Query

Dear readers,

Are any of you going to Sewanee this summer?

If so, drop me a comment or email me at jeff.newberry [AT NOSPAM] gmail [dot] com.

I got the packet of info from Sewanee today. I am very excited & very much looking forward to the experience.

Dispatch from Rainy South Georgia

Yes--rain & thunder all day. A buddy of mine & I bush-hogged the area outside of the fence in my backyard. We got soaked & covered in mud. So, I came inside to play my Strat for a while, just to lighten my mood. It worked.

But what really lightened my mood was this: Rebecca Morgan Frank, the editor-in-chief of Memorious, contacted me today to let me know that the journal willl be printing my poem, "Deep, Like Blood," in an upcoming issue. I'm honored to be included in such a fine journal: it's published, among others, Ed Pavlic, Gary McDowell, & my good friend & UGA peep, Dorine Preston.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere at Sign

I’ve written nothing recently but half-scraps of poems. I’ll start with an image or a line, sit down to write, & go absolutely nowhere. I wonder if I’m too self-aware of my writing process. I think that there has to be a degree of mystery in art: if an artist is too aware of what he/she’s doing, does that awareness interfere with the alchemy of creation? Isn’t a scientific truth that observing a system changes it?

***

I have, however, been trying to write songs. I have absolutely no ear for melody. I’ll sit down, scribble out some lyrics, & try to find a melody, six-string in hand. Good Lord. Everything I write sounds like a power ballad: Firehouse, Warrant, Def Leppard, eat your hearts out.

Of course, all I listen to is jazz or blues. Maybe Bob Dylan and Ryan Adams can teach me a thing or two about melody.

***

Listening to the Into the Wild soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. Will report back when I have an opinion. I’m ordering CDs by Whiskeytown & Son Volt this week. Maybe these guys can teach me about melody. However, I’m also listening to a Dylan compilation that a friend at work gave me. Don’t ask me how, but I missed the boat on Dylan. I love what little I’ve heard. I’ve just never been into the whole folk scene.

Give me Hendrix, Clapton, Bloomfield, any of the Three Kings, Vaughan, or any other guitar slinger any day of the year.

Of course, some people think that guitarslinger = wanker. I respectfully disagree. I sort of have to; otherwise, I’d be admitting that I am a wanker.

Come to think of it, I rather am sometimes.

***

Reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. Yes, yes, I know; it’s not on my comps list; but as soon as my summer term starts, I’m going into lock-down mode for pleasure reading. All reading this summer will be for comps.

I am, by the way, loving Greene’s book. The book’s opening chapters are a fantastic odyssey through the history of quantum physics and general relativity. About midway in, after blowing the reader’s mind with the absolute strangeness of the quantum universe, Greene moves into an extended discussion of superstring theory and the implications of superstring theory on our understanding of physics and space-time. I don’t understand half of what I’m reading, I’m certain, but this book is mesmerizing.

Recently, someone told me that superstring is essentially outdated now, an old theory. I don’t care. The Elegant Universe is fascinating.

I picked up Greene’s second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, at the local library the other day. Don’t know if I’ll finish it before summer term starts, but I’m going to try. The impossible is possible in the quantum world.

***

Have you seen Iron Man?

Can you believe that Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens next weekend?

I’m beyond stoked.

***

How about you reader, what’s the haps? Thanks for stopping by.

[REMOVED]

Ed Pavlic reading in NYC

And Now for Something Completely Different

Great news in the mail yesterday: I've been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writer's Conference in July. I'm so incredibly stoked. I've heard tales that Sewanee is writer's book camp, that the days are heady & filled with workshops, readings, lectures, & all sorts of intellectual/creative discourse. I don't know who's going this year, but if you'll be there, so will I.

***

Drafts completed this spring semester:

"My Body"
"Apocalypse Fever"
"Speaking in Tongues"
"Letter from North Florida"
"Day's End"
"Pay Day"

***

The Cortland Review has just published a new Spring Feature, showcasing some outstanding poetry talent, including two of my favorite poets writing today, Ed Pavlic & Nicholas Samaras. Pavlic talks with John McFadyen-Ketchum about Winners Have Yet to Be Announced, and Samaras reads a poem from his unpublished manuscript, Simko.

***

Listening to Delta Moon, Robert Johnson, Drive-By Truckers, Lester Young, & The Black Keys.

Watching: Juno. Fantastic.

***

How about you, reader? Witnessed any signs & wonders lately?

What I Believe

They Feed They Lion
Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
             Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion Grow.
          Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
                From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
They grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
                From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.