I need to work on my empathy

1.

Last Christmas my dad stopped me when I was outside, warming up my car, and he stressed that I must "work on my empathy." My relationship with my sister had started to break down and I barely talked to her this past Christmas; I never talk to her now. I'm not sure how to do it either.

I also treated a woman here in Stillwater very poorly and I rarely see her around now. My friend asked me if I have ever been hurt, we were drunk, and I said "fuck yeah, I've been hurt," or something like that. Probably not as funny or visceral. Probably, I just said "yeah."

2.

I kept thinking I've been writing poems from this "character" named Tommy but they all sound the same. I need to ditch the artifice and realize this is just my fucking voice. Every poem I have written since I moved down here has been me and only me. With the exception of a few early ones (I've tried to bring in this feminine voice, but she sounds like me too, or my sister). I don't know what I am doing sometimes.


3.

I tend to get pegged as a "funny guy." This is fine sometimes but most of the time I wish it wasn't, and I know it's partly my fault. Boisseau used to recommend Old Male Poets to me she thought I'd like him. I kind of did, well, I liked half a book, but I finally came to the realization his work lacks ghosts.

Boisseau kind of pointed to this and so did Hadara: poems contain ghosts, or ghost words of the Real Poem you're trying to write. There has been this intangible aspect to people's poems I either like or I don't like and it's because that most the language of most people's work is so polished it is dead--think of the Poet as the big furry thing in those Warner Bros. cartoons strangling the life out of a pretty thing, desiring to name it George. Their poetry lack ghosts. The poem has been busted.

I don't know if I have any right to say this--I can't write for shit most times and my work is fairly clear and accessible.

I guess I try to keep ghosts in it--one way to do this is to stay messy I think, if just a little messy. I don't want to be beautiful all the time; I always think of anti-lyric (not so much prosody as "how would I say this").

When I'd go back to Boisseau and tell her I didn't like the Old Male Poet she recommended, she somtimes would say "I don't either." I liked this a lot: she knows there is something of worth in people's work she doesn't agree with. I miss that right now.


4.

My friend Andrew's daughter Eleni did. She drew Tommy and called it "Tommy is sad."



Andrew asked her why Tommy looks up. She said "most people look up when they are sad."

Man...

I only ever talked to C.D. Wright once and she warned me that the worst thing that will happen to me is that I will imitate myself. That seems to be happening right now.

Like, I am trying to use Takashi Shimura in a poem. Or the feeling of being Takashi Shimura (he is in the blog pic). I don't know how to write those eyes.

Dang.

Odds and ends

i.

I saw Chang Rae Lee read at the Kansas City Public Library. Whitney Terrell brought him in. Lee signed books and then Lewis, Zac, me, and some others went to the Harry's Country Club to sit around and drink. I talked to Chang Rae about Korean cinema. He said something good and precise: The closest American filmmaker to the Korean style is Quentin Tarantino and even he is conservative. Where Tarantino ties himself to his aesthetic completely--Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, Pulp Fiction all operate chaotically, but still within a strict genre form--Korean filmmakers like Im Sang-Soo and Park Chan-woo deconstruct form and convention with exactness. They shift from slapstick comedy to ultra violence in a single scene. Such are Koreans--they work hard, then party as if they're ready to die. And only they can pull it off.

This is my problem: I blow up the form before I learn it. I run too much off of energy.

ii.

I think I can expand this idea through the metaphor of neighborhoods. Drive through an old neighborhood in a city and you'll see lots of different houses close together: Second Empire, Queen Anne, etc. Old trees envelope them. The yards are green but a little wild--they look like Woody Allen from the early 70's--and dandelions hang out in there and on the burns. My work always ends up like this; a unity in variety if that's possible (usually I fail at that, too, like this metaphor).

iii.

Now think of suburbia or better Kansas. No trees stand over big bright cookie-cutter houses. The yards uniform and wide, buzzed like R. Lee Ermey, they all look the same. If there's a variety in houses, it's a more explicit economic indicator. Bigger means you sell more and care less about detail. My work never ends up tight, but I must appreciate this approach: It is safer, can be fun. I could learn to play more golf in this environment. I will like driving through old neighborhoods more.

iv.

I'll be reading with Marcus Myers, Jeff Pollard, and Karla Deel Friday, April 30 in Lawrence, KS at Mirth Cafe, 745 New Hampshire.

v.

I will attend the PhD in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University this fall.

I read Robert J. Baumann's Man About Town earlier

I am excited about writing again.

