THAT SHE MIGHT APPEAR, THAT IT HASN'T BEEN THREE YEARS

k so witty intros aside, the long + short of it is i've come up with some new self-prompts for poems.  (the) bucknell (younger poets seminar i attended this june) was more of a draining experience for me than anything of a kickstart; i scraped clean every last bit of education and haphazard experience and when i came home i felt like i hadn't quite come up for air just yet.  

anyway so i've been thinking a little bit about america as a giant blow-away bazaar, about the torn-off truck tires littering the roads (this is easy to think about when one came at me like a heat-seeking missile on the eisenhower last week) that have a name, apparently -- illinois alligators, & so then about the alligator child i saw in pennsylvania this june at reptileland, the keeper's fingers roped around his little clenched mouth.  also i don't have a centralia poem yet.  we took an impromptu field trip at bucknell out east to this coal town that's been burning underground for the last fifty years.  smoke escapes from rocks, from graves, and the next week in workshop everyone had jumped on that bandwagon.  bodies burning underground.  (the bodies burning underground bandwagon?)  morbid shit, but obviously beautiful.  anyway i was too busy writing a poem about women who are sexually attracted to bridges to really think too much about centralia those last few days.  i want to say this is typical for me but it might take this blog in a strange(r) direction.

i mean.  i have so much stuff out right now to magazines, and all i can think about is that the last time someone picked a few pieces of mine for an anthology, they made a beeline toward the villanelle i wrote at seventeen.  this happens year after year.  so i wrote another villanelle this june (this one albeit being about a virgin trying to avoid inevitable necrophilia, or something like that - i'm not really sure to be honest) for some vague karmic reason but hasn't seemed to help.  this is where i start grousing about rimbaud quitting the po-biz at seventeen because he knew he'd peaked, or about the fact that my ideas about what makes a good poem have, like, shifted slightly, but mostly it's: you should probably write more often and - well, i don't know if there's an and.

anyway i should shower & get on my swimsuit - i'm spending the day at the community pool with an old friend from high school summer enrichment biology (nope not joking) before i go pick up the boy from his internship.  bringing some c.d. wright for some beach reading.  & all that.