My spell checker does not know Emersonian, but it does know Amazonian.

Off to put the next postcard (How to Control a Runaway Camel) in the mail. While the mail coming to me may be okay, I'm entrusting this card to the notorious Stanford post office, where a student once photographed postal workers tossing bundles of received mail into a dumpster.

Robin reporting from home:

There's a man playing with his son outside.

One of them seems to be playing "Lord Sinister"; the other is "Dr. Diamond." They're currently refueling their ships and reloading their torpedos. "Lord Sinister is not one to give up easily. 3-2-1 fire." It's a little difficult to figure out what the kid is saying because he has a bit of a lisp, but he seems to be saying that his father is doing it wrong because that's not what happened in the magazine. Dr. Diamond doesn't get buried by an avalanche, he slides down the mountain for some other reason, and there's something about a secret trap door.

Dad: We'll seek justice at once.

Kid: But they never discover who was in the trap, right?

Dad: Right.

Kid: But they never really discovered what happened. Right?

...

Kid: Johnny Hunter turns invisible, but Lord Sinister turns orange, oh, I mean invisible.

Dad: We have to make sure all the toys are inside.

Kid: Nooooo.

Dad: You don't want to lose them.

The best thing about the term "school of quietude" is its resurrection of the suffix "-itude," last seen in the early '90s in such terms as "total pumpitude."

Welcome back, David. Coming back from Chicago to find David still silent was like finding the tent lost a post in the big storm.

Every English person I meet in the Bay Area is from Manchester. My classmate's from Manchester. My other classmate's boyfriend is from Manchester. The woman who cuts my hair is from Manchester.

I'd join the band as a backup singer, but I guess I'd have to audblog my bits.

Del's first postcard arrived yesterday--I guess SF mail is more efficient than East Bay mail, as Cassie's sometimes took days. Talk about the material text--there was a word I couldn't make out because part of the back of the card had torn off, which I guess made it even more interesting.

It was strange to start writing postcards before I'd gotten anything from Del--I had to write two that way--simply because of the delay of the post. A bit like knowing starlight is ten million years old.

James Longenbach in the Boston Review:

The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell opens a window onto the life of a great American poet. That this poet is named Frank Bidart does not distract from Lowell’s achievement...

The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell: Errata

Blake mud
stupid mundi
champ of marsh

from India with my Mother's toddy

the Swiss had thrown the orange
the zoo's rumble fumble
its antic dough

The account of him is pulchritudinous
on some dupe
I want to stay with grappa!

My childhood was an amusing shower
another nerf to plain
a salvaged senility

Believe it or not, I am posting poems because I am actually finding it easier to write poems than to come up with some other scintillating form of blog content. Weird side effect of blogout.

Elephant & Castle [19]

Your raygun name
is a sour berry,

a hanger-on.
That backwater

pint wouln’t cut
a finch. Is it tough

enough for action
is what I’m asking.

Every barber-can
Smith & Jerry

thinks he’s got us
up a mudchute.

Soak it, chalk
it up to crossing

castles at the gooey
end of the street.

I knew Kasey and I thought alike.

Tempted to go back and retake the test to be someone more interesting.

You are Beast!

You are brilliant and extremely clever. You can handle almost any problem swiftly and efficiently. You are devoted to philosophy and are always up for a good discussion. Sometimes, though, your anger gets the best of you and you upset those whom you care about.

Realized that Del may very well read the poem here before he even gets the postcard, which I can't decide if it's cool or totally defeats the point.

Fired off my first postcard to Del. I still have some of those "Worst-Case Scenario Handbook" postcards left over from my correspondence with Cassie, so I plucked out "How to Jump from Rooftop to Rooftop," which sounds like writing.

My poem was called "Hymns of St. Bridget: Errata," and was drawn from the errata sheet at the front of a remaindered copy of the Frank O'Hara/Bill Berkson collaboration of the same name:

Japanese
arrived
here in the monk-hatch where you--
"succeeded" and "awful"
"upped" and "of course"
Acattolico
particularly
it's divis est
collaborate
paraphrase

Coming soon: The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell: Errata.

And isn't there some backstory about Frank Bidart's dragging out the editing of Lowell for years? Just poking around the Web I find one press release that says that Bidart's edition will be released "in 2001," while another says "in 2002."

Any mention of Lowell seems to prompt a lot of hand-wringing from people who wonder whether Lowell was the last "major" American poet, the last poet who everyone needed to have read and who could command some broader level of cultural authority. Perhaps that time is simply as (deservingly) remote as the time when a poet could gain authority simply by "being a Lowell."

I guess I have this reactionary fantasy of going out and buying Lowell's Collected from the biggest mega-chain-bookstore that I can find, grabbing a coffee from Starbucks to go, and holing up reading in a mountain cabin or Manhattan penthouse for about a week.