Incendiary Lit

He was 71 when he died yesterday from heart failure. If you don’t know who George Carlin was, I don’t know how that’s even possible, actually. If you don’t know who George Carlin was I hope you’re under the age of 18 and/or were raised in a strict religious cult because the man was brilliant. There’re a ton of clips of him on Youtube if you wanna reminisce. Click here for a bunch. He was the author of some of the dirtiest jokes to not be the Aristocrats, and scathing political and religious satire. There. I told you, just in case you only landed on Earth today. Go watch some of his bits. Here’s one about death that may help those mourners through. Don’t mourn for long though, he was always a celebrant, so instead celebrate his work and move on to more acts of creation like writing or singing or making babies (unless you’re a big dummy, in which case, please don’t procreate).

This little piece originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, then in her collection Tumble Home, or, seven short-short, or just plain short stories and an 86 page novella. Very good stuff. There’s an image of an owl’s face, I won’t ruin it for you, but I’d been attributing it to Li-Young Lee, someone who I was also reading a lot of at the time. I just remember walking around the hotel I worked at thinking about how perfect the description, how apt. I also like that she (Hempel) doesn’t connect the dots for the reader, she just presents them in a clear pattern and says, essentially, “Have at it!” More after the story.

Church Cancels Cow
by Amy Hempel

Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern–this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who finds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots.

Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, “You should keep that dog on a leash.” She says, “That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.”

When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, “Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave?” She says, “I found faces on my mother’s grave. I had to clean them off.” I say there are other dogs that walk here. I say my dog goes in the woods before the place where the headstones start.

I leave her talking to me from her car. I walk away with my dog in the direction of my house, and she follows in her car so I turn back around and lead her through the cemetery and sit down on a random grave and take a wire brush from the pocket of my coat and begin to groom my dog, brushing slowly from the ends up to the skin so as not to tug and hurt her. I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears. When she leaves the second time, she leaves rubber in the road.

For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakeable dog. I write down her license plate number, so what. I pull weeds with my back to her. And after thoughts of worse things than bricks coming flying through the windows of my house, I pull off grass-stained gloves and cross to her car and say, “You know, I’m on your side about this. I have relatives buried here, and I don’t want to find faces on their graves.”

She says, “You have relatives buried here?”

For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.

In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way, me counting cows on one side of the road, my brother counting cows on the other. But if we passed a church, the person on whose side the church appeared had to start their count over again.

Why did church cancel cow? The question was not a question back then, and when I try to think why, the best I can guess is–because we were having fun? Until I mention it to my brother who says, “Don’t you remember? You don’t remember. It was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow.”

And why it comes to me now.

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Right? Take it in for a second.
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OK, I just wanted to talk a little about the layering and parallels in this piece. There’s the obvious parallels: Cemetery from the cow game and from the Japanese lady’s face-stained grave; the counting of dogs and the counting of cows, both from a car. What really got me was the profundity of the game these kids were playing, and whether or not they were told the cemetery cancels cow rule or they made it up themselves, they clearly understood the concept of death at a young age. And though the narrator clearly thinks the Japanese lady’s absurd, her behavior in such a close proximity to death is humanized by the remembrance of mortality’s early place in even the lighter times.

Also, come on, faces/feces is pretty funny, or, that the narrator calls them faces when she confronts the stalker in her car. I love that. I always think of the Big Lebowski, how the Dude took phrases or unique words he’d heard earlier in the movie and says them. Or more recently in Hot Fuzz when Danny repeats Angel’s vocabulary guideline corrections immediately, and often incorrectly (”What made you want to be a policeman officer?”). The narrator here, was being more wiseass about it, which is funny also. Then the repetition of faces with that amazing “halved-apple faces of owls” which is so accurate. See:

Then of course there are other little things, like: “When she leaves the second time she leaves rubber in the road” which is a pretty crafty way to make “she peeled out” artistic. Small details like that are things that you need to pay close attention to in your own writing. Saying things in an easily understandable, but unique way. Something that the reader hasn’t read fifty times. The formatting is also a little off from ’standard’ with the dialog (normally each . This choice helps the reader breeze through the dialog a little more smoothly, I think. Though if it would slow the reader down, who knows, unless someone’s really curious, I guess they could reformat it themselves and report back.

