I am tickled that Ron Silliman previously pictured me as a glowering giant.

Right on, Chris. "Like shining from shook foil" has got to be one of the best images ever.

I am sympathizing with Catherine's vertigo. I basically can't sleep on my left side because if I do and sit up too fast everything spins like crazy, sometimes on and off for a few days. For some reason decongestants seem to help. One doctor told me I had "benign positional vertigo," i.e. "you get dizzy and we have no idea why."

It's probably caused by watching too much TV!

I've invited everyone I can think of to the Postcard Poems reading this Sunday. You come too.

Today's the last day of my postcard exchange with Del. Day to day, the postcards let you not worry about the whole and focus on the local--whatever you can do in that space on that day. But now I find myself thinking back and wondering whether what I've written this month is going to add up to anything, whether it will make a whole or make any sense together. When I swapped with Cassie I tried meticulously to copy out every poem I wrote and save it in a file, but I've been lazier this time, so if something were to get lost in the mail this time it would really be lost. Ooh. Danger.

Going to have to resist the urge to write something melodramatic. Eh. Why fight it.

It's going to take some getting used to actual variation in the weather again. That existential exhiliration of waking up in the morning and not knowing when you look out the window whether it will be sunny, cloudy, raining, warm or cold, maybe even having to open the door and stand outside for a second in your bare feet testing the air. Or how pissed off you are when a downpour starts and you didn't bring an umbrella. Plus tornadoes.

End of July in Palo Alto and it is raining. That is just wrong.

Hey Kasey: Did you notice that Cordite is on a zombie kick?

Sorry, Josh, my shoulders have shrunk back to their California size. Maybe next time.

You know what? I take back the mean stuff I said about the poetry clubhouse. It's great in here. The grown-ups are gone and my Barbie dolls are driving a dump truck while you're playing with your blocks that say "truth," "beauty," and "chocolate fries." A couple people are over in the corner watching Willy Wonka or making up the rules as they go along. Through the gaps in the floor you can see that the ground's a hundred feet down. And there are no walls.

And knock off the "poetry clubhouse" crap, like we're the kids and you're the grousy adult.

Henry, I am fully aware of the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested," thank you. I did pay attention in grade school.

My point: the "disinterested" reader is a myth; even TV doesn't aim for the undifferentiated general viewer. Why not admit that our readers have interests, positions, prejudices one way or the other just like we do?

You would have been better off making it a rhetorical question.

Me, Li, & Chris in Chicago? You're on.

I don't want disinterested readers, I want interested ones.

Henry implies that the poetry of "theme & subject-matter & more direct speech" has been swept away by the triumphant barbarians of the avant-garde, who now hold sway over the holy poetic empire. It's an idea I see popping up in a lot of poetry debates, even (especially?) among self-identified avant-gardists: maybe we've swung too far in this direction, maybe we need to "go back to" ______ (speech, feeling, love, lyric, etc.).

Anybody read the New Yorker recently? Poetry? American Poetry Review? I don't think the speech-based thematic poem is under any particular threat. (If it were, I might say good riddance, but that's another story.) Nor do I think the alleged victory of the avant-garde is so total. Locally? Sure, experimental types have found sinecures here and there, established presses, journals, even whole academic programs. But the face of poetry that "most people" see, even most people who study poetry in college, if they see any at all, isn't one that strikes me as dominated by the avant-garde.

The anxiety over poetry communicating to a coterie rather than to a wide audience has been with us at least since Wordsworth, and probably since Milton. I don't think we're going to win a big new audience for poetry by writing like Billy Collins.

My poetry might suck, but it's not because it's not about anything.

The list of books I have checked out of the library takes up 19 pages.

Better: "speech" in poetry is a mode, not a universal.

"look in thy heart, and write."

Henry: "speech" ain't the only way to communicate.

Anybody got a microphone and amp we can use for the Postcard Poems reading?

This purple notebook stuff is good.