Nonfiction genius Samuel Maclain Edmonds recently admitted to being in a “post-MFA slump.” Said slump involves, according to Sam, having “not written a word…in about a month.” While, clearly, the most impressive thing about Sam’s post was that he made reference to dry humping two times in one paragraph, I think it’s also impressive that he was honest with himself about being in a slump. That he had the courage to say, “Sam, there’s a real problem here” and then work toward a solution.

I’m not so brave. I haven’t been doing much writing either and I’d like to keep it that way. When I write, I realize I exist. And when I realize I exist, I realize that someday I will no longer exist and that tends to bum me out pretty severely. The best thing, I think, is that we all just stop writing and avoid these realizations altogether. We can never stop existing if we never existed in the first place, right? It’s time we fought back.

But how does a writer who doesn’t write pass the time? I mean, what else can we do? I’ve conducted some experiments recently and found that most any activity that isn’t writing can keep a subject from writing. Like drinking tea while staring at a blanket or napping. Today I took a nap and when I woke up, guess what my notebook was filled with? Not words. Not sentences. Not paragraphs. Not ideas or stories or poems. I had made no impression on the world whatsoever. Damn, that felt good.

There’s a cemetery very near my house that I sometimes walk to. I know not a single person buried there, but I still like to stroll through the headstones and read the deceased names’. The deceased do so little writing, I’m not even sure they know what words are anymore. How I envy them.

I recently attended a poetry reading that was mostly delightful. The sound quality was clear. And the reading was well attended, giving the fashionably understated gallery an inviting buzz. There were two readers.

The first was young, perky, cute, nervous. She read for thirty minutes from four or five different books, breaking between each poem to give the audience some context through which to access the piece. Prior to the reading, I was unfamiliar with this poet but it seems her collections are mostly conceptual, all the poems coming together to serve some rough overarching narrative. Which is fine. A practice I tend to like, actually. And the poems themselves were interesting and engaging.

My problem was this: in giving a 15 to 30 second setup before each poem, I felt somehow distanced from the work. Like instead of experiencing the ups and downs of lyrical tension, my brain was scrambling to see how the language fit into the context she had provided. I was trying to take from the poem what she wanted me to take from the poem. Which seemed to restrict the way I encountered her work. As if from each piece I was to draw a specific, “right,” meaning. It was a Saturday night, folks. I didn’t want to be told to jump through this or that hoop. In fact, I never want that from poetry. Who does?

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I’m a man and privileged. Some of these privileges I’m aware of. I feel them thrashing in my bones when I strut into a job interview, or drive through lawns with “my boys,” when I walk around my neighborhood at night and don’t fear being raped or harassed. And, certainly, I’m privileged in ways totally unbeknown to me; in my most honest moments, I ponder over these shrouded multitudes, trying to identify them, if only to better understand how I interact with the world and the world with me. A guy’s got to pass the time somehow!

Occasionally, though, my utter maleness prevents me from managing certain situations. Albeit rare, it happens. Typically these are situations involving children. If I perfectly fit any criminal profile, it’s that of a pedophile. This isn’t something that I think about often, but I did the other day when I went for, what was supposed to be, a relaxing afternoon stroll.

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As mentioned in my super rad last post, I recently moved back to my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Which is fine. I’m living with a couple friends of mine. They’re good dudes (always have been), but I was, admittedly, a bit nervous to move in with them, only because I had lived alone for awhile, and had grown quite used to it. Rather liked it, actually. But, to my delight, I currently love living with my roommates. Why?

Some wild and crazy guys.

1) it’s cheaper

2) it’s less lonely than living alone (imagine that!)

3) incredible things happen on a daily basis, like

today a silverfish walked into our house and caused quite a stir. When John found it on the kitchen floor, he really lost his shit, and tried smashing it with a Pledge bottle. But he missed, and the silverfish ran beneath the sink.
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I recently moved from Spokane to Omaha and do not currently own a bed. Which is fine. Before I moved, I sold mine at an exorbitant rate to a good friend, then used the money to buy an unlicensed handgun. So it goes!

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I arrived in Omaha thinking I’d  spend a couple nights on the floor before tracking down a bed. Enter my hero friend Justin. Out of nowhere this guy digs out his grandpa’s WWII era Army cot and begins setting it up for me. What a good dude!

