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Some strange things I've seen lately:
The Oscar Mayer Weinermobile (in a hotel parking lot)
A large photo of Osama Bin Laden that had been used as target practice, and was thus littered with bulletholes (in a cafe in Harrisonburg)
Several tall fir trees decorated with 2-foot wide, bright yellow, plywood kangaroos (my best guess is the owner must work at the Australian embassy, which itself is decorated with a large, light-up, surfing santa whose surfboard is pulled by a team of eight kangaroos).
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I am making a few hand-bound copies of my mss, "Moving Day," for family gifts this year. I am very pleased with the multiple-signature binding method that I came up with, which is significantly less of a pain in the ass than doing a kettle stitched, mulled binding into hard boards (yes, I know more bookbinding terms than you, and therefore I am more awesome). I will probably try to post some pictures later today.
I told Jeff that when the apocalypse descends, I would earn our living as a bookbinder, like in Colonial Williamsburg. He laughed, because he thinks that is less of a post-apocalyptic survival skill than say, being able to hunt, kill, and dress a raccoon, but I think that we are advanced enough to have a literate apocalypse. People will still want the news, and Bibles. I'm thinking that after the apocalypse, people will especially want Bibles. It's the #1 bestseller of the end times!
I found a moleskine that I half used up taking notes and things back in early 2007, and then somehow lost for the past year and a half. It is full of extremely odd scribbles and a bunch of bitchy/misanthropic things I wrote while listening to readings that I (apparently) didn't care for much.
Here is a representative page of odd scribbles:
I'm unconvinced.
Condos in Murderland
Portofino & its promontory
Flaming mallard confrontation
throw me down into a meat reverie
And here is a representative page of bitchy/misanthropic things:
Poetry reading or prelude to getting drunk? Begs question of why we don't just skip ahead.
all of poetry seems bankrupt & retarded
instead of writing, we should steal things
Poetry is what I do because I'm a coward.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
In the new issues of Bird Dog, and The Hat, and in the forthcoming 10th-anniversary issue of LIT.
I am amazed whenever my poems actually come out in journals, because I am a very very bad submitter. Terrible. I never know where to send anything. Which is silly, but somehow true. I can name about 1000 magazines, but feel weird about trying to figure out which ones I should send to.
But you know me. And maybe my pomes. Any suggestions for places to place my feeble outpourings? I know this is lame but I feel like if I actually have suggestions from non-me people, this will somehow be helpful, as I am so woefully uncertain as to my own ability to tell where I should be submitting that it amounts to a paralysis.
One thing I have noticed this year is that the zeitgeist has become more favorable to my "Applies to Oranges" poems. When I first wrote them, they were dead in the water at every journal I tried. Now they seem to get picked up whenever I work up the nerve to send some out. I have no idea what the heck is in the air and water over there in editor-land that makes squat, unexplanatory, orange-referencing pseudo-sonnets the hot ticket item this year. But I will take what I can get.
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Oh well. I am full of ham and have been gifted with some cupcakes, so all in all I am feeling pretty good about it all even though the Nobel and Pulitzer committees grievously omitted to award me prizes prior to the Big Three-Oh cut-off date. Alas, dreams of my youth!
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