I did not abandon MySpace.  I went missing, and because no one reported my absence to Missing Persons, it took me some time to find my way back to this perch.  Nearly eight months, in fact.  But here I am.  And here’s my update.

This summer I put two full-length poetry manuscripts--Dismembered Love Notes and All That Hell-- in circulation, which means into book contests.  So far, nothing’s come of that effort, but the game’s young.

Three poems from the All That Hell manuscript (“Soldier of Fortune, 1969,” “American Girl,” and “Shape”) are now available in the poetry section of Perigee, an on-line lit mag.  Here’s the link.  http://www.perigee-art.com/  From any of the poems you’ll be able to link to a reprint of an essay that covers some of the same ground, American Bottom (literally ground) and Overpass Girl.  “No Apology for Happiness” was published earlier this year in the Spring issue of Northwest Review (47.2).  Nothing I’ve written has been as important to me as all of this American Bottom/Overpass Girl material.

Certainly not the review I wrote for American Book Review, in which I pan a very important poet’s latest book.  Fat lot of bad it did Richard Howard.  By the time the review came out early this year, Without Saying: New Poems had been named a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle award for poetry.  If you’re keeping score, and I am, that’s poetry, creative nonfiction (lyrical essay), and a book review.  Add a scholarly essay, “Richard Hugo’s Montana Poems: Blue Collars, Indians, and Tough Style,” published in All Our Stories are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (Univ of Nebraska Press, 2009) and that’s four of my writerly food groups.

Which brings me to the fifth of my five food groups, fiction.  Surprisingly, the most traffic of all.  A story, “Rivers to Gilead,” made an appearance in the Winter 2009 issue of The Southern Review (45.1).  Three solicited microfictions bunched up like the Marx Brothers in the inaugural issue of the on-line magazine Mayday, all of them Black Guy Bald Guy pieces:  “The Latest Buddy Team Cashing In,” “Numbers Mean Something,” and “Slowest, Fattest Curve in baseball History.  Here are the links.
 

http://maydaymagazine.com/issue1microprodavenportlatestbuddyteam.php

http://maydaymagazine.com/issue1microprodavenportnumbersmean.php

http://maydaymagazine.com/issue1microprodavenportslowestcurve.php

Drew Burk asked me for a fiction he could post at the Spork website as one of the Weekly Fictions.  I sent him” Concrete Jungle, Asphalt Jumble,” another Black Guy Bald Guy.  
Read it: http://sporkpress.com/weeklies/prose/archives/00000046.htm.
Listen to it: http://www.archive.org/details/SporkPodcast10_06_09-SporkPress.

One more Black Guy Bald Guy, “Given the History of Rope in America,” was supposed to make an appearance in Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, (Doug Martin and Kim Chinquee, eds., Snow*Vigate Press) actually a reappearance since it was published in Diagram (http://thediagram.com/6_2/index.html) way back in 2006.  But since I’ve yet to see a copy, I can’t verify such a book exists.

Poetry Reading-MVC

Poet Steve Davenport will read and engage in a discussion about the craft of writing poetry. The reading is offered by the MSJC MVC English Department in association with the MSJC Foundation and Poets & Writers, Inc.

This is a rare opportunity for students and the public to listen to a successful poet read from his writing as well as engage in a discussion about the craft.

Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise (2006), which won Pavement Saw Press’s Transcontinental Poetry Prize and was short-listed for that year's National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) finalist category in Poetry.  His “Murder on Gasoline Lake,” published originally in Black Warrior Review and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007, is now available as a New American Press chapbook.  The Summer 2008 issue of The Literary Review carries a chapbook of his recent poetry and fiction.  The poetry, “Curtal Sonnets from American Bottom,” won him a Charles Angoff Award for best contribution that volume year.  In addition to poetry and prose in dozens of literary magazines, his scholarly work can be found in academic journals, university press anthologies, and educational materials.  About Uncontainable Noise, Kathleen Graber writes, “What there is . . . of the cowboy in these poems is an attitude which transcends the simple and violent lexicon of Remingtons and bullets; it is an archetypal outlaw spirit, a resistance and resilience, that passionate, uncontainable style of being in the world that makes the cowboy so very dark, both darkly irresistible and darkly dangerous.”  Another reviewer, Eric Miles Williamson, puts it this way: “Steve Davenport writes like Charles Bukowski might have written if he’d had more talent or been able to hold his liquor better.”  Steve earned his PhD at the same school, University of Illinois, where he has served the Creative Writing Program since 2004 as Associate Director and Ninth Letter’s Creative Nonfiction Editor. 