Winter Break Reading List

I'm taking these books back with me to Dayton:

Euonia, Christian Bok
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems, Noelle Kocot
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Paper Lion, George Plimpton

I never read Kurt Vonnegut in high school. He seemed reserved for 6'0, 160 pound boys who play guitar and have minds for math. Bukowski was more the speed for 6'4, 275 pound boys who watch Nicolas Ray and Sam Peckinpah films. Robin had a lot of Vonnegut. Last Christmas, she lent me Jailbird to read on the plane--she thought the way Vonnegut connected all of his ideas neatly together could be a good resource for my work. I liked it, and finished it quickly. As a 6'4, 236 pound man, I feel better about reading Vonnegut. I like his imagination and I like the ginger smell and the feel of the greened archive paper of Del paperbacks--they help his sentences. An hour ago, I bought the Del paperback of Breakfast of Champions over the hardcover version at Half Price Books in Westport.

If I get anywhere with my own stuff, I want my first book, at least the cover, to look like a Kurt Vonnegut Del Paperback from 1979--san-serif font, with a lot of reds, oranges, and yellows. A smooth painted drawing of a green skinned Don Quixote riding a donkey with no eyes and mouth.

Vonnegut supposedly always wanted to be a poet, but didn't feel up to snuff. I think, if he was around now, he could be considered an above-average prose poet simply based on his ideas and their general strangeness. Cats Cradle's chapters short chapters remind me of prose poems I see around the internet, or in small journals--inventive titles, short scenes. "The Girl Pool" (33-34) and "Vice President in Charge of Volcanoes" (23) come to mind.

I tried to teach Ball Four in my composition class--it did not go well. I've always wanted to read George Plimpton's Paper Lion, and I found a copy for $4.48 at Half Price Books.

I feel unhip in cheap bookstores.

I think I can read all of these this break.

Expect poems about the death of psychocars by plastic bats

Instead of working on PhD applications and prose from the perspective of Pete Rose, I have played Earthbound Zero, or Mother, most nights.



For those unfamiliar with NES era RPGs, you can change the default names of your heroes to anything you want. For instance, in Earthbound Zero, the main character is named Ninten. I have renamed him Phil. His friends Loid, Ana, and Teddy have become Lewis, Robin, and Jason--my friends. Two nights ago, Lewis and I explored Duncan's rocket factory before an Old Robot murdered him.

The landscapes in Nintendo games appear so clean. No one leaves crushed Bud Light Lime cans in the grass or fuck in the street. The closest place in reality must be Singapore.

Gary Sullivan's Pet Peeves

They are valid.

I should not make fun of other poets.
I have not written much lately.
I pay to much attention to fantasy football.

When in Japan, in 2005, I was compared to a Bulgarian sumo wrestler

Writing is slow and terrible right now. When I teach sometimes I have moments of fear that I will become what I don't want to become one of those white, middle-aged male poets who write narrative poems--descriptive purple prose non-stories with line breaks. I think that this fear is created because I am narrative. At least I will never write about fly-fishing. This comment should not apply to B.H. Fairchild, who I think is excellent.

Working Words went well--I read poems from my project about a suicidal minor league basketball player. I don't know how well they were received. We all bowled afterward, I rolled a strike during a 70. My second game was only 46. By this point I had stop paying attention, drank a lot, and talked to Michael Pritchett in between turns. I played air hockey with a new student from Charlotte, NC--her fiancee works as a mechanical engineer.

I feel like an asshole every time I google myself.

I'm one of Blog of a Bookslut's highlights of the current issue of NOÖ Journal. Like Michael Schaub says, though, it's all great. I liked Ron Padgett and Jason Bredle's stuff quite a bit.

Today I went to Half Price Books in Overland Park and looked around. They had old copies of Look from the early 1970's and a December 14, 1971 issue had a Doral Cigarettes ad. The best part of the ad was the picture of the new Doral filter with this text:

The new filter delivery system is so complicated
it would take an explanation by a scientist,
but Doral explains it in just two words:
"taste me."

I've been watching HBO's Rome. I'm near the end of the series with a few episodes left. Joni used to wear gladiator sandals, she probably still does, and I thought they were hot. I thought about her sandals in the history section of Half Price Books and about how Mark Antony ordered his assassins to cut Cicero's hands off and nail them to the doors of the forum. They also mounted Cicero's head and Antony's wife stabbed a hack-pin into his tongue over and over again.