Kind of sick, worn out from traveling and general excitement. Full weekend, what with the grad student theory conference on Friday and Saturday (heard some really excellent papers on the topic of mimesis and poetics [not necessarily together] by Buffaloers Michael Cross, Eli Drabman, and Thom Donovan, along with Cornell stalwarts Alex Papanicolopoulos, Pedro Erber, and Alex Young-Bryant; plus a fascinating and useful lecture by Michael Hardt of Empire fame on the topic of multitude) and then of course the Soon reading with Ann Buechner and Mark Lamoureux. Be on the lookout for Mark's new manuscript, whose name I can't recall but which uses the names of stars as jumping-off points for intensely lyrical and moving poems. This morning Mark guest-starred in the D&D game, during which our intrepid heroes climbed precariously down into a not-quite bottomless pit, fought off a cloud of killer bats, and then took out a hideous Siamese zombie (two zombies badly stitched together). Experience points for all my friends!

I've admired Simon DeDeo's poem review blog Rhubarb Is Susan for some time now, and now I'm delighted to report that he's turned his acute and sympathetic critical eye on one of my own poems. The poem in question is pretty old, dating almost to Montana days, and it's interesting to get a fresh perspective on it. Simon doesn't call any attention to its being a ghazal in his review, but that kind of makes sense since I found the ghazal form to be more of a useful generative procedure than a form I was using in full consciousness of its history and implications. A form of orientalism, perhaps, but at the time it was a useful spur to the imagination. I kind of like the requirement that the poet insert his or her own name into the final line; it's a kind of boomerang treatment of lyric subjectivity for a form that puts most of the focus on the semi-objective fact of obsessive repetition. Anyway, my thanks to Simon.

Speaking of obsessive repetition: I know they're kind of evil, but via Paul Guest I've just discovered Amazon's rather beautiful new "Concordance" feature, a representation of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. In the case of Selah the top words are "eyes," "light," and "water," with "air," "mother," "sea," and "white" following close behind. Draw your own conclusions.... Looking forward to what they'll discover about Fourier Series (seventeen days remain!).

Happy Birthday, Charles Fourier!

A very exciting message from Spineless Books:

Thursday April 7th, 2005, is the 233rd birthday of Charles Fourier, the French utopian thinker whose alarmingly imaginative vision influenced Marx and Engels, among many others.

Today Spineless Books announces the publication of Fourier Series, by Joshua Corey. Fourier Series is the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award for Best Book-Length Work of Constrained English Literature, as judged by Christian Bök.

About Fourier Series, Christian Bök writes:

"Joshua Corey writes a poetic series based upon the psychosocial permutations magined by the utopian thinker Charles Fourier. Corey arranges a resonant, emotional lexicon into a quadratic structure that emulates in language the kind of interpersonal relationships that, according to Fourier, might ideally define a social utopia of competitive cooperation. Just as Fourier imagines a set of artfully designed communes, in which members, chosen for their variegated talents, but compatible passions, might coexist in a state of harmonic integrity, so also has Corey selected a diverse ensemble of elegant, sensual phrases and arranged them into an array that highlights the beautiful potential inherent within the force-field of language itself."

Joshua Corey's first book, Selah, was chosen by Robert Pinsky as the winner of the first annual Barrow Street Book Contest and was published by Barrow Street in 2003. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and webzines, including LIT, Typo, Colorado Review, Octopus, VOLT, and The American Poetry Review. In 2004 twenty-five sonnets from his new manuscript Severance Songs were selected by Michael Palmer for publication in a special issue of the magazine Conjunctions dedicated to the work of young and emerging poets. In 2005 he was a participant in the Festival of New American Poets sponsored by the Poetry Society of America at New School University in New York City. He lives in Ithaca, New York where he is writing a dissertation on avant-garde pastoral and keeps a weblog, Cahiers de Corey.

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com

Fourier Series will be available April 28th. Postage and handling charges are waived for advance orders.

http://spinelessbooks.com/fourierseries

Spineless Books is an independent publishing house dedicated to the production and distribution, in print and electronic forms, of innovative literature with an emphasis on collaborative writing, formal experimentation, and utopian thought. Our books with spines include Drawn Inward, poems by Mike Maguire, and 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie, with illustrations by Shelley
Jackson.

