Detritus or not.

DETRITUS:

The bag above. The germs that keep getting everybody sick (o universe, thank you and knock very softly and kindly on wood, for keeping my family relatively healthy). The economy. Grumblings. Trees that somehow make more dead leaves even though they're completely bare. Fights over nothing, conducted by children who don't really care who gets to sit on the right side of the couch anyway. Being cold all of the time, even when it's not cold out and students are running around in flipflops and no coats. Grading, and its avoidance. Whiners. Unloading the dishwasher, then realizing that it's stupid to gripe over unloading a dishwasher, since having a dishwasher is a true luxury. Emails without answers. Administrative inheritances of in-kind non-blessings. Updating the calendar, printing it, then having to update it again. Soggy back yard lawns. Ultra-loud music when put on hold, followed by ultra-quiet customer service representative. Knowing it's going to snow some time in the future. Waning supplies of Halloween candy. The lingering reek left when a car in a parking lot turns into a great conflagration.

NOT DETRITUS:

This week we're welcoming visiting writer Matthew Guenette to Akron. He's going to visit several classes, conference with UA NEOMFA students, and read on Thursday night. Photos will be forthcoming. Here are the details:

The University of Akron English Department’s Literary Arts Series presents a poetry reading with Matthew Guenette and Michael Dumanis on November 12, 2009 at 6 pm in The Martin Center Library Room 105 Fir Hill Street Akron, OH 44325

Matthew Guenette's first book, Sudden Anthem, won the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. He is also the author of a chapbook, Hush of Something Endless, from Ropewalk Press. Sudden Anthem was named a 2008 Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the Wisconsin Library Association. In 2009, Matthew was named the Writer-in-Residence of the Hessen-Wisconsin Literary Exchange, where he spent three months in Wiesbaden, Germany, giving workshops, readings, and working with prisoners. He lives and works in Madison, WI.

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) and the coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). He is currently an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where he also directs the CSU Poetry Center.

There will be a complimentary buffet following the reading.

How to defibrillate a poem (before it's too late).

1. Fold the poem in half. Put it in your underwear drawer. Not in your drawers; in a drawer. Close the drawer. Go for a walk. Choose someplace ugly, filled with sorrow. Extra points for a locale that includes profuse multi-sensory information (ripe, overflowing Dumpsters, putrid crab apples piled on a lawn). While on the walk, feel sorry for yourself until you become distracted by the above. Upon returning home, wash your hands, then finish the poem.

2. Select a very sharp pair of scissors. Put those scissors back where you found them. Select the dullest pair of scissors that you can find. Cut your stalled poem into strips. Invite some outside source (clothes dryer, pet hamster, favorite lover) to mix up the strips for you. Dump the strips on the floor. Blink three times. Reconstruct poem from the strips.

3. Why is your poem worth defibrillating? Can't answer this question? Then perhaps you should put it in cold storage instead.

4. Read the poem aloud three times, in different voices. One of these voices must be Scottish (do your best). Then, throw the poem away. Take the garbage out. Salute the sanitation workers as they dump your trash onto the truck. Return to your desk and recreate the poem from whatever you remember. Finally, eliminate any mention of haggis that might have seeped in during the process.

5. Journey to your favorite office supply store. Do not purchase any Hello Kitty stickers. Instead, select a package of highlighter pens. Five colors will suffice. Ponder the poem. Consider its various elements and/or techniques. Give each element / technique a name. One technique must be named "Just Me Being a Shithead." Highlight the various elements / techniques in their own colors. Then rewrite the poem using only one of those elements / techniques. Feel free to color the entire poem orange upon completion, if that satisfies you.

How to kill a poem (before it even starts).

1. Write in close proximity to the dull, everyday tasks that you need to do. Example: poise yourself with notebook in the middle of a pile of dirty laundry. Turn on several fans so that tumbleweeds of pet hair cartwheel across the floor. Refresh your email inbox every five minutes and reply to even the most inane messages, even spam about the Ebay account you don't have.

2. Get a great idea, or even a promising idea, and then lose your nerve. Scan your memory (google works, too!) for other poems about the same thing, and convince yourself that they are all much better than your own poem.

3. Begin pondering the following questions. What is poetry, really? If I put a stack of poems on a scale opposite a bunch of bananas, which would weigh more, and therefore be more valuable? What else could I be doing right now?

4. Complain on your blog about not writing. Whine to your friends. Clip coupons. Berate yourself over all of the contests you didn't win, and the grants you didn't receive, even if you never applied in the first place.

5. Situate yourself in a public place. Make small talk (of the non-flirty variety). Tell people that you are a polymer scientist. Tell people that you make ships in a bottle for a living. Tell people that you invented the pylon cone. Run away screaming. Do not consider writing a poem about the experience.

My cat is on Prozac, but I am not.

