I am making an afternoon entry because I am delaying running an errand for Chip Delany. I have to pick up some photocopy packets for him, but it is cold and drizzly outside. Some people know how much I hate small drops of cold water (I think there might be pebbles out there, too...).

So instead I am eating corn and sardines. Thanks to Beth's roommate who showed me the cool-ness of eating corn with black pepper. I love the new taste. In the past, corn was bland to me - tasty but nothing to get excited over - corn was always a very utilitarian vegetable to me. But now it is all-different. Peppered corn has opened new vistas and coined new paradigms in my life. I love corn with pepper!

Sardines are cool, too, but they have always been cool.

Thanks to Phil for his write up in his own journal http://www.prairienet.org/~pbrewer/Journal/writing_progress.php I also want to proclaim Phil's hip-kitsch reference to "Buckaroo Bonzai" which he owns on DVD. I am speechless Phil. Will you never cease to amaze?

Took a few minutes at work today to do some preliminary research on the poet Juliana Spahr. She is one of those LANGUAGE Poets and she will be reading at Temple University on February 14th, 2002. I had high hopes for this woman since her bio indicated that she had interest in punk rock and hard core, but instead her work closely follows the LANGUAGE tradition in that the work is very self-consciously avant-garde. I should remember to link her stuff too so that the grateful reader can inspect on her own. When I was first introduced to Spahr's work, it was by way of an essay that she wrote in her early (i.e. pre-avant garde) days. She said she wrote about her mom and that no matter what she did she couldn't write about anything except her mom. Then the great leap of faith to avant-gardism and now eschews all traditional forms to be intentionally lacking in subject or plot or literary place. Now she supposes herself to be a much better poet.

Well my opinion of all that is simple - poetry is just like any other form of writing - you have to work through the crap that you produce in the "early" days. If you find that can't write about anything but your mother, then it is not the fault of the poem (or the form or the subjectivity in the poem); it is the fault of you. As if the use of "I" or proper syntax is what is keeping you from your real genius.

For all that, I am similar and different. Writing fiction of poetry that has appeal beyond the author (or the author's friends) takes time and effort. The reason I am leaning so much to brief, dense, surreal prose poems is because I know my limitations. I am not a good plotter and I am lazy. But I do have good ideas. I like my characters but they don't have much life beyond their four paragraphs of fame.

So the question that was posed to me by EVERY writer-instructor at Clarion this summer is "Who am I going to sell this to?" I can only do what I did then, shuffle my feet, look at my knees, and mutter, "I dunno." Which is why I need a real job. My Asian whore characters are not going away so until the world changes, I'll need a good job. LSD-addled anti-heroes don't put fish on the table, fish puts fish on the table (that was "Tick" reference). I'll be back later.

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