I’m much more typo-prone than I used to be. Strictly speaking, I’m not only more typo-prone, but more usage-error-prone as well. For example, it used to be that if my fingers typed “it’s” for “its,” I’d auto-correct without even consciously thinking about it. I knew better, but my fingers made a mistake, and my brain reacted quickly enough to the muscle mistake that it told my fingers to correct even before I consciously registered that I had typoed. Lately I find that my brain doesn’t correct as quickly or necessarily even automatically. I’ll review posts after publishing and find typos and spelling errors that I didn’t catch. (I’ve always been a near perfect speller and have had the same auto-correct mechanism for spelling goofs.) Sometimes I never catch them and they have to be pointed out to me. To my credit, this is partially because I’m usually posting in a hurry, and it’s not like I’m publishing in the New York Times here, after all, so who cares? But I do care, not out of any concern for you, my precious three readers, but out of a sense of pride. I’ve always been pleased with my ability to auto-correct, my near-impeccable spelling and grammar. To see it deteriorating (largely through lack of directed exercise) is painful. I’ve been staring at blocks of code for too long, I think. Luckily, in my latest job shift, I find myself doing more writing. I do reasonably well-thought-out blog posts at my other blog several times a week. Here’s hoping that exercising my proofreading muscles a bit more strenuously as I’ve been trying to do will pay off. Do me a favor and keep an eye out for my long slide into incomprehensibility; if I slide very far at all, do let me know, preferably employing good usage and grammar in order to set a good example.

So let’s just say that while I’m very happy at my current job, if somebody wanted to pay me a comparable salary to sit on my ass all day every day doing things, as I felt like it, like writing the next great visionary novel or even just a few little mildly successful bits of doggerel, I’d drop the day job in a heartbeat.

This message brought to you in part by “Chapter and Verse,” a roughly annual newsletter put out by the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in which newsletter can be found two students who graduated with me whom I knew, one of whom has gone on to be a Grammy nominee and one poet who, after having edited a respected magazine while earning her master’s degree, has gone on to continue publishing her own work and to become an instructor in the program from which I myself graduated. I propose for this nifty little publication the following motto:

Chapter and Verse, making you feel like shit today, tomorrow, and the next day. And the next. And the next. And so on.

I wrote an article months ago that has finally appeared at Digital Web Magazine. If you’re not a beginning-to-intermediate PHP developer, you probably won’t find it very interesting. This is the second in an occasional series (find the first here) I’m doing for Digital Web on PHP.

As noted elsewhere, much of what I’ve managed to write over the past few years has been animal-centric. When I showed some pieces recently to a former teacher and still-mentor of mine, he recommended a book by Robert Wrigley entitled Lives of the Animals. Because our themes are at times similar, I was keenly interested in reading the guy, but I found myself disappointed upon a first reading. I could tell he wrote skillfully and carefully; I knew that much of what he wrote was good. But it just didn’t resonate with me the way somebody like Andrew Hudgins does (especially in Saints and Strangers). I put the book down, a little disappointed.

The other day, a friend and former coworker whom I was talking to about doing some contract work for my company mentioned that he was involved with the Knoxville Writer’s Guild. I’ve known for years that the KWG was around but have never looked into the organization. Whether I neglected to do so because I figured they’d all be either hacks or schmoozers or just because I didn’t have time or energy I don’t know. At any rate, I perked up this time around and signed up for their mailing list. I almost immediately received notification of a reading by Marie Howe, one of whose books (What the Living Do) I had actually read in college. My reading the book started out as my thumbing through it because it had an interesting cover. I ultimately sat down and read it cover to cover, probably a couple of times. It’s a good book. Stoked at the prospect of going to the first reading I’ve been to in years, I wanted to read some more contemporary stuff, so I went back to Wrigley’s book the other night. And I liked it much more. It’s much stronger at the beginning and becomes a little droning toward the end.

