Bullshit

Why are some poets such fucking prima donnas? I was working on a collaborative book for a couple of hippies and they are just fucking insane. I started designing and formatting this book in June or July. By August I had a draft completed. Then these two started revising their poems. Usually, one does this before one sends a book off to be considered for potential publication, and this step has often long been taken by the time the book has been accepted and the press is designing it. That was even a minor problem. Now--as of the end of March--there have been two print proofs, and one of the authors wants to change the margins, which would essentially mean reformatting the entire book. And I'm not going to do it. There have been numerous problems while working on this book, a book that has lines in it like "Poetry and smoke . . . —both are so intoxicating and so ephemeral" and "Learning to open our heart to the moon was a vast candle" and "to insure my vitriolic equilibrium" and "We had once been mahatmas too". In other words, it's not a very good book. This book has a section in it called "Star Pie". What the fuck? Fucking new age bullshit. I don't make the decisions on acceptances and rejections, by the way. I just have to make the goddamn thing. It's not even new age. It's like reading a version of the asshole white guy with the shaved head who stops you on a street corner, or--more likely--on your college campus and tries to talk you into buying some twenty dollar book entitled something like "Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission." Some bullshit like that. These people--the ones for whom I was designing a book--think their book is good and that people are going to buy it. I don't even fucking care about what I'm saying here. Some poets are among the world's most deluded people. They will be the cause of future world wars.

Ever have that experience

of reading someone, then you get to hear that person read the same stuff, and you have a brand new experience with their writing? I had that happen to me while traveling with Molly Gaudry through Baltimore and New York for readings. I now have to re-read We Take Me Apart. Molly's reading from her book opened up new paths for my understanding of the beauty of the language of that book. I feel like a spoon inside your drawer, or that you're a spoon and I'm also a spoon, and we're totally spooning. That's my bastardization of Molly's way more kick-ass work.

Thanks to Adam Robinson, for hosting us in Baltimore; to Joe Young, for carting us around in his car; to Justin Sirois for letting me play with his campfire; to Jen Michalski and Michael Kimball, for scheduling us to read at the 510; to Peter Brown, who came out to see us in MD; to Brooke Shaeffner and Amanda Nazario, for penciling us in in NYC; to John Dermot Woods, Shya Scanlon, Mark Dockins, Greg Gerke, Meakin Armstrong, John Madera, Dawn Raffel, Andrew Zornoza -- everyone -- for coming out to see us. It was really fun. Now I am going to continue drinking the beer I ordered because my fucking flight's been delayed by an hour and a half.

Readings Tonight!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Scott McClanahan, Lily Brown, and Jeremy Schmall at Solar Anus!!!!!!!! At the Beep Beep Gallery!!!!!!! At, I don't know what time, shit!!!!!!! But probably at 7 PM!!!!!!!!!!

I'm reading in Baltimore tonight!!!!!!! With Molly Gaudry!!!!!!!!!! For the 510 Reading Series, at Minas Gallery!!!!!! It should be way fun!!!!!!!!

Thanks

to Ryan Call who presented my book at NOÖ Journal. They're also presenting writerly stuff by writerly pals Heather Christle, Shane Jones, and Joseph Young. There are also books presented that were written by writers whom I do not know personally, but I kind of feel like I do: Natalie Lyalin and CA Conrad.

Speaking of Joseph Young, he read here in Atlanta last night, along with Adam Robinson, James Yeh, and Alexis Orgera as part of a Solar Anus March Madness thing that's going on around here. In less than two weeks Dara Wier's coming to town!

Just got back

from Baltimore. It was a great reading there, last Saturday night, with Heather Christle, Ric Royer (who also read from Andy Devine's Words), and Adam Robinson and his band Sweatpants kicked things off with some of Adam's poems and the band's tunes. The night before the reading I cooked a five-course meal at Adam's apartment for his cooking show (the soon-to-air Culinary Genius). Saturday afternoon Heather cooked a brunch dish for her show, and we kicked it around the fire pit at Justin Sirois's house. Then Sunday me, Adam, his brother, and his brother's friend went skiing here: It was the most fun I've had going somewhere to read, I think. I didn't have to tell a soul to get fucked.

Keep forgetting to mention shit

Reading this Saturday night in Baltimore with Heather Christle, Molly Gaudry, and Andy Devine. At Dionysus (8 Ea. Preston, near the corner of Charles and Preston) at 9pm. Adam Robinson will be jamming some stuff out from the Sweatpants goodness. Sure to be a good time.

A Couple New Reviews

Thanks to Jason Jordan at decomP magazinE for this awesome and generous review of Prose. Jordan says, "What’s most impressive is the language..." And that makes me feel good, as it was something I was very conscious of, very much trying to be creative with verbs, etc. I even have a writing exercise that my students now do, after reading some of the little sections form that book. I have them write a short paragraph, but they have to try to make every sentence some kind of metaphor. They also have to try to use as many different metaphorical tropes as they can (i.e., hyperbole, metonymy, simile), and can even go so far as to write "notaphors" or metaphors that aren't actually metaphors: "Everything sounded old, just as it was—antebellum, and cotton mill-studded." I also give them a list of nouns that they must use as verbs or adjectives: pavement, toaster, etc. "The officials pavemented our city into the twentieth century"; "she toastered her way through breakfast". Stuff like that. It's fun, at least. Anyway--no more rambling. Thanks Jason.

Also, many thanks to Andrew Wessels, who wrote a wonderful review at The Quarterly Conversation. I am a little bit floored by this one, because Wessels says such smart things, and I'm utterly flattered that I was able to please such a bright reader. Wessels's blog is called A Compulsive Reader, so there you go. Just some short examples of his reading of my book:

"Iredell’s main character does not inhabit condensed, walkable cities. He inhabits expansive American cities and the rural wildernesses in between. The car both embodies and creates the narrator’s relationship to his location. One cannot help but think of Creeley, “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going”, and at the same time think of Kerouac’s On the Road. To be on the road, to drive, is a vital American experience."

and:

"This drifting might make one think of ennui. But although there is a relationship between the spirit of Iredell’s poems and the spirit of Rimbaud’s poems, the precise designation of ennui is not quite correct. A more appropriate term would be one that is entirely American and encompasses what it means to be American at the turn of the millennium. A more appropriate term would be disengaged."

and this last one:

"Iredell’s work skirts many boundaries and traditions: poetry, prose, and the European traditions of the bildungsroman and ennui. But it avoids each of these, if ever so slightly, and marches out on its own. The poems are not coming from a tradition because no tradition is the American tradition. The poems might recall traditions, but Iredell is not using these trappings to tell his story. Instead, he is telling his own singular story, creating his own specific tradition and genre as his story unfolds through this series of poems. A singular, American story. A singular, American poem."

I can only hope such nice things get to be said about my next book. The Book of Freaks (the title may change, not sure) is forthcoming (looks like in November) from Future Tense Publishing. Kevin Sampsell, author of the currently-destroying-all-other-memoirs-memoir A Common Pornography is the editor at Future Tense, and he has been kind enough to love this collection of oddities. So we're going to freak it up this year.