This is a little too long to submit to the Indiana Review 1/2k prize, as it’s 591 words, but it’s close. A lot can be done in 500 words, as the notoriously brief Amy Hempel proves yet again here. My favorite, and many people’s favorite Hempel story is “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” which is in Reasons to Live as well as her collected stories… but I also found this little article about the story and a little research about the, apparently semi-autobiographical story. Very interesting, posted at the Hipster Book Club.

The Writers @ Work (where hip meets lit according to their website) is a conference held in Utah June 23rd-27th. Yes, just days after my birthday and I didn’t win free tuition from a pool of hundreds. So sad. Anyway, here are the winners. Go here to check out more information about the conference. It looks really cool.

(from their website www.writersatwork.org)

Winner: Margot Wizansky, Brookline, MA, for “Cosmography”

About “Cosmography,” Ms. Addonizio had the following comments:

“The author of ‘Cosmography’ has a gift for narrative and for language which creates an experience of lived life for the reader. I admired this writer’s ability to convincingly render the voice of an eighteenth-century midwife in the ambitious opening poem. Like the description of a steak in ‘Breakfast at the Retirement Home,’ the writing here is often ‘luscious, blood-rare.’ ”

1st Honorable Mention: Keegan Goodman, Chicago, IL, for “Four Poems (’Residence’ and others)”

About “Four Poems: (”Residence” and others):

“From an autobiography written by a dead man to a woman attempting to construct human beings out of grease fat and coffee grounds, these prose poems create their own marvelous and off-kilter worlds.”

—

I don’t know about you guys, but that first honorable mention sounds awfully interesting. Russell Edson-esque is what I’m hoping for, but we’ll see. These winners will be published in an upcoming Quarterly West, and will receive free tuition to the Writers at Work conference. The poetry winners were chosen by Kim Addonizio, fiction by Steve Almond, nonfiction by Abigail Thomas. The other winners were (fiction)

Winner: Ben Roberts, Ogden, UT, for “The Three Nephites”

About “The Three Nephites,” Mr. Almond had this to say:

“My God. I was absolutely blown away by this story, which does what every great short story must: it creates its own world and sucks the reader into that world and horrifies us and at the same time (and this is the miracle, I think) makes us never want to leave. The voice is absolutely fearless, ecstatic, and dangerously wise. I could feel my heart thumping as I read the last line, and for a long time after.”

(not exactly a scathing review) and nonfiction:

Winner: Valerie Due, San Diego, CA (Yay San Diego), for “The Skinning Board”

About “The Skinning Board,” Ms. Thomas has the following comments:

“I love the emotional restraint coupled with the ravishing prose of the piece. It serves so perfectly the young narrator whose initiation into the harsh realities of life–and death–on a farm is being presented here.”

Click here now. (audio file)

Kurt Vonnegut is sort of a religion to me, and if I didn’t have so much school to blame it on, I could very likely commit Hari Kari for not knowing about Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s new and uncollected writings. Mark relates a few anecdotes from his introduction the posthumous book. Never has an egg metaphor been so sad. Learn a little bit about American literature, listen to this excerpt. Then buy his books and read them all (but don’t start with Galapagos. You need to work your way up to that tremendous, but very odd novel). I’m a huge fan of Bluebeard, Player Piano, and Cat’s Cradle, and Siren’s of Titan too, but I’d say read one of the other three I mentioned first. Plus, if you don’t care which edition you get, pretty much all of the books I listed can be found for about $1. So spend the ten dollars that would use to buy a burger (without tip) at Chili’s, and get three books that will make you laugh a minimum of ten times, as well as have interesting and imaginative plots. Do it. Go Vonnegut.

