My buddy Kate recently scanned in old pics from our days back at College of the Ozarks. Here's me and Kate before an Elliot Smith show in 2000.

And here's a bunch of us (including the famous poet and editor Zachary Schomburg) playing music at one of the famous C of O Symposiums.

Here's us dudes now, the night before the big wedding. Here's Kate, Will & Shannon.

I've been spending almost all of my time in front of this here computer either doing layout/html for Fascicle or doing my text editing job, or working on Sex Hat. So it's non-stop iTunes. Heavy rotation albums: Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender, every Can album from Monster Movie to Landed, Willie Nelson's Red-Headed Stranger, Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey & Astral Weeks. Also, various mixes, including this new summer mix that I think I got tweaked just right tonight.

Cooler Still (Summer 05)

1. Ping Pong, Can
2. Open My Eyes, The Nazz
3. Action Time Vision, Alternative TV
4. Why Can't We Live Together, Timmy Thomas
5. Kreen-Akrore, Paul McCartney
6. Tango Whiskeyman, Can
7. The Perfect Man, Sun Ra
8. Intro Live in Germany 197? ("Fuck you white mutherfuckers"), Miles Davis
9. Strawberry Letter, Shuggie Otis
10. Festival, Dungen
11. Gaby, The Boots
12. Whatcha Gonna Do, Peter Tosh
13. Raised Eyebrows, The Feelies
14. Intensified Festival 68, Desmond Dekker
15. When You Were Mine, Prince
16. Summer Madness, Kool & the Gang
17. Intuition, John Lennon
18. Graceful Dub, Israel Vibration
19. Holy Are You, Electric Prunes
20. Pills, New York Dolls
21. Baby Strange, TRex
22. Tupelo Honey, Van Morrison


There's a couple of solid runs in this mix, including numbers 4 thru 7 -- percussion-centric. I like the vibe from 18 thru 22, less progressing textures like 4-7, more of a balancing between very different worldviews. 18-19: thesis. 20-21: antithesis. 22: synthesis. If you got an MFA at Arkansas, that might've been somewhat humorous right there. Track 16 is the central silence of this mix, where the mix stops becoming the mixer's and becomes the mixee's.

Great birthday yesterday, my favorite that I can remember. Just me and Leigh all day -- woke up early after a late night to do my text editing gig, then went back to bed around 9 in the morn, back up to answer calls from my parents and grandma (me: "hello?" grandma: "you better be awake!"), a little more zzzzs. Then a couple hours spent at The Bookshop on Franklin Street, the used bookstore that always has hidden gems. This is the place where I've picked up the Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky issues of John Taggarts old journal MAPS, as well as the Jack Spicer Boundary2 issue from the 70s, a copy of the Exact Change Yearbook (w/ CD), about 7 copies of the Olson/Creeley correspondence, Frank Samperi books for like two bucks, Zukofsky issue of Hugh Kenner's Paideuma in 78, the Zukofsky Man and Poet NPF book edited by CF Terrell upon Z's death, etc. I have to make an effort to go there regularly or else Marcus Slease digs up all the good stuff. They had the Creeley issue of Boundary2 there for 20 bucks -- I'd been planning to get it when I felt more confident on money, but someone beat me to it. There's a 65 dollar find-of-finds for me there that I'm taking in a bunch of old books in today as trade in hopes of acquiring. There's also first editions of the last two Maximus installments, and a first Oppen in amazing shape.

Anyway, got three books yesterday: a Roland Barthes reader edited by Susan Sontag, Steven Helmling's The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, and John Ruskin's The Lamp of Beauty.

Chris Vitiello had people over at his house this last Saturday for a reading by Mary Burger and Evie Shockley and to celebrate Chris and my birthdays -- Marcus picked up Mark Scroggins' Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge for me ("to the thinking man's Zukofsky"), and Ken Rumble got me Olson's Letters to Origin, from which generated many of my Fascicle ideals but which I've never had a copy of for my own library.

