A hot shower and some trauma oil took most of the pain away. I feel pretty good, actually—it's a beautiful spring day, and Bogie and I had a fine hour's walk around noontime. Now to see if I can finish that damn paper. Received courtesy of the Slope prize: Jonah Winter's Maine. I seem to be swimming in what I loosely and inaccurately refer to as "American surrealism"; the Steve Healey book I'm reading also falls into that category. In some ways I think it might constitute the new mainstream: Fence is full of this stuff. Sometimes it's spookily effective, often it's merely tiresome, a tic. Generally the more I feel the poet is tapping into an unconscious larger than his or her own, the more interesting I find the poetry. Also I find I get more impatient more quickly with the male practioners of this mode: the sons of James Tate and Dean Young. When women do it (Arielle Greenberg calls it the gurlesque), there's almost always that social dimension because they are trying to break up the calcified structures of the collective feminine unconscious (which are more visible if not more restrictive than those of the masculine unconscious). I think in my own work now I'm becoming interested in tapping into that "masculine unconscious"—hideous beast that it is—without engaging in the same game of dodge-em that I see other male poets using to partially disguise their aggressivity. But maybe that's actually too unbearable to contemplate. Enjoy your symptom! And choose your sublimation wisely.