Just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, Anti-'s newest Featured Poet is Rob MacDonald. If you can figure out the secret code, the poems actually predict the Super Bowl winner!

Yes, the title of this draft, as you may well be aware, comes from "Ozymandias," what I would answer asked my "favorite" poem. I'm not quite sure yet that it fits the subject matter, but no matter. That's what drafts are for.

I recently finished rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in at least a decade. I read it at least a dozen times between the ages of 10 and approximately 21, but I stopped reading it after that because I had so much other reading to catch up on and so much less time to do it. I was also a little worried that I'd find myself liking it less. However, I decided to go back to the series last month, and I plowed right through them again.

It's still highly enjoyable world-building, mythologizing stuff, and I was well prepared for the little foibles I didn't used to think about, like the fact that three-quarters of the time Tolkien writes an action scene, his viewpoint character gets knocked out early on so he can summarize it after the fact. I also found new things to enjoy, like Tolkien's immense attention to detail at the level of scene, particularly how a natural landscape is put together. Finally, he had some damn good figurative language I didn't even remember, such as near the end, after the main climax, when he writes of the celebrating masses "Their joy was like swords..."

It wasn't quite as great an experience because of that you-can't-go-home-again aspect of your childhood favorites, but it was still completely worthwhile. I've already started rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I also probably read into the double digits, then stopped). In much less nostalgic news, I'm also tackling Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.

I just found out I have to convert this blog from Blogger to WordPress by March because Blogger is discontinuing FTP support and wants to charge me to host my files on their servers. Uh, why would I do that exactly? Fortunately, I already have WordPress installed on my site, but I'm going to have to figure out a bunch of stuff I don't want to waste time on. Still, WordPress is way better than Blogger, and this will give me a chance to go through my archives and dump useless old content, which can only be a positive.

Wow, this was some weekend for Anti-. I got to add a second name to the Anti- blacklist after a guy (the only three people I've ever told not to send work to me at either journal I've edited were guys, what a shock) was verbally abusive simply because I rejected him. And also, the first guy on the Anti- blacklist sent me another submission, then was verbally abusive when I pointed out that I had asked him not to send work again last year because he was verbally abusive when I asked him not to ignore our guidelines about how often to submit or lie about when he had last sent work, as if I don't have e-mail records. So now their messages go straight to the trash folder. Congratulations, guys!

In much happier news, I accepted several excellent poems that you will be seeing in upcoming features and issues. Here's a preview of some of the poets soon to have features:

Rob MacDonald
Erika Meitner
John Cotter & Shafer Hall
Marcus Wicker
Martha Silano
Clayton Michaels
Soham Patel
Stefi Weisburd

I'm happy to say Front Porch has picked up five(!) poems, which takes a big bite out of the current manuscript. It's some of the weirder, wackier stuff too, which is especially nice since that side had been lagging a little.

I posted on Facebook, but I can't remember if I posted on the blog, that January was to be a month of no restaurants, no junk food, no desserts, and no drinking alcohol. I bloated on all of the above during the holidays, and I badly needed a detox. So how has the month gone?

Restaurants Days: 0
Dessert Days: 2 (One was at my girlfriend's dad's birthday, and my girlfriend's mom likes that I'm a big fan of her food, so eating a piece of chocolate cake there wasn't a hard decision)
Junk Food Days: 0
Drinking Days: 2 (Game night with friends is more fun with a cocktail, sorry)

Without a doubt, I've felt better the last 2-3 weeks playing basketball. It could be partially a placebo effect, of course, but I have to call this month a success. Maybe I should implement a modified version of the plan, with a little wiggle room, going forward.

Of people who will read this post, more will know my name than will have heard of John Ashbery.

If all the people of the United States (or, indeed, the world!) were surveyed as to whether they had heard of me or of John Ashbery, the difference between us would be statistically insignificant.

Therefore, I am as well known as John Ashbery.

QED.

Repeat as needed with Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, or whomever. Or make your own post and substitute yourself in for me. The applications are endless.

There seems to be a lot of fascination out there about how a poem goes from concept to completion, as it were. At readings, poets give explanatory intros, longer than the poems themselves, that include how and where and why they wrote each poem. Interviews often come back to these questions, more than just a craft primer, of what-were-you-thinking-when or where-do-you-get-your-ideas.

I certainly don't begrudge others their interest in those questions, though I only tend to find them interesting when the person doing the answering is especially funny and engaging. I think a lot of my disinterest is because I suspect my answer on the genesis of most of my poems would be similar:

"I had these two funny statements or ideas or facts--probably at least one of them was something not literally true that works in an interesting way when treated as if it is--and I realized there was a vague connection between those two things so they could be in the same poem. I wrote the connective tissue between the two things and figured out what they added up to. Then I rewrote the poem about 30 times, often losing what I had thought was the original point, as well as one or both of the initial lines. Then I had it rejected about 20 times."

It's not exactly compelling stuff, right? I mean, let's look at a couple poems from Torched Verse Ends that are online:

"Sturgeon's Law": My blog was already named when I wrote this poem, and I like the gist of Sturgeon's Law. I came across the facts in stanza 2 and used them to achieve the wrongheaded conclusion reached there at about the same time I realized the percent thing went with Sturgeon's Law. Then I found/made up a bunch of real and fake factoids, all misapplied. Stanza 1 came from a cartoon I wrote. My resume writing accounted for most of stanza 3. Snopes and my brain filled in the rest.

"Deathmatch Mode": I had a vivid dream wherein myself and three friends were repeatedly killed in various horror movie scenarios. It stayed with me after I woke up, but as I toyed with it, I realized the horror movie is really not my milieu at all. However, it took little effort to transfer the scenario over to video games, especially because I had been playing (I think) Unreal Tournament, which (at least the way I was playing it) is basically kill-kill-kill-die-respawn-kill-repeat-until-bored. I also realized the poem was turning into a loose proto-sonnet.

Are those explanations either interesting or useful? Do they enhance your appreciation of the poems in question, which should be the main point? I dunno...

Your newest Anti- Featured Poet is Kathleen Winter.

"Penumbra’s a conundrum..."