Spineless Books Box 2458 Providence RI 02906 http://spinelessbooks.com

While reading email listen to Eclectic Seizure online:
http://spinelessbooks.com/eclecticseizure/2004
http://spinelessbooks.com/eclecticseizure/2005

Hoo-hoo-hooray!

Okay, I know I promised dirt on AWP as well as verbal mementoes of my assorted travels. But I'm just too tired! I will, however, list some highlights of the past ten or eleven days in roughly chronological order:

- Hanging out with Richard and Trevor. These guys are my poetry brothers and we always have a great time together. I miss them something awful.

- Meeting Richard's mom and brother in Portland; his brother looks just like him.

- Reading with Richard at PSU thanks in part to the gracious offices of Michele Glazer (author most recently of Aggregate of Disturbances from Iowa). Portland State is Richard's alma mater and it was fun to see the hometown boy make good. Also, my cousins Dan Smith and Josh Davidson live in Seattle and they came out to see me read for the first time. Met Dan's girlfriend Bethany for the first time, too.

- Discovering Open Books in Seattle for the first time. What an amazing store and what an amazing couple the owners John and Christine are. There was an especially nice crowd at our reading, plus three of our old Montana writing buddies who now live in Seattle (with babies!) showed up: Betsy Haring (sp?), Jon Groebner, and Emily Bedard.

- Powells! My god, you'd need three days just to browse the first floor! I had cannily brought some books to trade and so only spent $20 total on a number of interesting titles, including Johanna Drucker's Figuring the Word, the original edition of Peter Gizzi's beautiful first book Periplum, and the long-coveted double issue of o-blek, Writers from the New Coast. Next time I'm bringing a bigger box.

- The most marvelous fish and chips at a place called Chinooks in Seattle. Spring for the halibut.

- Seattle's great beauty and cosmopolitan vibe. Like a less pretentious San Francisco. Very high on my list of places I'd like to settle.

- Our AWP panel and the nice comments we got from seemingly everyone we met afterwards.

- The book fair: I'm not at home so I can't provide a list of everything I stuffed into my duffel bag, but I will tell you what I bought and read on the plane: Canadian film director Guy Maddin's wonderfully bitchy memoirs, From the Atelier Tovar, and A Book from Nicole Brossard's The Blue Books, both from Coach House. Passed up on both volumes of Steve McCaffrey's collected for just $12 each, a decision I now regret. The press' director, Alana Wilcox, was very friendly to me and invited me to come and tour the press (it really is in an old coach house) if I ever come up to Toronto. Which I will certainly do.

- Meeting up with Montana folks old and new; I pretty much covered this in my earlier post.

- The friendly atmosphere of Vancouver in general and the conference in particular; there were as always plentiful opportunities for humiliation but I managed not to answer that door. I think.

- New York, New York! Yesterday my parents and I took the ferry into Manhattan and one of the most flawless spring afternoons imaginable. We wandered through the galleries in Chelsea, then down to a late lunch/early dinner at Pastis, a terrific bistro on what I think they call little 12th Street. From there we ambled down to Houston and over to Bowery to Dixon Place, where we were treated to the most marvelous hospitality by Paul Johnson, Ellie Covan, Kimberly Brandt, and some other very cool folks. Embarrassed to realize that I'd met my fellow reader, Matthew Burgess, when he'd come up to read as part of Jane Sprague's West End Reading Series a couple of years ago with Lisa Jarnot. It was actually something of a West End reunion because Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb also showed up. I also got to meet Brend Iijima for the first time along with Erica Kaufman, both of whome were kind enough to buy copies of Selah. Dixon Place is currently in a very cool, cozy, and casual black box space with lots of couches and a fridge full of beer. We read to a full house: I read just one poem from Selah, "Infected Elegy" (which is strangely fun to read considering what a sad poem it is) and devoted the rest of my time to Fourier Series. Matthew read from a new chapbook, Yeah, You and some new poems, delighting me by ending with a New York poem with "pastoral" in the title. I'm semi-languagey, he's more New York School; it made for a surprisngly good mix. Rode the ferry home to New Jersey looking back at the blazing skyline feeling a little bit like the Michael J. Fox character in Bright Lights, Big City, only without the cocaine.

