This weekend promises to be leisurely and liminal, as it represents (for me, at least) that last great breath before the dive down to semester’s end.  In front of me I have the second half of Johnson’s Rasselas, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and a few award-winning bits of short fiction.  On the horizon I can also see those mountains of grading rising up, but they’re a ways off yet.   My exams will wrap May 7th, and then summer comes, right on schedule.

As finishes go, this one has been exceedingly sweet.  Early in the week I learned that my proposal for a Summer Faculty Scholars grant had been accepted.  That means I’ll get to spend most of the season working on verse to finalize a collection, and the university will sponsor the material outlay and the entry fees for a number of first-book contests.  Yesterday, between a grievance hearing and a department meeting, I knocked out the last of the semester’s committee obligations as well.   There’s still a little cooking left to do, but it can be done in my idle time.  Finally, last night I got the chance to head out to dinner with the members of Sigma Tau Delta and some of my favorite folks in the English department; niftier still, STD accorded me the Chip Off the Old Block Distinguished Faculty Award, a delightful surprise.  Teaching is something of a rudderless profession, but feeling that I’m doing right by some of our brightest and shiniest makes for a mighty fine star to steer by.

Today, if I manage things well, should involve nothing but even breathing.  I promised one of my Honors advisees that I’d go over her project proposal with a fine-toothed comb, but most of my plans for the coming week are otherwise already scripted.  Maybe I’ll do a little advance work for finals.  Maybe I’ll pay an extra visit to the gym.  Maybe I’ll call a few friends or send a few letters.

Or maybe I’ll just get outside and enjoy this gorgeous day.

I’m sorry for the brief hiatus; I had a major hard drive meltdown, and I’m still in the process of getting my virtual legs back under me.  As it turns out, posting from my office at CMU is not quite the same thing as posting at my “leisure” at home.  Accordingly, though I technically blogged mid-week, I will not vouch for your user experience.  I cannot be held responsible for anything I’ve said whilst hopped up on pilfered gummi worms. 

Last night I mustered the mojomentum to sit in on the debut reading of Robert Fanning’s American Prophet.  You can buy it over here, but I would only do so if you wish to be universally admired for your taste and good breeding.  I’ve had a longish week (by which I mean “horrifically long and generally traumatic”), and I suffered from a Punxsutawney Faceplant (a special form of Wandlessian narcolepsy) a couple of hours before the reading.  Natheless, I’m glad that I went, both for the sake of the reading itself and my own cranial convolutions.

Although I’m nowhere near completing the project, merely conceiving of a timeline for rounding out a polished collection of poems sapped some of my ideational energy.  I tend to be freakishly forward-thinking (why plan for tomorrow when I can plan for 2012?), and knowing how I’m going to spend much of 2009 emptied my future of one of its principal inhabitants.  Last night, however, my squash played one of its wiggedy associative tricks:  as I listened to Robert read, the framework for my second collection came into view. 

I don’t think that’s so much putting the cart before the horse as buying a second cart before the first horse has grown big enough to draught, but I’ve never been fond of equestrian metaphors.  In any case, I now have an object to write toward, one that will carry me beyond the short term into the murky unknown.   I have a healthy attitude about murk; it’s really quite slimming.

Oddly enough, with such an object in view I now feel better equipped to tackle the obligations of what appears to be an overstuffed weekend.  Let’s just hope I don’t have another epiphany until I have this batch of exams graded.

At last, by not-especially-popular demand, the post the ladies have all been waiting for:  The Bald Man Compatibility Quiz; or, Why I Remain Single, Part 114 of 114!!!

This is, as Serious Cat will confirm, a very serious quiz.  There’s a scoring system involved and tiered results and everything.  It’s just like Cosmopolitan, except not very cosmopolitan.  That’s how we protect ourselves from copyright infringement.

You can take the quiz today, and I’ll post the scoring system when the weekend comes around.  You’ll have to wait until next week to find where you fall in the bald man compatibility continuum.  Can you handle the suspense?  I sure can’t!

