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Sunday, June 6, 2004

The really weird thing is that my knee disappeared when I was attempting to demonstrate the action in Rhina Espaillat's "Reservation," in which "the man across the table drops his head / mid-anecdote, just managing to clear / a basket of warm rolls and butter stacked / like little golden dice beside his ear." He was more graceful, but then, he was dead.


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Back from the Carrboro Poetry Festival, where I met Chris Murray, Kasey Mohammad, and Tony Tost, who with his fiancée Leigh had my wife and I in stitches. (Thanks, Deana, for going with me.) Clayton Couch disappeared after reading. Among those I heard but didn't get to realtime blog, I particularly enjoyed John Balaban (though my wife tells me Linh Dinh said that Balaban's Vietnamese is pretty much unintelligible) and Gerald Barrax, but almost everyone put on a good show. Randall Williams brought a Bush effigy; Hassan wanted to be reassured we weren't going to burn it. Patrick Herron, the organizer, deserves canonization. Take that how you will.

I didn't get to hear Chris or Kasey read because I had to drive back here, but we shared drinks (some of which I spilled in the lap of a poet named Murat when my knee gave out — that was weird) and poetry talk at the Spotted Dog. Only Leonard Nimoy was offered as a poet who couldn't kick Maya Angelou's ass, and that didn't get a consensus. There was some Frost-trashing as well, but Kasey and Murat defended "Death of the Hired Man" and "The Witch of Coos"; Chris and I would have helped but were at the next table and had a hard time being heard. "The Road Not Taken" was a popular target, and despite being a good place to take a discussion on narrative at our table, I kept quiet—I was already taking too many contrary positions and I was embarrassed about the drink-spilling. Tomorrow I'll show how post-modern "problematization" (that word's its own problem) of narrative ain't got nothing on Frost in that poem. Tonight I'm tired.


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"just two poems, one's a little longer than the other and they're both about computers"

"In the Beginning": two voices, God's and the computer's

God's password was "technocrat"

"Let there be light"
"Unrecognizable command: try again"
"Create light"
"Done"
"And God saw there were zero errors"

"And God saw he had zero funds remaining"


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"Clever ironies cannot change our luck"

"We knew and we know these men / and are ashamed to be fooled again"

"crops withered as the shopping center flowered" (1954, Brown v Board of education, first shopping mall built on land bought from Billy Graham's father)

" shiny marked white(?) and a white one marked(?) colored, new but with a dripping drain"

"Google giveth and taketh away"

"tomato above, let us call this love"

"most poems are about analogy or confusion and I'm not always sure which is which"

"If the cat's tail ended in a plug or the blender were covered fur, you couldn't tell them apart"

"the idea of my own limb swinging down to beat me like a bloody club became a part of how I think of me as much of how I think of him"


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She liked my "Animals Without Backbones" shirt for the planaria

"Our universe has a way of squeezing everything before its born or reborn, like your hold on my tired organs"

"Blasphemous master, placate me now"

"Well-toned fractals make the landscape. What all am I host to?"

"Just one break and I'm broken"

"Weather sends me opposite the bird, yet I disappear out the window. Wind is something like this bird"

"Next days horn; last night's two short(?) gazes"

"indulge me … thanks!"


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"Mac"

First one to read from table where there's a handwritten sign, tall lower case letters, "lonely" He made the sign. But the table really was lonely.

from a first dinner at the grownup table "Not a crumb anywhere" and "never ever pass your bones to Dad to pick clean."

at a Quaker meeting: "This place was not safe for ants!" … "I wished him luck among all those shoes" … "It was a bad Sunday for both of us."

Snake Says We Got IT All Wrong: "Do those Bible-thumpers really think women are so dumb that even a snake can pull the wool over their eyes." "In your spare time from TV, think it over ."

nifty version of Eve's first days, about the deals made and not kept

"a sex poll--pole spelled with 2 ls and no e" … after wondering about average of 2 and half times a month "I wondered about that 2—was that a whole bunch of halves or even less?"

"OK I'm going to finish you off"


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First Poet Laureate of Carrboro

on a a cattle drive from montana: horses, "Their luminous brown eyes watching us for a signal. We give no signal … Letting them run without fear"

Gifts of a step mother"Conversation whenever, whatever … Caring not to cross into replacement"

"a certain after-dinner mind"

"perhaps it is a word like duende on page 276"


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Didn't have the juice to do the second session yesterday

He brought a Shrub doll!

"the difference, dear reader, between requests and demand is a ready red brick"

"yes we will show these hooligans--we will rub vacation and flesh in their faces"

"exurbia revolves around its satellites"

When the music stops al theses chairs get cul-de-sacced"

"Fortunately, we have a Texan for this Manichean matchup who penetrates where the germs live"

leaves presidential politics

"Darling, I've secured you like a bond."

"He keeps a drowned boy dead by heaving air in spurts"

From The Bigot's Boots: "When I lived in the silver box you rented to drive south I did not know you would give me boots"

and "Tonight I reach for Sherman's Torch and Atlanta flickers under my feet."


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