Found my second wind, I guess. That's all the news for now, though the alert among you will have spotted bigger news to come....

There's no contest, people: that old chapbook of mine is WAAAY more embarrassing to me than the yellow thong. What's worse, all the Montana students I met this past weekend seem to own copies.

Back in Ithaca, sun's out, seventy degrees! Me and dog walk now.

Richard Greenfield has asked me to post the following announcement about an upcoming conference at the University of Denver. Sounds pretty darn interesting:

Call for Papers
Giving Attention: Writers, Scholars, Theorists
University of Denver

We invite presentations and readings from writers, scholars, and theorists on
attention and inattention in the fields of literary scholarship, creative
writing, and literary theory for a three-day conference in Denver, CO, hosted by
the University of Denver, from

Friday, October 7 to Sunday, October 9, 2005.

Plenary addresses concerning will be delivered by two figures who are fascinated
by the interconnections between creative work and criticism:

Anne Carson, Professor at the University of Michigan, author of Autobiography of
Red and Glass, Irony, and God

and

Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita at Stanford University, Scholar in Residence
and Lecturer at the University of Southern Carolina,
and author of Poetry On and Off the Page

This conference is a unique chance for creative writers, scholars, and theorists
to share their work and discuss how their different attentions complement each
other. Papers and readings of creative work addressing the political, literary, aesthetic, historical, and cultural implications of this issue are welcome.

Also welcome are proposals giving attention to the decline of theory, or to
rethinking the role of theory in contemporary writing and scholarship. How have
the deaths of recent theorists, critics, and writers (Edward Said, Maurice
Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, James Welch, Susan Sontag, and others) affected the
way in which our field attends to theory?

E-mail 250-word abstracts or panel proposals of 750-1,000 words by May 1 to
Daniel Fusch, dfusch@du.edu, Literary Studies/Theory, or to Joshua Wilson,
jwilson9@du.edu, Creative Writing. Registeration and a $30 conference fee are
due July 1.

Conference Organizers:

Gloria Farler, Daniel Fusch, and Joshua Wilson
Department of English, University of Denver, Denver, CO

A word about Creeley, whose death didn't exactly haunt the Vancouver conference but which made for a palpable absence nevertheless. His influence on me has been indirect but vast: all the roads of the New American poetry that I discovered in the past demi-decade lead to and through him. I saw him twice: once at a reading in San Francisco in 2000, where he seemed quite frail, sitting down to put across his magnificent late poem "Histoire de Florida"; and at the Zukofsky conference last October, where he actually seemed much more vigorous. Thought about shaking his hand after his moving reminiscences of Zukofsky (Creeley was famously approachable and generous to young poets) but decided not to; I regret that now.

Josh Corey's North American Tour 2005 concludes tonight at Dixon Place on the Bowery in NYC. The reading takes place at 258 Bowery on the second floor at 7 PM; I'll be reading Fourier Series and a few other things with a poet named Matthew Burgess. Come by and I'll regale you with scandalous tales from the AWP!

