Elijah,

God, Topo Chico and a book on a beach sounds so good right about now. Would you believe Louisiana has no beaches? I keep forgetting that Kate Chopin's book, The Awakening, is set in New Orleans, and it opens on a beach in Grand Isle. Technically, Grand Isle is still safe for swimming, but you won't be catching me in those waters. Anything that is even remotely close to the Mississippi, I will not be swimming in. Maybe that's just me. Have you ever been to New Orleans?

Thank you, also, for the kind words abt my poem. I'm happy it made you laugh. I wanted to be a comedian when I was a little kid (which is a terrible thing to admit to anybody), but when I went to college at Florida State, I realized I was too awkward for the improv comedy groups (I was told that I was trying too hard to be funny), so I hung out with the film majors, but then I realized I wasn't as smart as they were (though now I think they were really just pretentious (some of them, not all of them)), which naturally dumped me on the doorstep of the English majors, and I think I fit right in. I think my impulse has still been to want to make people laugh. My Dad's a wedding DJ/Entertainer in Orlando and I think his personality rubbed off on me. We're both pretty corny dudes. I guess that would be what kind of sport my poems are playing lol.

Conner is actually my older younger brother. I have three brothers. I have an older twin named Tanner and a thirteen year old brother named Cooper, and, ofc, Conner. I write about Conner and Cooper pretty frequently, but I don't write about Tanner much. Tanner and I used to gang up on Conner pretty bad when we were kids. I wasn't as brazen as Tanner was, but we did, one time, get Conner running at full speed to our bedroom only to slam the door in his face. We were pretty rotten. I love my brothers though. I saw that movie The Iron Claw and sobbed for, like, half the movie, because I do not know what I would do without them. Do you have any siblings?

I think I get what you mean about losing somebody like Kelly. I grew up pretty southern baptist, and we have that idealized picture of the gates of heaven and Jesus standing there, but that's got to be the closest thing to a fairy tale I can think of. 

I heard this story of a cowboy whose horse and dog died, and he was sad about it, then he died. When he died, he kept walking down a road until he got to these big white walls and pearly gates, and standing before the gates was a man in a robe and the man said: "Welcome to heaven." The cowboy was happy, but then he asked the man in the robe: "Are my horse and dog here?" and the man in the robe said: "no, we don't allow pets in heaven." So the cowboy decided maybe heaven wasn't for him, and so he keeps walking down the road until he gets to a little saloon in the middle of the field and there's a guy sitting on a tractor and his horse and dog are sitting outside in the shade of a tree, too. The cowboy is so excited to see them, he gives his dog and horse a big hug. The man on the tractor says to the cowboy: "welcome to heaven," and the cowboy is confused. "I thought that place back there was heaven?" The cowboy says. The man on the tractor says, "Oh no, that's hell." Now the cowboy is even more confused and he says, "Doesn't it make you mad that those people back there are pretending to be you?" The man on the tractor replies: "Actually it's kind of nice. They screen out the people who would leave their friends behind."

Anyways, I'm not sure what the afterlife holds, but I know your friends are there, and they're with you now. There's a poem by David Kirby called "My Dead Dad," that's kind of about the dead still with us. I'll see if I can find it for you. It's in his book The House of Blue Light.

Hmmm... chapbook recommendations. Diode has some great chapbooks. Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar is my favorite, but Kaveh is a literary treasure. I just read his book Pilgrim Bell and DAMN. That guy can write. 

What's some of your favorite poetry collections? Or just books in general? I just defended my thesis so I might have some time on my hands soon!

One last question: what's the worst job you've ever had? Paid or unpaid.

Until next time my friend,

Parker

Parker,

Last question first: the worst job I've ever had was serving food at Olive Garden. One might think this would be a good gig based solely on the fact that every employee running through the kitchen gets to stuff breadsticks in their mouths between serving (this is why you always hear "we are waiting for the next batch of breadsticks to finish" when you eat at OG). But I was 18, and very bad at my job. Once, I was bussing a table and dropped a ramekin of marinara on the floor. The marinara popped up with the energy of a bouncy ball on steroids and hit an elderly gentleman in the face. Seeing sauce all over a stranger's face and realizing it was my fault, I died in that moment. I was frozen while his son screamed at me to go grab an effing towel. I learned something about physics that day....please tell me about the worst job you've ever had!