Jessica and I are working on an independent study class right now that involves reading as many 2007 journals that we can find, and pick the ones we like the most. The project still has a ways, but I’ve really started noticing some of the same names, especially in the smaller journals like Cairn and the Pacific Review the Willow Review and the like. Patrick Carrington, Sean Kilpatrick, Jonathon Wells, Emma Bolden, Geof Hewitt, Gary Nowacki, and Marilyn Ringer. This, of course, is merely coming from some guy who thinks he’s learning to become a poet, so take it with a grain of salt. The names may be terribly familiar, or new, but check out their poems when you come across them, at very worst they’ll be decent poems. I guarantee it.

For those of you with $1900-2400 disposable, and July 5-13th off of work, this sounds like the trip of a lifetime. A week at a Guatemalan lake with three great writers? Almost everything you’d need is included in that price, too, so check it out: The Joyce Maynard Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop.

I have a bad habit, or a good habit, depending on how you look at it, of buying books that look interesting, despite the lack of time and already mountainous pile of books (I’m not even mentioning the nonfiction books on Easter Island, Peru, Oak Island, mythology etc etc) that I haven’t been able to read more than a little bit of, and it’s really annoying. Late night amazon.com shopping sprees are responsible for many of these, the rest are from discount shelves/bins. Today I’ll focus on poetry, and bear in mind, there’s a ton more in the stack of “to be read” beyond, and in some cases above these.

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems of Albert Goldbarth. (also include Saving Lives by Albert Goldbarth). I wrote a paper on Goldbarth in the Fall Semester, and it very nearly caused me to apply to University of Wichita to seek his tutelage. Yeah. He’s really, really good. Unfortunately MFA applications were a gigantic bust from my grand plans, so I may still apply… it’s just, you know, Wichita. But that’s one of the only things the program has going against it, so anyone who doesn’t mind the small town school, check out their MFA website here. Goldbarth’s the SHIT. Both of these books were the result of a late night Amazon spree.

Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele. Dr. Bill Mohr’s one of the greatest assets possible for CSULB. He’s been in the LA poetry scene for decades and with Momentum Press published many tremendous artists. He introduced us to Timothy Steele, who is kind of a neo-classicalist. Or something like that. He usually writes with a very well handled rhyme scheme, but the subject matter is more of a gritty everyday sort, similar to Phillip Levine. I think, at least, from the little of the book I’ve managed to find time to read. Very good stuff. He handles meter and rhyme with such ease, I’m hoping to take this book on the next roadtrip I embark upon and hopefully learn a thing or two about rhyme while I’m at it. This was a $1.50 bin book at school. Who can resist that?

The October Palace by Jane Hirshfield. She’s a buddhist, I think, and she’s highly acclaimed. I can’t quite remember which poems of hers I’ve read in classes or journals, but I know there’s been quite a few. I’ve picked this book up a few times and read a couple poems, but still, less than half probably, and never in ideal poetry reading settings. This was a $5 purchase in a bookstore outlet (which was located in a vacant supermarket in Santee, CA).

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. Again, Bill Mohr turned us onto Kees, a wonderful poet and his collected poems is, what I’ve read, a solid collection, but with school’s reading, and then my own writing and trying to keep up a little, at least, with journals, simply no time. This was actually not an amazon spending spree. I thought about this one before I was at a computer.

…to be continued…

I’ve been slowly working on a novella/novel for the last 4 or so years. Or, I wrote a version that became more of an outline back then, and after 2 major overhauls, the last one just finished which added almost 10,000 words, it is finally just about ready to go out. It is a good feeling. An accomplishment. I’m definitely very happy to hopefully have the major work of my first long project done. I did kind of steal an idea for the formatting from the novel I just began, of telling it in short vignettes, which worked because it was already formatted like that with only an extra break to indicate a time break. OK, that’s probably more than you needed to know, but I just wanted to share, and offer the suggestion of vignettes to people who may also be struggling with formatting their own novels. It’s fun, and if you have any time breaks after something particularly poignant, by having that as the end of a chapter, meaning your reader has to turn the page to read anything else, and in that break they’ll be thinking a little bit longer about what just happened, which hopefully will ingrain your words a little deeper.

After the break, there’s one of the couple very, very short chapters pulled from the middle of my book, “The Smiles Are Killing Me.”
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Coming from the UK (New York) Times, this interesting article about Cormac McCarthy. I’m sad to admit other than his name, and the title of some of his books (mostly ones turned into movies) I’d be lost to tell you anything about the Pulitzer Prize winning man, or even his writing style. It’s one of those rare days where I can say “I learned something today.”