Actually it wasn't very scandalous, just a fun, hypersocial weekend. We had a very gratifying response to our "New Nature Writing" panel, and I think I've gotten all the panelists to agree to send me their papers for posting here—I'll get on that after I'm back in Ithaca. We had expected a low turnout and catcalls from the Mary Oliver fans in the audience; instead the room was packed (well over a hundred people) and people we met afterwards kept telling us what a great panel it had been. I was thrilled to be approached by Forrest Gander with some very complimentary remarks immediately afterwards. Strangely unnervous chairing the panel; maybe the readings earlier in the week had helped me to get my game face on. It also helps that my brother in poetry Richard Greenfield was on the panel and had my back in case a band of disgruntled ecocritics rushed the table. Anyway that happened on Thursday afternoon and the rest of the trip was mostly a party. Too many books at the book fair (I'll list them later) to add to those I'd already acquired at Powells and Open Books. Meeting or re-meeting such bloggers as Laurel Snyder, Shanna Compton (good god, what an awful experience she and Sean had with JetBlue), Paul Guest, Kasey Mohammed, Janet Holmes, and Robin Reagler (apologies if your name not here). This AWP also served as something of a University of Montana reunion: in addition to the three Musketeers of Richard, Trevor Toland, and myself (someone proposed that we more resembled the trio of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion: guess who was who!) we were reunited with old friends Nils Michals, author of Lure, blogger Deborah Wardlaw-Pattilo, and Marisa (whose last name shamefully escapes me). Also there was Bob Baker, one of my favorite Montana profs and the reason I came to Cornell (he was a comp lit PhD there and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met), Joanna Klink (she wasn't teaching when we were there but she's Bob's partner now), and our old creative writing teacher Patricia Goedicke, who amazed us all by boogieing on the dance floor on the last night until well after midnight. The three of us were treated to lunch by Cal Bedient (who read some amazing poems from a new manuscript; you may also know his books Candy Necklace and The Violence of the Morning) and his friend 'Annah Sobelman (author of The Tulip Sacrament) who while a visiting prof at Montana introduced us to the work of Brenda Hillman and other innovative writers (including Cal, who came to Missoula for a memorable reading/visit wearing a ponytail and an acid-green shirt). Perhaps most gratifying was a long night of drinking with some current Montana students, including Brandon Shimoda (who I see has a collaborative poetry blog) and two guys whose last names I didn't catch but whose faces and passions I will not soon forget: Nathan and Chad. (Also met the Nabokovianly named Siobhan Scarry and a number of other current or former students.) We had an epic bull session about poetry, evil, politics, Montana, Baudelaire, Fanny Howe, Mennonite theology, friendship, and numerous other topics until closing time at a pub on Pender Street. Then of course there was Vancouver itself, all glinting green glass and Hong Kong crenellations. How staggering the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest is; how subtle, if not anemic, the East seems by comparison.

More reminiscing to come once I'm back in Ithaca with my best dog and best girl.

O Canada! Two minutes left here at the internet kiosk to say: the readings in Portland and Seattle were awesome, as is the Pacific Northwest generally. Now here in Vancouver with Richard--already met fellow blogger Paul Guest for the first time at a reception yesterday--and today's our panel, after which there will be nothing left to do but go to readings, buy books, and party. If I find a less expensive way to access the internet I'll do a more detailed post then; otherwise you'll have to wait till I return to Ithaca (or at least Trevor's place in Seattle) for my full report.

April Fool's Day update--couldn't get this to post yesterday, so I'll just add that I've met tons more bloggers and our New Nature Writing panel was very well attended and generally a huge success. This morning it's actually sunny out; maybe we'll play hooky for a while and take the ferry to Victoria, a very beautiful and touristy thing to do. More details later when better Internet access is available.

Good morning, Seattle! Long flight and bumpy, too. Consoled myself with an absolute fistful of books:

- The first three essays from Perloff's Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. She makes a useful distinction between the New Critical practice of "close reading," which tends to neglect the signifier in favor of thematics, and a "differential" practice. May have more to say about this later.

- More chunks of the Zukofsky issue of Chicago Review (they are very slow to update their website—it still shows the Dorn issue). Very stimulating essay on ethics as aesthetics, a topic near to my heart, by Susan Stewart. She's a smart cookie; I want to pick up her Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Also some good reviews, including one of the newly released Zukofsky-WCW correspondence. I knew Williams was "earthy," but as it turns out he was practically a rapper when it comes to his obsession with sex and mad props. Is there a good biography of him available? Besides his own, I mean.

- The Douanier Rousseau quarter of Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years. I've never had much patience for art criticism and tend to enjoy the biographical stuff more than the commentary on painting. But Shattuck is a lively and interesting writer; it also helps that the paintings he discusses are so familiar.

- Brenda Iijima's Around Sea. More pastoral, though she denies it at one point. Some breathtaking lyrical passages as the whole accumulates into a kind of word-picture that seems to be devoted to depicting what's at stake in our human relations given a recklessly imperiled environment. A hard book to summarzie.