Without further ado, the most quizzical quiz you ever will see:

1.  Given your druthers, which of the following would you take to the annual fall ice cream social/sock hop?

            a. Westley

            b. Vizzini

            c. Fezzik

            d. Inigo

2.  You are the figurative cheese to the bald man’s metaphorical macaroni.  Which variety are you?

            a. gouda

            b. cheddar

            c. pepperjack

            d. brie

3. You are mackin’ in the back seat (or possibly the trunk) of your Daihatsu.  Which of the following songs is on the radio, setting the mood for your smoocheration?

            a. “Tubular Bells”

            b. “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”

            c. “Conjunction Junction”

            d. “The Linus and Lucy Rag”

4.  You discover the bald man’s reasonably unhealthy attraction to mimes.  You accordingly spend much of your quality time…

            a. trapped inside imaginary boxes

            b. climbing imaginary ladders

            c. walking against imaginary wind

            d. leaning against imaginary walls

5.  Based on your karmic performance in this lifetime, you will most likely be reincarnated as…

            a. desulforudis audaxviator

            b. mapusaurus roseae

            c. najash rionegrina

            d. helarctos malayanus

6.  The bald man, as we all know, is unnervingly androgynous.  From which gender-inappropriate cartoon character have you learned the most precious life lessons?

            a. Funshine Bear

            b. Ookla the Mok

            c. Barbapapa

            d. Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living

7.  The bald man is, as you might expect, a roller derby aficionado.  Which of the following bitchin’ roller derby names would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. Abra Cadaver

            b. Clownsnack

            c. Eva Destruction

            d. Sadie Masochist

8.  Much to the chagrin of native speakers of English, the bald man makes up roughly 54% of all the words he uses.  Which of the following portmanteau words would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. ouroborobotic

            b. ampersandwich

            c. curlicubicle

            d. nonsensual

9.  The bald man, as you may have noticed, refers to himself in the third-person with appalling regularity.  What would you choose as your own third-person nom de diablerie?

            a. the wiggedy minx

            b. the muscatel jezebel

            c. the woebegone amazon

            d. the tricksy vixen

10.  You just finished the Bald Man Compatibility Quiz!  How do you feel?

            a. squishy

            b. bewigginsed

            c. woozy

            d. reprobate

That’s it!  Tune in next time (“next time” here meaning one representative point in a possible future, not necessarily the very next time) for the results!

Yesterday I was a diligent monkey and (again, despite my plan to simply plan) completed a set of revisions and prepared them for submission.  I’ve got to slap a few stamps on the set and drive to the P.O., Eudora Welty style, but I’m feeling pretty good about my productivity.  With a little luck I’ll have the table cleared to begin some new projects by next Sunday.

Over the course of the day–and the process did, in fact, take me all frickin’ day, even though I had three of five revisions finalized already–I experienced a bit of corroborative shock.  In perhaps one of every ten cases the most recent entries in the Directory of Poetry Publishers do not correspond to the most recent updates on the pages hosted by the journals themselves.  In a few instances addresses differed; in others, submission policies had changed.  One expects intermittent turnover in mastheads and the like, but making sure I had each packet properly posted nearly sent me into an obsessive frenzy.  My cross-referencing system salvaged my sanity, happily, but the process got me thinking about information on the net.  I can be pretty nerdcore when I try.

I have written before about the peculiarities of the blogosphere and their impact on the dissemination of data.  For reasons I cannot fully explain my own blog rates pretty high in searches for certain keywords:  “single professor for marriage” will get you here in short order, as will quotes from Millay and Tennyson and more scintillating keywords like “naughty narwhal” and “Diane Lane navel.”  I am not making any of this up. 

Moreover, the “News Department” and “Hawt Post” links at WordPress invariably lead to all sorts of mischief:  the poor feller who routinely rails at Barack Obama’s charlatanry is having a hard time being heard over the Sarah Palin ruckus, and said ruckus seems to consist mostly of shrill demands to a) treat her fairly and b) make sure all the claptrap from the liberal media has been fully contextualized.  Such policies do not apply to other politicians, of course, but you get the gist.  It’s not so much news as much ado about ado.  Meta-ado, if you will. 

