Public Transit Poetry

So there's this poetry contest here in St. Louis where they pick 15 poems to be displayed inside local Amtrak cars. I'm going to submit a few un-critiqued poems, which I'll probably have to hand-deliver since they're due in the office on Monday, and I only just went over some potential poems to turn in and made sure they fit the maximum 15-line limit...Is it just me, or is hand-delivery border-line creepy? I get to be almost-late and pseudo-stalkeresque. Story of my life.

FYI: Sean Keck, BC '07 was one of the winners last year.

Here are the poems I'll probably submit. (Posting them here instead of on our G-Docs account is so in-your-face.)


Covered Bridge

You made yourself a covered bridge:

Red walls, white roof, beams flaked with sawdust,
Weather-scraped, painted like seasons
Of rainstorms have rolled down upright panels,
And stood: soaking, drying, standing.

A steepled roof, scent of hay can trick the mind,
Red lumber can still the heart:
Shelter to take us over the stream, and over, on.

But I can hear the whitewater stones,
Tramp the grass, feel it rise in the soil.
I know the creak of air through floorboards,
The absence underneath. Please

Don’t build me a barn for passage.
I’m four legs, one mouth in still drowning water, and
The river’s home to me.



Toasting the Flood

The flood comes for frittatas and stays to wash in the sights.
To work for once, the Venetians walk through water.

Meanwhile the gondoliers docked
At half-submerged café tables
Toast the morning off, glassfuls
Scooped from the waist with well-
Tuned wrists, gray water high
Over taut ankles, and stones
Over more water, spilling the flood
Into itself:

Alla salute di Venezia, the floating city!
To our Atlantis, may we go down together—
When the world turns over,
They’ll need boatmen below, they’ll need
Those men that know the way.



Inauguration Day, Hampton Overpass

To the man made of January ash
Standing in the crushed-us dust cross
Roads, at night, the gaping
Hole where old Hampton Bridge used to be, a question—

Him foot prints freezing as a Polaroid
Turns to focus, the lamplights go out
On the town, this stretch of midtown
Where the overpass went under and came down—

Him at the imploded span, deserted
To the search for lightning conductors
Amidst concrete cylinders, almost praying
For dissolution—oh, let bulbs overrun their rims,
Whittle us to our central spinning—a question—

Does the breath, waiting to be breathed, have to ask:
How do we get there from here?



...So, let me know how you all are doing with writing, jobs, life, etc. And if you think I should adjust these poems before Monday at 5 p.m. Any advice welcome.

Single White Male Seeks a Writing Career

Whoa. It seems that I have gravely misled you. I know almost nothing about freelance writing.

The only thing I can say is that I am a fan of Craigslist for many reasons. It's not only the ads for free beige toilets that have won my affection; there are also two sections that list writing jobs. One lives under "jobs" the other under "gigs." This is where I found my one ill-fated writing assignment. Coincidentally, I also found my real job, my last 3 apartments, and my beige toilet on Craigslist.

Free-style (what what)

Hey Tom --
Can you post some tips for beginning freelancing?
I want to start submitting to local papers/websites while I'm working my 9-to-5 (which is, thankfully, no longer Borders. I'm in the Biomedical Engineering department at Washington University now, yeehaw).

I know I addressed Tom specifically, but don't be shy, feel free to join in everybody.

I'm not sure if it is because I'm working or lazy, but I am currently only reading one book, the title of which I could not remember, but one that I recommend. I looked up the title: "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt. It is historical fiction, which is not really my cup of tea, but is very well written and reminds me of strolls though Oxford.

Burn Before Reading

Hi Writers,

Yall read a lot. I, on the other hand, spend hours in the book store, buy lots of books, and read them entirely too slowly.

I'm currently reading Until I Find You, by John Irving. I will soon be out of Irving books to read and this makes me have a sad face, but not sad enough to type a sad face. So I've still got my dignity. Most people often extol the virtues of A Prayer for Owen Meaney, but I'm much more a Cider-House-Rules kind of guy (though the subsequent movie makes me throw up in my mouth). (Okay, there goes my dignity.) :(

Our blog, sparse as it often is, needs more pictures. As such, and in no part due to any laziness within myself, I am going to pop in a picture of one of my "To Read" stacks instead of typing. My laziness is only a coinicidence.

On the writing front, I am inactively working on two different pieces of fiction. In one, there is a pregnant woman. I've now written scenes wherein the character miscarries, where the baby is born and the mother dies, and where the baby born and the mother lives. You can imagine how this will be confusing for any potential readers.

For that reason, I have registered for a creative writing class at Boston Adult Ed. Though I often mistrust strangers on principle, I've decided to surround myself with ones that want to write and see what happens. Hopefully magic.

Burn After Reading

No writing? There's always reading.

Recently finished:

Emperor of the Air, Ethan Canin. (I went to a reading of his at a local college, and Curtis Sittenfeld was in the audience, which makes no sense to me- why is she in St. Louis? Anyway, his short stories, especially the title one of this first collection, are pretty great, but he read from his most recent novel, America, America. It seems age and years of listening to himself talk at Iowa has made him expansive bordering on just long-winded.)

The Hunger Moon, Suzanne Matson. (So good! Beautifully drawn characters and climactic tension. And I'm not biased because she was my thesis advisor.)

Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins. (Re-read for about the twentieth time and it blew my mind all over again. Possibly- no, I think it is- my favorite book of all time.)

Currently reading:

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut. (Awesome, as per usual.)

Of Love and Other Demons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (A girl bitten by a rabid dog, a corpse with flowing red hair, a smitten priest? I don't know, I can't really get into it yet.)

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace. (Oh, my God, I'm in love. "Forever Overhead": re-read, and omg what an f-ing gorgeous story.)

Whitman. (If I'm sending off an application or going into an interview, for some reason I keep repeating the first few lines of "Song of Myself." It seems to help.)

I miss the blog, Attic-addicts. Let's get it goin. How's everybody doin? I've been slinging books at Borders, got a job today at Wash U, and last night I learned to country two-step. That's about it.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Is this thing on?

Hey everyone,

So I'm sure we're all busy now that the holiday season is here. But I'm hoping we can all take some time to post and discuss new work over the break, so start gathering ideas! In the meantime, what's on everyone's reading lists? Here's a few I'm hoping will turn up in my stocking:

* Reborn: Journals and Notebooks of Susan Sontag
*Frisk by Dennis Cooper (or anything by him, because he's terrifyingly twisted)
*Louise Bourgeois (biography) by Julia Kristeva
*Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose : Gender Performance in Photography
*My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsey Handler (come on, you know you wanna read it, too)
*Writing New York: A Literary Anthology by Phillip Lopate (he's my workshop prof for next semester! Kim, he's featured in Tell It Slant, which is currently on my desk)

Ok, that's all for now. Keep the writing coming!

~Stace