Contact: Rickianne Rycraft at ext. 5642 or rrycraft@msjc.edu

Jeff Hendricks, Professor of English at Centenary and old pal, first takes me to the campus-owned house where I'll spend three nights, a two-bedroom home where a lot of famous writers have stayed (guest book signatures).  Or he took me to his Contemporary Lit class first.  I can't remember.  The class was fun and the questions were good, though I'm never as good remembering what I was asked.  Maybe twenty kids.  One question about my writing the essay in the 2nd-person.  I always get that question and the answer's always the same.  Wasn't my intent to write 7000-plus words in 2nd-person.  Snowballed and then an attempt to change it all to 1st-person felt like flat memoir.

After that, back to the house for some down time before my 7pm reading.

The reading took place in a big, beautiful room at their student union/cafeteria.  Great podium with a clock built in.  All podiums should have such a clock.  Here's what I read (correct order, I think).

A poem by a daughter (1st-grade Sophie) followed by poems by a Dad (hers).  One prose exception, "You Be Wing."  All of it read in sets.

"Green Egg and Ham" (text below)

I love you

You are best mommy

Tess Hannah Sophie

I love my girls

Daddy

Daddy is the bee monster

Sophie is in first grade.

Stephanie Deloris Alisha

Mrs. Quisenberry

I have long hair.

"In the End We Walk The Long Tunnels, Dumb Slaughter"

"As If Lids Or Walls Kept Anything In Or Out"

"So I Send This Three-Word Burst, Poor Ink, Repeating"

"Last Night My Bed A Boat Of Whiskey Going Down"

"Making Like Scheherezade After The Smoke Clears"

"Godless Murfy Has His Say About Massacre"

"Murfy Blesses the Cowboy Of Drunken Love's Love"

"My Prairie Love Blossoms In Wildflowers Sonnet"

"Meat-Axe Bedtime Story"

"Outdoor Life"

"Good Housekeeping"

"Popular Science"

Wallace Steven's "Of Mere Being" followed by my rewrite, homage, what-you-will, "National Geographic"

"You Be Wing"

No time to read the first poem in my friend Patricia Smith's National Book Award Finalist Blood Dazzler, so I held the book up and asked the audience to consider purchasing this great book of poems about Katrina.  Then I closed with "Real Simple (1)."

Wonderful applause afterwards.  And a short car ride to food (Shreveport brings the good food) with a few faculty.  I didn't see any cans of beer, so I enjoyed three bottles.

The highlight?  Hanging with my old buddy, Jeff, and meeting his university people, his family, and his gorgeous house.  The honor?  Hanging with primo Jack London scholar, Earle Labor.  Don't get much better than that.  My thanks go to everyone there.

Better than Upchucking Guff, which, now that I think about it, was probably the name of David Bowen's first band.  Or last.

I believe Okla played bass and timpani.

I'll start with recent stuff up Chicago way.  Two Mondays ago I drove up to hear Tom Kennedy read and talk craft at Harper's College, and last Monday I did the roundtrip train thing to hang with favorite poet-buddy Garin Cycholl and three of his UI Chicago classes to talk about Murder on Gasoline Lake.

Next month I'll be down in my second favorite state, Louisiana, to read at Centenary College in Shreveport.  Both Murder and Uncontainable Noise are on Prof. Jefferson Hendricks' Contemporary Lit syllabus.  I believe I'm week thirteen.  At least I was when I did some Googling back before Hurricane Ike.  Tentative plans include my visiting a class or two or three as writer, editor, MFA administrator and reading the evening of Wednesday, November 17.

Spring's busy with AWP (February 12 poetry reading with University of Illinois faculty and moderating a tribute to William Gass the next day, Friday the 13^th) and trips to Mt. San Jacinto College in the sunny land between San Diego and LA (Tuesday, February 24) and Ohio Wesleyan University (mid April).  More about them as details unfold.

I have a story, "Rivers to Gilead," slated to appear in the Winter 2009 issue of The Southern Review.  And finally after years of waiting, I'll finally get to see my Richard Hugo essay in print.  That is, if the University of Nebraska Press delivers on its Spring 2009 promise to get All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (editor, Brady Harrison) out into the world.  Cornhuskers, grunt and push, please.   

This summer Lynn and I asked the girls (ages 10, 8, 6, 2) to watch some movies with us, roughly a couple a week.  We warned them: old movies, silent films, foreign films, black and white, popular movies that marked an era.  More than anything the point was the inauguration of a family tradition, a vacation of sorts in our own living room.  We were also after the accumulation of some cultural and historical touchstones for the girls.  Here's what we ended up watching.  The order of the films is not accurate, but it's close.
 

