The great figure.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am sharing with you this photo of my shadow juxtaposed with a pile of spilled pickles on wet concrete. I hope it encourages you somehow to work pickles into your holiday festivities. Or, better yet, to find something ugly enough to be beautiful.

Book news:

The 2008 Akron Poetry Prize winner, The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland by Rachel Dilworth, is now available from the University of Akron Press and other retailers. Rita Dove made the selection, and the amazing Amy Freels designed the book. Please check it out!

The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, February 2010) by David Dodd Lee is now available for pre-order on Amazon. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy. I am also very excited to share the word that David's new book, Orphan, Indiana, is forthcoming from the Akron Series in Poetry, as one of my editor's choice selections from this year's reading period. Full details will appear soon on the UA Press website.

Non-book news:

I am currently eating a school of cheddar and pretzel goldfish crackers, which have been mixed together in a coffee filter (without coffee) for my enjoyment. I highly recommend this as a snack.

I wrote a new poem yesterday, and even though it's very much a draft, I'm so happy to be writing. I have a lot of reading to do over winter break, but I hope to spend a lot of time on new poems, and putting my manuscript together.

End-o-term just might be my favorite part of the semester, until the grading kicks in.

The piles of leaves have finally been removed from my devil strip, tree lawn, parkway, or whatever you call it, thanks to the City of Akron. My yard looks great. I hope the universe doesn't consider this an invitation to send snow.

Hungry for it.

I risked lowering the temperature in my fridge yesterday to capture a photograph of this cliche. I also had to lay on the kitchen floor. But a good cliche is hard to find. So what if it was no cake walk? I'm annoyed by the fact that the accent mark on the e isn't working. O blogger. You have gotten better over the years, but you still aren't perfect.

I guess I could say the same for myself.

I was looking through my "Fall 09" poetry file, and I'm disappointed. Under ten pages of new work. I have done some revisions, though, and since I was all "on fire" over the summer it's not the end of the world. In a way, I'm lucky I was able to write at all, considering the massive upheavals that went down recently.

That said, I am very hungry for the following:

1. Writing new poems.

2. Looking over the ms pile I sequenced a while back, and writing the poems that seem to be missing from it.

3. Deciding which 2-3 presses I'll be sending it to.

4. Eating apples and oranges.

5. Generally decompressing.

Last night I found myself photographing a pile of spilled sliced pickles in the grocery store parking lot. They were downright luminous. At first it looked like a flattened stuffed animal soaked with rain. Then the slices began to distinguish themselves. I took the photo, pretending I was scrutinizing a text message rather than brandishing a camera. Then I got into the car and looked at the picture, which had morphed from a brilliant tragedy to what appeared to be a pile of green vomit.

I think I may need to work with the levels a little.

Now you see it.

I know it's only Tuesday, but I have a sense that if I make it through this afternoon and evening I'll be entering the home stretch of home stretches. I guess that's rather optimistic thinking for someone with a boatload of grading on the horizon, but so what.

The university is making cutbacks in janitorial services. This became readily apparent about thirty minutes into the first day of the reduced services. It's especially bad timing because people keep dropping post-Halloween fun sized candy wrappers on the floor. I have been picking them up. I hate it when things are untidy (except for my closets, but nobody sees those). When I interviewed here, one of the things that impressed me about this school was how neat it was. I think I may have to engage in some vigilante cleaning.

[Confession au sujet de fun sized candy.] Although I am not usually a candy fan, I have been eating my way through my kids' Halloween loot in an attempt to prevent disappearance. Now that I am no longer cooking large, bland meals every night, I have found it surprisingly difficult not to lose five-ish pounds every two weeks. People have started asking if I am ill. Hopefully candy will help. I am trying all kinds of candy that I never imagined existed. I guess I should be eating something more wholesome, but I have to get rid of the candy somehow, and my kids certainly don't need it. When the candy is all gone I will begin baking loaves of whole wheat bread. As long as you can bake them in the crevices of a laptop computer.

A mess.

Don't you love it when you clean something over and over and over and over again, and it never looks any better, and then you clean it over and over and over again, and then miraculously it's 155% better than before? And as an unexpected bonus, you now have awe-inspiring biceps?

That's the story of my basement.

**Literal** It was a mess. Filthy, desecrated by cats, filled with cobwebs and dust on both finished and unfinished sides, barely-lit thanks to electrical problems and blown fluorescent bulbs, and just generally nasty. I'd lie awake in my bed disturbed at what was looming downstairs. I'd sprint to the washing machine and back. If I dropped something on the floor I'd wash it again.

