Love poem to Mirjam Ott, Captain, Swiss Women's Curling Team

(draft)

Let me sweep your surface with my broom.
Knock that rock into your circle
and score anything but a blank in your end.
Those brunette curls in my hands, your eyes
motherfucking crazy, my friend Jeanne
said your eyes were that. She wouldn't trust you.

Yell "go" in Swiss like we're in the Olympics.
I'll pashaw those Swedes and Danish
sisters, all blonds, all black tights, skirts.
Drop those Adidas athletic pants, please.

Men's hockey bores me. Your perfect shot
from your knees, your knock-out

percentage of 85%
(Olympic average: 68%)
do not bore me. Your face

I've seen before. In dreams
it is blurred when looked at
straight on, like you cover your face with silk
when I talk to you and everything--
the face, nose, those sniper eyes--
only focus in my peripheral

vision, when you're on NBC doggy style.
The rock in your hand, that clarity/
Deja vu sense comes back and I'm all right
again. I see you in high def.
Stay with me and fuck Canada.

I'll be reading with Joni Lee, Lindsay Waples, and Eric Scott at Watermark Books in Wichita Friday night at 6:30.

In the beginning, everyone looked like Tim Tebow

Writing this thesis has got me thinking about the intentionality my pop culture artifacts lack. If I use pop culture, it needs to be in a way to get to the image without distracting the reader. Robert Haas had a poem that used the climatic scene involving Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai. I over complicate and get to convoluted. I'm not sure how to get around that. My sentences all sound the fucking same.

I submitted to the Poetry Society of America's chapbook contest in December. I rounded up the poems I felt like were the most successful, further edited them, and sent the whole thing out at the deadline. Everything seems insurmountable. Even when I get work placed, and start to think about a chap or a book, the whole thing never feels done. I think this is why I don't have multiple chaps or a manuscript done. Who wants to read? Who will read it? I think I communicate clearly but everybody leaves, so I must not articulate myself very well.

I found Ron Silliman's post about contests this morning (scroll down a little for the post)--this made me feel a little bit better.

Keep truckin' right?

FRiGG Law and Order Issue 27

FRiGG 27 is up now. I have a poem in it. Ellen Parker, the editor, asked me in the fall if I watched Law and Order. I said yes and she asked me to contribute something. Julianne Nicholson probably doesn't read poetry. That might be a good thing, because I think she's pregnant. Her husband's last name is Cake.

Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth is quite good and exciting. I have been reading it with the intention of reviewing it for New Letters. The last time I talked about wishing America would implode so I can write Tomaz Salamun or Charles Simic poems with greater authenticity--they write well, they're funny and they're beautiful. The mix of violence, surrealism, and hope, I thought, could not be captured by a white, male, American poet.

Svalina nails this feeling by using American cultural artifacts within the context of Judeo-Christian-American creation myth. It's violent, it's funny, it's beautiful, and it's sad. He's successful when me, and others, are not. He does not graft Eastern European images onto American sentiment. It never gets hollow. The form gets a bit repetitive, but the poems never die in the shell. He reminds me of the best of Simic and friends.

I hope that's accurate. That's the spirit I'm trying to capture in the review. I don't know how to review anything though.