people riding on BART trains -- the people who have to walk in the rain to work, who discover they like walking in the rain, that it doesn't hurt them but in fact it makes them feel alive. They feel the heat in their cheeks and their hearts, and they don't need a damned jacuzzi to keep them warm. They know where they have to go and they just go.

I guess we're just never satisfied, we writers. We're always trying for the next level. And when we get there, there's always something else that looks so good we think we'd be happy if we just had it. Do we ever arrive? Probably not. We keep changing the rules, keep learning new things about ourselves, about the world of desires, about desire itself. And we write about that: the perpetual state of need we all seem to live in. What's our reward? The occasional rush, I guess -- the incomparable joy when we finish a really good poem or get into a really good magazine. It's as ephemeral as a drop of rain, but it's happiness all the same.

ø
- posted by Amy Miller @ 3:49 PM

 
This sure is a groovy blog!

In a fog
and full of grog,
I stumbled o'er
a fallen log

On looked a frog,
I'm sure, agog,
as I bemoaned
my soiled tog

"You filthy hog!"
myself I flogged.
"You've landed in
a pile of blog!"
- posted by Post @ 10:56 PM

 
I am feeling really crusty today. I was reading Angela's very true blog below and it struck me that I hate the word "Blog". Can't it be a "journal" or a "rantpad" or a "thoughts list" or something other than a Blog? Blog is a word more appropriately used to describe something you would gingerly clean up with a big wad of paper towels, something to be removed and never spoken of again, something you might carry around a handkerchief for. Who came up with the word, and are they laughing still? Every age has some word that needs to go - I'll date myself by saying that "groovy" is something I could never get past my lips. It was just too ridiculous, even though I considered myself pretty groovy at the time. But compared to "blog", "groovy" is as pleasant as a soft autumn breeze. So, I'm feeling a little better now that I have gotten that off of my cold-laden chest. I also noticed that there is another post-apocalyptic movie coming out, so it is time to once again start plugging my novel, Into Wild Places, and possibly ship it around to some agents who could get it distributed more widely. You never know.......
- posted by Robert @ 9:18 AM

 
I’ve been thinking a lot about a friend of mine and I’m hoping she knows how fabulous I think she is—and not just because she knits. She’s also an amazing poet and a good, kind person. This brings me back to knitting. It is something I associate with good, kind people. When I was pregnant last year, she gave me a blanket she knitted for my son. It’s soft, multicolored, with a raised alphabet on one side. Lately, my son has been fingering the letters as he falls asleep with it. He’s partial to the “R,” and it’s the sweetest thing watching him drift off. I want my friend to know how happy her gift makes my little boy; and I want her to know much I appreciate that blanket (and the great snacks she brings from the Dixon fruit stand, and how sweet she is to my cats, and how thoughtfully she listens to people). After she gave me the baby blanket, she told me she was working on it in her hotel room while we were at a poetry festival. It figures. I was in one room probably obsessing about my swollen ankles or Fritos, and she was down the hall quietly making my son’s favorite blanket. Anyway, I want to thank her. I tried to write a knitting poem, but I write knitting poems about as well as I knit. However, Pablo Neruda can write a damn fine knitting poem, or rather a poem with knitting in it. And this is not a thank you for knitting, but a thank you with knitting in it.

Ode to a Pair of Socks

by Pablo Neruda

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.
My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.
Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.
I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.
Like jungle explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.
So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking about a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.


- posted by Angela @ 9:57 PM

 
/

A while back I experimented with writing poetry on my lunch hour at work.

I grabbed a notebook and went up to the empty fourth floor of my company's building -- empty because they've downsized the snot out of everything. I found an abandoned office with a chair and sort of a view (of the big building across the street), and I plunked myself down to write a poem.

I wrote a lousy poem about -- what else? -- the big building across the street. I sawed away at it for about an hour, and finally gave up in disgust. It was just a crappy poem, and it wasn't getting any better. This writing-at-work thing wasn't going to fly.

Then, on the way back to the elevator, a landscape of empty cubicles caught my eye, and I started thinking about the end of the world -- The Quiet Earth and On the Beach. Some lines popped into my head. I opened the notebook again and scribbled a few things down, then sat down in a different empty office, and ended up writing a better poem.

So the moral was: The better poem popped out af ter I'd given up on the whole enterprise. Damned sneaky thing, this poetry. It doesn't come when it's called, but the minute you turn your back, bam! -- it's on you like a twenty-pound cat.

O
- posted by Amy Miller @ 9:41 AM

 
OK, I had a little talk with the fellow who wrote that "twinkledy dinkledy" poem last night and he said if I didn't like it I had to post out here myself. Interesting idea, just writing stuff out here that you think other people might want to read. Did you guys ever hear about a $300/lb coffee called Kopi Luac (I think that is correct) There is a coffee shop on B street in San Mateo that carries it sometimes. It is the joint creation of a coffee tree and a small marsupial named Paradoxorus which lives in the coffee plantations of Java and Sumatra. The Paradoxorus enjoys eating only the ripest and juiciest of beans, and after the fruit is digested it releases the "seed", or what we call the coffee bean, in the usual fashion. These droppings are gathered, probably originaly by local poor people who couldn't climb a tree but, now that it is worth $300/lb, by armed gangsters, and sold as a gourmet item primarily in the US and Japan. Here is what the coffe connoiseurs at dreamship.com have decided: "Is Kopi Luwak worth it’s price? Those who have been fortunate enough to try it at a cupping are delighted with it’s intriguing chocolaty, syrupy taste and would enjoy it whenever it is available" So, there you have it. Another example of eastern animal droppings triumphing over western elitism!
- posted by Robert @ 9:48 AM

 
bloggity bee
bloggity boo
we blog
you blog
who blog who?
weblog prologue
diary roux
thinkity thinkity
two times two
sippity eggnog
playin da foo
laying down thoughts
by me and you
- posted by Post @ 11:43 PM

 
Wow, a blog. This is so fabulous. Since this is one of the first postings I should say something super witty or poetic. Wow, a blog. This is so fabulous.
- posted by Angela @ 6:56 PM

 
Green is a frog,
Violets are blue.
This is our blog,
new just for you!
- posted by Post @ 1:03 PM