Wrigley writes very tautly. There’s very little in his poems that doesn’t need to be there. And he writes with a sort of country elegance. I don’t mean that I fancy him to be a good ole Southern dandy but rather that he writes of the woods, of chasing snakes, of ticks on hunting dogs, of burning a dead horse, but he does so elegantly. His poems are smooth and flowing. They address rustic things but are themselves by and large not very rustic at all. It’s an interesting combination.

Wrigley writes in a very evocative way. Reading through the book, I felt constantly as if I was being reminded of things I had experienced. It eventually hit me that very few of the experiences he describes were ones I had first-hand knowledge of. In other words — and I think this captures one of the best things good poets do — he reminded me of things I hadn’t experienced as if they were very familiar to me, surely a testament to his talent at evocation and description.

I’m pretty sensitive to the fact that some of my beliefs brush up rather harshly against some of the beliefs of a few people who probably read me from time to time, and so I’m reluctant at times to post on certain topics. Or, really, one topic: Religion. It’s not that I’m in any way ashamed of my beliefs; I just don’t want to hurt the feelings of anybody close to me whose feelings would be hurt by some of my opinions. This post could possibly hurt feelings. Fair warning.

The following letter to the editor appeared in an area newspaper (one that I actually used to be a copy editor and layout guy for):

It is beyond my understanding that anyone with just the slightest intelligence could believe that there is no creator of all things. I would think that such a person would be too embarrassed to reveal such stupidity.

Let’s look at a few things. The person who invented the camera for example, truly did a marvelous job. A mechanism that with its lenses and shutter could capture a picture of an object. Man is praised for his ability to create such a marvelous thing. All the work involved to figure it out and build it. But with the human eye, well it just happened.

I was in Townsend a while back and saw some paintings from one of the local artists. The details in the picture would captivate any one. It took lots of thought and imagination to paint such a fine picture. Did it just happen or did someone design it?

Computers are a very great invention. The human brain has devised a wonderful electronic one. But the human brain? Well it just happened.

Even in nature it is so amazing with all its diversity and complexity. How is it a humming bird does what he does? It is so much different from other birds. All the birds are different from each other. You would think somewhere along the line since they just happened that some birds would be a little mixed up. How is it possible that a little acorn becomes a mighty oak? All the branches, twigs, leaves all came from the DNA that was in the little acorn seed. All the different varieties of trees just happened? All grasses, weeds which differ so much, they were never designed, they all just happened. What ignorance! Lets think for a moment of the little insignificant watermelon seed. It goes into the ground, dies, and out from it is a huge vine and the vine produces a watermelon which has a green cover, a white rhine and a red inside full of water for man’s enjoyment. Same with corn and all seeds.

Have you ever wondered why it is that all the fruits and vegetables are just the right size for humans to eat? An apple or carrot can be so easily held in the hand. Why isn’t there a few potatoes or oranges as big as houses? All the things we eat are just right in size for our consumption. Just happened huh?

All you folks who say there is no creator who made all these things are showing off absolute stupidity. Your problem is that you don’t want to have to answer to your maker so are free to do whatever you like.

Kinda reminds me of the fellow who went to his medicine cabinet and picked out a product that read, “Poison.” But he didn’t believe it would kill him so he drank it and he died. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe something. What matters is that truth is truth and regardless of what you believe, truth will stand. You who don’t believe in a creator with whom you must give an answer to one day. That doesn’t change the truth. Not only will you answer to him but every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

“The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”

Aside from the fact that the speaker’s letter isn’t very Christian in its approach to those he’s criticizing (he must not have read Matthew 5:22, which says that anybody calling somebody a fool is in danger of hellfire), he’s simply got his facts wrong. Nobody on my side of the fence suggests that the human brain “just happened.” In fact, it took years and years of minor random changes and natural selection for the useful changes for the human brain to evolve to its current pretty darned nifty state. In my opinion, this is much more complexly beautiful than the notion that the human brain was created with a zap and an incantation by any god. But that’s just one flaw with his argument. This letter really struck a nerve with me, and so I drafted my own and sent it off the the editor of the paper that published this gentleman’s tirade. The text of mine follows:

In a letter entitled “Believing is choice” published on Feb. 18, the writer expresses his astonishment that anyone could believe that all the wonderful things of this earth could have come about without the work of a divine hand. His argument seems to be that great things cannot happen spontaneously; there must be a designer, and (by extension) the greater and more complex the item in question, the greater its support for the existence a creator must be. The obvious question, then, is how great a being must exist to have created so great a god. And how great a being to have created that god. And so on. The argument simply doesn’t hold together when you remove the convenient assumption that God Himself has no creator, which assumption undermines the foundation of the whole argument, rendering it not only unsound but utterly absurd.

The writer notes as further proof of a grand design that fruits and vegetables are the perfect size for human beings to hold in their hands and eat. But what about watermelons, which are too large for my mouth? What about cocoanuts, which are rough on the teeth? Why, if the divine plan is so well-thought-out, do edible animals flee when we hunt them rather than falling onto our plates fully cooked and seasoned upon the first hint of our hunger? I once tried to eat a sperm whale in one bite and was unable to manage it in spite of God’s perfect design. Why do our joints wear out and why are we so susceptible to the illnesses inflicted upon us by tiny microbes? Why do our teeth have to fall out and regrow when we’re young rather than growing with us like the rest of our bodies? Why do we need glasses and hearing aids? Why is it possible for us to swim but not to fly? Why are babies born with holes in their hearts and with twins attached to them at the head and missing the hands God designed carrots and oranges to be held so easily in? Are these children God’s rough drafts? Is God not so perfect after all?

A more plausible answer seems to me to be that they’re not the rough drafts of some halfwit god but are products of an unfeeling mechanistic natural process. Anyone who would worship the careless and haphazard (or just plain cruel) god represented by the facts the letter-writer leaves out quite possibly deserves whatever that god decides tomorrow to inflict upon him.

Every once in a while, I get a chance to meet up with one of my old professors, and he’s kind enough to review what poems I’ve managed to write since we last visited. When I was still in school, I had dreams of maintaining contact with some of my fellow writing students, of one day having my letters with some of these future laureates bound into collections and archived in university libraries as literary commodities. I had hoped to maintain at least basic contact and possibly to trade poems for review from time to time whether or not the more lofty aspiration worked out. As it turns out, I’ve kept up with none of my partners in pens. Oh, there were a few letters near the beginning, and I recently thought I might rekindle a correspondence with one of the friends who had gone on to edit a magazine I had submitted some poems to. But by and large, my literary trajectory has been flat: I have neither produced much decent work nor managed to browbeat my favored classmates into staying in touch. Everyday life keeps me from thinking about this very often, but from time to time, I feel something like sorrow and profound disappointment at having essentially given up that part of my life.*

There are scattered nice moments, though, as when I got my packet of poems back from my former professor yesterday inked with many positive comments. Naturally, there were revision suggestions on all the poems, and some of them came off as duds (though he didn’t say as much), but several of them that I felt ok about he thought were pretty good. So while the urge to write is often dead or at any rate weaker than the urge to put food on my table and clothes on my baby, maybe all the talent’s not completely gone, and maybe every once in a while, I can shave some of the edge off my disappointment.

*This is not to say that I’m not happy with my life as it’s unfolded. It’s more like saying that while I chose the turkey, I sure would have liked to have had some ham as well.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about why one writes poetry. It’s a question that’s been with me for a decade or so now, peaking during the period beginning maybe 8 years ago and ending about 6 years ago. This was the period during which my formal studies of poetry were at their most vigorous and during which I struggled a good bit with why one writes poems the way one does, especially today. In centuries and decades past, poets used formal conventions such as rhyme and meter as a canvas for their ideas, and so there was a pretty clear distinction between poetry and prose. In the 20th century, poems using no discernible convention became more and more common, and poems often seemed rather like prose chopped into lines. This being the case, why would anyone bother to write poems instead of just writing the prose without bothering to add carriage returns every few lines? Naturally, some poets whose work seemed on the surface to be arbitrarily broken into lines had some useful or at least loosely measurable metric by which they chose to mete out their lines. It’s nevertheless tempting to wonder why they even bother to do so, if it’s so difficult to divine what’s behind their line breaks.

