A break in the clouds

Metaphorically of course. Eugenian morning fog continues for what must be a record umpteenth day.

Last night I received the first rejection of this whole new "real job" stage of life. Carney Sandoe, a sort of caseworker-based clearinghouse for teaching candidates, didn't consider me sellable enough to take my case. Which would seem to mean, by implication, that their rejection stands in implicitly for the rejection of however many thousands of schools with which they liason. Maybe that's not the case. But it feels a bit like that.

Brighter news: the poem "LANE BIKE", the title of which I wrote yesterday and then abandoned, is finished. Among its many subjects:

o metonymy;
o that time I first kissed Kristin, who'd been riffing on the need to seize the day, which I did;
o the environs of West Eugene (especially its car graveyards and train tracks);
o the Lascaux cave painters;
o anthropologists of the Distant (distant!) Future (future!)

But it'll have to sit in the books for a bit before I do anything with it. It's way imperfect.

I'm tearing through the remaining books on my MFA reading list: C.K. Williams's Flesh and Blood, Eamon Grennan's Still Life with Waterfall. The former is far less satisfying than I remember. The eight-line form, each line of a Whitmanic length, is not the problem. In most of the poems the problem is to do with, hmm, let's see, maybe the near-total absence of image?? That might have something to do with it. Without image being meaningfully deployed & developed, the prosaic tendency of C.K.'s long line tends to blot out anything poetic. The best of these poems ("The Modern," about eating a tomato; I mean, hot damn) are quite fine, but the worst are like entries from a shrink's nightly journal of Deep Thoughts.

Grennan's poems, however, shine. Much of this might relate to the fact that I can hear his Irish lilt reading each line (especially whenever I come to the word "heart"), but really he's just expert at what he does. I don't think he'd mind if I shared one.

Up Against It

It's the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things - this fact of glass - and can only go on
making the sound that tethers their electric
fury to what's impossible, feeling the sting in it.