Congrats on defending your thesis! That's a huge deal. Any plans to continue that project? I wonder if it has anything to do with that essay you wrote on Natalie Diaz's "The Gospel of Guy No Horse." I read that story after you mentioned it in your poem. Isn't she amazing? I remember watching a video of one of her readings. She prefaced her poem "They Don't Love You Like I Love You" by talking about a phone call she got from her mom years after the poet left home to work in academia. Her mom said something like "just come home already, Natalie. All those professors, administrators, publishers, editors, students. They don't love you like I love you." I think about that a lot. We writers love our work, and it is important to invest in it, to make a life with it. But I'd be mistaken if I thought the institutions I've given my time and energy could ever love me back, that work could ever love me back (to borrow from a book I haven't read but hear a lot about). That's not to say I love my institutions (I don't; although, teaching is something I enjoy doing), but I give them a lot of myself. All this is to say, one of the things I love about your poem is that it creates a space for your family and your writing to coexist, to actually feed each other and become something new and unexpected. That's special, and I imagine it will mean something to your brother and whoever else reads it. 

I can't imagine growing up in a house with so many boys! I have one sister who is older than me. I think she'd say the worst job she ever had (since we're on that subject) was working at Sonic. I loved loved LOVED when she worked at Sonic. My mom and I would visit her daily during our Summers. Cherry limeades and tater tots. This sonic was by a train bridge and one day there was a dead deer on the road under the bridge. I didn't like how close cars were getting to him, so I went and picked him up and carried him away from the road as he peed down my leg. I don't want you to think I was a hero that day; I was the opposite. I left the deer in the grass next to the Sonic. The decomposers now had their own drive-in. 

Hmm, here are some favorite poetry collections off the top of my head: I'm a sucker for prose poems that are interested in phenomenology and the blurriness of boundaries between entities and atmospheres, so Berssenbrugge's Hello, the Roses (which I've already mentioned) and Etel Adnan's Sea and Fog. Then there's my taste for the radical response to biopolitics, so Andrea Abi-Karam's EXTRATRANSMISSION and Aase Berg's Dark Matter (translated by Johannes Göransson). I also love when poems hold the surreal in their hands, so Larissa Szporluk's Dark Sky Question and feeld by Jos Charles. It's funny you mention Kaveh Akbar because his Calling a Wolf a Wolf is also a fav (and I believe some of the poems from his chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic are embroidered throughout the collection). I just flipped to a random dog-eared page and found this line: "it's never too late to become / a new thing, to rip the fur / from your face and dive / dimplefirst into the strange." What are your top five books?

I haven't responded to everything in your last email, but this letter is getting long and I trust you'll understand. If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be? You can choose multiple people, especially if you want to bring them into conversation with each other and yourself.

Cheers from Ohio,

Elijah

Elijah!

Hmmm... if I could have dinner with anyone I think it'd have to be Chappell Roan, Oscar Wilde, Mozart, Steve Lacy, and Judge Judy. We'd have to go to this Italian restaurant in Vegas that can't remember the name of, but there was free wine and excellent meatballs, and these people strike me as being okay with free wine and excellent meatballs. First of all, I love musicians. People who play music well are very sexy to me, and the three I have here are absolute rockstars. Oscar Wilde because he strikes me as a party boy and a personality, and Judge Judy because she is so entertaining. I think we'd all have a great time. What about you? Who's your dream dinner guest(s)?