- Jeff Clark's Music and Suicide. I really don't care for the first poem, "A Mantis and Chocolate," which in my initial flip-through had led me to conclude that this book is a serious falling off from The Little Door Slides Back, a book I love. But the book is undismissable when read at a sitting: yes, there are large tracts of self-indulgence, but there's also urgency and what I take to be a deliberately fucked-up euphony about many of the poems—a struggle with decadence encoded in the very language. The central poem/essay, "Shiva Hive," teeters on the edge between pretentiousness and profundity. What most impresses me is the eroticism and violence that's so close to the surface. He's auditioning pretty hard for the role of notre Baudelaire.

All right, Trevor and Richard are now up and wandering around the room and giving me shit about blogging, so it's time to go. Elliot Bay Books, maybe some tourist stuff (Pike Place Market, anyone?), then we have to go rent a car and head down to Portland. See you there!

Gearing up for the big departure on Saturday. Finished my Healey review and my AWP talk, so there's nothing left to do but pack. Hey! Will I see you on my Post-Avant PoWorld Tour 2005 (Abridged)? Here are some places and dates of interest:

PORTLAND, Ore.: On Monday, March 28 at 7:30 PM, Richard Greenfield and I will be reading at Portland State University. Not sure what the exact venue will be.

SEATTLE, Wa.: Tuesday, March 29 at 7:30 PM, Richard and I will be reading at Open Books at 2414 N. 45th Street. Call (203) 633-0811 for more information.

VANCOUVER, B.C.: Thursday, March 31 at 1:30 PM is when our panel on "The New Nature Writing" is happening at the AWP Conference. Again, that's me, Richard, Bin Ramke, Sally Keith, Karen L. Anderson, and Jonathan Skinner with a diverse group of short talks on the relationship between nature and innovative writing. Check us out!

NEW YORK, N.Y.: Tuesday, April 5 at 7 PM, Matthew Burgess and I will be reading as part of the "Experiments and Disorders" series at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery. I'll be putting more emphasis on Fourier Series here than I will at the other readings.

Blogging will be sporadic from here on out but when I get the chance I'll post updates. I'm expecting to meet a lot of bloggers for the first time out there, among other virtual friends and well-wishers. Should be quite a party! Now I just have to decide what I want to take with me to read on the plane....

The preceding suggests I myself am hardly untempted by the tactics of juxtaposition that characterize the latter-day American surreal. But for me sound is always primary, closely followed by the look of letterforms, with signification (better: the play of signification) and the palpable history of a given phrase or word a close third. Noticing that these prose poems obey certain formal laws which I am somewhat loath to quantify—but I am struck by my tendency to end them with something of a prose couplet (that is, two sentences whose respective endwords rhyme). So I haven't journeyed as far from verse as I might eventually like to do. But the only way I've found to make leaps from the structuring principle of sound is to rely on structuring principles of space as in page-as-field poems. After that the only clear way forward I see is by thinking of structure in a more macro way: would it be possible to orient composition around the paragraph rather than the sentence, line, or phrase? Possible for me, that is; I know it's quite possible for other people.

Is anyone else's sitemeter acting wacky?

Stick Figure Sunset

Ardency of the adrenals blazing on the copperbang roof of a caustic supermarket. Misread determination. Clang and jangle outside the parking lot, Potemkin shopping cart tumbling downstairs. A message from the gonads: go. Track the flight of the bumblebee past the projects and the shambles, haste bittersweeting waste. Tropes for honeylight strewn blinking over the trees. On the St. Charles streetcar a woman is buried deep like nothing else in New Orleans. My maw mau-maus me in the mausoleum made from the girlie magazines of my youth. That yielded to faster honeys, false horse latitudes. A woman represented by a skirt belled by a grating, great. You're with us, my bone china, you're one of the gang now.

Avast ye, Spongebob, but here's a pickle in primary hues: what else might be prehensile? Lute strings snap outside the oratory in synch with the supplicant's libido. Art of underwater. Sword snags on a rictus root and the filibusterers' final hurrah. We're falling backward on brittle golden hinds. Find a history for the cremaster muscle that gestures slyly at my gender, which even dandelions have. Seaplane lands on the Mississippi by a tanker spilling essence and peas. The ferry found a sealane between bruised nature and a Gemeinshaft. Alligator sausage at the cafe. A wilderness of me encircles my campfire nightly.

