Autobiographical

My full-length book, Where We Think It Should Go, can be yours via Octopus Books, Small Press Distribution, or Amazon. We better celebrate these hard copies while we can. When I'm not writing poetry, I teach amazing young people who are blind. I believe in a healthier future.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Satellite Telephone



That's a photo of the journal Satellite Telephone posing as a face. And the photo is backwards, and the mirror is what you get. Anyhow, it's a magazine put out by Robert Dewhurst. I have about 10 pages of stuff in there. There is a typo to correct. In the poem, "San Leandro," "I bought friends" should read "I brought friends." It's not me in the poems though, so I don't know. Maybe she did buy friends. Maybe I wrote that. Maybe I changed my mind. Is that why Typo is Typo? Also there's a little "stars" for "stairs" action which I wish we could do in real life.

Here's information from the website. Lots of great stuff in there.

"SATELLITE TELEPHONE is a small, irregularly published magazine of poetry and fictocriticism, born in Portland, Oregon, and since on the move. It's second issue (Spring/Summer 2008) came out today (July 23rd), and is pleased to feature new writing by: CLAIRE BECKER, LYNN BEHRENDT, ROBERT DEWHURST, FANNY HOWE, KEVIN KILLIAN, RODNEY KOENEKE, CHRIS KRAUS, DOROTHEA LASKY, SAM LOHMANN, KIMBERLY LYONS, SIMON PETTET, CHRIS PIUMA, ARLO QUINT, DAN RAPHAEL, HANNAH SAYLE, KYLE SCHLESINGER, FRANK SHERLOCK, and SUSIE TIMMONS. The artist-writer GOODY-B. WISEMAN drew a beautiful cover.

"The magazine is xeroxed and staple-bound, with silkscreened covers. It costs $7, postage paid, and can be purchased below with paypal. Copies _may_ also be found in Portland at Reading Frenzy; in Los Angeles at FAMILY; in Washington, DC at Bridge Street Books; in Amsterdam at Boekie Woekie; and in Germany at the Cologne Kunstverein. Or, like the first issue, #2 is free as a trade for mail art or other zines. You should do this. Email the editor for his current address."

This summer I went camping for my summer


I'm back to work now as are many of you probably. It's kind of sad to have time go quickly, be back to work, feel the gulf from Saturday to Saturday. Because so much happened—you moved your body to and from a place so many times, but a little piece of garbage sat waiting to be thrown away, and it didn't get thrown away. And a whole week went by. And a sweater sat soaking to get a stain out. It sat for two weeks in the water, not disintegrating perceptibly.

It's exciting too, and maybe even though the job seems harder you're doing it a little better because one thing you learned to do last year comes easier. I'm sad and excited which manifests in exhaustion at the end of every day. My goals from last new year's are met (moving to city, riding bike), so the next four months I can use to file and mail things and update this blog when I'm not working. And drink less, be less social, reverse my previous new year's resolutions.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008


I had up a very unflattering photo of a French horn, but I took it down because it didn't go with the very flattering landscape of my blog. In its place, here is my sister and me at Laura Ingalls Wilder's house.
I used to play the French horn, and it was wild.

There's a lot of other stuff I've been meaning to put on here, like the Frank Stanford Literary Festival, some chapbooks I got in the mail, and Satellite Telephone magazine I got in the mail.

More soon!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Did I ever mention that the new episode of Rabbit Light Movies is up? I'm one of them up there in a hotel tower looking down on railroad country in Lincoln, Nebraska. Don't judge me. I'm pale and tired and reading the title poem of this blog. It's called Human Is Animal, Animal Is Back. That causes a lot of google searchers for, I don't know, human and animal sex, to end up here. Shit, that mention's going to make it worse.
Lauren Levin's excitement about Link+ on the Mrs. Maybe's Seance Blog reminded me of the mystery of my stolen (and according to the library, paid for) graduate thesis. It was one of my first posts on this blog. I'm kind of glad because I don't have to steal it myself in the future. But really, who burned my thesis? You can search for it on Link+...

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Bruce Conner

I missed it for a while, but Bruce Conner died. Here's his NYTimes obituary. Maybe my sister can remind me, or my upcoming trip to Kansas City. Was there some of his art at the Nelson?

The S.F. Chronicle had some interesting stuff:

"In 1967, Conner ran for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. He described his business or occupation as 'Nothing. My qualifications for said office are as follows: The light of the body is the eye; therefore when thine eye is single, they whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is dark, they body is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.'

"One campaign speech was a list of desserts, reports the Bay Guardian. The artist/candidate received 5,228 votes."

Start the backward trajectory of limited choices as technology takes us the other way

I tried writing down every thought. I thought it would be a poem. It was fourteen pages long. I've got to work at the fourteen pages to find the poem—like finding order in the chaos in nature. Finding math. Figuring out ferns. But the poem might not be there. Or it has to be there somewhere, but I might not ever go in there to find it.

I've been trying all day to put words to a scary bleak dream. I was at a version of the house where I grew up. Everything in the yard was dead. My mom was gone, and my dad telling what I needed to know about the house before he left. He was standing in the yard watering the dead things with a hose. And sometimes my dad was not my dad. He was my friend who just moved away.

I'm supposed to spend more time alone and get things done, but is there something sad about getting done that you're meant to do? Balance. Only temporarily have I ever achieved that.

Do you think that you should get paid to do what you want to do, get money from the state and be a poet? Maybe we shouldn't all have to be teachers? My housemate thinks that if that's the case, then he should get paid to be a sailor. I say Yes. But he believes in work. They're both work. Poems can turn others into poets, and that's for the good of society. Can anyone prove this empirically with a longitudinal study?

What if we each spent all day on the basics instead of being extreme specialists? Healthwise, isn't that what they're saying we're supposed to do?

Paris Hilton's Response to John McCain

Friday, August 1, 2008


Available soon from Traffiker Press, the thing you see on the table: Jared Stanley's flapping open chapbook, The Outer Bay. It is sure to be an excellent read. To get it, you're going to have to send a check to Andrew Kenower probably.

On a side note, I am wondering if anyone has watched the cancelled HBO series created by David Milch, John From Cincinnati. It has many of the same actors and speaking styles and sometimes music as Deadwood. I recently finished it, after getting stuck in the middle for a while. It was alright, way better than many things.

Tonight maybe I'm going to see The Exiles, 1961, which looks awesome. And I'm now going to try to go swimming. Goodbye.