I feel you with that Olive Garden job. Something about large chain restaurants really brings out the worst in everybody. I've had a series of terrible jobs, but I think the worst overall was Blaze Pizza. I worked there for like three years, and it was my second job I'd ever worked, but my first job living on my own. I liked getting the discount on pizza, but my boss for a majority of my time was a nightmare. She'd pit people against each other, schedule you more hours than you could work, and she'd work you just enough for you to still be qualified as part time, even though I was getting like 35 hours a week every week. We had five different general managers in those three years. All of the supervisors worked 50+ hours without overtime. And then they had this weird creed-o that you almost had to memorize. It had hand motions and everything, and when you got reprimanded they'd say "that's not meeting the Blaze standard and exceeding expectations." Anyways, one of the last shifts I worked, I made fun of the assistant general manager (who was also dating the general manager) and he took me into the back hallway, got in my face like he was going to hit me, Gordan Ramsy style, and that's when I was like, okay, let me find another job.

That's a crazy story about that deer. It was a nice gesture to pick it up and move it. I can see that connection with nature in your poem, too. Maybe not in such a deliberate way as moving a dead deer from the road, but in the same spirit. Your poem is grounded between two worlds. Do you believe in thin spots between this world and a spiritual world? I've always heard places like Appalachia and high up on mountains on the west coast have these thin spots. I'd be terrified to go there.

I'm going to have to check these books out, because I don't know many of these authors or titles. Jos Charles is familiar though. I ran a literary festival last year and I believe we invited Jos at some point in the history of that festival, and they may have also judged the chapbook contest I'm doing right now? LSU's creative writing program has an interesting history, but I feel similarly to you as you do about the school you're at (what school are you at?). The institution does not have your best interest in mind. I've met wonderful people while I've been here at LSU, but I've never actually met my boss? Like someone who is responsible for my pay and my well being? Even supervisors aren't really supervisors. But, that's just how I feel about the academy. 

I think, once I graduate this MFA, I'm going to work at the Baton Rouge Library. I like teaching a lot, but LSU pays next to nothing for their adjunct position and unfortunately my writing hasn't made me fabulously wealthy. I'm not sure it ever will, and that's okay. I'll write regardless of the few monies I make from it, but at the same time: I need some monies. I have a lot of thoughts about writing while working, because that's the reality for almost every creative person I know. We have to have some kind of income, but the hard part is making that job work for you and not you work for that job. That's another thing I learned at Blaze: these bosses will abuse your time if you let them. Like, I'm a poet first, even if I spend most of my time at a desk at the library (which is where I am currently writing to you).

I could talk all day about it, though.

Anyways this letter is also getting long so: top five books: My Time Among the Whites by Jennine Capo Crucet, Babe by Dorothy Chan, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Neon Vernacular by Yousef Komunyakaa, and Brutes by Dizz Tate.

I know we're on a deadline to get this turned in to our friend at ballast, so no worries if there's not enough time to write back by then, but if there is I have one last question: if you had a business that smuggled banned books of poetry into high schools across America, what would you name that business?

Raising a glass from Baton Rouge, the greatest city on the planet (I'm half way not joking abt that),

Parker

Parker!

My wife read Like Water for Chocolate and said it read kinda like a soap opera. She told me how the main character had these powers where when she cooked for others, her feelings would get transferred to those who ate her food. Didn't she accidentally make everyone horny with her food because she was cooking while feeling horny? As someone who lives in Baton Rouge, you probably know all too well the near-magical, magnificent power and influence of food. I also remember thinking how cool it was that the author included recipes in a novel. I love when authors stretch a genre like that. 

Your dinner party would make absolute WAVES. I think if you bring a harpsichord, some theatre masks, and a percussion kit, the rest of the evening will take care of itself. My dinner would be Weirdos Only: Arca, Björk, FKA Twigs, Iris van Herpen. All three of the musicians have collaborated with one another in different combinations (check out the music video "How's That"), and they all seem like people who would wear Iris van Herpen, whose garments are very sculptural: they're giving a very sci-fi biomorphic exoskeleton kind of vibe. I'd have to take them to this Argentinian restaurant in Cincinnati called Ché, which serves THE BEST empanadas (don't tell my mother I said that). If you're ever in Cincy, lmk and I'll meet you there. 