More troubling still is the tendency of contemporary news agencies to link to blogs and op-ed columns; quite a few political commercials running locally (here in Michigan, a battleground state) sometimes cite the same sketchy sources when they bother to cite at all.  It’s becoming more and more difficult to cut through all the blather, which is why I’ve recently reduced the time I devote to my daily news surf.  I hate coming away empty-handed, and given my druthers I’d rather research Charlotte Smith or evil clown puppets.  I have my priorities straight.

Frankly, the ready availability of information also has some creepy applications.  Let’s face it:  I’m not terribly difficult to find online.  I’m not a monument of unageing intellect by any stretch of the imagination, but my virtual footprint is sasquatchian by my modest please-don’t-look-at-me standards.  Were someone inclined to write me, it would take all of thirty seconds for them to find me in the CMU directory.  What’s more wiggedy, however, is the frequency with which people write me at my private addresses.  I’ve received fan mail for my horror fiction at one, and a scholar with whom I’ve collaborated in the past somehow wound up with an address I now use almost exclusively for e-commerce.  I also know a few alumni associations (against my wishes, I might add) have plunked old addresses in their databases, so I get regular solicitations mixed in with occasional blasts from the past.  Add in my accessibility here and on MySpace (and at some point I’ll probably establish a Facebook presence just to stretch myself thinner), and things get creepy, my virtual “friendship” with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark notwithstanding.  Well, actually that is kind of creepy.  For her, anyway.

I suppose there’s not much to do but learn to live with it and/or exploit it.  Toyota (or some other auto manufacturer–I clicked right past) has a new online ad, for example, that asks you to enter a friend’s phone number to place a free call.  I can’t imagine that ends well for the friend, but that seems to be the direction we’re headed.  I suppose it’s better to embrace the madness before the madness embraces you.  It will have you in its clutches sooner or later.

First, allow me to contextualize:  I am not a small person.  I stand around 6′4″ and usually weigh in at about 245 pounds.  I do not blot out the sun, but were you to run me over with your Prius, few courts would believe you did not see me.  Accordingly, while I am willing to concede that contemporary science has not yet embraced the Wandlessocentric model of the universe, I generally expect the common courtesies one extends to a noticeable human.   In return, I will try not to squash those smaller than me.

This morning, during my visit to the coffee shoppe, I placed my order and stood to the side.  Two women entered the shoppe shortly thereafter, placed their orders, and stood directly in front of me.  (Allow me to note that they actually stood directly in front of the coffee dispensers and also dispensed with most socially responsible “please” and “thank you” responses in their exchange with the cashier.  I do not like these women–no, not at all.)  Moments later, when my order was ready, one of the two claimed it and began to prepare it, fussing over the fact that it did not at all resemble her order.  I politely stepped in to claim it, and the woman seemed utterly flabbergasted that the barista might have made the drinks in the order they were requested, much less that a tallish bald man was standing right behind her and had apparently been standing there all along. 

That sort of stuff really sticks in my craw, if only because inattention seems to be the handmaiden to inconsiderate behavior.  A person who actually insults me is much less likely to annoy me than a young man who stretches his legs the moment I am passing by (as happened yesterday) or a young woman who parks her bicycle next to my car in such a way that I cannot open the door without moving it (which happens daily).  The line between carelessness and discourtesy gets a little blurry.  By the same token, this kind of thoughtlessness rankles even more when performed as a matter of practice or policy.  When I arrived at the gym this morning, for example, the door was locked; a notice on the door indicated that the gym would be closed from 8:00-12:00 for staff training.  The gym administrators should probably realize that the folks who really need to know that information will usually arrive between the hours of 8:00-12:00, yet the notice in question was not posted at 8:00 yesterday.  The CMU gym boasts that it has been voted the best fitness center in mid-Michigan for several years in a row, but I cannot help but think most non-student members would go anywhere else were there somewhere else to go.

While I’m discharging all this black bile, special kudos to the woman who wrote me last Friday to ask a special favor of me.  I responded in the affirmative perhaps four hours after I received her message and waited for the follow-up note that would allow me to perform the favor in question.  That note did not arrive until last night at about 9:30PM.  The reason for the delay?  A cold, apparently the most debilitating cold in recorded American history.  As it turns out, my desire to perform the favor has waned since then.  I am the protagonist in my own story, and I shan’t be trifled with by walk-ons.  Behold my rampant egotism!

