Frank!

The NY Times Book Review profiled a new collection of poems by Frank O'Hara (my favorite-est poet).

Booze, artists, poetry, NYC, tragic death... what more could a romantic hope for?

While I'm at it...

I'm up late due to a surfeit of sleep today. Besides rising late I took a long nap after lunch. This morning I took Frieda to the beach with my coworker, Lisa, and her friends John and Yosh. The dogs had a great time, though I think Frieda overdid it, her hip is sore and being a crybaby, she's acting incredibly put out about it. Me, I feel gritty - there's easily a pound of sand down my shirt.

This last week was busy. Summer is usually slow around university campuses, but I've got some ongoing projects to slog through. Adding insult to injury, I was also hormonal as hell and that tends to suck my energy away. And make me weep uncontrollably. Nonetheless, I had a productive week, poetically speaking, as I entered out an assload of poems into some contests. (Assload: that would be more than "a fucking lot," though considerably less than "goddamn horrifically vast.")

I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any summer vacation plans - all of our travel is happening this fall. Pairing that with my heavy workload makes me feel a little overwhelmed. I'm also bummed that the solstice is behind us - now we start losing daylight. I realize this happens incrementally, but I mourn the loss of sunlight anyway.

We were watching the first of Frontline's two-part series Bush's War tonight. You know, some light, weekend entertainment. It's both impressive and angering at the same time - the horrible march toward war where almost every player in the administration bowed to the whims of fucking Cheney. It's a finely crafted outline with amazing photos and moving interviews. One realizes, watching CIA and Pentagon officials sit and spill their guts out, that these people were burned badly enough to participate in this documentary. These aren't people who would generally run to the media and let loose - they're truly appalled enough by the adminstration's actions to come out 7 years later and tell their stories. Part two begins with the first attack on Baghdad, the actual start of the aggression. As Navin Johnson said in The Jerk: "Roll the ugliness."

Wouldn't Navin be a great name for a cat? I think it would.

Sean's stepdad has been scanning Sean's baby pictures this week (a fucking lot of them) and many of them are unspeakably cute. This is my favorite:

Self-Indulgence

I'm working on this new poem - this is my first draft, after several rough drafts. My process is to write it out long-hand several times over, modifying it until I feel it is "done" enough to bother typing. How do I know when it's ready? I don't mind reading it. I worry that this poem is a bit inaccessible. I showed it to my friend Brian and he seemed to feel it was a bit hard to enter. I don't mind this - it's a hard balance for me to strike, saying what I want to say, how I want to say it, but also allowing some of it to get through to the reader. I don't want to play to an audience, but it would be nice if they caught my general gist.

I think it needs to be expanded outward. There's more to say, although I'm tempted to let it be for a while.

Letterhead

Should we call me a cat’s toy or
tired mouse? That’s not quite
it – a double-breasted bauble
a mailbox slit rammed with
letters, outgoing notes unread. We
won’t extend one finger,
unfurl a knuckle inside the crease
split a jagged line – not for old
time’s sake or even a bubble of gas,
a laugh. We, flurry of loose’d pages
a sigh, leaves that never hit
the ground. We boats sink
paper melts from our mouth.
We are the page, slicing
each pad of the fingers I own.
I the whole hand, cup
at the sea, open.