I wrote a poem last night for a poetry contest to be judged by James Tate. I wrote it in my "own" style," but sort of "directing my attention" to the potential judge/reader. Now I'm going to write some banal narrative poems for another contest judged by Robert Pinsky. I know it sounds hokey to enter a poetry contest. I had a bad experience as a kid, writing a perfect villanelle, with Petrarchan paradoxes about fire and ice, and losing out to a kid who had stolen his poem from a hallmark card. The next year I made them make me a judge so I could weed out the plagiarisms. I'm using the contests as a sort of "generative device." Kind of like Spicer's "Book of Magazine Verse," where the idea of publishing poems in The Sporting News or Ramparts led to the poems themselves. I actually have the first edition of Spicer's book, which was surprisingly affordable. The cover looks just like one of those old Poetry magazines. "None of the poems in this book have been published in magazines. The author wishes to acknowledge the rejection of poems herein by editors Denise Levertov of The Nation and Henry Rago of Poetry (Chicago)."

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"Now accepting private poetry students... " Why does that sound so funny? Probably because all the readers of the blog are more accomplished poets than I am. That puts the relation between writer and reader on a strange footing.

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When I went to Amazon to buy Wishes Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red, the website greeted me with a suggestion that I buy... Rose, Where Did You Get That Red. I was a little freaked out about the Amazon people getting inside my head to such an extent. Of course, the prosaic explanation is that the last two books I bought from them were Impossible World and Sun Out.