To turn this to some useful end, I can’t help but think that one of the characteristics that separates real poets (read:  poets that are not me) from normal folk is the keenness of their attention, their penetration into the essence of things.  I recall with great vividness, for example, a poem by one of my colleagues during my short tenure at Auburn, a fellow named Gale Acuff.  It was nothing more than a meditation on a sheet of yellow lined paper, and I reckon the first few bits of imagery were well within anyone’s perceptual compass.  After the first several lines, however, Gale began evoking all sorts of tactile, visual, and sensual impressions–the angle of his handwriting on the page, the way he had crowded margins, the fine gaps left in the ink as the nib of the pen skipped over the dents left by writing on prior pages.  Every image struck me (a person who uses such yellow notepads regularly) as unmistakably accurate, no matter that I had never before attended to the details he had committed to the page.  It was a genuinely surprising piece in that way, one that revealed new dimensions of an object I thought I knew well.  Part of the reason I so admire the work of Carl Dennis is that he regularly pushes just past the expected level of readerly attention:  he delivers exactly what you’d anticipate, and then he goes it one (or two, or three) better.

So today, as I try not to squash the wee, I’m going to try and look deeply into things.  If that causes me to trip over extended legs or knock over a bicycle, I hope the owners will forgive me.

First, some help for my obsessive friends:  as far as I can tell, Showtime’s I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single partakes of typical reality teevee devices.  Some viewers have noted that the central figure (an actor/writer/director named Eric Schaeffer) has re-enacted scenes from a book on relationships he wrote back in the day, which punctures the illusions of the format; more have noted that Schaeffer can be kind of a prat.  That’s about all the help I can give you, as I couldn’t be bothered to watch any episode after the first.  I wish Mr. Schaeffer the best of luck, and I wish readers whose choice of search terms somehow led them here happier hunting.  This is not the clearinghouse for all things Schaeffer, no matter what Google might tell you.

As for the person who arrived here by searching for “naughty narwhal”?  I do not know where to begin to help you.

Today, however, I wish to tell you about the clever-clever, which is sorta naughty in its own right.

Many moons ago, during my first semester at Emory University, I took a course on contemporary Irish poetry.  In that class, I was introduced to a critical distinction by one of my new companeros, a British fellow named Gavin.  Gavin distinguished one kind of poetry, verse possessed of a certain imagistic depth and complexity, from another variety associated primarily with tricksy wordplay.  He called the latter the “clever-clever,” which in some forms seems rather shallow:  once the reader figures out the games the writer is playing, the heavy lifting of interpretation is done.

I know of course that not all tricksy verse belongs to the clever-clever category.  I mention the concept today only because mine sometimes does.  The clever-clever represents a tendency I’m eternally trying to fight.

The piece I’m working on currently is a challenging one, as I’m negotiating two constraints:  I’m trying not to settle on a first-person perspective (not because of my usual paranoia, but because I feel in this case it would be uninteresting), and I’m also trying to pay homage to a viewpoint very foreign to me.  Like most hommes d’un certain age, my past is checkered with colorful personalities, and I’m trying to capture a semi-classic image:  that of a feller who sold off all his belongings and took to the road in search of…something.  I can only achieve so much psychological penetration, so I’ve been circling around the image, coming up with connections and associations I might used to convey my external impressions.  When I started committing words to paper, however, the clever-clever happened.

I’ve got a few strong details to work with.  He had issues with addiction, and his penchant for roaming arose in his effort to combat them; he often described himself as a new kind of addict, which is a vein I’ve already mined in the poem.  His last days with his peeps also involved some nice images–a  going-away party he never showed up for, the gentle rejection of the presents his friends gave him–and I think I’ve recaptured those details interesting ways.   When it comes to describing the man himself, however, the clever-clever rears its ugly head.

To wit:  for reasons unknown, the word that most strongly attaches to him in my mind is peregrine (which probably tells you something about how my brain works from the get-go).  My first effort to realize an image in the poem in reference to that word came out thusly:

Whatever whims whistled his peregrine soul 

were pitched to no will but his own.