Junot Diaz’s first novel (following sensation short fiction collection Drown) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tale of immigrant struggles, a bone fide curse, a sci-fi fantasy dork (Oscar) and his tumultuous family. It was one of the most highly reviewed books of 2007, getting praise like “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel” from Publisher’s Weekly and “Propelled by compassion, Díaz’s novel is intrepid and radiant.” from Booklist, yet, its sales thusfar have been a mere 27,000. And it is highly likely to be nominated for a Pulitzer. Isn’t that scary? That your book can be wonderfully reviewed, there’s buzz of a Pulitzer (Junot has yet to cross over into his 40’s) and yet, your book, your baby, is left to be dusted on store shelves. Jeez.

Here’s a yahoonews article outlining other publishing failures, and successes of 2007.

So, I’m apparently the last person to grab this gravy-train, and I feel like I’m dressed in my best and covered in Thanksgiving sauce. Or something. But The basic plot of Nabokov’s Lolita is very similar to the earlier (1916 to Nabokov’s 1956) version, an 18 page ‘novella’ which sounds about average short story length, but hey, who’m I to tell those crazy Germans (and the author did become a prominent Nazi journalist) what to call their pedophilia? Anyway, here’s the opening paragraph of a John Lethem essay from Harper’s recently called Love and Theft…

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.

OK, paragraph and a sentence, big deal. Anyway, he gave the original author a different name than what I’d read on the St. Petersburg website, where there was an article titled “Nabokov was no plagurist, say his admirers” but seeing as the head of the Nabokov Museum offered such unbiased insight as “He couldn’t understand German well enough to read such literature.” But seeing as he lived in Berlin for 13 years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Museum officers are worried about Job security.

Jonathon Lethem’s essay goes on to talk about Cryptomnesia which is: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations. New word for today. Whee. Have a pleasant day.

Janet Holmes, poet, editor and teacher at Boise State, which is quickly climbing the ranks of MFA programs I’m interested in (you can rent a 3 bedroom house, with front and back yards in Boise for under $1000 a month. Wow.), has a blog called Humanophone, I just came across this little post from The end of August about teaching Frank O’Hara in Idaho in 2007, and some of the questions she fielded. Really entertaining, and relatively sad, how little some college students know. But it’s also entertaining. Check it out here.

Despite federal moderators stepping in, Hollywood’s writers are on strike. Now you might be curious how this will effect you. Depends on how much you watch tv. The first people to feel the crippling effects of being without hollywood writers means that there won’t be another Heartbreak Kid of The Comebacks in theaters to watch for awhile. OK, the people who will be affected are people I enjoy watching like Conan O’Brien and Craig Ferguson. John Stewart and Potential Presidential Candidate (got the $35,000 to be a republican yet?) Stephen Colbert also will feel the sting of the writer’s strike. What is the strike about? Well, what are strikes ever about: money. Most importantly about residuals from DVD sales and movie downloads. How so? Well, take for example the story of Matt’s friend’s Dad, Randy Feldman. When my old roommate Matt was living in LA, he made skater-friends with the son of Randy Feldman, a Hollywood writer who lived in a nice house and didn’t work. Why? Because he wrote Metro and Tango and Cash. But, we’ll just assume he barely scrapes by now, since he’s not getting the level of residuals that he needs to live off of his past achievements. You don’t expect novelists to be content with seeing their book still on the shelves a decade after it’s published, they wrote it, they need to get paid. How far-reaching will the strike be? I’m not sure if anyone watched football last week, but one of the commentators said “There hasn’t been this much over a patriot and a colt since Paul Revere’s famous pony ride.” You know a former NFL player didn’t think that one up all on his own. That’s right, even football is saturated with writers. Comforting thought, isn’t it? That we’re needed everywhere, and that there are people willing to only get by on their small residuals while they fight to earn us (potential) future Hollywood writers larger paychecks? Thanks guys, but if you start ruining Heroes or House of The Office, we’re gonna need to roll the sleeves up and rumble.