I'm fascinated by thin places, but I don't think I've experienced them the way others have. My wife and I went horseback riding at New Mexico's Ghost Ranch, which apparently is a thin place. The red rock towers and vast desert landscape certainly made me feel like I was between worlds. This is where Georgia O'Keeffe did so many of her paintings. The tour guide told us how one time Andy Warhol visited O'Keeffe's residence there but no one was home. So he painted her a surprise across her entire fridge for her to return to and see he was there. The housekeeper found it, figured it was a mess, and cleaned it all up before Georgia got back. I'd like to think that painting exists somewhere in the thin place.

That's wonderful you plan to work at Baton Rouge Library. I worked at a public library in Missouri for a summer and it was one of my favorite jobs. I worked circulation, which was the most customer-servicey position there, but all of the guests were so nice, I can't remember one bad experience there, really. It also seems like a good job to have if you want to preserve your writing energy. Currently, I am at University of Cincinnati, working as what they call an educator faculty, which means I was hired to teach mostly, instead of research and publish (although they are pretty supportive of us doing that too if we want). It was hell being on the job market, which is why I'm relieved to hear you're going alt-ac. I have a 3-3 load right now and it's tough finding time and motivation to write. I know we're wrapping up here, but I'd love to reconnect soon so we can talk about writing and work, writing as work, working to write, etc. I have lots of thoughts about this too. 

My banned book smuggling business would be a library bus and I would have to call it either the Sapphomobile or the Fun Home Wagon; something gay as shit like that. I would set up a fun house mirror labyrinth around the bus at schools to trap parents and administration. I would hire local queer antifa wherever I travel with it, and they would post up with baseball bats and paintball guns at smuggling sites to keep the fascists away.

Let's keep in touch, shall we?

Elijah

Dear Elijah,

Hello my new friend. I hope the weather is nice where you are. I'm in Louisiana, and we've had three intermittent days of rain, one day of sun, blue skies, and a cool breeze just in time for a St. Patrick's day parade, and now we're back to cold, wet rain. 

I loved your poem. I love that we get the opportunity to talk like this, because I get the feeling that we may have different things to say about poetry. I say that because I feel like we've got very different styles here. I am currently reading Stephanie Burt's book Don't Read Poetry, which, from what I've read so far, is about this topic exactly: how the term poetry can't be defined so easily because the word poetry means different things. Like how sports is sports, yeah, but there's soccer, football, basketball, tennis, diving, swimming, running, etc. and don't you dare get it confused. 

I think we're both writing poetry in English, but the way you're using white space, form, and line length is something I feel a little terrified to try. I feel like I figured out my mid page line length, saw tooth margin, and rambly sentences. Doing otherwise makes me start to sweat and hyperventilate and start pacing, which is all just to say, I'm not sure how you're doing it, but it's working really well. Your poem makes me feel like I'm walking through this metaphysical world with you. I feel like the ground is shifting above me, below me, and through me. But then you tether me with these little images that your speaker seems to fixate on. I love it.

I looked up the two people you quote at the beginning. I hadn't heard of either of them. I will def check out more of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. She seems like a good teacher of poetry. Lol, I feel like I'm redefining poetry for myself every day. Poetry is large. Poetry contains multitudes.

I looked up Kelly Caldwell, too. I read the article on The Spectacle and a few of her poems, including the one you quoted. Did you know Kelly? If so, I'm so sorry. Unless this is a different Kelly. Either way, friendship is invaluable, more so than family, even. 

I'm currently putting off doing my work. I have to save a metric assload of chapbooks to my computer and divide them up between my readers. It will take me about two-ish hours. Maybe three. It's one of my weekly magazine chores. It's for the greater good of poetry and poetry's infinte amount of styles. I will die at this altar, I fear. 

Another question: what's your favorite thing to do in the summer? I'm missing Florida. I love a Florida summer. Except for a Tallahassee summer. I don't much care for Tallahassee.

Your comrade in poetry,

Parker