So, a fantastic week for books. We went to see the Bad News Bears remake yesterday, and saw The Wedding Crashers the night before that. I liked BNB better, if partly because the original is one of my ten favorite movies (if you haven't seen it lately, rent it: it's darker than you remember), and this remake is better than most in that it runs through the situations of the 1976 original and rethinks them for the current climate -- interesting to think what has shifted: the sort of physical abuse and cruelty of the original is much tamer, and childhood is portrayed as less lonely and frightening in the remake, but the language is more explicit. And apparently alcohol and smoking are more taboo now: I don't recall the Kelly Leak character smoking in the remake, at least not chain smoking like in the original (he also seems about 3 years older than the 1976 Kelly Leak), and Buttermaker passes around non-alcoholic beer at the end. But the kids are still fairly unsentimentalized, and much more aware of sex than in the original: in the remake, Amanda tells Buttermaker that he must "have a big one" because she doesn't know what her mom saw in him.

I'm sounding a little more critical of the remake than I intend -- I think Bad News Bears (76) is a legitimately great movie, in my opinion the best baseball movie ever, and one of the best movies about childhood ever. The key scene of the original, when the opposing coach hits his son for disobeying orders and throwing at one of the Bears and his son responds by holding onto the ball when it is hit back to him (allowing the overweight Engleberg to round the bases on a weakly hit ball) and then walking off the field is one of my favorite scenes of a kid displaying will in the face overbearing adult power and physicality. Linklater I think misunderstood the power of that original scene, or else knew he couldn't recreate it, so he revises it to a more entertaining but much less resonant manner. Also, the Amanda and Kelly Leak characters are amazing athletes in the remake, but a lot less interesting as actors, which is probably not fair to the actress playing Amanda since it was Tatum O'Neal in the original. The Kelly Leak in the original is very creepy and lizardy, and while less physically imposing than the remake's Kelly Leak, is a lot creepier.

Anyway, Billy Bob is outstanding -- Matthau is so entranced in my mind it's tough to gauge Billy Bob's performance in relation, tho he is a lot more believable as a former ballplayer than Matthau. Billy Bob moves as though he grew up playing ball --even tho he's only showing the kids the drills, he could be (in Silliman speak!) the most convincing actor ballplayer since Charlie Sheen in the Major League movies. He has the most active arm of any aging actor of his generation, etc.

Wedding Crashers is worth a matinee just for Vince Vaughn's character (and his 'love interest'). Will Ferrell is brilliant too for his five minutes. I just think it copped out and tried to hard to be a romantic comedy instead of being really funny all the time -- part of the reason I love Anchorman and Naked Gun so much is that they never pretend to be anything than a bunch of opportunities for gags. Owen Wilson is pretty lost as the straight man -- his brother should've been playing that role.

Thirty years old today. Good stuff. I've been looking forward to my thirties, and it's hitting at a perfect time: Leigh and I just got married, I'm starting Ph.D. work at Duke this fall, Fascicle is launching this summer. I'm also feeling as tho I'm approaching an end of a transitional time in my writing -- I'm working on a project called 1001 Sentences that should be the last element of Sex Hat. It's nice too to have closed out my 20s with a lot of my twentyish ambitions accomplished.

I'm all about inconsequential blog posts these days. It's my paying homage to the genre. For months I've jealously seen others' IPod shuffle posts, so now that I'm blogging again, and that I've got the IPod Leigh got me for my birthday pretty filled up, here's tonight's early morning shuffle:

Dub Belly, Scientist, This Is Crucial Reggae: Dub
Colony, Joy Division, Closer
Private Sorrow, The Pretty Things, SF Sorrow
White Light/White Heat, Velvet Underground, White Light/White Heat
Skid Row, Merle Haggard, I’m a Lonesome Fugitive
Big Eyed Beans from Venus, Captain Beefheart, Clear Spot
Weatherbox, Mission of Burma, Vs.
Got to Get You Into My Life, The Beatles, Revolver
If I Was Your Girlfriend, Prince, Sign o’ the Times
I Am a Cinematographer, Palaces Brothers, Days in the Wake
My Dark Ages, Pere Ubu, Datapanik in the Year Zero
Fussing and Fighting, Bob Marley, Reggae Fever 1
Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
Soul Survivor, The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Needle in the Camel’s Eye, Brian Eno, Here Come the Warm Jets
Little Women, The Kinks, Face to Face
It’s February, Jandek, The Beginning


I'm kind of a classic rock freak. Very little new music on my IPod. Don't know. There's new stuff I like: Antony & the Johnsons, Richard Buckner, Wilco, Animal Collective. But not that much.

On my wishlist: Pugh Rogefeldt, Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone.

A couple posts back I got to musing about whether exploring the local in a more intense manner would be one possible strategy for countering a certain sameness that seems to permeate many journals of excellent quality but decreasing interest to me -- that is, if one desires to read or edit a journal that presents a different view of poetry than what a good number of journals seem to be already succeeding at presenting. Is it too much of a leap to believe that how a journal is edited expresses/constructs a (at the least) possible view of what poetry is? Right now I don't think it's too big a leap.

Also, right now, I feel like I have pretty down what the view of poetry is expressed by a great many journals, and the intellectual/emotional/aesthetic ranges found inside them -- new issues offer variations on a view, but the basic view seems the same, with part of this view being that each issue seems separate from the issues of the journal that came before and will come after -- this might seem a contradictory statement (since I'm saying that the view stays consistent while the each issue is an isolated event) but what I'm saying is issue-by-issue a context doesn't seem to develop, argue with itself, expand itself, etc. Names, and styles and tendencies, change, but that's different than reading and engaging the back issues of LANGUAGE and accessing a distinct view on the art that one can then endorse, alter, reject, wrestle, mock, grope, etc. A distinct view that one can read come into being issue by issue. I'm pretty aware that many people are very happy to read more good poems, and not want more from a journal. Right now at this point in my life I'm looking for something different, and I think a lot of it is that I've decreasingly looked to poetry for personal comfort, personal emotion, etc. and more so as a means of accessing (intellectual/moral/emotional) knowledge -- which might partially explain my being enamored with Olson for a few years now as his poems, prose and poetics have been alternately a companion to, or extension of, or counter to, my reading in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and such. Olson, Zukofsky, Rasula, Rothenberg, Eshleman, HD, Byrd, Stein, Duncan and the rest I feel have uniquely situated me to engage these other fields -- I feel I have acquired, through pleasure, certain tools that deepen my interaction with texts classified separately from poetry and poetics by and large. And naturally my engagement of other fields have intensified the pleasures I find in the above poets/critics.

Somehow I'm going to try to steer this towards Jake's question as to whether my thoughts on exploring the local applies to his journal storySouth, which is a literary journal with a Southern orientation. I've been trying to collect my thoughts on this -- storySouth was one of the first places to grant me publication, and played a similar role for other writers I've come of age with, which serves an important function definitely for writers and for readers. But I don't think that was the question. To be honest, I skim thru storySouth these days reading the work of writers I know or am somewhat familiar with, so I'm not equipped to give an informed overall view of what storySouth is doing. This shouldn't be taken as a dismissal of the quality of poetry in storySouth, because honestly I haven't really been reading Fence, Slope, Canary, New American Writing, Jubilat, American Poetry Review, etc. in any further capacity either -- I more or less skim thru, looking for writers who I have already developed an interest in, or sometimes a stray poem will jump out at me, but I don't feel compelled to read issues cover to cover to deepen or challenge or gird my views of poetry/knowledge/etc. I was wondering today driving back from the video store (Naked Gun DVD) whether I've developed a kind of auteur view of editing -- not that the editor is pulling the strings behind what is found in the journal, but that an editor(s)' conception of what poetry is and what its context can be is at least part of the impact of a journal, and then the individual works found in the journal operate within this context, which can be either numbingly familiar, radically positioned, etc.

