"I want my writing to occupy a space where it is more than an expression or extension of my worldview." Yes. Exactamundo. If you read this blog, you probably also read Tony Tost's; but if not, please go right away to read his long, thoughtful, and moving post about poetic discovery and the end of apprenticeship. There's an uncanny resonance between what he says and what I'm finding in Richard Hugo, particularly this comment about Tony's new poem in progress, "World Jelly": "My hope is that this writing is simple, straightforward and on some level would derive from a psyche that would not be socially acceptable to me." Writing that takes you beyond notions of association—as fruitful and necessary as those associations are—into a deeper and riskier relationship with—what? Hugo would probably simply say "the self." I would say Tony is talking about tapping into that part of himself that is irredeemably part of the world, or the part of himself that the world put there. It's not social per se, but the knot in the Unconscious that being in the world puts there—the interpolations that manifest as your obsessions, as the kinks in your desire. Brave stuff. I only hope Tony's not telling the truth about eventually giving up blogging. We all still have lots to learn from the window in his head.

As others have noted, there's are new issues of Free Verse and GutCult. The latter includes my first ever published review. Over at Free Verse there's a useful review of Angus Fletcher's book A New Theory for American Poetry. I suppose now I'll have to read the damn thing. And of course there's glorious poetry all around.

Time to get out of bed, maybe.