**Figurative**My basement was a hideous, looming metaphor. There were other metaphors inside the metaphor. I hired a guy and his wife to come remove several of the metaphors. They put those metaphors on a truck and I will never see them again. I hired an exterminator (this is literal, fyi) to inspect the basement and put an end to the cobwebs. I used a shop vac on the metaphor. I used a shop vac for hours at a time. Then, finally, I used my upstairs vacuum on the metaphor. I started washing the floors of my metaphor over and over again. I scrubbed my metaphor's floors on my hands and knees. Some days when I'd already washed the floors of the metaphor I snuck downstairs and washed them again. I got rid of some detritus in the metaphor. We fixed the lights and the metaphor was illuminated. I let my children start playing in the metaphor. I woke up one morning and walked right through my metaphor, and marveled at its brilliance.

In non-basement news, we had an amazing time with Matthew Guenette. I did not want him to leave. I want him to come back. I am kind of impressed that I was able to put his poem on youtube.

I am entering the final weeks of the semester. It's glorious. Or, rather, it will be soon. Much like a heavily-rehabilitated basement.

Matthew Guenette live at The University of Akron

Why I love my job.

(Guenette, Biddinger, Wasserman, Dumanis)

Detritus or not.

DETRITUS:

The bag above. The germs that keep getting everybody sick (o universe, thank you and knock very softly and kindly on wood, for keeping my family relatively healthy). The economy. Grumblings. Trees that somehow make more dead leaves even though they're completely bare. Fights over nothing, conducted by children who don't really care who gets to sit on the right side of the couch anyway. Being cold all of the time, even when it's not cold out and students are running around in flipflops and no coats. Grading, and its avoidance. Whiners. Unloading the dishwasher, then realizing that it's stupid to gripe over unloading a dishwasher, since having a dishwasher is a true luxury. Emails without answers. Administrative inheritances of in-kind non-blessings. Updating the calendar, printing it, then having to update it again. Soggy back yard lawns. Ultra-loud music when put on hold, followed by ultra-quiet customer service representative. Knowing it's going to snow some time in the future. Waning supplies of Halloween candy. The lingering reek left when a car in a parking lot turns into a great conflagration.

NOT DETRITUS:

This week we're welcoming visiting writer Matthew Guenette to Akron. He's going to visit several classes, conference with UA NEOMFA students, and read on Thursday night. Photos will be forthcoming. Here are the details:

The University of Akron English Department’s Literary Arts Series presents a poetry reading with Matthew Guenette and Michael Dumanis on November 12, 2009 at 6 pm in The Martin Center Library Room 105 Fir Hill Street Akron, OH 44325

Matthew Guenette's first book, Sudden Anthem, won the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. He is also the author of a chapbook, Hush of Something Endless, from Ropewalk Press. Sudden Anthem was named a 2008 Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the Wisconsin Library Association. In 2009, Matthew was named the Writer-in-Residence of the Hessen-Wisconsin Literary Exchange, where he spent three months in Wiesbaden, Germany, giving workshops, readings, and working with prisoners. He lives and works in Madison, WI.

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) and the coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). He is currently an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where he also directs the CSU Poetry Center.

There will be a complimentary buffet following the reading.

How to defibrillate a poem (before it's too late).

1. Fold the poem in half. Put it in your underwear drawer. Not in your drawers; in a drawer. Close the drawer. Go for a walk. Choose someplace ugly, filled with sorrow. Extra points for a locale that includes profuse multi-sensory information (ripe, overflowing Dumpsters, putrid crab apples piled on a lawn). While on the walk, feel sorry for yourself until you become distracted by the above. Upon returning home, wash your hands, then finish the poem.

2. Select a very sharp pair of scissors. Put those scissors back where you found them. Select the dullest pair of scissors that you can find. Cut your stalled poem into strips. Invite some outside source (clothes dryer, pet hamster, favorite lover) to mix up the strips for you. Dump the strips on the floor. Blink three times. Reconstruct poem from the strips.

3. Why is your poem worth defibrillating? Can't answer this question? Then perhaps you should put it in cold storage instead.

4. Read the poem aloud three times, in different voices. One of these voices must be Scottish (do your best). Then, throw the poem away. Take the garbage out. Salute the sanitation workers as they dump your trash onto the truck. Return to your desk and recreate the poem from whatever you remember. Finally, eliminate any mention of haggis that might have seeped in during the process.

5. Journey to your favorite office supply store. Do not purchase any Hello Kitty stickers. Instead, select a package of highlighter pens. Five colors will suffice. Ponder the poem. Consider its various elements and/or techniques. Give each element / technique a name. One technique must be named "Just Me Being a Shithead." Highlight the various elements / techniques in their own colors. Then rewrite the poem using only one of those elements / techniques. Feel free to color the entire poem orange upon completion, if that satisfies you.