I think the poem’s pretty hot, probably the best poem in the English language since “Song of Myself.”

Goddamn, my eyes burn.

Adverbs: none; adverbs are for losers and cowards

The following is part of the second stanza of a poem entitled Into the Fog. I've been stuck for a third stanza for almost two years now, but I'm waiting patiently for inspiration.

Last week, people, I posted the first stanza of The Consolations, the poem that, if I ever get another poetry collection published will be both the title poem and the first poem in the book. There's going to be a poem by that same name as the last poem in the theoretical collection.

My homegirl is dropping hot fire on her blog, as usual, and, on today's post, I got name-checked.

1999. I was back in Madtown, watching baseball with my dad and reading a really lousy poem in a literary journal, a pen in my hand. The poem made me think of a friend of mine from grad school because I knew that she would have disliked the poem, too.

I wrote Into America as an assignment for David Wagoner's grad workshop at UW. The assignment was to write a poem where every line ended with an "r" sound. Going in, I didn't think that the assignment would produce a poem that might end up in my book manuscript, but the only major change I ever made to the poem was to break the lines so that every other line ended with an "r" sound.

A few months ago, Erica O., one of my fellow former Wisconsin Institute Fellows sent me an article that she had recently had published. The writing, of course, was lovely, and one sentence really jumped out at me. I knew immediately that I wanted to use that sentence as a basis for a poem.

Okay, I didn't get a chance to post a poem when I was in Las Vegas. Sorry about that, but here's a poem that  I'll be reading tomorrow at a taping for a local PBS show coming out of Fresno. I'm not sure when the show will be on, but I'll update once I do know.

The poem's in three sections, and the first section was the first thing that I ever wrote in a creative writing class.