I used to know a guy with a big tattoo of Baudelaire's face on his arm

It actually looked more like Don Knotts.  

I have no interest in getting a tattoo of Baudelaire, but I do share his dream of "the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without [formal] rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie . . . ."  

Okay, I haven't actually written any prose poems yet, but I've had a sort of breakthrough in terms of how I want to write them.  I think I may have stumbled across a strategy for writing these prose poems that could be for me what Berryman's basic Dream Song form was for him.  Not that I think these will be even a tiny bit as good as Berryman's poems; I just feel that this strategy might allow me to finally say what I want to say in the same way that the Dream Songs allowed Berryman to finally write the poems he was born to write.  Lots of them.

I don't want to say much else about them, because that may anger the gods, and they might tell the Muses to shut up.  But I am sort of excited about writing these.  I hope they turn out half as well as they promise to be in my imagination.

Mind you, I'm referring to how well they will satisfy me, not necessarily the reading public.  It could be that what I really want to say is strangely irrelevant and even obsolete to the poetry community.  But I don't care.  Publishable or not, these may be my real work.

Oh, line breaks.  We have had a love-hate relationship for so long.  But I've got to let you go.  I've met someone else.

2009, You Fickle Bitch

So, it turns out that my optimism regarding 2009 was a bit misplaced.  Once again, the masters of the PhD universe have foolishly denied my attempts to storm their castle.  Well, one school admitted me without funding, which I thought might be do-able with loans and such (at least for one year), but that's looking dubious.  Thus, I amback where I started.  I'm still taking some classes toward high school teaching licensure, but I don't think I can do that much longer, either. 

Anyway.  I've also been thinking a lot about writing mi poemas, if not actually writing much.  Or at all.  But I feel things are looking up in this area, because this morning I had a brainstorm about how to solve my problem with finding a new form and a new voice.  It is the kind of brainstorm that makes me think, "Duh, how retarded was I not to think of this sooner?"  I am feeling a strong desire to write prose poems!

I used to be really into prose poems, but I haven't felt at all close to that form for the last few years.  Now, suddenly, it seems like exactly the form I need to use.  Instead of fussing with lineation--wondering whether I should stick with the traditional flush-left variety, or try Wright's drifty dropped line, or go full-on Graham-eque--I will go in the opposite direction. 

I'd already decided that in my new poems, I want to use dream logic,  and I also want to invite in many sub-voices, archetypal ones, mystical ones, psychoanalytic ones, lyrical ones, all sorts of different registers and cadences.   So now I'm thinking how excellent it would be to let them all pool together in a thick yet spacious linguistic field, a.k.a. a prose poem.  Plus, I have to admit that my prose is probably better than my verse.  (I almost said "better than my poetry," but as Russell Edson said, the opposite of prose is verse, not poetry.) 

At any rate, I'm feeling more excited about writing than I have in a while, so that's a good sign. 

In related news, I have a poem in the excellent new issue of RHINO, so buy that.  There's a link over on the right.  And another of my poems will be presented online at Glass: A Journal of Poetry (also linked over on the right), but not until August.  But what they have up now is also worth reading, so check them out.