Here I am blogging in my office last week. Picture by JD.

How to Get Started, How to Keep Going, How to Stop by Jordan Davis. Unpublished book ms.

I got to read this and the Susan Schultz book on the same day. Sundays can be good.

Aleatory Allegories by Susan M. Schultz. 2000.

I've never actually owend a book by Schultz up to this point. This book is very substantial, almost meaty in texture. I love those shifts of attention from one line, one image, to the next, especially in the longer poems.

Meeting someone who says: "Oh, you're that email person."

The Susan M. Schultz, Mary Jo Bang reading at the City Museum last night was well attended. Probably a lot of WashU students there to see Mary Jo. I had Susan sign some books for me. Aloha. Had a conversation with David Hess afterwards by the bonfire about Ted Berrigan. Aaron Belz told me he just passed his PhD exams at SLU. Next year the readings will be in a less hostile environment. Perhaps the new museum of contemporary art?

Took Julia to baseball practice this morning. She loves the game. If I didn't have a kid I probably wouldn't even own a baseball glove.

Did you see the letter to the editor by Henry Gould in the New York Times Magazine this morning?

I'll see you at the Susan Schultz reading in a couple hours. I think I'll bring Julia with me.

Left to right: Stan Lombardo, Ken Irby, Jordan Davis, Judy Roitman. Photo by JM.

I hadn't really thought about Berrigan's sonnets when beginning my "100 Trillion Poems." I was thinking mainly of Queneau...

Another photo by JD.

A photo taken by Jordan Davis in Kansas on his recent visit.

I have a new blog (temporary I hope):

One Hundred Trillion Poems

This is the poem mentioned on Nick's blog, if you got here from there. I'm not trying to upstage Million Poems. As Jordan pointed out to me, it's cheating anyway.

the torches by James Tate. Unicorn Press, 1968, 1971.

I have affection for this book, having purchased it at Serendipity Books in Berkeley for $2 when I was 15 or 16, when Tate used to be a better poet. Sure, it has some corny "deep images," but also some wacky humor, not too jaded, as Tate later became.

Whose birthday is it today?:

"Blue Windows, blue rooftops
and the blue light of the rain,
these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff
pouring into my enormous ears
and the tears falling into my blindness

for without him I do not play,
especially in the afternoon
on the day of his birthday. Good
Fortune, you would have been
my teacher and I your only pupil

and I would always play again.
Secrets of Liszt and Scriabin
whispered to me over the keyboard
on unsunny afternoons! and growing
still in my stormy heart.

Only my eyes would be blue as I played
and you rapped my knuckles,
dearest father of all the Russias,
placing my fingers
tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes."

April 1, 1954.

Album de vers antiques by Paul Valéry.

This was a lot of fun to read, especially since I didn't understand all of it. The poem "Eté" [summer] is full of a romantic effusiveness that I don't associate with Valéry.