Thought currents.

One variable that seems to affect the contexts created by a journal is how the journal acquires its work -- a journal that basically picks out the best submissions from the inbox and supplements these with new work from familiar poets seems to me to operate with a certain satisfaction with the standard way of doing things in poetry. This seems to be pretty true if its a (cough) School of Kwai-etude or Poseyvaunt journal.

The journals I've grown to become most interested in seem to operate in a manner different than the above. So I think to answer Jake's question, or at least to begin addressing it in a somewhat general manner, I think it might depend on how storySouth acquires and frames its content (which would be clearer to me if I read it more carefully lately) (it is clear for instance that Jacket's means of acquiring work is different than the Canary's) (both might have a brilliant poem from John Latta but I don't think anyone could argue that both journals are presenting basically similar views of the art) (obviously I have a preference for Jacket)

When I'm thinking about engaging with a location, the local, I'm thinking about doing it by directly by finding out, by whatever means, what is going on there that is interesting/challenging/etc. (easier if you're living there), then presenting that, or making that one component of a view of poetry. By contrast, one could limit a journal to just work from Arkansas, solicit work from Miller Williams and a couple more names, and accept the good stuff that Arkansans who want to send to you do send, and present that once or twice a year, but then that would seem to replicate the model I outlined in the previous paragraph, but on a smaller scale. The same paradigm, right? The 'famous' poet has succeeded at his/her aesthetic and is invited by virtue of that (and to give the journal credibility), the editor picks through work that fits his/her view of quality/publishability, less famous poets send their work hoping that what they've written fits the already established aesthetic (work that doesn't reinforce the aesthetic assumptions by definition is rejected). Have any journals really shaken things up with this model? It seems like a recipe for systems-maintenance, whether that system is post-Language, narrative, etc.

An interesting journal I think would have to become more than just the expression of the editor's view of poetry -- a more interesting journal would challenge not only the reader's, but also the editor's assumptions about the art.

I think Can We Have Our Ball Back? presents a different strategy by its radical openness -- there doesn't seem to be a familiar presentation of what is 'best' or 'good' recycled issue by issue but with different names attached. The range of work is pretty radical, as is the presentation, which doesn't pretend to duplicate the institutional legitimacy of program-backed print journals but instead CWHOBB I think uses the new medium as a means for rethinking how to collect and distribute poetry. I think these are reasons it's an important journal. By contrast, AS/IS, at least for the week or so I paid attention to it before getting bored, seemed to overdo this -- a noble failure with an interesting premise, but for me still a failure as an interesting space for poems in that it seemed to get dominated by a handful of people, which is no more radical than a couple of people hogging the microphone at a group reading by the force of their will and not saying anything interesting.

While I'm making friends, I should mention my opinion that a 'one poet at a time' journal like No Tell Motel or Unpleasant Event Schedule is closer to re-packaging current aesthetics/assumptions as opposed to re-conceptualizing or altering them. Again, this is extremely couched in my current ideas about what I am looking for in journals right now -- I don't think I'm speaking on the behalf of anyone other than myself here -- if the people behind the journals I just mentioned are mostly interested in the [of course noble] activity of highlighting individual poets that they think are doing good writing, then their journals should be counted as successes. I think most readers would count them as such. But these journals are less influential to my developing views on poetry publishing (and poetry therefore in general) than Jacket or CWHOBB. The poems (and poetry?) seem so isolated to me in the poet-by-poet format, which is good I guess if poetry-as-I-find-it-right-now felt like enough for me and I was just looking for a few good poems. I'm basically saying that I don't think abandoning the issue-by-issue format for a poet-by-poet format is any more innovative or radical than a poet rewriting a poem on ten tiny sheets of paper that was previously written on one. A different package.