It’s not a terrible sequence, but it’s sure not a good one.  The word overwrought comes to mind.  The real tragedy, however, is that this is the first raw thought that occurred to me.  I didn’t have to torture the lines to work out the assonance, the alliteration, or the jaunty allusion to falconry (which we know all the kids are into these days); that’s just how it formed in my head. 

You may be encouraged to know that I’ve gone in a different direction, but I find that my writing involves an ongoing battle with language shenanigans.  It took me an hour just to work around the verb “pitch” because I loved the semantics so well, and I spent two days last week working out a transition that hinged on the word “purchase” (as acquisition, as grip), even though I finally threw it out because the implications of that grip were too strong for my needs.  I find that my mind, left unattended, is always prepared to hammer out ornate phrasings and figures.  Half of my time is spent deciding if they work in the service of the image or idea.

When I’m lucky, they do:  a few pieces I’ve been fortunate enough to publish depend on my facility with wordplay, and sometimes those phrasings turn out quite lovely.  More often than not, alas, the clever-clever serves as a kind of default mode, a self-indulgent hiccup that helps me overcome the empty page.

As it turns out, overcoming the filled page, when it’s beset by the clever-clever, can be just as challenging.

Am I making quasi-naughty allusions to Pauline Réage/Anne Desclos for the sake of my French-Canadian readers?  Yes, yes I am.  In my line of work we call that off-brand pandering.

While you recover, let me tell you how momentous the past six minutes have been.

First I realized that the projected title of the verse collection I have been working on was kind of lame.  How did I realize this, you might ask, obliging person that you are?  Because in the process of thinking up the subject line for today’s post, the word that had been eluding me skewered me like a two-ton narwhal.  The original word in the original title, in its defense, had nuance on top of nuance, but the new word will grab readers by the gullet and, just when they think it’s about to kick their asses, it will buy them a mai tai.  You don’t come across that kind of edgy every day, not even in my apartment.

In those six minutes I also learned that Rachel Maddow, on whom I have a semi-serious crush, already has a partner named Susan.  Out of spite I will refer to her as Thrakkorzog…on purpose.  It does not pay to get on my bad side.

In those six minutes I also learned that the diversion I had planned for the next two months has been well and truly bollocksed.  I have coveted an immersive game for many moons, but thanks to the kindly folks at Can You Run It?, a pretty nifty site for casual gamers unsure of their computers’ muscle, I learned beforehand that my video card is not mighty enough to handle the zazzy graphics.  The problem?  Pixel shading.  Honestly.

I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.  I’m on summer vacation now, so four minutes of work per day is just about my upper limit.  I will add, however, a blog-appropriate rumination about language.  I can be pretty topical when I try.

I’m currently working on a poem and, in light of the titular epiphany mentioned above, I have to concede that I’m frankly a hostage of language.  I honestly could not tell you why the revised title is utterly perfect, but I know it to be so.  I know it.  By the same token, I know that the words in the twelfth line of the text I’m now working on aren’t quite right.  I can install serviceable words, of course, and get the reader to another section in which everything plays out just as I like, but I find I’m not willing to compromise–or else the words themselves aren’t willing to let me.

On Monday I was snagged by line five:  I had a strong impression of the requisite rhythm, a stronger sense of the meanings I wanted to imply, and a stronger sense still of the vowel and consonant sounds I needed to link the text to the surrounding verse.  I hammered and chiseled and pried and pounded, but I couldn’t form the words that fit.  I wound up spinning my wheels for a few minutes, checking the news, powering down the computer, and finally heading for the shower…and then the words showed up.  There’s nothing esoteric or fancy or obscure about them (although they do carry connotations that further my purposes), but they slide into place as though no other words in the world could ever do their work.  If you can get an endorphin rush from typing, by golly, I did.

It’s an odd concatenation, an intense expenditure of creative energy yoked to a profound helplessness that hinges on a latent faith that the words are out there, patient and waiting.  I don’t like to get too transcendental about the experience of writing, obviating the fact that serious work and painstaking craftsmanship are the better part of it.  That being said, however, anyone who tells you that the process doesn’t bring you into contact with something wiggedy and mysterious is a filthy liar.