What I do not need:

1. A diary. I think I had one as an adolescent. Even then I didn't need one the way some people do.

2. Distractions. Perhaps this is because I am naturally distracted by things that shouldn't be distracting. I don't think television could ever fit into my life again, aside from watching football occasionally.

3. Tea. I wish I needed or wanted tea. I grew up drinking tea all of the time, but that's because my mom made it for me. I'd like to be a tea drinker. I'm just not.

4. Reading for pleasure. Don't hit me. I just don't get to elect to read something because it's enjoyable. Often, however, I do find myself liking the things I have to read.

5. More than 5.5 hours of sleep per night. I hear you're supposed to get more than that.


What I do need:

1. At least one instance of unexpected beauty every day. Today I viewed some ominous clouds in the distance, and they were exactly what I needed to see at that moment.

2. Typos, and other language mistakes that remind me how playful words can be.

3. The uncanny. I need this even more than coffee.

4. Something small and furry that sneaks around my house, yet ultimately ignores me. I have four of these at present. That's not counting the ones I'm just imagining are there.

5. A wee bit of competitiveness. I am not proud of this. Sometimes I need to intimidate myself in order to get inspired.

Cavalier

What happens when you have a bunch of poems that you believed in (and believed) at one point, but no longer believe in (or believe)? I'm talking about a change of heart; not just outgrowing the poems, but no longer meaning them. No longer caring about what they have to say.

Is a poet obligated to mean the poems he or she sends out into the world, or reads to the public?

I never faced this dilemma until recently.

Perhaps I didn't have enough meaning to begin with back then.

I've probably mentioned that I trashed an entire book this past year. I made the Saint Monica series into a chapbook, but that left 50-60 pages of poems that I basically abandoned after publishing most of them in journals. People have been shocked that I don't intend to make those poems into a book. I don't want to, and it wouldn't feel right. I couldn't picture myself doing a reading tour with those poems in 2012.

Kelli has some fascinating posts about the evolution of book manuscripts. I know that I need to get motivated to work on assembling/sequencing/submitting my new ms, the one I wrote to replace the one I threw away. I wonder if I'd be more motivated if I didn't work in literary publishing. I wonder if I am totally overthinking this. I wonder if I'd seem so cavalier if I were a fiction writer. Don't they throw things away all of the time?

Not jellyfish, of course.

Bird's eye.

I'm still not writing, but I'm taking pictures again, and that makes me happy. I'm using my real camera quite a bit, and the camera on my blackberry too (I figured out how to turn that evil flash off). Every day I see 2-3 things I wish I could've photographed, but either wasn't quick enough or was too self-conscious to stop and ponder. There's a lovely sewer grate with my name on it here on campus, and some day it will be mine.

Right now I'm contemplating frugality. I've never had to be especially frugal in the past, but being on my own and supporting two kids by myself, I need a crash course. I'm trying to only purchase items I really need at the grocery store. In my former life I'd cut myself a blank check for groceries and end up buying all kinds of strange items. Last week I shopped when I had barely any time, and that helped. My one semi-indulgence has been turning my creepy basement into a nice rec room. I'm hoping it will be a good investment.

Perhaps this is a personality quirk, but I always consider the week I'm currently in to be "over." So I'm already in week 11 (out of 15) of the semester. Somewhere near the end of September time sped up. It's warm here now, and though I spent several hours with the leaf blower the other day somehow my yard is all leafy again, just not quite as bad. The leaf blower had a direct effect on my handwriting, after shaking my wrist for that long, and my signature looks like the scribblings of a madwoman. I think it's funny. Thankfully I don't have papers to grade right now.

I think I had a dream about AWP Denver last night, but I don't remember any of it.

The Real Scare

Today I'm giving "working at home" a try, while various people come kill ants, measure for carpet, maintenance the furnace, and install a programmable thermostat. While this happens I plan to do some grading, and also blow the leaves out of the back yard. My yard is the width of a business-sized envelope, so hopefully this won't be too hard. I already did the front and it did not kill me.

It's strange being in my house alone. It's luxurious, and not luxurious, but mostly just creepy. Every minute of my home time is usually witnessed by at least one, if not both, of my kids. Right now I'm feeling very unsupervised. But I still need to get work done.

Without meaning to, I have entered into a phase of not writing. Perhaps it's an October thing. At any rate, there are no new poems to report. I was too tired Friday night, and so forth.

I know this is, like, twenty years too late, but I think I'm finally ready to stop trying to impress my parents. It's impossible. Even if I won the Nobel Prize my mom would still remind me that I'm not a brain surgeon. If I went back to school to become a brain surgeon she'd probably gripe about me not being the right kind of brain surgeon. It's just very disheartening when your own parents are incapable of being pleased with you.

Perhaps instead of working at home I'll go get a mohawk! That'll show 'em.