Two Weeks and Change

In about two weeks Kyle and I will be off to New Jersey for the first stop on our 17-day tour.

Things are coming along smoothly at this point. Everything's confirmed, as you can see below. We know where we're staying now in almost every city. I find that folks are usually pretty generous in their housing of a few poor poets. I know I would do the same for others, so it's nice to see that happening for us.

A few other odds and ends to go (like figuring out how many books to bring with us), and then it's time to start making a list of everything we'll need. I'm still debating on whether or not I should get a netbook to try and blog and check email and everything. But that's just another thing that can get lost, damaged, or stolen. I'm sure I'll be able to check things enough, if not everyday. And I can always just take a regular notebook and pen, of course.

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I finally turned the comments off for this blog. I clearly haven't been updating it very much lately, and even though I could just ignore the spammers, which is all I've been getting recently, it's easier just to turn them off.

If anyone needs or wants to get a hold of me, my email address, as always, is at the top right of the blog.

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I received my contributor copies of Hollins Critic the other day. Looks good.

Thanks again to the editors.

I also haven't been paid for poetry in a long, long time, so that's always welcoming.

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I still haven't been writing much, but I'm not pressing the issue. I have some ideas, and I'm sure, at the very least, that a jaunt across the U.S. will jump-start some ideas come August.

But I'm still tinkering with the new manuscript, which is currently at about 10 places right now.

That's about it until September, and if nothing happens with it by then, I'll be sending it to more places come 2011 than I did last year.

Jump in the Pool

I got an acceptance in the mail today from The Cincinnati Review, which I was thrilled about until I read that they wanted the poem Passages North previously accepted. I had emailed them, but this isn't the first time something like this has happened; sometimes emails get lost or deleted. I do keep good records, which is something on which I pride myself. None of the other poems in the batch have been accepted yet, so hopefully the editor will be willing to take a second look, since he did say he liked the rest of the poems too. If not, though, I'll keep sending. I like The Cincinnati Review a lot.

The thing is: the aforementioned poem I was thinking about ditching and not even putting in the batch I sent to those journals and others. It's a really weird and bizarre poem, and I thought maybe it didn't have a place to even be considered for submission. It clearly goes to show how much I know about my own work. Then again, I have a feeling the folks I trust with seeing drafts would've said, "What the hell is this?"

Then I got home from the store to a Hollins Critic e-mail acceptance, which was funny and welcomed considering the former events. It's also a newer Nocturne, if you can call it that, because I think most of the time I really don't know what a Nocturne is. But a semblance or seedling of a new manuscript I think keeps growing slowly, because I'm starting to recognize some similarities, and though the poems seem to be linked, they certainly don't belong in the first manuscript that's currently out all over the place at contests. I think that's a good sign. At least new poems are being written, and that's always a good thing.

At the store I was also greeted by a bigger guy who smiled at me and said hello. At first I was confused, but then I realized it was a guy who used to live mostly in the street near my old apartment a few years ago. He had these two vans and a car, and would always be working on them, and his car would be filled with empty Natural Light packages, and he'd usually be sitting in the front seat of the car if he wasn't working on the vans: batteries and wires and tools strewn all over the place. I always said hello to him when I was walking somewhere, and I can't believe he recognized me, but then again I end up recognizing people I don't even know and have never met at places like AWP, just from a photo on the back cover a book sometimes. I remember faces. Apparently he does too.