Seven things to do before I die:

The real answer is:

1. Live
2. Live
3. Live
4. Live
5. Live
6. Live
7. Live

But the blogger meme answer is:

1. Translate the Iliad
2. Go to Egypt
3. Eat Morbier
4. Write a poem worth reading
5. Watch all the episodes of Magnum, PI
6. Move to a warm place
7. Improve the world

Seven Things I cannot do:

1. Sing
2. Say “lily”
3. Watch horror movies
4. Do the splits
5. Read Faulkner
6. Write pantoums
7. Eat hot peppers

Seven things that attract me to my mate

1. His sense of humor
2. His kindness
3. His love for animals
4. His intelligence
5. His voice
6. His beard
7. His toastiness

Seven Books I love:

1. Gaudy Night, by Sayers
2. Emma, by Austen
3. Blood Sport, by Francis
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Lee
5. Sabriel, by Nix
6. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, by King
7. The Dubliners, by Joyce

Seven things I say

1. Oooookey
2. Golly
3. Woo!
4. See you later, potater?
5. Snug
6. Someone just push me in front of a bus
7. BASTARD!

Seven Movies I’ve loved:

1. Charade
2. Better Off Dead
3. Babe
4. The Awful Truth
5. The Importance of Being Earnest (50s)
6. Pride and Prejudice (90s)
7. Die Hard

I apologize for the times I defended greed.

It’s taking baseball away from my TV. It’s nothing definite, but the Indians have apparently decided that they can make more money by taking their games off more TVs.

It doesn’t make sense to me, but what the hell do I know? I’m in sales!

“A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it.”

Perhaps if they had to answer the phone they’d stop screaming at each other in the middle of the street.

My voter registration is just fine, but since you’ve asked, I’ll double check that it’s fine so that I can vote against your stupid-ass party.

Why are they permitted to phonespam my house? Why, Santy Claus, why?

In talking about mad ideas, I forgot to mention the one that is the hardest and, potentially, the most worthwhile.

You know how you can go to Netflix or Amazon and they suggest another movie or another book? I want a “Suggest a Poet” website.

“People who like Richard Wilbur might also like…”

Or perhaps, “People who like Joyce Kilmer should get hit by a bus in New Hampshire…”

So Rik has mad ideas and, unlike most of us mad folk, he puts his money where his mad is.

I had the mad idea to invent a poetic form and then host a contest to write one. But in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t so crazy.

I had the mad idea to create an “Average Joe Poetry Contest” in which poems would be judged by non-poetry readers. I still like that idea.

I had the mad idea of an “Average Joe Poetry Magazine” where the audience is non-poetry readers. Insane. INSANE. But I like it.

And I still like the idea of anonymous poetry boards. Real boards, mind you, not some moronic flamefest where people use their anonymity to attack or play usenet games, but one where the personalities are divorced from the poems. This idea has been tried to an extent, but I’m still interested.

If you haven’t checked out Greg Perry‘s daily poetry reviews, you are missing out. He’s threatening to quit, and I think it would be great if he tagged another blogger as his replacement. The critiques aren’t just for readers, they are for the very poets who are published in these daily mags. Someone is reading!

I don’t think my ideas are mad enough to suit Rik. I should have involved goat cheese and possibly skittles.

TE Ballard describes her new, flinching ways so beautifully in this post.

I used to fly down the roads here, so secure in my undying. I didn’t think I was immortal. I didn’t think. I didn’t need to.

There’s a road just behind my house where the hills suspend you at the top, like a toy train pulling too much weight and getting caught by the balance. You are looking up the road, up the hillside, then at nothing but sky, and then it all falls and you can’t see the sky or anything but the road piercing the valley and rising up again on the other side. Again and again, drudgery, brief freedom, and then the rush with gravity latched to your wrist like a cinder-blocked handcuff.

I used to love that road. I loved the way my tires would tug free of the ground so briefly and then I’d bounce back to earth and build up speed for the next launch. Now, I just want to sit at the bottom. I want every driver to see me, you can’t avoid seeing me if I sit here, quietly. No soaring. My god, no flying. And no peekaboo with the sky. Now you see me. Now you don’t not see me.

I don’t have to take that road. There are ways around. But a part of me remembers liking the me who flew.

I participated in a very informal poll about favorite poetic forms, and I mentioned my love of dizains. I do love them. I love their mirrored qualities, their length and, frankly, I think I love their scarcity. How many dizains have you ever read? I’ve read less than a hundred. Perhaps less than fifty. Perhaps even fewer. I’ve written about a dozen.

Their scarcity means that there is something very fresh and alive about a dizain. I haven’t seen it all. Yes, I know that I haven’t seen it all when it comes to sonnets, but in my cynical phases (at least once a day) I feel that I have. And then I get cranky. And then I eat lunch and feel better, so it’s probably just hunger pangs.

Why the sonnet? Why not the dizain? Why does one form explode in popularity and then maintain that ascendancy, while another one has to be explained because the reader has never heard of one? Even in a group of well-read metrical poetry fans, the dizain needed defining. It’s a rare form, and it’s not getting any less rare.

Thoughts on dizains, and links to them, most appreciated.

Thoughts on why certain forms never catch on also appreciated.

Ten thousand dollars in small unmarked bills most appreciated.

David Harris-Gershon, “auctioneer”, is writing in a fascinating way about his life and how he came to the point of auctioning off his writing income.

At least, I’m finding it fascinating. You might too if you read it.

Know this! He’d kick my ass at Centipede.

Certain poets and certain songs are, for me, not conducive to my own writing. If I read Spenser I end up writing like a bad parody of some hopped up dude in pantaloons. Really!

And there’s a song that’s on the radio now that is sucking the ability, however much I have, right out of me. It’s not the song, it’s something about the song. I get songs stuck in my head all the time, so this isn’t just a case of earworm. This is Something Bigger. Something that’s making my poems sound like songs on Hot AC.

Fall Out Boy. Fitting name.

I hate when I get an image wedged into my imagination but can’t get it into a poem.

Months or years ago, as a passenger in a car, I thought that the road repairs looked like writing. Some beautiful Arabic script that I had no hope of reading.

I wrote a poem. It’s below and it’s not very good. But I can’t figure out how to use that image, what to say, how to describe what I felt it meant.

And I know that “Farsi” is factually incorrect, but if Keats can do it, so can I!

Not Taken

She couldn’t read the road, no matter
that she saw how calligraphy filled
the Farsi cracks with macadam, finding words
within the holes and breaks, the pattern
aped and duplicated, here at the shoulder, there
splitting the doubled yellows, new tar black
against the fading cinder grey.

The dog passed this place on clicking claws,
escaping from his bath. She asked the tar
which way he might have turned, there at the crest–
pattered to the west or trotted east
on steaming feet. It wouldn’t speak, too slow
to crack new alphabets, to send new tongues
uncoded through its brittle skin.

He came back, cold, a frost of spines to towel
and curse and scold. For years he fled. She quested
up the hill, the long black pavement, riddled
with Arabic. He’d run and return, return
until his hips failed, sprawling, his eyes clouded blue
and still the pavement murmured underneath a tire
and would not answer questions or point the way.