Now, if the smaller sheets of paper alter the poet's approach to writing her/his poem and reading the poems of others (both of which by extension would alter the poet's modes of thought/emotion), then that's a different manner. Maybe along those lines a poet-by-poet online journal could be pretty radical if it opened its space to a poet for a week to do whatever that poet wants -- impromptu poems, manifestos, guest-editing for a week, etc. That I think I would make time for each week.

Kind of obsessing over Fascicle right now, so slow blogging.

We have a cool independent free weekly here called The Independent that covers all of the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham) area. Each year they award Indies to people involved in the arts, especially those who help organize, cajole, involve others. Patrick Herron and Ken Rumble were awarded one this year for their work with, among other things, the Carrboro Poetry Festival and Lucifer Poetics Group and the Desert City Reading Series. You can check out the write-up I did on them here.

Also please check out my buddy Brian Howe's new blog. Brian is a hot shot poet, and also a music writer for Pitchfork, 'Sup and a whole bunch of cool spots.

I like the fact that there's a lot of room for disagreement in terms of what a journal can do, or how people approach the idea of editing -- I think Larry Sawyer, who edits Milk, one of my favorite online journals, is coming out of a similar school as me, or is looking at similar editing maestros: Cid Corman and Clayton Eshleman, among others. He's got some sharp comments in my previous post, as does Noah, who floats an idea I'd love to see someone take up: a journal that publishes the same 10 poets each issue. I think my thoughts that a journal supporting a few writers would help those writers develop come from reading Olson and Creeley's letters, but also from my own experience of having someone ask me for work and that being a great spur for trying something new, even if I had unpublished stuff sitting around; there's nothing I think like writing knowing that someone who you respect is waiting for that piece and that it could quickly enter circulation. World Jelly, which Scott Pierce is publishing for Effing Press, was written for that purpose: I threw the idea towards him of writing a chapbook-length work for Effing to consider, with me looking at the chapbook as a compositional unit. One planned feature of Fascicle is to have a chapbook length selection for each issue; we will hopefully have a chapbook length work from Paul White for the first issue, and from Tim Van Dyke for the 2nd. I know that both have been working on these projects knowing that there is this cyberspace waiting for them, and hopefully also a strong readership.

I've been wanting to jump back onto the blog for a little while, partly to flesh out these editing ideas that have been percolating. In the last post I raise the possibility that some very good journals are in certain ways interchangeable, which one can respond to as sarcastically/self-pitying as one likes, but which I think is an actuality that should be addressed. It's a real issue, and one which myself and friends around here have talked about, how excitement over certain journals wanes because there seems to be a certain static-ness to them: very often there will be quality work from quality writers, but it doesn't often seem to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts (to paraphrase a great email I got today), at least not in any way to affect change the way Language, Origin, Caterpillar, How(ever), Sulfur, etc. do. Part of this is perhaps the issue of pulling from the same pool of writers that I mentioned previously, but I think a larger part of it may be what seems to be an issue by issue amnesia.

I think one option for doing something other than this is to, as Larry mentions Corman suggesting, offering large swaths of writing from a few writers as opposed to small swaths from a lot of writers. I think another option is to consider pools that are less dipped into, and in this I'm thinking very local and very global pools (knowing that the global always consists of the local). We're trying to do this with the first issue of Fascicle. On the global end, we've been granted a godsend in the fact that Kent Johnson is operating as translation coordinator for this first issue, and hopefully will return to do so again. If you know Kent mainly as the provocative guy lurking in various blog comment boxes, there's whole other worlds in which he circulates. One of which is as translator and friend of translators everywhere, and as an editor of one of my favorite anthologies, The Third Wave anthology on contemporary Russian poetry. So Kent raised up his flag and now Fascicle will be featuring the work of many, if not most, of the major translators of poetry. I've also sent out calls to some of the translators I've made contact w/ thru Octopus. And hopefully many of these translators will be pleased with the quality of readership and company their work finds in Fascicle, and will want to contribute work again and again.