Perhaps it’s simply the craft of it that matters to these poets. By writing lines that feel right to themselves, whether or not there’s a clear rubric used for breaking lines, and by taking great pains to get to that final draft with all its editorial bloodshed, the poet has labored to create an artifact he or she feels pleased to have created. This raises the question of whether some sorts of poetry are (or should be) a private or a public art form. I could labor for weeks on a piece of nonsense doggerel that I’m proud of because the process of making it took much craft, but if it’s not something that others could appreciate in some way without my having to explain that I fasted for six weeks while painstakingly etching my drafts into yak skin using my own blood a pinpoint at a time, maybe it’s something I ought to be privately proud of, and perhaps I should consider becoming a performance artist rather than a poet.

In cases in which the poem itself is fairly accessible if not obviously ruled by some formal convention, why, again, should one bother to write it in verse? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’ve written my own healthy share of formal verse but have also written much free verse. And while the lineation and the diction tend to make sense to me on some level and while the primary action or description of my poems can usually be extracted pretty easily, I do wonder why I’m nevertheless compelled to write in anything but prose.

One of the only remotely satisfying answers I’ve come up with to date is that prose often feels as if it should be longer. Writing in prose something as compressed as what many write in poetry seems rather like driving your car a few yards down the driveway to get the mail. Writing poetry gives us permission to compress what we’re writing. Labeling something as poetry — whether it be by whacking prose into lines or writing a book of short prose and calling the pieces prose poems — is like announcing that the driveway is short enough that cranking up the car for a drive to the mailbox would be absurd. Which is not to say that poetry is insignificant or useless, for the end result, whether your mailbox is at the end of a 15-yard driveway or of a two-mile driveway, is that you wind up retrieving the mail. The intellectual payload of poetry and prose, in other words, may be very similar in spite of the different mindsets they may require. There is much of great emotional and intellectual value that can be said best — or at least very well — in a short burst of highly-charged language.

I’ve been reviewing some of the things I’ve written over the past five or ten years in preparation for a brief visit I’ll be paying a college writing teacher/mentor in a couple of weeks. I haven’t had much of an inclination to write original creative work since graduating, though there have been a few short stories, two or three half-earnest attempts at novels, and a few dozen stilted efforts at poetry (my specialty while in school). Of the short things I’ve written during this time, it just occurred to me, many of them have to do with cruelty to animals. I knew many of them were animal poems, most of them bird poems, but I hadn’t really noticed that most of them deal in some way with cruelty to or in any case the suffering of animals. Take these instances:

• The old woman who gets pigeons drunk in order to catch them to wring their necks.
• The birds found burned by creosote in a chimney.
• The hummingbird killed inadvertently by an ornithologist.
• The headless dragonfly that seemed still to be alive.
• The run-over cat left to suffer a slow death in the road.
• The hunted hawk.
• The Legend of the Crossbill (after a poem by Longfellow)
• The sand flea with its shell ripped off.

It seems as if there are more already written, and I know I’ve got some more to write (at least three more spring to mind immediately). There are others that don’t deal directly with the suffering or recent deaths of animals but that pertain to animals in some way:

• The bit about deveining shrimp.
• A flamingo piece.
• One about a snowy owl.

Again, there are probably more that simply don’t spring instantly to mind. I was thinking that a good book or section title might be “Cruelty to Animals.” Naturally, as human beings are animals too, some of the things one tends to write about human suffering could fit into such a book or section as well.

I don’t harbor any real notions that I’ll write enough more decent new work or manage to cobble these and other pieces together into a book, but thinking about the organization of the things one has written and at times, where possible, writing in the direction of an organizing principle are just things one does. And I wanted to get this idea down because, well, the bad memory and all.