To set up a scholarship in perpetuity, as in, one time fee for virtually eternity of every year payouts. The Academy of American Poets works with colleges to set up writing scholarships at schools. A one time payment of just $2,500 gets a $100 scholarship/prize every year. That could fund a small college journal’s contest perhaps. With $25,000 (about) you can get $1,000. Did anyone say book contest? By arranging contests and scholarships at your school press it could do a few things. You can set up a class dedicated to the selection and production of the prize winning book, like Fresno State’s “Philip Levine Prize.” You can raise the quality of submissions to your journal, because, lets face it, we break out the bigger guns for cash. As a writer it’s great to actually get paid for your efforts in cashy money. This means a general increase in the quality of work submitted, as most contests say all work submitted will be considered for publication… See, like Admiral Akbar so cleverly observed “It’s a trap!” But it will result in more exposure to your magazine, and better quality work, making it even more of something that people are excited to be published in. Even if your magazine’s already really good, it will also bring you the satisfaction of doing your part to help young writers getting the attention they deserve. Here’s a link to more official looking information about setting up a scholarship/prize in perpetuity on The Academy of American Poets website. One that doesn’t have pictures of star wars characters on it, I guess.

How about $41,000? Last May one of the only 500 first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s for us Americans) sold for $55,000. This week another sold for $41,000. But, seeing as there are only 500 in existence, and many of those apparently went to libraries to be torn up from cover to cover by snot nosed kids eating purple popsicles, perfect copies (the $41,000 is also signed by JK Rowling) are getting to be almost as rare as Honus Wagners. Well, probably not quite there, but you see the parallel. After Harry made his trip to the Americas, the days of 500 copies were well over, the last installment of the series has sold over 400 million copies, in 64 different languages. JK Rowling is a billionaire. Second richest woman in the world, behind Oprah. And whereas Oprah only makes a monthly hobby of getting people to read who would normally just be watching daytime TV, Rowling’s spent the last decade plus getting people who would normally be watching Pokemon or Spongebob to reading long novels that will hopefully segue into other reading. Tip of the hat to both. Here’s more about the $41,000 book from YahooNews.

A) I mean, come on guys, why don’t you know this already. If statement A doesn’t apply to you because B) you have already submitted, take this as a “Good one,” a pat on the back for supporting your literary community, if it doesn’t apply to you because of C) You don’t care, then tell me how little you care about these contests. Most creative wins a prize. Something glorious. Anyway October 31 is the deadline for:

James Hearst Poetry Prize c/o North American Review which is $18 to enter (includes a year subscription to NAR, which is well worth the $18 by itself) five poems (2 copies of each, no name on them for the blind reading, so make sure to also include braille prints. Or, maybe you can skip them this time.) for the $1000 grand prize.

Also, there is the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize, judged by none other than the great Tony Hoagland. Go buy What Narcissism Means to Me this very instant. Even if you already own it. Someday you’ll need to send a writer a gift, and what finer gift can one hope to receive than one of the most entertaining books of poetry in the last decade? Anyway, basic specifications: $3000 prize for a book of 48 pages or more (by someone who hasn’t published even a long chapbook- over 25 pages). Entry is $25, but this is definitely one of the more prestigious of first book prizes.

November 1 deadlines (remember, that’s only 1 day later)

Bakeless Literary Prizes. This prize is issued in three categories (all for a writer’s first book): Poetry, Fiction, Non Fiction (no scholarly works for non fiction)You win no cash, but get publication by Houghton Miflin, and a free ride to the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont (a $2,200 value for the 11 days and room and board). The entry fee is just $10, so why not, right?

Briar Cliff Review’s prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Non Fiction. Entry is $15 for the $1000 prize. Up to 3 poems, or one story for each fee. Each entry gets you a copy of the wonderful journal. Here’s my review of the last issue. It’s a very spectacular journal, and you won’t regret entering once you see what a great piece of art the journal is.

For more prize information check out the amazing New Pages contest page… for book contests check the link on the top right of the page. Poet’s and Writers also has a great contest calendar here.