All of which is nice and fine and exciting, but in terms of conceptualizing what this will mean concerning what Fascicle should be, as a journal, and what it establishes as its modus operandi, it leaves options, even in terms of how to present work in translation. It seems that in a lot of journals, especially online, poetry and translation are presented under different tables of content, or there will be special portfolios on poetry from Australia, China, etc. A lot of this is great: I'm thinking of my pleasure in reading the selection of work from England that GutCult ran a few issues back, and also the Baja poetry portfolio from Jacket a few years ago. My own preference is to have translations and poems that are originally in English all mixed together. If Fascicle were a print journal, this would probably be easier, and I would again use Sulfur as a model and the issues would move thru poetry, translations, essays, etc. all throughout the issue, with the implication that all of this contributes to a whole. Essays, reviews and such will be under separate headings from poems and translation, but I think in order to assume a different normality than journals that can seem almost isolationist in their American only contents, it makes sense to have all creative work together. Part of the motivation is that I think it's exciting to click on any unfamiliar name and not know from what locale, or even what language, this person is composing. Another motivation is not to imply that poems from Americans is the main stream and poems from elsewhere are simply tributaries: it's just more exciting to read innovative work from Moscow and Austin when they're snuggled close to each other.

A trickier pool is the local pool: in this I simply mean I am, and I know Ken Rumble and Chris Vitiello would second and third this, really interested in what's going on in the different communities -- what's shaking in DC, Athens, Philly, Milwaukee, Austin. Fascicle will hopefully have news correspondents from all the above communities, and hopefully any other, who are interested in sharing what the poetry news is for their area: what's getting published, who's starting journals, etc. I'm also hoping Fascicle will regularly feature work from people in these communities: I know we'll have a lot of Triangle area stuff in each issue, but also from other active communities. One of the reasons I asked both Ken and Chris to help on Fascicle is not just that I wanted even more of an excuse to hang out with them, or just because I think they have great taste in poetry, but also because they know more about what's going on in a lot of these communities than I do: they know the great writers in San Francisco and DC who aren't as high profile as some bigger names, but who are doing amazing stuff. Or they can shoot off an email to Rod Smith or Brent Cunningham and ask who's doing amazing stuff. One shady aspect of asking people to be correspondents is to hit them up for suggestions of people in their community who are doing amazing stuff. There are writers here in Chapel Hill/Carrboro like Todd Sandvik, Brian Howe, Randall Williams who are doing amazing stuff under the radar, are writing poems that don't settle for being just publishable but that push and cajole in really interesting ways. It's amazing stuff.

Silliman's making sense over at his blog on journals: Jacket is obviously the great resource and journal, and I'd place Ubu Web right behind tho it doesn't pretend to be a journal. Someone in his comments trots out the "get rid of issues" argument, but I'm not convinced. Ultimately, web journals serve as massive databases and archives, and I think should be geared and edited towards that means to be of most use, and I think the issue by issue format is the best way of doing this; it might be an arbitrary organizing device for an online journal, but it is a means of organizing and editing at a workable level.

How many people are doing really unique editing work at journals who are under 40? This isn't a rhetorical questions, just a means of looking at editors who aren't just doing a 'good' job, but are noticeably distinct in either the approach to editing and/or in who you find in their journals. For instance, what you find from Spahr and Osman at Chain you don't see at other journals, and I'd argue Behrle's Can We Have Our Ball Back? stands out distinctly from other journals in its editorial vision. Skanky Possum has a unique aesthetic, so does The Poker. I come to these journals with expections that I don't come to other journals with.

