Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

Big thx to Scott at Split Lip for talking to me about poetry and my silly efforts. Also, big high-five to David Tomaloff for saying the best thing ever about me: "When I think about T-Gob and his work, I imagine an America remixed by deejay saints in tank tops; I imagine trees growing ice cream that melts under the Midwest summer sun, dripping and forming text on the shells of silverback turtle-puppies, who then carry it off to his editors—and then that, my friends, is how cookies are made."

Christopher Newgent, one of the cool dudes and a stellar writer and a bourbon guy, writes a bourbon column for Hobart, bringing together these three awesome attributes. His newest post is total WOW.

Hellyeah to Vonnegut letters. 

This looks like a really interesting book about atheists/religious people relations. Check this excerpt.

Major woot-woot for my pals Mark Neely and Ashley Ford for their Pushcart nominations from Pank.

Maurice Manning on Conservatism

The poetry world lost a real deal in Jack Gilbert this week.

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
by Jack Gilbert
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her. The summer mornings begin inch by inch while we sleep, and walk with us later as long-legged beauty through the dirty streets. It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing. We know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them, can hear them breathing. Our spirit persists like a man struggling through the frozen valley who suddenly smells flowers and realizes the snow is melting out of sight on top of the mountain, knows that spring has begun. Fire When Ready were one of the best bands no one has ever heard of.

PLOP PLOP LIT PLOP

It is no secret that I'm a Dean Young yahoo. This interview with him is wow. 

Narrative is a baggy concept. It accommodates anything from a baseball box score to the Iliad. Might it be possible we employ the term for any sequence of events that occur through time that seem to have some sort of relationship, a causal relationship even? Our language, albeit in spite of the Futurist attempt at words-at-liberty, makes a sequential sense—syntax is time passing so we could say any sentence or group of sentences is to some extent a narrative. Which pretty much makes the term useless. As divergent as my poetic practice is, I try to be alert to possible strains within drafts that signal modes of connection. For me those modes of connection certainly don’t need to be rational, logical, plotted, or telling a story. But any signal whatsoever I try to attend to and see as an opportunity, so sometimes I do end up using threads of traditional narrative, the scaffolding of story that can establish a stability, an endoskeleton. We could say that there is a narrative to these three words: brick, blood-drop, red feather which entails the passage from inert material to mortal flesh to a sort of avian/angelic possibility or we could say that what holds those things together is their redness. I try to be alert to as many possibilities of connectedness as I can simultaneously, even if one may undermine the authority of another. 

My top pal/mentor Todd McKinney has two poems up at the new and stellar Split Lip Magazine.

Very stoked for Wendy Xu's first book (not to mention that collab chapbook with my buddy Sturm). Cool to hear her talk about po-po and such.

I think language is always waiting patiently on us to engage it, to play with it and arrange its parts, to build something weird out of it, but the hardest time to stop and think to do this is any space outside of poems. To “negotiate” with a poem is right--it says things, you say something back, you say YES! or you say OH NO, but the two of you build the complete experience together. I always like when part of a poem’s contribution to the negotiation is a pseudo-“normal” syntax, if it seems aware and proud of its glitch, and if it wants to subvert my normalized expectations at every turn.

I have a poem "How Many Years" in the new nap magazine.