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Letter to the Next President

Dear Mr. President,

Some things to do in your first couple of months:

  1. Call the Governors in for a Round Table Discussion:
    1. End Militarization of Local Police Forces.
    2. End Drone Flights Over US.
  2. Call a Full Session of Congress:
    1. Whip Their Asses into Shape re: Running the Country, not Their Own Personal Beliefs.
    2. Passing Wall Street Regulation.
    3. Passing Real Energy Reform.
    4. Passing Real Economic Recovery Steps. (Look to the Great Depression for ideas. Those actually worked.)
  3. Address the Nation re: Market Forces & Fuel Prices.
  4. Prosecute & Break Up the “Too Big to Fail” Corporations.
  5. Equal Rights Amendment for LGBT.

The US is a country which has led the world in every endeavor. Make it so again.

Thanks,

Eric

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After Dorianne Laux’s Craft Talk

The Creative Writing program at ODU brings in a visiting writer each semester. This semester it’s Dorianne Laux (who you should definitely read, if you haven’t), and on Thusday she gave her craft lecture titled “The Marriage of Music and Meaning”.

This of course made me go back to my thesis and wonder whether I’m spending too much time in my head dealing with conceptualisms instead of the very real task of making music. Of course, the last poem that got published was written more in attention to sound than anything else: “god, you choke old stones down” has a great music (to me, at least).

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Where are You Going, Where Have I Been?

While I haven’t been posting here (or at Poetic Idealism) lately, that’s not to say things haven’t been very busy.

One thing I’m very proud of is the state of the new issue of Barely South Review, which has taken up most of my time these past two weeks. It’s turned out beautifully, with no small thanks to the contributors who sent us wonderful materials to work with, and the staff who put in many long hours.

On the other hand, this workload also means my thesis has taken somewhat of a back seat recently. I’ve written a couple of new things, but still feel about fifteen poems short. These are in me somewhere, and now I have time to go mining for them.

Continue reading “Where are You Going, Where Have I Been?”

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What needs to happen is a good couple Weeks of unhindered new productivity. Which will begin on Tuesday. I swear. For real.

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Left Turn Approaching

For those of you who’ve been following the project here, you know I’ve been writing a lot of poems based around science, and specifically the disciplines of astrophysics and particle physics. They have tended to ask the reader to shift his/her viewpoint and maybe become uncomfortable with the poem. In particular, this stems from the poems’ atheistic / agnostic viewpoint, which is in conflict with the majority of (at least) American sense of order. A lot of them have also been a lot less grounded in the human experience, and more so in the explanation of how I see the universe.

Some may even categorize these poems as Romantic.

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Notes: On Juniper – #1

– If you have to do a Q&A, be wary of giving high schoolers the inadvertent right wrong idea.

– Mermaids are a deep well of interestingness. Also, fantastic option for the body, image, and the guy nodding in-and-out at the bar.

– Clear articulation of workshop processes is good stuff (also known as pedagogy).

– If you only have a week, don’t expect to get everything done. (personal and educational)

– Everyone is here because they earned it, including me.

– Everyone is full of self-doubt in this profession.

– Australians are everywhere.

– Intensity.

– The rule is to avoid politics & religion. But you can’t really in this environment.

– There are lots of books and authors I don’t know about (and the same for you).

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So I’ve taken a week off to relax, build Ikea stuff, and generally decompress, but look for new posts coming soon!