The Kid

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Forrest Gump

The General

Bicycle Thief

Bringing Up Baby

Visions of Light (documentary about cinematography)

How Green Was My Valley

Young Frankenstein

E. T.

The Gold Rush

Pink Panther Strikes Again

Cirque de Soleil Corteo

Philadelphia Story

Some Like It Hot

As you might expect, some movies did better than others with the girls and they didn't agree on their favorites.  As a group, they tended to enjoy physical comedy.  (Chaplin fared well, for instance.)  The documentary about cinematography preceded the visually stunning How Green Was My Valley.  That may have helped make the movie enjoyable for them.  Plus, Grandma Jenny was visiting and she dug it.  The films that did the best overall were Bringing Up Baby, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Some Like It Hot.

The Fall Festival has begun.  We opened with the original Sabrina (Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden).  On the horizon are 400 Blows, The Princess Bride, and To Have and Have Not.

1.  As in fifths.  George Dickel.  Old No. 8, black label.  Twelve left.  Okay, twelve minus a few shots.  I feel a whiskey villanelle coming on.

2.  I tip my glass, my favorite glass, my sour-mash-over-ice glass, to Okla Elliott for posting a blog about my new chapbook (Nine Poems and Three Fictions), which is now available in the beautifully designed Summer 2008 chapbook issue of The Literary Review.  Also, as he points out, free on-line for downloading.  I'd maybe remember how to put a link here, but I'm sipping Dickel, listening to Uncle Tupelo, and attempting an evil-level sudoku when I should be sleeping.

3.  I love my Jala Neti Pot.  Though I'm tempted, I would never drink Dickel from it.  

4.  Sean Karns was seen at a party this past weekend betting on Ohio State to beat USC without asking for points.  I understand.  I'd understand better if he'd been swimming in Dickel. 

5.  The Davenport 2008 Summer Family Film Festival, brought to me by George Dickel Old No. 8, will conclude with a viewing of To Have and Have Not this Friday or Saturday.  I will blog about the festival in a few days when I've collected all the titles.  I can say that Bringing Up Baby was the clear winner with Sophie Mose (age 10), Tess (8), and Hannah from Urbana (6).  Nora (3 this Thanksgiving) did not vote.

6.  Things do not look good on the evil-sudoku front.  Bartender?  Dickel me up.   

He's smart and funny, he's building an empire, and four of his songs are perched in my iPod.  No, I'm not talking about Churm, although one of the four songs, "Creepy Old Dude," ought to be Churm's theme song.  I'm talking about MySpace friend David Bowen.  Read all about him, or partly about him, at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm.  "What David Bowen Knows."  Do it right now.  While he knows stuff.

Late last year I got a call from a writer friend who decided he wanted to teach Uncontainable Noise in his Intro to Lit class this semester.  (You know, the one's that's almost over.  Have a drink.)  He didn't want to go through the normal channels to get the books to his students, so I shipped him forty signed copies.  I got a deal from my publisher and told my writer friend to sell them for ten dollars a pop to make the transaction as simple as possible.  I learned the futilities of the $12 sale at my first reading.  He called this afternoon to say the class devoted to my book had just ended.  He said it went well.  Then he said he sold only ten copies.  Maybe eleven before he's done because after class a young guy came up to him, said how much he liked the poems in class, and wanted to know if he could buy a copy.

Here are three issues as I see them.  First, how do thirty kids come to class without the book?  Okay, maybe a few scored copies on-line.  Let's say five.  How do twenty-five kids come to class without the book?  Put it on the final, I say.  No, make it the entire final.  Screw Voltaire, Whitman, and Kafka.  Second, the syllabus begins with Molière and ends with Davenport.  Molière to Davenport.  I agree.  I also agree there's something very wrong here, but I'm too busy having tee shirts made to think about it.  (I'm putting the syllabus on the back to give people who don't buy books something to read.)  Third, what might the students have said in class today?  "That was another bad word.  I should have bought a copy."  "That shit ain't poetry."  "When I go to grad school, I am going to make that book the subject of my dissertation—that is, if I ever buy a copy.  You know, and then read it."   "Professor, like how many times has this captain poetry dude been married?  I'm beginning to see things."  The real issue here is would I have wanted to be a fly on the wall next to one of the desktops, which very probably did not have a book on it?  Do I really want to know what was said?  Would you if it were your book?

I'd write more, but I have to call the woman at the print shop to let her know my decision about the "Molière to Davenport" font.  I have it narrowed to Goudy Stout, Frutiger SBIN v. 1, or Reservoir Grunge.