Or, what a clever torturer.  Read more »

Occasionally, at parties, people I half-know will throw handfuls of cashews into their mouths and go, “so, Tim, what do you write poems about?”

And while they’re chewing, I’ll stare pensively into my drink, slosh it around a little, eventually saying something like, “quit bogarting those nuts.”

It’s not so much that I don’t like discussing what I write –  really, what else do I have? –  it’s just that I have no idea what the poems are about.

Many things appear in my poems: ones I love, or have loved, favorite foods, seasons, animals, articles of clothing, colors, smells, fears, memories. But no single something ever dominates a single poem. And I’m okay with that, except for when Cashew Hands is interrogating me by the punch bowl. Read more »

Last week Cathie Johnson barked about how she views artistic “theft” as a way for the stealer to establish intimacy with those they’re stealing from. I found that quite nice, and it got me thinking.

Surely there are multiple ways “theft” can function when it comes to creating art – homage, parody, debasement – but, no matter what, it seems a way for one artist to enter into a conversation with another artist, a way of responding. But what makes the response itself art? Something interesting? Something a third-party will pay attention to and engage with and be moved by? Same as anything else, I’d say, tension.

Earlier this summer I began listening to To Destroy a City, a Chicago band that’s self-titled debut offers a satisfying blend of sweeping post-rock and dynamic ambience. The only voice that appears in the album is that of T.S. Eliot (a little known Modernist poet from Missouri) reading from “The Hollow Men”, the band gradually creeping in and, in a way, taking over. I find this interesting namely because, in my mind, T.S. Eliot is still Goliath and anything resembling a challenge to him warrants celebration.

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it somehow turned into an essay about saying goodbye to the house I grew up in. I’m baffled things took such a turn. What could this mean about Enemies? What sort of portal has their music opened? And why? Who would I be if I’d never begun listening to them? Or writing this? Or posting on Bark? Or had never moved to Spokane for graduate school? What if I hadn’t grown up in that old house in Omaha? What if my mother had never fed me Brussel sprouts? Would I love them now? And how would that change the way I feel about Enemies’ album “We’ve Been Talking”? I love it now. Its dynamism. Its stops and starts, all the while feeling “familiar,” “inviting.” These are great guys, I find myself thinking, tapping my foot.  I’d like to hang out with these guys. I wonder what their rehearsals are like, so busy negotiating angular melodies and varied rhythms to worry about lyrics, or intent, just starting somewhere and following their impatience as it hops nimbly along, intoxicating and dexterous. Right now, I love it.

Perhaps you will too.

Hey, folks. My name’s Tim and this is my first Bark post. Glad to be here. So, a little about myself: I’m a 27-year-old white male. I recently earned my MFA in poetry and haven’t written anything of value since May. But that’s okay. We’re working on it.

In fact, we’re working on a lot of things right now. But not really accomplishing much of anything. My summers are usually like that. Purgatorial.

Now, I realize having summer vacation is a luxury, that I should be “stoked” for a chance to “kick back” after a trying school year, and just “take it easy.” But I can’t. Year after year, summer proves to be a bummer. Without some day-to-day structure, I flounder in free time. Sure, I read some; I write some. But what else? Where does the time go?

Simple enough questions, I suppose. I often spend several daytime hours “cleaning.” This consists largely of picking up various artifacts, walking around with them for a few minutes and setting them someplace new. My apartment, then, stays consistently cluttered, but the orientations of bottle caps, candles, guitar picks, action figures, mysterious keys and magazines are constantly in flux. Perhaps this process contributes to something larger, cosmic. Or maybe I’m just lazy, and I’ve found an activity for my waking life that takes about as much effort as sleep. Either way, it gives my imagination an opportunity to run freely, which is usually a good thing. Sometimes, though, I lose complete control, it goes bounding down some dark corridor and suddenly Kevin Spacey’s character in Se7en seems strangely admirable.

What this process doesn’t do, certainly, is impress anyone, or make me feel like a particularly interesting person.

“Do anything fun today?” a perky barista recently asked.

“Oh…a little of this, a little of that.” I cryptically responded, ashamed, as if I had just disemboweled someone in my bathtub, then popped out for some chai.

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