[Where] Do We Go [Now] ?

We've got some top-shelf gloom happening here in Akron, Ohio today. But at least it's kind of warm gloom. If you have to have gloom, it might as well be warm.

This time of semester I feel like I'm skidding on a patch of ice. I did manage to catch up on my grading, though, and that was a relief. So I'm skidding on ice but not spilling coffee on myself in the process.

Just when I started feeling better from pneumonia, my kids came down with a cold, and then (surprise) so did I. This morning at 4 am I thought I was a goner. Right now, though, I believe I will survive. Perhaps this is just the universe underlining my resolution to take better care of myself in 2011.

I usually prefer the even years to the odd years. I did get tenure this year, and got my second book of poems picked up, but you know, I kind of have hope for 2011, too.

Lots of hope for 2012, namely no longer being an administrator and being a teacher and editor again. Just a teacher and editor. Oh, it sounds so heavenly right now.

I haven't been very creative lately, but I'm starting to take more pictures (and see pictures everywhere--so distracting), and I reckon I am going to be like a loaded poem gun come December.

Hang on to your [ - - - ]

Hello from the headquarters of a person who can breathe. She can also talk and sleep and eat food. She can take pictures of the moon. It's hard to take pictures of the moon. I mean, really hard. I want--I mean, she wants--to take a lot of pictures. Perhaps this is to compensate for the lack of poems lately.

She is already making her New Year's Resolutions. One can be summed up as : Get the Fuck out of There.

By "there" I'm sure she's referring to the office. Not Dodge. Dodge is just fine, for now.

The person who can breathe, she realized (from the time when she couldn't breathe) that she can get a lot more done at home. As a bonus, she can get these things done with cats nearby, which is almost always a good thing.

The person who can breathe, she's not happy that her kids will not be home for Thanksgiving. However, the person can breathe, and has thereby made some fun holiday plans, including a day (Friday) dedicated entirely to laziness. So if you are fixing to email somebody who can breathe on Friday, please forgive her if she does not reply. It is not because she is waiting in line to purchase electronic gadgets at a bargain basement price.

Updated BOR contrib list here, and a list with some good friends on it here.

Thanks so much for all of the well wishes on the book. The person who can breathe feels tremendously grateful, and thoroughly oxygenated.

O Holy Insurgency

My Exile in Lungville was seriously uplifted by the tremendous news that Black Lawrence Press will be publishing my new collection of poems, O Holy Insurgency, in summer or fall of 2012. They've been an absolute dream to work with on Saint Monica, and have taught me a lot as a book series editor as well as a poet. I feel much more comfortable shouting other people's good news from the rooftops, but I wanted to share this here because I am so damn excited about it.

O Holy Insurgency is dear to me personally, which made sending it out for publication a terrifying prospect. It's also hard because I'm a poetry book publisher, which makes me overly-informed about some elements of the process. I am very glad that it's found such a good home. I feel like I can breathe a little (and now I literally can, thanks to modern medicine).

If you'd like to read some of the poems from the book, you can find them online at diode, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily (via The Journal), The Rumpus, Thermos, ducts.org, and likely some other places that I'm forgetting right now, due to the excitement.

Thank you so much to all of my spectacular friends for all of the support as I worked on this manuscript. Here's a little blog flashback to July 2009, when I was up to 49 pages of the ms.

Now back to the real world. Thanks again, everyone!

Tall, dark, and branchsome.

This big guy lives behind me with his friends and some wires. It was windy yesterday and he took off all his clothes and threw them in my back yard. I wonder if he's regretting that decision right about now.

In other news:

I'm on the mend. I'm not coughing so much. I have tried (especially per Lyle's advice) to get more sleep. I took some measures (new alarm clock, revamped bedding, etc) to get Ray to stop waking me up every three hours. I think lack of sleep is much to blame for the current state of things.

The Monkey and the Wrench is getting paged, and it looks gorgeous. I am so excited. The design features real monkeys. Well, drawings at least.

The past few weeks I was wandering around wondering when I'd ever get some good news of my own. I'm probably the only person who has ever felt like that (ha ha). I may have even said it out loud. I'm pretty sure nobody was around.

I'm having one of those days at work where I am totally distracted and borderline useless.

Let's just say that I got some really good news today, and that I'll share it soon.

I've already told the big guy who lives behind me, but he's not going to let the cat out of the bag, or the bird out of the hand, or whatnot.

Iron [Lung] Maiden

It's a very strange thing being knocked at random out of normal life, which relies upon a great deal of fortitude, and sequestered to the house and the couch, where I don't know how to watch tv other than sports, and I don't know how to relax, and I don't have the sense to make tea or eat crackers. I'm beginning to learn, however, because apparently if you don't do the above, you wake up incredibly more sick. If you forget to take painkillers at regular intervals, or to use your inhaler as directed, you will feel rather deathful.

I've been under the weather since early-ish October. But I just keep on moving, you know? Because that's what I've always had to do. I can live without food or sleep. I can teach even if the room is spinning (who says you don't learn any valuable skills in grad school?). I can put my mind elsewhere. It's just what I do.

Except, apparently that's hard to keep up if you can't breathe, so here I am, pondering the spaciousness of my house, and the fact that somehow I have a house, and knowing that some time this morning I need to get to the grocery store for some produce, and then make a lazy display of myself until the kids get back from visiting their father.

I'm great at taking care of sick people. Even sick pets! But I am physically restraining myself (overstatement) from doing work right now. When I was a wee bit delirious I kept making promises (to whom, I am not certain) that I will take better care of myself from now on. Like, really try to be healthy, or whatever.

Meanwhile, my little Saint Monica has been getting a bunch of pre-orders on Amazon, which has brought me endless amazement and thankfulness from my sick bed. I spend so much more time editing and commenting on other people's poems than I do writing or pondering my own. It feels almost unnatural or wrong to think about my own work before the work of others.

I think I sense a theme here.

Anyway, please send me some lungtastic vibes. When I make it to the grocery store, I will buy healthy things, and I will consume them. Oh, and the above is a hyperbolic segment of my Japanese maple, not a cross-section of my lung, but it sure feels that way lately.

Done.

Have creepshow, will travel.

Yesterday was the first time I read a novel cover to cover in, like, I don't know. Maybe two years? Maybe five? And I remembered how that used to be a weekly thing when I was a grad student. Nowhere to go but couch and cat and book. At the time I thought it was a really shitty way to live. I was obviously an idiot to think that. I would love to have more days of nothing but read. Note: there is a difference between day of nothing but read and day of evaluating 50+ poetry manuscripts in a sitting. Just wanted to clarify.

This week I am going to Jackson, Mississippi with the amazing Erika Meitner to visit students of Steve Kistulentz and to read some poems and to be on the radio and to bring our poetry taboo craft talk to a new audience. With my family situation and all it's been a while since I have been able to travel far away aside from AWP, so this is really cool. Things are finally better. I have never been to the south aside from AWP Hotlanta. I have no idea what to expect. I used to travel quite extensively. But I also used to be able to read for eight uninterrupted hours. Think there's a connection between these things?

Haven't written many poems. Have, however, started planning for a major fiction project. I have no idea what's gotten into me. I've just been thinking in prose sentences lately. Perhaps it's the weather. Who knows.

Oh, and the novel? Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I'm reading it for the book club I moderate, but I probably would've read it in one day even if I wasn't under the gun.