The Prelude whips to a stop, spitting gravel. My Huffy goes over a bump. This town is porous to my gesture, it seems to swim above the ground. Urgent burden of a nutsack mediated by heated mirrors. In the Navy the floor is a deck, the wall is a bulkhead, the bathroom is a head. Even the pirate navy yo-ho-hos its four to the floor. Wait till I play the race card tapdancing on cheap headstones. They say poverty isn't marriage, at least not in this grandstand. My dog is balding gracefully. My father hands out horny thumbs. If my features lack definition it's easier to bear your face. Carry me under your tongue and gargle your go-cup's light.

My first and only redhead, Zoe, a crown on island experience. Nimbus of the beachballed moon. If you can feel green fire you can feel yourself pitching across the lawn into your clean home plate. The inaudible body's clock puts out matches one by one. A dunce cap, felicity, a snifter in absentia. Rubbing alcohol, cool, it's a cruel summer. Your silence before a beatdown makes us call out your dead name. And if Tricky Dick should hear? My body's an admirable is. Clothes simulate an opening and an envelope's meant to be pushed. Sweat the imitation, Sally, plumb the simile's plum. Purple life before the decayed map of a simmering plain. The City of New Orleans was a train.

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.

So I went for a run this morning for the first time in four years: a beautiful spring morning, the perfect occasion for beginning the long march back into some kind of shape. And how am I rewarded? I threw my back out during the final sprint. Phooey. At least it's my upper back—I hear the lower back is more usual, and more painful. But I don't know if I'll be doing much sitting at computers for a while.

A predictably obtuse and petulant response to the letters written in defense of Ammiel Alcalay is now available for your head-shaking perusal. As far as my own part in it goes, I wonder how Lappen's rhetorical question, "Is this really the kind of education that public, taxpayer-funded universities and parents should have to pay for?" fails to constitute a call for censorship, if by "censorship" we mean an action taken to prevent the dissemination of a particular brand of speech or education.

I especially liked this part from the first paragraph: "Incapable of reasoned argument, spewing epithets, pretentious, paranoid, and stupid enough to conspire and provide cause for legal action right in public, they embody, in James Taranto's phrase, a 'toxic mix of self-pity and thuggery… characteristic of an alienated political minority.'" This is a perfect word-for-word description of Lappen's original article and the behavior of the most visible right-wing activists generally—except that they no longer have the excuse of being in the political minority for their behavior.

I hope readers of this blog will continue to join me in wishing Ammiel Alcalay well and in supporting his work. Why not start by checking out a few of his books: After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays 1982-1999, from the warring factions, and the anthology he edited, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing.

Why does this strike me as kind of creepy? Not just the ad itself, but the concept? Somehow this confirms me in my suspicion that The Believer, though in many ways an admirable magazine, has it in for poets and poetry.

Beginning the long run-up to Vancouver and AWP this week. I am finishing the little paper I'll be giving as part of the "New Nature Writing" panel that Bin Ramke, Richard Greenfield, Sally Keith, Karen L. Anderson, Jonathan Skinner, and myself are doing on Thursday, March 31 at 1:30 PM in the Hyatt Regency Plaza "B," 2nd floor. Got all that? My essay has the blandly overambitious title "The Nature of Writing" right now; at the moment it resembles a cage match between Mary Oliver and Louis Zukofsky. Guess who wins? I also have this other piece I'm fooling around with, "Theses on Pastoral," which would perhaps be more fun but I'm not sure how to finish it. It would have the virtue of brevity.

In preparation for thinking about both nature and Canada, I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of Christopher Dewdney's book The Natural History, an often erotic meditation on a world-landscape that ranges from Ontario to Brazil and from paleolithic times to the present day. If D.H. Lawrence moved to Toronto, earned a degree in paleontology, and wrote a history of sex (in the broadest possible terms), it might look like this:

Wooden alveoli erect and fragile
in the rarefied air of October, leaves
frosted-glass, rock chapel orange and red.
The sky no longer enclosing us. The sound
of a distant airplane blossoming into clarity
and not enclosed. Eels pulled from
the canal. Even the planets are motile,
hoary with diamonds above the chiming
sunset. She wims alone and naked
in a clear October lake. A white building
stands free and O the spirits looks dimly
out from there.

