Surreal

What a wild day! Gene worked and I hung around Miama University of Ohio and sat in the library and worked and watched the stock market ooze.

And I have two poems up today at The Salt River Review. This makes up for the slew of rejections I've gotten all through September.

And The Beat Goes On

Gene & I have slid down south to celebrate Anniversary 23. Wow. Twenty-three. We'll be state parking it after today. Hopefully later this week I'll have some good nature photos to post. I love, love, love to see the tobacco drying in those open barns.

In other southern news, I've been really enjoying the clusterflock blog, which has absolutely nothing to do with the south thematically, except there's a link there today to another blog that has Flannery O'Connor giving a lecture at Notre Dame and reading her story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Follow the links and you can download the lecture and the story.

And finally, I have a poem up at jmww. A very nice way to end the day.

Leafy Green

The next time I visit my California brother, I want to see this.

Woo-Hoo!!!

Chad has had work accepted at Thieves Jargon! Congrats!

Watering

The mailman was good to me today. Good. What Water Left Behind by Rutger Kopland arrived. A while back I wrote a short poem called "Leaving the Keweenaw" that just didn't quite get to where it needed to go. I liked it, but it just didn't quite finish the arc for almost everyone who read it. Well, Kopland's first poem in What Water Left Behind is another leaving poem, but it is just perfect. I can't wait to dive further in.

Leaving

Leaving is not the same
as creeping out of the house
pulling the door quietly to
behind your existence and not
coming back. You continue to be
someone who's expected.

Leaving you may describe as
a sort of staying on. No one
is waiting, for you are still there.
No one says goodbye,
for you are not going away.

(Rutger Kopland, What Water Left Behind, Waxwing Book, 2005)

Neck Deep in the Big Muddy

"The losses for average people are just beginning." - guest on NPR's Diane Rehm show this morning.

They're more than just beginning. Hold on to your hats or whatever that thing is that gives you comfort.

In a side item, while the world financial markets are crashing, the featured article at Yahoo this a.m. had to do with Michelle Obama's fashion choices. For some reason my laptop has the Yahoo page set as my home page. That's going to be changing.

So here's my little survey: What's your homepage?

When I settle on something, I'll let you know mine.

Fact Check

"The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise. Out of wounded vanity or stubborn pride or desolate need, the poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction to the intolerable. Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe, as well as of the world of relations, the solitude of the apparently marginal soul."

Louise Gluck, "Best American Poetry 1994: Introduction."

Come Here Often?

Why, yes, yes, I do.

Math & Art

A slideshow to start your day. Or end it. The BBC.

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

And The Chicago Trib on the candidates' healthcare plans or The Washington Post article.