Well, the manuscript found in the apartment of Jose Luis Calva in Mexico City was called “Cannibalistic Instincts” a horror novel. And though he’d dismembered his girlfriend, and boiled some of her flesh, he claims he hasn’t eaten any of it. When will these writers learn that crime is best committed by the criminals, and written about by the writers, not the other way around. Writers who commit crimes, at least recently, have sucked at it, or, underestimated their police nemesis. He’s also being investigated for another dead ex-girlfriend and a prostitute. He tried to “escape” and the somehow was “hit by a car” say the Mexican police. How convenient, karma stepped in right at that moment, with the Mexican Police right there. Anyway, here’s a slightly more in depth article from the fair and balanced Fox News.

Just to get a feel for this. We still have a relatively limited amount of viewers, so I guess the best way to give you what you want is to ask. Do you want more MFA profiles, more literary terms defined, more about literary journals and how to submit, more theory of putting together a book, more laughs of the day? Better quizzes? We’re about to do a massive guerrilla marketing campaign, well, massive in LA and Orange Counties… outside of that, any word passed along would be spectacular. Thanks guys, and please use that comment box.

Like, totally. Similes are easy, fun, and get across your point. Here’s a Sharon Olds poem that uses, *pauses to put on Count attire* One. Two. Three. Four, five-six-seven-eight. Eight! Eight Similes! HA-HA-HA!

Feared Drowned

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,
your suit black as seaweed, your bearded
head slick as a seal’s.

Somebody watches the kids. I walk down the
edge of the water, clutching the towel
like a widow’s shawl around me.

None of the swimmers is just right.
Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven,
they rise out of the surf, the water
rushing down their shoulders.

Rocks stick out near shore like heads.
Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit
and I cannot find you.

My stomach begins to contract as if to
vomit salt water,

when up the sand toward me comes
a man who looks very much like you,
his beard matted like beach grass, his suit
dark as a wet shell against his body.

Coming closer, he turns out
to be you - or nearly.
Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back.

Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio hypothesized, in their wonderful textbook The Poet’s Companion, that Sharon Olds has a simile-making machine in her basement. Despite many attempts, Ms. Olds’ basement vault has yet to be breached.

So why exactly would you use a simile? Usually if you’re describing something, and you picture it in your head, and you see, say the child’s safety blanket draped over his arm, and for some reason your brain flashes to that movie you saw last month about the hit man, and when he was dragging the dead body, and you think, hey, he was carrying his safety blanket like a fresh corpse. Relatively morbid, but don’t get on me, it’s your simile. Sheesh.

Another reason for similes is that whole pesky layering thing. You know, how what you say doesn’t just mean what it means, but means something else entirely as well. Meaning meaning meaning. A big pain in the ass. Even a blank page has meaning nowadays. You can’t get away from it. But if you want to venture into the whole, despicable making-your-poems-mean -something thing, then you can use a simile to tie your theme to the poem a little more securely. For instance, take your morbid little simile there. Say that was the first thing you thought of when you sat to write a poem. The kid with the safety blanket and the fresh corpse. This could go many places. How do you tie it together? If you want your poem to be about the loss of innocence, incrementally small (a pet toad died) or large, the use of the simile is one thing binding the theme and the narrative. Why not add a few more stitches. His footsteps on the stairs, slow as a death march, or his long hair shading his eyes like a widow’s veil. Over the top, perhaps… but you get the idea, right?

For further reading of the wonderful Sharon Olds check out amazon here, you can get many of her books for under $3, with shipping it’s cheaper than two gallons of gas, or a six pack of something imported. The difference between drinking 3 instead of 4 cocktails at the bar, depending on your drink. So just buy one of her books already. It’ll be worth it.

South Park’s Season 10, Episode 05 takes on the whole James Frey scandal in “A Million Little Fibers,” though it does turn from James Frey to strictly Oprah after about fifteen minutes, and gets a little crude, even for South Park standards, but it’s still pretty funny if you’re at all familiar with the situation. Check it out here and laugh. Or get offended, or think, no wonder this is the lowest rated episode on imdb. Or think it’s great. There are plenty of options. We’ll leave it wide open to your interpretation.