In contrast, there are a lot of quality journals that you could maybe take the contents out of and put in another issue and not be puzzled by: switch the poetry from a recent Fence with a recent The Canary or Slope or even one of the Octopii that I co-edited and there wouldn't be many people who would remark the difference, or maybe notice. Which is not necessarily in and of itself a bad thing, but it is I think a thing, and more an opportunity to think about editing approaches and not just a critique. I think Octopus' contents stand up w/ about anyone's, but there's not a lot of poets that we published there that you wouldn't also expect to see in Fence, etc. Which means or doesn't mean a lot of things, but which perhaps signifies that a lot of the quality journals going now are pulling from the same (large) pool of writers. As an editor I can think to myself: okay, this pool of writers is taken care of right now editing-wise; these different aesthetics have their platforms. So all that means to me is: what other quality stuff is out there? How to find it? How to then get it across?

What I'm interested in attempting w/ this new journal that'll be launching this August is to push a little harder than I did before, looking at tendencies, scenes, writers, etc. that I find of interest and both try to discover what is there and also to help facilitate what is there by providing an open space for those writers. I think great things can happen when a writer with a lot going on knows that what she or he is working will quickly find a quality place to be published in. I think if you find three excellent editors to support your projects, you'll have a fruitful writing and publishing life. Could you imagine say a twenty year run where you knew Hambone, Sulfur and Talisman would be awaiting your newest projects and publishing them? Olson exploded once he had Corman and Creeley giving him space to fill. I would guess Combo's great support of Kasey Mohammad's writing helps him to pursue new projects at a greater speed than he would if he didn't have that, or other journals, that he knew would open its pages to him. Great journals don't just publish already great writers -- I think a great journal is one that helps writers become great.

So that's one idea behind Fascicle. There's right now at least a handful of writers whom I'd publish sight-unseen because I think so highly of their work. Peter O'Leary comes to mind. Chris Vitiello, Mary Margaret Sloan. Tim Van Dyke. One means of measuring Fascicle's success would be knowing that these writers could look to Fascicle as an outlet for ambitious work that other journals perhaps would not so readily make room for, and perhaps that would help bring this ambitious work about.

If you're a music fan: I'm guest blogging over at the best MP3 blog running, Moistworks. Today put some Animal Collective, Lee Perry, Bob Marley and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Tomorrow is all underground Arkansas rock: The Stranger Steals, Tel Aviv, W/O, and Affection.

Hey, Tost here. Back in the saddle. What's new w/ me? Married!

Yes, the classic cake eating picture. Note the strategically placed wedding cake. Note to other aging poets who are getting married: don't get so worried about performing your wedding night that you take a handful of Viagra a few hours before the ceremony. It was tough moving that cake around the whole reception so appropriate pictures could be taken. Also note: a Joseph Cornell piece as the decoration on the groom's cake. That's right, I reduced my favorite artist not only to decoration, but as decoration on the backup desert. Mmmmm, stolen dignity tastes good.

This is a moving picture from the rehearsal dinner, my dad handing to me the family sex hat that's been passed down from Ebeneezer Tost and now to me. (Hoo haw, I haven't lost a step!) Actually it is a pocket watch that has been passed down from my Dad's grandfather to his father to him and now to me. Good stuff.

This is a picture of me escorting my mom down the aisle while people rudely just wander around behind us as though something other than a wedding is going on. Look at them! Beers in hand, like it's some picnic. I mean, only one person attending the wedding seems to be even aware that we're walking down the aisle. Thank you, and only you, Emily.

Here's Leigh and her father getting ready to head down the aisle. You can be sure people were paying attention then. Leigh does look quite gorgeous though. We got married under Magnolia trees in Springdale, Arkansas.

Here's a pic of me and some Arkansas MFA buddies. An Arkansausage party of massive literary talent if you will.

That'd be, standing: Andy Albertson, Adam Prince, Adam Clay, TTost, Skip Hays.
That'd be, kneeling: Nic Pizzolatto, Sean Chapman, Mark Cherry.

Romance! Our first dance as a married unit, to The Kinks' "Strangers" ("strangers of this road we are on/we are not two, we are one").