It's a noun-heavy poetry, approaching the problem of nouns from the opposite direction Stein chose: Dewdney's vocabulary is estranging in its accuracy, its deployment of unfamiliar, often scientific terms (or as he himself says, "Linnaeus a certain key"). (Stein defamiliarizes through deliberate vagueness, slippage of shifters, repetition, until we are half persuaded she is providing us with a record of the numinous, or at least of consciousness.) I'm becoming very interested in Canadian poetry generally: their mainstream seems much more alive to linguistic play and possibility than ours, if the little work I've seen (by Dewdney, Anne Carson, Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Steve McCaffrey) is any evidence. Vancouver should be a good opportunity to see and acquire a bit more of it.

My stick is kind of boring and canonical, I realize, and suspiciously androcentric. But with the desert island stuff especially I find I crave writing that's full of talk and personalities, and lots of it. Much as I love Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans doesn't quite fit the bill. But perhaps I should substitute the Franklin 3-volume edition of Emily Dickinson (which I'm lucky enough to actually own: a birthday present from my own Emily) for the Milton. Joyce has to stay: I'm gonnna be craving urban experience on that island. Proust is one of those never-had-time to get around to it deals (though I've read about half of Swann's Way)—if you've got the time, why not do it in French? Hopefully I'd be completely fluent by the time I was rescued.

Trying not to be utterly disheartened by the swelling roar of religio-political fanaticism that our polis is currently drowning in: the Schiavo mess, the "nuclear option" in the Senate, ANWAR drilling, IMAX afraid to show films about evolution—the list goes on, in large ways and small. We are sliding into the Dark Ages here, people. I'm increasingly revolted by religiosity and tribalisms and patriotisms of all descriptions. Where's our Voltaire? Where to find the ceaseless and bitter and accurate mockery that our political culture so richly deserves? The table is so far to the right it's on its side—when will the machine say TILT?

I've been watching that pesky "stick" circle around blogland for a while. Finally it's my turn, thanks to Kevin. Okay then.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

I think some people have been misled by this question: in the novel, this doesn't mean a book to be burned but a book that a resistance member chooses to memorize and thus "become." So I'd probably choose the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (the later editions are too long).

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Like Kevin, I too have had a thing for Death from the Sandman comics. Beatrice as embodied by Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing. And two Lucas-heroines were crucial to my pubesence: the bikini-clad Leia of Return of the Jedi and the sassy, blue-eyed, probably alcoholic heroine of Raiders of the Lost Arc, Marion Ravenwood aka Karen Allen. Guess I'm too visual a guy to have a crush on purely literary women, unlike the hapless hero of Woody Allen's great short story, "The Kugelmass Episode."

The last book you bought is:

Peter Gizzi's Some Values of Landscape and Weather.

The last book you read is:

Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.

What are you currently reading?

The twentieth anniversary issue of Verse, James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, Steve Healey's Earthling (I'm reviewing it for Bridge), Steve Benson's Blue Book, Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, and the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

Five books you'd take with you to a deserted island:

I'm assuming that a copy of the Bible and a complete edition of Shakespeare are gimmes, here. The other books are chosen for voluminousness (lots of time to kill), rereadability (ditto), and the company they'd provide:

1) John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose.
2) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
3) Complete works of Rilke in German.
3a) a German-English dictionary.
4) James Joyce, Ulysses.
5) Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu.
5a) a French-English dictionary.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 people) and why?

This stick dies with me, but y'all should feel free to answer it on your own blogs or webpages or church newsletters or whatever.

A shout out to Action Books, the new publishing outfit from Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göoransson. They have books forthcoming from Lara Glenum, Aase Berg, and Arielle Greenberg.

Off to hear my colleague Alex Papanicolopoulos talk about a paper he wrote on Stein's Stanzas in Meditation.