Among The Jumbled Heap

On becoming a famous poet…

Want to know how to become the most important poet in America over night? Jim Behrle has the answer: How you can become the most important poet in America overnight. Here's a snippet: There are many paths through the art. Having enough money to sit in a log cabin all day watching foxes make out, with berries on one’s breath. Having an entire university beneath one’s command. Ability to drag friends in for a little merlot and sloppy sex with students. This is perhaps my favorite part: ...

The Yankee South

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankee...

Poetry makes nothing happen…

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. -W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" I've been thinking a lot about poetry and politics. This is one of those recurring themes in my thought...

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...

More of Andre on Writing

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I'll write more on him later, but I can't resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after d...

Twenty Tippled Years From Today

Looking at journals as I prepare to move, I came across this sonnet I wrote some time in '97 or '98. Forgot I used to write sonnets. Twenty tippled years from today, sitting On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing With a mason jar in hand and sipping Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious, Twenty tippled years and I will think about you. Twenty years ...

Nugget of Wisdom from Andre

"Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book she...