My Wet Notebooks

Hello Dear Readers,

whoever, if ever, you are. I've been away for a couple of days. But I'm back to recount my recent adventures and purchases.

Today, a bottle of gatorade spilled inside my bag, creating a calamity that I'm sure is familiar to all bookish types--water damage. Yes, the Simon Armitage book I'm reading, my daybook, my journal (oh, not my journal!), my dell digital jukebox, and my contributor's copy of the new Western Humanities Review, were all slightly wetted, though fortunately not drenched. How crappy.

But I've been reading these English poets I mentioned earlier. It's a real change, a welcome one, from the looseness and fragmentation of so much contemporary American poetry. I'm reviewing the new Iowa anthology of new American poetries, so I've been steeped in a heavy sampling of po-moetry. The more constrained cleverness of poets like Armitage and Gweneth Lewis has been a welcome alternative.

In other mediums, I've just bought a CD by the jazz drummer Jim Black. It's loose as well, melodic, but sloppy. But Black is amazing, combining almost machine-like precision, chops that are ready to sample the rhythms of any genre, and an experimental flair that makes him not unlike, well, much contemporary poetry.

My thesis conference at Columbia is this week. As my readers are both friends, I don't anticipate being surprised by their responses to my work, but wish me luck. Finally, I will have my MFA. I've been scared a safe would fall on me before I got the damn degree.